This post originally appeared in The Valve (now defunct) on October 6, 2006. It was part of a "book event," as it was known, in which a number of writers would give their views on the chosen book. Some of the writers were regular columnists at The Valve, and some weren't. Generally, a good time was had by all. This book event was devoted to Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Diversity is an even more pressing issue back now than it was back then, when Bush II was President, which is why I'm posting my contribution here. You can find the whole book event here, in the trusty Wayback Machine.
Caveat: Some of the links have probably rotted. I've not checked them nor attempted to repair them.
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Prelude: Shantytowns
Back in April one Tyler Cowen published an article in Slate suggesting that shantytowns be constructed in post-Katrina New Orleans:
Since so many homes were destroyed, the natural inclination is to build safer or perhaps impregnable structures. But that is the wrong response. No one should or will rebuild or insure expensive homes on vulnerable ground, such as the devastated Ninth Ward. And it is impossible to make homes perfectly safe against every conceivable act of nature.
Instead, the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance. This means the Ninth Ward need not remain empty. Once the current ruined structures are razed, governmental authorities should make it possible for entrepreneurs to put up less-expensive buildings. Many of these will be serviceable, but not all will be pretty. We could call them structures with expected lives of less than 50 years. Or we could call them shacks.
I haven't given the matter much thought but, on the face of it, the suggestion seems worth considering. Cowan made the curious mistake, however, of concluding that piece with this fairytale:
To be sure, the shantytowns could bring socioeconomic costs. Yet crime, lack of safety, and racial tension were all features of New Orleans ex ante. The city has long thrived as more dangerous than average, more multicultural than average, and more precarious than average for the United States. And people who decide the cheap housing isn't safe enough will be free to look elsewhere-or remain in Utah with their insurance checks.
Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences. Cheap real estate could make the city a desirable place for struggling artists to live. The cultural heyday of New Orleans lies in the past. Katrina rebuilding gives the city a chance to become an innovator once again.
While it is true that remarkable creative activity has managed to survive in unfortunate physical circumstances, I would think the proper view of this relationship is that creativity thus survived in spite of those circumstances, not because of them.
Cowan's disingenuous praise of creativity among the poor is an example of the kind of thinking that Walter Benn Michaels eviscerates in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. The cultural creativity that sometimes manages to flourish amid poverty is, in Cowan's view, somehow supposed to compensate for that poverty or to demonstrate somehow that poverty really isn't such a bad thing. In Michaels's view such thinking is self-serving rationalization. He is right to critique it.
However, I'm not going to concentrate on the book's main argument; I'll leave that to my fellow bloggers. I am concerned about the book's very odd conclusion, which is about Michaels himself. In some entirely reasonable scheme of things, that conclusion is irrelevant to the argument - Michaels himself says so - but still, it is there, 12 pages all about Walter Benn Michaels in a 203 page book. Why?
As Miss Piggy Says: Moi Moi Moi
Michaels begins his conclusion by climbing into the third person and telling us (p. 191):
Walter Benn Michaels teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He makes $175,000 a year. But he wants more; one of his motives for writing this book was the cash advance offered him by his publishers.
As it happens, that paragraph is the first thing I saw when I opened the book. I wasn't intending to read the conclusion, the pages just happened to part there when I opened the book.
So I began reading that paragraph and promptly splattered myself on the ceiling in anger and disgust: “another narcissistic mea culpa from an opportunistic pomo critic.” That's what I was thinking. “And he's bragging about his salary too,” which is quite high for a humanities professor, though it's only martini money on Wall Street - something Michaels is at pains to point out.
Once I had scraped myself off the ceiling and gathered my wits about me, I was puzzled. I associate such self indulgence with identity theorists, who seem to believe that a frank acknowledgment of their own positionality will magically insulate them from misconstruing the thoughts and actions of the Others about whom they write. But Michaels is not such an identitarian; he's quite opposed to such thinking, and says so in this book (and others as well). Why is he making such a typically identitarian move? And, at 6% of the page count, in such an exaggerated form in such a prominent position, the end of the book?
One possibility, of course, is misplaced vanity. That seems to be what University Diarist thinks:
He ran out of things to say but he had a book contract, so he's filling up pages . . . with cultural self-flattery. In that particularly repellent mode UD calls KISS ME I'M HONEST. Says he's got an enormous household income but wants much more because he wants to be the super-rich he envies in the pages of the NYT ... that the homeless guy outside his house pisses him off rather than inspires him to become Albert Schweitzer ... that he thinks he has better taste than other people ...
When Michaels tells us, in a book about the economic greed, blindness, and insensitivity of American elites, that he himself is an invidious grasping sort, it doesn't humanize him or interestingly complicate the redistribution problem.... If indeed he “does not feel rich” even though he's hugely affluent, one can only conclude that it's because of people like Michaels that we're in the cruel winner-take-all fix he himself deplores.
I'm can't go along with that final comment, but I certainly resonate to the KISS ME I'M HONEST branding. Yet, while I am quite willing to believe that academic superstars, such as Michaels, are sometimes prey to vanity and self indulgence, I have been unable to convince myself that Michaels wrote those final pages out of nothing but vanity. There is something else going on.
Let us read a bit more (p. 191):
Some readers will be tempted to see a discrepancy between these facts and the arguments against economic inequality made in the preceding chapters. But they should remember that those arguments are true (if they are true) even if Michaels's motives are bad, and they would be false (if they were false) even if his motives were good. Not to put too fine a point on it, the validity of the arguments does not depend on the virtue of the person making them.
I quite agree. So why doesn't Michaels simply allow people to judge his ideas on their merits, free of any information about who he is, how much money he makes, that he is Jewish, or what he thinks about the homeless man he saw outside the window of his study? Why not simply present his arguments and be done with it?
Consider the following passage by sociologist Robert Merton, from a 1945 article on “The Sociology of Knowledge” which is reprinted in his collection, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press 1957, p. 457):
With increasing social conflict, differences in the values, attitudes and modes of thought of groups develop to the point where there orientation which these groups previously had in common is overshadowed by incompatible differences. Not only do there develop distinct universes of discourse, but the existence of any one universe challenges the validity and legitimacy of the others. The co-existence of these conflicting perspectives and interpretations within the same society leads to an active and reciprocal distrust between groups. Within a context of distrust, one no longer inquires into the content of beliefs and assertions to determine whether they are valid or not, one no longer confronts the assertions with relevant evidence, but introduces an entirely new question: how does it happen that these views are maintained? Thought becomes functionalized; it is interpreted in terms of its psychological or economic or social or racial sources and functions.
Thus knowledge of a thinker's position in society, his identity, will be used to discount the arguments he makes.
The conditions Merton described in that mid-century article are certainly true of current intellectual life in America, both in the academy and in the larger civic sphere. Difference and distrust are rampant and any and all ideas can be interpreted as deceptive moves in a struggle for power and domination of one sort or another. Thus throughout Michaels's career it has been common for literary scholars to discount arguments by reference to some hidden agenda of the person making the argument. This argument is capitalist, that one is paternalistic, that other one over there assumes white privilege, and so forth. These days psychoanalysis is anathema to one group of intellectual tribes while evolutionary psychology is anathema to another. Of intellectual cooties there is no end.
One move in such a game is for a writer openly to declare his identity, his position in the matrix of potential discounting factors, in the name of openness and honesty. Identitarians do this all the time, especially when they are considering the work of people whose identity is different from their own.
This is the context in which I wish to consider Michaels's conclusion. It bears on his argument, not in a rational-deductive way, but in a rhetorical way. Rationally, the conclusion is irrelevant to the arguments in the body of his book. But rhetorically, that's different. In the manner, however, of Laurence Sterne, I propose to progress through digression. Thus I will first consider, at some length, two examples of standard authorial positioning statements in identitarian contexts.
Other People's Culture
Let us begin with a casual example of authorial positioning, from an article in Krin Gabbard's anthology, Jazz Among the Discourses (1995), one of a pair of anthologies arguing that “jazz has entered the mainstreams of the American academy” (p. 1). The general purpose of the anthology is to help ensure that this new discipline is in harmony with the latest developments in postmodern humanities scholarship. One Steven Elworth contributed a paper examining the critical transformation of jazz into an art music: “Jazz in Crisis, 1948-1958: Ideology and Representation.”
In the course of his argument, Elworth offers this observation (p. 65):
The major paradox of all writing about culture is how to take seriously a culture not one's own without reducing it to an ineffable Other. I do not wish to argue, of course, that one can only write of one's own culture. In the contemporary moment of constant cultural transformation and commodification, even the definition of one's own culture is exceedingly contradictory and problematic.
While the entire passage is worthy of comment, I want to consider only the first sentence: Just what “culture not one's own” is Elworth talking about? Since this article is about jazz I assume that jazz culture is what he's talking about. While the jazz genealogy has strands extending variously to West Africa and Europe, has been and continues to be performed by Blacks and Whites, before audiences both Black and White - though, in the past, these have often been segmented into different venues, or different sections of the same venue - the music is conventionally considered to be Black. That convention is justified by the fact the music's major creators have been overwhelmingly Black. Thus it follows that jazz culture is, as these conventions go, Black culture.
That convention leads me to infer that Elworth is White. I do not have any hard evidence for this assumption; I've never met the man, I've seen no photographs, and the contributor's blurb certainly doesn't indicate race. But the same set of conventions that dictate that jazz is Black music also make it unlikely that any Black scholar would refer to jazz culture as “a culture not one's own.” It follows that Elworth is White, or, at any rate, not-Black.