Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Oh yes Alfred, so true.

In lit classes, students are usually not given enough secondary commentary about the primary texts, for some weird purist reason. An interesting conversation has been going on for decades or centuries - we're going to avoid it, class. That way we'll get fresh takes from you students, even though we profs couldn't have gotten our degrees without laboriously engaging with the ongoing academic conversation.

it's hard to ensure that everyone is involved in the material, and assess understanding as you go, if you don't find ways to open discussion to as many students as possible.

true; good for all students to feel invited/ welcome into discussion. but necessary prof skill here is to paraphrase, redescribe, redirect student commentary back to the text & disciplinary (e.g. literary, philosophical, etc) relevance.

xxxxp yeah ryan this whole issue, like many others in college teaching, makes me wish i could really know what goes on in my colleagues' classrooms

like, i suspect that there is a LOT of 'let us have a discussion now… tell us what U think… o that is an interesting opinion student x… but maaaaybe there is a question we can ask about it… is there anyone who can think of a goooood question???', and associated waffling/blundering about encouraging and excluding moral and political positions, allowing opportunities to express oneself and not be silenced, etc.

but based on seeing that from positions of less authority (from years of teaching-assistanting) and distantly (gleaning what peers were doing) i long ago veered sharply away from that model. i guess in its place i try to do like you say, and focus on the narrow confines of my discipline, but for me that has happily meant that class conversation can be more dialectical and less discussy. WHEN i'm more deeply prepared for it. when i have to teach on things i'm only superficially conversant with, OR teach material that is itself less deep (crummy articles which give little and presume a lot from their intended academic audiences), i find myself groping back toward 'what do you think the author was saying?' 'can somebody tell me what the argument of this piece was?' bullshit. (which of course rhetorically/logically opens up the space in which people can be denied, invalidated, confirmed, etc. since the appearance given by the discourse is that they're 'sharing their opinion'.) when i can do as i prefer then a lot of the issues are mooted and students can walk away with knowledge and understanding and can sort out their ideological junk on their own from a better position.

i think this applies to potentially all material, too. the only time i've really noticed first-hand (overheard) any student resistance remotely in the same register as that UIUC report was 15 years ago when i was much more green and trying to teach texts like anzaldua's 'borderlands' in a counter-curricular culturally diverse philosophy intro course, when i was not in as strong a position as a teacher and had less of an idea how to treat the (unusual) text as a text like any other. i was forced by circumstances a few years back to pick up a couple of sections of that same course as a teaching assistant (after my phd, while i was teaching another course of my own), so i had the experience of looking back from a different position on something i had already done several times over my proto-career, and any and all hints of dealing lightly with 'perspectives' out of concern not to be inappropriate or unwelcoming, from past iterations, really stood out in my memory. i'd say those made the usage of the texts seem something like calling on the black student in the room to provide 'the african american perspective', or trying to productively scold the white suburban students who say oblivious privileged shit. whereas the more i got more familiar with the text as a text (and texts in general as texts), the more i could just say, ok, did you read the thing? these are some concepts in it, let's analyze them - and let the resultant discourse do its own work.

xp ps

i.e. in college; high school is different case; probably doesn't make as much sense (or it's too soon) then to maintain rigorous boundaries on discussion

too soon in students' education (learning to "read")

have u met college students lately : /

( :/ )

my classes are invariably judged by students to be "hard" and I think that's why I get very little in the way of bullshit discussions, like the kids figure out early on that most of what they could say besides "what is this text saying" is stupid, and I don't encourage discussion for its own sake so they don't say the stupid things. maybe I end up lecturing more than other profs? I teach historical texts and technical topics fwiw. I recognize my privilege as a white male to get students to recognize that the texts are hard and that listening to me is their best chance at figuring them out---though I also inform them day 1 that I'm a Latino, hoping to break a stereotype as we head into conceptual outer space. my hardest task is convincing them that they should care about what I'm teaching about; if I'm successful then they'll have questions and we'll have a discussion emerging from their questions.

my absolute favorite college professor was this old crazy-haired guy with a deeply sonorous voice and a v dry sense of humor who would drone on endlessly about colonial American thinkers/writers/morality/politics. The classes where the professors would let the students basically blather and run the game were always worse, (although I def did my share of participating)

this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schaar (RIP)

it frustrates me how often this thread revolves around university-related flareups because to me the most immediate concern for the abuse of this kind of stuff is in the world of politics, cf http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/05/13/maybe-time-for-change/

you really only need to get through the first set of asteriks there to get at the point i'm gesturing at here, and god does he need to hire an editor

i think you're right about the academic focus--but there's a lot of academics here so we get riled up easy.

(also we need to poll that list of books freddie links in that post)

omigod hoos do I have to read de Boring again

my life is a university-related flareup

you can't use identity-based criticism to dismiss ppl's arguments ('you can only think that bc of white privilege') and then complain when the reactionaries start using the same arguments at you, esp if 'you' is a white guy calling out other white guys. treesh shared a jacobin piece w/ me recently that said pretty much the same thing.

I think complaining about other peoples right to complain is a sort of universal right by now.

ok obv you /can/ do anything but it doesn't make for a particularly coherent political statement

freddie has been on this for a while tho and i think he's otm - gender/race of speaker are not useful metrics for determining the validity of arguments (which obv works in reverse too, there are plenty of reactionaries w/ minoritarian identities)

We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. We celebrate grassroots activist movements like Black Lives Matter, but we insult them by treating them as the same thing as hashtag campaigns, and we don’t build a broader left-wing political movement that could increase their likelihood of success. We spend all day, every day, luxuriating in how much better we are than other people, having convinced ourselves that the work of politics is always external, never internal. We have made politics synonymous with social competition. We’re a mess.

i do think the reason a lot of these issues come up at the university level is bc, probably since ~64, it has been the popular imaginative locus for leftist politics. on one hand that's probably been a good thing (lots of young, passionate ppl pushing politics), on the other hand, it sounds an awful lot like a bunch of college students arguing with each other which is never going to hold much appeal for adults.

agree there's a lot in that blogpost that's otm

The conclusion starts to go off the rails though... Lol like "we should stop being online and start being productive" buddy that horse is already outside the barn

to me the most immediate concern for the abuse of this kind of stuff is in the world of politics

Sorry, Hoos. The abuse of speech in politics is not a problem that can be solved, any more than you can eradicate malice, egoism, impulsiveness and bad judgment from the world. About all you can do is carve out a space where these abuses are exposed, challenged and showed for what they are. In a stable small group, this approach would be enough to inoculate the group against a bad actor, but in an unstable chaotic environment like the internet it will never be nearly enough. And the trolls know it.

by "politics" i don't think hoos meant the world of national politics, but discourse on the "left" more generally

malice, egoism, impulsiveness and bad judgment exist within the left as much as anywhere else

sure but you can't let them have free reign over everything

*rein

why haven't you stopped them, then?

aimless, i don't know what you are arguing here. this is a link to "politics and the english langauge," an essay where orwell points out what he sees as disturbing trends among the left intelligentsia of his time, who have been repeating the same cliches over and over and seem resistant to interpreting their situations "afresh," even at a time when things are changing all the time. his point is to encourage writers to be more aware of how their speech relates to "reality", nebulous that may be, and be on the lookout for what de boer has recently termed "critique drift," which is when a general principle takes over one's mind so completely that it obscures more than it reveals.

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

if orwell were here, would you tell him 1.) this is pointless the war is lost, 2.) i disagree with your analysis. i don't think these problems you identify are real problems, or else they aren't problems for the precise reasons that you give. my analysis is _______________ 3.) something else

that post might sound snarky. wasn't intended as such. i just don't quite understand your position in terms of the desirability or relevance of a substantive meta-critique of political language

xps

re university (and why this tends to flare up there), it's place (along with internet) where rhetoric (word-techne, word-power, self-fashioning/ ego-construction through speech-acts) holds peculiar sway

of course ‘real life’ politics also about rhetoric, but not only (& it also involves rhetoric too often discounted/ misunderstood by the left)

nb that’s one reason pre-election polls often fail

but deej otm that exhortation to move from ‘online’ to ‘real life’ (“being the hardest working person in real life”) may be unhelpful cliche too—

and that (false?) dichotomy not necessarily where relevant distinction is. problem (i think?) is intra-discursive, as opposed to within vs. outside of (online) discourse

xp

When you tell me "you can't let them have free rein over everything", I can't figure out what you have in mind that would be any different than "carv[ing] out a space where these abuses are exposed, challenged and showed for what they are"? Or how what Orwell is doing in his justly famous essay is any different, either.

So, I have a similar difficulty understanding what you think you are telling me that is a corrective to or amplification of my earlier statement.

LOL @ Mordy's blog post. What self-congratulatory, generalized nonsense. That Star Wars ring theory was more convincing.

presumably the rl comment from freddie just means "stop thinking arguing on twitter counts as civic duty"

adam i didn't post any blog posts. which are you referring to?

speaking of malice, egoism, impulsiveness and bad judgment, FdB in his looong examination of the toast misses the point of Nicole Cliffe's "list." is it a joke? not really, it's a dare. i dare you to whine about this. i dare you to not get it. pipe up, fucker, see what it gets you with me. can you help yourself? no, i bet you can't.

i mean, look at the followup: http://the-toast.net/2015/05/13/my-favourite-deleted-comments-from-the-white-dude-book-list/

ok, fine, FdB isn't down with that kind of tribal entertainment. but he doesn't seem to really get why it exists. laziness? idk, maybe. i don't see how an unlazy, more diligent and industrious left would be any clearer of this kind of middle-finger raising stuff.

"hacky garbage" not up to the Toast's occasionally "perceptive" best? oh well, they can't all be hits i guess.

doesn't he get get how furious people are? it misses him what underlies the blank-faced non-humor of a post like this. what a respite it is to see something that's as fed up as you are. if there's one thing i've figured out from reading enough of the "online left" "identity politics" ppl is the realness of anger. living in the majority culture but marked as outside it in some/many ways is exhausting on a level i'll never get. people are pissed! they're pissed at white men! it's all so unmanageable for dB.

And none of this is even to begin to ask what, exactly, any of this stuff accomplishes, how continuing to build this immense shibboleth White Dudes — made by white people, for the entertainment of white people — actually helps in the fight against racism or sexism. Set those basic questions of what we’re actually doing here aside.

...

One-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen.

are you sure? like are you really sure they don't? it all counts, buddy! i'm trying to imagine a left that was devoid of these things and it looks like something already empty and decapitated.

What did Emma Goldman say? "On the internet I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to do mean posts."

xp Mordy: the post which opines "We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s" while not taking the slightest effort to attempt such an elucidation.

Maybe I am just not a fan of meta-critiquing in general. I say if you have a problem w the way things are, try and explain a better way to do it, rather than knocking it down.

oh ok i was just c/ping from h00s deboer link

FdB in his looong examination of the toast

god this was profoundly embarassing

deej otm that exhortation to move from ‘online’ to ‘real life’ (“being the hardest working person in real life”) may be unhelpful cliche too

i go back and forth on this--obviously work being done online is valuable (its what i do for a living), but a large part of its overall value comes from its impact on people's offline lives. i think FDB's point is that when we prioritize discursive warfare over living impact, we're losing the plot. and i'd agree.

and discursive warfare *is* living impact when we live online, clearly--i guess i'm just saying putting all the eggs in that basket misses the boat for me.

hoos i'm thinking of this not really in the context of #irl organizing work that you do but in the context of ongoing anti-harassment struggles, overlapping with school, writing, work, dating, and so on. people are struggling to just be online, freddie doesn't like the jokes. i don't want to over-elevate "discursive warfare" either. who would want to do that, after all.

need it even be said, that one bay area fanatic who equated opposition to TPP to a lynching is a jackass.

it was interesting how easily he invoked the language of anti-racism and anti-sexism to defend his disgustingness though. when people start thinking too much in stereotypes -- this is a brocialist view, authentic people with real struggles think this other thing, listen up dudebros, etc. -- it just makes things cloudy and dumb. imo.

lol @ "brocialist"

some people have found that language useful in articulating real things they've encountered though, so i feel weird dismissing it. but what deboer calls "critique drift" is, i think, real. maybe stereotypes can only work for progressives at first, but eventually they are just going to reify identity in troubling, exclusionary ways. like "stuff white people like," which claims to paint "white" stuff as overly bland, but has the effect of 1.) closing nonwhite people off from stuff many connect to, like artisan handbags and soap and indie music 2.) implying that non-white culture is something other than safe and civilized.

that deblah piece is amazingly incoherent. it starts by picking on something that is probably universally acknowledged to be deranged, something massively outlying in stupidity, and then it somehow ties it into the majority of the piece, which is on the toast, and which turns the just sort of ok but maybe a bit clever toast article into something fucking amazing.

like the toast piece doesn't say they are good books to own or bad books, worthwhile to read or not. it is just books that it claims white men own at least one of. if you find that somehow offensive, that's what you're bringing to the table freddy, not what the toast put out there.

"Tags: books, i own most of these books myself, men, undisputable facts"

One of the weirdest parts of FDB's argument is the assertion that we're all on the same page w/r/t goals, where after reading a few of his pieces you start to wonder if that's, you know, actually true.

a lot of the biggest problems w/ this kind of language is just a simple lack of intersectional thinking, right?

i don't want to open a can of worms where i haven't researched the full dimension of the discussion around it, but if someone thinks i'm off-tm with this i'm sure there are plenty of better examples. But i think for example of the phenomenon of 'manspreading' or men taking up space on the subway, and how there's a reasonable seeming argument to me that oftentimes the policing of this ignores a class difference: that a post collegiate with an office job accusing a guy exhausted from his manual labor gig of 'manspreading' is probably not thinking about issues of class. This isn't a problem, though, of person X being too PC or too controlled by modern left discourse as much as it is a lack of awareness regarding entitlement which is what this whole thing is combating

so i mean, apply this to the white man books list: from the POV of a person uncomfortable w/ the grammar of institutional power, who feels on the 'outside,' to see a list of books that they've been told to read in high school, and to be the only one in their family who was like, i'm going to read these books and get to college, and then they do it & are suddenly told that they'd invested their time and energy into a false idol of the white man's educational system—it's that system they should be mad at, yes, but does this article reach this person, or does it only address those already familiar with that conversation—everyone who's already keyed in to the 'rules of the game'?

idk as a dare i don't think it's wrong, if it destabilizes the canon before rhetorical straw man from that last example gets to school then good, although i kind of get where freddie is coming from when one gets the feeling that this book list can have the effect of seeming impenetrable to those who haven't grown up in a literary household, discussing novels & understanding that the canon they received in high school wasn't to be trusted

the piece doesn't say anything about how those books are a "false idol of the white man's educational system" this is such a fake strawman "only person in their family" thing you've invented i don't even know. and like the list has James Clavell (who is so perfect to start it off!) and tucker max and fuckin seabiscuit and The 9/11 Commission Report -- its not doing what you think it is.

have we talked about why fdb's chosen selfy is a blurry "this facial expression"?

that deblah piece is amazingly incoherent.

otm.

The piece in the Toast listing 79 titles of books "that literally all white men own" was even more incoherent and pointless, btw, in that it said as close to nothing at all as it is possible to say in that many words. I own maybe six of the 79 books and I am a white man, but somehow neither of these facts, nor their confluence, came as a surprise or a shock to me. You could have impressed me as much if you told me I also eat toast or own socks.