Home | Away

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Book club recommendation

I just finished the last academic obligation I was supposed to fulfill in 2002 (and can now move on to the couple of things I was supposed to finish in 2003).  It’s a review of John McGowan’s remarkable and compelling (but, alas, no-longer-new) book, Democracy’s Children:  Intellectuals and the Rise of Cultural Politics, and when I first read it, fourteen months ago, it spoke to so many of my frustrations, desires, and obsessions that I simply wasn’t able to review it.  I had way too much to say.  I reread it this fall, and it still speaks to my frustrations, desires, and obsessions, but this time I managed to squeeze my response down to 1100 words for the good people at the South Atlantic Review, where the review will appear later this year.

My review describes Democracy’s Children as an “array of theoretically informed dissents from some of the salient projects of the current theoretical scene” (that’s a neutral form of praise, by the way), and suggests that McGowan “take[s] the relative autonomy of intellectuals as an opportunity to voice some serious skepticism about the idea of relative autonomy-- and even more serious skepticism about the cogency of recent critiques of autonomy.” What I like most about the book, though, is its principled pragmatist insistence on a symmetrical account of belief (that is, an account of belief in which those who do not agree with us are presumed to be as reasonable or at least as self-reflexive as ourselves).  Two of my favorite passages:

“Sometimes I think my stance just reflects a sense that the cultural left is too subtle by half.  Injustice and the indignities that attend it are just not that complex.  In particular, I find any reliance on intricate accounts of psychological mechanisms implausible-- and politically troubling when attached to claims about unconscious processes.  Democratic interaction depends, I believe, on a faith that people generally know what they are about and that rhetorical efforts to shift their self-understandings can be direct.  After all, the intellectual will resent attempts at indirect manipulation and will believe herself able to see through this.  Why not accord the same ability to our audiences?  Once we have to rely on strategies that by-pass conscious beliefs in order to transform those beliefs’ unconscious underpinnings, we have entered a realm of discourse that renders autonomy, consent and equality problematic.  That this trinity cannot be assumed is an important truth; that the attempt to achieve it is to be abandoned is far less evident.  Doubtless, the cultural left (of which I am indubitably a member) shares my political commitment to democracy, which is why I feel it important to indicate the undemocratic flavor of some work in cultural politics.” (25)

“The pragmatist must be hostile to theories of ideology that posit motivations and intentions unavailable to consciousness as the determinants of action.  Pragmatism depends on agents who can, for the most part, know what they are doing.  The pragmatist need not deny systemic relations and/or effects, just as he hardly ignores inherited social codings, but must deny that agents are systematically and incorrigibly unable to perceive and take into account these relations, effects, and codings.  The strongest argument here is that the theorist of ideology has achieved a conscious understanding of these matters.  What, in principle, could refute the possibility of all other agents’ attaining a similar understanding?” (214-15)

All of which is to say-- as we ordinarily don’t say in academic book reviews-- buy this book now.  No, not later this month.  Right now.  You can ask Cornell University Press to send it to you, if you visit their website and promise to give them $17.95 plus the usuals.

Posted by Michael on 01/10 at 10:13 AM
(34) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages