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Dish Awards: The Year’s Biggest Poseur?

A Poseur Alert is awarded for passages of prose that stand out for pretension, vanity and really bad writing designed to look like profundity. Thus far, this year’s top vote-getter is from Susan Elizabeth Shepard and Charlotte Shane on one of the age-old sex positions:

69 confronts us with an unfortunate truth: it is a distinctly capitalistic, efficiency-emphasizing endeavor that erases the unique personhood of each participant by relying on a crude approximation of how human bodies fit together if human bodies are conceived of as identical, two-dimensional figures like the numbers of its name. … The position also echoes the service economy in its demand (mainly on women) of a convincing performance of pleasure. It’s not enough to simply be present and to competently do the job that’s asked of you by your lover, you must also appear to simultaneously enjoy said lover’s ministrations, regardless of the delicate balancing requiring to keep from suffocating him or breaking his nose. This is a form of emotional labor like that demanded from baristas, servers, and sex workers; not only do you have to do a good job, you have to like it.

The current runner up was written by Mark Bauerlein about tattoos:

As a friend put it to me: A tattoo isn’t the Word made flesh, but the flesh made word. It may strike old-fashioned types as pedestrian narcissism and adolescent conformity, and sometimes it surely is. But in a deeper and more troubling way, it is canny and subversive artifice, spiced with a moralistic claim to personal liberation. A tattoo is a personal statement but also an anthropological position that accords with the prevailing transvaluations of our time. It’s a wholly successful one, too, judging from the entertainment and sports worlds, and youth culture. With the mainstreaming of tattoos, another factor in the natural order falls away, yet one more inversion of nature and culture, natural law and human desire. That’s not an outcome the rationalizer’s regret. It’s precisely the point.

Vote for one of the above, or any of the other three finalists, here. After that, cast your votes for the 2014 Malkin Award, Hathos Alert, Yglesias Award, Cool Ad, Face Of The Year, and the year’s best Chart, Mental Health Break and View From Your Window. This is also the first time you can help choose the Map Of The Year and Beard Of The Year as well! Polls will close on New Year’s Eve, so be sure to register your choices before then:

Click here to vote for the Beard Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Chart Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Cool Ad Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Face Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Hathos Alert Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the 2014 Malkin Award!
Click here to vote for the Map Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Mental Health Break Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Poseur Alert Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the Window View Of The Year!
Click here to vote for the 2014 Yglesias Award!

Please note: due to there not being enough nominees this year, we will not be issuing a 2014 Hewitt Award, Moore Award, or Dick Morris Award. You can learn more about those and all our awards here.

The View From Your Window

Woodbury, Minnesota, 7.44 am

When The Self Is Lost

Gracie Lofthouse investigates depersonalization disorder, which is “characterized by a pervasive and disturbing sense of unreality in both the experience of self (called ‘depersonalization’) and one’s surroundings (known as ‘derealization’)”:

Dr. Elena Bezzubova, a Russian psychoanalyst who treats people with depersonalization in California, calls it a painful absence of feeling. “A mother comes to me and says, ‘My son is in prison, I received a letter from him. I do not care, but it bothers me. Please prescribe me something to cry.’”

It might be the implications of the numbing, as opposed to the actual numbing itself, that cause the most distress. Have you ever played that game when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning? It’s called semantic satiation. Like words, can a sense of self be broken down into arbitrary, socially-constructed components?

That question may be why the phenomenon has attracted a lot of interest from philosophers.

In a sense, the experience presupposes certain notions of how the self is meant to feel. We think of a self as an essential thing—a soul or an ego that everyone has and is aware of—but scientists and philosophers have been telling us for a while now that the self isn’t quite as it seems. Psychologist Dr. Bruce Hood writes in The Self Illusion that there is no center in the brain where the self is generated. “What we experience is a powerful depiction generated by our brains for our benefit,” he writes. Brains make sense of data that would otherwise be overwhelming. “Experiences are fragmented episodes unless they are woven together in a meaningful narrative,” he writes, with the self being the story that “pulls it all together.” InThe Ego Trick, Julian Baggini writes that people are, as the 18th century philosopher David Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “bundles of different perceptions.” “The unity [of self that] we experience, which allows us legitimately to talk of ‘I,’ is a result of the Ego Trick—the remarkable way in which a complicated bundle of mental events, made possible by the brain, creates a singular self, without there being a singular thing underlying it,” Baggini writes.

Mental Health Break

Deadly but beautiful:

Lovecraft Never Dies

Charles Baxter explores the persistent appeal – as well as persistent racism and misogyny – of H.P. Lovecraft. He considers how his fiction represents faith, writing that “what accompanies Lovecraft’s depictions of living death is a fundamental conviction that there is something wrong with the whole idea of resurrection, mostly because there is something wrong with life itself. The greatest hope of Christianity is, in these stories, a terrible outcome fervently to be avoided”:

His three best stories, “The Colour Out of Space,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Dunwich Horror,” can all be read as inversions of Christian themes, as Houellebecq first noted. “The Colour Out of Space” contains a travesty of the Pentecost, “The Dunwich Horror” a travesty of the Incarnation, and “At the Mountains of Madness” a travesty of resurrection, which also appears elsewhere in graveyard-kitsch form in “Herbert West: Reanimator.” Whenever anybody or anything is brought back to life in a Lovecraft story, the resurrection is always botched, and the return to life is catastrophic. Since life itself is a form of sleepwalking anyway, the descent of the “foul” Pentecostal flame in “The Colour Out of Space” can only bring more destruction and misery, the God of these stories being a malicious trickster.

As for the afterlife, or the life to come, the unlucky resurrected ones dwell in various subbasements and oubliettes where they give off “a deep, low moaning” that is “hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities.”

In Lovecraft, all the eternities are desolate. When not made out of spare parts and jolted to life by electrical means, the resurrected are hidden away, “leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of [a] narrow shaft.” This is not just the depiction of horror but of genuine suffering, the suffering of those perpetually imprisoned and unable to die.

Haunted by the failure of death that can result in zombiism, the stories repeatedly quote “the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred”: “That is not dead which can eternal lie,/And with strange aeons even death may die,” an utterance not of hope but of inconsolable despair. Like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the stories are haunted by death-in-life and by the prospect of a life after this one that may be even worse than the one you have now.

Our Bestsellers, Ourselves

Heather Havrilesky, scanning the last 20 years of the New York Times‘ hardcover-nonfiction bestseller lists, ponders what our country’s taste in books reveals about its readers:

As I Want to Tell You by O. J. Simpson (1995) and The Royals by Kitty Kelley (1997) yield to Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore (2003) and Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward (2004), you can almost see the support beams of the American dream tumbling sideways, the illusions of endless peace and rapidly compounding prosperity crumbling along with it. The leisurely service-economy daydreams of the late ’90s left us plenty of time to spend Tuesdays with Morrie and muse about The Millionaire Next Door or get worked up about The Day Diana Died. But such luxe distractions gave way to The Age of Turbulence, as our smug belief in the good life was crushed under the weight of 9/11, the Great Recession, and several murky and seemingly endless wars. Suddenly the world looked Hot, Flat, and Crowded, with the aggressively nostalgic waging an all-out Assault on Reason. In such a Culture of Corruption, if you weren’t Going Rogue you inevitably found yourself Arguing with Idiots. …

[T]he most popular nonfiction authors of our day might be characterized by a certain overconfident swagger, the modern prerequisite for mattering in a mixed-up, insecure world.

More often than not, these “authors” aren’t authors at all, in the strict sense of carefully pondering their ideas and diction and lovingly crafting an argument sturdy yet supple enough to carry their work over to a mass readership. In place of the William Whytes, Vance Packards, and Betty Friedans of earlier, more confident chapters of our national bestsellerdom, we have promoted a generation of alternately jumpy and anxious shouters. Generally, these public figurines fall into one of two categories: television personalities who have hired hands to cobble together their sound bites; and middling nonwriters suffering from extended delusions of grandeur. When it comes to hardcover nonfiction, a realm in which (for now at least) books often are physical objects, plunked down on coffee tables as signifiers or comfort totems, Americans don’t seem to be looking for authors or writers or artists so much as lifestyle brands in human form: placeholder thinkers whose outrage, sense of irony, or general dystopian worldview matches their own, whether it’s Glenn Beck, Barack Obama, or Chelsea Handler.

Beard Of The Week

Stephanie Jarstad assembled The Twelve Beards of Christmas as part of a “photography project to support men’s health and prostate cancer awareness.” Check out a gallery of her portraits here, and follow her work here and here.

How Veterinarians Affect Human Health

Sasha Chapman explains:

The idea that there is a connection between our health and that of other animals is not new. Sir William Osler, one of Canada’s most admired physicians and a father of modern medicine, is also considered a father of veterinary pathology. He believed that his students, whether medical or veterinary, should study the anatomy and pathology of both human beings and animals. When Osler delivered the inaugural address at the Montreal Veterinary College in 1876, he titled it “The Relations of Animals to Man,” and told students it would not be long before “you find out that similarity in animal structure is accompanied by a community of disease and that the ‘ills which flesh is heir to’ are not wholly monopolized by the ‘lords of creation.’ ” Back then, in lecture halls at the Faculty of Comparative Medicine and Veterinary Science at McGill, veterinary students sat alongside medical students.

Today, such crossover training would be highly unusual.

Most doctors have little to do with animal medicine, unless they’re taking the family pet for a checkup. Likewise, vets rarely take more than a personal interest in human medicine. Each profession keeps to itself, and each tends to collect and analyze its own data separately, making it difficult to share information and identify cross-species health risks. And in the case of zoonotic diseases—those that move from animals to humans—there can be a tendency, between the professions, to develop an us-versus-them mindset. Vets are concerned with their own patients’ health, and doctors with theirs. We segregate these disciplines at our peril. Most of the emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases that have plagued humans in recent decades—including Lyme disease, H1N1, and Ebola—began in animal populations, and were first transmitted to human beings either directly or through our shared environment. Consequences can be devastating, as in the case of plague, which emerges periodically from animal reservoirs.

No, Not All Sex Workers Want To Be Saved

A&E is producing a To Catch a Predator-like show about sex workers called 8 Minutes:

Executive producer Tom Forman describes the premise:

[Kevin Brown is] a cop in Orange County who retired a couple years ago, then devoted himself full time to his church. So he was a full-time cop turned full-time pastor. As a cop, he worked vice. He saw girls who had no place else to go, who had been abused by their pimps, girls who really needed a helping hand, and what he had to do as a cop is arrest them. Now that he’s running a church, he can offer them that help.

And Brown has eight minutes to make his case to a woman each episode, hence the title. Samantha Allen pans the series:

Kevin Brown’s vigilante preacher schtick is “disappointingly unsurprising,” as Lane Champagne, a community organizer for Sex Workers Outreach Project New York City (SWOP-NYC) tells me in a phone interview.

The idea that all sex workers are victims who want to be “rescued” is so pervasive that some clients regularly try to convince sex workers to give up their trade—they just usually don’t bring a camera crew along with them. As Champagne suggests in her own critique of 8 Minutes for a sex workers group blog, Brown’s holier-than-thou angle is not a far cry from the “well-meaning but kind-of-a-dick regulars who fall in love with you and think it’s a compliment to say [things] like, ‘You’re so much better than this.’”

And in an e-mail interview, Kaelie Laochra, a sex worker who runs the popular Respect Sex Work Twitter account, agrees that clients who attempt to “save” her are often the most inadvertently insulting.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown recently called the program “an abomination that should never, ever have gotten the greenlight”:

Seeing someone’s photo online and then proceeding to track them down IRL and secretly monitor their movements would, under other contexts, be considered stalking. But apparently anything goes when your aim is to “save” women from exerting their own agency.

The Foucault You Didn’t Know

In an interview discussing a new volume of essays he edited about the French philosopher, Daniel Zamora portrays Foucault, especially in his later years, as more friendly to and fascinated by neoliberals Hayek and Friedman than many of his votaries on the academic left want to believe. Zamora claims to have been “astonished by the indulgence Foucault showed toward neoliberalism”:

[H]e saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.

Foucault seems, then, in the late seventies, to be moving towards the “second left,” that minoritarian but intellectually influential tendency of French socialism, along with figures like Pierre Rosanvallon, whose writings Foucault appreciated. He found seductive this anti-statism and this desire to “de-statify French society.” Even Colin Gordon, one of Foucault’s principal translators and commentators in the Anglo-Saxon world, has no trouble saying that he sees in Foucault a sort of precursor to the Blairite Third Way, incorporating neoliberal strategy within the social-democratic corpus.

Dan Drezner nods, telling conservatives and libertarians to take a second look at their unlikely ally:

One of the virtues of teaching at a policy school is that Foucault is not quite as central to scholarly conversations as in traditional humanities departments. That said, Zamora’s observation rings true — which is why conservatives should embrace him and his work. From a conservative perspective, the great thing about Foucault’s writing is that it is more plastic than Marx, and far less economically subversive. Academics rooted in Foucauldian thought are far more compatible with neoliberalism than the old Marxist academics.

In some ways, Zamora’s book is an effort by some on the left to try to “discipline” Foucault’s flirtation with the right. It will be interesting to see the academic left’s response to the book. But Zamora also reveals why free-marketeers might want to give Foucault another read and not just dismiss him with the “post-modern” epithet.

Update from a reader:

This being an area I am quite familiar with, let me just say that there is very little new in Zamora’s “discovery.” Only the petty bourgeois of identity politics in US academia could ever embrace Foucault as “left-wing.” And they sure did, bereft that they were of any context or any economic culture (let alone knowledge).

It’s not that Foucault is “right-wing” or “left-wing.” I am not even sure that he could be pegged on some sort of “progressive vs conservative” scale. On the one hand, he once stated that everything that is historically constructed can be politically changed. On the other hand, he blurted out the mother of all elisions in Discipline and Punish (if I remember well): talking of the invention of biopolitics, the thrust by the modern state to catalogue, normalize and regiment living beings (with a particular focus on humans), he wrote “this all took place on the backdrop of the industrial revolution.”

And that was that for economic forces. One sentence! The gall of that man! It’s hilarious. It was a dig at a certain naive and mind-numbing strand of Stalinist historical materialism in vogue in France at the time (the irrelevant and awful Althusser, Sartre, Bourdieu: in the late ’60s-early ’70s Foucault was cleverly waging a positional war against the grand poobahs of France’s intelligentsia).

Of course this played very well in US comp-lit departments, where all things economic or material are sneered at. Now you could be a true armchair radical, no need to worry or study actual economics and the history of capitalism. Boring. Besides, Foucault himself thought it was useless. And that way, as a tenured radical on a US campus, you did not have to question the society, the economic incentives and the motivations that had lead you there in the first place. That is, the booming market for mass education in the late-sixties. Suddenly any small-town middle-class American, low on cultural capital but armed with good grades, could legitimately compete for a tenured job at any University nearby. Fucking boomers.

Not saying it’s all bad, but hey, you must take the bad with the overall good. Incredible development in human capital comes with a few philistines. It’s a small price to pay.

(Photo of painted portrait of Foucault by thierry ehrmann)