Category: Protest tactics

Anticolonial Aesthetics and a Politics of the Impossible

I want to register some reactions to J. Daniel Elam’s compelling World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics (Fordham University Press, 2021).

Elam begins form a position almost exactly identical to that of Christina Sharpe—the position of those whose lives are not only not protected by the state, but marked by the state for wretchedness unto death.

“Politics can only be ‘the art of the possible’ for those whose lives are secured by the state, or, in other words, only for those who can confidently know that they will live to see the ‘possible’ attained. Those whose lives are not guaranteed by the state, or those whose lives the state actively expects to end, cannot afford the luxury of such politics. The ‘wretched of the earth’ require, instead, a politics of the impossible. This politics requires imagining and foregrounding, in the face of imminent or certain death, a politics not accountable to regimes of ‘success,’ ‘sustainability,’ or ‘attainability,’ but rather to ‘the meantime’: the time being, the passing moment, and the present” (2-3).

“This is an unsustainable and inconsequential politics. It is a radical politics of the present. . . . Despair and nihilism are insufficient for an anticolonial politics, but they guard against the equally unsatisfactory politics of optimism and hope. Anticolonialism is, in this final instance, a project of locating fleeting moments of egalitarian politics in the relative opacity of an unguaranteed future” (3).

In a memorable phrase, Elam writes of recuperating “an anti-nihilist non-futurity”(5)—connected to the attempt “to create a language sufficient to imagine political collectivities motivated by the fact of their current impossibility. They [anticolonial writers] invented aesthetic forms necessary to imagine a worldwide egalitarianism rooted in the unlikelihood of any future at all” (4).

My first response is to note how closely this tracks Walter Pater’s aestheticism. Many of the key themes of the conclusion to The Renaissance are reprised here: the focus on fleeting moments, the insistence on the present since the future only brings death, the rejection of the utilitarian calculi that measure the worth of the present in terms of its “fruits,” in the things that effort in the present will make possible, will bring into existence. Pater’s radical atomism moves toward severing any connection between one moment and another—a dissolution that also unravels the self (which is revealed as an essentially temporal construct, built upon a constructed continuity between past and present, thus creating an entity, an identity, that can be carried into the future.) Elam follows a similar path when he considers Gandhi’s attempts “to abandon both mastery and self”(73), and recommends “the disavowal of the self-knowing self,” in favor of “the tentative assertion ‘that the something that [one is] should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant’”(125; italics and brackets in original; the quote is, I think, from Roland Barthes, although Elam’s footnote doesn’t make that absolutely clear.)

To note the similarities to Pater is not to belittle Elam’s project. My intent, rather, is to clarify the stakes. The echo here, I think, is the Adorno and Horkheimer of The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The target is the madness of productivity. Everything must be turned to account. Everything we do is in order to achieve something else. Nothing is done for its own sake. Elam’s experiment is to ponder—with the help of a series of anticolonial writers—what it would mean to embrace the “inconsequential,” to step aside from the pressure, the demand, to produce a future out of the miseries of the present. The claim—and here the similarities are to the contemporary work of Fred Moten, David Graeber, and Jack Halberstam among others—is that the effort to produce that better future only guarantees making the present miserable. It is the very logics of mastery and productivity that render life in the here and now unbearable. In his most expansive moments, it is that logic of exploiting the present for the future profits it can secure that is the hallmark of colonialism. To be anticolonial is not simply to oust the European colonial power; the fully anticolonial must overthrow the extractive processes that strip-mine life right now. It is regimes of accumulation, laying up stores for the future, that must be overcome.

Except that it can’t be overcome—or, at least, won’t be overcome in your lifetime or mine. Faced with that impossibility, what kind of politics makes sense? Elam proposes an inconsequential politics, one that aims (only) for “fleeting moments” of egalitarian commonality. Even putting it that way makes it too utilitarian. Elam speaks of a non-teleological politics, which starts to look something like Foucault’s “care of the self,” except with a more collective resonance. Certainly in Graeber and Moten, the call is for something like “being the change you want to see in the world” (the famous charge that Gandhi lays on us). Elam ponders the possibility (which he derives from Fanon) of “stopping and leaving” (pp. 117-125), of refusing to play the utilitarian game. Why accept the madness and despair the colonial regime inflicts? Refuse participation in its mad push for ever more productivity—a push that destroys life in all its forms, human and non-human.

I want, today, to register all my worries about an inconsequential politics. But I will in my next post concentrate on the strengths of Elam’s case—and on the specifics of the practices he thinks embody the politics of the impossible, of the meantime, that he advocates.

Elam is way too smart to believe that many people have the option of stopping and leaving. There is “no escape” (124-125) for the vast majority. That’s why his is a politics of the impossible. Which is a nice intellectual legerdemain, but of no consolation (dare I say of “no use”) to those suffering in the present. To be (most likely) over romantic about it, I am surprised that Elam doesn’t turn to what Hannah Arendt called “the lost treasure of revolution.” Arendt was referring to the ways in which participation in collective struggle is, itself, a heady and deeply satisfying experience. And it is so satisfying in large part because it gives individuals the kind of immersion in a collective project that is seldom afforded to us. In short, revolutionary struggle does not have to succeed to prove meaningful. But it does have to be oriented to a continual protest against and articulation of the injustices of the existing socio-political structures. For Elam’s purposes, it provides that experience of egalitarian collectivity that he treasures

Elam’s book notably never uses the terms “justice” or “power.” Maybe that’s because “justice” and “power” are consequentialist in their focus on outcomes. But I suspect—and here is where I really ground my reservations about a politics of the impossible—it is because politics is always disappointing. No political effort ever achieves it goals in a perfect, non-compromised fashion. When full-scaled utopia (the overthrow of all productivity, all sacrifice of the present in order to achieve something in the future) is your stated desire, then it follows inevitably that you will see the goal is impossible and opt for a politics of the impossible instead of the messy politics of the possible. Your refusal to settle for half a loaf (social democracy instead of a complete dismantling of capitalism, to take one example) means you dream of an (impossible) escape from politics altogether. Because justice can never be won once and for all, because it can only be secured imperfectly and temporarily by the endless fight against the forces that would withhold it, you want to walk away. The continual mixture of defeat with (compromised and partial) victories is just too exhausting. Better to go off (and here I am being really unfair to Elam as tomorrow’s post will show) and read a book instead.

All of this connects to the (only implied in Elam’s book) alignment of power with oppression. But power can also refer to the capacity to get something done—and point us toward the things that individual could never accomplish on their own, but can accomplish when part of a collective. We are back to the “lost treasure.” Feeling powerless in the face of established institutions, routines, and socio-economic demands is the common lot in today’s world (and, undoubtedly, in every society throughout human time). That’s why experiences of power, of being able to participate in doing something that moves (however imperfectly) toward its goal, are so exhilarating. The imagined and virtual collectivities that Elam celebrates, even as he acknowledges they are “ephemeral and fleeting” (14), look like a simulacrum of what the heart really desires.

In short, this is a politics of despair, a politics that pursues a “diminished thing” (the Robert Frost poem I keep coming back to) because it cannot see a path to what it truly desires. Of course, Elam explicitly acknowledges that he is describing a politics of despair. The question on the table is how to live under terrible conditions, ones that make it impossible to live an affirmable life. That’s the strength of his book—and of Moten’s work (to take one other example). And that’s the question—how to live—that I will take up tomorrow.

But, first, let me summarize my objections. There are two main planks, both of which might be seen as protests against the all-or-nothing position associated with the dream of revolutionary transformation. First, capitalism, utilitarianism, colonialism, racism are all configured as monolithic totalities, not only entirely evil, but also viewed as coherent overarching wholes that must be felled tout court or not at all. I am deeply influenced by Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism as We Know It on this score. We need analyses that abandon totalized characterizations of large abstractions in favor of examination of varied practices on the ground. To paint all utilitarian thinking and effort as oppressive means, presumably, that the writing of books is as soul-destroying as working in a coal mine.

Admittedly, when it comes to racism and colonialism, I am not inclined to parse out certain practices that are acceptable or (even) less pernicious. But do we really have to align colonialism with utilitarian thinking—and then say we have only eradicated colonialism when we have rendered the world free of the tyranny of consequentialism? When it comes to racism, once we posit that racism is constitutive of American society—and that racism in the US will only be overcome when the whole social order is dissolved—we not only should expect a fight to the death (who is going to acquiesce in the complete collapse of society?), but also (and more much importantly in my view) ignore and fail to recognize as resources the vocabulary of rights and equality built into the American political order—a vocabulary that blacks (and others) have been able to mobilize to their benefit. In short, American racism exists alongside other components of “Americanism” in ways that belie seeing American society as monolithically racist–or as lacking any internal resources, traditions, or institutions that can be used to fight racism.

Working the seams is, I am arguing, a more realistic politics than constructing (theoretically) an undifferentiated, non-contradictory, monolith which can then only be dislodged (or even changed) by its complete dismantling. I have also already said that this alternative politics is frustrating, endless, replete with partial victories, stinging defeats, and soul-wrenching compromises. But it also offers joys of participation to those engaged in its multiple struggles. The politics of despair, I am suggesting, comes from a demand for all or nothing—combined with the response that “I’ll take nothing” because I know that getting all is impossible.

Second, the problem with all or nothing thinking in that it locates the problem in “the system.” The focus is on institutional fixes. If we just get the design right, then all that messy political stuff will disappear. Justice, equality, freedom will just flow automatically from the perfect machinery we have established. (Marx offers a prime example of this kind of thinking.) But what I am saying is that there is no escape from politics, from the endless need to negotiate among competing interests, competing visions of what is desirable, and also (crucially) between necessary trade-offs among goods. There are always going to be people trying to game the system (no matter what the system is), but there is also the intractable fact that securing one good must in many cases require sacrificing another good—and there have to be political processes to handle disputes over what sacrifices to make. The left is all too prone to an unrealistic faith in mechanisms, in design.

This last way of thinking, I should add, is not offered in any form in Elam’s work. Instead, his politics of the impossible is addressed to a different critique of revolutionary practice and theory. Namely, he is concerned that the means of revolution (violence justified by its ends, for one example) or its aims (to gain power in state form, to achieve sovereignty) will doom any successful revolution to merely replicate (even if in somewhat different forms) the oppressions of the prior regime. If colonialism is characterized by a logic of mastery, of consequential action, then colonialism is not overcome when the European occupier leaves. The post-colonial nation state, all too often (and inevitably it would seem in this despairing politics), offers new versions of the assaults on life that characterized the colonial period. Postcolonialism is a social and political condition that has not yet been achieved, no matter who sits in the halls of government.

A good place to end for today because it points to one of the many strengths in Elam’s book. He is addressing real dilemmas: how to live in an unjust present? How to move us from that present to a future that will not merely reproduce the oppressions of today? There is a good case to be made—and he makes it—that the traditional politics of struggle and revolution has been unable to deliver on its promises—and so a new kind of politics must be imagined and practiced. And there is surely a case to be made that sacrificing lives in the present in the name of a better future that is not going to be achieved (that is impossible to achieve?) is madness and unjustifiable. (We just need to think of Stalin and Mao to see just how mad—and how evil—such sacrifices are.) So how to live “in the meantime” is an urgent question. That part of me hates ceding power to the bad actors, hates what looks like the quietism of letting the other side win, doesn’t mean that Elam is wrong. I just can’t stop asking why the other side’s world (despite its self-destructive insanity, measured in the toll it takes on human and non-human life) is “possible” while our (the left’s) utopian visions are “impossible.”

Ben Lerner (2)

Floating beneath the surface in Lerner’s 10:24 is a longing for connection, for art’s communicative possibilities to open up a pathway to community.

“[I] felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I look at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurablity of scale—the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate register, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. . . . [W]henever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of this possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down by the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event” (108-109).

The theme returns in a short lecture given by the narrator at a round-table featuring three writers. He has explained how the Challenger disaster and its aftermath (a poetic speech by Ronal Reagan, the rash of anonymously generated jokes about the event that circulate through the culture) set him on the road to becoming a writer.

“If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ [a poem Reagan quotes in his speech] as a poem—in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem—and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting in the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t even funny at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammars the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all” (115-116).

The wistfulness here reminds me of John Lennon’s Imagine—and seems tied to the author’s (and our?) inability to access Whitmanian mysticism with any conviction. The skyline is a monument to collectivity. It could never have been built except by many human hands working in concert. And even if the various activities encompassed by city life—“bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity” (108)—are “bad forms of collectivity” they are “figures” of the possibility of collectivity. Selves share the “meanings” by which “we build a social world.” The boundaries between selves are utterly porous; we dissolve into one another—and into the stories that we share, the images that guide us. If only we could tweak those facts, shift them slightly on their axes—then the world and each one of us would be “the same but a little bit different” (a formula for utopia that comes from Benjamin or Brecht or someone of that ilk; I can’t find the exact source).

We always already exist in collectivities; the struggle is to make them better, to make them serve our deepest longings rather than to stifle and frustrate them. We fight collectivity (cling to selfishness in all its senses) even as we long for it. Art is connected to that longing; think of how movies and plays move us to tears, even those of us who almost never cry in “real life.” We only indulge our longings in the safe space of art, while living our prudent, advantage-seeking, lives in the everyday world. We know—as Adorno says—what our better selves and a better world look like, and we live out the shame (no matter how deeply we manage to bury it) of the gap between that vision of the good and the sordid realities we inhabit and reproduce.

The web of shared meanings is what we might call “myth”—and what is frightening about the current moment in American history is that the prevailing “myth” is no longer shared. (Probably it never was; more likely is that those who held alternative visions were more ruthlessly silenced in the past.) There are two (at least) utterly incompatible set of meanings circulating through the culture—and they appear so incompatible that the proponents of each find it close to unimaginable to share the national space with the other side.

In a sense, the power of art has never been so dramatically on display. The left/liberal vision occupies the lion’s share of official culture, from the high art bastions of museums and universities to the culture industry’s popular music, film, and TV. But the unofficial, unsanctioned world of the internet has spawned the alternative vision of the populist right, which now has its spokesperson in the White House. Fed by a not inaccurate understanding of its exclusion from “respectable” opinion, populism has developed its alternative modes of communication alongside its refusal to credit anything the official world has to say.

Communication, “spin,” how and to whom facts and meanings are articulated, command the field. Only catastrophic natural events—the virus, hurricanes, wildfires—seem capable of breaking through the morass of words and images, and not in any definitive, unequivocal way. That supposed objective barometer of facts on the ground—the market—has proved as fictitious (if not more) than other “social indicators.” Printing money and piling up debt have become disconnected from any actual consequences. Inflation remains low, faith in government bonds remains unshaken, the stock market indices remain high. We do appear to have left a reality-based world far behind.

And yet. There is so much real and remediable suffering out there. How did we, the human race, manage to turn all our possibilities, all our astounding capacities, into shit? Collectively, we have built an amazing world. But it amazes far more often by its byzantine dysfunctions than its praise-worthy accomplishments. We can work wonders in medicine, but have developed a bureaucracy for delivering medical care that creates massive amounts of spiritually deadening labor and places obstacles in the way of getting treatment to those in need of it. We can feed seven billion people through our farming practices, but have built a system with perverse incentives that lead to the destruction of food while people go hungry and encourages the depletion of the natural sources of agricultural productivity. We spend billions of dollars on military hardware, but claim we can’t afford to help the 20% of children who live in poverty.

I have always disliked Lennon’s Imagine. It seems so removed from actual engagement, so enchanted with its own melancholy. I find Lerner’s wistfulness more substantial. He more fully articulates the sense of being both outside and inside of the collective failure. Outside of it because seemingly unable to effect its unfolding disasters in any way—and outside of it because viewing it from a perspective that makes one unable to take its madness for granted or as inevitable or as immune from harsh judgment. Inside because one is fully engorged by this whale; one can’t pretend not to be a participant, day in and day out, as one struggles to construct a life, a way of negotiating through this minefield. Coming to terms with the devil is what we do even if we dream of living otherwise. Driving one’s car, paying one’s insurance and tax bills to underwrite inhumane systems, consuming then throwing away plastic. The list of contributions we make toward perpetuating the world as currently constituted is endless.

Stop the world, I want to get off. Whitman’s optimism is no longer available, even if his dreams are. Lerner returns to Whitman later in the book and wonders about the “ecstasy” that runs through Whitman’s encounters with wounded Union soldiers in the hospitals in Washington DC. There is something inhuman, deeply disturbing, in how Whitman gets off on the sight of these suffering bodies. Optimism in such circumstances is reprehensible—and seems linked to an ideology of “glorious sacrifice” that was, I would hope, finally put to rest by World War I.

Where to find that optimism today? Clearly, some people find in the collectivities created by the demonstrations that have become a recurrent feature of American civil life in 2020. Insofar as the demonstrations attempt to construct—and make stick—a counter-narrative, a vision of American society antithetical to the racism and division Trump wants to amplify, the battle is on. It is a war of meanings, and a war between an inclusive vision of collectivity against a divisive one. Lerner articulates for us the forlorn, but still deeply felt, longing for that inclusive collectivity (the beloved community) even as he reminds us that art (if understood in the widest possible sense) is where articulation takes place, where the meanings we hope to share are first presented. We can never quite believe that Shelley was right about poets being the unacknowledged legislators, but it is less incredible to recognize how the arts are powerful creators of community—and of the shared meanings that hold communities together.

R.I.P.: American Democracy

The flags should all be flying at half-mast today. American democracy died last night.

I know many will say it has been on life-support for many a day now. Others will say, “you fool, it never existed in the first place.”

But it did exist so long as the path forward, the way to bring about the changes and reforms one desired, was electoral politics. If you could swing, through all the devices of persuasion, a majority to your side, you could take over the government and pass the legislation you deemed necessary.

Yes, that is simplistic and ignores all the veto points, all the obstacles put in the pathway of change. And it ignores how the system always excluded certain people—people who had to resort to extra-electoral tactics (civil disobedience and its various forms of protest) to make their needs and desires felt.

But the great social movements of American history, the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, aimed for the vote. They put so much emphasis on gaining the vote precisely because they associated the vote with power, the power to effect change. They believed that we had enough of a democracy, no matter how imperfect, that it made sense to engage in electoral politics—and that electoral politics was the road to reform.

Perhaps that belief was a delusion, but 2006 and 2008 seemed to bear it out. The country rose up against the lies and incompetence of the Bush administration—and grabbed the government back.

Now, however, we have a Republican Party in power that is determined to never let another 2006 or 2008 occur. Their simple plan is to render “free and fair” (that old cliché) elections impossible. Emboldened by the nation’s acceptance of Bush v. Gore, they have deployed every means at their disposal; they keep people from voting or nullify electoral results: voter suppression, gerrymandering, judicial or legislative over-rides of election results (taking away powers of elected officials if they are Democrats, as has happened in both Wisconsin and North Carolina).

Still, I will admit to having thought there was a limit to their willingness to turn elections into farces worthy of the so-called “people’s republics” of yore. Surely, even the Republicans needed the cover of “legitimacy” that elections provide in a democracy. Various pundits kept claiming that John Roberts was the bulwark against complete Republican destruction of our democracy. He cared, they said, about the integrity of the Supreme Court, about its standing above partisan politics.

Quite evidently not. The Supreme Court last night authorized a Wisconsin election in which thousands will not have their votes counted. The situation is Kafkaesque: in order to be counted ballots must be returned before they have been received. But the court’s decision is as straightforward as could be: we will validate election results even though thousands are prevented from voting.

I am heartsick. If electoral politics are a sham, are rigged from the outset, the only way forward is non-electoral politics. As Martin Luther King saw very clearly, that means either a “persistent and unyielding” non-violent mass movement or a resort (always, necessarily by a much smaller number) to violence. King insisted that violence could not succeed; not only were the odds against it too great because you will never get large numbers to join your violent movement, but also because violence breeds more violence as it creates bitterness and the desire (almost impossible to ignore) for revenge. It also turns off those sympathetic to your cause, but opposed to violent means. (I am channeling MLK’s essay, “The Social Organization of Nonviolence” here.)

The Republicans have learned (it would seem) over the past few years that they pay no price for their destruction of democracy. I venture to guess that life for most people in this country is just comfortable enough to keep them from endangering what they have by devoting themselves to a long, persistent struggle. Endangering their leisure time, their peace of mind, their jobs and livelihood. The reasons may range from petty to dangers to economic and physical well-being.

It seems that the death of democracy will occur amidst various howls of protest, but little more than that. The officials elected in today’s Wisconsin election will take office—and continue to wreak the damage that has been the platform of Wisconsin’s Republicans for the past ten years.

Unless a strong and effective dissent is lodged—and such a dissent will require sacrifices of time, comfort, and well-being—democracy will not return. Or, if you prefer, democracy will not be seen for the first time in this land. I do not see where that dissent will come from, where that movement will arise.

Joseph North Three: Sensibility, Community, Institution

Now we reach the point in my discussion of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard UP, 2017) where I mostly agree with him. I am simply going to take up some of his key terms and goals and inflect them somewhat differently. I think what I have to say runs parallel to North, not ever much meeting him on his chosen ground, but not running athwart his formulations either.

Here’s three of North’s descriptions of his project.

The first comes from a footnote on Raymond Williams and features North’s “scholarship/criticism” divide. “Of course, none of this is to say that Williams was not deeply committed to ‘practice’ in other fields of endeavor; I merely mean to observe that he understood his disciplinary work in scholarly terms, as cultural analysis, cultural history, and cultural theory, rather than understanding it in critical terms as the systematic cultivation of sensibility. Naturally the two are not finally distinguishable, and any powerful work of scholarship moves readers to try on different ranges of sensibility, etc. etc. But the ‘practice’ of scholarship, conceived of as cultural analysis, is necessarily neither direct nor systematic in this respect” (pg. 233, fn. 18).

The second is notable for its raising the issue of institutions. “I only want to add that the problem facing the discipline is not an entirely new one, for in a broad sense it is much the same problem that the critical revolution of the 1920s managed to solve: the problem of creating a true paradigm for criticism—the problem of how to build an institution that would cultivate new, deeper forms of subjectivity and collectivity in a rigorous and repeatable way” (126-27).

In the third passage, he faults the work of D. A. Miller and Eve Sedgwick for its “lack of any prospect of a true paradigm for criticism—the lack of any hope of putting together a paradigmatic way to use the literary directly to intervene in the social order” (173). Two pages earlier, he describes what I think he means by “direct” intervention. “My point is simply that it really does make a difference to the character of the work produced by an intellectual formation when those involved feel strongly their responsibility to the needs of a fairly well-defined larger formation beyond the academy—a larger formation defined not simply by its ‘identity’ but by its character as a living movement—which is to say, really, a formation defined by its always limited but nevertheless real ability to define itself by determining, collectively, the trajectory of its own development” (171).

I can’t resist, of course, registering where I disagree with these statements. I have already made clear my skepticism that there is a rigorous or systematic way to cultivate a sensibility. I am also astounded that North does not recognize feminist literary criticism of the period from 1975 to 1995 as a paradigmatic case of academic work tied “to a fairly well-defined larger formation beyond the academy.” And if Sedgwick’s relation to the gay liberation movement isn’t a similar instance, may the Lord help the rest of us. And North’s repeated (as much a tic as his use of the term “rigorous”) use of the words “true” and “really” make him appear more Stalinist than I think he really is. Does he really intend to shut down the pluralism of intellectual work in favor of the one true path? Re-education camps for the critics so that they get with the program—and are taught the methods of the new systematic pedagogy. Surely, one of the delights of the aesthetic sensibility is its anarchism, its playfulness, its imaginative ingenuity, excesses, and unruliness. I suspect that “systematic,” and “repeatable” and “direct” aesthetic education would prove counter-productive in many cases. At least, I hope it would–with teachers and student both summoning enough gumption to rebel against the indoctrination.

Finally, I want to quibble with his description of “direct” intervention. Work that stands in support of, proves useful to, “larger” social movements is not direct—at least not directly political. Here’s Judith Butler in a 1988 essay offering a straightforward description of political acts. “Clearly, there are political acts which are deliberate and instrumental actions of political organization, resistant collective interventions with the broad aim of instating a more just set of social and political relations” (“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” Theater Journal 523). That cultivating an aesthetic sensibility might play a role in encouraging someone to join that social movement is not the direct political intervention that the movement attempts through quite different means and actions than what the critic does in the classroom or in her written work. To confuse the two does no one any good—especially if it lets the teacher/critic deem herself sufficiently political as she advances her academic career. The teacher/critic’s contribution is valuable, but it also indirect.

Enough with the dissents. I completely agree with North that “sensibility” is the crucial concept for the “hearts and minds” side of politics. Cultivating a leftist sensibility is necessary, although not sufficient, to creating the kind of society we leftists want to live in. The caveats here are familiar. There is no guaranteed path from an aesthetic sensibility to a leftist politics. [Let me also note that the practice of close reading is also not the only, or even the royal road, to acquiring an aesthetic sensibility. Lots of people got there other ways, which casts doubt of the “systematic” and “rigorous” pedagogy, and on the fetishizing of close reading.] For many aesthetes (Nietzsche, Yeats, and Pound among them), the vulgarity and bad taste of the masses drives them to anti-democratic, autocratic visions of strong, masterful leaders of the herd. For others (Wordsworth and Coleridge for example), reverence for genius promotes a kind of over-all piety that leads to a quietist respect for everything that is, investing tradition and the customary forms of life with a sacred aura it is impious to question or change. (This is the aesthetic version—articulated by T. S. Eliot as well—of Edmund Burke’s conservatism.)

But the larger point—and now we are with David Hume and William James in contrast to Kant—is that our political ideas and principles (and our ethical ones as well) are the products of our sensibility. It is the moral passions and our moral intuitions that generate our political commitments. James (in the first lecture of Pragmatism) talks of “temperament”—and throughout his work (from The Principles of Psychology onwards) insists that our stated reasons for doing something are always secondary; there was the will to do something first, then the search for justifying reasons. Indignation at the injustice of others (or of social arrangements) and shame at one’s own acts of selfishness are more secure grounds for conduct than a rationally derived categorical imperative.

James seems to think of temperament as innate, a fated from birth. North’s point is that education—a sentimental education—can shape sensibility. I agree. My daughter was in college at George Washington University when Osama bin Laden was killed. Her classmates rushed over to the White House (three blocks away) to celebrate when the news was heard. She told my wife and me that she didn’t join the celebration. It just felt wrong to her to dance in the streets about killing someone. Her parents’ reaction was her Friends School education had just proved itself.

Sensibility is akin to taste. The leftist today finds it distasteful, an offense to her sense of how things should be, to live in Trump’s America. I will use my next post to describe the sensibility of the right in that America. But for the left, there is outrage at the caging of immigrant children, and at the bigotry that extends to non-whites, women, non-Christians and beyond. Fundamentally, it is the shame of living in such a needlessly cruel society, with its thousands of homeless and millions of uninsured.

I don’t know exactly how a specifically “aesthetic” sensibility lines up with this leftist sensibility. And as I have said, there is certainly no sure path from one to the other. But I am willing to believe (maybe because it is true at least for myself) that the aesthetic stands at odds with commercial culture, attending to values and experiences that are “discounted” (in every sense of that word) in the dominant culture. Being placed at odds, in a spot where the taken-for-granteds of one’s society are made somewhat less self-evident, has its effect. If what one has come to appreciate, even to love, is scorned by others, new modes of reckoning (again in every sense of the word), and new allegiances (structure of feeling) may beckon.

Here is where Hume is preferable to James. Hume (Dewey and Mead follow Hume here in a way the more individualistic James does not) portrays sensibility as shaped through our communal relations and as reinforced by those same relations. In other words, even non-conformity is social. It is extremely difficult, perhaps impossible (akin to the impossibility of a “private language” in the Wittgenstein argument) to be a solitary “enemy of the people.” There must be resources—from the tradition, from received works of art, criticism, and cultural analysis, from a cohort—on which one can draw to sustain the feeling that something is wrong in the dominant order.

Education, in other words, can play a major role in shaping sensibility—and it is the community the school offers is as crucial as the educational content. Young people discover the courage of their convictions when they find others who feel the same way, who have the same inchoate intuitions that school (in both its formal and informal interactions) is helping them to articulate. The encouragement of teachers (yes, you are on the right path; keep going; keep probing; keep questioning; trust your instincts) and of peers (those famous all-night bull sessions after our student finds her sympaticos).

Communities are, famously, ephemeral. We can idealize them (as arguably Hannah Arendt does in her definition of “the political”—a definition that seems to exclude everything except the excited talk among equals from the political sphere). Societies are corrupt, impersonal, hierarchical, mechanical, not face-to-face. Communities are “known” (as Raymond Williams phrased it), informal and intimate. A familiar narrative of “modernity” sees communities as overwhelmed by society, by the depredations of capitalism, war, and the ever-expanding state. (Tonnies)

This romanticism does not serve the left well. Communities are not sustainable in the absence of institutions. And they certainly cannot withstand the pressures of power, of the large forces of capitalism and the state, without institutional homes. There must (quite literally) be places for the community to gather and resources for its maintenance. Make no mistake about it: neo-liberalism has deliberately and methodically set out to destroy the institutions that have sustained the left (while building their own infrastructure—chambers of commerce, business lobbying groups, the infamous think tanks—that provide careers for the cadre of right-wing hacks). Unions, of course, first and foremost. When did we last have a union leader who was recognized as a spokesperson for America’s workers? But there has also been the absorption of the “associations” that Tocqueville famously saw as the hallmark of American democracy into the services of the state. Outsourced welfare functions are now the responsibility of clinics first created by the feminist and gay liberation movements to serve the needs of their communities. Financial stability has been secured at the price of being experienced as embedded members of the community; now those organizations are purveyors of services begrudgingly offered by a bureaucratic state that always put obstacles in the way of accessing those benefits.

North is right to see that the neoliberal attack on institutions extends to the university. The aesthetic sensibility (since at least 1960) has been bunkered in the university, having failed to sustain the few other institutional structures (little magazines, the literary reviews it inherited from the 19^th century) that existed in the early 20^th century. Reading groups are well and good (they are thriving and I hardly want to belittle them), but have no institutional weight or home. Humanities departments are about it, except for the arts scene (again, mostly woefully under-institutionalized) in some major cities.

So there is every reason to fight hard to keep the humanities as an integral part of the university. I personally don’t think taking the disciplinary route is the way to fight this fight—but maybe I am wrong. Maybe only claims to disciplinary specificity and expertise can gain us a spot.

More crucially, I think North is absolutely right to believe that our efforts as critics are doomed to political ineffectiveness if not tied to vibrant social movements.

[For the record, here is where I think North’s criticism/scholarship divide really doesn’t work. Efforts along both lines can prove supportive or not to social movements. It is the content, not the form, of the work that matters. And I also think work that is apolitical is perfectly OK. It is tyrannical—a mirror image of the absurd regimes of “productivity” that afflict both capitalism and the research university—to insist that everything one does contribute to the political cause. Life is made worth living, in many instances, by things that are unproductive, are useless.]

The problem of the contemporary left is, precisely, the absence of such social movements. The civil rights movement had the black churches, and then the proliferation of organizations: SNCC, CORE, SCLC, along with the venerable NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph’s labor organization. It sustained itself over a very long time. The feminist movement had its clinics, and NOW. The anti-war movement had A. J. Muste and David Dellinger, long-time veterans of peace groups. The Democratic Party is obviously no good unless (except when) it is pushed by groups formed outside the party, groups that act on their own without taking instructions from the party. The Bernie Sanders insurrection will only reshape the Democratic Party when it establishes itself as an independent power outside the party–with which the party then needs to come to terms.

The trouble with Black Lives Matter, ME Too, and Occupy is that they all have resisted or failed (I don’t know which one) to establish any kind of institutional base. Each of these movements has identified a mass of people who share certain experiences and a certain sensibility. They have, in other words, called into presence (albeit mostly virtually—except for Occupy) a community. That discovery of other like souls is comforting, reassuring, even empowering. I am not alone. But to be politically effective, these movements need legs. They need to be sustained, in it for the long haul. And that requires institutions: money, functionaries, offices, continuing pressure at the sites deemed appropriate (for strategic reasons) for intervention.

In short (and now I am the one who is going to sound like a thirties Marxist), the left needs to make the long march through the institutions—a march begun by creating some institutions of its own on the outside to prepare it for the infiltration of the institutions on the inside. That’s what the right has been doing for the past forty years. While the left was marching in the street on the weekends with their friends, the right was getting elected to school boards. Protest marches feel great, but are ephemeral, easily ignored. Our society’s shift rightwards has come through a million incremental changes wrought on the ground by somebody in an office somewhere, by right wing hacks and business lobbyists writing legislation, by regulators letting oversight lapse, by prosecutors and courts looking the other way at white collar and corporate crime. During the Obama years, the left paid almost no attention to state-level races, ceding those legislatures to the right almost by default–with grievous consequences (not the least of which is a weak bench, unable to provide any potential national candidates between the ages of 45 and 65).

We need leftist social movements that pay attention to the minutiae, that are not addicted to the large dramatic gesture, that don’t engage in the magical thinking that a piece of legislation or a court decision solves a problem once and for all. It’s the implementation, the daily practices of state, corporate, educational, regulatory institutions (as Foucault should have taught us) where change takes place, in often silent and difficult to perceive ways. That’s the room where it happens—and the left has all too often failed to even try to get into the room.