Robinson’s essay focuses on the notion of ‘constitutive lack’ that has come to define political theory inf(l)ected by psychoanalysis. This notion is also sometimes referred to as ‘the Real’ and appears to function as a reified and metaphysical version of the Freudian Unconscious, since it often invokes repression, denial, compulsion repetition, and the death drive, but Robinson argues, partly following Judith Butler’s objections in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, that ‘constitutive lack’ functions as a mythologizing, obfuscating myth. Lacanian theorists see ‘lack’ as the source of continual novelty in psychic life, driving the polymorphous manifestations of perversity, for instance, or the inevitable transgression of norms. ‘Lack’ functions by supplying aleatory resistances that makes all treatment uncertain and ultimately futile, so in political theory it tends to undermine the normative force of claims regarding justice, fairness, and reform, in favor of an explanation for why the revolution has not yet occurred or is continually being coopted or corrupted. This cynicism and rejection of incremental reform often gets called anti-essentialism without any real justification, considering that it is a pretty obvious brand of structuralism.

Following Roland Barthes, Robinson performs a kind of anti-Lacanian diagnosis, while critically reviewing a number of instances when Laclau, Mouffe, and especially Zizek have invoked this myth precisely where evidence, arguments, and attention to detail were necessary to back normative claims. He describes this as an ‘order not to think,’ an authoritarian concept that irrationally takes every exception and objection as proof of the rule and protects itself from reasonable criticism through esoteric jargon, rhetorical flourishes, and ad hominem attacks on the psyche of the critic.

All of this strikes me as pretty consistent with Lacan’s own feelings about the necessity of a master in the struggle to give up on an impossible project of self-mastery. Since psychoanalysis gets invoked in political theory most often in order to justify the conflation of self-mastery with autonomy, and then to indirectly undermine autonomy through a reference to the Unconscious, I can’t help but suspect that we ought to have long ago jettisoned good old “You need a Master, I will be your Master” Jacques Lacan. There’s no obvious reason why my failure to repress every Freudian slip and irrational impulse entails that I should put myself in the hands of another human being who is, by nature, equally unmastered and flawed. Frankly, this sort of fallibilism strikes me as the best proof for autonomy: if I can’t rule myself, than certainly no one else is up to the task!

Robinson combines this basic criticism with a sort of ‘greatest hits’ of the worst excesses of the provocative attempts of Zizek et al to remain relevant by backing Stalin, anti-Semitism, mass violence, and other stupidity, while denigrating capitalism in order to preserve some sense of solidarity with progressives and level-headed leftists. Here I think he unjustly maligns Mouffe and Laclau by combining their work on antagonism and solidarity with Zizek’s ravings about show trials. Zizek may be a charlatan, but Laclau and Mouffe only came to psychoanalysis through Marxism, and I believe that Mouffe especially has substantive insights to offer to contemporary political theory. Her reification of antagonism is nothing like Zizek’s reification of the Real, because while she often uses locutions in which antagonism is a subject engaged in activities, this is a shorthand that she can and does cash out in attention to particular situations and contexts, while ‘the Real’ operates as an unsymbolizable and ineffable actor, the ‘invisible hand’ of embodied existence or somesuch mystical nonsense.

Robinson apparently believes that Deleuze and Guattari offer the best resources for providing an “active and affirmative” conception of contingency. Insofar as some political theorists will always want to invoke psychoanalytic concepts like repression, projection, aggression, and fetishization to explain racism, sexism, and capitalism, I believe that contemporary scholars like Shannon Sullivan and Kelly Oliver (both teachers of mine) offer a better model for the interaction of psychic life with public life than their Lacanian kin.

Oh, and check it out Robinson has a blog!

All great philosophical movements need an anthem:

Or buy the t-shirt:

Consider the story of SlimVirgin, a controversial Wikipedia administrator. The last two links tell the story of a troubled young woman, who lost a friend in the Lockerbie bombing of PanAm 103 and was personally involved in the investigation, and perhaps for a time employed by British intelligence, who then went on to create and edit Wikipedia articles related to these events that are “seriously skewed in directions that she has promoted and protected.” Alternatively, the lost friend was a cover and her work for British intelligence was aimed at disrupting the investigation, and now subsequent reports of it.

You know, I think Colbert might be on to something. Truthiness prevails.

Putnam is famous for his work on social capital, which is just a way to talk about community and civic engagement while using the vocabulary that entrepreneurs and Marxists can understand. Basically, there’s a value in friendships, which we can cultivate and enhance through labor. Our friends can also help us cultivate more material goods: they help us find jobs, collaborate on projects of mutual advantage, assist us in times of hardship, and give us joy in the good times. That’s not Putnam, however: it’s Aristotle. Where Putnam comes into the picture is in an analysis of the nationwide loss of social capital in the United States over the last forty years.

Basically, Americans have fewer friends and acquaintances than they once did. As evidence, Putnam points to our increasing non-participation in traditional social organizations, like church, but also less morally weighty institutions like bowling leagues (thus, Bowling Alone.) The bridging/bonding distinction is well-known at this point: sometimes we cultivate relations with people ‘like’ us, deepening the connections within our community, while other times we cultivate relations across communal divides, extending our friendship network to include members of different races, political persuasions, etc. The two kinds of capital are mutually reinforcing: people with bonding capital develop bridging capital, and vice versa. Just as in business, the (friend-)rich get richer.

So one way of reading Putnam’s research is to say: we’re going through a growth spurt, and we’ll eventually find a way to reproduce the cohesion and sense of identity necessary for trust to develop. Right now, we don’t trust each other because we’re still digesting the massive growth of American multiculturalism, which is a self-reinforcing result of economic success. As we become a wealthier nation, more people immigrate, more ideas and lifestyles become viable, and we’re shoved into increasingly mixed company. Eventually, we’ll subsume these changes in the demographic constitution of the country. The problem with this ‘eventually’ is that we’ve pretty much given up on religion to accomplish identification (we’re not likely to sacrifice religious diversity any time soon) and the nation-state has been ‘in decline’ almost since it was invented by Westphalia. What we need is to stop changing and growing… and we’re not going to do that. In the absence of a full text of the lecture, I’m going to refrain from judging Putnam himself. The Financial Times summary talks about things like the Pledge of Allegiance or the power of World War II to bring people of different ethnicities together (while killing Japs, I guess.) If all his solutions are this lame, I’m thinking his protestations about the coverage are purely for show.

Let’s be clear: the reason Putnam has been so careful about the uptake of his most recent line of research is that he’s afraid of furthering xenophobia and racism. It’s bad enough when people hate foreigners for ‘taking their jobs.’ Just think about your average lonely meathead blaming his friendless existence, like his joblessness, on illegal immigration. But what do we do if Putnam is right about the problem, but not the solution? What if you need a certain minimum amount of ‘bonding capital,’ a certain number of close friends who are mostly ‘like you,’ before you can invest in ‘bridging’? I think this must be true: how can you even say what you’re ‘like’ until you have that basis? Putnam assumes that skin color and cultural education are enough to give this sense of identity, but that’s clearly wrong: you’ve got to share a community with someone before you can connect with other communities, and that initial sharing can’t just be a matter of genetic inheritance or childhood experience. In those situations, you’ve yet to figure out who you are in any deep sense, and yet your provisional identity is caught up with skin color and superficial cultural rituals, so it’s easier to discover “yourself” among others like yourself. For that, you need friends, and as Putnam has shown, people have fewer friends in diverse neighborhoods, even among their ‘own kind.’ The opposite side of the old saw: the (friend-)poor get poorer.

So: what’s the solution? I’m going to say what Putnam seems unwilling to say: I don’t know. Frankly, I don’t think anybody does. Demographics and population pressures are tough issues for any thinker, made tougher by the improbable magnitudes involved: 300 million people is a lot. But maybe, we could start by making an active effort to trust each other. Usually, people deserve it.

Despite all the links, I couldn’t help but quote one particularly pleasing excerpt:

I would be unsatisfied if my only way of addressing a problem were to read and write about it. I don’t think you can learn enough about a social or institutional issue by reading; you must also listen, negotiate, observe, and experiment. By the same token, writing doesn’t make things happen. Books and articles can help to change opinions. They can certainly guide activists by analyzing complex problems. But they very rarely have an impact by themselves. If I wrote about what’s wrong with education, but could never help to organize a response, I’d be frustrated.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

(m) Ask yourself, what is the big fashion in my profession right now, or in my specific area? Fashions usually edit reality, leaving out important issues that will come roaring back sooner or later. Don’t be a reactionary by trying to roll back the current fashion to something that came before. Instead, identify those elements of the current fashion that are valuable, and articulate an agenda that remixes those elements with the elements that are being left out.

This is good advice: Agre is not the too-clever problem described in the title. In my field, political philosophy, the answer is undoubtedly deliberation, and so I have structured a good deal of my recent work on the things deliberators ‘edit out.’ But let’s take another field, economics. The trend there appears to be Steven Levitt’s style of wacky slice-of-life research, popularized in Freakonomics, that satisfies the infotainment market by giving nice, juicy nuggets of economic data.

Noam Scheiber critiques that trend in this New Republic piece. His argument is that Levitt’s economics-light style distracts his discipline from the big questions of poverty and wealth, famine and obesity, disease and sanitation that ought to occupy them, in search of ‘clean identification,’ tricky little hiccups in the world that give us clear indications of causality, as when Levitt proved that

“a slight increase in the chance of arrest dramatically deterred auto theft. Levitt discerned this by studying cities that had approved the use of Lojack, a transmitter that leads police to stolen cars.”

Much of the rest of the work done in this style tends to be useless and unsurprising, like his studies of sumo wrestling corruption, or else so controversial as to be muddled by the ensuing debate, like his claim that the legalization of abortion led to lower crime rates. So if this is the trend, which is already experiencing a backlash, what’s being edited out? Well, Scheiber points to two things: slow, arduous quantitative empirical studies, and formal economic theorizing. Methodologically, he’s right, but what he’s ignoring is that Levitt’s methods are appealing to a public still ignorant of the ‘duh’ moments he identifies in Freakonomics. It seems to me that Levitt’s work is also good for taking ordinary experiences and making them resonate with the economic theories.

So, as a humble philosopher, I’d suggest that the next big thing is this: making the big questions of poverty, famine, and disease resonate with popular audiences. These things do affect us, so it shouldn’t be so hard. Maybe young economists will have to reject the quest for ‘clean identification’ in the search for quotidian but profound research, but I’m not sure that’s completely reprehensible. The scholars who can keep asking the big questions in a mundane key, people who emulate Amartya Sen instead of Levitt, will be able to ride out both this trend and its aftermath.

“Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines well-being. This is the core of my argument. For detail and evidence, go directly to the chapters; for implications, to the conclusion, which also has chapter summaries.” (Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence)

That’s a phenomenal paragraph, but the comments page includes some highly competitive paragraphs for the prize of absurdity, and few lyrical contenders. Mostly the lyrical paragraphs are taken from the canon: Aristotle’s curious opening to the Metaphysics, or Nietzsche’s feminization of truth at the outset of Beyond Good and Evil. That’s obviously cheating, since the goal is to discover some unexpected wit. Then there are gems like these:

“Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.” (David L. Goodstein, States of Matter)

Pretty good, eh? I picked up my copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition to present the first paragraph containing her paean to Sputnik, but ultimately I think she belongs in the canon and isn’t properly an academician so much as a public intellectual, with all that entails for her style. Her biographer, though… there’s some spunk in Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s first paragraph to For Love of the World that deserves mention:

“Many of the European refugees who came to America before or during the Second World War had changed countries often and could call none home. When they told their stories of persecution and displacement, personal loss and political disaster, their American hearers glimpsed a world out of joint in novel and nearly incomprehensible ways. Each storyteller was, as Brecht said, ein Bote des Unglucks, a messenger of misfortune.”

It’s a bold line for a storyteller to take. I like it.

1. Michigan State U.
2. CUNY Graduate Center
3. Princeton
4. U. Virginia
5. Rutgers New Brunswick
6. U. California at San Diego
7. Penn State
8. U. Texas
9. SUNY Stony Brook
10. Rice U.

I think that they should probably weight citations more highly than gross publications, since this is an indicator of quality. Penn State beat UT Austin, for instance, apparently because of raw publication rates, even though Austin professors are cited more often by two orders of magnitude. I haven’t seen the rankings of journals from which they’ve garnered their seeds. I’m guessing there will be plenty of room for argument there, since it’ll engender specialty disputes: Mind v. Philosophy and Public Affairs v. Law and Philosophy v. The British Journal of Aesthetics, etc. etc. Worse, it’ll reinvoke the dreaded ‘Continental v. Analytic’ split, which I have to say is pretty much meaningless to political philosophers like myself, though many seem to have thrown their hats into that ring.

Let me reiterate my view on all this: I don’t care. Moreover, I wish others didn’t care. The impact these rankings, rather than my own work, have on my career prospects makes me sick. I wish I had a shot at being considered as an individual applicant rather than the product of a reputation-weak-but-somehow-still- productive graduate program. If I wanted to be judged according to the status and abilities of my professors or past alumni or the university’s endowment, I would have gone to law school.