Walter Benn Michaels Weighs In at The Valve

Walter Benn Michaels responds to bloggers who've been debating the merits of The Trouble With Diversity. In my estimation, he does an excellent job of refuting the major arguments against made him, most of which turn out to miss his major point concerning the way the Left's efforts to combat economic inequality (the US once aspired to wage a War on Poverty, after all, though it ultimately decided to fight a war in Vietnam instead) have been eclipsed in the US, first by modes of identity politics and then by a more banal commitment to "diversity."

(Cue Luna's "Lost in Space.") "I've heard it all before" at various UIC forums, so what I found most intriuging in this exchange was Michaels' response to the University Diarist, a blogger who wonders why the dedication to The Trouble with Diversity made her "skin crawl."

Lately I've been researching about affect and literature, a project that I suspect Michaels would view as a dead end insofar as it would seem to privilege the subject's response to the stimuli produced by textual object over the author's intention. The critics and theorists I'm looking at try to posit a subjectless affect, and at this point, to be honest, I'm undecided about the viability of this model, at least when it comes to writing.

But to return to the topic at hand, the UD's rhetorical question could certainly serve as a example of the need to reason through our initial affective responses. The UD's visceral response to the dedication in TTWD that leads her to fantasize about Michaels and his wife dying while having sexual intercourse. I won't go into details. It's just a bit too gross, not least because Michaels and Jennifer Ashton are colleagues of mine at UIC. (Yes, my response is based partly on my subject position.)

Anyway, here's Michaels' reply, which provides an example of how to respond with dignity to a pretty outrageous remark:

All this is put a lot more provokingly in the chapter itself, and because it’s put provokingly, I am not surprised that people are provoked. UD’s also being provoked by the dedication, however, I can’t explain. Maybe it’s because she literally misread it (she says it’s to “my wife” but it never mentions “my wife”). Maybe it’s because she doesn’t recognize that “so necessary” is an allusion and hence doesn’t see that it involves a certain amount of irony. But as to where her coital death fantasies come from, I’ve got nothing.

Coital death fantasies. Where's Zizek when we need him? I'm sure he'd have plenty to say on this topic, particularly within the context of a - ahem scholarly discussion. More importantly, I'd like to hear Zizek and Michaels debate the claim that the truth of a claim has "nothing to do" with the speaker's subject position. As I've suggested in an ebr essay discussing Zizek's account of Christianity's pervese core both Michaels and Zizek insist upon a universalist notion of the truth against varieties of postmodern pluralism or relativism. They also agree that multiculturalism, particularly academic multiculturalism, is a strategy for eliding class-based inequality. However, what I didn't address properly in my ebr essay was how differently Zizek and Michaels understand the truth. The difference, in short, has to do with Zizek's commitment to a universally divided subject and his model of ideology, two factors that lead him to insist that a speaker's motives (both conscious and unconscious) matter greatly when it comes to assessing the validity of his or her claims. For instance, it might be true that Sadam Hussein was a brutal dictator, but when VP Cheney was making this claim in the buildup to the Iraq war, what mattered was the deeper truth concerning the motives for repeating this assertion publically from a position of great authority. Michaels would argue that Zizek's position is based on notions of authenticity that he finds irrelevent. I should work all this out rigorously at some point, but there's work to be done...

First, one pressing question: What is the ironic reference to "so necessary" that Michaels suggests the UD misses? My guess: Jay-Z's "Change Clothes, lyrics by Pharrell. If Walter is at today's colloquium, I'll have to ask him.

Caution: Philosophy

Here's a photo loaded with allegorical possibilities. It was shot at the Border's bookstore on State Street in downtown Chicago.

Does the yellow tape express some new managerial position about the dangers of philosophy? And why is the warning applied primarily to philosophy written by Germans whose surnames begin with the letter 'H'? Indeed, why the need for caution? Are the ideas expressed in the books considered dangerous? Or are such weighty tomes simply hazards impeding to the efficient sales of more marketable titles, e.g., the latest fad-diet title, a volume of New Age pop psychology, or the newest Harry Potter book?

As someone working in a U.S. English department I can't help thinking that the images register the shift away from so-called 'high theory' (Continental Philosophy) toward historicist criticism and cultural studies that has occurred over the past decade or so in the humanities, especially literary studies. The rise of historicist criticism and a naively simple modes of cultural studies in literary studies has led, in various forms, to a return of the long-standing opposition between philosophy and literature/poetics. The winner in this battle? In literary studies, anyway, both are losing, as language and lit departments face increasing pressures to churn out students whose ‘literacy’ ‘pragmatically’ enables them to secure jobs writing various genres of corporate copy.

I'm posting these images for a colleague of mine in literary studies (not at UIC) who has recently experienced resistance from his or her departmental colleagues for drawing so heavily upon Hegel in his or her work. Nevermind the fact that the project, is intended to demonstrate how Hegel's dialectical logic informs the manner in which Joyce depicts a day in Dublin unfolding Ulysses. Against those academics who bizarrely claim that Joyce was an apolitical high-modern elitist, this project presents a universalist Ulysses, i.e., Joyce’s efforts to materialize cognition via punning and cunning language experiments can best be grasped through a Hegelian framework that never forgets Dublin’s place within a larger totality – the world circa 1904.

S/he presented material at a departmental seminar and discovered that the many of the attendees hadn't read the larger manuscript circulated before the seminar, apparently because they were put off by the explicit philosophical content of the material. Then, during the seminar, they wasted time by asking this academic to define basic Hegelian terms and concepts that, had they bothered to read the essay, were explained carefully in the text. Moreover, they had the gall to imply that the philosophical concepts were somehow superfluous. It was disappointing to discover these anti-philosophical attitudes are prevalent in Europe as well.