Corey Robin's Blog, page 60

On the New York Intellectuals

I first read Irving Howe in college, in Andrew Ross’ seminar on intellectuals. We read Howe’s “The New York Intellectuals.” I don’t remember what I thought of it; what I remember is that I admired Howe as the epitome of the independent political intellectual. At some point in graduate school, I grew less enamored of the New York Intellectuals as a whole (in part because of their compromises or collaboration with McCarthyism, in part because the ideal of the independent intellectual loosened its hold over me), and Howe fell in my esteem as a result. Which is ironic because Howe was one of the few anti-Stalinist intellectuals who kept his bearings during the McCarthy years. This past year, I’ve been re-reading Howe. His literary criticism hasn’t really held up for me (I’d add to my list of essays there his cramped reassessment of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett.) But I’ve been newly impressed by his political criticism. When he’s not obsessively whacking the New Left, he can be astonishingly keen and prescient about the weaknesses of the American Left, the paradoxes of the welfare state, and the long-term impact of McCarthyism. At his best, when he’s not seized by that crabbiness of spirit that so often marred his judgment and writing, he can see from up high and down deep what’s moving and stagnant in the American current.

This morning, I re-read “The New York Intellectuals.” It first appeared in Commentary in 1969. It has two weak moments: when he’s rehashing his critique of the Stalinism of the American Left of the 1930s and 1940, and when he’s gnawing on the “new sensibility” of the counterculture and its spokepersons (Marcuse, Mailer, Norman O. Brown, even Susan Sontag). It’s those pugilistic moments that Howe is so often celebrated for—Howe the political and cultural polemicist—that I find the most tiresome and familiar. When he’s not rehearsing his case for the prosecution, Howe can really rise above the material. That’s the Howe I find most enduring.

Here are just a few observations of his in that essay that I thought were worth noting.

1. The European socialist intellectual ends his political engagement by breaking with the Communist Party; the New York Intellectual begins his engagement by breaking with the Party.

2. “They came late“: The New York Intellectuals were late to modernism (by the mid to late 1930s, when they had come into their own, the battle for Joyce, Eliot, and Pound had been won). They were late to the radical experience: by the mid-1930s, Communism had become a political problem for the left, and much of the New York Intellectuals’ engagement with radicalism was, from the beginning, a process of disenchantment. “Their radicalism was anxious, problematic, and beginning to decay at the very moment it was adopted.” They also came at the end of the Jewish immigrant experience in America. Overall, theirs was a condition of belatedness; despite our sense that they were at the center of the action, their own sense of things was that everything happened before them.

3. The one political achievement of the New York Intellectuals was the delegitimization of Stalinism among socialist intellectuals. I can’t help but think that for Howe, who aimed to forge a vibrant and politically effective socialist left free of the Stalinist taint, that would be something of a disappointment.

4. The New York Intellectuals made no serious contribution to political thought; their main contribution was a style. Howe may be at his most brilliant best in describing that style and its limitations.

Let us call it the style of brilliance. The kind of essay they wrote was likely to be wide-ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to “go beyond” its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation. It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transition and other concessions to dullness, calling attention to itself as a form of or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle—such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the New York writers. Until recently its strategy of exposition was likely to be impersonal (the writer did not speak much as an “I”) but its tone and bearing were likely to be intensely personal (the audience was to be made aware that the aim of the piece was not judiciousness, but rather, a strong impress of attitude, a blow of novelty, a wrenching of accepted opinion, sometimes a mere indulgence of vanity).

In some of these essays there was a sense of tournament, the writer as gymnast with one eye on other rings, or as skilled infighter juggling knives of dialectic….

At its best the style of brilliance reflected a certain view of the intellectual life: free-lance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis. For better or worse it was radically different from the accepted mode of scholarly publishing and middlebrow journalism. It celebrated the idea of the intellectual as antispecialist, or as a writer whose speciality was the lack of a speciality: the writer as dilettante-connoisseur, Luftmensch of the mind, roamer among theories.

The downside of this style, or at least one of them, was, its quick and easy descent into fashion, an inability to remain with a theory long enough to understand its ins and outs, and narcissism, a problem we often identify with our internet age but which long predates it:

The twists and turns were lively, and they could all seem harmless if only one could learn to looking upon intellectual life as a variety of play, like potsy or king of the hill. What struck one as troubling, however, was not this or that fashion (tomorrow morning would bring another), but the dynamic of fashion itself, the ruthlessness with which, to remain in fashion, fashion had to keep devouring itself.

…

In the fifties the cult of brilliance became a sign that writers were offering not their work or ideas but their persona as content.

5. The main cultural contribution of the New York Intellectuals was the consolidation of a canon. They were not the avant-garde of modernism; they were its curators.

6. What drove the New York Intellectuals was not money, power, or even fame; they were possessed by a “gnawing ambition to write something, even three pages, that might live.”

7. The influence of the New York Intellectuals has reached an end. (That was in 1969.)

8. On liberalism and the intellectual:

For those of us who have lived throughout the age of totalitarianism and experienced the debate of socialism, this conflict over liberal values is extremely painful. We have paid heavily for the lesson that democracy, even “bourgeois democracy,” is a precious human achievement, one that, far from being simply a mode of mass manipulation, has been wrested through decades of struggle by labor, socialist, and liberal movements. To protect the values of liberal democracy, often against those who call themselves liberals, is an elementary task for intellectuals as a social group.

9. On The New York Review of Books:

The genius of the New York Review, and it has been a genius of sorts, is not, in either politics or culture, for swimming against the stream.

Foreign Policy is Domestic Policy is Foreign Policy is Domestic Policy is…

Margaret Thatcher started with the Falklands and finished with the unions:

We had to fight the enemy without in the Falklands. We always have to be aware of the enemy within, which is much more difficult to fight and more dangerous to liberty.

Scott Walker started with the unions and wants to finish with the Islamic State:

If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.

Foreign policy is domestic policy is foreign policy is domestic policy is…

When David Brooks Knows He May Not Know Whereof He Speaks

David Brooks’ letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates is making the rounds. What I was most struck by is how nervous, how preemptively defensive and apologetic, Brooks is. For once, this preternaturally self-confident pundit has been forced to confront the possibility that he may not know whereof he speaks.

Listen to this:

I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

Or this:

If I do have standing, I find the….” [That if I have standing!]

Or this:

Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change.

What to make of it? Unsuccessful attempts to disarm his critics? Maybe.

Or maybe we should pay more attention to that tone of  aggrieved and bitchy petulance which accompanies these qualifiers: “I suppose…Is my job just…is just silence…” That “just” gives the game away.

In the face of a black man reasoning his way to freedom, Brooks is rendered powerless, struck dumb (even by Brooks’ literary standards, his critique sounds incredibly flat, dispirited; he knows he’s against Coates, but he just can’t summon the necessary rhetorical fire to oppose him).

Not unlike that Guatemalan archbishop who complained about leftist land reformers in 1954 that they sent local peasants “gifted with facility with words” to the capital, where they were given opportunities “to speak in public.”

Monday Morning at the Wagners

From Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1878-1883:

Coming from his bath, R.[ichard] says to me: “You are quite right—we should have slaves”… [January 7, 1878]

One more potential bit of evidence, incidentally, for my claim that Nietzsche’s arguments in early essays like “The Greek State” and in Birth of Tragedy may have been about real, not metaphorical, slavery.

In her diary, Cosima Wagner makes clear that she and Richard had been discussing the benefits of slavery over wage labor (“I declared recently that slaves had been happier than the present-day proletariat”), which was one of the main defenses of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War in the South. Though the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche was, in 1878, on the brink of a permanent rupture, we know that much of Birth of Tragedy was inspired by Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner. It seems plausible that Cosima’s table talk with Richard about slavery in the late 1870s was an extension of earlier dialogues about slavery between Richard, Cosima, and Nietzsche in the early 1870s.

As I’ve argued before, the battle over slavery and emancipation in the Americas was watched closely in Europe, and though we know a lot about the left’s response to that battle, we know less about the right’s. I’ve speculated that Nietzsche’s writings on slavery, which are often taken to be more rhetorical and psychological rather than statements about actually existing slavery, should be thought of as perhaps the leading edge of European speculation about the cultural and political costs of ending human bondage. Which, again, was for Nietzsche a matter of present history.

Ultimately, what I’m interested in is how these discussions of abolition and emancipation on the European right in the latter half of the 19th century play a role in the development fascist political economy in the first half of the 20th century. The role of slavery in the Nazis’ thinking about settlement in the East—and in their actual practice in the 1940s—remains something of a mystery to me. How was it possible, after a century of bourgeois celebration of free labor and wage labor, for a European country to make slave labor the foundation of its economic thinking—not at the peripheries of its extracontintental colonies but at the heart of its empire? During World War II, it’s even been reported, Wagner’s grandson used slave laborers from a nearby concentration camp in his Bayreuth productions.

In the meantime, there’s Cosima Wagner, giggling with her husband (after he says we should have slaves, he continues, “but who should be the first slave? Ross or Georg?” Cosima notes, “We laughed heartily”), fresh from his bath, over the question of human bondage.

American Ambivalence: The Limitations of the Writer in the US

Speaking of Daniel Aaron, this graf from Writers on the Left is pretty great:

Paradoxically, the American writer’s running quarrel with his society, his natural inclination to admonish and to castigate in the guise of entertainment, may have sprung as much or more from his identity with that society as from his alienation. He has never been easy during his rebellious moods, never able to divorce himself from the cowards, scoundrels, and vulgarians he attacks. Indeed, the very intensity with which insurgent generations of rebels have assaulted the unkillable beliefs of the bourgeoisie suggests an attachment to their enemy the rebels themselves have hardly been aware of. Made bitter by rejection, and despising a milieu so uncongenial for the creative artist, the aberrant or misfit writer still yearns to be reabsorbed into his society, to speak for it, to celebrate it. And the history of rebellious literary generations, which is in one sense the history of the writer in America, is a record of ambivalence, of divided loyalties, of uneasy revolt.

Walt Whitman, Bolshevik

Reading Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left on the F train this morning, I found out that Walt Whitman was one of the very first American writers translated by the Soviet government after the Revolution. Reading around the internet after I got home, I discovered the following:

In 1919, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers and Red Army Deputies printed 50,000 copies of Leaves of Grass.
During the Civil War, Whitman’s works were rushed to Red Army soldiers at the front.
Between the Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union, 28 editions of Whitman’s works were published.

I also found out, from Aaron, that initial funding for The Masses came from the Vice President of the New York Life Insurance Company.

Things you learn while riding the F train…

Mary McCarthy on the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I don’t know why people complain about the loss of public intellectuals or the decline of intellectual life more generally. I just finished Mary McCarthy’s Intellectual Memoirs: New York 1936-1938. As far as I can tell, there’s more action on one night of Facebook than she reports over the entirety of two years.

That said, McCarthy makes one fascinating—at least to me—observation about how we learn to read newness in the arts.

In our Beekman Place apartment, besides PR [Partisan Review], I was trying to read Ulysses. John, in the breakfast nook, was typing his play “University” (about his father and never produced), and I was writing book reviews. Every year I started Ulysses, but I could not get beyond the first chapter—”stately, plump Buck Mulligan”—page 47, I think it was. Then one day, long after, in a different apartment, with a different man (which?), I found myself on page 48 and never looked back. This happened with many of us: Ulysses gradually—but with an effect of suddenness—became accessible. It was because in the interim we had been reading diluted Joyce in writers like Faulkner and so had got used to his ways, at second remove. During the modernist crisis this was happening in all the arts: imitators and borrowers taught the “reading” of an artist at first thought to beyond the public power of comprehension. In the visual arts, techniques of mass reproduction—imitation on a wide scale—had the same function. Thanks to reproduction, the public got used to faces with two noses or an eye in the middle of the forehead, just as a bit earlier the “funny” colors of the Fauves stopped looking funny except to a few.

Nietzsche on the Situation in Greece

On the Genealogy of Morals:

The debtor made a contract with the creditor and pledged that if he should fail to repay he would substitute something else that he “possessed,” something he had control over; for example, his body, his wife, his freedom…

Let us be clear as to the logic of this form of compensation: it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in place of money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure “de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire [of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it],” the enjoyment of violation….In “punishing” the debtor, the creditor participates in a right of the masters….The compensation, then, consists in a warrant for and title to cruelty.”

Aladdin and Value

I found a free copy of The Arabian Nights on a stoop yesterday, so I spent the morning reading its version of the Aladdin story to my daughter. It’s a “junior” version of the story that was published by Grosset & Dunlap in 1946, but it appears to hew closer to earlier versions of the story than do the more popular and contemporary versions we see in the movies and such. In any event, it’s an interesting snapshot of its moment, whatever moment that may be.

Two things of note about this version of the Aladdin story.

First, it’s very much about the value form. Aladdin begins the story as a total naif about value: the genie gives him a silver plate, which he foolishly sells to a peddler, who’s a “rogue,” for 1/60th of its value. A good part of the story is about Aladdin’s gradual enlightenment as to the nature of value: understanding, for example, that he could and should sell the silver plate for its full value or that a set of glass baubles he possesses are in fact rare jewels. Not only that, but his gradual enlightenment about value constitutes his maturation as a man, his assumption of responsibility, his greater internal depth and awareness of himself as a person. And of the world, too. In fact, the narrative talks about his education at the hands of a group of honest merchants, and it mentions that this is his introduction to “the world.”

Second, though my daughter and I are almost finished with the story—it’s damn long, so what I’m about to say may be proven wrong in the last 15 pages or so—we haven’t yet encountered the proverbial “three wishes” from the genie. Aladdin’s wishes seem to be unlimited. In popular versions of the story, it’s the scarcity of the wishes that lead him to an appreciation of their value; he comes to appreciate how important—and well chosen—his wishes must be via a growing awareness of their finiteness. But in this earlier version of the story, at least so far, it seems as if his appreciation of value comes via his education from the merchants and his love for the princess, whose name in this version is Buddir al-Buddoor. Scarcity plays almost no role at all.

Two quick thoughts in response.

First, the story provides a good illustration of Ellen Meiksins Wood’s point that there were markets before there was capitalism, that capitalism is not reducible to markets or exchange.

Second, while the value form (in the economic sense) may have played a larger cultural role in pre-capitalist societies, its function as a moral tutor was not as dependent on scarcity as someone like Mises would have us believe. In fact, scarcity—at least as we encounter it in the story, in the form of Aladdin’s initial poverty—breeds a kind of ignorance or indifference about value (his thrifty and careful mother is, admittedly, a counterpoint to that claim, but that only goes to show that scarcity in and of itself need not provide us anything in the way of a particular model). It’s only when Aladdin possesses something—and is educated about what his possession might mean for his flourishing, which again has little to do with its scarcity—that Aladdin comes to appreciate its value. Which again might lead us to wonder how important scarcity, as opposed to abundance and prosperity, is to the moral justification of capitalism as opposed to other modes of exchange.

From Whitney Houston to Obergefell: Clarence Thomas on Human Dignity

Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas:

What she remembered most vividly, however, was the way [Clarence] Thomas woke up each morning. He had a theme song which he would play at high volume in his room at the start of every day, “kind of like a mantra.”

“What’s that?” she remembered asking [Gil] Hardy [Clarence Thomas’s roommate] when she was first rocked out of bed by it at an early hour.

“Oh, that’s just Clarence,” Hardy replied with a laugh. “It’s his theme song.” The song, “The Greatest Love of All,” was a pop anthem celebrating self-love rereleased by Whitney Houston.

Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son:

I’d heard the song many times, but it had never meant more to me than it did now…I took heart from George Benson [who originally performed the song]: …No matter what they take from me/ They can’t take away my dignity.

Clarence Thomas, Obergefell v. Hodges, dissenting:

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.