I think, although I’ve probably been properly among the literati less than you, the draw of managerialism comes from a sense that there are simply too many of us and too many variables for there not to be some overhead without our blowing each other up or using up all the resources etc. I’d presume it emanates originally from the admiration for the early Cold War thinkers which seems so prevalent even when submerged under IE; Maoist affect or whatever. Becca Rothfeld has Trilling, as so much less relevantly do I, while John Ganz was just quoting Adorno’s categorical imperative the other day. The dream of some sort of stable arrangement where the writers could scribble, painters paint and philosophers ponder without having to scramble around hustling and being someone’s life coach (as Blake Smith was describing it the other day) is a seductive one, although it appears as unrealistic in our moment as either of Plato’s cities-in-speech.
Also, don’t be intimidated by the blue checks or whatever, lit blog fight club is fun!
I can understand the wish to be incorporated, which writers/artists have mostly been throughout history, and I'm sure it was restful, to just have to ornament a pre-given script. Some days I could go for that myself. But the wish to sermonize to the laity and to act like snitches, the wish always to preach and punish, is the one I find more puzzling. At least the Cold War people were more properly divided within themselves on this; Arendt hated the mob and Adorno the petit bourgeoisie, but they both knew they had more to fear from bureaucrats and technocrats. Trilling himself sheds light on the matter, as I once polemically quoted against Ganz—
—and as for Adorno's imperative, its uselessness can be demonstrated by the fact that Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and this point probably even Hamas all think they're fulfilling it. It's become just another warrant for murder.
The undeniable truth of that Trilling quote aside, I go back and forth on how relevant I think some of those midcentury critiques of bureaucracy are today-they seem tailored to either the Soviet situation or a kind of welfare state that is even in nominally socialist Europa mostly no longer with us. Lasch is a better critic of that sort of thing, even if I don’t find his lowercase t trad populist answer particularly convincing. Yes, there’s a side of Trilling which is passed down through Hawthorne and Melville, and which one finds in the way he read James and Freud, a suspicion that action itself is somehow evil, that the only redemptive thing is the contemplation of the beautiful object. Whenever I read him (or them) I’m always half raging against them becuase I see so much of that suspicion in myself, and I often suspect it of being nothing more than an alibi for ignoring the horror outside. Then again, what you say is also true: it’s not as though anyone has ever managed to make the screaming stop, and one wouldn’t want to be in the situation of still having the same horror outside without beautiful things to contemplate.
Yes, Emerson says this too in the essay on Goethe I quoted in the last IC episode:
"If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril."
Probably the shared bias of the artist and intellectual there, and our derivation in the modern age from the clerisy. I don't know if I think action is evil, but, to the political point, I have come to see activism that way; all that shouting and marching, but in the end they're just foot soldiers for some old or new regime. I still think there are enough technocrats and bureaucrats around, even if they've now gone to war with each other over the rest of us as the prize, to keep criticizing!
Interesting reflections as always. If we're talking about the very narrow subset of people of good will who think that classic literature can and should be taught in college classrooms, I'm somewhat skeptical that the real debates in scholarship and in critical approach that play out in academic writing map onto pedagogy as neatly as one might think. This may have been different in the 80s and 90s, but in our age my impression is of broad parameters that are more shared than different. I'm absolutely positive that my acquaintances who teach at right wing civics centers teach classes that I would find totally fine and good and that they wouldn't find much to object to in my classes (deficiencies arising from my personal limitations aside). Of course, that raises the question of the relationship between scholarship and pedagogy: by no means an easy question.
Thank you! I agree with you, but I mainly had in mind how very narrow this subset has become. Obviously it varies by institution and institution type, but in the R1 English department where I was a grad student and adjunct from 2006-2021, teaching classic literature became less and less of a priority, and was positively discouraged in some contexts.
I think, although I’ve probably been properly among the literati less than you, the draw of managerialism comes from a sense that there are simply too many of us and too many variables for there not to be some overhead without our blowing each other up or using up all the resources etc. I’d presume it emanates originally from the admiration for the early Cold War thinkers which seems so prevalent even when submerged under IE; Maoist affect or whatever. Becca Rothfeld has Trilling, as so much less relevantly do I, while John Ganz was just quoting Adorno’s categorical imperative the other day. The dream of some sort of stable arrangement where the writers could scribble, painters paint and philosophers ponder without having to scramble around hustling and being someone’s life coach (as Blake Smith was describing it the other day) is a seductive one, although it appears as unrealistic in our moment as either of Plato’s cities-in-speech.
Also, don’t be intimidated by the blue checks or whatever, lit blog fight club is fun!
I can understand the wish to be incorporated, which writers/artists have mostly been throughout history, and I'm sure it was restful, to just have to ornament a pre-given script. Some days I could go for that myself. But the wish to sermonize to the laity and to act like snitches, the wish always to preach and punish, is the one I find more puzzling. At least the Cold War people were more properly divided within themselves on this; Arendt hated the mob and Adorno the petit bourgeoisie, but they both knew they had more to fear from bureaucrats and technocrats. Trilling himself sheds light on the matter, as I once polemically quoted against Ganz—
https://grandhotelabyss.tumblr.com/post/682681094182748160/john-ganz-the-emerging-tech-lash-with-this
—and as for Adorno's imperative, its uselessness can be demonstrated by the fact that Israel, Russia, Ukraine, and this point probably even Hamas all think they're fulfilling it. It's become just another warrant for murder.
The undeniable truth of that Trilling quote aside, I go back and forth on how relevant I think some of those midcentury critiques of bureaucracy are today-they seem tailored to either the Soviet situation or a kind of welfare state that is even in nominally socialist Europa mostly no longer with us. Lasch is a better critic of that sort of thing, even if I don’t find his lowercase t trad populist answer particularly convincing. Yes, there’s a side of Trilling which is passed down through Hawthorne and Melville, and which one finds in the way he read James and Freud, a suspicion that action itself is somehow evil, that the only redemptive thing is the contemplation of the beautiful object. Whenever I read him (or them) I’m always half raging against them becuase I see so much of that suspicion in myself, and I often suspect it of being nothing more than an alibi for ignoring the horror outside. Then again, what you say is also true: it’s not as though anyone has ever managed to make the screaming stop, and one wouldn’t want to be in the situation of still having the same horror outside without beautiful things to contemplate.
Yes, Emerson says this too in the essay on Goethe I quoted in the last IC episode:
"If I were to compare action of a much higher strain with a life of contemplation, I should not venture to pronounce with much confidence in favor of the former. Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which all action must pay. Act, if you like,—but you do it at your peril."
Probably the shared bias of the artist and intellectual there, and our derivation in the modern age from the clerisy. I don't know if I think action is evil, but, to the political point, I have come to see activism that way; all that shouting and marching, but in the end they're just foot soldiers for some old or new regime. I still think there are enough technocrats and bureaucrats around, even if they've now gone to war with each other over the rest of us as the prize, to keep criticizing!
Interesting reflections as always. If we're talking about the very narrow subset of people of good will who think that classic literature can and should be taught in college classrooms, I'm somewhat skeptical that the real debates in scholarship and in critical approach that play out in academic writing map onto pedagogy as neatly as one might think. This may have been different in the 80s and 90s, but in our age my impression is of broad parameters that are more shared than different. I'm absolutely positive that my acquaintances who teach at right wing civics centers teach classes that I would find totally fine and good and that they wouldn't find much to object to in my classes (deficiencies arising from my personal limitations aside). Of course, that raises the question of the relationship between scholarship and pedagogy: by no means an easy question.
Thank you! I agree with you, but I mainly had in mind how very narrow this subset has become. Obviously it varies by institution and institution type, but in the R1 English department where I was a grad student and adjunct from 2006-2021, teaching classic literature became less and less of a priority, and was positively discouraged in some contexts.
Yes, too true.