Watergate As Democratic Ritual

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Professor Jeffrey Alexander writes in his 2003 book, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology:

* In June 1972, employees of the Republican party made an illegal entry and burglary into the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Republicans described the break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” neither politically motivated nor morally relevant. Democrats said it was a major act of political espionage, a symbol, moreover, of a demagogic and amoral Republican president, Richard Nixon, and his staff. Americans were not persuaded by the more extreme reaction. The incident received relatively little attention, generating no real sense of outrage at the time. There were no cries of outrage. There was, in the main, deference to the president, respect for his authority, and belief that his explanation of this event was correct, despite what in retrospect seemed like strong evidence to the contrary. With important exceptions, the mass news media decided after a short time to play down the story, not because they were coercively prevented from doing otherwise but because they genuinely felt it to be a relatively unimportant event. Watergate remained, in other words, part of the profane world in Durkheim’s sense. Even after the national election in November of that year, after Democrats had been pushing the issue for four months, 80 percent of the American people found it hard to believe that there was a “Watergate crisis”; 75 percent felt that what had occurred was just plain politics; 84 percent felt that what they had heard about it did not influence their vote. Two years later, the same incident, still called “Watergate,” had initiated the most serious peacetime political crisis in American history. It had become a riveting moral symbol, one that initiated a long passage through sacred time and space and wrenching conflict between pure and impure sacred forms. It was responsible for the first voluntary resignation of a president.

How and why did this perception of Watergate change? To understand this one must see first what this extraordinary contrast in these two public perceptions indicates, namely that the actual event, “Watergate,” was in itself relatively inconsequential. It was a mere collection of facts, and, contrary to the positive persuasion, facts do not speak. Certainly, new “facts” seem to have emerged in the course of the two-year crisis, but it is quite extraordinary how many of these “revelations” actually were already leaked and published in the preelection period. Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkheim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves…

Political life occurs most of the time in the relatively mundane level of goals, power, and interest. Above this, as it were, at a higher level of generality, are norms—the conventions, customs, and laws that regulate this political process and struggle. At still a higher point there are values: those very general and elemental aspects of the culture that inform the codes that regulate political authority and the norms within which specific interests are resolved. If politics operates routinely, the conscious attention of political participants is on goals and interests. It is a relatively specific attention. Routine, “profane” politics means, in fact, that these interests are not seen as violating more general values and norms. Nonroutine politics begins when tension between these levels is felt, either because of a shift in the nature of political activity or a shift in the general, more sacred commitments that are held to regulate them. In this situation, a tension between goals and higher levels develops. Public attention shifts from political goals to more general concerns, to the norms and values that are now perceived as in danger. In this instance we can say there has been the generalization of public consciousness that I referred to earlier as the central point of the ritual process.

It is in light of this analysis that we can understand the shift in the telling of Watergate. It was first viewed merely as something on the level of goals, “just politics,” by 75 percent of the American people. Two years after the break-in, by summer 1974, public opinion had sharply changed. Now Watergate was regarded as an issue that violated fundamental customs and morals, and eventually—by 50 percent of the population—as a challenge to the most sacred values that sustained political order itself. By the end of this two-year crisis period, almost half of those who had voted for Nixon changed their minds, and twothirds of all voters thought the issue had now gone far beyond politics…

What must happen for an entire society to experience fundamental crisis and ritual renewal? First, there has to be sufficient social consensus so that an event will be considered polluting (Douglas, 1966), or deviant, by more than a mere fragment of the population. Only with sufficient consensus, in other words, can “society” itself be aroused and indignant. Second, there has to be the perception by significant groups who participate in this consensus that the event is not only deviant but threatens to pollute the “center” (Shils, 1975: 3–16) of society.

Third, if this deep crisis is to be resolved, institutional social controls must be brought into play. However, even legitimate attacks on the polluting sources of crisis are often viewed as frightening. For this reason, such controls also mobilize instrumental force and the threat of force to bring polluting forces to heel. Fourth, social control mechanisms must be accompanied by the mobilization and struggle of elites and publics that are differentiated and relatively autonomous (e.g., Eisenstadt, 1971; Keller, 1963) from the structural center of society. Through this process there the formation of countercenters begins.

Finally, fifth, there has to be effective processes of symbolic interpretation, that is, ritual and purification processes that continue the labeling process and enforce the strength of the symbolic, sacred center of society at the expense of a center that is increasingly seen as merely structural, profane, and impure. In so doing, such processes demonstrate conclusively that deviant or “transgressive” qualities are the sources of this threat…

In the first weeks that followed the breakin at the Democratic headquarters, “Watergate” existed, in semiotic terms, merely as a sign, as a denotation. This word simply referred, moreover, to a single event. In the weeks that followed, the sign “Watergate,” became more complex, referring to a series of interrelated events touched off by the break-in, including charges of political corruption, presidential denials, legal suits, and arrests. By August 1972, “Watergate” had become transformed from a mere sign to a redolent symbol, a word that rather than denoting actual events connotated multifold moral meanings.

Watergate had become a symbol of pollution, embodying a sense of evil and impurity. In structural terms, the facts directly associated with Watergate—those who were immediately associated with the crime, the office and apartment complex, the persons implicated later—were placed on the negative side of a system of symbolic classification. Those persons or institutions responsible for ferreting out and arresting these criminal elements were placed on the other, positive side. This bifurcated model of pollution and purity was then superimposed onto the traditional good/evil structure of American civil discourse…

In the 1960s struggles, the Left had invoked critical universalism and rationality, tying these values to social movements for equality and against institutional authority, including, of course, the authority of the patriotic state itself. The Right, for its part, evoked particularism, tradition, and the defense of authority and the state. In the postelection period, critical universalism could now be articulated by centrist forces without being likened to the specific ideological themes or goals of the Left; indeed, such criticism could now be raised in defense of American national patriotism itself. With this emerging consensus, the possibility for a common feeling of moral violation emerged, and with it began the movement toward generalization vis-à-vis political goals and interests. Once this first resource of consensus had become available, the other developments I have mentioned could be activated.

The second and third factors were anxiety about the center and the invocation of institutional social control. Because the postelection developments described above provided a much less “politicized” atmosphere, it became safer to exercise social control. Such institutions as the courts, the Justice Department, various bureaucratic agencies, and special congressional committees could issue regulations in a more legitimate way. The very effectiveness of these social control institutions legitimated the media’s efforts, in turn, to spread Watergate pollution closer to central institutions. The exercise of social control and the greater approximation to the center reinforced public doubt about whether Watergate was, in fact, only a limited crime, forcing more “facts” to surface. While the ultimate generality and seriousness of Watergate remained open, fears that Watergate might pose a threat to the center of American society quickly spread to significant publics and elites. The question about proximity to the center preoccupied every major group during this early postelection Watergate period. Senator Baker, at a later time, articulated this anxiety with the question that became famous during the summertime Senate hearings: “How much did the President know, and when did he know it?” This anxiety about the threat to the center, in turn, intensified the growing sense of normative violation, increased consensus, and contributed to generalization. It also rationalized the invocation of coercive social control. Finally, in structural terms, it began to realign the “good” and “bad” sides of the Watergate symbolization. Which side of the classification system were Nixon and his staff really on?

* The televised hearings, in the end, constituted a liminal experience (Turner, 1969), one radically separated from the profane issues and mundane grounds of everyday life. A ritual communitas was created for Americans to share, and within this reconstructed community none of the polarizing issues that had generated the Watergate crisis, or the historical justifications that had motivated it, could be raised. Instead, the hearings revivified the civic culture on which democratic conceptions of “office” have depended throughout American history. To understand how a liminal world could be created it is necessary to see it as a phenomenological world in the sense that Schutz has described. The hearings succeeded in becoming a world “unto itself.” It was sui generis, a world without history. Its characters did not have rememberable pasts. It was in a very real sense “out of time.” The framing devices of the television medium contributed to the deracination that produced this phenomenological status. The in-camera editing and the repetition, juxtaposition, simplification, and other techniques that allowed the story to appear mythical were invisible. Add to this “bracketed experience” the hushed voices of the announcers, the pomp and ceremony of the “event,” and we have the recipe for constructing, within the medium of television, a sacred time and sacred space.

* Through television, tens of millions of Americans participated symbolically and emotionally in the deliberations of the committee. Viewing became morally obligatory for wide segments of the population. Old routines were broken, new ones formed. What these viewers saw was a highly simplified drama—heroes and villains formed in due course. But this drama created a deeply serious symbolic occasion.

* Administration witnesses appealed to loyalty as the ultimate standard that should govern the relationship between subordinates and authorities. An interesting visual theme that summed up both of these appeals was the passive reference by Administration witnesses to family values. Each witness brought his wife and children if he had them. To see them lined up behind him, prim and proper, provided symbolic links to the tradition, authority, and personal loyalty that symbolically bound the groups of backlash culture.

* What was the symbolic work in which the senators engaged? In the first instance, they denied the validity of particularist sentiments and motives. They bracketed the political realities of everyday life, and particularly the critical realities of life in the only recently completed 1960s. At no time in the hearings did the senators ever refer to the polarized struggles of that day. By making those struggles invisible, they denied any moral context for the witnesses’ actions. This strategy of isolating backlash values was supported by the only positive explanation the senators allowed, namely, that the conspirators were just plain stupid. They poked fun at them as utterly devoid of common sense, implying that no normal person could ever conceive of doing such things.

This strategic denial, or bracketing in the phenomenological sense, was coupled with a ringing and unabashed affirmation of the universalistic myths that are the backbone of the American civic culture. Through their questions, statements, references, gestures, and metaphors, the senators maintained that every American, high or low, rich or poor, acts virtuously in terms of the pure universalism of civil society. Nobody is selfish or inhumane. No American is concerned with money or power at the expense of fair play. No team loyalty is so strong that it violates common good or makes criticism toward authority unnecessary.

Truth and justice are the basis of American political society. Every citizen is rational and will act in accordance with justice if he is allowed to know the truth. Law is the perfect embodiment of justice, and office consists of the application of just law to power and force. Because power corrupts, office must enforce impersonal obligations in the name of the people’s justice and reason.

* Narrative myths that embodied these themes were often invoked. Sometimes these were timeless fables, sometimes they were stories about the origins of English common law, often they were the narratives about the exemplary behavior of America’s most sacred presidents. John Dean, for example, the most compelling anti-Nixon witness, strikingly embodied the American detective myth (Smith, 1970). This figure of authority is derived from the Puritan tradition and in countless different stories is portrayed as ruthlessly pursuing truth and injustice without emotion or vanity. Other narratives developed in a more contingent way. For Administration witnesses who confessed, the committee’s “priests” granted forgiveness in accord with well-established ritual forms, and their conversions to the cause of righteousness constituted fables for the remainder of the proceedings.

* In terms of more direct and explicit conflict, the senators’ questions centered on three principle themes, each fundamental to the moral anchoring of a civic democratic society. First, they emphasized the absolute priority of office obligations over personal ones: “This is a nation of laws not men” was a constant refrain. Second, they emphasized the embeddedness of such office obligations in a higher, transcendent authority: “The laws of men” must give way to the “laws of God.” Or as Sam Ervin, the committee chairman, put it to Maurice Stans, the ill-fated treasurer of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRETP), “Which is more important, not violating laws or not violating ethics?” Finally, the senators insisted that this transcendental anchoring of interest conflict allowed America to be truly solidaristic—in Hegel’s terms, a true “concrete universal.” As Senator Wiecker famously put it: “Republicans do not cover up, Republicans do not go ahead and threaten… and God knows Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed [but as] human being[s] to be loved and won.”

In normal times many of these statements would have been greeted with derision, with hoots and cynicism. In fact, many of them were lies in terms of the specific empirical reality of everyday political life and especially in terms of the political reality of the 1960s. Yet they were not laughed at or hooted down.

* The reason was because this was not everyday life. This had become a ritualized and liminal event, a period of intense generalization that had powerful claims to truth. It was a sacred time, and the hearing chambers had become a sacred place.

The committee was evoking luminescent values, not trying to describe empirical fact. On this mythical level, the statements could be seen and understood as true—as, indeed, embodying the normative aspirations of the American people. They were so seen and understood by significant portions of the population.

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Public Intellectuals in the Global Arena: Professors or Pundits?

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2016 book.

Patrick Baert writes:

* My underlying thread is that intellectuals, including public intellectuals, are constantly involved in various forms of positioning and, crucially, that new societal conditions encourage novel forms of positioning while discouraging others.

* Authoritative public intellectuals thrive in a very particular setting. They thrive in societies in which a significant section of the population values intellectual life and in which nevertheless the cultural and intellectual capital is concentrated within a small elite. They thrive in a hierarchical educational context, with “hierarchical” referring to a clear distinction not only between elite institutions and other higher education establishments but also between high- and low-status disciplines. They can exist independently of academic appointments because of independent resources, gained from family wealth or successful exploitation of the media of the time (book-writing and print journalism in the first half of the twentieth century, broadcasting in the second half and beyond). They tend to surface when the academic setting is more amorphous, with limited specialization, and especially when the social sciences are poorly professionalized. It is in this very specific context that authoritative public intellectuals like Sartre and Russell have a field day. Steeped in highprofile disciples like philosophy and mathematics and with the confidence of the right habitus and an elite education, they can speak to a wide range of social and political issues without being criticized for dilettantism. The early part of the twentieth century, especially in parts of Europe, fits this ideal type remarkably well. It was the era of the philosopher as public intellectual.

What has changed since? First, philosophy has lost to a certain extent its previous intellectual dominance. This is partly due to the rise, during the latter part of the twentieth century, of various philosophical currents, such as postmodernism and neopragmatism, which questioned, if not undermined, the erstwhile superiority of philosophy over other vocabularies. Within the Anglo-Saxon context, Rorty and Richard Bernstein epitomize this strand, advocating Gadamerian hermeneutics and Dewey’s pragmatism over epistemology.10 But besides the developments within philosophy itself, other factors also came into play. The social sciences have emerged as a significant force and have professionalized, making it more difficult for philosophers or others without appropriate training and expertise in the social sciences to make authoritative claims about the nature of the social and political world without being challenged. Massive expansion of the ranks of professional social scientists means there are now lifelong specialists in the areas that public intellectuals used to comment on who are better placed to contest such “generalist” interventions as uninformed and superficial.

* Second, with high educational levels for larger sections of society, the erstwhile distinction between an intellectual elite and the rest no longer holds to quite the same extent. With higher education also comes a growing skepticism towards epistemic and moral authority, an increasing recognition of the fallibility of knowledge and of the existence of alternative perspectives. Speaking from above and at their audience, as authoritative public intellectuals do, is no longer as acceptable as it used to be. Print and broadcasting media have become less deferential and more willing to challenge the statements of politicians and other public figures a process assisted by the arrival of journalists with higher education and subject specialism.

* If various societal forces have worked against the authoritative public intellectual, then what has emerged in its place? In the first instance, “expert public intellectuals” have come to the forefront. These are public intellectuals who draw on their professional knowledge, derived from their research in the social or natural sciences, to engage with wider societal or political issues that go beyond their narrow expertise.

* Social scientists, on other hand, are much better placed to act as expert public intellectuals, equipped as they are with well-rehearsed methods and specialized as they are in analyzing contemporary social and political phenomena…

* There is, second, the rise of what I would call the dialogical public intellectual. Contrary to both authoritative and expert public intellectuals, dialogical public intellectuals do not assume a superior stance towards their publics. Rather, they present themselves as equals to their publics, learning as much from them as vice versa…

* Philosophy, as practiced in the realm of the academy, has become quite removed from the rough and tumble of contemporary society. It is telling that in the current economic crisis very few philosophers have intervened in ways that have resonated with the wider public. This is, as I pointed out earlier, partly because, in the wake of the collapse of communism as a project with global aspirations, the general public has become more wary of theoretical schemes about what a future society should look like. But it is also partly because the way in which philosophers are being trained, especially within an Anglo-Saxon setting, is not really conducive to a critical and constructive engagement with issues that currently concern the wider public. In this context, philosophers are most likely to be successful in retaining a public profile when dealing with questions for which there is no obvious empirical resolution, including issues of faith or ethical choices.

* As one of the researchers on the new social media points out, the opposition of bloggers to journalism “is
raised largely by channelling the voice of the people” and offering “a more intimate, personal kind of authority in place of the impersonal authority of journalists. . . . What the bloggers asserted through use of readers’ messages was that there was no difference between themselves and their audience.”21 In this new context, a “democratic” form of positioning is more likely to provide intellectuals with the necessary credibility and to help the dissemination of their ideas. This strategic advantage of the dialogical public intellectual in the current constellation explains his or her recent rise in various domains. So the notion of positioning is a significant component of the story.

LAW PROFESSOR PAUL HORWITZ WRITES:

The Blogger as Public Intellectual

* Have the Internet and the blogosphere opened up new vistas for public intellectuals? And, if they have, do public intellectuals acting as bloggers operate any differently than do traditional public intellectuals taking advantage of other conventional communications media?

* Public intellectuals have benefited as much or more from the rise of other communications media, such as radio and television, as other speakers. But the blog, as a medium, offers some more or less unique benefits that those other media do not. Public intellectuals have certainly taken advantage of those benefits to open up “new vistas.”

* I would suggest that the ethic of the blog is made up of three core qualities: immediacy, connectivity, and feedback.

* Blogospheric norms encourage fairly quick reactions to current events—“hot takes,” as current lingo has it whether those events are occurring in one’s own life or across the world. A blogger who sits on an event or an idea risks having that idea or news item become stale. Staleness is especially problematic in a quickly moving environment with countless competitors, all of whom operate at relatively low cost and are equally capable of being accessed instantly by readers. The blogosphere is no place for an idle or contemplative writer. If you have more to say about something, you can always write a new post later. In the meantime, the race goes to the swiftest.

* Immediacy is no guarantee of depth. To the contrary, the faster one’s reactions, the less likely they are to contain any depth at all. Many blog posts, especially in light of the desire to be first to link to a new story, become simple “aggregation” posts: posts that do no more than link to a story or to commentary on other blogs, without adding any content other than the obligatory “Interesting” or “Read the whole thing.” The initial post may promise later posts offering more and deeper analysis, but such promises are often forgotten in the press of events or superseded by other developments.

* First, many public intellectuals blog about events that are not within their expertise, and will enjoy no particular advantage here. Second, although there will be times when genuine experts are quick to respond to an event with valuable analysis, there is no guarantee they will be any faster than an even larger number of nonexperts, who will be happy to bloviate with stunning rapidity on issues about which they know little or nothing. Third, intellectuals, no less than others, are often captive to their own priors and passions, especially when they are responding in real time. Finally, although some expert intellectuals are skilled at communicating to a general educated audience, others are not—and the nonexperts may be more eloquent or provocative, even (especially?) if they lack more than surface knowledge of the subject. The race for the attention of the blog-reading public goes not only to the swiftest but to the most readable. There is no guarantee that the winners will be the most thoughtful or expert writers. If anything, the ongoing academization of expertise makes this less likely to happen…

* Academic work encourages habits of mind, and especially habits of writing, that limit one’s audience to other academics, and generally other specialists within one’s own field. To become an academic is a time-consuming enterprise. It takes years to be credentialed as an academic, and still more to gain an academic reputation. Gaining that reputation generally requires the academic to write specifically for his or her peers, in a format that is not highly accessible, either in terms of style or content or, in straight physical and financial terms, in terms of the forum of publication; even in the Internet age, academic journals are expensive and hard to find for those who are not affiliated with a university. We write on narrow topics and write to be read and understood by the few, not the many.

* In sum, the blogosphere is unquestionably a boon for the would-be public intellectual. It serves as a counterweight to the “academization of intellectual output [that] created barriers to the flourishing of public intellectuals.” 71 It both offers room to the nonacademic public intellectual and lowers the opportunity costs of engaging in general public intellectual work by academics. It “democratizes the function of public intellectual,”
72 routing around the traditional gatekeepers and allowing a much wider range of people to make genuine contributions to a true dialogue. The narrative of public intellectuals in decline that was so much in vogue a mere decade or so ago is now in need of considerable revision.

* First, public intellectual blogging routinely involves a good deal of illegitimate trading on authority. Many academics are wrongly convinced that they are smart about everything, not just their own corner of their own subject. Although some carefully limit their public writing to their own area of academic specialization, many are eager to write about the same broad political and cultural subjects that all public intellectuals turn to. And in doing so, they are more than happy to flaunt their academic credentials, no matter how irrelevant they are to the subject at hand…

Second, public intellectuals, academic or otherwise, are as capable of being ruled by the passions of the moment as anyone else. The immediacy that is one of the core aspects of the ethic of blogging exacerbates those tendencies by removing even the slightest time for reflection and incentivizing them to write quickly. In the grip of their convictions, they are less likely to write with humility or to second-guess themselves, and more likely to make unnecessary predictions, adopt an unwarranted air of certainty, assume the worst of their opponents, and write with a hot tempered voice.

Third, although blogging public intellectuals are more likely to find a wider audience for their work,74 that audience is not necessarily going to be much more politically diverse…

To this, though, must be added the evanescence of the blogosphere.

* Lawyers possess most of the skills that are key to success in the blogosphere. (And legal academics possess not only lawyers’ skills but also some extra public intellectual chops—and, most importantly, a good deal of free time in which to blog.) Much of human activity and current events intersects with the law, so they never lack for a subject. Legal academics, even more so than social scientists, tend to be intellectual bricoleurs and parasites, borrowing tools and perspectives from whatever field of knowledge seems handy or trendy. The fast turnaround that the blogosphere prefers is made easier for the lawyer by their main skill, which is to engage in skillful, if often half-informed, logic chopping.

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Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (2015)

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Review: “In late 1980, an apparently minor dispute at Cambridge University became headline news. The question was whether or not the young lecturer Colin MacCabe – whose work was heavily influenced by recent developments in structuralist and post-structuralist theory – should be upgraded to a permanent position. And before long, as Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert put it in their short book Conflict in the Academy, the so-called ‘MacCabe Affair’ had ‘swelled to heroic proportions, drew vast media attention and became invested with considerable moral and symbolic significance,’ generating waves that are still felt in English faculties today.”

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book:

* Commonsensically, we tend to view social conflict as a dysfunctional, destructive, even pathological form of social interaction, harming individuals and groups through tearing the cohesive social fabric, and there is of course much to justify understanding disputes in this way. However, it is also clear, as Lewis Coser (1964) argued, that social conflict is able to serve a variety of productive social functions, such as allowing for the
communication of dissatisfactions, defining group boundaries, providing an impetus for more adequate forms of social organisation, and even increasing social integration, especially, of course, for in-group members. There is also evidence that once the ‘MacCabe Affair’ became public, social pressure increased for participants to take sides. In this sense rather than simply revealing pre-existing divisions, the controversy also acted to create and solidify them, strengthening and simplifying antagonistic identities.

* Public disputes, by their nature, garner attention, and as well as generating grist for the journalistic mill, that attention also enables participants to engage in what Norman Mailer called ‘advertisements for myself ’…

* MacCabe’s subsequent career – three years later he was Head of Production at the BFI, the following year, Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and a little later, Professor of English at Exeter University – renders the notion of him as ‘victim’ somewhat of a misnomer, as he himself readily admits, the ‘ “MacCabe Affair” … enabled me to leave Cambridge trailing clouds of glory and an overinflated reputation’
(MacCabe, 2010a).

His academic writing also benefited from events; his publishers quickly cottoning on to the commercial value of what was described as ‘Cambridge’s worst academic controversy for a generation’ (Mulhern, 1981). With impressive speed, and only two weeks after the Senate House discussion, his publishers took out an advertisement in the TLS, daring potential customers with the explicitly allusive strapline ‘Controversial and Original: Three books by Colin MacCabe’ (Figure 2.1).

* In spite of this late start, after the Great War it [English Literature] began to develop very rapidly, eclipsing the Classics as the central humanities discipline, with the Cambridge School, characterised by its critical and analytical approach (in distinction to Oxford’s philological and scholarly one) playing a central role. The influential, zealous, bolshie, and highly opinionated F. R. Leavis was key in championing the essential importance of the discipline in Cambridge and beyond, and in establishing what arguably became the orthodox humanistic approach to analysing literature until at least the 1960s…

* In some quarters, the experiences of WWII had provoked suspicion towards this antebellum belief in the humanising forces of an education in English Literature, since, as Steiner pointed out, it was now impossible
to ignore how little humanistic acculturation had done to avert the barbarity of war. ‘We know now’, he wrote, ‘that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning. To say that he has read them without understanding or that his ear is gross, is cant’ (Steiner, 1967: ix). Forces of pluralism had also slowly battled their way into the study of English literature during the late 1960s and 1970s (Easthope, 1991), especially outside Oxbridge. In part this occurred through the arrival of a more socially diverse student and staff body and a broadening of the gaze of the discipline to include cultural creations that had traditionally been excluded from the narrow version of the canon that Leavis’s ‘great tradition’ (1980 [1948]) came to represent.

* The shift is expressed well by the novelist and literary professor Malcolm Bradbury in his description of his own career through English departments:

“During the 1950s, when I was a student, the dominant mood in the study of English literature was a moral and humane one; literary studies were the essential humanist subject … But with the expansion and hence the increased professionalisation of the subject, the tune changed: there was a hunger for literary science. By the 1960s, a volatile mixture of linguistics, psychoanalysis and semiotics, structuralism, Marxist theory, and reception aesthetics had begun to replace the older moral humanism. The literary text tended to move towards the status of phenomenon: a socio-psycho-culturo-linguistic and ideological event, arising from the offered competencies of language, the available taxonomies of narrative order, the permutations of genre, the sociological options of structural formation, the ideological constraints of the ‘infra-structure’.”

* the emergence of ‘Theory’ in English departments was not merely an import from abroad (most obviously from France), but (with notable exceptions, such as the work of Barthes) also an import from other disciplines,
in particular, the social and human sciences…

* Wider society had begun to turn away from poems, plays, and novels as their primary source of cultural expression and experience, and a certain minority of the Cambridge English Faculty were suggesting that those media to which their attention had increasingly been drawn could themselves be productively analysed in a similar manner to literature (even if the interest in this broader range of media within the Cambridge Faculty more generally extended nowhere near as far as other English departments elsewhere in the country). Heath, for example, was interested in cinema, Williams had been introducing film into his lectures, MacCabe had just published his book on Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group (MacCabe, 1980) and after the affair went on to develop ‘screen theory’
with Heath and others.11 The expansion of the term ‘culture’ to cover practices and creations beyond the more restricted zones of what might here be called ‘high culture’ was of course a characteristically social scientific – and in particular, anthropological – move to make (Tyler, 1891), and one that Williams (e.g. 1958) had been hard at work elaborating.

Leavis, by contrast, had been clear that genuine culture could only ever be the preserve of a gifted ‘tiny minority’ whose role it was to protect against the majority’s philistinism, and where to possible guide the cultural discrimination of the masses (Leavis, 1930; Carey, 1992, for variations on this theme); his, like Richards’s before him, was a vision of modern cultural decline.

* Though far more consequential than the MacCabe Affair as an event, the Watergate scandal was in fact more simplistic in its symbolic dimension. Effectively, the struggle was over whether the facts of the break-in to the Watergate Hotel were to be told at the level of everyday goals and interests (i.e. the level of ‘politics as usual’) as the Nixon administration wished, or, as eventually took place, at the more sacred levels of societal
norms and values, hence signalling systemic crisis and the need for fundamental purification and renewal.

* Since the majority of the actors made their living from the professional analysis and use of the English language they were therefore highly sensitive to the power of drama, oration, and rhetoric, as well as the seduction of linguistic aesthetic, which added both to the quality and clear theatricality of the events, thus rendering them particularly amenable to dramaturgical analysis.1 Furthermore, argumentation, by its very nature, has a tendency towards rhetorical escalation, a process which often triumphs over whatever pacifying intentions actors may start out with.

* One strategic achievement of the pro camp was securing the Senate House as the stage upon which the main debate would be acted out. Whilst Cambridge is more generally a highly ritualistic university, the Senate House in particular holds a privileged place within the university’s ritualistic geography. It is in many ways the university’s main agora, and is considered distinctly hallowed ground.

* The contribution that a stage and its set makes to what Coleridge called the ‘willing suspension of disbelief ’ is only successful if the actors collude in playing by the script which accords with the set, and the antis had no intention of doing so. The antis’ counterstrategy therefore involved lowering the tone of the proceedings
so as to desacralise the event, deprive it of its ritual status, expose the performance as mere verisimilitude, and so return it to the level of the profane. One tactic to this end involved employing humour and casual indifference to undermine the pros’ efforts towards ‘impression management’ (Goffman, 1990 [1959]). In contrast to the sacred and solemn tone that was, quite literally, set by the austere neo-classical building, the jocular triviality with which many of the antis delivered their own performances signalled to the 600 strong audience not only a sense of security in the knowledge that MacCabe’s supporters had already lost the battle and nothing that happened in the Senate House would reverse the Appointment Committee’s decision, but also that the ‘MacCabe Affair’ had nothing at all of the sacred about it.

* Humour, especially in the affective responses it is able to evoke in the form of collective and contagious laughter, has the advantage in symbolic struggles of encouraging shared ‘effervescence’ (Durkheim, 2001 [1912]),
helping solidify a sense of community amongst those who are ‘in on the joke’. Further, it has the added benefit of avoiding the necessity to employ outright invective, which runs the risk of losing favour with one’s audience. The use of humour, if effective in eliciting amusement, acts as a shield and alibi for degrees of offence that would be unthinkable in its absence… The capacity of humour to draw factions of the audience and performer together in shared amusement was also often combined with a variety of other rhetorical techniques, such as sarcasm, insincere
politeness, pretend sympathy and surrealism, all of which drew their performative power from the dramatically potent realm of play…

* audiences collude in determining a performance’s dramatic success, and that the performers themselves are aware of this fact. In this sense, a successful performance ought properly be understood as always to some extent a co-creation involving necessary input from both actors and audience, an implicit rule that structures all dialogic social interaction.

Both sides of the social interface that constitutes a performance are required to ‘play along’ in order for the symbolic communication inherent within it to come off effectively..

* for the pros’ case to hold any legitimacy, it was crucial that they were able to raise the central issue at
stake – MacCabe’s non-reappointment – to the level of the sacred and demonstrate that his failure to receive a permanent lectureship revealed that the central values of the faculty, and by responsibility and association
the university more generally, were under threat if his dismissal went unanswered. They attempted to achieve this by showing that the events had not only threatened propriety in terms of breaching the meso-level norms regulating proper employment procedure, but even further up the symbolic ladder, that a violation of the higher values of fairness, intellectual openness and pluralism had taken place. Achieving the goals of this strategy would mean a necessary acknowledgement that a crisis had occurred and that ritual purification and renewal was therefore
necessary.

* As a counterstrategy, the antis attempted to disrupt this projected ‘definition of the situation’ and de-sacralise MacCabe’s non-reappointment by claiming that the decision was in actual fact taken at the profane level
of routine appointments considerations.

* Whatever the actual underlying mechanism that had drawn all the attention upon the English Faculty, it is clear that on the performative level, the very fact that so much attention was indeed being paid to the events could be taken as an indication that something untoward must indeed have occurred, or otherwise, why all the fuss? A student in the Senate House, for instance, suggested that ‘[i]f all were well in the English Faculty we would not be here’ (Clemmow, SHD: 360). The very fact that the debate had been called, and the very fact that the national press was still busy printing stories about the events (whether or not these stories were in substance behind the pros’ cause) sustained a performative risk of undermining the antis’ claims that this was simply ‘business as usual’. This placed the antis in somewhat of a ‘Catch 22’ predicament, since their substantive efforts to inform audiences that the scandal had indeed been overblown or orchestrated (e.g. Sykes-Davis, SHD: 335) continually
ran the performative risk of simply drawing further attention to an affair which they were invested in claiming was no affair at all.

* a decade following the departure of MacCabe for Strathclyde, another affair exploded in Cambridge, with the
ultimately unsuccessful attempt to deny the university from awarding an honorary doctorate to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

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The Seven Pillars Of Friendship (3-30-22)

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

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The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings, and the Biology of Boom and Bust

Posted on March 30, 2022 by Luke Ford

From the 2012 book:

* another remarkable fact struck me during the dot.com years – that women were relatively immune to the frenzy surrounding internet and high-tech stocks. In fact, most of the women I knew, both on Wall Street and off, were quite cynical about the excitement, and as a result were often dismissed as ‘not getting it’, or worse, resented as perennial killjoys.

* When traders, most of whom are young males, make money, their testosterone levels rise, increasing their confidence and appetite for risk, until the extended winning streak of a bull market causes them to become every bit as delusional, overconfident and risk-seeking as those animals venturing into the open, oblivious to all danger. The winner effect seemed to me a plausible explanation for the chemical hit traders receive, one that exaggerates a bull market and turns it into a bubble. The role of testosterone could also explain why women seemed relatively unaffected by the bubble, for they have about 10 to 20 per cent of the testosterone levels of men.

* One brilliant and particularly influential description of its effects was written by Andrew Sullivan and published in the New York Times Magazine in April 2000. He vividly described injecting a golden, oily substance about three inches into his hip, every two weeks: ‘I can actually feel its power on almost a daily basis,’ he reported. ‘Within hours, and at most a day, I feel a deep surge of energy. It is less edgy than a double espresso, but just as powerful. My attention span shortens. In the two or three days after my shot, I find it harder to concentrate on writing and feel the need to exercise more. My wit is quicker, my mind faster, but my judgment is more impulsive. It is not unlike the kind of rush I get before talking in front of a large audience, or going on a first date, or getting on an airplane, but it suffuses me in a less abrupt and more consistent way. In a word, I feel braced. For what? It scarcely seems to matter.’

* hypothesis: testosterone, as predicted by the winner effect, is likely to rise in a bull market, increase risk-taking, and exaggerate the rally, morphing it into a bubble. Cortisol, on the other hand, is likely to rise in a bear market, make traders dramatically and perhaps irrationally risk-averse, and exaggerate the sell-off, morphing it into a crash.

* thoughts are intimately tied to our physiology. Decisions are decisions to do something, so our thoughts come freighted with physical implications. They are accompanied by a rapid shift in our motor, metabolic and cardiovascular systems as these prepare for the movements that may ensue. Thinking about the options open to us at any given moment, scrolling through the possibilities, triggers a rapid series of somatic shifts. You can often see this in a person’s face as they think – eyes widening or squinting, pupils dilating, skin flushing or blanching, facial expressions as labile and fleeting as the weather. All thoughts involving choice of action involve a kaleidoscopic shift from one bodily state to another. Choice is a whole-body experience.

* Hearing is faster and more acute than seeing, about 25 per cent so, and responding to an auditory cue rather than a visual one can save us up to 50 milliseconds. The reason is that sound receptors in the ear are much faster and more sensitive than anything in the eye. Many athletes, such as tennis and table-tennis players, rely on the sound a ball makes on a racket or bat as much as on the sight of its trajectory. A ball hit for speed broadcasts a different sound from one sliced or spun, and this information can save a player the precious few milliseconds that separate winners from losers.

* the higher we rise in the nervous system, moving from the spine to the brain stem to the cortex (where voluntary movement is processed), the more neurons are involved, the longer the distances covered by nervous signals, and the slower the response. To speed our reactions the brain tends therefore to pass control of the movement, once it has been learned, back to lower regions of the brain where programmes for unthinking, automatic and habitual actions are stored. Many of these learned and now-automatic behaviours can be activated in as little as 120 milliseconds.

* The trouble with these reaction times is just that – they are reactions. But good athletes are not in the habit of waiting around for a ball or a fist to appear, or opponents to make their move. Good athletes anticipate. A baseball batter will study a pitcher and narrow down the likely range of his pitches; a cricket infielder will have registered a hundred tiny details of a batsman’s stance and glance and grip even before the ball has left the bowler’s hand; and a boxer, while dancing and parrying jabs, will pre-consciously scan his opponent’s footwork and head movements, and look for the telltale setting of his stabiliser muscles as he plants himself for a knockout blow. Such information allows the receiving athlete to bring online well-rehearsed motor programmes and to prepare large muscle groups so that there is little to do while the ball or fist is in the air but make subtle adjustments based on its flightpath. Skilled anticipation is crucial to lowering reaction times throughout our physiology.

* The financial markets are replete with stories of hunches, instincts and gut feelings. These feelings consist, according to legend, of an inexplicable conviction that an investment is destined to make or lose money, a conviction often accompanied by physical symptoms. The symptoms reported by traders and investors are often quirky, like a coughing fit before the market goes down, an itchy elbow before it goes up. George Soros, founder of the hedge fund Quantum Capital, confessed that he relied a great deal on what he called animal instincts: ‘When I was actively running the fund I suffered from backache. I used the onset of acute pain as a signal that there was something wrong in my portfolio.’

* ‘Everyone knows how panic is increased by flight,’ [William James] wrote, ‘and how the giving way to the symptoms of grief or anger increases those passions themselves. Each fit of sobbing makes the sorrow more acute, and calls forth another fit stronger still, until at last repose only ensues with lassitude and with the apparent exhaustion of the machinery. In rage, it is notorious how we “work ourselves up” to a climax by repeated outbreaks of expression.’

* When the world sends us a message it does so through the language of surprise and discrepancy; and our ears have been tuned to its cadences. There is nothing that fascinates us more, little that agitates the body more completely. Information warns us of danger, prepares us for action, helps us survive. And it enables us to perform that most magical of all tricks – predicting the future.

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