The string below is reproduced from a Facebook discussion of Jackson Lears's review of two books (by Sally Jacobs and Janny Scott) that appears in the London Review of Books:
[Opening entry from me, Tim Lacy] Check out the review below [above]. And here's the commentary I added at my profile page: "Most of this review is a complicated, informative look at Obama's family history. At the end Lears hits you with some lefty pessimism about where Obama's presidency is headed. Fine. The last year has inoculated most of us from that. But in the very last line---Boom!---Lears implies that Obama would be willing to draw us into a war with China. ...Wow. ...There's pessimism, and then there's pessimism. Lears thinks that Barry has inherited his father's arrogance, and is willing to apply it Bush-43-style to our foreign policy." ...Am I the only one that sees this a bit far out?
Comments:
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
African Americans' desire and more on the racial protocol
I am returning to thinking about the racial protocol, which was begun here.The original quote that introduced that phrase to me is:
This contrasts starkly with Michael West's and William Martin's argument
"The literary theorist Claudia Tate developed the term 'racial protocol' for the assumption that African Americans' experiences can be reduced to racial politics and that individual subjectivity carries little importance. As a result of the racial protocol, much writing about African Americans focuses entirely on racial struggle and not on the human experiences that would move the analysis beyond a two-dimensional representation of African Americans' lives."
--Anastasia Curwood, Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars
This contrasts starkly with Michael West's and William Martin's argument
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Ribuffo, "President James A. Garfield Had a Great Personality" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part III)
Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought."' See the first paper by Dave Varel here. The second paper by Dave Steigerwald is here. Below are the comments by Leo Ribuffo.
PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD HAD A GREAT PERSONALITY
Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
In the generous spirit of S-USIH, this is less a comment in the AHA/OAH “gotcha” sense than some reflections on two interesting articles. My first reflection is that both of these essays deal with what might be called the self-absorbed era in the conceptualization of the self—and all deal primarily with middle class people or above in a rich world power during a relatively short span of time, the past 120 yrs or so. Accordingly, choosing a conception of the self was to an increasing degree voluntary, especially after the culturally normative “American Way of Life” of the Great Depression yielded to the looser notion of “life styles” in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the era, as David Varel stresses (following Warren Susman's classic essay), when, amid visions of affluence, an ascetic emphasis on “character” yielded to a “culture of personality” befitting a “culture of consumption.”
Without totally discounting the now standard notion that the search for the self in some sense escalated during the modern era, whenever that began, let me suggest that it had a longer lineage, was not confined to rich “Western” countries, and often involved what William James called forced options. Consider the following hypothetical situations:
A speaker in 331 B. C. E. Persia. “Believe it or not, guys, Darius III just lost to Alexander the Great. We’ve got to decide how Hellenized we’re going to become.”
PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD HAD A GREAT PERSONALITY
Leo P. Ribuffo, The George Washington University
In the generous spirit of S-USIH, this is less a comment in the AHA/OAH “gotcha” sense than some reflections on two interesting articles. My first reflection is that both of these essays deal with what might be called the self-absorbed era in the conceptualization of the self—and all deal primarily with middle class people or above in a rich world power during a relatively short span of time, the past 120 yrs or so. Accordingly, choosing a conception of the self was to an increasing degree voluntary, especially after the culturally normative “American Way of Life” of the Great Depression yielded to the looser notion of “life styles” in the 1960s and 1970s. This is the era, as David Varel stresses (following Warren Susman's classic essay), when, amid visions of affluence, an ascetic emphasis on “character” yielded to a “culture of personality” befitting a “culture of consumption.”
Without totally discounting the now standard notion that the search for the self in some sense escalated during the modern era, whenever that began, let me suggest that it had a longer lineage, was not confined to rich “Western” countries, and often involved what William James called forced options. Consider the following hypothetical situations:
A speaker in 331 B. C. E. Persia. “Believe it or not, guys, Darius III just lost to Alexander the Great. We’ve got to decide how Hellenized we’re going to become.”
Steigerwald on "The Willful Self" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part II)
Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought"' See the first paper by Dave Varel here. This paper is by Dave Steigerwald. Comments by Leo Ribuffo will follow.
“Hollo! I must lie here no longer”:
Versions of the Willful Self from the Gilded Age to the Me Decade
by David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
As one or two of you may be aware, I’ve made a bit of a living over the last few years criticizing the concept of individual agency in postwar America, especially in its application to consumerism. Typically there it includes claims that consumers exercise some measure of decisive power over the marketplace when they make idiosyncratic choices about either what they purchase or how they interpret the goods they buy. Choice is good, this line of reasoning seems to go, and because it provides so much of it, contemporary consumerism must also be good. Because versions of this line of thought came to pervade a good deal of writing about consumerism from the 1980s on, it seemed to me worth poking a few sticks at. At its most serious and most fruitful, the consumer-as-agent argument was a necessary counter to Frankfurt School cultural determinism, that stifling intellectual blanket laying upon those who began writing in the 1970s and 1980s. [1}
“Hollo! I must lie here no longer”:
Versions of the Willful Self from the Gilded Age to the Me Decade
by David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
As one or two of you may be aware, I’ve made a bit of a living over the last few years criticizing the concept of individual agency in postwar America, especially in its application to consumerism. Typically there it includes claims that consumers exercise some measure of decisive power over the marketplace when they make idiosyncratic choices about either what they purchase or how they interpret the goods they buy. Choice is good, this line of reasoning seems to go, and because it provides so much of it, contemporary consumerism must also be good. Because versions of this line of thought came to pervade a good deal of writing about consumerism from the 1980s on, it seemed to me worth poking a few sticks at. At its most serious and most fruitful, the consumer-as-agent argument was a necessary counter to Frankfurt School cultural determinism, that stifling intellectual blanket laying upon those who began writing in the 1970s and 1980s. [1}
Monday, December 26, 2011
Varel, "Saving the Self" (Personality and the Self Panel, Part I)
Dear Readers: As a special holiday season treat, I give you one of the more interesting panels from our recent conference--"Personality and the Self in Twentieth-Century American Social Thought"--with papers by Dave Varel and Dave Steigerwald, followed up with comments by Leo Ribuffo.
Saving the Self:
Henry Murray and Humanistic Personality Psychology, 1920-1940
by Dave Varel
PhD Candidate, University of Colorado-Boulder
When asked about the reasons for his shift from physiology to psychology in the 1920s, Henry Murray, a leading early personality psychologist, explained: “human personality, because of its present sorry state, had become the problem of our time—a hive of conflicts, lonely, half-hollow, half-faithless, half-lost, half-neurotic, half-delinquent, not equal to the problems that confronted it, not very far from proving itself an evolutionary failure.” [1] T
his comment reveals Murray’s concern for the fate of the individual in modern society at the same time that it suggests an activist element inspiring his work in the field. Yet too often scholarship on Murray has overlooked the social and cultural context in which he self-consciously functioned, instead highlighting his place in the disciplinary dialogue of psychology and the interpersonal relationships that informed his life. [2] This paper argues that the life, work, and significance of Murray can only be fully understood by linking his personal and professional life with the broader historical context. It also shows how Murray, in addition to reflecting the emergent “culture of personality” and fear over the “masses,” imbued the concept of personality with mystery, complexity, and uniqueness through his work in the social sciences. [3]
Saving the Self:
Henry Murray and Humanistic Personality Psychology, 1920-1940
by Dave Varel
PhD Candidate, University of Colorado-Boulder
When asked about the reasons for his shift from physiology to psychology in the 1920s, Henry Murray, a leading early personality psychologist, explained: “human personality, because of its present sorry state, had become the problem of our time—a hive of conflicts, lonely, half-hollow, half-faithless, half-lost, half-neurotic, half-delinquent, not equal to the problems that confronted it, not very far from proving itself an evolutionary failure.” [1] T
his comment reveals Murray’s concern for the fate of the individual in modern society at the same time that it suggests an activist element inspiring his work in the field. Yet too often scholarship on Murray has overlooked the social and cultural context in which he self-consciously functioned, instead highlighting his place in the disciplinary dialogue of psychology and the interpersonal relationships that informed his life. [2] This paper argues that the life, work, and significance of Murray can only be fully understood by linking his personal and professional life with the broader historical context. It also shows how Murray, in addition to reflecting the emergent “culture of personality” and fear over the “masses,” imbued the concept of personality with mystery, complexity, and uniqueness through his work in the social sciences. [3]Lumpers, Splitters, and Essentialists
Mark Lilla has a thought-provoking review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind in the January 12, 2012, issue of the New York Review of Books, though its interest is less in what he has to say about Robin than in his own argument about what is going on in American conservatism these days. Though Lilla sees himself as arguing from fundamentally different premises than Robin, in at least one crucial respect, I believe they make a similar mistake.
Lilla dismisses Robin's book fairly quickly, calling Robin an "über-lumper":
...which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class. Catholic reactionary Joseph de Maistre and George W. Bush are both on the right in Robin’s scheme; following his logic, since Maistre spoke flawless French, Bush must too. Which would be some national secret. Yet that’s exactly how Robin proceeds, until he has corralled everyone he doesn’t like into a pen and labeled them all conservatives and reactionaries and right-wingers, terms he fails to distinguish.
I haven't finished Robin's book, but from what I have read of it, there's at least a grain of truth to this accusation. Certainly Robin's project is to identify what he sees as the essence of conservatism, an essence that defines conservatives throughout Western modernity. Conservatism, according to Robin, is always an "idea-driven praxis" and those ideas are, always and everywhere in the modern world, counterrevolutionary. Robin is certainly a lumper...though whether or not this makes his project "incoherent," as Lilla claims, is less obvious.
In contrast to Robin's lumping, Lilla instead erects a model based on limited, but fundamental, splitting. Lilla describes modern, Western politics in terms of two binaries: liberal-conservative and revolutionary-reactionary, two divides which, in Lilla's account have no necessary relationship to each other whatsoever:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)