Trigger warning: text contains expletives and references to Donald Trump and Kim Kardashian.
Look at you. Your appearance is a wonderful succession of carefully arranged details. The studied dishevelment of your clothes: autumn colours, bohemian, unprepossessing yet expensive. Your demeanour is carefully calibrated to evoke an image of cultivation, of social accomplishment, élan and aspiration. Like most us, you enjoy the luxury of shuffling through a seemingly endless catalogue of social tendencies, aesthetic judgements and intellectual poses – you wear each like accessories. This tendency has led you to assimilate some of the more prominent features of contemporary counterculture: a preoccupation with identity politics; with societal discrimination, especially along racial and gender lines, and the dogmatic insistence on ever more archaic political language to redress certain omnipresent ‘power relations’ or ‘biases’. The political outcomes of these commitments are more often than not bizarre, with hashtag campaigns against fat-shaming heralded as an indicator of social progress and ‘empowerment’. This might all seem rather familiar: the term political correctness has gained currency in recent decades. But using it makes one liable to the charge of reductionism however, and I would presuppose that it is a much larger phenomenon with complex intellectual roots: post-structuralism, critical theory, literary theory, cultural criticism – these are just some of the terms that have been used to describe the wilder shores of unreason inhabited by the denizens of many philosophy and sociology departments. But that’s nothing I want to go into too deeply, just as little as I want to suggest my contempt for all things post-modern. Nor will I mention the Sokal Affair with one breath. So perish the thought.
What I am concerned with how all of this bullshit – this divisive and at times non-sensical form of counterculture – seems to be all to often associated with the political left as a whole. This seriously pisses me off, leftist as I am. There is little point, however, in denying the fact that leftist and progressive movements have been co-opted by this type of discourse. In doing so, it has largely subverted an effective engagement with the spectre of neoliberalism as well as greatly cheapening and hyperpolarizing our political discourse.
The whole things is, of course, not a uniform movement. There are different variants, or flavours if you like. For the sake of brevity, let me describe two of them. One countercultural variant is perhaps best described as the white edgy liberal variant, or alternatively TedTalkism. You know TedTalks: a sickening phenomenon where science, philosophy and technology are run on the model of American Idol, where celebrities of some kind use a combination of epiphany and personal testimony to recycle fake insights for an audience of mostly white, mostly liberal, mostly middle class millennials. The premise of this megachurch infotainment is that we don’t need to engage with anything in a serious academic manner; rather some new, sexy technology will ‘change the way we think about x, y, z’ and before you know we will innovate ourselves out of our problems. The same people sit around in Starbucks with their MacBook, reading WIRED magazine, jerking off to the latest video about how some new cloud app will revolutionize fucking everything. These are the same kind of people that adorn their LinkedIn profiles with such statements like “I am passionate about blockchain-based crowdfunding platform that matches deserving underprivileged undergrads with funders”. It would never occur to them to actually address the causes of poverty and high tuition fees or to pass moral judgment. It’s all about treating symptoms. Benjamin Bratton, in the only good TedTalk ever, memorably described this tendency as placebo technoradicalism, toying with risk so as to reaffirm the comfortable. The major insight here is that the basic design of liberal society is never discussed. Thus, the irony is that this variant of counterculture is not even progressive because it, like liberalism, believes itself to be objective, un-ideological and therefore above any discussion of ideas. Ideology, like bad breath, is what the other guy has. Economics, if at all, is discussed like a form of metaphysics stuck in some Cold War gear: options for change range from basically what we have plus a little more Hayek, to what we have plus a little more Keynes.
A disregard of hard, seemingly unfashionable levels of analysis and penchant for style over substance is what this variant have in common with the that other loosely defined movement, which one could describe as post-modern. Post-content, however, might be a more apt term. I think you know very well what I refer too. It has been all too easy for you to live in the borrowed splendour of critical thinkers whose work rather uncritically consumed – and by that I mean you’ve read one passage and maybe secondary text for one of your course. Bogus shows of learning, you trying to impress beyond your means. Why? You think that simply paying lip-service this sort of ostentatious postmodernism you have found an easy substitute for an informed opinion on say economic policy or political affairs or on issues of true intellectual and moral import. I mean it would be much harder to do the grunt work and actually find out for instance how the economy works than simply playing bullshit bingo: “There is nothing outside of discourse!”/ “There are no universal standards: it’s all textuality!”/ “We should ban the sexist and race-bating Hemingway from our curriculum!”/ “There is no such thing as ‘facts’ or ‘truth’.”/ “But those are just Western values, we shouldn’t judge countries like Saudi Arabia on their basis!”. The list goes on. Everyone who doesn’t agree with you earns such toxic sobriquets as “racist”, “sexist”, “privileged”, “ableist”, “essentialist”, “positivist” or, gasp, “western white male”. The category mistake that is inevitable made is that a racist ends up being somebody whom you call a racist. Now, I could probably write my Ph.D. on the theses issues, but let’s just stick to that to that ubiquitous statement about truth. Firstly, there is a philosophical temperament that sometimes surfaces here, that indeed thinks that anything less than the whole truth must not be only partial, but just because of that somehow false. Then of course it is the implicit postulation of precisely what it seeks to contest: a performative contradiction, since for there to be no truth, the statement “there is no truth” has to be true itself. How could you possibly be so self-incriminating?
Your political correctness, to extend the tiresome phrase, has reached an alarming level where the university curriculum is subject to the effective censorship of so-called trigger warnings (e.g. a censorship of Virgil, given the depiction of rape in the Aeneid), where satirists and any kind public commentator are forced to eat their words for eliciting the ire of some insufferable undergraduate nit-picking jerkoff who took offense at something he deemed inappropriate. A nasty side effect of this trend is that any mention of freedom of speech and political correctness in the same sentence immediately gets me associated with the likes of Harold Bloom and Donald Trump. Hyperpolarization in a terminal stage.
At best, this whole bullshit might qualify as mildly-entertaining sophistry; at worst it might engender a dangerous absence of, you know, meaning in public debate. Meaning has become the Yeti of political discourse, the pursuit of which is deemed slightly eccentric if not dubious. More to the point, the current trend in academic leftism it is a dangerous departure from the traditional Marxist preoccupation with the unity of theory and practice: within the context of political struggle, theory should guide and prove itself in practice. But this brand speculative leftism has reached a level of abstraction so divorced from reality that it’s no longer part of any struggle. It has arrested the development of a political left able to translate its critical resources into effective, concerted action. The moral energy that signified the activism of, say, the 1960s has become dissipated and introverted: we kept the weed and sex (nothing wrong with that) but dropped the values. Now we are singularly incapable of coordinating our thoughts. When the real issues arise, you guys are found standing dauntlessly at the sides, offering little meaningful commentary. I mean what relevance does your half-baked knowledge of your favourite French thinker’s genealogy have for an analysis of the financial crisis, or urban poverty, or human trafficking? Meanwhile the media becomes an echo-chamber of positive reinforcement, translating the obscure verbiage of post-structuralism into a stupefying and ever-increasing cycle of meaningless activity.
The horrible irony of the whole affair is that you and those motherfuckers in the sociology departments have more often than not completely misappropriated certain things: for instance you seem to believe that Jacques Derrida (for whom I have no love lost) declared there was nothing outside of text, a myth as widespread as the claim that Napoleon was an imp. Equally ridiculous is the assertion that Frankfurt School theorists like Marcuse rejected the Enlightenment. Perhaps the worst indictment is the portrayal of a true intellectual heavyweight and universal mind like Edward Said as the father of identity politics, while in actual fact he detested the movement. A simple glance into the foreword (!) of his magisterial Orientalism would have cleared things up, but somehow you and the riff-raff over at SOAS and the New School managed to fuck it up.
Look at you. What are you accomplishing? You know that famous poem by Yeats that you pretend to have read? About how the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity? It still holds. Most people in this planet are being exploited and oppressed and there are some very tangible reasons why. This is not an issue of shutting stable doors after the horses have bolted, but these reasons certainly have nothing to do with Hemingway’s racism. And yet, all your doomed, if fashionable, brand of counterculture has resulted in so far, apart from allowing you to embellish your own character, is having given birth to a scary mechanism where you can (must) applaud a nude pic of some attention-grabbing narcissist like Kim Kardashian as ‘empowering’.
There is, of course, an alternative to all this. It’s summed up in the injunction: get a life.
By Dominik A. Leusder
The Bell 