``One should not, however, group Schwartz’ critique with those offered by critics such as Thomas Frank, William Julius Wilson and Walter Benn Michaels, who pose a politics of traditional, supposedly color-blind economic populism in opposition to a politics of difference. Such writers do an excellent job of pointing out the limitations of identity politics and skewering our country’s obsession with identity (Michaels offers an especially coruscating analysis of the diversity industry in his recently published book The Trouble With Diversity), but as Schwartz notes, the old New Deal coalition was in many respects racially exclusionary and made efforts to address the autonomous oppression of historically marginalized groups through policies such as affirmative action necessary. And because so much popular opposition to progressive taxation and social investment has been grounded in racial hostility toward the supposedly “undeserving” (that is, black and brown) poor, “the road to a revitalized social democracy cannot avoid a forthright anti-racist politics.”....''
(Chris Maisano)
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Thanks for posting this. I spent most of the last couple of weeks thinking through the weirdness of WBM, how and why he reads wrong, even when I went back over texts. I discovered an interesting issue of what Sartre might call inauthenticity----from the political to literary. It has to do with the position of a literary critic and his relationship to fiction.
This issue is intimately related to this observation from Schwartz to Maisano:
``But what a pleasant surprise to read such an intelligent review…and one not written by a professional academic, but a rank-and-file intellectual activist (an academic would have rendered the review even more impenetrable than the theory-half of my book).'' (Joseph M. Schwartz)
Michaels wrote a paper on Toni Morrison's view of Henry James, called Jim Crow Henry James. I can't get more than a paragraph of it, since it's behind a subscription only journal. I had the same trouble looking up Morrison. I haven't read Morrison, only heard her read passages of Beloved, which sounded beautiful. I don't like James period but I also know I could learn from him in writing fiction, which I suspect Morrison did.
Even so, I think I understand Michaels objection to the psychological novel with its focus on the interior dimension and its ability to elide the external social and economic forces that make up the more material relations that form people's sensibility, actions, and their position in the socio-economic strata.
The critical and Marxist argument against the psychological or bourgeois novel is a very old one. In the American writer's scene of the 1930s, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep came under very similar scrutiny to Michaels' likely position against Morrison.
``Call It Sleep was influenced by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, and brought among the first an interior monologue into American literature. The reader learns about the world of the immigrants' Lower East Side from the boy's vantage point - David's oedipal conflicts and his encounter of anti-Semitism on the streets, neighborhood gangs of non-Jewish youths, and an early introduction to sex, which terrifies David. Roth used in an extremely impressive way dialect, broken, misspelled English, mispronounced words of the street boys, the dialects of Irish policeman and Italian street sweeper, and the language of David's mind.
The novel was dismissed by the leftist New Masses which complained that it's "a pity that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels." Roth had joined the Communist Party in 1933, but found that he could not write his works in the true spirit of class struggle. As a consequence, Call It Sleep was not praised for its social critic. Roth was more concerned with the psychological development of his characters, Freud's ideas, and linguistic considerations. However, the work has been hailed by some critics as one of the finest works of proletarian novel, although Roth did not particularly focus on the sufferings of the working class...''
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/henryr.htm
One way to take on the English department literary criticism crowd is to divide them between those who also write fiction and those who don't. As Scharwtz noted about Maisano's review, there's a distinctly different voice and sensibility between somebody who as worked in movements for social justice in their various forms and who writes and thinks about their experience, and those who haven't, i.e the safely positioned academic crowd.
I think that's what was going on in those on the list who found Michaels suspect from the get go. I am certainly not against the academic literary crowd. Hell I wish I had one of those jobs myself. On the other hand, there is a danger there of loosing touch with the actually existing cultural-class flows in the other strata.
For a critical theorist, one place to start back toward getting grounded, is to start writing fiction from the theory v. practice position. You get a lot better view of what is going on in fiction, if you have tried to write it yourself. The first dilemma, is exactly the separation between a well off academic life, and the nature of the ordinary working world. I can report the disjunction is very large. There are similar disjunctions and conjunctions in painting, between the art historians and critics who paint, and those who don't. You can see right away, the same sorts of ``off-ness''. On the other hand, I can see the immediate `right-ness' when somebody like Frank Stella writes on `space' (see Stella, Working Space).
In any event, I am making my way through a book I've mentioned on list before. It's called `Sidewalk', Mitchell Duneier, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, NY, 1999. Duneier is a sociology professor, living in Greenwich Village, who gets to know the mostly black, down and out magazine and book vendors on the sidewalk during the rise of the Giuliani wars.
Then last, in the so-called Marxists v. Multicultural debate, I was reminded of a very difficult subject for a more class-left based literary criticism to tackle. If you want to tackle black writers from a white Marxist, literary criticism point of view like Michaels takes with Morrison, try taking on Ishmael Reed.
Reed often writes in the discordant beauty and cacophony of the actually existing multicultural voices that make up America today. I find myself in my own conversation, dropping a little Spanish here, a little Oakland slang there, then some fancy academic words I like, some advance art views I hold and found, and try to weave something that builds up what I see and hear on the street, in stores, and so forth. Reed is particularly good at this and its jarring harshness is completely incompatible with the neoliberal concept of multicultural diversity, in its theoretical compatibility with corporate concepts of a rainbow bourgeois in positions of management and power.
What makes Ishmael Reed so good at his criticism, is his fiction and poetry, and the other way around, directly grounded in life. What seems to run through it all, is a stunning combination of concrete history, the immediate recognitions of the actual existing voices of left, their multicultural dimensionality, and a thoroughly hard core art/scholar voice all rolled into one.
CG