Clegg, Obama, 'Old-Style Progressives' and 'Pragmatism'

In the U.S. political ideas seem to twist and turn at the whim of various right-wing media mouthpieces. Typically the re-fashioning occurs in cahoots with the right wing politicians. So, as the conservative DLC types in the Democratic Party make a hard charge to the right (which has been ongoing since the late 1980s) there is not much push-back from people who say ... ''Not so fast, that is a bastardization of this or that progressive or liberal idea ... or ... No, actually the constitution or our political tradition (or whatever) don't state or imply anything like what you claim!'

The problem, in part, is that any such voice of sanity is drowned out by the megaphones on the right. And, let's be clear here, I am not even talking about the Republicans with their party organ Fox 'News.' I am talking about the voices of 'moderation' among the Democrats. Of course, those voices are not typically attuned to intellectual discourse; they are concerned to show that they are realists. Think Bill Galston or Cass Sunstein. Think Rahm Emmanuel. No egg-head talk for them.

Here is an example from the U.K. Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg offers this pronouncement on 'authentic' progressive politics in The Guardian. He constructs a dichotomy between old-style progressive who are obsessed with equality and new style progressives (like himself) who are properly re-focused on social mobility as a way of fracturing inherited, hence unjust, patterns. This rhetorical move brings to mind a remark from Vaclav Havel: "... hard and fast categories ... tend to be instruments used by the victors." In this instance, the distinction also fails - as Stuart White points out in this astute commentary - to grasp the actual claims of 'old style' progressives of a liberal or socialist stripe.

Distinctions, in other words, carry consequences. and in this instance Clegg surely is aiming to shift the terms of discourse rightward. It is not enough to say, as he does in numerous ways, 'let's work together,' 'let's think in non-zero-sum terms,' lets embrace bi-partisanship' (to echo our own hoper-in-chief). Because, having constructed a false dichotomy at the start he proceeds to neglect the fact that any reconciliation has profound distributional consequences. And those consequences are, as White notes, precisely the basis for pervasive inequalities that subvert the prospects for social mobility.

There are lessons here for the Obama is a pragmatist crowd. It is not enough to simply listen to everyone and split the difference. One has to look at where we stand, how we got here, assess responsibility and, most importantly, see how political-economic power has been used to shape the current circumstances, before making a plan to move forward. Simply splitting the difference leads to more of the 'winner take all' politics that Clegg claims to abhor simply because it takes the current state of affairs, with its already established winners and losers, as the point of departure. Old style progressives, in other words, insist on getting an historical grip before plunging ahead. Without that historical perspective, a putatively pragmatist focus on consequences simply re-confirms the fixed inequities we currently endure. On health Insurance; on war-crimes; on economic recovery; on foreign adventurism. On all those fronts, Obama has done lots of listening and little serious analysis of the sort I mention above. As a result we get not pragmatism but opportunism. There is a big difference.

Have a nice Thanksgiving.
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P.S.: (Added 26 November 2010) You can find yet another astute reply to Clegg here. The punchline: "This isn’t democracy. It isn’t a new way of being progressive. It is the deep marketisation of our society, carried out at breakneck speed."

Slow Down and Smell the Theory ~ Alfredo Jaar

Artist’s Statement: In his own words. … Alfredo Jaar talks about his installation The Marx Lounge, a neon lit reading room devoted to left wing theory. His piece is a public realm commission for Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched, the International Exhibition. (here)

Well, I've been a great reader of this kind of literature for many years and I really think there has been a kind of revolution going on in the last 20, 30 years in the intellectual world.

If you read some of these texts by Stuart Hall, by Terry Eagleton, by Alain Badiou, by Jacques Rancière, Frederic Jameson, etc, etc. They are extraordinary texts and essays. They are very challenging. They are models of thinking the world and that's what I do as an artist. I create models of thinking the world.

So I wanted to share this knowledge with the public because people tend to go very quickly in a biennial. They move from work to work. They are stressed. They are rushed. They want to see everything, and so this is in a way a work that asks you to ‘stop, please stop, stay here, relax, take your time, why don't we think for a while?, let’s go in depth into these subjects.’

I'm an architect making art so basically when I was given the space I wanted to create a comfortable space where people could sit down, enjoy themselves, and have good light to read, be comfortable, to offer them a break in this rush around works. And basically we created the longest possible table to accommodate some 1,500 books.

So the centrepiece is this huge table and of course we made a funny allusion to Marxism and communism with the red walls and the neon sign that says Marx Lounge, and we have the red carpet and we decided on black sofas. So it’s a very striking colour decision. We took red and black. But it's really a comfortable place. It's a place that invites you to sit down and relax and read. It's a reading room.

I wanted people to stop in their tracks, because you can access the internet in your home and on your phones. There is so much technology today, but I think the book has this value of stopping you in your tracks of asking you to go deeper inside. I have the impression that technology keeps us on the surface.

It's very difficult to sit in front of a computer and go deep inside because your eyes get tired very quickly. You have to operate software. You have to operate the mouse, etc, etc. And you are distracted by mail, by different windows opening up and flash movies and things like that. So here it’s really about you and a world construction that is being made in front of your eyes by this author in the book. I wanted to slow down and technology goes too fast. I really wanted to slow down.

Liverpool has a long tradition of progressive politics and historically it's a place where workers have fought for so many rights and so I thought it was the right place to create a work like this.

As a political theorist I find Jaar's work wonderfully provocative and his taste in "theory" unfortunate. Many (not all) of the writers he mentions are virtually impenetrable [1]. Among the problems with progressive or leftist "theory" is that verbiage takes the place of analysis; not only is there a tendency to be Luddite with respect to the often very useful tools of standard social science, but there is a preoccupation with abstraction and a turning away from genuine political and economic problems.

By contrast, among the things I like about Jaar's art is the way he keeps his eye on the ball - that is, on the problems of people in the world. For a start, here as in past projects, aiming to get people to stop and see and think. So, while Jaar sees the parody being the red neon sign 'The Marx Lounge,' I take the "theory" being peddled in this garish decor redolent of a bordello.

Mark & Jim's Big Adventure (Round 2) ~ Approaching Visual Images: Photography, Politics & Political Science

Today is cloudy in Washington, D.C. thanks to hurricane Earl. I am here for the annual American Political Science Association conference. In a sort of 'blow your own horn' way, I thought I'd explain what I am up to. Like most academic conferences this one consists mostly of panels of people presenting their research. I am not doing that this year. Instead, for the second year, I spent the first day of the conference collaborating with a bunch of (mostly) young faculty members and graduate students on problems surrounding doing work on visual imagery. Here is a description of the short course that a colleague and I coordinated:

Short Course #14 ~ Approaching Visual Images: Photography, Politics & Political Science

Conveners: Mark Reinhardt, Williams College and Jim Johnson, University of Rochester

The domain of contemporary politics is saturated with visual images, particularly with photographic images. This is the second year we are organizing this short course. It will explore the ways politics and photography intersect from a variety of vantage points. We intend the course to be interactive and encourage participants from any sub-field. We offer this course as an initial step toward expanding the space within political science where scholars might devote sustained attention to the visual dimensions of politics. The course is an independent initiative, not sponsored by the APSA or any formal group or organization. There is no fee for the course. However, because space is limited and because we plan to circulate a set of background readings, we ask participants to contact either or both of the course conveners no later than August 7th. Please contact one of the conveners with any questions regarding more detailed plans for the courses.

Mark, of course, is the fellow who co-curated this terrific exhibition a few years back. That means, in other words, that he has some professional experience in this area while I am more or less making things up as I go along. Given that the discipline of political science is largely oblivious to visual imagery in general and photography in particular, nearly anyone working on the broad terrain is making things up as they go. We are hoping to create a network of people who can aid one another in that process. Here is the more detailed description of how the course was structured:

Session 1 - Pictures & Political Science: We will distribute a couple of papers of our own and will do so once we have gathered, less as reading (obviously) than as spurs to conversation about how we came to be working at the intersection of politics and photography. Our hope is to use this time to open up a discussion about the exigencies and opportunities of teaching and doing research at the junction of politics and visual images given that this is not terribly common in the discipline.

Session 2 – Violence and Meaning: Making Photographs "Speak": In this session we will examine a variety of photographs involving explicit or implicit violence, as well as some of the critical discussions to which such photographs have given rise. The goal is to frame a conversation about how photographs are interpreted and, through that, about the political hopes and fears it is reasonable to impute to individual pictures and to the technologies of photography.

Session 3: Thinking With Photography: Politics & Power: In this session we will focus broadly on “pragmatics” that is, on photography and its uses. Rather than address the topic in very abstract terms we will discuss how a variety of photographers (e.g., Richard Avedon, Richard Ross, Trevor Paglen) have sought in various ways and across several genres (portraiture, architectural photography, landscape) to capture power, its operation, and its effects. Here again, the aim is to prompt discussion.

It has only just now occurred to me that we ought to have announced this undertaking here on the blog. Our plan is to do the course (with somewhat different themes) next year when APSA is in San Francisco.

Theory Talks #36 ~ Michael Shapiro

I teach in a Political Science Department. This afternoon I discovered (because my friend Susan Orr pointed it out to me) a web page called Theory Talks which is run by Peer Schouten at the Institute for Global Studies in Göteborg, Sweden. It is a terrific undertaking which consists in an ongoing series of interviews with luminaries in the ephemeral disciplinary sub-field of "International Relations." The reason I think the site is so useful is that my own home department is, by any reasonable standard, not only small, but quite narrow and inbred. I do not say that in an entirely pejorative way; there is something to be said for a shared vision, so long as it does not become stultifying. (I actually believe that there is a strong argument to be made for the virtues of dogmatism in social and political inquiry. That places me at odds with many of those who proclaim the virtues of pluralism and 'interdisciplinarity' and so forth. That is another topic.) That said, the discipline of political science is pretty various and that is something that my own colleagues and our graduate students seem not to recognize, at least in any positive way. The interviews that Schouten has posted are a reminder of that.

Readers of this blog will want to consider this interview with Michael Shapiro ~ "Pictures, Paintings, Power and the Political Philosophy of International Relations." Shapiro is among the very first political scientists to work on the intersection of politics and photography. While I would differ with him on all sorts of matters, his work is smart and provocative.

Political Philosophy & the Left (Part II)

Some time ago I posted a link to the first part of a longish, but quite useful interview at The New Left Project with political theorist Stuart White. The second part of the interview is now available here.

Thinking a Bit About Democracy

"So democracy becomes a real problem, right? If people continue to choose inequality, what can you do?"

"Democracy has always been a problem. The truly attractive features of the Western tradition that we accidentally—and it really is accidentally—get the benefit of are the rule of law, liberalism and tolerance, all of which are virtues inherited from predemocratic societies, whether they were based in eighteenth-century Anglo-American aristocratic individualism or nineteenth-century European forms of a type of developed postfeudal legal state. Democracy comes last. Democracy is simply a system of selection of people to rule over you. And it's not accidental that everyone is now a democrat. The Chinese are for democracy. George Bush was for democracy. The Burmese believe in it; they just call it something slightly different. South African whites believed in democracy; they just thought it should be arranged differently for blacks. Democracy is a dangerously empty term, and to the extent that it has substance, and the substance consists of allowing people to select freely how they live, the chance that they will choose to live badly is very high. The question is, 'What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense?' The answer is, 'Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism.' And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism."

This remark is from this interview with Tony Judt, published not long ago in The Nation. It reminds me of conversations that I have on a depressingly regular basis with my friend and co-author Jack Knight. These conversations typically occur when, by more or less democratic processes, this or that group of people make a more or less wholly bone-headed decision. What Judt seems to overlook is that the sort of 're-education' via public argument on which he falls back too is a feature of democratic politics. In other words, democracy is not quite so minimal or 'empty' as he makes out. It does not in any way insure a just or fair outcome; but it sets the terms, and thereby structures, our public disagreements about how we choose to live.

P.S.: Actually, having thought about it a bit more, I want to take issue with Judt on another point. He lauds the practices of liberalism, tolerance and rule of law but derides those whose idea of the good life consists in pursuing their own self interest. But someone fancying themselves a good 'classical liberal' could following, say Hayek, endorse all of those practices (and, indeed, think we need little else) while subscribing to precisely the view of the good life that Judt derides. Among the virtues of democratic decision-making is that, well beyond simply allowing us to choose rulers, it affords the sorts of institutionalized process for allowing us to assess when systematically, someone's pursuit of self-interest truly comes at the expense of others and, if so, what sorts of systematic remedies might be had.*
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* There is an argument to be made there. But it is one that can be made. For an initial cut see Jack Knight & James Johnson. 2007. "The Priority of democracy," American Political Science Review. 101:47-61.

Political Philosophy & the Left (Part I)

You can find this useful interview with political theorist Stuart White (Jesus College, Oxford) here at the New Left Project web page. This is just the first installment. I'll link to the second part once it appears.

Are Student Evaluations of College Faculty the Beginning of the End for Higher Education?

I teach at a smallish liberal arts College embedded in a largely vocational University. I say 'vocational' in the sense that a good many of the students are in undergrad and graduate programs leading to some professional degree (Business, Medicine, Music (performance), Education, Engineering, and so on). There is nothing wrong with any of those enterprises. Indeed, the various professional schools serve as a model in which there are some things one simply has to know in order to be deemed well trained or educated. Faculty know those things, students are on campus to learn them. By contrast, the entire curriculum in the College, by design, is driven by student choice. There are really very few substantive requirements. Worse, in my own department, it seems that most students can get a degree without ever really writing a paper more than ten pages long or so. By that I mean they face few demands either. All I have to do is mention a longer writing assignment - or one that requires independent research and thinking - and students drop the course in droves.

In that sense I have been impressed by this series of essays that Stanley Fish has written for The New York Times. In general, I think he is on the right track. Two things, at least*, are important to note, however.

First, it mostly is the conservative types, those who insist on a 'classical' curriculum, who also think there are right answers to every question, or who think that education consists in providing answers instead of priming students to ask and explore smart questions. There are, of course, right and wrong answers even in my field. I expect my students to know what John Stuart Mill or Hannah Arendt said about, say, freedom and why they said it. Beyond that, there is no reason to think that there is a single, unambiguous answer to the question as to whether either Mill or Arendt gets 'freedom' right or that their reasons for being preoccupied with freedom are cogent. The conservatives are simply out to lunch on that score. The whole point is that freedom (and other political concepts) are deeply contestable. The same is true in other domains and disciplines too. That hardly is a conclusion likely to attract support among conservatives.

Please note that I am not saying 'anything goes' - one surely can advance better and worse arguments (reasons) or more or less sound evidence for a given position. That said, at the end of the day, neither your reasons nor your evidence is likely to be decisive. Others will still disagree with you and, despite what you think, be reasonable in doing so.

Second, a good part of the problem is due to the fact that faculty often simply are not willing to defend some body of knowledge or some modes of inquiry as crucial to proper training or education. There is what we might call 'canon' aversion. This is driven in part by fear that students will find the resulting requirements too taxing or irrelevant or whatever. But it also is driven by unwillingness to take a stand, to make a judgment. Those most willing to take a stand often those who have least grasp of substantive material - we get consensus on 'methods' but not on the point of learning those techniques in the first place. And that is easier than having serious, contentious conversations about what students need to know and what faculty, therefore, need to teach.

I am not painting a particularly pretty picture. But it doesn't make sense to say that the dire trends in post-secondary education are all due to taking student evaluations seriously.** After all, if you don't want to rely on the judgment of students whose judgment do you plan to rely on?
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* Another thing to wonder about is whether the education that Fish received in high school is an appropriate model for a college curriculum. I suspect that the answer to that question is complicated. Moreover, there is the problem that Fish neglects, namely that Colleges operate on a market. So even if something 'classical' and hence suitably demanding, is what Colleges ought to be selling, it might nonetheless fail on the market.
** As Fish seems to do: "And it all began with student evaluations, or, rather, with the mistake of taking them seriously. Since then, it’s been all downhill."

The Charlatan

OK, here is the key passage from this essay/interview in The Guardian yesterday about/with Slavoj Žižek:

"He opens a copy of Living in the End Times, and finds the contents page. 'I will tell you the truth now,' he says, pointing to the first chapter, then the second. 'Bullshit. Some more bullshit. Blah, blah, blah.'"

He, of course, is the master himself. I could not have said it better myself. Although, no doubt, I simply am failing to grasp his deep irony and intelligence. Maybe so.

I like to flatter myself that I am reasonably bright. And, over the years, I have worked through a lot of difficult philosophy and social science. I even understood quite a bit of it. In all honesty, though, having tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to read Žižek, I never understood a word the man said. It simply was not worth the effort. On his own say so I guess there is no reason to even waste time worrying about this latest missive.
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P.S.: For those inclined to succumb and enlist in the Žižek fan club I recommend A review essay by Alan Johnson (no relation) in Dissent (Fall 2009) entitled "The Reckless Mind of Slavoj Žižek." It seems that, setting all the irony and self-parody aside, performance art can have dangerous - meaning authoritarian - political implications.

Raymond Geuss on Realism and Utopianism in Political Philosophy

... here at Philosophy Bites.

Institute for New Economic Thinking?

I stumbled across the web page of a new Soros-funded undertaking called The Institute for New Economic Thinking. You can find it here. The Institute is holding an initial conference (invite only) at Cambridge. Having looked over the agenda it seems like they will be rehashing now standard questions. So, while the Institute is a welcome undertaking (and is backed by substantial funding and lots of smart fellas) it is not clear on first glance how "new" the thinking will actually turn out to be.

An Introduction to Pragmatism

The folks at Philosophy Bites have posted this nice discussion with Robert Talisse on the topic of pragmatism. Rob is a smart guy and nice fellow who manages to convey the basics in straightforward terms.