It’s been a while since I checked out the work in the field—almost four years:

I’ve now spent more time reading the literature than I ever have watching the show. Some of it has been very instructive. There was, for example, a journal article from a few years ago complaining that other scholars had not grasped Oprah’s postmodernity because they had failed to draw on Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on dialogism.

What important results follow from applying Bakhtin? Well, the concept of dialogism reveals that on talk shows, people talk to one another.
We may not have realized that before. But we do now. Scholarship is cumulative.

And now the interpretive horizon will be even wider.

To put it another way, I have not been writing about George so much as to him. With hindsight that was probably also true of an essay called “After the Last Intellectuals” that appeared in Bookforum a couple of years ago.

Simply recycling what I’ve already written is never appealing. It seems like a better use of this opportunity is ask George about some things left implicit, or undeveloped, in my last de facto open letter. That was the piece on Isaac Rosenfeld, an exemplary modern case of the public intellectual as unhappy consciousness.

Putting it that way is already a problem, however. To be a public intellectual now tends to mean refusing “unhappiness” …. except, of course, as a gesture within the performance space of the media. The experience of a complicating and impassable distance between thought and actuality—between consciousness and the possible receptivity of the world to criticism or action—is not the same as acting indignant or confrontational. The differences between Randolph Bourne and Michael Eric Dyson go beyond the fact that one of them lives in an age when it is possible to publish a book of transcripts of his CNN appearances, though that has at least something to do with why only one of them is worth reading. (About ten years ago, in the pages of In These Times, I tried to launch the expression “publicity intellectual” to cover that sort of thing, but the expression never caught on, which is probably just as well.)

The ability to complain in a suave, topical, and/or contrarian manner is, of course, very delightful. But George has questioned it as a sufficient basis for critical engagement with culture and society, and rightly so. He worries that the public sphere is an echo chamber dominated by figures who are on the speed-dials (not to mention the payrolls) of the powerful. Rather than being intellectuals, they are the spokespeople and flak catchers for corporate or government interests. Surely he is right about that, too.

But I want to challenge George a bit on his alternative, which is to call for intellectuals to be really public-minded and critical, and to show more activist spirit. They should be speaking truth to power, and so forth.

Challenging him here is not the same as arguing that he is wrong. I agree that criticism and activism are part of what intellectuals are good for. Not that this necessarily involves making a big production number of it, striking poses and gesturing broadly; in fact, we’re probably better off without that sort of thing. (Nothing that Susan Sontag ever wrote or said or did about Bosnia ever seemed intended to persuade her fellow citizens of much except how very passionate Susan Sontag was about Bosnia. This was only just so much of a contribution.) Being an activist intellectual should involve a certain amount of boring activity, even rather a lot of it, often done in quiet settings, none of which merits a line on anyone’s C.V.

This expectation does lead into a bit of a conundrum, however. For it seems to presuppose the existence of some reserve of values, commitments, influences, inspirations, ideas, ideals, superego energies, etc. In other words, a supply of meaning that nourishes the critical intelligence and allow it to sustain itself—even without much extrinsic reward or obvious encouragement, and when necessary in the absence of any.

This cannot be understood purely as a question of individual character, temperament or commitment. But there are moments when the issue is posed, and resolved, at that level. (Such being one of the points Rosenfeld insisted on.) It is a matter of ethos. That inevitably brings in questions of community or tradition: Just where is this reserve? What does it look like? And what allows it to sustain itself? I often read George’s work with the hope he will drop some hint of his thoughts on this score, but maybe the best thing would be just to ask him outright.

Thinking about this can very quickly lead into paradoxes—with “the herd of independent minds” being an efficient way to express one of them. There is always an express lane of authorized heterodoxies. They are now often very conveniently codified in a syllabus. In some quarters, if you fail to assimilate them properly, you are not “professionalized” and ostracism then follows. (If Nietzsche came back from the dead long enough to see some of the petty careerism his work has made possible, he’d start talking to horses again, and storing his own feces in a drawer.) When I asked about what values and commitments enable critical intelligence to sustain itself, this is not exactly what I had in mind.

Now, it may be that George has come to his own sui generis resolution of this problem, by way of a distinctive biographical trajectory. He once belonged to Opus Dei and was able to read modernist writers and thinkers only by special permission. Talk about “transgression” now comes cheap, but chances are George experienced it in ways reminiscent of a Dostoevsky character, and it had real consequences for his life as well as his thought. I admire this quite a bit. The measured quality of his prose reflects a mind trying to take its bearings in full awareness of the abyss between how he once would have answered Kant’s three questions and how he would consider them now. This also gives his politics some edge.

On that score his work is often reminiscent of the spirit that prevailed in working-class literary and educational circles about one hundred years ago. To quote Jonathan Rée’s Proletarian Philosophers: Problems in Socialist Culture in Britain, 1900-1940 (Oxford, 1984), the energetic quality of discussion in those groups was “not just the exhilaration of having filched something which their oppressors wanted to keep for themselves…”

There was also something disruptive about the theoretical content of what they learned. The world of knowledge into which they had forced their way was, to many of them, a world of radicalism, if not of socialism: it contained some substance which seemed to corrode the ideological compound which, they felt, their bosses used to keep them down. They read Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel, or studied botany and phrenology, and the unction of natural theology curdled. They read Buckle or studied history, and existing social arrangements began to seem contingent and provisional. They read the poetry of Shakespeare and Burns (but not Morris – his works were too expensive), and perhaps glimpsed the possibility of escaping the narrow, puritanical circle of a joyless, sexless deontology of work. And beyond that, their athletic enthusiasm for self-improvement through intellectual exercise provided them with a model of social progress: they had a sense that they themselves were shifting, by their own efforts, from a crabbed, superstitious, and fearful parochialism to a bold and oceanic inclusiveness of vision, in which the infinite universe could be grasped as a whole. Surely, this individual betterment could be repeated on a social scale, and then the divisions between classes, nations, or groups would be accorded their true (that is to say, their vanishingly small) significance.

Now that’s a metanarrative.

It was not unique to the British working class. If you read accounts of the early socialist movement in France, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, the same tendency stands out. The precise local references vary, though not all that much. In one place they read Whitman, and in another, Pushkin, but that’s about it.

Isaac Rosenfeld was a product of this tradition, even if he did also satirize it. In a short story called “The Party,” he portrays the melancholy routines of a radical sect that gathers to argue in a dingy meeting hall. (This story gives me flashes of déjà vu. Either that or post-traumatic stress disorder. The difference is one of nuance.) The centripetal tendencies of such a milieu are not very pleasant, sometimes, but they are certainly no worse than what you find at a big academic conference. People don’t wear nametags, because they get to know each other all too well.

It is, as the communitarians say, community. Love it or leave it. I find it impossible to do either. It matters to me to know that there is a tradition of cosmopolitan-intellectuality-from-below. There is a certain tendency now to assume that, no, on the contrary, this is all a matter of nostalgia, a dream of halcyon yesteryears. That oh, so sophisticated certainty tells us something about how completely the prevailing institutions have made themselves seem indistinguishable from intellectual life as such. (An inability to imagine existing outside certain familiar patterns is how those familiar patterns come to look like life itself.) But anyone who has actually been exposed to it knows otherwise, and also knows that it was no Golden Age picnic. To quote my Bookforum piece mentioned earlier: “Bohemia can be fun if you have money; otherwise, it is hard on the nerves.”

The tradition Rée described is now a long way from being robust. But does it make any sense to call for an activist mode of public-intellectual activity if you assume that every trace of it is dead?

Part of what I have taken from reading George’s writings over the years is a sense that some spark of that tradition is still being transmitted, who knows how, and that it may yet revive. The effort involved is not particularly rewarding on any terms but its own. That is beside the point. Or conversely perhaps it is the point. I would like to hear more from George about this. He has been at it a while. I want to understand how he keeps going.

Here’s the trailer:

I haven’t seen the film yet—it’s only showing in NYC now, it seems—but would welcome a screener DVD. It’s not like I’m going to bootleg it out of the trunk of my car or anything. I don’t even have a car, if that makes the folks at Zeitgeist Films feel any better.

(crossposted)

Newsweek, of all places, has a fascinating intellectual exercise in which they ask several of their film and media writers to name one popular culture text that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Obviously, the idea of capturing the zeitgeist of eight often turbulent years with a divided electorate and a fractured media landscape is an impossibility. No single text can encompass the tragedy of September 11, the war in Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble and collapse, and our news media’s often vacuous response to all of these events. But the Newsweek writers offer some interesting choices, ones that collectively seem to move toward capturing some sense of Bush-era culture.

I tend to think Battlestar Galactica wins, hand’s down. (Per earlier item.) See the rest of Chuck T’s entry here.

My best aim seems to be with “Vinkel” set at 15 and “Styrke” at 50, which clobbers him with a dramatic “Midt I Fleisen!” Otherwise Bush just sort of ducks or doubles over, or else the shoe drops to the ground.

The reinvention of this tactic after more than half a century probably owes less to the historical memory of the union (considerable though that is in the case of UE) than to the example of actions in Brazil and Argentina that followed the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce.”

Either way, it’s an instance of moral economy reasserting itself amidst crisis. I see that interpretation comes up in the short article that Nelson Lichtenstein (author of a biography of Walter Reuther) and Christopher Phelps (now working on a book about strikes and social thought) wrote earlier this week for the CNN website:

Factory occupations are rare because they violate the everyday laws of property, and for the most part American workers are law-abiding people. They occur only when workers feel morally aggrieved, when they sense that ownership has itself violated the law, when the boss has become the outlaw in their eyes and in that of the community as well….

It is hardly surprising that Republic’s workers have laid temporary claim to the factory in which some have given decades of their lives. Its owners and creditors have forfeited their own claims, both moral and legal, to rightful stewardship.

As Sen. Robert Wagner said in response to the 1937 sit-downs, “The uprising of the common people has come, as always, only because of a breakdown in the ability of the law and our economic system to protect their rights.”

It’s a form of satire that seems to work best with the more inflated, ‘80s or ‘90s pop-rock videos, the ones that were developed as little storytelling movies, even though the “movies” had little to do with the song itself or seemed patently pretentious, with or without the song. In short, there’s a profound disjuncture among the posturing twit-lead singer, what he’s supposedly singing about and what’s going on all around him. As they used to say about political photo-ops: It doesn’t matter what the candidate is saying, it’s the background he’s in front of and how he looks….

In a literal video, the lyrics provide a running description of what is happening onscreen—commentary that, as Jerome says, “repeatedly calls attention to (and calls into question) the video’s image choices, making them appear laughably random. Or it subverts any greater, intended import they might have by flatly describing the images and thus “grounding” or re-contextualizing them in a more self-consciously ‘down-to-earth’ matter, while actually presenting a wise-ass commentary on them.”

A good description, which I quote so that there is some filling in this entry before we go on to the next video.

Situ-speak might call this detournment, though Jerome suggests the British expression “taking the piss” instead.

But after thinking it over a little, I believe a critique from outside the poli-sci orbit is necessary.

Wendt and Duvall seem to mount a radical challenge to the anthropocentrism of contemporary ideas of sovereignty. But in so doing, they are complicit with the lingering effects of Cold War ideology—for nowhere do W&D consider the work of Juan Posadas, who proved four decades ago (to his own satisfaction anyway) that flying saucers demonstrate the existence of communism elsewhere in the galaxy.

If memory serves, my first encounter with Posadas was in the pages of Robert Alexander’s Trotskyism in Latin America, published by the Hoover Institution in 1973 and easily one of the most depressing books I have ever read. Between brutal repression and a certain fissiparousness, the odds were never good. But amidst all the gray, the story of Juan Posadas was at least…colorful.

Posadas was an Argentinian shoemaker and football star who, after many years as a fairly orthodox adherent of Bolshevik-Leninism, developed a number of rather distinctive positions. One of them was his belief that the process of world revolution might advance considerably if the Communist bloc would launch a preemptive thermonuclear war. He urged the Soviets to do so just as soon as it was convenient.

This was not, by and large, a popular idea within the Fourth International. In due course Posadas went off to found his own international movement, which was for the most part based in Latin America. Some of the Posadists were in Cuba, for example, where they ended up doing, so to speak, deep entry work in Castro’s prison system. But there were also adherents in Europe. While in London on honeymoon in 1993, I visited a store where it was possible to buy recent issues of Red Flag, the official newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers Party of Great Britain (Posadist). I did. The paper consisted mainly of translations from the extensive writings of Posadas, who died in 1981. By some accounts, Posadas spent his final years yelling into a tape recorder, so perhaps the RWP-GB(P) was just trying to catch up with the backlog of transcripts.

He was a man of many theories. But his best-known thesis (which, once you grant the premises, is perfectly reasonable) is that flying saucers were a sign of hope for the revolutionary cause. As we know, development of the forces of production eventually reaches “a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument.” It is obvious that interstellar travel would require a very, very high level of development of the forces of production. Therefore UFOs must be coming from a highly advanced communist civilization. Q.E.D.

Posadas explained all this in a brochure published in France in 1968, portions of which were translated in an issue of Red Flag that must itself be a collector’s item by now. A précis of his arguments appeared five years ago this month in The Fortean Times, in an extensive article by Matt Salusbury that, as of now, is only available in Google cache.

Here is the most pertinent excerpt:

Posadas’s Les Soucoupes Volantes (Flying Saucers) opens in the baffling, tortured, long-winded style that became his hallmark: “A new ray has been discovered in the Soviet Union which is infinitely more rapid than light… This energy must have a property and strength infinitely superior to what we know.”

The pamphlet continues to lurch from cliché to cliché, bordering on incomprehensibility: “In the same way it is conceivable that a being who raises his hand and produces light, attracts, remakes and organises energy… And the forms of the social organisation could be infinitely superior,” and continues: “Even if these reports of flying saucers are fantasies, as is possible that the majority may be, many of them, their historical basis is correct… the scientific capacity of human beings is determined by their social organisation.”

And there is a Marxist explanation for why the UFOs visit but do not stay: “Capitalism doesn’t interest the UFO pilots, which is why they do not return. Similarly, the Soviet bureaucracy (doesn’t interest them) as they don’t have perspective.”

UFOs, predicts Posadas, will show a greater interest in us “at the moment of the collapse of the bourgeoisie and the General Strike.” Star Trek fans will recognise the similarity with the film First Contact, in which Vulcans passing Earth only show an interest in humans after they have developed warp drive.

“To draw conclusions from these problems… [it is] necessary to study attentively … The answers to these mysteries would lie in a study of Marxism,” advises Posadas. Presumably, it is necessary to study attentively in order to work out what the hell he means by other mind-boggling ideas expressed in Flying Saucers, including his conviction that elephants live for 260 years; that humans will disappear to be replaced by something else; that humans will ultimately reproduce asexually like amœbæ; and the puzzling statement that the UFO phenomenon is “not an accidental, occasional concern which arises because a person two metres tall arrives, fair haired and with transparent clothes.”

Flying Saucers ends with a call to our extraterrestrial comrades: “We must call upon beings from other planets when they come to intervene, to collaborate with the inhabitants of the Earth to overcome misery. We must launch a call on them to use their resources to help us.”

One can readily see why bourgeois conceptions of sovereignty would be threatened by such ideas—and why those within the ranks of capitalist political science would refuse to consider them at all.

And for the next quarter century, celebrating May Day in the United States remained a pretty good sign that you were on the political margins. That started to change two years ago. Turnout was lower in 2007. But it’s a good sign when the website of the AFL-CIO’s Washington, DC Metro Council runs an announcement for tomorrow’s protests.

Meanwhile, there are interesting developments elsewhere…

My digital penpal John V. Burke has been sending info about how the dockworkers are going to shut down all West Coast ports on Thursday to protest the war. Postal workers in New York and San Francisco have expressed support for them, and port truck drivers are calling for a day of protest against fuel prices.

This counts for a lot more than the reclaiming of the original Labor Day. (A holiday that began as commemoration of an event in American labor history, no less.) As John writes in a message he’s sent around to friends:

I well remember how indignant a lot of antiwar people were at US organized labor’s late, feeble, and sometimes dead wrong positions during the Vietnam War. Much of the then AFL-CIO leadership supported the war (though this support grew less vocal as the war dragged on under a Republican administration); so did a lot of union members, notably the building trades “hard hats” who waded into an antiwar rally in Manhattan in 1969. There were exceptions, including the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) on the West Coast and, eventually, the United Auto Workers and a number of public employee unions; there was a labor coalition against the war, which formed a contingent at rallies, bought ads in the print media, and lent support to antiwar candidates.

What there wasn’t, though, was any use of labor’s economic strength—the strike weapon—to express opposition to the war, and that baffled and irritated some antiwar activists, especially those who didn’t know much about labor law or labor history. (I know this doesn’t apply to a lot of the recipients of this message; feel free to skip ahead if this is familiar material.) In particular, students from middle-class families weren’t aware that under the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, the use of the strike weapon for any purpose except in disputes about collective bargaining agreements is explicitly prohibited…..In return, major corporate employers would recognize unions and accept contracts that included regular productivity and cost-of-living increases; there were occasional disruptions in this cozy arrangement, but strike activity fell sharply from the big upsurge in 1946-47 and stayed low until the “stagflation” and mass layoffs that began in the mid-70’s.

And now, thirty years later, even that is ancient history.

The Cold War is over, the steady-growth postwar economy is over, union density as a percentage of the workforce is down from 35% to 13% (and less in the once-powerful industrial sector), anti-labor policies have been entrenched at the NLRB for many years, and neither the Carter nor Clinton administrations achieved labor’s goal of legislative reform. (How hard did they try? Good question.)

In short, the deal that undergirded labor’s qualified support for the Vietnam War has fallen apart. The postwar social compact was a tradeoff; the other side went back on the bargain. It’s time for labor to begin reclaiming its full range of tactical options in support of a robust participation in political life, on an agenda of labor’s choosing without the artificial constraints imposed by Taft-Hartley. This will be, inevitably, a gradual process, and it may get ugly; I don’t think there are any US Attorneys dumb enough to try to indict the ILWU leadership, but I may be being too generous.

John—who was a railroad brakeman for fifteen years and a locomotive engineer for another thirteen, before retiring—says he’s going to be out tomorrow “with my United Transportation Union button on, prouder of the labor movement, my movement, than I’ve ever had a chance to feel in my life.” Me? I’m going to be on Capitol Hill, marching around in front of the Republican and Democratic National Committee offices, chanting bilingual slogans about solidarity. That sounds pretty good to me. Beats yelling at the television set.

But not me. So: Woo hoo!

It seems appropriate, then, to follow up Henry’s recent post about bookshelves with a notice that Matt Christie is offering wooden shelves to the public at a reasonable price. (They are much more attractive than some I’ve seen lately.) Matt also turns out chopping blocks.

These item are all made by hand from actual crooked timber. Contact him via pas au-delà for rates.

Anybody who combines woodworking with Blanchot deserves a plug on the 33rd most powerful blog in the world. The precise metrics used to determine that ranking are probably among the Guardian’s trade secrets, of course.

The creator of the site, Virgil Griffith, acknowledges the problems. “I’m aware correlation [does not equal] causation,” he says. “The results are awesome regardless of causality. You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.”

Gripe if you must, but diverting the chart certainly is. The Book of Mormon falls right in the middle. There is probably a Mitt Romney joke to be plucked from this, like over-ripe and low-hanging fruit. Verily I say unto you, have a look. (via Librarian.net)

The latest volume from the King Papers Project, for example

comprises King’s sermons from 1948 to 1963, which remind us of King’s immersion in the black Baptist church and of the wide range of theological sources and social criticism he drew upon. For King, Christianity was the social gospel. His outlook was astonishingly radical, especially for the McCarthy era. In a college paper entitled “Will Capitalism Survive?” King held that “capitalism has seen its best days in America, and not only in America, but in the entire world.” He concluded a 1953 sermon by asking his congregation to decide “whom ye shall serve, the god of money or the eternal God of the universe.” He opposed communism as materialistic, but argued that only an end to colonialism, imperialism, and racism, an egalitarian program of social equality, fellowship, and love, could serve as its alternative. In a 1952 letter responding to Coretta’s gift to him of a copy of Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward (“There is still hope for the future … ,” she inscribed on its flyleaf), King wrote, “I would certainly welcome the day to come when there will be a nationalization of industry.”

The volume’s assiduous editorial annotation permits us to locate King in lived dialogue. We discover, for example, that his 1952 sermon on “Communism’s Challenge to Christianity,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church, prompted a letter of retort from Melvin H. Watson, a Morehouse College professor and Ebenezer congregant, who attempted to set King straight on the virtues of Stalin. Watson, a holdover from the Communist-led Popular Front, helps us place King’s democratic radicalism in bold relief while providing a concrete illustration of how black communities retained a strong left-wing presence even after the 1940s.

The whole article is available online from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Looking over the passage just quoted, I had a flashback to various hopeless arguments with Chron copyeditors—for it is singularly absurd not to have capitalized the “c” in Phelps’s line mentioning that King “opposed communism as materialistic.”

The international Communist movement (corporate world headquarters in Moscow, later with rival franchise based in Peking) was indeed materialistic, yes. But would King have opposed communism, tout court? “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”?

I doubt that very much: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)

Instead, all we’ve had lately is a very long speech in which Chairman Bob talks about himself in the third person. What’s necessary is “a culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian,” he says. Well, sure. But first you sort of need a reason to call a press conference. This is where the 24 hour news cycle is your friend. From a single spark….

In the meantime, Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP newspaper, has come out with a cogent and thorough critique (pdf) of Avakian’s recent writings and the entire cult(ure) around him.

All irony to the side, I must say that this is a pretty interesting document, and so is the rest of Ely’s website. It is clearly the work of someone whose Maoism comes by way of Godard and Badiou as well as the RCP’s idiosyncratic Gang of Four-ism. For those who are interested in that kind of thing, it is the kind of thing they will find interesting. Thanks to Santa’s elves for bringing it to my attention.

Still, I have been somewhat irregular about working with Zotero. Required to give a more or less sensible reason for this, I could say that it is a matter of waiting for the 2.0 version, none too patiently. But the really deciding factor is that I still use Netscape, which is proving less rational or defensible all the time. Shifting over entirely to Firefox (of which Zotero is a plug-in) seems like a good resolution for the new year.

One factor holding up the 2.0 version—which will, it’s said, allow people to share documents—is the range of intellectual-property issues it would create. But at IHE this morning, Andy Guess reports that the Center for History and New Media is going ahead with the development of a Zotero archive into which scholars can deposit material, as long as it is public-domain.

In partnership with the Internet Archive, and with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the center is creating a way for scholars to upload existing data files to be optically scanned (to make them text-searchable) and stored in a database available to the public. Since only works in the public domain can be made available in that way, scholars will have to complete an online form with legal assurances.

The vehicle for the new environment will be the Zotero plug-in for the Firebox browser, also developed by the center. The software stores Web pages, collects citations and lets scholars annotate and organize online documents. A new feature of the plug-in will allow people to collaborate and share materials through a dedicated server. Building on that functionality, according to Cohen, the system will allow scholars to drag and drop documents onto an icon in Zotero that essentially sends it to the Internet Archive for storage and free optical character recognition.

This seems like a step forward. I guess the next big development will come when the Zotero people work out something with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, also known as JSTOR.

CT passed the same marker in July, though it does not appear from the archives that anyone noticed at the time.

A slogan that used to appear at Technorati said something like: “There are 55 million blogs. Some of them have to be good.” I never understood the logic of that. The idea that enough quantity is bound to produce some quality is not too rigorous, even by the standards of some blowhard quoting Anti-Duhring. Likewise, enduring for four years is no guarantee of anything either. But it’s pretty remarkable, even so, especially given the hyper-ephemeral nature of this medium.

Cliopatria at its best has been an example of why those who denounce the entire blogosphere as a bunch of people wearing pajamas in their basements and whinging about American Idol are, themselves, pretty silly. Congratulations to Ralph and the other Cliopatricians (also to myself for the good luck of being one of them) and also, retroactively, to the Timberistas (and ditto).