My main goal for this experiment is to see what naive readers do with stories that have been heavily “theorized” — obviously the Baudelaire story is famous in large part for the attention Derrida paid to it, and Odradek is a “regular” in many strands of literary theory.

Do you ever do experiments like this, readers? How have they turned out? (I’ll drop into comments tomorrow with an update.)

In addition, Anna Kornbluh, the reading group’s fearless leader, maintains a Google calendar with theory-related events.

W. is impressed by my stammer.—‘You stammer and stutter’, says W., ‘and you swallow half your words. What’s wrong with you?’ Every time I see him, he says, it gets a little worse. The simplest words are beginning to defeat me, W. says. Maybe it’s mini-strokes, W. speculates. That would account for it.—‘You had one just there, didn’t you?’

Perhaps, W. muses, my stammering and stuttering is a sign of shame. W. says he never really thought I was capable of it, shame, but perhaps it’s there nonetheless.—‘Something inside you knows you talk rubbish’, he says. ‘Something knows the unending bilge that comes out of your mouth’. (Lars Iyer, Spurious)

Equality is a central term for Rancière, but it is quite a circumscribed equality, the equality specifically and only of speaking beings. Which immediately raises the question, what about non-speaking beings?Animals would be the most obvious example, but there are also human beings prevented from speaking by age and infirmity, disability, oppression. Rancière might object that these examples of non-speaking don’t exclude people from the class of equals, which isn’t strictly speaking beings, but rather beings that have the logos, that have access to language; and, furthermore, it is the structure of the logos, of language, which ensures this equality. However, in the way Rancière makes his argument, speech is indeed theoretically central, and problematic. The argument for axiomatic equality occurs in what is, as it were, the primal scene of politics for Rancière, the moment at which a master gives an order to a slave. This contains the central contradiction of politics: the master presents themselves as of a different order from the slave and so as entitled to give the slave orders; but in the process of giving the order, the master assumes that the slave is capable of understanding the order, that is, that master and slave are equal in their possession of language. This argument doesn’t depend on speech literally understood – it would work if the order was handed over in written form or using sign language – but it does depend on features of speech broadly construed: the two participants must be in the same place at the same time for their equality, the possibility of the slave speaking back to the master, to manifest itself.

That is, Rancière’s argument for the equality of speaking beings is phonocentric in Derrida’s sense. Phonocentrism is the belief that spoken language is more authentic or primary than written language. The two features that are supposed to give spoken language this primacy are the presence and synchronicity it is supposed to require; through this presence, the speaker retains the ability to directly authenticate the meaning of their words. Writing, on this theory, is a poor copy of speech, where, in the absence of the author, the written text is parasitic on the authority which the primary speech situation provides. Derrida points out, however, that the asynchrony and absence which characterize writing are features that are inherent to all language, and are present as possibilities in spoken language as well. The absence of language is the condition of possibility of its presence.

This isn’t just a philosophical position for Derrida; rather, the prioritization of spoken language in philosophy supports the prioritization of those authorized to speak, particularly white men. Irigaray makes a somewhat similar argument, that philosophical accounts of meaning in language depend on excluding the non-meaningful in a gendered way, constructing the category of femaleness through this exclusion from language. What differentiates Derrida’s and Irigraray’s positions from Rancière’s is that, for Rancière, exclusion from language is a ruse of the powerful (slaves are persuaded of their inability to speak, and thus their inequality, but this is a false belief, the falsehood of which they can realize), whereas for Derrida and Irigaray exclusion from language is a result of the operation of language itself.

This suggests an alternative to Rancière’s idea of the equality of all speaking beings: where we are equal, rather, is in our status as non-speaking beings, in that moment of faltering hesitation that may (or may not) precede speech. This idea of a community of non-speaking beings is part of Adam’s idea of “radical awkwardness,” although this awkwardness may be a more general sociality than just the linguistic; nevertheless, I think a specifically linguistic inarticulacy is an important part of the phenomenology of awkwardness. Thinking about awkwardness primarily in terms of language also allows us to use a whole history of thinking about the relationship between women and language to think about the relationship between awkwardness and gender.

A number of  reviews of Awkwardness pointed out that all the awkward characters discussed in the book are male, and this somewhat blunts the potentially radical force of awkwardness. Judith Halberstam has a useful analysis of a related phenomenon, the difference between male and female stupidity (using as examples Dude, Where’s My Car? and 50 First Dates, respectively). Although stupidity is the opposite of the intellectual competence traditionally assigned to men, male stupidity isn’t opposed to this stereotype; “though we punish and naturalize female stupidity,” a man’s stupidity “is quickly folded back into his general appeal as a winning form of vulnerability…. Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques” (The Queer Art of Failure, 55-7). So too with male awkwardness, which, as in the Apatow comedies Adam discusses (and as Adam points out) raises the possibility of a critique of articulacy only in order to resolve the problem in a new and non-awkward male homosociality. Embracing female awkwardness would be more radical, because it would involve an upending of the standards which exclude women by privileging the possession of language.

This is particularly relevant in the post-Fordist context that Adam discusses, because of the increasing economic importance of articulacy, an articulacy which is increasingly feminized. Just as Apatovian male awkwardness is ironic, a mask for continued male power, so too is post-Fordist female articulacy; this image of the sorted, omnicompetent woman is produced at the same time that possession of language is increasingly tightly integrated with the forms of control involved in wage labor, which means that language is increasingly experienced not as a capability but as a demand. In One Dimensional Woman, Nina discusses the way in which post-Fordism feminizes labor, and connects this in particular to “the demand to be an ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking,’ ‘selling yourself,’ in effect to become a kind of walking CV” (21). Linguistic labor requires a compulsory sociality, which repurposes earlier ideas about women’s work and women’s greater social skills as a paradigm of labor.

This shows how post-operaismo discussions of linguistic labor as the basis for the construction of the multitude may be overly optimistic. Virno does recognize that the rise of linguistic labor in post-Fordism  is “ambivalent,” in that it can give rise to forms of domination as well as forms of liberation. However, there is still an underlying optimism in the idea that post-Fordist linguistic labor involves a “fundamental mode of being,” as Virno says (A Grammer of the Multitude, 84), because the suggestion is that the communication involved in post-Fordist labor involves a kind of fundamental human universality, which is liberated, or produced in a more direct form (and so in principle at least available for re-appropriation) in these new forms of capitalism.

But what if it is not speech, but non-speaking, which is the fundamental human universality? Then awkwardness would not only be, as Adam argues, the potential grounds for a radical politics, it could also be a mode of resistance. Discussing an earlier form of compulsory sociality, Shulamith Firestone describes a kind of weaponized awkwardness:

My ‘dream’ action for the women’s liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their ‘pleasing’ smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them (The Dialectic of Sex).

One could point out the fact that evangelicals don’t “really” take the Bible literally, but that just repeats the problem: it’s a superficial, “gotcha” type of argument that doesn’t engage with the issue at the appropriate level. People don’t generally change their minds when you catch them in a surface-level contradiction — they either shrug it off or get mad. In fact, I’m going to risk a bold hypothesis: reasoned argument never produces a change in basic worldview or practice.

This is not to say that reasoned argument is useless. It’s a valuable intellectual skill, but one that only really holds within the boundaries of certain intellectual games. The basic error of liberal proceduralism is that it assumes all of life can be made into one of those intellectual games — that politics and religion, which touch on the most intimate and important matters in our shared life, should conduct themselves in basically the same way as a debate about how you can tell if someone is a philosophical zombie or how to explain the behavior of quantum particles.

This work of historical clarification is an insistent theme among many liberal Christians, and while I obviously agree with the historical point that’s being made, I find something unsettling in the way it’s approached. What if events had gone down pretty much as the gospels presented them, with Jewish leaders pushing a reluctant and cowardly Pilate to execute Jesus? Would anti-Semitism then be justified? The insistence on the historical innocence (or at worst, secondary responsibility) of Jewish leaders of the time seems to imply a certain anxiety that it would be justified — or at least to indicate the limits of the liberal strategy of focusing on historical facts without mounting an explicitly theological counter-argument, with the effect that the “traditional” theological framing remains very much in place.

Another question: what are we to conclude from the Romans’ responsibility? The radical interpretation of this — which I share — is that it indicates that early Christianity was a profoundly political movement opposed to the Roman Empire. More liberal thinkers don’t seem to go in that direction, however, instead preferring to fall back on the notion that “it was all a big misunderstanding.” But again, if Jesus really had been preaching sedition, would the Romans have been justified in torturing him and then murdering him in one of the most painful and dehumanizing ways ever devised? I’m going to say no. Even worse, it seems to me that the “big misunderstanding” interpretation fits perfectly within the traditional framing that would make the poor unwitting Romans into the instrument of the Jews.

This seems to me to be a familiar pattern in liberal Christianity — the traditional framing is never seriously questioned or countered, and instead the battle is moved to a terrain with higher stakes. We can see this in arguments that fundamentalists don’t really follow the Bible literally — the hidden premise being that they should. Or from the opposite side, we see a reluctance to take the Bible too seriously — the hidden premise being that the fundamentalists have it right. Or in the insistence that the historical Jesus was a teacher of moral and spiritual edification — the hidden premise being that he is still a source of divine authority.

I believe that this pattern contributes to the widespread perception that liberal Christians aren’t “real” believers — they continually appear to be attempting to superficially “hijack” Christianity for liberal ends, rather than daring to make the properly theological case that Christianity should support those ends.

Dear ________,

First, I want to thank you for your call a week or so ago. I have not been ignoring it, though the delay & your stated concern in the voicemail would perhaps suggest otherwise. Things have just been more busy than normal, attentions tugged this way & then that. While I confess I could’ve made and/or found the time to respond, either by calling or by writing, life is filled with decisions, most of them, we hope, not as malevolent or even as plainly calculated as they might appear, and I opted for decisions that did not include a quick response to you.

Second, you will no doubt notice that I’m responding via email rather than your chosen mode of communication, the telephone. Please, do not read anything into that either. I’m simply far more comfortable in print than I am in person, with even my closest friends. Would that I could carry on my own internal dialogues & diatribes wholly in print, I might make a better go at consciousness in general.

To your concern: I did not stop attending church because of my participation in Occupy Oakland. Again, appearances here are wont even to deceive me. Occupy surely played a role in the decisions I’ve made, but mostly only in their final acts. There was, that is to say, much leading up to my decision to take a break from involvement in the church, none of them related to Occupy. I’ve spoken to [the good Reverend] at some length about this, and we remain in contact still – just last week, in fact – so I have no problem relaying, at least in part, my reason. In the simplest of terms: I did not have enough faith. Which is to say, I didn’t have any spiritual faith at all. This is not a new development. What was new, however, was that I had (foolishly, perhaps) put myself in various formal & up-front positions of prominence in the church, representing various ideals & formations of faith, speaking on behalf of faith, as it were, never quite believing in the faith so much as I believed in the believers. (Would it be a scandal to say I find a kind of atheistic beauty in religion that the spirituality you cherish cannot attain?) In many respects, I stand by my thinking in this regard, as I approached much of my participation (and, yes, as sad as it may seem, leadership) as an experiment: can one, I wondered, help lead when one believes in the material reality of the church more than what the church says and/or experiences of itself? The jury is still out on that, as I don’t want my psychic & physical burden necessarily to be representative. But, suffice it to say, I was chastened by mu effort, though I remain fascinated by the question. I am considering writing a book on it, in fact.

Anyway, yes, I could’ve & should’ve handled the bowing-out better than I did. I had every intention, for example, of helping [the good Reverend] complete her thesis project, not to mention finishing my term as vice-moderator. I am very embarrassed to say, I followed through on neither.

One constant, however, is my high regard for the work done by the congregation (not least of which you). I’ve been especially encouraged by your brave work with Occupy Oakland, to the point of being placed in jail, & am humbled at you going “all-in” with your participation in this regard.

I’ve gone on at some length now. I will end things for now on this note. Again, thank you for your concern & your call.

Fans of Friedrich von Hayek may be surprised to learn that the Austrian economist is the talk of Occupy London. Hayek’s observation that distributed intelligence in a voluntary co-operative is a hallmark of real economy rings true beneath the bells of St Paul’s. Occupy is often criticised for not having a single message but that misses the point: we are committed to incorporating different preferences before coming up with policies. In this sense, it could be said we work more like a market than the corporate boardroom or lobbyist-loaded politics – our ideas are radical but also just and democratically decided.

The policy proposals that follow focus on reducing tax-avoidance, using monetary policy to boost the housing market, and changing the way executives are compensated — hardly revolutionary stuff, but probably beneficial. (I’m not sure, though, how the idea for the Bank of England to use “quantitative easing… to fund housebuilding” would work either logistically or in terms of getting the desired outcome.)

I understand that these kinds of demands are uninspiring for any number of reasons, above all because they embrace the logic of capitalism and implicitly legitimate the system by reference to a “better way” to execute it. At the same time, I don’t think there is widespread understanding of more radical alternatives, in large part because it’s not at all clear, objectively, what the desired answer would be. (In this respect, I’m reluctant to embrace the notion that the problem is the open-ended, anarchist nature of the Occupy movement — though I’m skeptical of that approach to some degree, I don’t think that having greater discipline and structure would be beneficial in the absence of an actual workable program. If an anarchistic/democratic form doesn’t automatically lead to good results, surely we can agree that a centralized “organized” form doesn’t either.)

Indeed, what’s most depressing isn’t that this group would cite Hayek, but that Hayek is objectively to the left of mainstream neoliberal economic ideology at this point — and of course Keynes counts as a radical leftist in this context. To put it another way: what’s most depressing is that drawing on Hayek genuinely counts as a step in the right direction compared to the idiocy that’s driving most policy makers.

Another thing that stands out to me is the mismatch between how relatively painless the task is and how ridiculously backed up most journals’ review processes tend to be. Part of that surely results from the procrastination that forms the bedrock of the academic life, but I also assume that there are many academics who are doing little to no peer reviewing at all.

And that’s when it hit me: I’m writing this post to procrastinate on reviewing an article!

In all seriousness, though, there’s no reason academics who are actively involved in research shouldn’t be peer reviewing regularly. I’d even suggest that doing as much as one article per month would not be particularly burdensome.

• The belief in creation ex nihilo
• Anthropocentrism: the contingent becoming of the universe reaches its pinnacle and unsurpassable goal in humanity
• Faith in the resurrection of the dead
• Hope in a coming mediator figure who, though possessing the divine power necessary to inaugurate the resurrection, empties himself
• An ethics based on living in joyful hope of the resurrection

It’s a good thing we have Meillassoux to tell us about these radically new and unheard-of ideas! I wonder if the other sections tell us about such innovations as a ceremonial cleansing to enter the messianic community or a symbolic meal commemorating the mediator figure.