Pulling The Pin Out Of Intersectionality, Whiteness, White Fragility Etc.

On pulling the idea of “systemic” aka “structural” out of the foundational premises of intersectionality, whiteness, white fragility, the social justice of the SJWs, and all other like theories, their entire edifices, the whole of their analyses, fall to being at best partial insights.

More Notes On Notes On A Draft Paper On The New Criticism

More further to the immediately below post: my friend’s response and my reply:

Friend:

Thanks.

Yes, I do expand and should make that clear.  My general category is deep interpretation, ie that there is something deeper than the story or emotional/though progression/development in the poem.  

Dead right about the final bit.  It should be "the illusion of a unified beauty, truth and goodness."

Third:  We disagree.  I think the dramatic moment and movement usually disappears is the pattern.  It was common to read in reviews of books that offered interpretations that the big thesis or theses were no big deal, but along the way there were very good accounts of lines or scenes.  And I found that too.  I said that in one draft, it may have gone in this one.  

The great accounts of poems just go from beginning to end tracing the drama.  No theme.  Of course the poems deal with common occasions, eg the death of a child, the murder of a loved on out of jealousy, but those are not themes which are more or less hidden from non-trained readers.  

We disagree on Abrams, perhaps the best scholar-critic of his time.  It is a brilliant brief account of a common procedure.  In every "analysis" The Well-Wrought Urn the poem boils down to two opposed attitudes being in ironic tension, again and again and again.  The vast dramatic differences, a man responding to an urn or a London dawn, are submerged in that ironic tension which is the organizing principle from start to finish.  

Kernan is also a very fine critic and did much better but when writing for students in an intro he fell back on the binary order beneath the temporal drama.  Take a look at Abrams' essay "Five Types of Lycidas" (i'll give you the ref if you want to bother) for a developed form of his critique.  

You are right when it comes to short stretches of reading, then the interpreters often attend to the moment and what's going on, but when they tackle the whole poem and want to have a summary statement they fall into allegory.  

By the way, Hegel did this first with Antigone by saying it was really a conflict between two equally valid moral principles.  One can re-tell a story or poem vividly, thus capturing the drama, but it is very hard to do at any length.  I know of very few examples.  There are good insights strewn all over but what made new criticism, or deep interpretation, successful in an academic context was its claim to reveal things (deep themes) that earlier commentators did not see.  Abrams in Five Types shows that in fact readers have always understood the poems.  The example I give with the In  Memoriam quote is the clincher for me.  We all know just what it means (or is, a lament that move from despair to hope)  so we have to talk about other things.  New critics claimed other had missed the meaning.  

Very fine criticisms and much appreciated and they will lead to changes.  

Thanks a heap, 

Me: 

I’m not going to get into it all with you since we’ve been back and forth any number of times. So, I’ll say that while the notion of NC (New Criticism) as complex unity via theme is wonderfully paradoxical, all to the good, pointedly succinct yet explosively expansive to take the NC past lyric poetry, it’s off kilter, like a side wind, to say it goes to “something deeper” than the story or the emotional progression through it. 

As argued these are the necessary conditions for what constitutes theme and it would be well if you gave theme in your paper a fighting chance and didn’t reduce what it is as a NC critical apogee to the silliness of Kerman calling Othello a morality play or to Abrams’s distorted version of what NC does with plays. 

If you can give the best arguments for and version of theme and then try to attack them with better arguments, then that would be a boon to your paper. 

For example, to try to specify what a longer work is about, to try to arrive at a general statement that captures its essence is hardly allegorizing, any more than the effort to sum up the historical evidence, or any hypothesis that seeks to account for a set of data, by way of a theory as to cause(s) is allegorizing. That way of describing these academic efforts are both unjust to them and misshape the idea of allegory. These theses don’t symbolize or stand for something else, free standing and discrete in themselves yet one to one symbolic, a crawling king snake as evil or as penis. Rather they have an existence only in relation in trying to explain what they sum up.

And one thing to heed in your paper are the first few words of your first quote from Frye when he speaks “academic criticism.” Your attack on the NC might want to distinguish between reviews and formal literary criticism and you might want more concretely to wrestle with the implications in saying you’ve used an approach to literature that falsifies and distorts it’s nature. There’s an implication of bad faith in that admission. Insofar as it’s not set aside by a persuasive justification, you let yourself off the hook of that implication too easily. 

That’s to me why the three crude examples of responding to the poem, mid paper, which you surprisingly say—perhaps to shock or be contrarian for its own sake—are “perfectly reasonable” seem adduced and commented upon by you in a vacuum. 

You’d, I think, want to specify the context of those reactions: they’d be laughed out of any *academically* meaningful discussion of poetry—say what goes in most college or even high school classrooms. 

So again, taking stock of “academic criticism,” its whys and wherefores, would shore up the structure of your paper, the context of “perfectly reasonable,” and could provide the beginning of an answer to the *apparent* bad faith implications of teaching by a critical method that, on your argument, wounds literature rather severely. 

Some Notes On A Draft Essay Titled Two And Half Cheers For The New Criticism

What follows are some notes given to my friend who authored the above referred to essay. As it’s in draft form, I can’t reproduce it, but I’m confident that my comments will make fairly clear what I’m responding to.

Here it is:

I just read your paper. I assume it’s a draft to be edited. I have so many marginal notes that they needed their own margins for notes on notes.

I don’t know what you want me to say about it, if anything. But I’ll make a few broad points.

I liked the history of ideas part of your paper, what set of considerations and pressures led to the New Criticism (NC) as a temporary academic mainstay.

I made an initial note about distinguishing among genres and noting that the NC typically applies to poetry. But part way through it struck me that really you have a trans-genre conception of it, which you most concisely state at the outset: “unified complexity” via “theme.” That definition takes the NC beyond its usual range of shorter poems and expands it to apply to all literature. That, if I’m right about it, might be made more clear. 

Overall, I find the argument of your paper somewhat confusing. “Two and a half cheers” suggests to me, with the resonance of the phrase “two cheers for democracy”—you give NC an extra half cheer—slightly muted enthusiasm for it, slightly since we’re only half a cheer away from muting the muting. I understand the paradox forming the spine of your argument: NC distorts, even falsifies, the nature of literature but it’s an invaluable pedagogical tool. But this paradox belies your titular fraction of two and a half. For even as NC is quite handy for teaching literature, can its distortion and falsification earn a score of 83.333%?

Of course this is only a playful quibble. More seriously, the NC in its distortion and falsification of the nature of literature comes in for quite a drubbing throughout the bulk of your paper. But on the last page, in the last few paragraphs you give it an encomium that drives against, and is hard to put together with, that drubbing. You write, “Futher, new criticism not only gives us the deep truth about works of art, but cognitive meaning, and finally beauty.” That startles me given what comes before knocking the NC. I thought to myself and noted, “Where does this come from. It subverts, or at least cuts against, the preceding argument.” If there’s some resolution of this tension, I’m not seeing it.

Overall, as well, I find the critique of the NC unsatisfying and unpersuasive. For example, you quote Alvin Kerman confessing his allegorical interpretation of Othello: his view of it descends to it being,

...a conflict between barbarism and civilization: "In some ways I have schematized Othello as just such a morality play, offering an allegorical journey between heaven and hell on a stage filled with purely symbolic figures."...

Who reasonably intelligent, besides someone caught in a reductive notion of the NC, would speak about Othello this way in interpreting it? To do so is both bad criticism and isn’t compelled by the NC.

Another example that gets closer to heart of things and impales you, I’d argue, on a contradiction is this by Meyer Abrams:

...The usual strategy of the imagist critic is to pull out a selection of such items and to set them up in an order which is largely independent of who utters them, on what occasion, and for what dramatic purpose. Freed from the control imposed by their specific verbal and dramatic contexts, the selected images readily send out shoots and tendrils of significance, which can be twined into a symbolic pattern---and if the critic is sensitive, learned, and adroit, often a very interesting pattern. The danger is, that the pattern may be largely an artifact of the implicit scheme governing the critical analysis...

Briefly, who’s to say that that’s “the usual strategy”? Asking roughly the same question just put to Kerman, why would anyone extract quotes denuded of dramatic context, independent of who says them, of their dramatic occasion and of their dramatic purpose? It’s utter foolishness to do so and the NC needn’t compel it. 

In that, here’s the contradiction: if, as you define it, the NC is the elucidation of complex unity via theme such that it’s trans-genre and ranges past shorter poetry to apply to all literary genres, then why can’t that unity be in part comprised by analyzing the selected quotes in their dramatic context, by who says them, by why they’re said, which is to say, what occasions them, and by their dramatic purpose? Your expansive notion of the NC would be missing vital literary components if critics didn’t attend to what Abrams dismisses out of hand. 

Given your paper, I could multiply the examples of what I see as inadequately dealing with the NC, but I’ve just given you the flavor of what they’d taste like.

Finally, for these few notes, I have a big problem with the/your conception of interpretation by way of the NC, or perhaps necessarily in the nature of literary criticism, being allegorical. I understand the point of a necessary tension in reading old works with current eyes. The characterization of interpretation as allegorical seems misconceived. 

Allegory is a symbolic structure wherein X throughout means or stands for Y, pretty well one on one. While an interpretation might conclude X stands for Y if that reading emerges from the text, the first step in interpretation is to understand what X means, and what it means may or may not be referable to Y. 

So if we say Othello is marked by jealousy, or that indeterminacy is of Hamlet’s essence, or that Huck is one kind of morally discerning kid about race on the raft but more conventional about it off the raft, then we are starting to come to critical and, so, interpretive, terms with who they are. And regardless of the distance between the time of those works and now, allegorizing is a severe misnomer for what we’re doing.

Anyway, I could go on but enough is enough I’m sure. As I have to run to an appointment, I’m sending you this as just written and not reread. So please excuse what doubtless are many errors grammatical, typographical, substantive and otherwise.

No Real Difference Between Sympathy And Empathy

First, this  on empathy.

Next:  Don:

This stuff re empathy is bullshit. 

Hume got it right.

Some say the word 'empathy' entered the language in the 20thC, and one linguist says it was in 1850. In any case Hume's word was 'sympathy'.  Hume declared, absolutely correctly, that the greater the distance of one person or group of persons from another, the weaker the sympathies. 

There are three kind of "distance" according to Hume, temporal distance, spatial distance, and a complex of differences Hume does not give a name to which can be called ethno-cultural differences. 

Hume says that sympathy is a lively impression, not tepid. Nobody today feels sympathy with the tens of millions massacred by the hordes of Genghis Khaen. Most of us think that what happened was terrible, and let go at that. The combination of distances in this case prevents the rise of the lively impression of sympathy, and no degree of tub-thumping hustling by psychologists can change that.

Today, the most important kind of distance between people is ethno-cultural distance, and I don't care how many woo woo compulsory brain washing sessions on 'inclusivness' are inflicted on people, it won’t wash.

Ethno-cultural distances are intractable. Something else is needed and I haven't a clue as to what it might be, and neither do the empathy peddlers.The distances are too great.

Last: Me:

Don, I understand how sympathy and empathy are typically differentiated, the first caring, concern and sadness for a bad thing that has happened to someone, the latter putting one’s self in the place or shoes of that other person such that “you feel their pain.” But I’ve always thought that really, drilled down, there is no difference and what we have rather is varying degrees of sympathy. 

For at least two reasons:

1. How can we be sympathetic unless we understand what the other person is going through and in that understanding register to some degree how that bad experience might affect us, which is the definition of empathy? 

2. And add to that this: we are all discrete individuals; we can never become, so to speak, “one” with another, never get past the boundary of our own subjectivity. So empathy’s feeling what another feels is in principle, I would think, misplaced concreteness, a kind of reification, a metaphor for close feelings or strong sympathy, taken mistakenly as something factually so.

My Note On A Note On My Note Below Trying To Provide A Brief Beginning Account Of Intersectionality

Note to a guy who sent me this note on my immediately below post.

.... I think you pretty much get it. What you do not do is expose its bullshittines. Don't  look to me for advice. I have given up on it all...

Me: 

I wasn’t tying to expose its faultiness, just trying to see if I was “getting it.”

So if you think I “pretty much get it,” then for me that’s mission accomplished.

The word is thrown around so much, is so pervasive in chatter these days, the way “deconstruction” used to be, I suspect that many who use it don’t understand what is meant by those who do understand it. 

So I think it’s at least minimally helpful to try to clarify what it at its core means.

So, again, if I pretty much did that, then I did what I set out to do.

And, again, to tell me I haven’t exposed it as nonsense is to tell me I haven’t done something I didn’t set out to do.

In critiquing intersectionality, I would, rather than focus on its indeterminacy, reject its foundational premises. 

Some are: 

that, regardless of our past, we now systemically oppress the marginalized; 

that the most privileged—that is, the privileged by way intersectionality’s criteria—form a hegemony intent on maintaining its power, advantage and control; 

that the criteria for ascribing privilege form a coherent basis for its assertion and application—essentially identity politics on steroids; 

that the idea of free expression is delusionary since speech is but a mode of power, one of the hegemon’s chief means of oppression and thus sustaining itself rather than a means of pursuing truth; 

that it’s delusionary to say we live in a free society rather than one in which controlling power seeks its own persistence; 

and, generally, the idea of culture and institutions as operating as a kind of superstructure.

But, yet again, none of this was part of what I’d set out to do in trying to clarify what intersectionality means. 

A Beginning Note Of An Account Of Intersectionality

Is this a good beginning of an account of intersectionality?

It’s the allegation of a convergence of different forms of oppression on both individuals and groups that establishes a hierarchy of oppressive victimization with the most aggrieved identities at the top and the most privileged identities, such as white males, at the bottom but with the bottom ruling and suppressing the top.

The convergence, figured as an intersection of oppressions, rests on an analysis of society that, continues the allegation, the causes of oppression are systemic or structural, built into the way society is formed as a matter of its history and its practices, institutional and otherwise, by the hegemonic privileged intent on maintaining their power and control.

Since the rhetoric of liberal democratic values and the noted practices are pretext for the oppression they serve to protect, truth-shattering power lies in the articulation of  experience of oppression. That articulation cannot be gainsaid by studies, scholarship or facts and figures—evidence—that point away and, so, distract us from this truth. 

A Note On Being 4/5ths Through Dickens’s Bleak House And A Theory About It

Note to a friend:

....1/5th left.

Shattered when Little Joe, not Bonanza’s, died.

Dickens with him, as he often does, outdoes himself. He conveys the beautiful, pitiable soul of the boy the way Twain does with Huck, though Huck is neither pitiable or doomed. The commonality is the illimited penetration to the deepest core of these boys and then representing them, especially in their voices, so that their effect on us is as well illimited. 

We’re educated to reject sentimentality in art—a low form of excessive emotion of sadness or regret or tenderness that upsets some presumed balance between our hearts and our minds such that good judgment is offended, but Dickens in his genius makes it transcend itself so as to become high art. He’s able to do this, I’d venture, because of his masterful authorial technique in creating it, that technique being the sum of what it is great writers do in making their fiction great. (List to follow in the next life.)

Btw, back to Dickens’s treatment of women in Bleak House, nobody’s gonna ever refer to Lady Dedlock as “little woman.” And in that a counter thesis is suggesting itself to me: maybe Dickens somewhat unaware is of the devil’s camp. 

The lavish generosity of person he lavishes on most not all of the little women—Lady Snagsby not so much, “not to put too fine a point on it,” to quote Mr. Snagsby—leads to a certain tiresomeness as finally their selflessness involves self abnegation. 

I think of Esther, Charlie, Rosa, Ada up to a point, Caddy. Ada breaks that mould in determinedly defying sense in marrying Carstone. It will not go well for them, I have no doubt. The great goodness of the little woman starts to become boring. Whereas which woman in the novel is more intriguing than the, I’m guessing, homicidal Lady Dedlock, has more complexity, is more compelling? 

Esther, where I’m up to so far, doesn’t know herself. She’s aware that a couple of others, namely Allen Woodcourt and Ada, sense her sadness after she has agreed to marry John Jarndyce. They intuit she’s denying herself in doing so. She has a passion for Woodcourt that can’t break, so far I stress, into her consciousness. She has no reason to think why others detect sadness in her. She is perfectly happy she tells herself and sincerely but self-deludedly believes. Here selflessness clearly leads to self abnegation. Generous goodness faces its own limit, its obstruction to human happiness. 

In all this the novel seems to me to house a paradox, a tension between selflessness and selffulness, to coin a word, between, could it be said, a kind of extreme sense and extreme sensibility, sensibility as Jane Austen has it. Where the demands of the emotional self dominate, when characters seek their fulfillment in following their passions, sensibility, they seem to seal their fate and doom themselves in different degrees of doom, say Ada and perhaps Lady Dedlock. But when they obey the dictates of sense, as in duty and in doing for others, they lose themselves and suffer their own measures of doom. 

Just a working theory right now. 

A Note On Dickens’s View Of Women In Bleak House And His Theory Of Fiction Apparent There

Note to a friend:

I’m where Jarndyce proposes to Esther—about 2/3ds through—but if you’re not there yet I’ll leave you in suspense as to whether she accepts, recalling her suppressed passion for the young heroic doctor, Allan Woodcourt.

But what’s striking me, and has been throughout, is Dickens’s attitude towards women, his personal life aside, as it’s shown in Bleak House. Submissive, retiring, humble, kindly, generous, door-mat-for-men type of women seem to be for him the personification of feminine perfection. The archetypal image of them being the helper, “little woman,” is basically the maid. The cold, aloof, beautiful, cool, haughty types, les belles dames sans merci, Lady Dedlock, intrigue him, the way women are attracted to bad boys, but they don’t get any real slice of Dickensian feminine virtue, it seems. 

P.S. Another thing occurring to me is that within Bleak House is a kind of Dickensian theory of fiction, that fiction manifests the connectedness amongst us all or, put another way, all our (at the most) six degrees of separation. The non Esther narrator quite early on comments on how big and populated and civically disparate is the London citizenry but latent amongst them exists a connectedness waiting for patency. 

I do believe that’s *part* of what’s going on thematically in this magnificent novel. 

My Tweet On Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance

...Finished #mailerstoughguysdontdance

If an impenetrably convoluted, dull story, lifeless characters, dead, unreal dialogue—ie, no one talks this way, the same for all characters, absurd theorizing and overly studied prose all are dancing, then this Norman Mailer is no tough guy...

A Short Note On The Political Fate Of Jody Wilson-Raybould And The Nature Of Political Morality: High Unflinching Principle Against The Reality Of Politics

Isn’t Socrates drinking the hemlock an expression of the ultimate incompatibility between high principle and and real life politics, between the purity of philosophy and the unavoidable impurity of real life, inevitably conflicted, complex, messy, problematic and compromised, on the ground? 

As Richard Posner said speaking of Machiavelli:

...People… have difficulty grasping the distinctive and essential components of political morality, comprising the qualities necessary in a statesman or other leader. Those qualities are strategic and interpersonal (manipulative, coercive, psychological) in character. They are quintessentially social. They constitute the morality, misunderstood as cynicism, expounded by Machiavelli, the morality that Weber contrasted with an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’, his term for the uncompromising absolutist ethics that one finds, for example, on the Sermon on the Mount. The ethics of political responsibility implies a willingness to compromise, to dirty one’s hands, to flatter and lie, to make package deals, to forgo the prideful self satisfaction that comes from self-conscious purity and devotion to principle. It requires a sense of reality, of proportion, rather than self-righteousness or academic smarts. The politician must have an ‘ability to let realities work upon him with inner consciousness and calmness.’...

I think these notions of pure Sermon on the Mount morality and contrasting political morality so understood go to the heart of what finally befell Jody Wilson Reybould and Jane Philpott. 

ON STEM AND SOME CONSERVATIVES’ DISMISSAL OF LIBERAL ARTS

First: this 

Then from me:

I wrote the following about one paragraph in this essay.

Me to my friends:

….If any of you care to peruse and comment, I’d be obliged:

As it happens, Ben Shapiro seems to me to have mechanistic view of sex and gender, namely a boy is a boy is a boy, a girl is a girl is a girl and and any individual’s internal confusion over that, gender dysphoria, is a disease to be cured. But without getting into the merits of Shapiro’s view—I disagree with it—what about this?

————————————————————————————————————————

I break down one paragraph from McManus’s essay.

McManus:

….Shapiro and others are well known for their crude arguments against the trans movement. But the argument that the only thing that matters is a purely scientific approach to the world inadvertently supports the position of transgender individuals (as it should)…

Me:

On transgenderism, how but by a scientific approach can we come to understand, then make judgments about it and deal with it? It involves how we’re sexually constituted, genetically wired and how in our minds we relate to our sexuality. By what but the different sciences raised by transgenderism and their integration into a workable theory can ever come to terms with it? Objection can be taken to what Shapiro thinks, but for that to be meaningful, it will need to be grounded in better science than what avails Shapiro.

McManus:

…If all we care about are the facts of the world, and how they can be manipulated to service our ends, there is no intrinsic reason why the fact of our biological sex at birth cannot be manipulated if we so desire…

Me:

Firstly, how does wanting a scientific approach to transgenderism necessarily morph into tendentious reasoning? And what says that Shapiro by his argument only cares about manipulating facts to service his ends? That says he’s being a propagandist of a kind. Maybe he is but who’s to say he doesn’t sincerely reach a good faith conclusion based on his understanding of the science? And why even impugn his motives? Why not make a better argument from better science? And, finally here, why move from a complaint, as I read it, of the bad faith manipulation of facts to serve ends, to the repetition of such bad faith arguing in the service of justifying transgenderism? It deserves better than that.

McManus:

…Indeed, since, according to the instrumentalist position, there can be nothing inherently wrong with pursuing the end of transcending our initial biological sex, we should be applauding those scientists who are better able to satisfy the wishes of individuals by bringing individual biology closer to that of preferred sex…

Me:

McManus earlier in this essay has described instrumental reasoning as:

…the world was little more than a collection of material objects interacting with one another according to scientific laws. The point of reason was to understand these laws, so the idle objects of the world could be manipulated and engineered to satisfy subjective human preferences. As Alasdair Macintyre puts it in After Virtue, instrumental rationality is a way of thinking about the most effective means of satisfying our desires. It remains neutral about the ends we choose to pursue, regarding all kinds of reasoning about which ends good human beings should pursue as embedded in superstitious traditionalism and religious pieties…

As I’ve noted, the dive into instrumental reasoning as here defined and applying it to transgenderism distracts us from and ought to be irrelevant to the issue wanting a proper approach. McManus could say, I suppose, “I’m just showing how Shapiro’s instrumentalism can work against him here.” But I’d say, stipulating for argument that Shapiro so reasons, “So what? It ought to be enough to say that instrumentalism has no place in a good faith discussion or debate about transgenderism and, so, enough said on that.”

McManus:

….Shapiro may object that this is simply unscientific, because sex is determined at birth. But that is no real argument, since the facts about the world simply exist to be manipulated through scientific reason, which can reconfigure reality according to our wishes….

Me:

Isn’t a little incoherent to posit for Shapiro his objection based on science? He either is an instrumentalist—as McManus defines it—or he’s not. If he is, then the posit flies in the face of his instrumentalism since facts are mere means to a desired end. And if he’s not, then why parade him as one and then posit him asserting science and then on top of that then provide an instrumentalist answer to his assertion of science?

McManus:

….Indeed, the more STEM fields advance, the fewer immediate barriers there will be to people doing just that. The only argument against this position is a (bad) moral one, and encouraging indifference to learning about moral argumentation can only entrench the belief that almost everything is a matter of opinion, bias and perspective….

Me:

I can’t make out this conclusion. Who’s to say instrumental reasoning follows from the advance of STEM education (in tandem with the decline in or dismissal of by certain conservatives humanities education, the main theme of the essay)? Who’s to say that STEM graduates are more likely to be instrumentalists than liberal arts majors, that an education in moral reasoning is a barrier to the instrumentalism STEM allegedly breeds? In fact, if we observe what’s going on in the humanities on college campuses, the infection by a kind of dictatorial political correctness emanating from the now current notion of intersectionalism suggests a much greater instance of instrumentalism in the humanities than in STEM faculties, which, to reverse McManus’s argument, seem a barrier to that infection.