“Nuanced”

Is this how we are supposed to read the excerpt above?

Reading Benjamin R Barber’s Consumed: How markets corrupt children, infantilize adults, and swallow c[i]tizens whole, [and] invincibly was reminded of some of the weird contortions Thomas de Zengotita [went through in] Mediated: How the media shape[s] your life and the way you live in it put himself through to avoid looking as if he was saying what he was so obviously saying, I determined to write a book of cultural criticism of my own, to be called Nuanced: How the contemporary left has been forced into hypocrisy, temporising [and] doublespeak by the fear that no one would otherwise publish, buy or read its books of cultural criticism.

Damned if he does [and] damned if he doesn’t in a culture that simply won’t be criticised, Barber explains why this can’t actually be described as a form of soft censorship proceeding from what unstreamlined old lefties would have called f**** c************. Not a bad thing, because it forces him to find a new way of (not) saying it, [and] books like Consumed – unable to point the finger at their own potential readership for fear of losing it – survive the market only on their ability to confect neologisms [and] catchwords, presumably in imitation of the business bestsellers [and] aspirational texts which they don’t actually want to be seen to be contradicting.

Without any paragraphs or being able to see where the book titles (both real and invented) are supposed to start and end the entire thing takes about five readings to make any sense of it.

Still trying to work out what five letter word beginning with “f” followed by a thirteen letter word beginning with “c” are intended to be censored in the second paragraph, and can’t find any meaning of the word invincibly that makes sense in context.

Stuart: for “invincibly” substitute “inevitably” and I think you’ll have it. Otherwise, your critique of rather sloppy writing (not that there isn’t an interesting point or two in there) is spot on.

Mr. Henry,

It seems to me that much of the left long to find personal fulfillment through being Amos Starkadders. There is, unfortunately, a shortage of Quivering Bretheren.

Sentenced to Death: What Every Writer Needs to Know About Putting Words Together Into Readable Paragraphs.

I don’t think I’ve encountered the term “unstreamlined old lefties” before. Does he mean unreconstructed?

OT but the blockbuster I’ve always wanted to write is Folding Chair: How One Invention Changed the Way We Sit — and Live.

Markets infantilize adults?

Isn’t it ‘infantilizing’ to assume that adults are helpless dupes who are too stupid to realize they’re being screwed and so need to be protected from their own inclinations and rescued from their false consciousness by Barber, et al?

stuart: it’s hard to sell books (well more than just the first few) if the people reading it think you are insulting or belittling them.

Particularly when your thesis is inherently insulting and belittling to them–hiding that takes extra work. Not as much as it would, though, if your audience were actually smart, but we’re already know they’re very easily fooled and lead astray.

I simply cannot tell what that post is trying to argue. That’s one of the worst pieces of writing I’ve ever seen on any blog, anywhere. Even the re-written version submitted by the first commenter barely makes sense.

Can someone explain what he is trying to say? Or better yet, just say it?

greensmile have you considered one reason for maintaining a small audience would be things like in the first sentence of the first link you included you use the term ‘demoncracy’, which is about the point that I stopped reading your blog. Maybe that is exactly your intent though.

Miss Luis

you do know, don’t you, that there never was anything nasty in the woodshed? It was all an excuse to terrorise the Starkadders into obedience. Perhaps Amos wouldn’t have been so busy terrorising his own brethren if the matriarch of the family hadn’t established fear as the only means of control?

(And have you seen the movie? I strongly recommend it, it even cuts out the silly sci-fi parts)

Mr. Sg,

I did think the movie was rather good actually, and in some ways an improvement on the book as it cut out the stylistic satire (the asterisks) that wore out its welcome after a dozen times or so. Otherwise it was extremely faithful to the book and rightly so.

You miss the purpose of “something nasty in the woodshed” – Aunt Ada’s club is not fear but guilt and shame.

I think that nasty stuff in the woodshed (real or not, it was ancient history) works quite well as an analogy of the club of guilt that is a favorite weapon of the western left, its ethnic chauvinist allies and the third world in general. It excuses a world of incompetence, foolishness and sin, just as it does at the Farm.

Henry, what was it that caught your eye in Harrison’s post? In reproducing it without comment you seem to imply either that it’s beyond ridicule or that there’s something well-said in it. Which did you mean?

Isn’t Harrison’s argument simply that:

1) Anti-consumerist screeds are now packaged to resemble self-help books.

2) They have to be find an audience,

so

3) They haven’t been winning up to now.

The argument is open to criticism, for sure. The prose is a bit free-associational, and the tone is self-indulgent. But by his own standards this post is a paragon of lucidity. Compare:

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/08/04/a-fiction/

You may be right about Harrison’s motive, and I don’t defend any part of his argument. But seeing that his post here is much less daft and obscure than, for instance, his other ones, I’m puzzled as to what Henry was driving at in reproducing it.

1) Anti-consumerist screeds are now packaged to resemble self-help books.

Like this one?
.

what in America would be good old-fashioned conservatism appears, in a British context, to be nothing more than testicular shutdown

…as opposed to cranial shutdown?

1) Anti-consumerist screeds are now packaged to resemble self-help books.

But anti-consumerism makes much more sense as self-help, for example:

How To Want What You Have

For people who have a problem with over-spending, changing their own attitudes and behaviors is a much more practical approach than shaking their fists and railing against TV commercials, Walmart, etc.

Matt in #25 makes a lot of sense.

Denunciations of luxury and excess are ancient; the rhetorical counterpoise may be asceticism or the virtue of the past. Jerry Muller’s _The Mind and the Market_ (Knopf 2002) has the interesting early example in Justus Moser (o with an umlaut), an 18th-century German defender of serfdom, social hierarchy, and local values who was alarmed at the capacity of peddlers to stimulate new desires. Muller (p. 97) quotes Moser: “Our ancestors did not tolerate these rural shopkeepers; they were spare in dispensing market freedoms; they banned the Jews from our diocese; why this severity? Certainly in order that the rural inhabitants not be daily stimulated, tempted, led astray and deceived.”

The “stimulated, tempted, led astray and deceived” part seems very much alive in the Barber book and Uncle Zip’s posting. The usual clue you are in the neighborhood of this argument is a tendentious effort to draw a line between needs and wants, and an argument that some people — other people — have been led astray into false wants.

More generally the idea that we are oppressed by having too much stuff, the anxiety that we are diminished when businesses try to persuade us to buy things, and the apparent worry that OMG someone might actually *enjoy* a heavily-advertised mass-produced good, seem to me constant tropes of affluence itself. There’s nothing inherently right or left about them (if those terms have any stable meaning today at all).

What’s worrisome is that other more interesting critiques get confused with this stuff. One of Uncle Zip’s commenters opines that Barber says what Marx already said; a lot of people seem to confuse any left critique with windy lamentation about consumerism. Of course this is not Marx; it was not until the Frankfurt school that someone figured out how to cobble together bits of Marx with bits of Justus Moser.

Speaking of Fucked, I see that Megan McArdle will be blogging for the Atlantic. A blog too far?

Maybe some folks just know that a false consciousness argument is a bad one, but find it hard to give up on entirely?

No doubt because they are interpellated into a subject position from which they misrecognize their relation to the false consciousness argument . . . damn! it just happened again.

Can someone explain what he is trying to say? Or better yet, just say it?

I think he was tring to say that Michael Moore is fat, that’s all they say these says.

Thanks Sam,

One could push a little more on exactly what “intentional” means and how much that covers. Borderline and perverse (I need a smoke!) cases aside, it strikes me that your health/harm criterion is unlikely to produce a list much different from the list it would generate for, say, a dog. This may be useful analytically in some contexts, but it doesn’t help us think about things like love or dignity which are not inherent in the person herself but in social interaction.

The other-people point I’m sympathetic with, though surely, as in Harry’s new wedding-present posting, we can also pay attention to other people’s wants, or even to things other people might like but don’t know they want!

This comes up in the literature on care, which sometimes likes to assert that care is about discerning the needs of others and meeting them, but which runs into difficulties when it goes beyond simple cases like a person needing insulin. Interesting epistemological difficulties arise in figuring out the needs of others, examined for example here:

Dalmiya, Vrinda. 2001. “Knowing people.” In Knowledge, truth, and duty, ed. Matthias Steup. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

On your last point, The “distracts” claim needs more evidence and argument. One might just as well point out that consumerism and advertising are full of inducements to buy things as gifts for others and to discern needs/wants in others that the others do not themselves discern — again, go back to Harry’s new posting and the happy discussion that follows it, a discussion that depends for its comprehensibility across space on the existence of brands and markets and entrepreneurial firms that make cool stuff that we can enjoy and get for other people. Now I’m not actually going to make that argument, but it does suggest that we can’t aprioristically reason from the fact that firms make an effort to get us to buy stuff to the moral condition of society.

To run it the other way around, there are plenty of examples of people ignoring (and worse) each others’ needs in situations of non-affluence.

It also — my last point, I promise — seems to me that there’s an implicit hydraulic theory of attention that gets invoked in the last sentence — the larger genre of argument taking the form that people aren’t paying attention to x (the thing I think they should) because they’re distracted by y.