eye of the storm

one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.

then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.

i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.

identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.

i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.

but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.

one thing we'd have to say about ruth padel: her work is radical not only in the realm of poetry, but in the genre of email, where she pursues a sort of automatic surrealism.

"ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily) Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well turnup...

"THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6 pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth."

as well, she is one of many innovators in the genre of postpostmodernist apology, where you're terribly sorry for being willfully misunderstood:

"I apologise for anything I have done that can be misconstrued as having been against him."

nothing quite matches the savage politics of poetry professors. she lasted, like, a week. but now they've had a woman, and can go back to another three centuries of men. it was a bad sign early on when padel hired karl rove as a consultant. i also dig her statement:

I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek.

words of the scandal-decimated politician.

my pro-conservative-studies piece is in the latimes this morning. ungratefully, i'm going to express my dissatisfaction with the edit. to start with, i am aware that you don't endow a professor, but a professorship or a chair. incomprehensibly, they lost the strongest paragraph:

    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.

anyway, if anyone cares, they can compare it with the submitted text.

For Conservative Studies
By Crispin Sartwell

That the University of Colorado would establish a Chair of Conservative Studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It certainly smacks of affirmative action, and casts conservativism in the syntax of whole departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, African-American studies, and so on.
    Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. Women may be oppressed, sort of, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multi-national corporations. In fact, if women are oppressed, they're oppressed by conservatives, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense.
    But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think it's not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. On a faculty of 825, the University of Colorado apparently has 23 registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed.
    The professoriate is unanimous for Obama. I say that's a problem. It's a problem in a variety of ways, but it's certainly a problem pedagogically: ideological uniformity does a disservice to students, and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge.
    I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backwards to teach texts I hate sympathetically; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Marx - both of whom I regard as totalitarians - compelling.
   But I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as or in the same way as would a professor who found them plausible. On the other hand, with Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," I've immersed myself in the text for years. I've struggled to parse every sentence. I've put it into the context of all Thoreau's work, and that of his friends and contemporaries.
    When I get to the end of the "Communist Manifesto" I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?" I don't - I can't - teach Marx the same way a Marxist would. I think that's fine, but what I'm saying is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if did try to be neutral) my real opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true.
    It's horrendously true in a situation in which academia produces a consensus. Here everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer within those departments to the texts taught within those courses to the ways those texts are taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible.
    Indeed, the academic consensus is of a particularly irritating variety. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a Ph.D. leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing: that no one could disagree with Obamanism without being an idiot. This has been expressed by the continual attack not on the positions of Reagan and Bush, for example, but on their grades and IQs.
  That is, the self-image of the professoriate results in a non-stop ad hominem attack. Furthermore, the claims of the professoriate to independence of mind, actual academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify - "working-class white men," for example - or indeed far more so.
    That's partially just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whoever's sitting next to you. But it's also partially a result of the fact that a professor has been processed, often for a decade or more, by the institutions that harbor this unanimity. The predictable result of "educating" professors for many years in unanimous institutions is that each cohort is a bit more unanimous than the one before.
     Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree, and in which they associate agreement with intelligence and with . . . degrees, jobs, tenure, and so on. If you think conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself richly justifies a decision not to hire or tenure a Ph.D. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors.
    Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.
   That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of these institutions is obvious. Higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obamanism as it is to conveying information. But it is massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective.
     So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they flower in endowed chairs of conservative studies, that's at least pretty funny.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College In Carlisle, PA. His book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory has just been published.

    

here's stanley fish's argument against the u of colorado's notion of establishing a "chair of conservative studies." 23 of the 825 faculty members describe themselves as republicans. that's actually pretty high. but anyway, fish argues, as he has many times before, that one's ideology is irrelevant to one's teaching, that even a liberal philosophy prof, for example, is obliged to give a fair assessment of conservative texts (plato or burke or adam smith, let's say) to his students. all i can say is that this argument is bizarrely naive. i do myself bend over backwards to give a clear and even sympathetic reading of "the communist manifesto," which i think is interesting but terrifying. but i do not deceive myself into thinking that i've expended as much effort in understanding it as i have on a comparable text i actually sympathize with (maybe "civil disobedience"). i  tell my students: 'well, you know, when marx says that the state must control all the media of communications, that sure seems totalitarian to me; but i don't think if you had a marxist in here, he'd think it was so clear.' but i also can't adequately represent the argument, regarding it as i do as ludicrous. at any rate: if you despise a text or a thinker, you read him differently, emphasize different things, etc, despite all your attempts to be fair. this is a typical and unavoidable human derangement, most clearly seen in the fact that nearly everybody sympathizes with themselves, that their account of their own lives and arguments is partly designed to beef up their self-image. the idea that people can simply drop off their deepest beliefs at the door is silly, even if we want to. and when you've got let's say 802 liberals on the faculty, you've got a pall of interpretation slanted in every possible respect: which texts we teach, and how. and it's even more dangerous if we maintain a fishy claim of impartiality; that doesn't get rid of the prejudices, merely conceals them, which buries the whole process further in self-delusion.

    ask yourself: how is it that all these professors are liberals, are more or less perfectly unanimous for obama? i'm not going to accept the professors' own account: that smart people are liberals and only ignorant idiots are conservatives (say "george bush" and roll your eyes here). even just the sheer self-praise involved in that assertion should give you pause. it has to do with the fact that they're trained in institutions by people for whom liberalism is an unquestionable orthodoxy. it has to do with the texts and classes and curricula and how they're taught. it has to do with the charming enthusiasm of people for believing whatever the person next to them believes, especially if the latter has the appearance of authority or expertise. the longer people inhabit the academic institution, the more unanimous they become, a strange coincidence if fish's characterization of education is true. if you ask me, these things have nothing to do with what education is, and i do think that some effort to achieve ideological diversity is warranted.

   i don't know if inventing the discipline of conservative studies is much of an answer, but it's at least delicious in its ironies: conservatives always hated the idea of "women's studies," "african-american studies," lgbt (or whatever it is) studies. etc. and the implicit portrayal of conservatives as an oppressed minority for whom affirmative action is appropriate is pretty odd considering how powerful conservatism is. on the other hand, in academia, conservatism really does constitute an oppressed minority.