In most classes I’ve taught, I’ve at some point asked students about the distinction between politics and economics; the first time I did so, I was expecting to challenge them with some Marxist arguments about the interrelation of the two. But I don’t think any of my students have ever thought there was a distinction between politics and economics; they all accept what Friedman thought was controversial in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, the neoliberal presentation of politics as simply another domain of the economic. Perhaps the correct response to this is a Žižekian one of overidentification, in which rather than treating the role of money in politics as an object of cynicism, we take it entirely seriously; abandoning left-wing illusions about a potential political control over the economic, and embrace a through-and-through economism.

This is also one of the places where Hardt and Negri are particularly useful. They are certainly not nostalgic for liberal democracy; instead, they see neoliberalism as reconfiguring the political and the economic in a way that calls for a new communist approach to the economy. However, I fear Hardt and Negri are too optimistic about the nature of this reconfiguration, as they see post-Fordism as rendering the economic directly political and, moreover, in an immediately communist way. The advantage of the Žižekian approach would be that it reveals neoliberalism’s obscene underside, its continued reliance on a kind of undead liberal politics. The challenge for the left is to figure out how to exorcise this specter of politics, and thereby insert itself into the economics of neoliberalism

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This confused me when I first moved to the US; looking for the left in the Bay Area it seems at first like there’s no there there. The general left-wing sentiment in the area doesn’t seem to be matched by the existence of left-wing organizations. It turns out that that’s not quite right; it’s just that these organizations aren’t political organizations but are, rather, community organizations and non-profits. Some of these have radical rhetoric and a revolutionary pedigree, but they all share the weakness of the Alinskian (non-)understanding of power, where power is not conceived of as something that could be appropriated collectively and used creatively to common ends, but where power is something someone else (the state) has, and the limit of collective action is to force concessions from those who do hold power.

The limitations of this lack of understanding of power were starkly illustrated in an event in last week’s walkout at Berkeley. Some participants in the action suggested the possibility of using the pre-planned General Assembly as the starting point for an occupation. Unfortunately, this suggestion was shot down by the facilitators of the General Assembly, who had already decided on their own structure for the meeting, and weren’t about to have this disrupted by a debate on the possibility of an immediate occupation. What was so frustrating (both in the sense of being annoying, and in the sense of working to frustrate the attempted occupation) is that the moderators resolutely refused to make explicit and take responsibility for the power they were exercising. This made it very difficult to contest their power, as they were able to present all their decisions as necessarily already democratically pre-authorized.

Nonetheless, a similar reticence about power was also in evidence among those proposing the occupation. The one thing I would disagree with in the IndyMedia account linked above is the description of those proposing the occupation as the “occupation committee,” which implies a level of organization and explicit self-presentation that was regrettably absent. With one honorable exception, the pro-occupation people didn’t really present themselves explicitly as a collective making a demand or proposal to the group; there was, again, an unwillingness to take responsibility for an attempt to wield power. In the hurry of the moment, and against the backdrop of the interplay of the moderators pseudo-democracy with the genuine democratic energy of the assembly, this failure of the pro-occupiers is, I think, understandable (I should myself take responsibility for failing to understand this, and act on it, at the time; it’s taken me this long to develop this understanding of what was happening). However, it will be important to avoid this mistake in the future.

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The problem with this argument is the incredible poverty of its understanding of politics. The suggestion seems to be that the only possible meaning of an action can be purely symbolic, an entry in a process of debate. The horizon of any conceivable action is “awaring” people. What this misses is that the staff, student, and faculty walkout might be a political action, an attempt to exercise power, or at least make a threat of exercising power. The very idea of politics has gone missing.

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I sat down, and simply wrote it straight through. 12 pages. How long did it take? Geez, maybe 2 hours, maybe 3 hours…. The point is…I paid no attention to style. That’s for later.

Now, this isn’t the first time I’ve read or heard advice like this, but I’ve never understood it. What does it mean to write without paying attention to style? What is writing without style? Isn’t writing the process of taking something that doesn’t quite exist, the content of ones thoughts, and making it exist by supplying it with a form? So to write without paying attention to style would be to not write at all.

Graham Harman’s written quite a bit about the importance of style, as a matter of essence rather than mere decoration; so it’s odd to see him suggesting the virtues (indeed, the possibility) of writing without attention to style. I wonder what he means by it.

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The chancellor had advised me, back in 1968, to do something about my name and appearance if I wanted to be taken seriously as a Hitler innovator…. We finally agreed that I should invent an extra initial and call myself J. A. K. Gladney, a tag I wore like a borrowed suit.

The chancellor warned against what he called my tendency to make a feeble presentation of myself. He strongly suggested that I gain weight. He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler…. I had the advantage of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk, or so he believed—an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness.

Which makes me wonder, how should I shape my physical appearance to be appropriate to the kind of academic career I want? Or, have I already, by my sartorial choices, sealed my academic destiny? A troubling thought.

Which brings me to this article discouraging people from doing PhDs (via). There’s something of a cottage industry in this kind of article, and they’ve always annoyed me for some reason. There are, I think, two interrelated problems. One is the academic exceptionalism, the suggestion that academic work is completely different from other sorts of work; to say that academic work is uniquely awful is still a way of maintaining that academic work is special. The second problem follows from this attempt to exempt academia from the rules that shape the rest of the world, because it suggests that you can avoid the problems of academia simply by avoiding academia. But, really, that’s bullshit. Of course academia is unique, like everything; but competition, insecurity, and exploitation are hardly unknown outside of academic work. Maintaining the fantasy that one could simply opt out of the problems of academic work encourages people not to struggle to improve the situation within universities, something that’s particularly unpleasant when the person making the complaints is a tenured professor, someone with at least a small level of power.

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Aside from that, I’ve been:

• Worrying about Britney Spears. Everything I saw about the VMA performances was talking about if Britney is fat or not (she isn’t), which misses the more serious point. Britney Spears the supposedly “real person” seems to be having a bit of a tough time, but it’s not like any of us know her, so any sympathy is pretty abstract. More worryingly, the VMA performace was so uninspired in terms of coreography, design, costume; it suggests a serious crises in the Britney Spears machine. Further evidence: she has an album coming out soon, and her website is still totally insane.
• Studying for an exam in contemporary political theory, which has persuaded me of the deep wrongness of political philosophy. Attempting to come up with a philosophical explanation of why certain political disagreements are invalid is not politically useful. See also this post in which Brian Leiter quotes the excellent Raymond Geuss on Rawls, and a number of people miss the point spectacularly in the comments.
• Posting stuff on Twitter. Those of you who read this site via RSS may not have seen the twitter posts in the top right. You can read those via RSS too, if this blog isn’t trivial enough for you.
• Inventing a song about Max Shachtman to the tune of awful Beatles record “Taxman.” My favorite couplet so far involves rhyming “Fourth International schism” with “bureaucratic collectivism.”

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• Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse
• Catherine MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (and maybe Only Words).
• Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics
• bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
• Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (ed) This Bridge Called My Back
• Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (and/or Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, depending on how much French feminism I want to read).
• Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (or Gender Trouble)
• Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety
• Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser and Drucilla Cornel, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange
• Linda Martín Alcoff, ed., Feminist Epistemologies

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the speaker can make a double assertion:

1. The common people are right to be suspicious of some intellectual work, which really is useless at best or counterproductive at worst.
2. I, however, do not do that kind of intellectual work and am very suspicious of it myself.

The problem with this is that by focusing on the individual’s choice of academic style, this kind of move distracts from a critique of the exclusionary power structures of academia. It’s a kind of beautiful-soul anti-intellectualism, that attempts to position the speaker outside of the harmful effects of academia through their individual virtue. But the problem is not one that can be solved just by good intentions, it derives from the structures of capitalism; abstractly, the division of manual and mental labor, more concretely, in the particular ways (social, economic) that some people are prevented from reading and thinking about certain things.

So, the problem here cannot be solved by choosing to write in a particular style (and it is a matter of style—these kinds of complaints always end up talking about Judith Butler’s subordinate clauses); what prevents wider participation in theoretical work is not superficial matters of subjects that are supposedly distant from “real life,” or writing that is supposedly inaccessible to “real people.” My favorite example here are the workers’ study groups of the 19th and early 20th century, who had no problem reading Capital. And, surprisingly given the elitist connotations of a revolutionary “vanguard,” Lenin has some forceful things to say about the stupidity of worrying about what the poor workers can get their little heads around:

It is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known.

— Lenin, What Is To Be Done?

As Lenin says, imagining the response of a worker to his anti-theoretical comrade, “We are not children … we want to know everything others know, we want to learn the details of all aspects of political life and to take part actively in every political event.”

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She took off her T-shirt, then her bra, then her skirt, and as she did she pulled the most incredible faces. She twirled around in her skimpy panties for a few seconds more and then, not knowing what else to do, began getting dressed again.

— Michel Houellebecq

I’m reminded of this post at Long Sunday about student disengagement from politics every day as I walk through Sproul Plaza. I’m confonted by a bewildering collection of Asian Business Associations, Pre-law Fraternities, Campus Crusades for Christ; there’s even Students for In-N-Out Burger out there every day acting as unpaid shills for a fast-food company. “Is this,” I wondered, “what Mario Savio died for?” But the more I think about it, the more I think that the politics (or lack thereof) of contemporary students is an unintended consequence of the success of the radical students of the 60s; or to be more dialectical about it, of the failures of the successes of 1968.

CR and the commenters to the post above point out the effect of economic changes on students, who have increasingly little free time, or expectation that a university education by itself will gain them any kind of financial security, and of course these effects are in part due to capital’s response to the success of late 60s challenges to Keynesian managed capitalism. And perhaps the proliferation of professionalized student organizations on Sproul Plaza is a kind of psychic counterpart to the collapse of Keynesianism.

In a totally liberal economic system certain people accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery.… Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.

Houellebecq makes the point (which seems to elude Tony Blair, among others), that formally free choice in the market always depends on depriving some people of choice. And if (as he shows in excruciating detail in Whatever) the model of choice is being extended to every sphere of society, we are increasingly confronted with both a demand that we exercise our choice, and a lack of anything to choose. “Not knowing what else to do,” as Houellebecq puts it, perhaps it’s not too surprising that students begin to construct hierarchies to which they can comfortably subject themselves. What else are fraternities and sororities, for instance?

The comparatively constrained pre-1960s social order provided an odd sort of comfort to those seeking radical change: they new their place, both in order to rebel against it and as an ultimate guarantor if this rebellion failed. The undergraduates I see on Sproul Plaza do not have this clarity or this consolation: political engagement, choosing a side and working for a political order in which one is ultimately responsible only to oneself, no longer looks like a liberation; it looks uncomfortably close to an infinite prolongation of capitalism’s terrifying, meaningless, demand: choose!

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Of course, there are certain sorts of misreading I’m not interested in, such as the Straussian approach. The central Straussian assumption is that great texts have a hidden, esoteric, meaning, available only to the philosopher. This supposed cynicism is actually an extraordinary gullibility; like bad psychoanalysis or bad ideology critique, Straussians are fooled by the oldest trick in the book, the idea that there is a “true meaning” behind the apparent meaning. Of course, this ends up with thing like reading Plato and saying, “the community of goods and women is obviously morally repugnant, Plato couldn’t possibly have meant it”; in other words, going to all the trouble of reading a 2000 year old work to come up with the same conclusions you already held. A properly cynical reading, by contrast, knows that people always say exactly what they mean, often without even knowing it.

But there’s another sort of misreading, not motivated by a desire to impute some true meaning to a text, indeed quite cheerfully unconcerned with questions of correct or incorrect meaning; Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, or Badiou’s book on Deleuze, strike me as good examples of this. What’s interesting is that, while these authors develop their own theory through constructing a questionable interpretation of their source, they are not just arbitrarily coercing their source material to fit their views (as Strauss does); rather, the specific source material they are misreading seems in some way a necessary component of their project. It’s that kind of productive misreading I’d like to master.

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