I just went through some complicated online process to apply for the position I will hold next semester when I am teaching at UNC Chapel Hill. The form identified the position I was applying for as "Visiting Assistant Professor."
I think I may have passed what they call in grocery stores the "sell – by date."
LFC and John Rapko have given me the Sally Field moment that we all secretly crave. Forget about my threat to ban comments. Even Marc Susselman aka AA is welcome here, though please Marc, in moderation.
In 1977, my first wife, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, published A Feast of Words, a literary biography of Edith Wharton. The Publisher, Oxford University Press, arranged for her to do a little tour of book clubs and such to advertise the book. Naturally, I went along. At one stop, she appeared on the program with Garson Kanin, a well-known movie director and producer and the husband of the famous actress Ruth Gordon. Kanin had published a memoir of his time in Hollywood.
I was too nervous just to sit and listen, so I stood by
the side of the room during the event. When
it came time for Kanin to speak, he stood up in front of the audience with his
hands behind his back and told a series of amusing stories about famous
actors and actresses. He seemed to be enjoying himself considerably, and the
audience responded in kind. So far as they could tell, he was completely
relaxed but from where I stood, I could see that his hands were not clasped lightly
behind him. Instead, they twisted and writhed like snakes trapped in a box. I
marveled at his ability to maintain a casual, offhand, relaxed demeanor while
he was obviously tied up in knots of tension.
One question spot quiz: why am I telling you this story from
45 years ago?
I have decided to try blogging without comments. During the 13 years that I have been blogging, there have been a total of 38,572 comments, if Google is to be believed. That is a lot of comments. I have enjoyed a great many of them, but in recent months I have grown weary of the comments section being dominated by a few people who seem in many cases only tangentially interested in what I am saying.
There are a dozen or so people who seem to have gotten to
know one another rather well through the intermediation of the comments section
on this blog, and I do not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of
continuing to communicate with one another, so I will hold open the comments
section for another few days and they can, if they wish, use the comments
section to exchange email addresses with one another. Then, in a few days, I
will turn off the comments entirely.
I will still be available, of course. My email address is
listed right at the top of the first page of the blog and anyone who wishes to
communicate directly with me is welcome to do so, as in fact many of you have
done over the years.
Next week, as I mentioned, I shall make a guest appearance in a graduate philosophy/law school course at Georgia State. The topic for that day is Charles Mills’s book, The Racial Contract. I thought I would start by reading a brief passage that I find especially powerful and then take off from that on a riff that goes in various directions. Here is the passage, from pages 17-18:
“The Racial Contract requires its own peculiar moral and
empirical epistemology, its norms and procedures for determining what counts as
moral and factual knowledge of the world. … There is an understanding about
what counts as a correct, objective interpretation of the world, and for
agreeing to this view, one is (“contractually”) granted full cognitive standing
in the polity, the official epistemic community.
But for the Racial Contract, things are necessarily more complicated.
The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial
polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is
divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said one has an agreement
to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with
the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white
epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.
Thus in effect, on
matters related to race, the racial contract prescribes for its signatories an
inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of
localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general
be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”
This is an extraordinary passage, a brilliant passage. It
is, in a way, the central passage of the entire book. It echoes the magnificent passage in the section of chapter 1 of Capital entitled “The Fetishism of
Commodities and the Secret Thereof” in which Marx first describes as absurd the
central thesis of bourgeois economics and then says that such forms of thought
express “with social validity” the production of commodities.
Just as one can unpack all of Capital from that brief passage, so I believe one can unpack
Charles Mills’s book from the brief passage quoted above.
We shall see.
While I work up a response to the two comments on yesterday's post, I do want to express my pleasure at the success finally of a group of Amazon workers in establishing a union. That is a splendid first step. Let us hope there are many more like it
Your responses have been an embarrassment of riches – so many questions and suggestions for further blog posts! I shall certainly read Ray Geuss’s book when it comes out, and then I can comment on it as seems appropriate. I will also try to say something about C. I. Lewis, the professor who influenced me most deeply in ways that I tried to capture in my autobiography. But today, I will try my hand at responding to Fritz Poebel’s request that I address the subject of reparations. This is for me an unusually difficult subject to get my head around so these comments may not be as polished and coherent as I would like.
Human beings live by collectively (although not necessarily
voluntarily) laboring to transform nature so that it can meet our needs and
satisfy our desires. In capitalist
economic systems like those that now organize virtually every country in the
world (including China, of course, regardless of its nominal allegiance to
something it calls “communism”), there are two structures of systematic
inequality. The first, which is essential to capitalism, is the exploitation of
labor by the owners of capital, exploitation that results in ever greater
inequalities of wealth and income. The second, which is I believe not essential
to capitalism but nevertheless is found almost everywhere, is the relative
inequality of exploitation that make some subgroups of the population – women,
persons of color, and so forth – even worse off than those groups that are
favored in the system of exploitation.
Capitalists by and large are inclined to be equal opportunity
exploiters, although they are of course happy to use the biases, prejudices, and
resentments of white men to serve their interests. The demand that women or
persons of color be paid the same exploitative wage as white men, that women
and persons of color be given the same educational and employment opportunities
as white men and be advanced in the hierarchy of jobs equally as are white men,
does not fundamentally threaten the ability of capital to exploit labor. That
is why one frequently finds large wealthy powerful corporations filing amicus
briefs in support of such things as affirmative action programs at universities.
Indeed, the demand by women to be given equal opportunity in the labor market
serves the interests of capital by bringing more members of households into the
workforce and correspondingly making it possible to reduce the wages of those
employed by capital. When two adult members of a household enter the workforce
full-time, the pressure is taken off employers to pay a “family wage” to an
employed man.
Does any of this imply that there is no point in fighting
for women’s liberation, black liberation, gay liberation, and in general for
the removal of all of the differential disadvantages that have come to be built
in the American economic and social system? Good God, no! Of course not! Those
struggles, to which I have in small ways contributed over the course of my
life, are worthwhile on their own terms. Beyond that, I believe they are
essential in any larger effort to confront the underlying structure of
exploitation as a whole.
All of which amounts to no more than a clearing of my throat
before I address the subject of reparations.
The owners of capital would like nothing better than to have everyone
believe that the demand for reparations is a fight between exploited white workers and
the even more greatly exploited black workers. That was the great genius in the
“occupy Wall Street” movement. By casting the struggle as a fight of the 99%
against the 1%, it made clear that the real enemy was capital, not white
workers. (Never mind the percentages.)
What is needed is not to take away some of what white families have and give it
to black families, but to take away some of what rich families have and give it
differentially both to black families and to white families but in a way that
equalizes their well-being across racial boundaries.
Well, that is just an elementary beginning. Now I must get a
haircut to prepare myself for my upcoming zoom appearances. There is no need
for me to appear as both old and shaggy!
