Lemmee Explain Things That Are Not True

The stats on this website are fun to look at. I seem to own the SEO for people looking for pretentious blogs (oh yeah!) Occasionally I come across an interesting search that makes me wonder, so it was with today's most interesting Google search that brought someone here, "Liberalism ruined Detroit."

Is that person in my head? Because I've thought a lot about liberalism in the context of Detroit, but I don't think liberalism ruined Detroit. That's hyperbole, and I have a feeling that the person searching meant liberalism in terms of the left, and not liberalism in the sense of Hobbes, and Locke, and Rawls, and all of those folks.

And to say that one ideology ruined something is simply wrong. I've written before that Detroit is often representative of the collapse of something, whether it be the ideals of capitalism or liberalism, but to say that something ruined it is simply disingenuous.

I think we need a little background. I wrote about liberalism on Persephone Magazine. Please take a look at it and then come back. Done that? Good.

In case you didn't read that, here you go:

Put simply, liberalism puts the individual at the center of it all with the goal of having her live as she chooses. The obstacles to this can be laws and customs that block individual choice.

So did liberalism ruin Detroit? No. Hardly. That is a very, very wrong statement both logically and ideologically.

But what did? Why this downfall? Thomas Dumm writes to Laurie Anderson (a long quote, but this is important):

I am writing to you because your united states have intersected mine. From your vision of our power and disconnection I have learned something that I want to share with you. When we are apart we oppose power to freedom. But when we reach united states, we shout about the power of freedom, even as we whisper secrets about the variety of crimes that freedom requires of us. We have failed in many ways. But I have learned from you that our worst offenses against ourselves and one another have been imaginary. There is no health in us. Our united states are the result of strange combinations and fearful disruptions. Because we pretend that we can unite through freedom, we are actually free to unite. And when we are united, we have trouble imagining what it would be like to be apart. But united states--yours, mine, ours, theirs--are always temporary; we live in constant fear that we will separate. The moments we fear that we could never survive being alone are the moments we discover that we have always been separate and alone (8).

There is, of course, a pun here. When we reach united states we reach the states that are united but also United States, with capitals.  When we come together, there is something unnatural and fearful, because liberalism is so wed to the individual. united states are at once dangerous and full of freedom because they are on the edge.

Dumm says later of Laurie Anderson: "She is free to comment on it, because she is in-between, vacillating, a self-haunting ghost in the machine of digital meaning (Dumm, 178)."

For me, Laurie Anderson is the ghost in between in another way: she is the ghost in between the popular and highbrow. "O Superman," perhaps, pervades our knowledge, but it is a voice that has better than some, bridged the gap. She has said we are a country of in-betweens and I will take on that voice. A ghostly voice, as Dumm suggest, a voice that is united and separate.

Oh, but what does this have to do with Detroit? I have written about ghostly Detroit before. About the haunting of liberalism:

In Specters of Marx, Derrida delves into Fukuyama’s interpretation of politico-economic liberalism, saying: 

On the one hand, the gospel of politico-economic liberalism needs the event of the good news that consists in what has putatively actually happened (what has happened in this last quarter of the century, in particular, the supposed death of Marxism and the supposed realization of the State of liberal democracy). It cannot do without the recourse to the event; however since, on the other hand, actual history and so many other realities that have an empirical appearance contradict this advent of the perfect liberal democracy, one must at the same time post this perfection as simply a regulating and trans-historical idea (62). 

In other words: the liberal democracy that Fukuyama (and other theorists of his ilk, I’d like to add) promote requires two events: the one we anticipate and the one that has already arrived, and it’s best not to confuse the two. To put it in the context of Detroit: the ideal of politico-economic liberalism has arrived and is inscribed in the grand halls and beautiful architecture. The ideal, however, has also never arrived, hence the decay and the haunting of the specter of what everyone wishes had happened.

And what does this have to do with everything else? That liberalism ruined Detroit or that Dumm/Anderson have useful things to say with their discussions of power, freedom, and unity? To the first point, liberalism does not ruin Detroit so much as it haunts Detroit. The logical fallacies of the individual that is not united cast a ghostly pallor.

What's more, the ghosts suggest a way to get along with them. I would never ask us to exorcise them because I find too much that is useful in the anticipation and the arrival/non-arrival. That in-between is useful theoretical space. Detroit is useful theoretical space. The specter of what everyone wishes had happened: the individualism, the capitalism that helps that individual, the life that is perfect and happy and bright tells us that it is unachievable but it also asks us to welcome that which we invite: a system that works a litlte better, than takes these lessons, that, to put it in Dumm's terms, unites its ghostly states.

I don't think I've naswered much here. Firmly, liberalism did not ruin Detroit, but the critique of liberalism, the invitation of the ghosts and the united states, well, that could very well be our very own path to freedom.

Sources:
united states by Thomas L. Dumm
Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida

The Fear in Liberalism

I've been reading Shklar recently, notably, her essay "The Liberalism of Fear." My copy of Ordinary Vices is on order, so I'm going to limit myself to that essay plus a few other sources, which I'll cite at the end. I drafted this a couple of nights ago and I'm not quite happy with it, but this is a blog, not graduate school, and I've had a bad day and want to get this off my plate so I can feed my soul with Buffy.

I made the offhand comment in another post that liberalism might be more conservative than we like to think. Thinking about this a bit more, I wonder if what I'm really suggesting is that American liberalism isn't really all that liberal. Shklar makes the observation that liberalism is not necessarily wed to modernity. What's more, many "liberal" governments have not been liberal at all. Perhaps our liberalism needs to expand a little. The liberalism of fear, Shklar hopes, points us in the direction of truer liberalism, a liberalism that actually lives up to the promise of allowing people to pursue personal freedom.

Fear is a useful term. One of my favorite critics of American politics, William Connolly, doesn't talk about fear, but he does talk about the visceral, a recognition of which can lead to more democratic methods of being. While he doesn't say this, if we turn back to Shklar, recognizing the baser instincts (like fear) could lead to more liberal sensibilities - a greater freedom for each individual.

Connolly writes, "Micropolitics and relational self-artistry shuffle back and forth among intensities, feelings, images, smells, and concepts, modifying some of them and the relays connecting them, opening up, thereby, the possibility of new thinking and alterations of sensibilities (Connolly 176)." What one of my theoretical crushes is saying here is that the political is related to the physical. These small little connections that we make in our brains every day influence how we behave. I am adding to this idea that fear specifically plays a strong role in shaping these behaviors of expansion.

 I'd like to talk hear about the fear I've seen in the past weeks: fear of losing collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, fear of losing access to Planned Parenthood,  and a fear of losing a just definition of rape, among many others. In these united states, we fear losing freedom over our very bodies (the bodies, remember, that on a micro-level help us define our politics.) And this fear is leading to suspicion of government and fear of the cruelty that it might cause - something that Shklar and every other liberal before her supports.

Shklar writes, "We fear a society of fearful people." Shklar asks not that we always be afraid. At some point she wants us to escape fear in order to ask deeper questions. But if we are to get there, we must embrace our fears to feel the push against cruelty. This message is more important than ever, especially if you are a woman these days because your body and your life and your freedom is under direct attack.


Things I read while writing this:
"The Liberalism of Fear" by Judith Shklar
Why I am Not a Secularist by William E. Connolly
"Judith Shklar or Fear of Liberalism" by Thomas L. Dumm (in his book united states)

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate:

Because a bad day deserves Maru.

A Few More Thoughts on Kateb

A funny thing about academic writing is that a lot of it is done in pieces. You write a chapter for a conference or for a journal and at some point these get mashed into one text and you have a book. This means that you have the option of reading a book out of order, or of just reading one chapter. That said, when you read an entire book you get to the end and maybe have a little sympathy for the author.

I said yesterday that I was concerned that Kateb's writing comes across as very male. He turns to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman to describe his ideal of the democratic individual. All of these authors are pretty progressive about things like gender and concepts like the hermaphrodite are not unfamiliar to them, though even in their balanced view of the world, the male side generally gets the benefit of the doubt. I think Kateb himself is likely very progressive about these things, but I wish he would think harder about the implications of the word individual because I'm sure the moment we hear the words American Individual, Homer Simpson is probably more likely to pop into our heads instead of say Kima from The Wire. In other words, Kateb's individual is more than likely white and male.

I further suspect that the individual comes from a privileged position because Kateb finds groups to be the root of most evil (I would say all, but I wouldn't ascribe to anyone so thoughtful such an all-encompassing word.) Kateb is consistent on this point - he finds identifying oneself with any group to be problematic, whether that group is a nation, an army, or a group with some commonality. I see his point - he wants to avoid absorption into the whole and the potential for docility that comes with joining others in solidarity (what a rational choice person might call a collective action problem.)

This is something that only someone in an insular academic setting for their entire life could possibly come up with because they really haven't had to deal with the day-to-day bullshit of systems that consistently kick you in the ass because you are female or black or brown or someone who pursues some alternate lifestyle. Those of us who do feel it daily find hope in groups and see them as necessary to finding individual freedom and rights. Kateb, I'm sure, would say that these groups are okay because they are either a) temporary or b) in contestation of government. But the groups I'm thinking of are ongoing in a fight and not necessarily against government. I myself identify as a feminist and see this as a group I will be a part of for my entire life and what I fight isn't necessarily part of a government institution.

Kateb spends a few pages on Foucault in a way that is interesting to me. He brushes everyone's favorite theorist of docile bodies aside because he thinks that Foucault doesn't understand the complexity of the individual. In other words, Kateb's individual isn't docile because his individual is too complex to be formed by being named an individual. I think quite the opposite. Foucault sees the individual as so complex that docility requires a certain internal strength to see where one is being defined and to slowly undo the systems of oppressive definition within ourselves.

Which is also why I think groups can be important to the individual. How do you recognize that you are docile? Perhaps when you talk with a friend and recognize you manifest the same behaviors that have contributed to your oppression. Foucault encourages critical thinking within the individual and part of that critical thinking, I would argue, is to recognize what disciplines you and those like you adopt.

I wonder if Kateb is weak on this point because he sees the only real threat to the individual as governmental. Other individual-threatening entities, in particular the corporation, enter no where into his argument. I’m not the only one who notices this – Thomas Dumm notes, “His [Kateb’s] admirable faith in the capacity of all of us in our own ways to participate in liberal democratic culture sometimes operates as a rhetoric for evading a confrontation with the most damaging conditions created and sustained by its corporate underpinnings (33).”

Where I do fall in love with Kateb, though, is at the end of The Inner Ocean when he talks about Whitman. I think I mentioned before that I love Whitman. He's so earthy and weird. I can't help but feel moved by Whitman. Kateb writes about Whitman in the final chapter and he is so very earnest and honest. Here his individual takes on some depth. Kateb's Whitman-reading individual loves life and seeks it out in themselves and in others, and in doing so leaves room for all manner of being. This I love and can totally endorse.

Things I Read While Writing This
The Inner Ocean by George Kateb
united states by Thomas L. Dumm
I also thought about Foucault in a very general way, but didn't think about one particular text.

Something that is not pretentious to clear your palate: