Perhaps the nerve Michaels has hit is exactly what Shag is saying and I tried to say. His basic argument is absolutely correct - multiculturalism has been, and was easily, appropriated by neoliberalism, it has been used to defer and deter issues and the politics of class and those fighting for it in its most reified forms are facilitating this appropriation, deferal and deterral.
However, while I only got a sense of this from his interview with you and the way he treated all sorts of wildly differentiated academics and folks working in the area of racial justice - as well as oppressed minorities and the poor - as if they were all the same and equally objects of his scorn, Shag's more detailed efforts have also run into a wall. He might not mean to do this but Shag has shown a number of places in his written work where that broad brush treatment occurs and both of us are, I think, reacting to the superior, condescending and indifferent tone of his implicit rejection of the idea that, perhaps, the folks he speaks and writes about might not be as deluded and/or bought as he implies. Your tone, and Adolph's, has been exactly the same. The nerve he's hit is, is I think at least for me, tied to the ways his style, his lack of complexity and his denigration of others make it so the people who ought to hear his argument dismiss it out of hand and don't want to hear it made in more relational ways from the rest of us.
His stance, and the one you and Reed are taking in support of him, suggests, implies or baldly states that there couldn't possibly be an internal contradictions to or stylistic flaws in) his work and that we are to take it or leave it; it is pure and we're alies of we accept it and enemies if we don't. It seems to me that the fact that Chuck, Joanna, Robert, Shag and I have all indicated that his description of the people we know working on the issues and living with the conditions he's writing about aren't described well by him ought to be indicative that there could be something to what we're saying... especially since we all agree with his meta-analysis.
Alan
PS: Perhaps an additional nerve of mine hit, as I indicated in the anecdote about the Imperial Valley yesterday, is that I've been that cocksure, superior and indifferent guy and part of my intellectual and political maturation arose from the beautiful and much-deserved slap/comeuppance delivered by the folks whose intelligence and agency my (completely not) unique insights had led me to ignore. He reminds me of an intellectually adolescent me, the one who thought he was the shit, but didn't actually know - and certainly wasn't ever going to convince anyone to listen to his - shit (because I was a prick).
On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 10:38 AM, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com>wrote:
>
> On Oct 6, 2009, at 9:56 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> so you approve of Michaels characterization of the work done by
>> folks like Laura Agustin on immigrant sex workers? That of David
>> Harvey in Potter Addition? They're just a bunch o f people who seek
>> to obtain respect for the poor and working class, right? Their
>> interest in 'agency' isn't to be taken seriously -- charachterized
>> in a sympathetic, internally critical way -- but is simply dismissed
>> out of hand as the work of handmaidens to neo-liberalism.
>>
>
> >> This is delusional.
>
Which part of it is delusional? Your comment is opaque.