Russell Jacoby has a piece out in “Tablet” that got approvingly retweeted by Richard Dawkins, then by Elon Musk. So maybe it’s worth giving it a read. (This post lightly edits my tweet response.)
I’m sympathetic to Jacoby’s old line: a lot of ‘theory’ silliness got spread about in the humanities in the 80’s-90’s. There were perverse incentives – professional rewards – for doing ‘philosophy’ badly in various ways. This was not good. I’m happy to badmouth bad stuff. But honestly, as Jacoby himself used to acknowledge, it wasn’t threat-to-the-republic-grade. Anyone who pretends ‘ivory tower-types being eccentric’ = ‘barbarians at the gates of western civ’ is one more funny, bug-in-his-ear character in some David Lodge novel.
But now Jacoby’s updated his script. It’s the very fact that these leftists don’t even have power in the Ivory Tower! – they don’t have jobs! they are bitter baristas! resentful HR drones! – that makes them so dangerous to civilization! Their weakness is their terrible strength!
The black comedy quality of this twist – surely this is shaping up a sad David Lodge novel – might give us pause for thought. But let’s instead hasten to keep up with Jacoby. He drags off the shelf that dusty ol’ bust, Orwell on “Politics & the English Language”. (Good ol’ ‘fascist octopus has sung its swan song’.) But we have all read it. The bare thought that foolish talk makes foolish thought is not thought-provoking.
We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media. The buzz words of the campus—diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety—have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus. “The slovenliness of our language,” declared Orwell in his classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language,” makes it “easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
‘Buzz words are destroying civilization’ is more like a parody of the charge against Socrates, that gadfly, not a serious thesis about ideas. The ease with which one may tag Orwell, rather than make an argument, is itself cautionary: off-the-shelf words in lieu of argument.
So let’s just spit it out:
what indefensible barbarism do these buzz words buzz on behalf of, sez Jacoby?
Orwell targeted language that defended “the indefensible” such as the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima. He offered examples of corrupt language. “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” The use of euphemisms or lies to defend the indefensible has hardly disappeared: Putin called the invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation,” and anyone calling it a “war” or “invasion” has been arrested.
But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable.
So they defend the … defendable. That doesn’t sound SO indefensible.
What follows is Jacoby deploying textbook fallacies: plain ol’ strawman arguments. If there is a BAD argument for, say, ‘diversity’, then arguments for diversity must be bad. In other words, anything any progressive buzzword buzzes about must be bad by association. What is especially striking is how Jacoby concedes the fallacy of his own argument. That is, he himself as much as admits the progressive buzzword arguments are, by and large, bad arguments for things for which there are also good arguments. Diversity is good!
So he is the one defending the indefensible by playing language-games. He distracts us with a cloud of buzzwords (albeit the other side’s) to conceal the fact that his side – the anti-prog side – swats first, ask questions later, when, say, ‘diversity’ demands pop up.
To put it another way, Jacoby is counting on progressives, who deploy ‘diversity’ badly – buzzily – to be useful idiots on behalf of an anti-prog push to shut down serious debate about the issue.
If he were serious about wanting to discern the true value of diversity, behind buzzily confused demands for it, he would attempt to bring that out, sans buzz. What is the defensible case for ‘diversity’? How should prog argue better for values they sense are important?
“Everyone loves diversity. Why not? As a human quality it is better than the reverse, homogeneity. Yet diversity exemplifies the murky lingo that defends the defensible.” You know what other murky lingo defends the defensible? Conservatism. Ordinary folks talking. Nothing shocking about people defending stuff that does more or less make sense, but doing so thoughtlessly. Chesterton’s fence and all.
If Jacoby really wants to tear down the Chesterton’s fence that is progressive defenses of the defensible, to rebuild it better, he could. He could charitably reconstruct progressive advocacy of diversity rationally, less buzzily. But he doesn’t.
Instead he plays a trick. By contrasting buzzy prog demands for diversity with ‘but it’s more complicated!’ counterpoint he makes it seem, ironically, like true defense/appreciation of diversity is the peculiar purview/province of anti-progs. But why think so?
We can easily turn that table back, after all. Jacoby has his parade of horribles – cases in which progressives have acted allegedly outrageously. But in each case (and others) isn’t it more complicated, when we look more closely? I’ll only offer one example.
The Tom Cotton case. This one bugs me. I’ve tweeted about it before. [Basically, a bunch of NYTimes staffers say Cotton’s op-ed made them feel ‘unsafe’, which does sound snowflake-y. But the fact is: the day before Cotton explicitly called, in effect, for the extrajudicial execution of American citizens, en masse, by the US military. So I think probably we can say that overshadowed the op-ed. Maybe Cotton wasn’t serious. Still, he did tweet it. Go read it.]
If you are going to argue that progressive thinking about ‘diversity’ or ‘free speech’ is naively one-sided, one-eyed, hence Stalinist, it is incumbent on you NOT to ‘prove’ that by staging a naively one-sided mini show-trial – you know, Stalin-style.
In sum, Jacoby’s conclusion retreads a minor genre that made sense as recently as a few decades ago – humanists, man! they read Derrida and Judith Butler and talk some nonsense! – but really no longer does.
They might be the American version of the old Soviet apparatchiks, functionaries who carry out party policies. Intellectually, they fetishize buzz words (diversity, marginality, power differential, white privilege, group safety, hegemony, gender fluidity and the rest) that they plaster over everything.
Politically, they mark a self-immolation of progressives; they flaunt their exquisite sensibilities and openness, and display exquisite narcissism and insularity. Once upon a time leftists sought to enlarge their constituency by reaching out to the uninitiated. This characterized a left during its most salient phase of popular front politics. No longer. With a credo of group safety the newest generation of leftists does not reach out but reaches in. It operates more like a club for members only than a politics for everyone.
Conservatives, not progs, fetishise buzzwords because, literally, the main conservative case against progressivism is buzzword-based: namely, progs fetishise buzzwords! Most progressives seem, however, not so addicted to terminology – for they needn’t be.
As Jacoby admits, buzzwords like ‘diversity’ defend the defensible. That means, if they are bad, better can be substituted. So: if you ask the prog on the street to say why George Floyd’s death was outrageous, without using ‘hegemony’ or ‘equity’, they can probably do it. But cons will be hard-put to defend George Floyd’s killing as non-outrageous without shifting the subject to bad buzzwords.
So the tough spot Jacoby is in is this: he needs to defend the indefensible (i.e. progressivism must be wrong, even though its values may be right) and all he has to do it are buzzwords.
Final thought: rereading the whole piece, after writing all this, Jacoby does that classic ‘rhetoric of reaction’ thing, shifting the pea, perversity, futility, jeopardy-wise. Is he trying to save progressivism from itself, more in sorrow than anger? Or is he indicting it as an evil changeling that needs exorcising? YMMV.
{ 57 comments }
Thomas 12.26.22 at 5:41 am
It may be worth noting, from what I understand of the situation (based on being in an adjacent newsroom at the time, and knowing people at the NYT), that part of the reason for the uniform “unsafe” language in staffers’ tweets about the Cotton piece was that the language could be framed as discussion of work conditions–meaning, protected by the union contract and labor law, and thus not something that the thin-skinned management there could respond to directly or individually.
engels 12.26.22 at 11:15 am
It seems to me that US academia, left-liberal activism and corporate management are converging on a single dialect centred around phrases like “centering difference” and “empowering transformational change,” which are opaque, to say the least, to anyone outside of all three.
Maybe US conservatives are doing something similar but if so they haven’t been so effective in exporting it.
engels 12.26.22 at 2:27 pm
Jacoby needs to be more dialectical: the problem is that BEFORE frustrated graduates took over the left, neoliberal managers took over the university system.
malloyjames 12.26.22 at 3:15 pm
buzzwords = cowardice. If you cant argue from a position that has enough logical inertia, use a buzzword. I think that is all Jacoby was pointing out in his updated article.
LFC 12.26.22 at 9:53 pm
While it has some shortcomings, the Jacoby piece is not quite as bad, I think, as Holbo argues.
Holbo says that Jacoby should construct a defense of diversity — a “good thing” according to Jacoby — that is shorn of buzzwords. Yet Jacoby makes clear that his problem — contra Holbo’s reading — is not simply with the buzzword or buzzwords, but with prevailing notions of what “diversity” means. He devotes two or three paragraphs to that; Holbo refers to none of it.
For instance, Jacoby repeats the now-familiar point that diversity does or should encompass political or ideological diversity, not simply diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. This is hardly an original point, but it does indicate that Jacoby is troubled by more than buzzwords. Or, to take another example, Jacoby notes that diversity-as-proportional-representation (e.g., in lead roles of major Hollywood movies) is an interpretation of “diversity” that he finds dubious.
In short, while much of Jacoby’s piece is couched as a critique of language and buzzwords — and frankly, a good deal of the now-fashionable language is indeed deadening and repetitive — a fair reading of the column shows that Jacoby is criticizing more than buzzwords. He’s criticizing a sensibility that the buzzwords reveal and exemplify. If it is true, for example, that the ACLU has dropped any mention of the First Amendment from its annual reports, that would certainly suggest that this sensibility is having, at least in some quarters, a corrosive effect and should be criticized.
Instead of picking off the low-hanging fruit in Jacoby’s piece — he cites Orwell, which is not new, so what? — Holbo should have engaged with one of the main arguments, which is that by substituting fashionable slogans for thought, a portion of the self-declared progressive left is detracting from — or distracting attention and energy from — the very causes, such as economic redistribution and a stronger “safety net,” that the left should be working to advance.
A more telling argument against Jacoby than the one Holbo offers would perhaps challenge Jacoby to be more forthright and direct about where he stands on particular issues. For example, should college admissions committees be permitted to take race into account as one of many factors in a “holistic” consideration of applicants (the subject of a case currently before the Supreme Court)? Jacoby implies he thinks the answer to that is no, but he doesn’t explicitly say it. He criticizes the prevailing notion of diversity without indicating what notion he would put in its place. Should museums seek to acquire more work by artists of color and other “marginalized” groups? Should syllabuses include more work by women and black and brown writers than they did 50 or 60 years ago? Is it bad that students now have to read DuBois and Fanon and Frederick Douglass and, yes, even Catherine Mackinnon instead of restricting themselves to Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Sartre, etc.? If so, then the fact that greater “inclusion” has been accompanied by an explosion of buzzwords and some mechanical sloganeering might be seen as an unfortunate consequence, but not one that necessarily invalidates all of the underlying developments.
LFC 12.26.22 at 9:57 pm
p.s. Sorry, last sentence of my comment should begin with “if not,” not with “if so.”
Peter Dorman 12.26.22 at 10:22 pm
As an argument for or against a particular political tribe, Jacoby’s screed (which I haven’t read in the original) sounds like a nonstarter. Anti-progs have their own buzzwords, like critical race theory and even woke, for that matter. In fact, just about every political position tends toward buzzwordiness over time, no?
I’m not sure this is the same thing, but concepts tend to be reified with repeated use. We forget their origins as approximate, selective descriptors and begin to treat them as if they were material entities. As far as I can tell, this is not a predominately left or right thing. Marxism, which railed against reification in its critique of “bourgeois” economics, indulged in the same sport with its treatment of classes as things and references to what capitalism “wants”.
There are big problems with the version of social justice activism Jacoby criticizes, but critiquing them requires substantive analysis, not generic denunciations of sloppy language.
Re Cotton: I can see both sides of this one. Based on what I know, I probably would have objected to the publication of his op-ed, but locking his views out of what is supposed to be a broad public forum comes with a cost. Part of the problem with both the progs and the anti-progs is that neither wishes to admit that judgments are often mixed. Makes it hard to have a rational discussion.
John Holbo 12.26.22 at 11:53 pm
“Holbo should have engaged with one of the main arguments, which is that by substituting fashionable slogans for thought, a portion of the self-declared progressive left is detracting from — or distracting attention and energy from — the very causes, such as economic redistribution and a stronger “safety net,” that the left should be working to advance.”
Yes, but if Jacoby were to shift to that completely reasonable argument the whole piece would be drained of its energy, which depends on mustering a sense that something far more terrible is going on.
Alex SL 12.26.22 at 11:57 pm
The first thing that gets me about the beginning of Jacoby’s piece is that both the piece itself and the conservative moral panic it describes pretend as if a few small parts of the social sciences are all of academia. What about geologists, economists, biologists, chemists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, archaeologists, etc? Did they also all become Marxists in the 1960s? If so, I missed that, not least in my own professors of the late 1990s.
The second is that him at the time telling conservatives that they “should awake from their nightmare of radical scholars destroying America and relax”, if meant seriously, betrays a naive misunderstanding of the purpose of conservative moral panics. They don’t want to relax. The privileged and powerful need to invent a never-ending series of imaginary enemies – be they Jews or Woke Professors – to be able to argue that they themselves aren’t privileged and powerful and thus responsible for other people’s misery but instead the truly oppressed and victimised group.
And here we are again: it is for this reason that Elon Musk (!), who is currently considered the second richest person on the planet and is friends with other similarly rich oligarchs, who mistreats and exploits his workers in a fashion that goes beyond usual expectations even for the USA, who has the ear of powerful politicians of his country of residence and and rubs shoulders with overseas princes and presidents, and who could do much good in the world with his power and fortune if he wasn’t seemingly driven primarily by narcissism and pettiness, concludes that the true danger to human freedom can’t be concentration of power and wealth in the hands of himself and his buddies but has to be (drum roll) woke academics.
Whatever that even means. Because, as previously mentioned, if you press somebody who opposes wokeism for a definition, they will either come up with some conservative strawman such as ‘a conspiracy to destroy civilisation’ or have to admit that it is something nice and benign such as being against injustice.
Jacoby does the second – he admits that wokeism is in favour of good things – but then turns into a twenty year old, lightly inebriated armchair philosopher by going, how is it diverse if everybody has to be in favour of diversity, eh? Also, how is it freedom of speech if I cannot be racist? Truly I have read one of the great thinkers of our times. What next – if you keep me from punching you in the face, it is you who is truly violent?
Finally, he marshals examples of wokeist terror to support his case that it is a dangerous ideology. Reading them was an interesting exercise: Students protest. Employees protest, and an editor resigns. A poet apologises for a poem, seemingly without having been protested at, but that part may just be poorly written. Writers protest, and a letter lectures. A book author observes something. A director declares, and language in reports and leaflets is changed.
Despite the use of alarmist terms such as “reeducation camp” and “suffer the consequences”, what Jacoby describes here is people making use of their right to free speech and… that’s it, as far as I can tell. At least he ends the piece by wishing for the left to become a proper left again instead of calling for the suppression of this type of speech.
As a side note, I have never been prone to hero worship or such nonsense, but I must admit that I am nonetheless rather disappointed by what Dawkins has let happen to himself. I really hope that when I am that age I will still have a sense of proportion, or at least that I still have a friend who will take me aside and have words with me when I declare Those Darn Youths Today to be the big problem while the world around me is set ablaze by elderly far-right billionaires.
John Holbo 12.26.22 at 11:58 pm
“Re Cotton: I can see both sides of this one. Based on what I know, I probably would have objected to the publication of his op-ed, but locking his views out of what is supposed to be a broad public forum comes with a cost.”
I can see both sides, too. But what I can’t see is objecting to a newspaper refusing an op-ed but not even mentioning, as associated with that, a sitting US Senator calling for the extrajudicial execution of masses of Americans exercising (largely peacefully) their right to protest injustice. It’s perfectly plausible Cotton would say that of course he only meant the army should mow down the bad ‘uns. It’s plausible that Cotton would even be sincere in saying he only meant that. That helps a little. Not a lot. If AOC had ever been so impolitic and idiotic we would literally never hear the end of it. So it makes no sense to be outraged at the NYT and ‘meh, not worth mentioning’ about Cotton.
John Holbo 12.26.22 at 11:59 pm
“He criticizes the prevailing notion of diversity without indicating what notion he would put in its place.”
Exactly.
Matt 12.27.22 at 12:09 am
engels said: …centred around phrases like “centering difference” and “empowering transformational change,” which are opaque, to say the least, to anyone outside of all three.
In at least some cases I’d say that the phrases are opaque to those using them, too, in that if you push those using them, they often have a hard time articulating what they are to mean. Of course, this isn’t limited to the groups most often using these words. This is so of things like the use of “woke” or “cultural Marxism” or “tradition” by many people “on the right” as well. My own view is that we should avoid these phrases – that the use of “buzz words” and cliches is in fact bad – because they mostly substitute for thinking, and there are topics in all of these areas where we can really use some clear thinking.
Alan White 12.27.22 at 12:34 am
Very interesting post John–thank you.
“Maybe US conservatives are doing something similar but if so they haven’t been so effective in exporting it.”
What they have been very effective in exporting is ratcheting up reactionary emotions of anger and fear against anything remotely perceived as progressive. As blatantly admitted in 2020, the Republicans have absolutely no platform anymore, which demonstrates my point.
Tyler 12.27.22 at 12:45 am
Just here to say thanks to John for making the effort to blog. It is appreciated!
Jake Gibson 12.27.22 at 12:55 am
He is hesitant to come forward with his preferred replacement: Tradional White Christian
hegemony. Which is the preference of contemporary conservatives. And is the source of their disdain for diversity or “diversity”.
John Holbo 12.27.22 at 1:37 am
Thanks for the good conversation. Sorry for turning some comments on late. (I was watching “Mamma Mia!” at my younger daughter’s behest last night and it took a lot out of me).
One thing I don’t mention which seems worth noting. The left honestly isn’t that jargon-ridden these days. People just don’t talk the way ‘theory’ people really did write in the 90’s. (Twitter has really killed that, if nothing else has.) There IS language-policing but theory jargon is one thing, language-policing is another. Jacoby has an argument that is really engineered to shoot down jargon. It’s not a target-rich environment, actually.
J-D 12.27.22 at 2:08 am
Maybe; or maybe the fact that it got approvingly retweeted by both Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk is a sign that it is not worth reading?
‘Buzzword’ is itself a buzzword, and in this respect Russell Jacoby’s complaint about the fetishisation of buzzwords is itself an example of what is allegedly being deplored.
The problem with it is not that it is unoriginal, but that it is unjustifiable.
Instead of providing a reasoned explanation of those doubts, though, they** respond with smart-alecky mockery: ‘The gap of 3.8 percentage points troubles the diversity mavens. Work to be done, comrades!’
Not in the absence of any investigation of the reasons why the ACLU has dropped any mention of the First Amendment (if they have in fact done so) and the absence, also of any explanation of the reasons why it’s a bad thing for the ACLU to drop mention of the First Amendment (if they have in fact done so).
It’s hard to engage with such an argument if the people who advance it will not provide evidence in support of it. It’s tempting to suggest that perhaps they are substituting fashionable slogans for thought.
You’ve got that right.
**If singular ‘they’ was good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for me.
PatinIowa 12.27.22 at 3:04 am
There are at least two extraordinarily slovenly things about the Jacoby piece.
In the first place there’s the usual conservative lumping of philosophical positions. It’s true that both Catharine MacKinnon and Gayle Rubin are both professors at the University of Michigan, and both call themselves feminists. It’s also true they differ radically one from another on a majority of issues, notably pornography. (I occasionally amuse myself by imagining them running into one another on the Diag.) Feminism isn’t one thing, to start. Also, it’s not Marxism, nor is Critical Race theory, nor is it necessarily post-modern. Lumping together the current theoretical positions on campus today is a little like lumping together Frege, Marx (why not?), Plato, Kant, and Hume, and then quoting Nietzsche to prove that American philosophers before Theory were misogynist pigs. (Oh, wait …)
What’s even more strikingly slovenly, to someone (like me!) who finished Peter Brooks’s “Seduced by Story” yesterday is his highly tendentious, markedly superficial story of the decline of the humanities (if you want to call it that) over the last sixty years or so. That’s not how I would describe what happened as I observed it, matriculating as an undergrad in 1971, getting a PhD in English in 1994, and retiring as a NTT faculty member earlier this year.
I think Jacoby could have provided a more thoughtful, nuanced account. I think Orwell is the perfect person to remind us why he didn’t.
PatinIowa 12.27.22 at 3:09 am
Oops: substitute for “a wide range of issues” for “a majority of issues.” I’m in no position to assert the latter. Apologies.
While I’m here, here’s a review of Brooks’s book. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-we-know-what-we-are-being-told-on-peter-brookss-seduced-by-story/
I read it with interest, as I call myself a narratologist at times.
John Q 12.27.22 at 3:33 am
I searched for the phrases cited by Engels “centering difference” and “empowering transformational change,”. AFAICT, the first is never used by corporate management, and the second is never used by liberal-leftists. Both are found in writing about educational theory, a topic which has long been mocked for its addiction to absurd jargon. I don’t know anything about Engels’ background. Maybe they’ve been to too many education conferences.
Thinking about my own reactions, “centering difference” sounds like quaint 1990s Derrida-talk, and the paucity of examples I could find supports this.
By contrast “empowering transformational change,” sets off alarm bells, which seem to be shared by my left-liberal audience whenever I observe that, in corporate speak, “change” always means “change for the worse”. That’s true even of simple messages like “our prices are changing”. This always means “going up”: in the event of a cut, the fact that prices are falling is loudly trumpeted.
Finally, having been around Marxists of all kinds for half a century, if any Marxist wants to complain about buzzwords and jargon, they should attend to the beam in their own eye, before the motes in others.
John Q 12.27.22 at 3:44 am
“What about geologists, economists, biologists, chemists, engineers, mathematicians, astronomers, archaeologists, etc? ”
As long ago as 2003, I observed that
“there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.”
https://johnquiggin.com/2003/03/01/its-academic/
LFC 12.27.22 at 4:12 am
J-D @17
I suppose I should be flattered that you dissected my rather hastily written (I admit) comment with the care that one would more usually lavish on a passage in a monograph or dissertation or published journal article.
That said, I think it’s fairly obvious, to those familiar with the ACLU’s history, why it would be bad for the ACLU to drop mention of the First Amendment in its annual reports (if in fact it has done so). Since you’re an Australian and not a U.S.-ian, you may not be familiar with that history, but, respectfully, I don’t think it’s incumbent on me to rehearse or summarize it.
Alex SL 12.27.22 at 4:23 am
John Q,
Good point with regard to conspiratorial, cultish thinking on the right; but one hopes that Jacoby would not see it quite like that and instead merely overgeneralises for the sake of his argument (some niche parts of the social sciences implied to be all of academia because only if that were the case could they influence enough students to appear remotely scary).
Matt 12.27.22 at 6:10 am
JH Said: People just don’t talk the way ‘theory’ people really did write in the 90’s. (Twitter has really killed that, if nothing else has.)
I’m not really “on” twitter. I don’t have an account, but I sometimes look at some feeds if I’ve found them informative or interesting. But even not really being on twitter, I see things like the following pretty regularly, and if this doesn’t count as using “buzz words” w/o much content, I don’t know what does:
(It’s an extreme, but not, I think, a super unusual example, so it seems odd to me to say that twitter has killed this sort of stuff.)
https://twitter.com/matrixgoth/status/1606032896619212800
John Q 12.27.22 at 6:20 am
I searched for ACLU + First Amendment and got this as the first hit
https://www.aclu.org/other/freedom-expression-aclu-position-paper
Like J-D, I’m not a US-ian, but it seems pretty clear-cut to me. After a long string of similar hits, we come to a lengthy and hostile NY Times piece from 2019 which quotes lots of people concerned about the ACLU, while referring repeatedly to nameless “younger staff” who are supposed not to share the commitment to the First Amendment.
Speaking as an old man, both Jacoby and many of the sources in the article come across as old men shaking their fists at clouds.
John Q 12.27.22 at 6:26 am
On the substantive issue of free speech, there’s a big difference between defending the rights of cosplay Nazis to march in public through Jewish neighborhoods, and defending the rights of armed terrorists (and politicians who support them) to threaten, and regularly carry out, political murders. The ACLU screwed up in Charlottesville by failing to make this distinction, and is now trying, like everyone else, to work out how to get it right.
J-D 12.27.22 at 8:48 am
It seems from John Quiggin’s more recent response that the ACLU has not in fact dropped mention of the First Amendment and the question which arises is rather why people have lied about its having done so.
But, that aside, I am well aware that it is not incumbent on you to respond to my questions and I didn’t intend to give the impression that I was even soliciting a response from you. It may be the case–I wouldn’t know–that most Americans would understand the reasons for criticising an ACLU decision (or, rather, hypothetical decision) to stop mentioning the First Amendment and feel no need to explain those reasons to us Foreignanians. That’s fine. I don’t expect to have everything explained to me and certainly don’t demand it. I don’t think, however, that it’s unreasonable for me to draw attention here to how the situation is (or may be) different for Foreignanians.
J-D 12.27.22 at 8:48 am
I find the meaning of that reasonably clear.
To me the position advanced seems not unclear but dubious. Its face-value plausibility is not high, and no evidence is offered to support it. It seems that some of the people who responded feel the same way. I think they and I understand the tweet in roughly the same way, enough to be able to doubt it for similar reasons.
Matt 12.27.22 at 12:12 pm
To me the position advanced seems not unclear but dubious. Its face-value plausibility is not high, and no evidence is offered to support it.
I mean, I suppose it’s true that there is no evidece offered to support the claim that … people who think it should be possible to build new housing in certain neighborhoods support “ethnic cleansing” and “cultural genocide” or are practictioners of “settler colonialism”, especially if (as you seem to be doing) you are reading those as literal claims. And of course that’s not surprising, because they are preposterous claims, taken literally. But that’s often a good indication that the claims are not meant to be taken litterally – that they are placeholders for other claims – “buzz words”, we might call them. They are used because they have emotive force, and it’s hoped that that will stand in for a real argument. (Importantly, “cultural genocide”, “settler colonialism”, “ethnic cleansing”, “neo-liberalism”, and similar terms, while they have straight forward, if sometimes contested, “normal” meanings, are also regularly used in certain academic fields with these less literal meanings.)
But this isn’t really my real interest. I was simply responding to the claim by John that “twitter has killed this sort of stuff off”. That seems to me to be pretty clearly not so.
Tm 12.27.22 at 4:23 pm
Engels: „It seems to me that US academia, left-liberal activism and corporate management are converging on a single dialect“
Does it seem to you, Seriously? You are such a connoisseur, nay expert, of US discourse. You should share your expertise more widely, perhaps write some bullshit pieces for the Atlantic or some such, I’m sure Elon Musk (who btw shouldn’t count as corporate management, for reasons) will retweet your wisdom.
William Berry 12.27.22 at 5:47 pm
I-D @28 says more-or-less what I was going to say about the quote Matt links to.
Granted, there are some multi-syllabic (big words!) in there but, as near as I can see, none that are especially obscure or semantically ambiguous in the given context.
William Berry 12.27.22 at 5:56 pm
Sorry: I typed “I-D” when I meant “J-D”.
And FWI[MOMNB]W, I’d probably agree with the sentiment*, rather than find it implausible.
*with the caveat that the remark is likely part of a larger discourse that I don’t know about (which caveat presumably holds for Matt, J-D, and any other readers ((unless they do know about it!)) ).
EB 12.27.22 at 7:48 pm
We can argue about whether the ACLU is mentioning the first amendment sufficiently to honor its founding purpose — but what is undeniable is that it has in practice wandered away from defense of the first amendment to other concerns.
The local office, for example, attempted to do grass roots organizing in response to the 2016 election (but failed). It has taken up abortion rights messaging, pro-immigration messaging, and a few other issues not strongly related to the Bill of Rights.
Now I, as a supporter of these other issues myself, should be OK with this, but the problem is that the ACLU was the only national organization devoted to the Bill of Rights. And, it is also sometimes joining fights against free speech if it is seen as criticizing a marginalized group in any way.
engels 12.27.22 at 7:52 pm
TM, apologies for culturally appropriating the US (or whatever riled you up this time). Actually I needn’t have written “US” as all this stuff is just as big in UK by mod. But I think Theory, wokism and management consultant speak all originated in US as it happens.
I did say “converging” so it’s not a fait accompli. But given the merging of speaker communities (managers overseeing academics who teach campus activists who will become the next generation of managers) and conceptual resonances between postmodernism, post-Fordist production and identitarian liberalism, it seems pretty much inevitable.
engels 12.27.22 at 7:53 pm
I find the idea that Twitter killed Theory incredible. If left-wing Twitter had a God it would be Judith Butler.
J, not that one 12.27.22 at 9:18 pm
The piece John Q cites at 25 and the piece linked by the OP share the quality of being vague as to audience. Many of these pieces are targeted to ordinary readers, outsiders to all the groups named, to persuade them not to use a particular vocabulary, and to condemn people who do – while ostensibly analyzing what insider groups are doing. In effect, they’re ascribing complete ideologies to ordinary people who have no input to those insider groups and are limited to saying “yes” or “no” to what they imagine some group of elites is doing. These two particular pieces are the obverse of that, telling ordinary readers they can ignore a whole area of discourse because it wasn’t really intended for them, it was made up by “younger” people or out of control academics, who can be ignored.
Tm 12.27.22 at 11:02 pm
Engels 34: Elon Musk is actually a representative of US corporate management, being CEO of several important multi billion dollar corporations. Too bad the irony of your parroting a CEO to charge leftist activists (based on zero actual evidence) of being ideologically aligned with corporate management is lost on you.
J-D 12.28.22 at 3:45 am
I understood John Holbo to mean that Twitter has killed off the kind of writing that was typical of ‘theory’ people (whoever they were) in the 1990s, and unless John Holbo cares to clarify the point, I’m not sure whether the example you cited is an example of the kind of writing that John Holbo considers to have been typical of ‘theory’ people in the 1990s.
However, you described it as ‘using buzzwords without much content’, and I found the content reasonably clear: certainly the responses to the tweet which I read suggested to me that other people understood the content much the same way I did.
J-D 12.28.22 at 3:49 am
I don’t know enough to judge how much the ACLU has changed direction or how (if at all) this might be a problem, but if it’s not actually true that it has dropped mention of the First Amendment from its annual reports then complaining about its having done so is the wrong way to respond.
John Q 12.28.22 at 5:57 am
In response to Engels, I’d suggest going to Twitter and putting “Judith Butler” in the search box. Not much evidence of deification to be seen.
John Q 12.28.22 at 6:09 am
EB: AFAICT, the legal case for abortion rights and privacy rights more broadly is based in either the Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment. And immigration cases routinely involve civil liberties.
Was it ever the case that the ACLU was solely about the First Amendment? What about the death penalty? Voting rights?
Snarky 12.28.22 at 10:13 am
I think, and this is just from my experience working as an admin drone in international organizations and large NGOs that trend left in policies but often right in day-to-day behavior (traditional hierarchies, highly unequal salaries, and working conditions, lots of environmental pressure to preserve the ideal of the IO vs to enact needed if uncomfortable change, etc., and I want to highlight cultural change takes time and no one acts in a vacuum, so I don’t expect this behavior to change overnight or due to some ‘great’ individual) that the use of buzzwords by those with power and access can (intentionally or not) be a way of excluding those who do not have power and access. Buzzwords can be more like blunt instruments used to create the appearance of structural change where no substantial change has happened. In poor, conservative communities where women were very unlikely to have the ability or the support to access basic women’s healthcare (outside of possibly their traditional role as mothers), the loss of abortion was not necessarily perceived as a loss because it was never really an option for those less capable of or motivated to buck what are often valued local traditions and practices (and this sticky adherence to community practices/traditions/thoughts is the case for most humans, even the ones in ivory towers.) What I found most useful in working with women in the communities in which I worked (and grew up) is to drop the buzzwords, appreciate their explanations of their daily work and honor their values as they expressed them (in word and deed, as long as I did not disagree in practice). There is much value in traditional motherhood as enacted by many women. I prioritized our relationship by prioritizing what I was told in the words in which it was shared. Then we worked together on ways to ease their daily work and build up from there, and in this I found more agreement than disagreement and more real structural change than cosmetic, in my own thinking as well as the systems in which I worked. I think that’s the real argument here, and I think there is room for agreement – that buzzwords are fine and great shorthand in a discussion like this, but that real policy work/change takes place in incremental steps that address individual and community needs as expressed by those individuals and communities. In this case, buzzwords are not useful and can be harmful and kill a relationship before it has begun. So let’s not outlaw or dismiss buzzwords, but maybe let’s put them aside if they do not foster productive discussion or if they threaten to shut down constructive conflict (and this is why I personally avoid Twitter…)
J, not that one 12.28.22 at 3:38 pm
One thing I’ll say for the Jacoby piece, when I read that notorious Butler quote for the umpteenth time, I realized I now understand what she means by her contrast between Marxian homology and “postmodern” decentered and ubiquitous individual exercises of power. Unfortunately, her recognition that there’s more than one way of looking at things does no work in the world. (Unless she understands the shift she describes in Marxian-homological terms lol so that postmodernism is only a stalking horse or propaganda for traditional Marxism.)
engels 12.28.22 at 8:27 pm
I’m not on Twitter anymore (don’t like the owner) but I did put Rad Butler’s name into Google and got this:
engels 12.28.22 at 9:38 pm
John Q 12.28.22 at 10:19 pm
Engels, I checked the tweets cited in the 2020 article you linked. The most viral had four (4) likes and one (1) retweet.
engels 12.29.22 at 11:49 am
Twitter Kidz can correct me but I think the interview “went viral”, not necessarily the individual tweets about it. I also did quick searches for “problematic trope” and “performative heteronormativity” for your edification:
https://twitter.com/search?q=problematic%20trope&src=typed_query&f=live
https://twitter.com/search?q=Performative%20heteronormativity%20&src=typed_query
John Q 12.30.22 at 2:13 am
Thanks for that edification, Engels. And for yours “ideological interpellation”
https://twitter.com/search?q=ideological%20interpellation&src=typed_query&f=top
engels 12.30.22 at 11:16 am
Ha! Marxists do use jargon too, sometimes (but not always) in an illegitimate, obfuscatory way (there was actually a current of Marxism founded to oppose this tendency) but the relationship between Marxism and Theory/wokese is somewhat complex, as Jacoby’s Butler quote shows, and as discussed in an older article:
J, not that one 12.30.22 at 5:31 pm
@49 hits the nail on the head. “Woke” as used by the Marxists who agree with it means “on the left but hasn’t done the correct reading and understood it correctly.” The argument that the “woke” have no political content boils down to “I think only my beliefs are the true left ones, and since you don’t agree, you don’t have actual beliefs.” I’m also be frustrated by people who have incoherent beliefs (or who think they agree with Marxists who actually seem to hate them), but I can still tell the difference between argument and propaganda. I don’t have to accept the quote’s insistence that Yang is representative of any group.
Trying to make everyone agree with you and then getting nasty when the group that agrees with you gets too big is not an effective political tack.
engels 12.30.22 at 9:03 pm
“I think only my beliefs are the true left ones, and since you don’t agree, you don’t have actual beliefs.”
You’ve written versions of this on about three threads and I’ve never said anything like it, but please do continue to use these discussions to work through your issues with the Marxist who stole your lunch money in grade school.
J, not that one 12.30.22 at 11:43 pm
engels @ 51
You’ve posted about three long quotes that all purport to show that Marxists originated intersectionality, and all show the opposite. If you can only understand disagreement with Marxism as some kind of personal grudge, anything you say about it can probably be written off. You’re definitely out of touch with the real world if you think Marxism is so normalized that disagreement with it is childish and neurotic.
engels 12.31.22 at 7:13 am
You’ve posted about three long quotes that all purport to show that Marxists originated intersectionality
No, I haven’t. And I don’t understand “disagreement with Marxism” that way; I was jokingly speculating as to what could be driving your replies as they’re so unconnected to anything I’ve written.
TM 01.04.23 at 11:53 am
engels 44: Who is Rad Butler and what is that person’s relevance for this thread?
engels 01.04.23 at 2:18 pm
TM it was a joke.
Harry 01.04.23 at 2:59 pm
I got this:
https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/10/archives/news-analysis-rab-butlers-innings-he-ticks-off-some-old-scores.html
which reminded me of that great story about Maudling missing out on the Tory leadership because he chose to visit a highly reputed fish and chip shop over an TV interview.
Butler, by contrast, lost any chance of leadership many years earlier by being an ultra-enthusiastic appeaser.
(I know this is ot, but engels has already taken us into surrealism, if Judith Butler hadn’t done it already, and its an old thread)
engels 01.05.23 at 4:04 am
Transgressing the boundaries (of Lords): towards a transformative hermeneutics of the 1922 committee…
Comments on this entry are closed.