Re: <nettime> Applebaum, etcetera

[Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>]

On 5 May 2022, at 8:38, Michael Benson wrote:

> In a windy piece in the NYRB on her last book, Jackson Lears
> tries to palm Applebaum off as someone under the influence
> of behavioral economist Karen Stenner, who (he says) views
> ideological differences as "merely" reflections of varying
> "cognitive styles." I think that's a bit dismissive, given
> that it's pretty undeniable that such "styles" (that is, of
> the kind that tend towards actual cognition rather than the
> reverse) tend to produce the most resistance to the
> authoritarian impulse and the most awareness of ideological
> manipulation. And he quotes Applebaum from her book
> "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of
> Authoritarianism" (Doubleday, 2021) as observing:
> "Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot
> tolerate complexity... there is nothing intrinsically
> ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’ about this instinct at all." He
> calls this a view stemming from "the rarefied atmosphere of
> the meritocratic elite, where political disagreements
> evaporate into elusive distinctions between those who can
> tolerate complexity and those who cannot."

It seems like everyone's agreed, in theory if not quite so diligently in practice, that 'pre-screening' is for the dogs. That's no surprise, because, put so crudely, it's yet another ~name for the purity tests that have bedeviled so much left–right debate — or, better, left–right shadow-boxing — for much of the last century. But if we blur our focus a bit, it becomes more serious: not the cartoon version ('does so-and-so meet Ideological Criterion X, allowing me to sully my eyes and mind with their latest publication?'), but the subtler problem of assessing how to apply what we know of so-and-so's past work to inform what they're saying now. The cartoon version is can pass itself off as a scientific-executive rigor: decisive, clear, efficient, brief. The subtler version is and will remain an art: weighing changing contexts, looking for shifting emphases, tentatively filling in the blanks, teasing out idiosyncracies, and all the rest.

Lears is an interesting case in his own right. He's a southern intellectual, which used to be rare but now seems to be a critically endangered species. His dissertation, published as _No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920_ (published in '81 by Pantheon when it was a leftish powerhouse and was nominated for an National Book Critics Circle Award) is a dazzling analysis of the fusion of anti-modernism, anti-intellectualism, and anti-cosmopolitanism during the US's industrialization. His second book, _Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America_ ('94), is narrower but great. I've only half-read his third, _Something for Nothing: Luck in America_ ('03), but have planned to get back to it for years now. If you take a step back, you can see how neatly these books also trace — beyond their ostensible focus — the rise of conservatism in the US, from the forces that coalesced into Reaganism through the neoliberal substitution of individualist fortune (in every sense) for social welfare. And, granted, this is really obscure, but his article on "Intellectuals and Intellectualism" for the _Encyclopedia of American Social History_, seemed utterly brilliant when I read it decades ago.  I think that might be where he diagnosed what he called the "cult of bourgeois social transparency" — the quintessentially yankee faith that souls can commune, and the kind of thing that would lead, say, George W. Bush to believe he could look into Putin's eyes and "see his soul." That might help us to understand Lears's impulse to write off Applebaum as mired in some cognitive style. His entire career has been in the north, but — and he knows this as well as anyone — his own cognitive style is pretty southern, if only in its sensitivities to northern pretensions and presumptions like "the rarefied atmosphere of the meritocratic elite."

So: Applebaum is a moving target, and Lears is too. Pretty much everyone worth paying attention to is as well — one good reason that the 'pre-screening' we all disavow (even as we do it, all the time) is unhelpful.  But, as Brian often notes, in a time when institutions and ideologies are collapsing, that kind of consumptive-cognitive filtering becomes especially dangerous: a way to 'perform' recognizable political stances even as their foundations are melting into air. What we need now, more than anything, is intellectual 'transiness': openness, eclecticism, ambiguity, questing. Because, it seems to me, we know where the alternative is headed: nuclear annihilation.

Cheers,
Ted
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