Apologia for Political Correctness

Music: Cocteau Twins: Garlands (1982)

I wish I could say that I found the photograph of 60 or so teens giving the Nazi salute surprising, but we've known—certainly ever since I can remember—that our anti-racism vaccines are ineffective.  These white, fascist zombies—which is to say, their infection is not a reflective one—are probably less ubiquitous than we think. The mass mediated overexposure of the extreme does give us a skewed worldview.  Still, there are certainly more racist zombies than folks in my line of work (that is, in the academy) often suppose.  Given the stories that are coming out from other students about the rampant racism at Baraboo High School, and the alarming racist sympathies of many administrators, the environment sounds a lot like where I went to high school. Bullying on the basis of gender, race, religion, sexuality, and so on was a common thing where I grew up.   

Jordan Blue, in the upper right hand corner, refused to salute. We should all be more like Jordan.

Still, that a photographer and these students thought this was a permissible cruelty should be alarming, even if this is not a surprise. And, of course, everyone knows the "permission" comes from the intoxicants of Trumplandia, easing a heretofore weak but nevertheless working clutch that makes driving drunk a little bit harder.  I am going to argue that this clutch is "political correctness," and that we need to be defending political correctness, but not as code for policing others' statements or calling folks out on the basis of some epistemological privilege.  Those who rally against political correctness—which is a sizable group across the political spectrum—perceive those of us who protect it as enacting a kind of smug arrogance.  I think (and feel) that we should return to thinking about "political correctness" for what it used to be when I was in college, something more akin to "political sensitivity," or perhaps "other attunement": the clutch you have to depress, the "what if," before you kick expression into a new gear.  Political correctness is a pause for reflection, not censorship.

I have an example of what I mean from this past weekend, when I attended a conference.  I was having drinks with a friend and we were discussing a mutual friend who identifies as genderqueer.  They use "they/them" pronouns and I slipped up and used the wrong pronoun.  My friend said, gently and with kindness, "you mean 'they.'"  "Oh yes," I responded, "I'm sorry.  Thanks for reminding me."  He responded that he didn't mean to police my language, which was unnecessary, I replied that it's not policing and it's ok to remind me that we're part of a larger community.  This, to me, is what "political correctness" has meant, lifting each other up as a community, not to be confused with identity politics, which has evolved into an essentialism in many ways that undermines the original point of identity politics.  That's a whole different issue, of course, I just want to make sure I separate political correctness from identity politics conceptually. 

Perhaps a term other than "political correctness" might be used, since it is so widely disliked as a “devil term,” but the original idea behind it, which also animates in some sense the growing awareness of micro-aggressions, the kindness intended with trigger warnings, and so on, is the clutch: political correctness is not thought policing, it is simply a point of reflection, a pause, in speaking or writing to consider what you are about to say. 

As a person influenced a lot by (post)structuralism and psychoanalysis, I tend to think that speech and thought and writing work with each other so tightly we have an egg or chicken problem: sometimes the words speak us, right?  Sometimes we mess up, mindlessly, and so it’s good to have a friend stop you and say, “did you mean that?” And our attitude to these reminders should be reparation, not defensiveness. I have regrettably lost more than one friend for my own lack of reflection and awareness—I can only wince thinking about how many more friends I would have lost were it not for political correctness.

So in my mind political correctness is not as much about policing thought or speech because, well, that's hard outside of some coercive context.  It's about creating a pause or fostering mindfulness and attending to the person or people you are engaging.  And because in a real sense we are each other—that is, self-consciousness is in many ways a composite of relationships with others past and present—it's ok to be someone else's clutch, not in some policing manner but in a sort-of community-minded way: "you mean 'them/they.'"

Teaching political correctness, then, is something like what we term in my field of study "rhetorical sensitivity," not only to others but to yourself because, well, you are what you say; you persuade yourself in how you speak. 

I'm reminded, too, of Richard Rorty's defense of political correctness: in the academy, at least, it has done more good than harm, and attuned us to the suffering of others.   The point of moral progress is to include more and more of the previously excluded and marginalized.  The Nazi salute by these kids--who are more than likely woefully ignorant of history and what it represents other than their privilege and cultural power--is a consequence of the erosion of political correctness, the attacks on political correctness hastened by the climate of hate orchestrated by the White House.  

As we widen the domain of inclusion, pronouns are changing—radically and quickly. Those of you who resist this changing need look no further than this abhorrent photograph: without the clutch you get a Nazi salute.

So I say again, it may be that the term "political correctness" needs to be retired, that it is saddled with the connotation of thought policing.  I have been trying to think of an alternative term to protect the idea that it represents to me--the pause, the clutch, the holding space--but I haven't quite come up with an alternative.    Or, perhaps, it's precisely the negative connotation of the term that we need to draw attention to its defense?     

Stop Making Monsters

Music: Biosphere: Substrata (2011)

 A favorite Sunday tradition is reading the paper and listening to the political talk shows on television.  Unfortunately, paper delivery is no longer reliable, but I can certainly count on generic norms for politicians.  Today the discussion on at least two of the shows concerned "responsibility" in relation to two attempts at mass, targeted carnage: the murder of eleven faithful at a Pittsburgh synagogue and 13 pipe bombs sent to leaders in the Democratic Party.  John Dickerson put it a number of politicians: hasn't President Trump enflamed "tribal" hatreds, and shouldn't he accept some responsibility for these attacks?

None of the talking heads would assign blame to the president, while a number did suggest that Trump's pugnacious "tone" has exacerbated scapegoating.  All of them described the killers as "deranged," such as Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford.  Despite research suggesting a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic violence over the last two years, Lankford sees "no connection" to Trump's rhetoric (video is here).

Lankford, of course, appears like a fool: like water for fishes, of course hateful rhetoric from the president enflames hatred.  Regardless of your methodological leanings, we have pretty solid evidence to suggest violent media enflames aggression and "anti-social" attitudes.  While there is no causal link between, say, Trump encouraging violence--even when he means it as a joke, sorry not sorry--it's also quite silly to insist the rhetoric of influential leaders does not "influence" people to do bad things.  History is instructive here, right?

As I've been writing for many years, thanks to the insights of the Frankfurt School on authoritarian personalities, the story is not complicated: life is hard.  Trying to live the good life, trying to do right by others, trying to take care of one's family, it's not easy.  What Freud called the "over-I" or "superego" refers to all the moral codes and rules and laws and sensibilities that we learn and inherit as a member of a given culture.  Unfortunately, the demands of "society" can be pretty brutal. So we have all sorts of ways to relieve the pressure, mostly intoxicants of some sort or another--such as, say, going to the movies or binging a television show.  Powerful leaders are such intoxicants: by allowing their sense of responsibility or ethical perspectives temporarily take-over the superego functions, people can find relief.  This is how authoritarians always come to power, by substituting their judgments or moods for our own.  In this way, for example, a long dominant norm of "political correctness"--which basically boils down to the Golden Rule and trying to be empathic with difference--has been dismantled in about two years. 

For many, I think the question concerns to what extent has the (re)installation of hatreds and other-anxiety depend on Trump?  Has he succeeded in completely perverting (or rather, exposing the perversion of) the national political imaginary? That remains to be seen, however, there's no question serious reparations are now necessary--unless there is a revolution hastened by an endless parade of "general crises" that, so far, seem to be part of the motor of neoliberal-capitalism.  

I have been thinking a lot about the repairing that must be done, both ideologically and structurally.  Since I've been arguing for some years now that rhetorical norms in U.S. culture are increasingly perverse, a number have asked me what might be some correctives or solutions.  My first response is that politics has always been perverse, and so what Trump has done is, in some sense, expose the ugly underbelly with a kind of humorless meanness.  Such exposure still gets people killed, and so while we can see the hate that underwrites the machine better, the response is not to cover it back up. 

But this is precisely what the political talk this morning has done: by isolating violence to Trump or "deranged" crazy persons, the systemic character of a structuring violence is obscured.  To even begin to fix, reform, or "revolutionize" the political machinery, we need to see these attempts at mass, targeted violence as a kind of outbreak, a reactionary response at the level of a people and a culture, not this or that mentally ill person.  Such persons, like Trump, are reflections of an illness that produces them.  These killers are not the cause of structural violence; they are the effect.

Hitting (Close to) Home

Music: The War on Drugs: A Deeper Understanding (2017)

 It has taken me some weeks to post my reflections on the calamitous case of Avital Ronell and Nimrod Reitman.  I won't rehearse the case because, if you're reading this, you're probably already well apprised or dogged (for those who are not or just happened by, there is a good overview here).  Unquestionably, a primary reason that I have been slow to post is because Ronell is one of my academic heroes: I love her work; I've been following her writing ever since I discovered Dictations in 2005; I've seen her speak twice and met her once; I've cited her ideas and jokes; I've taught her work for years; she's even weighed in--through a mutual friend--on a career decision I had to make. It is a much harder homecoming when you are forced to meet your heroes at the academic laundromat ("I thought you were Victoria Vertis . . . .").

In part, however, I've been slow to post because school has started again and, coupled with recommendation letter writing season and the blind-reviewing bonanza typical of the beginning of fall term, academic whack-a-mole is in full swing.  In part I've been slow because new essays, reflections, op-eds, and other kinds of underclothes keep getting dumped in the public washing drum—which keeps rattling in a seemingly never-ending cycle of intrigue and remembering forgotten chewing gum. In part I'm slow because my defense of Ronell on social media turned out to be unexpectedly exhausting—but certainly not "misguided" or disgruntled because I could not harass my own students, as some suggested.  And in part this has taken me some time because I know my opinion may be unwelcome for those who smell the scandal as a matter of principle instead of seeing it as the principled, muddy tangle it has actually become.  

One celebrated screed published by a former teaching assistant asserts Ronell's reputation for abusiveness is so well-known it's "boring," taking the tangential opportunity to disparage the enterprise of criticism as an infantile quest for superiority on the pedantic playground (the gleeful, self-congratulatory tweets from the author slacked my jaw).  Another extreme is a website created specifically for mounting public defenses of Ronell, the "Theory Illuminati," which appears to be the only place to find counterpoints to what has emerged as the reproaching party-line (the backchannel here, mentioned in some of the posts on the site, is that mainstream outlets have denied Ronell and her supporters space to rebut screeds and refute accusations).  No doubt there are good reasons for the website, but the off-putting tone and counter-punching pitch seems to echo the clamor of righteousness; more than a few pieces might be said to reinforce the charge that Theoryland is an incestuous world of "cultish subjugation." Regardless, in either or any case, it strikes me strangely that so many who have waded into this sexless-swamp seem so lacking in rhetorical sensitivity: petulant pot-shots, collateral damage tangents, and dehumanizing personal attacks from any angle just makes the critical humanities appear foolish to a public already primed toward anti-intellectualism.  The absurd but possible consequence of the apocalyptic rhetoric is that Reitman and Ronell fade from the "conversation" altogether and we are left with the subtextual stake at large: the right of the theoretical humanities to exist (despite the derrière presently staining stately settees in the Oval Office, though, I still think such an  absurd conclusion is hyperbolic). 

For the record, I do not condone some of Ronell's transgressions of intimacy (she has not denied a number of Reitman's unusual stories) or probable abuses of power.  We do not know, of course, but even if the over-the-top flirtation was a consensual mode of friendship, there are just some things one shouldn't say to a subordinate in a power-fraught relationship.  But, I also don't condemn Ronell as a serial abuser either, despite the popular pressure to do so, not only because there does not seem to be a pattern of it, or because there are many competing testimonies from current and former students about her nurturing and care , but also because I am leery of the all-too-American habit of turning humans into monsters, usually as part of a projective process that culminates in the perverse cult of the kill ("I know these claims seem overblown, and yet . . . [stab stab stab]").  It's not simply that Nimrod Reitman or Andrea Long Chu or others want Ronell punished; they want her destroyed, they want a public  immolation.

This said, my argument was and remains that very little of the public discussion about this case has to do with the alleged abuse and counter-abuse; it certainly has little to do with what popularly flies under the banner of "sexual."  As Corey Robin wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education, this calamity is really about power--and more to the point, a lack of it for graduate students. Just based on personal conversations, very few graduate students think or feel they can or should share their opinions about the case because of their precarious positions and plights in the higher education industrial complex.  I will come back to this point in an affective solidarity, but to get there I return to what I said on social media when the story initially broke: the controversy surrounding Ronell is not about Ronell. The scandal has been a catalyst and an excuse to oxygenate other grievances, leading to the formation of a rather formidable projection machine.  

KICK 'EM WHEN THEY'RE UP

At least initially, the desire for dirty laundry was driving the public narrative more than the facts of the case. This is not to claim I have some back-channel insight (although I did before it all "leaked").  That this is more about laundry than the law is a rather easy claim: Ronell and Reitman have all the facts and the feels; we don't. From any angle the story doesn't look good, but this is part of my point: in less vexed contexts, we would probably recognize that truth is felt from all sides, if each of their publicized documents are to be taken seriously. In a sense, empirically verifying that Reitman suffered or that Ronell was used for her star-power doesn't matter, because these conclusions are their reality and life is plodding painfully for them both as true.  As outsiders I think the box is black—and this is part of the reason it is generating so much discussion. Its mystery is uncomfortable, uncertain, maybe it holds the Gom Jabbar (to go with the popular fantasy of witchery), but it ain't like we've got a history of peeking inside Ronell or Reitman's boxes (as we do with Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose . . . and John Searle).  And still, weeks and weeks after the story "broke," it's getting stuffed with all manner of dirty clothes (one supposes underwear, but at the moment it seems to be mostly capes).

To make this calamity productive, I think a focus on the clothes is a better wrangling, capes and all.  The question is not "what really happened here?"  The question is certainly not whether an abuse of power is warranted.  Rather, the question for me is, "what are folks trying to wash?"

I recognize a focus on the laundry will be dismissed as mere displacement, avoiding the "real" issues of abuse, or perhaps decried as letting an arrogant professoriate get a pass (I have called this familiar, academic move, "the brilliant pass").

"So many words Josh!  This is not a complicated matter; you're just rationalizing bad behavior!"

How can I let the details of Ronell's apparent neediness and power-abuses go unexamined? How can I not decry the apparent duplicity of the student?  Why can't I denounce the abuses of power and academic privilege? Why can't I plant a flag against abuse?  (And I ask, somewhat naively to some, why is sharing an opinion about the case considered flag-planting in the first place?) I do denounce and reject abuse, most of us do, I just refuse to impale the backs of these particular bodies; their example is exceptional and it is complex, not the norm of far more abusive, clear-cut, well documented, and grandiloquent expressions of misogynistic meanness.  That this academic controversy lands at the same moment a grand jury in Pennsylvania found the Catholic church guilty of causing and covering up pedophilic atrocities—making a child pose naked as a crucified Christ while priests snapped photos—provides needed perspective. 

At another level, however, I think some of these charges are warranted if only because many of us are a part of the structure that we critique: there is no outside, and of course we need to self-examine because this is the right response.  I don't think or feel, however, we should be browbeating each other in the process: we might disagree about how to respond to Reitman's charges against Ronell, but there's no question we're on the same side (e.g., abuse is bad). Some will righteously intone, like that patented Oprah move of riding a wave that has already crested, "some things aren't complicated."   Except, of course, when they are.  Except when "some things" shouldn't, at the very least, be equated, like a thousands of years of a documented history of men abusing women and the "bad mother" fantasy of Mrs. Robinson's priapic manipulations. In other words, there is no sound equivalency to the abuse of men by women here.

To respond to this calamity by saying, "uh, wait a minute, this is more complicated" than the proper conclusion one is supposed to reach is neither "strategic victim blaming," nor is it a rejection of Title IX and its intended protections. In an earlier post about the problematic framing of the controversy, I think Lisa Duggan read this responsibly: "If we focus on this one case, these details, this accuser and accused, we will miss the opportunity to think about the structural issues. If we are social justice feminists and not neoliberals, we care about the broad structures of power, and not individual bad apples case by case." In part, an attention to the broader structures of power asks us to take a look at how people are talking about just how bad the apples are--to attend to the rhetoric of laundry dirtied by bruised fruit.  

GAS-LEITING, OR, SCRIVENERS (ON) SPEED

Notably, the original frame for the story came from a former Longhorn and an apparently status-obsessed philosopher, Brian Leiter, who is an established and respected interpreter of Nietzsche, but whose most recent  fame is linked to his blog on academic gossip.  Posted originally on June 10 under the tag "Posturing, preening wankers"---that is, self-absorbed masturbators---Leiter wrote that "Blaming the victim is apparently OK when the accused in a Title IX proceeding is a feminist literary theorist."   Leiter's post was not actually about the charge against Ronell, but a support letter drafted by Judith Butler and others and signed by a number of prominent, international humanists, testifying to Ronell's character. I have more to say about the letter itself below, but suffice it to say Leiter framed the missive as a matter of hypocritical #MeToo blackmail and bullying.

Where the laundromat gets ironically filthy is with Leiter's unwittingly gendered (b)lather: despite a rather storied series of sexual harassment scandals surrounding Professor Surly, Leiter reported "John Searle may be guilty of sexual harassment" [my italics] under the tag "issues in the profession." Ronell and "a gaggle of critical theorists," as a related blog put it, are afforded no such caution, but rather described as "wankers" and "precious 'theorists'" and "'theory' illuminati" in the masculinist tones of philosophy proper, of course.  Even though the gendered frame seems quite deliberate--the theoretical humanities are for p-words, in all the senses---the double-dealing drama was too rich not to travel to Gotchaland. Which it did, almost immediately, both into dude-bro backwaters and blogs that boys named Tucker like to scratch and sniff, and through the more "progressive" portholes of publicity that we see through, for good or ill, to keep us afloat in the seas of the Fourth and Fifth Estates. 

The anti-theory frame liberally lifted from Leiter was set aflame by an unscrupulous reporter who permanently hitched the case to #MeToo.  The hitch only tows a load in name, but it seems more likely the motive is journalistic ambition or fame, if only because balance here is probably better served peer-reviewed: "What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?" Zoe Greenberg titled her piece, signaling some sort of sub Rosa ignominy. Our mediated addiction to speed and the thrill of an affective outrage drives the titular mousetrap (it's never a better one, just a faster snap that, set in a series, buzzes out a click-bait quiz or a bulleted list).  The case has little to do with feminism or with #MeToo, except perhaps for the string of synonyms for pantywaists deployed by various critics of "theory." There has been a strong and almost comical effort to turn the Ronell and Reitman case into a referendum on a flavor of man-hating "feminism" that only exists as a unified cell like a Saturday morning cartoon (except those no longer exist either; Andrea Dworkin's gambit was that these guys would take her both literally and mistake her as a senator).

However unwitting her postfeminist conceit, The New York Times reporter was, in fact, disturbingly dishonest in her gas-leiting. She deliberately twisted the remarks of a dear friend and colleague to craft a more salacious or siliceous story, discretely effacing the contextual speed-bumps of a three-page, single-spaced statement my friend submitted in the hope of a balanced account; when called on to correct her contrivances Greenberg refused.  Fortunately, The Chronicle of Higher Education made a number of attempts to correct Greenberg's calculated contortions, Slate revised a mistaken piece based on those contortions, and The New Yorker assigned the always astute Masha Gessen to produce a more balanced story—which she did.  But the pre-matted, framing damage had already been done: once Leiter leaked and Greenberg's story peaked, the hate mail came fast and furious at my friend; she was called a "cunt" and a "liar" and was accused—anonymously, of course—of routinely harassing and sleeping with students on The New York Times website (these claims are, I stress, deliberately injurious and patently absurd). Misinformation can be disastrous; jaundiced journalism, however, directs aggression away from structure and toward persons in inevitably hurtful ways. 

On the whole, I still trust The New York Times, which is not reducible to the injurious misdeeds of its individual reporters. Even so, my conclusion about Greenberg is that her "reporting" on the Ronell/Reitman rumpus is a condensation of a more systemic, hepatic hysteria about the academy: an arrogant professoriate, out of touch with the "real world," is in the business of first intoxicating and then taking advantage of students. This hysteria was metabolized long before a contemporary exemplar was found to make it real again (since apparentlyJane Gallop's pony-play has faded from memory). 

The pre-formed tragedy reminds me of how anti-affirmative action zealots picked Abigail Fisher as their poster-case to challenge the University of Texas—perhaps not the best choice for two Supreme Court challenges given her mediocre record. Indeed, with the sudden and sweeping success of the #MeToo movement, breathtaking because of the swiftness of the justice in the court of public opinion, it was just a matter of time before the neoliberal logic of equivocation would work its way into the addictive thrall of identity politics in search of a case. An irony that might leave even Alanis Morsette confused is that misogyny underwrites the drive to push for a quick and dirty story instead of a considered sifting of the details, which would complicate and dull the rush, losing so many sets of lucrative eyes.  As Jean-Luc Nancy recently commented, the preformed push is to insist the case is rather simple and to hasten a return to clarity--precisely, of course, what fantasies often do for us:

. . .  from confusion, clarity is born: how good it is to have a clear vision of the world, well-ordered and structured upon exact divisions and defined attributions, to be able to tell instantly and unquestionably the good from the bad and vice-versa, to be able to correct the tiniest infraction, to be absolutely serious and infinitely vigilant. How good one feels in this precise world in which everything and everyone is in the proper place assigned to the proper role! 

So, who says this is a complicated world?

Well, uh, for most of us in the humanities saying so is part of the job description, which is why a majority of college courses should not be taught online: back-and-forth dialogue and exchange are required.  Better than any piece I've read so far, Gessen is the only journalist to get this part of the problem right.  And as most of us "inside" the academy know, this calamitous case is a jumble better discussed in the key of "both/and," but now forced into a larger public of "either/or" and making the proper affiliation (the person who suggested my defense of Ronell was a cover for my desire to harass my students is, of course, a ripe if not silly example).  This conjunctural mishmash, spoilt by the special sauce of speed (there is no time for marinating or reflection, only Snap-chats and snap-judgments), is the problem with this particular case: #MeToo is a principled movement, righteously waged and much for the greater good, but inside the halls of academe we would normally proceed with more caution and care and contextualizing, which is the imperfect impulse so well represented by Title IX, even when the coveralls are on.  The calamity underscores, too, how academics are now forced to mediate two very different modes of publicity, one that cherishes complexity and another that abhors it as mere rationalization.  This is the perfect storm for a projection party and what seems to me a now ubiquitous reckoning with academic precarity, taking quick and principled stand to stem the phatic frenzy of a self-understanding that is irrevocably and relentlessly socially mediated. 

Close your Facebook account or resign from Twitter and the default insecurity of academic  wobbling gets coupled with voicelessness.  Saying nothing about the issue is part of the problem of academic precarity too. 

A PROJECTION PARTY

 I go "meta" because there is no other way for me to ethically reckon absent certainty; as I read the reams of posts about the case, wounded affect is the only truth I sense with some conviction.  Aside from the feelings shared by the characters (we have) fashioned for this academic opera, real people are suffering, and you can sense it in how they comment on the case: the protests and indignation of some are over the top, but most of us are recalling events from our own pasts, ugly abuses, getting harassed or stalked and feeling powerless to stop it, and we are layering memories of these experiences on top of what appears to be an egregious extreme of the Academic Star System (ASS™).  Of course we project, because in the absence of facts or detail that only the accuser and accused can share, there is little recourse for sense-making: either shine a light in their faces and see your reflection there or go meta. Shining a light is important, especially if there is a documented history of bad behavior or meanness--but the consequence is inevitably scapegoating, justified or not, and the parade of principle at the expense of persons.  I choose in this case to "go high," and the reason is that because this calamity hits (too close to) home, we tend to eat our own.

When I spoke out in defense of Ronell on social media about a month ago (my central hammer was the fact that she had not been allowed to respond), I was not surprised by the blow-back, but I was somewhat caught off-guard by the energy it sucked out of everyday living---after a week to typing "slow down" and "wait a minute" and "I did not say that," I just had to take a break.

What is so rough about this particular event?  Why is engaging in discussions about it so exhausting?

I was also surprised that otherwise good scholars of argument would make fast recourse to equivocation: either you are against Ronell, or you are for harassment (Michael Gerson, Bush II's speechwriter, would have approved . . .  but only 17 years ago). Although many if not most academics sidle up to the Left and are, for the most part, riding in the same saddle of social, economic, cultural, and political issues, we witnessed renewed rites of self-immolation with this calamity, mostly in terms of thinly veiled hatreds of "high theory," especially the French flavors. People really do get upset about the enterprise of theory, as if everyone who reads and works with the the project of the posts dreams of bullying others with the javelins of their exclusive jargon (full disclosure: my first book is about the rhetoric of tribalism, secrecy, and jargon).

As a friend confided in me via email, when Searle was exposed as a serial harasser no one indicted philosophy of the mind. Now here Ronell, her accusers, and her lettered defenders are called to account for perceived abuses to Romance—or Romaine—languages.  "Ronell's work strikes me as a big bowl of word salad," writes Katha Pollitt in The Nation, "[b]ut I understand that the general project of deconstruction is the analysis and dismantling of conscious and unconscious structures of power." Of course, "deconstruction" is not an enterprise that one works like a blueprint, but apparently getting it right is not as important as getting "it" off one's chest, like an elephant.  Regardless, many of the critiques of Ronell's intimacies with Reitman--now a subgenre of its own--must include the requisite side-eye about theory-speak. Responding to a defense of feminism on the Theory Illuminati website, Rebecca Schuman tweets it is a "hot glob of theory word-salad garbage."  Leiter is known for describing the theoretical humanities as "bad philosophy."  When he barnblogged his ready-made, anti-theory bandwagon, of course, the scandal was introduced as a self-imploding cabal of preening, continental "wankers," inspiring any number of Duke UP depreciators to reach for the popcorn as so-called Feminists and Deconstructionists go Sumo.

Not only is the Ronell-Reitman Ruckus linked to an abuse of language, but entire bodies of thought, especially a presumably monolithic feminism. One podcast takes up the question of whether or not those who study deconstruction inevitably undo all ethical moorings---after all, Althusser killed his wife,  observes Douglas Lain. The orgy of equivocation doesn't stop with the castigation of the French scene, but continues into the late hours with an apparent collapse of "Deconstruction" into "social construction"; this is a problem because it safeguards Nazis:

The seeming inability of rigorously trained, highly educated professors to identify what should be an obvious example of abuse — or at the very least give a person who seems to have credible claims to being a victim of sexual harassment the benefit of the doubt — signals a fatal flaw in the philosophical framework of the old Left. One could argue that their actions damage the legacy of Deconstruction beyond repair in an age where alt-right academics are already using the language of social construction to justify the “alternative facts” of white nationalism.

The jargon of "deconstruction" is also coterminous with the "lie of the feminist academy," writes Scott H. Greenfield, which ultimately amounts to a dishonest diversion:

Had this been a male professor, even a superstar, who sexually abused a female student under his care, he would have been immediately fired and his career obliterated to the deafening cheers of feminist academia. But then, this isn’t about preventing sexual abuse by scholars of their students, but a feminist tool.

Forget the jargonized rhetoric about power dynamics and oppression. To these feminist scholars, Title IX is just a bludgeon to beat men into submission, and they fought to protect one of their own from facing the consequences of her sexual abuse. And largely succeeded.

Clearly Ronell's person and work are bones getting ground for someone else's bread—in both senses.  As is obvious with Leiter's leaks and Greenberg's dream of a big break, the case amounts to academic reality television show shot in The Tower (the title, of course, is School Tower Schadenfreude). 

DOES OUR ASS™LOOK BIG IN THIS LETTER?

Putting the prefab projections aside, however, I shouldn't ignore the ignoble epistle that appears to be the primary catalyst of them: Judith Butler and other high profile scholars such as Galati Chakravorty Spivak and Slavoj Žižek circulated and signed a letter that was eventually submitted to NYU administrators.  According to an undisclosed source, what has yet to be reported about the motives of the letter is that it was trying to keep NYU's administration from secretly firing Ronell, an unprecedented punishment. Publicly defending the firing of Ronell would be a problem, so under the protection of Title IX confidentiality, NYU thought they might do so quietly.  Not so, said the signatories, who wanted NYU to know Ronell's termination would not be confidential, which is part of why the letter underscores the signatories not having seen the report (confidentiality worked) but also why it takes the stardom approach that it does (people will notice). In retrospect, the latter strategy was wrongheaded and hasty.  The signatories did not think about the irony of the strategy to fight secrecy while assuming their own confidentiality, said the informant.   

So, the letter was meant to offer testimony about the integrity of Ronell's character.  But it went one step beyond by describing Reitman as instigating a "malicious" campaign.  In this respect the letter certainly seems to rehearse the well-worn patterns of excuse so typical of those accused of abuse, which is a primary reason that Title IX exists. It also seems that many of the signatories were not aware of the intimacies that Reitman made public and that Ronell did not subsequently dispute.  Nevertheless, regardless of intent, Butler recognized how the letter was perceived as "victim shaming" and  issued an apology and explanation, as did a number of others. 

What appears less forgivable to many is the Academic Star System (ASS™) that the letter has been taken to represent.  Writing for Jezebel, Esther Wang rehearsed the rumpus as a "familiar story--of deeply fucked up [sic] institutions where star professors hold too much power to determine the future of their protégés . . . ."  Whereas I find Reitman's lawyer's claim that he is the victim of sexual abuse a bit of a stretch, the central reason his suffering resonates with others in the academy is precisely the power structure the ASS™  appears to replicate: "Despite broad disagreement about the meaning of the Avital Ronell scandal," writes Lee Konstantinou for The Chronicle, "there is consensus about one thing: Ronell is a 'star,' and this status has something to do with how we should feel about what she is alleged to have done."  Carefully written sentence, that one.

Here is where the ASS™ starts to cleave between the public/private line: at land-grant institutions like my own, the hierarchy of power represented by the star is less prominent than I think it is in a private school system.  In my fields, communication  and rhetorical studies, there are certainly "stars," but the ability of one's advisor to help secure their employment disappeared decades before my generation started graduate school.  I worked with and under two rhetorical theory luminaries, but whether or not they wrote me letter of recommendation did not determine if I got a gig; it may have helped, but royalty-makers they were not (if that were the case, I would not have had so much trouble landing a job).  As a friend and I were discussing ASS™ privately, she observed that the increasingly crummy job market for students in the humanities probably exacerbates perceptions of a professor's power to place "their people."  Just from my experience as a professor for the last 16 years, the power students imagine advisors have to amplify or ease their job search is mostly (though not always) a projection. Whether or not Ronell or others boasted about their royalty-making powers, I suspect the repeated claim in many commentaries that professors can make or kill careers is similarly overestimated.  The ASS™ is a real thing, to be sure, but it has more to do with salary and globetrotting and slush funds—excuse me, professorships—than installing disciples or directing disciplines. 

The anxiety over the ASS™ seems to me a much more acute experience for graduate students in Ivy League scenes--spaces typically far beyond the reach of a first-generation college student from Centerville, Georgia (like me). The gravity of the academic solar system also does seem to to have more pull in Ivy League fields, like literary studies or philosophy, which public universities also have but which were always tied to courses in basic skills (e.g., rhetoric and composition; informal logic, and so on). 

During my time at the University of Minnesota, I did notice the work of ASS™ among my cohort in the departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, where I was first introduced to "high theory" and in which my cis-male classmates didn't seem to bathe as much (the "cultural studies boy"—we'd say "hipster," today—was stereotyped as stinky and shaggy hair and correcting your German).  I do recall in those courses there was much more competition among the students to say something brilliant, to garner the notice of the well-known professors, and to become a kind of Lord of flies and hangers-on like me (as I've written about before, I will never forget a Ph.D. student in cultural studies taking me to task, "haven't you ever heard of Lacan on desire?" followed by a smug laugh; the professor, I recall, dressed him down for such snobbery).  This is to say there was certainly a desired ASS™ among the students, whether or not the faculty actually cultivated it I do not know. 

For most of us following this case, we just cannot know how trapped Reitman actually felt working with Ronell---there are as many testimonials to her nurturing mentorship as their have been charges of mafia-style meanness.  I do remember how often I felt intimidated in some of those cultural studies courses, and how other students (rarely the professor) mocked my ignorance; I was glad to be anchored in a different department.  I do remember my first publication was from a paper I wrote for a course on Walter Benjamin, and that when it came out the professor used the essay to shame her own students for not publishing (the logic here, of course, is if a speech person who teaches public speaking can publish in Telos, "why can't you?").  There is an undeniable hierarchy and system of power that trades on privilege, trucks in abuse, shames by praising someone else's brilliance, and that feeds on anxiety.  The stereotypes of graduate school are more true than not.  I know in the two departments I work in we do tend to bend over backwards (at least I do) so that students do not feel like they are a part of some weird ASS™. 

The ASS™ is, indeed, (a) big (problem).  On the one hand it is inevitable, just as any community has popularity contests, and its often as much fueled by projection than anything (Dr. Seuss wrote a nice treatise on this topic after some field work with the Sneeches).  But to address ASS™ as a structural problem that promotes abuse and feelings of woundedness, you have to dismantle internal class structures, not target individual people.  

I regret my own institution is doing the opposite of dismantling the context for power abuses, based in part on an ASS™ working parasitically on external funding models: sovereign are they who assert the state of grant-getting perfection.   In part driven by a compensation system that rewards those who achieve external funding, around the time I arrived at the University of Texas the Academic Super Star  system was gradually set in place: rather than lift all boats, UT would aggressively recruit stars with large salaries.  I remember a candidate for the provost (now our president) campaigned for the post by arguing his top priority would be faculty raises to be competitive with our peer institutions.  He did just that when he became provost by approaching deans and asking them to identify their most important faculty; those folks would then get 20-30k in tiered raises, while everyone else got 2% (and only then if you were lucky). This so-called Faculty Investment Initiative is actually an Academic Star System that unwittingly promotes precisely the kind of resource-starved climate the leads to abuses of power.  For example, naturally when set up less as a party circuit and more as a reward system,  ASS™ inevitably gets replicated with faculty and graduate students, since the whole university industrial complex is run this way.  Looking up from the bottom, we see the system reflected in graduate programs that deliberately admit students without funding (requiring them to work many jobs and/or take out loans) for the purpose of having standing stock.  This is why the ideology of ASS™eventually does demand a form of subjugation among students: "Come to our program" or "come work with greatness," and "studying with us is a privilege." 

To truly subvert the ASS™, punishing our "stars" is not the solution.  Administrators--that includes me and many of those reading this blog--need to stop giving some professors planets and making everyone else adjuncts to the stars.  Make your faculty and graduate students feel like a community, eliminate gross disparities in pay and try to "float all boats," including the lifeboats of any university, the non-faculty staff.   An ASS™system driven ultimately by the pursuit of goods external to the practice (prestige, money, good PR) ends up making the non-anointed appear and feel like mere support staff for the handful of professors who rarely teach, travel extensively, and make the rest of us advise their students and teach their classes.  It seems to me the calamity of the Reitman-Ronell controversy is as much about venting frustration about this toxic and now apparently crumbling reward system as it is the actual details of the case.

A PEEK IN MY CLOSET

Discussing our ASS™ has veered a bit too meta for the point of this post, which is that the Ronell-Reitman calamity is more about the lust for a dirty story than what actually happened.  I've tried to detail how that lust acts-out in a number of directions for a multitude of ends and objects that are only coherent as concerning power.  Seeing the stars down to earth puts them as glow-in-the-dark stickers on the ceiling in my closet, because the most pertinent projection for this post is my own. 

My initial impulse to defend Ronell against the accusation of sexual harassment is no doubt informed by my knowledge of her scholarship, but it is also unquestionably a consequence of my own experience working closely with both undergraduate and graduate students. The impulse to "come clean" in the wake of this morass is nigh ubiquitous, and I want to resist suggesting that there is any perspective from which one can "come clean."  I can no more launder my past than I can wash of the culture of which I am an expression. Publics, even private publics, have always been filthy---at least in thought.  Like Jimmy Carter, I have sinned in my heart, although I cannot claim to have (consciously) acted on my fantasies. 

When I started my career as a professor I was the same age as (sometimes even younger than) my graduate students; I had a powerful crush on one student, but had the sense not to act on it (we remain friends and joke about those times today). After coming to UT, I remember hitting on a graduate student (not in my department) at a party.  I also dated a graduate student I met in a reading group (she was not my student and also in different department).  Today I'm much older and no longer in generational proximity to graduate students, but the perspectives and general comportment between professors and students has also changed.  My employer strictly forbids professor/student relationships now—but officially only two years ago.  Still, such slash-lations were the norm for my department long before I arrived (at least one faculty couple here began as student/professor). Heck, one of my mentors in the field wrote a book about student-professor trysts—she married her professor, who is also a mentor of mine—so I know it was a common thing.  This older, more fluid exchange between student and professor just was less prominent for my generation, and I recall romance was actively and vocally discouraged when I was going through graduate school at the University of Minnesota. There was a world, however, in which intimate relations between professors and graduate students was not unusual—it was a norm.

As most who have taught will tell you, however, attraction to students—romantic and otherwise—is normal, part of the dynamic of teaching, a consequence of transference and countertransference, and so on.   As I advise my own students these days, you shouldn't beat yourself up if you are attracted to a student—this is human.  Ethics concerns how you act on the feels.  One ethical response is to forge friendship if this permitted (as it would be in graduate school), but not to act on anything romantic and to recognize how power plays into the dynamic.  The best way to manage charged relations is to channel energies in productive ways (e.g., scholarship). In short, in the academy we are attracted to others not just physically, but intellectually. Indeed, intellectual attraction has been cultivated and celebrated for centuries as a virtue of the life of the mind. So I have repeated this to my own graduate students incessantly, as much to remind myself as to offer advice: the hardest part of the academic life is negotiating boundaries, and the pitfall is confusing them. When I have these conversations I use the metaphor of "hat wearing" that one of my mentors used with me: "you have to sense when you are wearing the student hat, and when you are wearing the friend hat," and so on.  As an educator, to actively confuse the headwear is abusive, wittingly or not. Whatever the motives, facts, or details, there's no question the Ronell/Reitman relation is fundamentally a headwear—not underwear--problem, in all the ways. 

Here's the rub and way of my own projection: I was accused of sexual harassment in 2004.  I did not learn about it until a year after the complaint was filed.  The complaint was made by the friend of an associate dean, a non-traditional student who was attending a guest lecture I gave for a colleague's class.  The lecture topic was friendship.  Research has shown that there is little to distinguish friends from lovers, and the point of the lecture was to describe the parallels between the different stages of intimacy between the two kinds of relations.  I recall the lecture began when I drew a chart on the chalkboard and asked the class to list the differences between friends and lovers.  Inevitably a student mentioned the “booty call” or “f— buddy” (“friends with benefits” was not yet a phrase back then).  I had given this lecture at least a half-dozen times. I made the mistake of repeating the f-bomb term and writing it on the board.  I found the term funny (still do, because it's silly in so many ways).  Apparently, after the course was over the student filed the complaint. 

A year later, I was informed by my chair that I had been under investigation.  The university lawyers concluded that I was not guilty of sexual harassment because I did not direct my remarks at any one student.  I was surprised, however, that I was a subject of surveillance for a year without knowing it.  In retrospect, this was probably for the best because I would have been anxious for a year, as I was about five years ago when I was under investigation at my current employer.  An anonymous person—I assumed a student I failed for plagiarism—wrote a letter to the president of the university accusing me of racism, pedophilia, and mentioning students by name on this blog. University officials did not believe I was a racist or a pedophile, however, the possible violation of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) required an automatic investigation (lets think about this for a moment—eh, charge of racism or pedophilia is not serious, but if I called out a student on my blog by name . .  . ).  I was informed by my dean this was occurring and apparently the investigation lasted for some weeks or months—I don’t know.  While this was happening a cyber-stalker was posting veiled death threats on my blog, and even attended one of my large lecture classes (emailing during the class to me what I was wearing and jokes I told during lecture).  I was fearful of the classroom and of going to work for about a year; the police created a file but did nothing.  Despite the fact that a malicious, false letter accusing me of nastiness was sent to the university president; despite the fact I was getting veiled death threats; despite the fact this person was attending my large lecture classes incognito; and despite the fact I felt spooked walking on campus, I was the one under investigation.  I was even told (apparently inappropriately) that the chief of cybersecurity knew whom the stalker was, but federal law required that I could never be told. 

I do not disclose these stories to take a bath, nor to admit wrongdoing.  I don't think I did anything other than exhibit humanness, including some misjudgments and missteps.  I still misstep in embarrassing ways, recently having had too much to drink at a convention hotel bar and saying something deeply hurtful to a friend.  I share these anecdotes to explain my reticence with--as opposed to a rejection of--our "believe the victim" ideology. On balance, I agree with the politics, I agree with finding faith in any accuser.  A friend used to work for child protective services, and there are always false reports---but its still preferable to risk those reports than to have a child get beaten. History and documented fact bears out this approach to thinking about justice in the workplace and presumably private spaces; the approach is not clean, but it is more humane.  Still, such a politics only works in a system that acknowledges complexity and honors perspectivism.  Because of its bottom-line logic, Title IX is an imperfect jumble, to be sure. But even jumbles deserve protection because to make everything tidy and simple, guilty or innocent, is fascism by some other name. 

Showmancing the Presidency

Music: Damian Lazarus & the Ancient Moons: Heart of Sky (2018)

My book on political perversion is drafted except for the conclusion. The conclusion is hard to pull off, as the argument there is that gun violence and the recent presidential election participate in the same logic of demand and disavowal. It’s a complicated argument that could easily seem  hyperbolic--although it is not; forcing others to witness atrocity is central to both--and it will also be the gist of my talk at the National Communication Association in the fall (titled there, “Gunplay”).  To this end, I needed to reframe the last case study on the Trump campaign and presidency as a genre, and make a better case for why genre is a better basis for figuring ethics than, say, the displacement of character that we term “persona” in rhetorical studies. I know many of my friends who have used persona as a concept for criticism may disagree, but I think the idea was invented to make the conservative feel comfortable about critiquing people.  It assumes an autonomy of personhood that only makes sense in a pragmatic/everyday manner.  Ultimately you and me are enfoldments of culture. 

Anyhoo, since I finished writing the chapter, former FBI Director James Comey published a “tell-all” cash-in to set the record straight, reigniting the rumors of a “pee tape” by discussing it in his book and on the many (many many) television appearances he made since it published. Comey is complex, to be sure, but: dude? Regardless, if you want to write about Trump and keep it up to date, urine trouble.  Because Hair Führer is just not going to stop, I keep insisting that Trump is merely one big, fat example of a much larger issue: the arrival of popular/political perversion and the eclipse of cultural neurosis (widely signified as public guilt, compromise, and apology). Here is a taste of the re-vamped introduction to that chapter (sources removed to avoid formatting/coding horrors, but easily provided by request in the comments):

________

For the last seven months of 2016, a former secret intelligence head for Russian affairs in the MI6 dashed off 17 memos to his employers at the DC-based Fusion GPS, an investigative firm that produces "oppositional research" for political actors.  British bloodhound Christopher Steele did not know for whom he investigated, only that he needed to provide leads for further research to verify his answers to the following question: "Why did Mr. [Donald] Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?”  It turns out the private intelligence dossier that Steele helped to produce was paid for by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)--routine "oppo" politics, of course.  The report gradually landed into the hands of U.S. intelligence officials and in front of the alarmed gazes of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.  The distressing dossier alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, in part by publicizing damning, private information illegally hacked from the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The report also contained damaging information about candidate Trump, which suggested that he was susceptible to blackmail.  

Although news of the existence and details of the dossier had been circulating "among journalists and politicians in Washington" months before it was reportedly revealed, much of the information was unsubstantiated and intelligence officials worried that the report would leak before Trump could be briefed on its existence.  After the president-elect was briefed, CNN reported on the existence of "classified documents" ten days before the inauguration, but resolved to disregard the details of the dossier because many of the allegations were unverified.  The online, tabloid news and media website BuzzFeed shared no such caution, however, and later on the evening of January 10, 2017, published the entire, leaked dossier "so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of government."  BuzzFeed was instantly pilloried by the press and government officials for violating journalistic ethics and compromising national security.

The possibility of a conspiracy with Russian officials is bad enough, but Trump's station was worsened by his repeated attempts to inhibit further investigation, which compounded the allegations of collusion with charges of obstructing justice: when the former Trump surrogate and current Attorney General recused himself from a special counsel investigation, Trump bullied and publicly humiliated the formerly, fiercely "loyal" Jeff Sesssions, and soon thereafter fired the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey. Yet despite the high drama of such political intrigue, and regardless of a seemingly never-ending investigation of high crimes--possibly treason!--by former FBI director Robert Mueller, at present the dominant catalyst for popular fascination are projections about Trump's allegedly aberrant proclivities in the bedroom.

While attending the Miss Universe pageant in 2013, the Steele dossier suggests that Trump watched two prostitutes urinate on a bed that the Obamas previously slept in at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton Hotel. As rumors about the Trump "pee tape" continue to circulate—-which Comey's tell-all memoir rallied again in 2018-—the argument that his political figure is perverse is hardly new(s): until the existence of the tape is proven or Trump leaves office or both, late night talk-show hosts will never let the rumors rest. In the fall of 2018, actor and comedian Tom Arnold hosted a Viceland documentary series, The Hunt for the Trump Tapes, in search of any incriminating recordings, the Holy Grail of which being filled to the brim with liquid gold . . . 

Addicted to Speed, or, Phatic Tweeting

Music: Eguana: Flashback (2018)

I have been re-reading Paul Virilio's work with a particular attention to his thoughts on speed, which he argued some decades ago was the logic of the political and global governance as a race ("dromology").  Finance capital had not quite emerged as the floating city of global signifiers-for-other-signifiers that create and destroy fortunes with a mouse-click; Virilio anticipated the transactions that are now made in (fractions of) nanoseconds.  Although he didn't quite see then our "digital revolution"---he certainly does now!---Virilio nevertheless anticipated the politics of speed nascent in the invention of the motor, which not only simultaneously created the accident, but also the amputation of limbs, which means space itself too (for speed, the glory of speed, we have compression).  So did Walter Benjamin, of course, with his thoughts about the camera, mechanical reproduction, and the ambling of the flâneur. 

Key to Virilio's thinking in the 1970s was the observation that the fetishization of acceleration—what Mark C. Taylor dubs the "cult of speed"—not only enables us to smash atoms but forever change the character of the observer and the observed in the process. Movement and circulation, by virtue of the inevitable bobbing of perspective for apprehending either, means that blur in the mirror is always closer or farther than it appears, but it is nevertheless all that we can see.  Acceleration changes the object of its force; the slower the competing vehicle, whether a Tesla or a nation-state, the more likely it is resigned to the ephemeral and obsolete.   

What I've been thinking is that the impossibility of reflection in a culture addicted to speed is how Trump can lead by the politics of a tweet.  Only in a context of continued acceleration does the power of serial scandal and the "on demand" streaming of offense make any sense.  Folk immersed in cultures of slower temporalities, consequently, cannot comprehend the rhythm of governance that Trump has pushed to the foreground (it was always there, just more in the background).  Virilio isolated the object of this focus in terms of the "phatic image," an object that arrests one's attention by virtue of its shocking or grandiloquent comforts and, often, irrelevant of meaning.  We might consequently characterize Trump's frequently outrageous tweets as something like "phatic posting" or "phatic trolling" in which the content is used in the service of its exhilarating blur, a sort of flashing. 

Such a characterization would be consistent with the argument that Trump: The Figure! is structurally perverse.  The hallmark of the perverse structure is the rhetoric of disavowal: affirming the reality or truth of something that one denies at the same time.  Phatic posting, trolling, or tweeting contorts content for social connection at the expense of considered meaning.  As with the tradition of Signifyin[g], to focus too pointedly on the syntagmatic axis ignores the social work of associative affectation.  In this respect, my critique of journalists' use of the term "double down" is the consequence of a perverse, phatic contagion of sorts, a parroting in speech form what they are forced to report about.  Our collective failure to contend with Trump's rhetoric as phundamentally phatic has been part of general sentiment that it is "unpredictable": it's not. 

A Case Against "Double Down"

Even the most causal news listener or watcher has certainly noticed the term "double down," which has become increasingly ubiquitous in political journalism.  I suspect that if we did a content analysis of the most influential and mainstream news sources, the term has been used every week since Trump announced his bid for the presidency in 2015.  Just a quick Internet search for news on Trump produces headlines that include the following: "Trump doubles down on immigration stance"; "President Trump doubled down on call to end due process"; "Trump doubles down on heightening border security"; "As Trump Doubles Down on Coal . . . ."; "Merkel Hits Back After Trump Doubles Down on False German Crime Figures"; "Trade row: Trump doubles down on Trudeau . . . "; and I could go on, but I think the point is clear.  Using the term "double down" is not only at this point an empty-calorie cliché, but also both registers and endorses the dumbing down of popular political conscience.  If, of course, there ever was such a thing (I think there was, but that's another post).

What I mean by "the dumbing down of political conscience" is the way in which a person is induced to forget the material conditions that make the use of force possible at all (by politics I usually mean, in the end, an expression of power primarily by the use of force).  In so forgetting, the bases of one's political views are semantic relations between words instead of references to a lived or shared reality (perhaps I should term this, "dumbing up").  I do not mean some objective reality, since what this means is always contested and at some remove the product of sentences.  But we do have things like facts and truth that we depend on that are not relative (my position on this is the psychoanalytic notion of "symbolic efficiency," or a certain reading of Rorty if you like, but that too is a tangent). 

The example that always comes to mind for me are numerous studies, inspired by the Great Recession, that show most U.S. citizens (or those polled, anyway) have overly rosy views of wealth inequity.  Occupy Wall Street mounted an impressive campaign to disabuse folks of the idea that they are going to be rich one day, but the rallying cry for the 99% has disappeared from the popular speaker and screen.  The brief blip of popular class consciousness has been replaced by cheers and jeers over the tantrum-cum-policy du jour bad news buffet, eliding the economic contradictions exposed during the recession. 

Much ink has been bled and screen time spent on documenting the human cost "zero tolerance" for immigrants and refugees on the Mexican border; still, it is alarming how quickly the president's resolve to enforce his gambling habit becomes the lead story with the use of one idiotic term.    Everyone knows the story on the border is about how folks seeking asylum are treated, but deploying "doubling down" in the same story is a kind of rhetorical misdirection that makes Trump (and Miller's) obstinance the most important focal point.  Such attention, positive or negative, fuels the cycle of messianic megalomania. 

The sudden ascent of "double down" in the news cycle, usually applied to so-called conservative positions or political spectacles, is not a coincidence: the increased use of the term in the news reflects the way in which governance, and the campaigns associated with it, are now assumed to be a form of risk taking--a game familiar to most of the voting public as reality television.  It has also come to connote stubborn or reckless decision making of course, so when used by journalists, it's also code for backdoor critique—however unwittingly deployed (hey, careful journalists, your unconscious is leaking).   

Of course, "double down" is a mid-century term, originating in U.S. casinos, that refers to doubling one's bet in a game of blackjack after having glanced at one's cards; this means you'll get one more card and that's it. The win could be huge, but the risk is high.  At some point in the 2000s the term migrated as a metaphor for taking lofty risks in corporate circles (especially the tech industry), eventually coming to signify for many the impending doom of a dumb decision.  Regardless, that the term has traveled into clichéd political metaphor registers the complete return to the glories of finance capital, or basically, risking other people's lives for personal gain  (irony there, Right . . . right?). The sweeping deregulation policies and dismantling of agencies of oversight, which will be the policy legacy of this presidency in addition to the manufactured war, has put large numbers of folks in danger. 

That at least half of Trump's public rhetoric fetches "double down" as a term for behavior is truly all but determined; this is the first casino presidency, after all.  The term "double down" in news journalism  is stupid, not only because it mystifies a return to a historical default of 80s-style deregulation in its own terms, but also because this jargon connotes a compulsive character in respect to its own addictive consonance: duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.  Every time I read the term or hear a reporter speak it, I imagine drool dribbling out the corner of a mouth framed by chapped lips. Duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh. 

In his cranky critique of Heidegger titled, The Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor Adorno unleashes a jeremiad against the linguistic innovations of German existentialism as a form of fetishism, where poetic neologisms and homey concepts (such as "authenticity") valorize the relations between words and concepts, obscuring their origin  in objective struggles, material constraints, and institutional domination.  This debate is not really my jam, but I do appreciate Adorno's argument that ideology is perpetuated in language use and that rhetorical habits create safe spaces for instrumental reason and ultimately hateful ideologies.  I'm suggesting that "double-down" is something like a popular equivalent, almost like a jingoistic endorsement of the very thing that it is supposed to critique.  The continued use of "double down" as a description of political decision making creates asylum for the kind of unregulated finance capital that blew-up and burst the economic bubble in the first place; it's use reduces political decision making to one deranged individual, displacing our collective responsibility to recognize that Trump is a production of the system, not a perversion of it.  

Decisions that affect thousands of people, if not millions, should not be described as a gamble or risk.  Politics is not a game show despite folks now "play" it that way;  "doubling down" is just another way of reporting a "daily double" that may "pay off big for the Republicans."  The odds are always with the house.  Reporting policy decisions and enforcement and the rhetoric that defends them as "doubling down" makes statecraft the new mystification, often unwittingly obscuring the material impacts of policy decisions in the jargon of luck and presidential volition. In a truer reality these are fiendishly calculated decisions made in full knowledge of the card to be drawn next: insofar as the MVP is the Hierophant, it will be the inverted card of Death.  

"Double down" is "collateral damage" by other screens.