From "Art Critics in Extremis," an essay* published by Hal Foster in 2002 or so:
Tom Wolfe notoriously trashed all late-modernist art as a critical scam, a "painted word" contrived in "Cultureberg" (his anti-Semitic slam against [Clem] Greenberg, [Harold] Rosenberg, and [Leo] Steinberg).Hasn't Wolfe been saying that about all of New York Jewry and culture for at least two decades? I didn't realize that Minimalism was at the kernel of the disagreement. Anyway, though Wolfe might point to his Jewish wife as evidence against his being an anti-Semite ("My best friend is Jewish!"), that phrase has always bugged me as textbook racism. It's a simple enough rule, and one that any satirist is smart enough to realize: If you're disagreeing with a group of Jews, don't phrase that disagreement in terms of your opponents' religion. Why will no one sit him down, explain this to him, and ask him politely to stop already? Good satire doesn't mean license to be a total idiot about commonsensical stuff.
Nevertheless, all credit goes to Wolfe for coining "fuck patois" in I Am Charlotte Simmons (an otherwise intolerable book).
* The same essay was more previously published as "Art Agonistes", but my copy appears to be an updated one.
I've been reading Boundless, this webzine by Focus on the Family, and it's pretty fantastic. The editorial formula: Take a rote, sexist stereotype, dress it up with the personal voice and namedrop brand things and places (to connect to "you" and "your life") and punch it.
Now, I'm not such a humorless literalist that I don't think the differences between the sexes aren't ample ground for humor. Women's complete inability to grapple with even simple arithmetic, for example: hilarious! But when an organization publishes—with a straight face, apparently—a guide called, "Husbands and Wives: How a Husband Should Handle His Wife's Submission," well, that organization will be sleeping on the couch tonight. There's no good humor to back up this jokey column about how men are too goofy, too labrador retriever-y to shop for groceries and succeed and so women should do the shopping. Under any circumstances I'd avoid ending a piece like that with the line "women should do the shopping," but it's especially suspect coming from the folks who believe that "women should do the everything men tell them to."
The tired lines follow the predictable ones (the Hunter-Gatherer emerges!), but along comes this:
John is a kid in a candy store when he steps through Safeway's automatic doors. He pounces on the very items most female shoppers avoid: dried fish, mint chutney, coconut ginger rice and banana-strawberry kefir.Really? That's what guys eat when their women aren't nagging them? Coming from a place where people really buy into this stuff, Focus on the Family has always struck me as being awfully similar to Focusing on a Bag of Pork Rinds, at least as far as culinary ambitions go. Chutney, coconut ginger, kefir? That's not Family Focused—John's shopping at Whole Foods!
Listless men return from shopping trips energized by their ingenuity. Noodles are replaced by artichoke hearts, milk exchanged for broccolini, the sought-after turkey traded for a single hairy coconut.Grocery shopping on the DL.
. . . and weren't afraid to ask. That Leon Kass essay? The first of three parts? Recycled. You can read the whole (insufferable) thing here. No big deal, really, but where's the disclosure?
Truly the only thing I can add to Kieran Healy's shelling of Leon Kass is a link. Just click through already.
But a couple words about Maggie Gallagher's mortifying guest stint at Volokh. (Scroll about from that link.) First and foremost: Doesn't anyone remember the payola pundit mess from a while back?
More importantly, what are these arguments she's bringing? She was crucified in comments for arguing that homosexuality led to the fall of the Roman Empire—I kid you not—and has rebounded with the tried-and-true slippery slope to polygamy. All this without explaining by what mechanism gay marriage actually threatens heterosexual marriage (or civilization), despite a chorus of commenters asking her to do just that. The "SSM" moniker, with all the monolithic threat implied therein, is her cleverest contribution to the debate.
The man who captured Adolph Eichmann has died. His memoirs, The Murderers Among Us, make for incredible reading. Weisenthal is well known for I Hunted Eichmann, a book in which (it is said) he leveraged the romance of some of his more notrious chases in order to promote and fund his operation. His superhero work was naturally arresting, but the other aspects of his work were also compelling: the meticulous research he never finished, the ethical boundaries he perpetually skirted in plumbing the underworld for leads, the rehabilitated Nazi politicians he tried to topple during the Cold War. Fascinating man.
David Velleman at Left2Right argues dispassionately against gay marriage based on the (U.N.-recognized) right of children to know their biological parents:
Yet reversing [the practice of omitting reference on a birth certificate to the biological donor in favor of the adoptive parent] would bear differently on heterosexual and homosexual marriages. It would affect only a small percentage of heterosexual marriages, and it would be no more prejudicial to their parental rights than openness in adoption, which is now widespread. But a requirement of openness in donor conception would affect all homosexual marriages as a class. Homosexual marriage would be, by its very nature, marriage that can lead only to qualified parenthood—qualified, that is, by the legally recognized parenthood of donors or birth parents. Maybe same-sex couples would be willing to accept a form of marriage that is second-class in this respect—but I doubt it.Velleman continues: "My worry is that a purely affectional conception of marriage will tend to favor a purely affectional conception of parenthood." The problem being that it's a little late to turn back that tide now. In his argument, Velleman consistently uses "marriage" when he means something like "parenthood." Consider that birth certification has almost zero bearing on families that do not include children—not just gay couples that don't adopt but the many heterosexual married couples that do not or cannot have children. Furthermore, our society is already asked to navigate the sensitive issues of "qualified parenthood" when heterosexual couples, for reasons of infertility (to cite one example) adopt a child. If we must prevent even the possibility that adoptive parents might violate a child's fundamental rights, then we will have to begin by reversing longstanding rights for heterosexual couples.
I sympathize with Velleman's distaste for the argument, put forth by a Massachusetts gay-rights organization, that birth certificates should replace "Mother" and "Father" with "Parent A" and "Parent B," whether for a child of a straight or gay couple. That's stupid. The suggestion fails to account for the actual world to which it refers, where children don't go about holding hands with A+B. Certainly gay marriage introduces some new questions—what label to put on the form for the adoptive woman who is married to the biological mother? I don't know, but I'll hazard that a reasonable (if not apparent) answer is at least feasible; and that we shouldn't put off the many questions regarding gay couples' legal rights and recognition because another murky question may or may not come up. These questions are soluble.
On a related note: Gail Armstrong has a wonderfully dark post about adoption and, in a sense, how murky every family is. It's a succinct complement to Velleman's sharp, starched argument.
There's a somewhat stiff Arts and Letters booth at TPM Cafe, but good luck finding it—there's no link to it (or any other categories, as far as I can tell) anywhere on the home page, which, in turn, is exactly where you end up if you enter artsandletters.tpmcafe.com. But by the power of RSS I came upon Brad DeLong's thoughts about Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent. The book would appear to be a tour of the vast ruins wrought by Theory, that notorious match with which Derrida (or Foucault or Fish or Fried), playing Nero, burned down the academy.
Of the book DeLong says:
There is a certain bloodlessness here: the dry bones hop about and clatter, but there is too little flesh on them: much too little is said about how High Theory changed—for good and for ill—how we read books.From browsing the series of entries in the book symposium on Theory's Empire hosted by The Valve (a great literary blog, if you're not reading it), I get the impression that a similar consensus emerged there as well. Sean McCann writes, "[t]he problem (to the extent we agree there is one) is not any ideas particular to Theory, in other words, but the academic celebrity system, the tenure review process, and/or the guild process of professional training." Jeffrey Wallen (a contributor to Theory's Empire) writes that one item of consensus among his colleagues is that "that theory died, or rather was asphyxiated, some time shortly after the death of Paul de Man. The sorts of concerns and practices that seemed to be at the center of literary criticism in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s were now largely viewed as obsolete and tainted."
So that should serve as some comfort if you are, like me, skeptical whenever a book emerges that has set in its crosshairs all of Theory. I don't mean by my suspicion that I can't appreciate or tolerate a minority report; but if Roger Kimball's Rape of the Masters or Hilton Kramer's work can be taken as representative of popular notions of discontent, attacks on Theory's contemporary are usually chased with a rejection of all the political or linguistic critical accomplishments of the twentieth century, in favor of a return to a sequestered version of New Criticism.
Daniel Green, responding to an essay in TE contributed by New Critic Rene Wellek, expands on this hostility:
As the author of Theory of Literature (long considered the primary theoretical pillar supporting the New Criticism), Rene Wellek surely exemplifies the imperative to separate theory from Theory that John Holbo has been discussing. Wellek cleary believed in the efficacy of theory—which he defines as “concerned with the principles, categories, functions, and criteria of literature in general"—but as early as 1982 he feared that literary theory was undermining the very assumptions on which literary study had been based. Were his fears (at least about the kind of theory then being promulgated) well-founded? I think not.A restatement of the fundamental disagreement about the relative centrality of the object and the reader that didn't involve casting aspersions on the situation of the academy sounds like good hunting for a traditionalist out to slay some dragons. Perhaps that's not to be found in this volume, according to DeLong et al. It sounds to me like an extraordinary introduction to some writers with whom I'm not familiar, so I'll add it to the wishlist. At the very least, I know what I'm getting James for Christmas.His essay,"Destroying Literary Studies,” reprinted in Theory’s Empire, contends that Theory (primarily deconstruction and reader-response theory, but also extending as far back as Northrop Frye) was threatening “the whole edifice of literary study” in an “attempt to destroy literary studies from the inside.” In retrospect, this seems an absurd charge to have leveled against the likes of Derrida, Frye, Stanley Fish, and (!) Harold Bloom, and seems to vindicate the counter-charge that New Criticism was an especially narrow and insular movement. If even Frye and Bloom couldn’t be countenanced as serious-minded rivals, wasn’t it New Criticism that was doomed to destroy itself “from the inside”?
[. . .]
The “theories” of both Derrida and Fish could have co-existed comfortably with New Critical formalism if everyone concerned had not regarded the differences between them as so considerable that they justified critical and curricular warfare. Judging from Rene Wellek’s essay (and many of the others included in Theory’s Empire), the New Critics and other traditionalists were just as responsible for initiating hostilities as the Theorists who ultimately defeated them.
Also note that, according to Amazon, "readers who viewed this book also viewed Saved by the Bell: Seasons 1 & 2 by Elizabeth Berkley"—do with that information what you will.
Old hat for regular G.p readers, but the Sepia Mutiny recounts and redresses Roger Kimball's recent reformulation of the white man's burden vis-à-vis Indian history preceding Partition. Ghandi's "rabble" and all that. Says Kimball, if you'll recall:
. . . this third-world feminist of color should get down on her knees and thank Siva that her country was the beneficiary of British colonialism. Without it, she would never have heard of feminism or even of the third world, since the very concept depends upon the freedom, education, and language that the West brought to savages [sic] countries in the 18th and 19th centuries. India is such an economic powerhouse today because of the legacy bequeathed by her former colonial rulers . . . everywhere that Britain went—I cannot think of a single exception—it left better off.A correlation/causation fallcy falling somewhere between a counterfactual and sampling on the dependent variable (e.g., Kieran Healey's "Why are so many of the closets I open full of my clothes?"), Kimball's proposition is that progress necessarily follows from British subjugation. Taking his hypothesis to one natural conclusion, one might suggest that the British immediately be persuaded to conquer the entire world, given all the benefits that subjugation to the queen confers; applying his thesis along another axis, one might suggest world domination by both the Nazis and Soviets as well, since many if not all the countries formerly conquered by these Empires are doing very well today (I cannot think of a single exception, or bother to define my metric), a trend only explained by the wise guidance of Fascism and Communism. Following the time variable backward, in fact, it's hard to come up with a single historical instance of brute imperialism that hasn't made the world a better place!
OK, I'm embarrassed to have missed this glaring item in the same Armavirumque post I mentioned below:
Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided. [emphasis added]Gandhi! One presumes here that our neocolonialist correspondent would avoid that tragedy by having India remain subordinate to the U.K.
Gandhi—rabble!
(Has nothing to do with the post; I'm just running low on puns.)
Using the privilege of his soapbox to respond to and demoralize an anonymous respondent to the New Criterion, Critter-in-Chief Roger Kimball spells out the poor man's case against Andrea Dworkin in an aside:
Here she is on the subject of sexual intercourse; and here she is in propria persona, as it were.To be clear, that one-two link combo, legitimizing all too many points made by Dworkin's defenders (among whom I don't include myself), belongs to Kimball.
Next up: Yo' mama (was a Communist) jokes!
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
"Whinging." The word. Totally over. Never want to see it again. Especially on a website - don't make me see it again. Let the word go forth.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
Before Dan went on his Colt .45 bender, he left us this parenthetical comment regarding the Donald Kuspit piece we both commented on:
Frankly I think it cries out for—interestingly enough considering its author's own critical predilections—a psychological reading of its dynamics and motivations, but I'm certainly not prepared to offer such myself.
If I remember correctly, I’ve already put myself on record as loathing psychological readings. And I’m not going to offer one here. But Dan touches on something I find important, so I want to briefly talk about that.
As was obvious to anyone who bothered to read the various posts, I was pretty ticked off by Kuspit’s article. At the same time, if one goes back and looks closely, most of what one sees consists of difference in emphasis and perspective, ways of talking and claims of what’s prior to what. Not nothing, but not a whole lot, either. Kuspit laid out a certain position, I reacted against it, and Dan mostly mediated, but one could point to all sorts of fundamental points of agreement, and even say that the disagreements were not as real as they seemed.
But like Dan says, it’s clear that Kuspit was involved in what he was doing. And it’s equally clear that I was involved in my reaction against it. Without putting anybody on the couch, one has to acknowledge that who one is, one’s personal history and all that comes with it, figures into how one thinks about these things. A former teacher of mine would sometimes ask, “How do you write a book like Foucault? Do you first have to be Foucault?” That all we write and say constitutes at some level a type of autobiography is the sort of thought that occurs to everyone at one time or another, and helps to explain the emotional intensity that can attach itself to even small differences. At the same time, once one begins to consider the epistemological abyss that opens once one starts to take such thoughts too far, the natural reaction is to pull back. I don’t have any answers to offer. There’s simply something plaintive about the thought that our understanding advances through our presenting allegories of our selves. It will not surprise regular readers of Modern Kicks that I find that Howard Nemerov expressed this conflict most beautifully. Dan thought he could stop me, but the Nemerov bloggin’ begins now:
To a Scholar in the Stacks
When you began your story all its words Had long been written down, its elements Already so cohered in such exact Equations that there should have seemed to be No place to go, no entrance to the maze. A heart less bold would have refused to start, A mind less ignorant would have stayed home.
For Pasiphaë already had conceived
And borne her bully boy, and Daedalus
Responding had designed the darkness in
Its mystical divisions; Theseus,
Before you came, descended and returned,
By means of the thread, many and many a time,
What was there that had not been always done?
And still, when you began, only because
You did begin, the way opened before you.
The pictured walls made room, received your life;
Pasiphaë frowned, the Sea King greeted you,
And sighing Ariadne gave the thread
As always; in that celebrated scene
You were alone in being alone and new.
And now? You have gone down, you have gone in,
You have become incredibly rich and wise
From wandering underground. And yet you weary
And disbelieve, daring the Minotaur
Who answers in the echoes of your voice,
Holding the thread that has no other end,
Speaking her name whom you abandoned long ago.
Then out of this what revelation comes?
Sometimes in darkness and in deep despair
You will remember, Theseus, that you were
The Minotaur, the Labyrinth and the thread
Yourself; even you were that ingener
That fled the maze and flew – so long ago –
Over the sunlit sea to Sicily.
Cathy Young of Reason takes up the unenviable task of speaking ill of the dead in a Boston Globe obit-ed on Andrea Dworkin. Her column is the first responsible comment on Dworkin's legacy I've seen. With all due respect—I don’t see that Dworkin deserves the respect of feminism. Feminists should have disposessed her work as beyond the pale as it hit the presses, and the movement would be stronger today for having done so.
Normally I find truck with the "by excess, progress" thesis Kevin Drum poses. (Which he's totally just saying to get back in the girls' good graces, but anyway.) Insofar as Dworkin's work, as rhetorically bombastic as it was, called greater attention to violence perpetrated against women, her work deserves praise. But I think that degree is marginal and greatly outweighed by the harm she did to the movement. For one thing, Dworkin’s work was more academic clarification of violence than public activism about it; for another, it takes willful misreading to withdraw from her fundamentalist campaign against pornography any practicable applications.
I’m surprised, for example, to see Amanda Marcotte, a strong feminist blogger, illustrate the point: She links to a Feministing post (about a brutal high school rape and attempted cover up) and comments on it in the context of Dworkin's work, saying that Dworkin "raised awareness of sexual violence." The times aren’t so caveman that only by the critical lens of feminism are rape and conspiracy monstrous, but nevertheless. The problem, I think, is that Dworkin’s given credit for drawing attention to the pressing question of whether and how explicit imagery frames societal perceptions of and behavior toward women—a pressing, difficult empirical question—but not only did she not treat this question with data, she never treated it at all. The empirical concern acknowledges a distinction between the virtual and the real, but Dworkin draws no such line; as Creep and Blink puts it, she occupies the "blurry line between leftist and rightist totalitarianism and paranoia" (link courtesy Lindsay Beyerstein).
The pornography Dworkin took to be literal violence against women was “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.” (In answer to which I’m tempted to quote Ellen Willis: “What I like is erotica, and what you like is pornography.”) The semantic baggage Dworkin invested in "explicit subordination,” she spent a career unpacking, but time and again she clarified that she meant pornography to mean, in fact, heterosexual sex, whether mediated by voyeurism, commercialism, otherwise, or not at all. Somehow I recognize that it shows poorly on me to quote her as saying, “Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman”—as if I’m cherrypicking the one erratic statement from her catalogue. But she meant that quote and all the other incendiary blasts. The camp she contradistinguished is men, whom she hated. She thought that heterosexual intercourse was rape, she said so time after time, and one only needs to read what she wrote to understand that.
But Amanda, Feministe, Bitch Ph.D. —all soft on her. It goes without saying that the misandry espoused by Dworkin (and Catherine MacKinnon) is the source for the “feminazi” smear and its many variations. Inexcusable, misogynist bludgeon though that may be , it’s not unfair to suggest that feminists are partly responsible for the persistence of that slur, by not only failing to disassociate Dworkin from the movement but in fact canonizing her among second wave feminists. Give her some credit for stepping up the rhetoric a notch, I guess, but her scholarship was atrocious.
Just wanted to observe that the New Criterion is still writing about Ward Churchill. For nearly three months they've draped heavy quotation marks around ethnic studies ("ethnic" "studies"), promoted a definition of academic freedom that shushes all the naughty words Hilton Kramer doesn't want you to hear, and otherwise pilloried Churchill, the most significant philosopher-king to ever have led the Democratic Party and all college students.
Someone woke up on the wrong side of the fringe this morning:
If people have never felt the need to think about art before two weeks ago, I maintain that we do not have a responsibility to listen to their dissertations now. If it takes so many tons of orange plastic in their back yard to get people going on art, maybe art isn't their subject. Gary Condit or Scott Peterson might make better areas of inquiry for them. Friends, let's take art out of the water cooler conversation and put it back in the galleries and museums where it belongs.Forget the elitist–populist criticism continuum—what James Panero is saying is that this model has one dimension too many. His negative review of The Gates is the canonical one, there is no room for competing opinions about the work, the people seeing The Gates are cultural philistines, and positive opinions of the work are those belonging to a flock of dimwits. Roll back Vatican II and give the man a mitre—I do believe James Panero wants to be Art Pope. The word from On High? Let them eat CourtTV!
I would think that a prominent critic such as Roger Kimball would gracefully bow out of the discussion following the death of a beloved artist whose work or politics he finds untolerable. But no—when opportunism knocks, Kimball answers:
Let the bouquets begin. The playwright Arthur Miller died yesterday at 89. An icon of the left-liberal establishment for decades, Miller has already been showered with a diabetic's nightmare of saccharine eulogies from . . . well, from just about everywhere. I won't intrude into this love-fest except to note that a measure of scepticism about Mr. Miller's halo of sanctity is in order.Ah, but intrude he does. He continues with a selection from a 2000 New Criterion piece in which he plays patsy to the longstanding but sputtering effort to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy and revise the history surrounding the House Un-American Activities Committee. But that's neither here nor there. I find Kimball's tone snotty considering the fact, but even that is a matter of decorum. What is revealing is that Kimball seems to suggest that because Miller shared a widely maintained political orientation that has since been determined to be wrong and unsophisticated, we ought to discount, for example, Death of a Salesman. If Kimball wants to revise Miller's godhead stature in American theater, he has to get past Willy Loman first.
I'm convinced that Miller earned his "halo of sanctity" with Willy Loman alone, but the criticism can be made. I'd guess that a minority report exists as to how the importance and centrality of Death of a Salesman has been overstated; I can even picture the rough outlines of a New Historicist's complaint that the work is wrong. But what Kimball offers is either a callow attack or extremely unorthodox. If Kimball's theory is based on an artist's position on the proper role of the state in production, then here he is consistent (if enrolled in a pointless exercise). If he exposes artists to a political or moral litmus and rejects artists with heterodox opinions, I don't know what to say. He might find more satisfaction in taking up the cloth; religion is the business of indoctrination, not art.
It's possible that Kimball does not find fault in Miller's work and is just wasting everyone's time with this reverse hagiographic chore. If he has something to say on Death or the other works that define Miller's distinguished career, he's not saying. But "Arthur Miller, Communist Stooge"? Hardly an analysis up to the task of handling the man's death. Useless, really.
After Fontana Labs revealed that Ward Churchill doesn't actually have a Ph.D. and Henry Farrell cited sound data to prove that terrorists aren't grown in Western comp lit departments, it's hardly worth the bother to say that Roger Kimball, still beating the Churchill drum, is still wrong. Everybody else seems to be ignoring him, but since he's made considerably more noise about the faults of Western academia over the course of his career than a clamorous couple of Instapundit posts, I think his name should enter in the mix. Kimball's just as good as Glenn, too—look where Kimball can get to given one leftist screwball's ridiculousness:
[A]cademic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.You always, always know that a critic is about to sell you some grade-A snake oil when he tells you that his opinion is free of politics. The only critics who use those terms are the ones whose principal occupation is the politics. It's in the name of "excluding the political" that conservatives cry foul when wonderful and fresh writers like Zora Neale Hurston edge out wonderful but exhausted writers like Ernest Hemingway from the modernist syllabus. What a critic like Roger Kimball wants you to believe is that a college education absolutely must cover every book that you cannot help but find otherwise on the shelves of Barnes & Noble. And that straying from the European canon in order to include forgotten, suppressed, rehabilitated, or outsider texts amounts to shoehorning art into the canon (which is, by the way, college course schedules we're talking about, frankly). And this interrupts the process by which universities stamp a uniform civic identity on American minds. As Kimball understands them, those minds, naked and unmyelinized before the age of 25, cry out for universities to protect their hosts from unkosher texts and reasonable car insurance rates.
Maybe he believes that student minds aren't up to the task of seeing the whole cloth and cutting away the bad. If they're unprepared to filter out Ward Churchill, I'm afraid that they're ill-prepared to handle the mind of Voltaire—but anyway, I'm sure that that's not Kimball's point. I think there's a meaty subtext to the academic freedom/freedom of speech distinction: Kimball implies some bizarre belief about whom a university ought to be allowed to employ. (At least I think that's where's he going; maybe you can tease some better sense out of, "I should think that freedom of speech still translates into a freedom from employing troglodytes.")
But as I said, it's hardly worth the bother—especially now that John Holbo has written the exhaustive rebuttal to this newest outbreak of anti-academia hysteria. Huzzah, JH.
To give Roger Kimball some fair due, I am also appalled at Ward Churchill's analogy of victims of 9/11 to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi technical bureaucrat who abetted the Holocaust. There's not an ounce of scalable criticism to that analogy—it's unworkable and repugnant. I'm less appalled by the invitation that Hamilton College extended to Churchill to speak on a panel, because it's important to be exposed to and understand arguments with which you disagree. But very stunning was Hamilton's invitation to Susan Rosenberg, a former member of the Weather Underground, to be a professor. Speaking, okay, but teaching? What the fuck? Kimball's right: The trustees ought to be raising some serious hell over this.
However—I'm not giving an inch on the meta point that Kimball hopes to make with every breath: roughly, that the university installed a right-minded Western civic education once before these effin' kids got to it with their mothereffin' multi-culti crap. I like these effin' kids! But really, Hamilton, you're not making it easy over here.
Yesterday Matt Yglesias scolded Roger Kimball for boldly mischaracterizing the trajectory of contemporary philosophy vis-à-vis the epistemology of truth. The nut of Yglesias's complaint is that Kimball snips from conjectures to fuel large, body-of-work judgments on theories; rhetorically conflates arguments; and cherrypicks theorists as it suits him.
Yesterday Kimball similarly annoyed me with a post on the perils of sexual liberation. His argument runs like a criticism of the Democratic Party that starts with Eugene Debs and ends at Lyndon LaRouche.
After a bumpy start in which he compares the widely accepted and observably successful sexual revolution of the 1960s to the excesses of mystical Anabaptists of yester millenia, Kimball identifies as bedrock and gospel to the sexual revolution the Herbert Marcuse text, Eros and Civilization (written in 1955, as it were). To the extent that one Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic analysis of sexual utopianism seeded the sexual revolution is somewhat irrelevant to Kimball's point—it can't be said that the Marxist-Freudian-aesthetic camp continued to win advents during the 1960–70s, Marcuse's personal cache with leftist students notwithstanding. Tracing a legacy between Marcuse's work and the intellectual tradition today is a considerable task given the large number of works that remain untranslated for lack of interest, but it's not unfeasible that there is a tradition today whose roots lie in Marcuse's work.
Getting from that narrow ledge back to a substantive observation on the dubious sexual liberation policies of today (the intolerable terms of which Kimball assumes the reader already knows) would require some gymnastics. Kimball might have made a leap from Marcuse's Marxist-Freudian aesthetics to someone working today in, say, the psychoanalytic tradition (Jane Flax?). Better yet would be to outline first the parameters of the complaint at which he wants to arrive. There's nothing Marcusian about it, but Kimball suggests:
By the mid-Seventies, though, the prophets were grumbling. The sexual utopia they had envisioned was--as the etymology of the word suggests--no place. Nature itself was part of the problem. A battery of new sexually transmitted ailments, from herpes to AIDS, arrived in quick succession to make casual sex a dangerous, potentially a deadly affair. But disease was not the whole story. For one thing, most people found the pursuit of sexual gratification for its own sake ultimately ungratifying. They were looking for sex without strings. It turned out that "the strings"--the emotional and spiritual nourishment that longstanding relationships offer--were essential: sever them and the pleasure chills.To ignore in his diagnosis that over this period women entered the workforce is an astounding error of omission and analysis. Caitlin Flanagan's interesting brand of feminism has a great deal to say on the subject, and in comparison Kimball is inobservant if not retrograde.So much was a salutary corrective to the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies. But true to form, the demand for sexual liberation has also spawned a counter-movement, an ideologically motivated demand for sexual orthodoxy. This shows itself above all in what we might call the sexual-harassment industry: the fantastical reinterpretation of everyday life such that every human exchange is potentially open to the charge of sexual malfeasance.
Wild stuff! But the thing is that MacKinnon and Kimball agree about the sexual revolution. It is certainly the weirdest spot in feminist criticism, the one at which both Catherine MacKinnon and Roger Kimball stand together to say that the sexual revolution ought never have gone as far as it did. Far left, far right, far out?
It should be obvious enough that MacKinnon represents no point of consensus in contemporary criticism. I'd call it a stretch to say that she's even played her marginal role relevantly since the early 1990s. Where's Adrienne Rich? Judith Butler? bell hooks? Portentous though the threat of a MacKinnon-led "feminist tyranny" may be, it would probably be more useful to address the performative and economic models that substantive critics are advancing today.
