Judith Shklar and Snobbery

Judith Shklar has a chapter in Ordinary Vices that is rather near and dear to my interests. It’s on snobbery and is titled, of course, “What is wrong with snobbery?”

 Shklar identifies snobbery as adaptable. It can be a symptom of class, something one is born into or works their way to achieve. It is a sign of pedigree, but is also criticized because it can make manifest sins like pride and selfishness.

In the United States, Shklar identifies what she calls “Secondary Snobbery,” which is seen as anti-democratic. She writes, “Somewhere, there had to be a line that marked off legitimate differences of wealth and talent from unacceptably undemocratic and unrepublican political manners and activities (101)."

She notes new breeds of snobbery in the United States, including the importance of people who work and make things with their hands, those who aspire to European class, and those in academia who have their own snobbery.

Of course, where I get most interested in Shklar’s writing is when she discusses snobbery in academia. Shklar remarks, “But in spite of appearances, snobbery is not built into academic work, and certainly not into learning. It just attached itself to them. The real university snob cares more about his society than about his knowledge. (127).”

In other words, if you’re an academic nerd and just love reading books, you’re not a snob, but if you’re all, “Oooooh, I go to Hah-vahd,” you’re a snob.

She continues later to describes why we shouldn’t be so hard on academics:

Academics must always become an excluding group, and even if they should never stoop to personal snobbery, they would still appear snobbish to suspicious outsiders. An actively self-humiliating stance of anti-elitism would hardly serve; it can only disrupt the inner life of learning without really altering the actual situation of the university, which is always visibly apart (132).

Shklar concludes her essay with an interesting point, which is that we should have many different groups so that everyone has an opportunity for inclusion and exclusion. What’s more, snobbery and the groups in which you can think (or make things) offer a certain type of freedom within them that is valuable to democracy (136).

So, to break it down: snobbery can be undemocratic because it excludes, but sometimes that exclusion can be beneficial because it allows a certain space to create handy dandy things.

Here’s where I agree with Shklar: having a group where you can share specific things and be separate so you can focus on your work is incredibly important. That is what working outside of academia has taught me. Working a full time job without having people to bounce ideas off of makes doing this work very difficult. And you also face a crap-ton of criticism about being, oh, well, a snob!

And of course, this blog’s name enters here. I’ve said before that I called it “The Most Pretentious Blog You Will Ever Read” in part to counter such criticism. Yes, I know most people don’t think this way. Yes, I know most people don’t read Shklar for fun, but I also know that the work that is done here (and in academia) is fucking important.

For example, I’ve been researching Joan Tronto recently because Minnesota would be one of those schools I might possibly want to put on my list if I possibly maybe someday decide to finish my PhD. One of the things that Tronto does that is important is to look at the concept of care and how if we rethink it, we come up with a more democratic society. It’s great work, and you only have the time and space for it from within academia (as far as I know, blogging about philosophy does not pay the bills, academia, however, does).

That said, I disagree with Shklar to a degree because there are so many barriers to academia, particularly political science, from being more usefully democratic. I think within certain disciplines, the good snobbery that Shklar advocates (as opposed to being a snob about, say, Harvard), is really detrimental. I‘ve often felt that if you are doing something like political science, which is so united with things like democracy and republican ideals, you ought to make it fairly accessible to people making political decisions.

There is a difference between the snobbish group that allows the freedom to think through important problems and the snobbery that creates an absolute division between those who are privileged to think about things and the people who make decisions. This is connected to what I have identified as No B.S. Discourse: which is talking clearly and not being prohibitively expensive. In other words, you can think from within the snobbish confines of academia, but you’d better be willing to make it expansive enough to include everyone else.

I agree with what Shklar is saying, but a caveat emptor should be attached because if you are writing within a discipline like political science that so affects others, you must think a bit more about how you can be less snobbish and more democratic. Or as Flavia Dzoden puts it (and I really must have this cross-stitched somewhere) my academic, snobbish, pretentious writing must be intersectional or it will be bullshit! But I’d like more space to think about all of this, and maybe it’ll be in academia.

I took out a subscription to an academic journal...

Because I was vaguely entertaining notions of going back to graduate school. I paid the money for The Hedgehog Review, which is one of those academic journals that isn't as heavy as say, Political Theory, and that can probably be vaguely categorized in the area of "public intellectual" writing.

But then, THEN, I read sentences like, "We could use another value-soaked word to understand what Burckhardt was getting at: society becomes more primitive, the more people see themselves categorically, in terms of fixed identities (Sennett, 28)." The point being that technology segments us, and as a result, we become more primitive and just resemble the bunch of talking heads on faux news.

This is all in the spirit of defending humanism, the project of which Sennett describes thusly, "Humanism's emphasis on life-narratives, on the enriching experience of difference, and on evaluating tools in terms of human rather than mechanical complexity are all living values -- and more, I would say, these are critical measures for judging the state of modern society (30)."

This is all because Sennett had the misfortune to experience Google Wave. It apparently did not allow him to collaborate in the way he would like. And honestly, I'm just annoyed at this. Google Wave was a product NO ONE liked. Google discontinued it because it sucked, not because it wasn't "humanist" enough.

It irritates me when academics are so afraid of us on the internet talking about intellectual things. I spend a lot of time on tumblr (my tumblr name is one I will take to my grave, but if you are an old reader of lady blog you may guess it based on an inside joke about a certain legume, and if you can guess it, you're in the club, baby). Tumblr, is for me, one of the most intellectually stimulating places to be. I have met plenty of IRL friends there and have had so many stimulating and inspiring intellectual conversations, I couldn't count all of them on my two hands and feet. What Sennett doesn't understand is that technology is never measured by mechanical complexity - it is measured by our ability to connect.

But then, I understand how media works. In my day job, I am a marketer. I spend time in the social channels talking about things I really have little interest in, but I get how this shit works. I'm tired of these academics who haven't really made an attempt at social media and the wonders it provides.

I'm reminded here of William Connolly, who remarks regarding Sheldon Wolin, who thinks democracy needs slow, non-technological time to succeeds, "...I also think it is wise today for democrats to be wary of nostalgia for a world of long, slow time and a circumscribed politics of place. The politics of local place (valorized by Wolin) and the state (valorized by others) are both pertinent to democratic action in the contemporary period. But they are insufficient to it (142)."

Duh. Time moves quickly in the social media world (though as FB daily reminds us, we are not allowed to forget). It is undemocratic to assume that slower time is better because most of us? We move at that pace and these slow, plodding writers ought to think of the rest of us, speeding ahead.

But that's not all. I've said before in my post on No B.S. Discourse - this shit? It really is pretentious. It assumes that a certain group of brainy people are better than another group of brainy people. Really, come to tumblr. We'll school you.

Things I read while writing this:
Neuropolitics by William E. Connolly
"Humanism" by Richard Sennett in The Hedgehog Review. Summer, 2011.

No B.S. Discourse

A ongoing hobby for me within the discipline has been how discourse in the real world differs from discourse in the academic world. I'm not sure what the pretentious title for this type of research is, so, let's, like good pretentious people, make something up - I'll call it No B.S. Discourse.

I'll define this as talking and writing in a manner that is understandable to everyone. See how easy that was? I could probably write a book about it, though, with logic and everything.

No B.S. Discourse first became an interest for me when I read Excitable Speech by Judith Butler. Now, I LOVE that book so hard. It blew my mind when I read it. Before reading it, I had never realized that political theory could be so goddammed critical, but the entire thing is virtually unreadable if you aren't within the discipline and have little experience reading thick texts.

What the book comes down to is that censorship needs to be questioned because not saying a word (whatever it may be) does nothing to investigate and remove the violence of it; indeed, saying you can't say the word propogates that violence. What Judy B wants us to do is to trouble the water of words, make them change, or if we must remove them, we need to do so in  way that challenges the entire system of that word.

I know! I read that at 19 and was like, "Whoah!"

While I understand that book now, it took hours to get to that point and a few class lectures, but I think a lot of people could get there more quickly, and some have:

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See? It doesn't have to be so difficult. But some would argue that it does. Here's Judith Butler's response to being given an award as a terrible writer:

Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you." 

The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."

What Butler is saying is that the common language is too supportive of very bad things, and she is right. Language matters and troubling language in complex ways could be useful, but I question its usefulness when the majority of people cannot understand it.

There is so much out there that makes me question Butler's premise (and remember, I LOVE  her): Jon Stewart, Persephone Magazine, Old Jezebel (before it got bad), Racialicious, Tiger Beatdown - I could go on, but these are all places where language is challenged in ways that people can understand. Of course, many of these authors have read Judith Butler first (among many others) but like me, they question the assumption that language must be difficult to trouble the water. They want it to be understandable so that everyone, not just the scholar or grad student, feels troubled.

What's more, these spaces of no b.s. discourse are quick; they operate at the speed of where people are at and what they are talking about at the bar, and that's at a level of immediate influence that an academic is hard-pressed to come by.

I'd like, for a moment, to quote Habermas (yes, I am going there, into the world of hard-to-understand discourse). He defines the principle of discourse ethics, or the way at which we reach universal principles of right and wrong as, "Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse." (Discourse Ethics: 93).

What Habermas says that is so important is that everyone must be allowed to participate. No one can be prevented from speaking. We all have to participate in this discussion so we can come to a moral conclusion that is acceptable.

Academic discourse precludes so many people in a multitude of ways. It is expensive. It requires training to understand. And in order to be taken seriously, you must also talk in a very specific way. In a way that gives you an "A." I take this as fundamentally against allowing everyone to participate.

Of course, non-academic discourse can preclude, too. The yelling talking heads on Fox News show us this every day.

And that's why the thought of finishing my PhD is sometimes so daunting. Because as critical as I can be of Judy B (it rhymes!) I still need her and how I think in the world and my ethics have been fundamentally shaped by people like her. But at the same time, I've read and had experiences outside of academic discourse that have been just as, if not more, influential.

I'm never certain of the right location for this work - here or someplace locked in an ivory tower. Goodness knows I'd have more time for it if I were in an ivory tower.