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http://www.firstofthemonth.org/archives/2010/10/left_behind_the.html Left Behind: The Rapture By Charles O'Brien Michael Berube, The Left at War, New York University Press The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Semiotexte Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City, Verso The three works under consideration here – the first, a survey of assorted leftist interventions from the past couple of decades, the second, a political sensation from a couple of years ago, the third, an assemblage of texts from the 50s and 60s – have nothing to do with anything in the news now. But, taken together, they tell us enough about where we are. It isn’t good. Michael Berube’s book is clearly occasioned by the Great Debate on the left over the Iraq War (the debate consisting largely of furious takfiri denunciations of those who have strayed from orthodoxy). But the book has broader, Jamesonian aspirations. So, for instance, we are offered a long discussion of Stuart Hall, and disagreements over the Kosovo war are gone over. It begins with a little Obama-ite triumphalism. The introduction starts: “This is, I hope, an untimely book.” Alas, no. Or if it is untimely, it is not because it is classic, purged of the purely topical, rather, it is untimely in a why-are-you-telling-me-this sense. The book is full of such sentences as “the collapse of the American news media must be seen in this context,” and “Chomsky has drawn fire longer than either Said or Foucault, and on more fronts, but he is not iconic for that reason alone.” The nub of the book, though, appears right up front: the aAcknowledgements. “Writing this book has been a thoroughly collaborative enterprise for me,” he begins. Such Grammy-speak shall not be tolerated. The book is all him. The second sentence: Chris Robinson, a brilliant assistant professor of Political Science at Clarkson University But it is not clear whether he is brilliant and an assistant etc. or brilliant for an assistant etc., and of course, we can only take Mr. Berube’s word for it either way. (and like me a lifelong fan of the New York Rangers) noted. read the first complete draft of the book and offered a ten-page critique of everything I’d written to that point. Thank me later! The adventure continues: Bruce Robbins, Cary Nelson and Danny Postel read the second complete draft and gave me the confidence to start the third. How they did that he doesn’t say, and I’m not sure such modernist hijinx in the narrative serve him very well here: Matt Burstein, assistant professor of philosophy, at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnston, generously offered to read the recent drafts as well, even though he was juggling four classes a semester. Full stop, as the plot thickens. He too responded with a ten-page critique of everything I’d written; It’s getting kind of hectic. Indeed, ! it was he who suggested the term “Manichean Left,” and I have taken the suggestion. Later in the book, Berube tells how he came to adopt the term “Manichean Left.” He considered, and rejected, other terms to characterize the other, disfavored left. The “academic left,” for example, wouldn’t do. (For one thing, it would have to include Berube himself.1) The “Manichean Left,” in his account, sees everything in stark, black-and-white either/or terms, so that if a Clinton is wrong, a Milosevic must be right. Forget that there’s already a perfectly good term for the phenomenon, recuperation. Berube doesn’t explain why he needed just this term, “Manichean,” with all its theological specificity. The all-black-or-all-white perspective might have been caught by the term — “checkerboard left,” which would have evoked just the right memories of dead time. Or the “digital left” summons up the picture of a slightly malfunctioning cyborg with random issues of The Nation on its hard drive. The term “Manichean Left” would be indefensible except that it excites an imagination avid of better names. Amanda Anderson and Eric Zimmer read the third draft and let me know how to tweak the fourth into its currentform; Would that, I wonder, be the book in my hand? Ben Carrington read the Stuart Hall chapter and festooned the margins with incisive and instructive notes; But not, I’d wager, “Exterminate the brutes!” Christopher Lane gave me invaluably stringent feedback on a talk I delivered just as I was mapping out the plan for the book; Invaluably! and Larry Grossberg read the Stuart Hall and cultural studies chapters with a characteristically keen eye. A dead eye would have been preferable. He goes on to thank “my listeners and interlocutors” at a long list of places. He is “especially grateful” to a short list of fifteen individuals for their “kindness, hospitality, intelligence and dialogism.” He thanks Leo Casey for three things. First come the “many online conversations.” Next come “our long talks in a Park Slope coffeer shop in the dark days of 2002-3.” And then, for “sending me his work on Schmidt, Hobbes, Dewey and Gramsci.” It’s like the Twelve Days of Christmas, but tighter. Memorably — at least to me — he thanks Michael Walzer: To Michael Walzer, I owe a simple debt of gratitude: after mistakenly identifying him as a supporter of the war in Iraq in a Boston Globe essay of September 2002 (indeed, just before he published an essay in which he concluded that “the administration’s war is neither just nor necessary”), he responded not by telling me to get a clue but by graciously inviting me to write for Dissent. And here I discover just how immune I am to the Berube magic. In marked contrast to his experience with Michael Walzer; there’s this. At First’s website, I broke the story that Walzer turns up for about twenty minutes in the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter sex tape. Because I considered the story poorly sourced, I soon deleted the post (in fact I had simply made it up). In my case, though, far from soliciting contributions from me for Dissent, Mr. Walzer has maintained a stony silence. Berube continues: I did not have a chance to start working seriously on [this book] until the National Humanities Center offered me an Assad Meymandi Fellowship for the month of March 2006. Some year-long Center fellows asked me what I could possibly do with a mere month of fellowship time; I can now tell them that I had four glorious weeks in which to read from morning until night, collect my thoughts, make my notes, and even - sometimes – sit in silence. I had not realized until I arrived in the Research Triangle (North Carolina) that I had never at any point in my adult life lived alone; but I can say with gratitude that the experience of sitting in silence and thinking after reading eight or ten hours is really quite extraordinary. Did it ever occur to him to quit his job? ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
