Strongthomas: Thanks for your comment — truly. As I’ve said in my reply to Ozma, I agree that thinking about ritual homosexuality is not in fact totally disjunct from criticizing Republicans and more likely to related (in some tenuous way) to developing models of human life which an activist might want to use for political ends.

In fact, there are in fact passages in the Markell where in the margin I’ve noted “lol — cf. Lederman!” For instance, on pg. 179 in a discussion of justice as fairness in the distribution of goods, he notes “the principle of giving what is due likewise presupposes that we have already determined who the relevant parties to a distribution are… every appeal to the identity as a settled criterion of distribution will likewise be a potential site of (nondistributive) injustice… because those people for whom justice is a live issue are not done becoming who they are; or, better, who they will turn out to have been.” This could be straight out of Ku Waru or Gender of the Gift! Perhaps you can see now the many levels on which it would appeal to me.

I have my own interest in the politics and semiotics of recognition and so will get to the Markell straightaway. I published a critique of Butler’s critique of the politics of gay kinship (Antigone’s Claim) drawing on a longstanding problem I have with Butler’s performative-inflected, quasi-Lacanian, Hegelianism: the resolute focus on the State. I wouldn’t want to be naive about politics in industrial democracies, but if doing fieldwork in Melanesia taught me anything, it is that recognition evinces and elicits diverse relational forms: as, for example, in the dense multisemous symbolism of semen exchanges in Anga-land and elsewhere, symbolism that makes explicit certain forms of personal constitution (‘identity’) while also binding people into future acts of exchange (‘recognition’). Reading about the ways in which Melanesians creatively invent and re-invent ways of recognizing themselves-in-others (and others-in-themselves) leads one inevitably to a critique of the relatively impoverished relational universe imagined in a politics of ‘the state’ and its critiques. And so, in fact, if I can tie a loop (if ever so loosely), I’m inclined to think that understanding ‘ritualized homosexuality’ (we know this is a problematic term, right?) in some ways helps us to think about ways of criticizing Republicans (starting with the naive individualism of laissez faire neo-liberalism). Just a thought.

I felt badly about my earlier post, because I knew I’d been unfair to you as a person whom I know not to be a reactionary. But I still do think we have a disagreement — let me find a more generous way than I did before to express what it is.

From what I gather of Markell’s book and your take on the same, you are both attempting to have the “life of the mind” and one’s action in the world be as practically and logically consistent as possible. I am currently finding this a hard go and am coming to the conclusion that it’s an irreducible, immanent contradiction I’ll just have to live with.

So — it is in fact fine by me if people talk about Marxism in their books and shopping in their lives — knowing you, I don’t reckon you could sign an affadavit promising you’d never made that kind of off-hand joke. I make those kinds of jokes all the time. In fact I’ll make one right now: Marxism strikes me as quite persuasive but then, I’m also a sucker for Patagonia’s advertising.

What instead bothered me about grad school was the sort of lack of willingness to dare to be contradictory in ways more effective/important than shopping. Shopping is actually a great example: it’s frivolous and fashionable, so everyone could joke about it light-heartedly. But there didn’t seem to be a lot of talking political philosophy in the classroom *paired with* public declarations of where people stood ANYWAY in terms of the imperfect politics of the world as we know it, and what they planned to do about it. Maybe it was because we were in a safely democratic city and we all sort of were on the same side anyway, and maybe this has changed since the political climate has more insistently importuned daily life.

So again, yes, I do think high-flown cleverness (and comments like “political philosophy is not for everyone”) is almost inevitably weaponized when deployed in political discussions. It is aimed right at people’s kneecaps. There are many important intellectual questions that lead in directions that, in my experience, provide much clearer *critiques* of action than they do guides to it. This doesn’t mean I think high-flown cleverness must die. But I don’t like its “gotcha” aspects, which I do think are incredibly paralyzing.

So, I want to ask the concrete question again, which you chose not to address but which comes right out of your original post: what IS so silly about teaching ritual homosexuality AND opposing Republicans vociferously?

To beg the question a bit: yes, yes, it is intellectually contradictory. So what?

I know that political philosophy is not for everyone, but I think it’s important not to lump people living the life of the mind — trying to rigorously connect their philosophical (and, in my case, religious) commitments to their action — with professors who ‘play at politics’. I think you are right to be critical of profs who take the moral high ground of Marxism in their books and then in class profess to be ‘world class shoppers’ (to take one example we both know) or who substitute the word ‘hegemony’ for ‘culture’ in their books and then think they’ve committed an act of politics rather than jargon. In fact I think the self-satisfaction that these people gain from this is a perfect example of the desire for ’sovereignty’ that their students have to bear for the sake of their own sense of self that Markell takes issue with.

So I think that putting me or Markell into this camp, or to categorize anyone who uses ‘high-flown cleverness’ as automatically guilty of those people’s sins is unfair. I’m an intellectual and I’m here to represent for the Life Of The Mind with a capital ‘LOTM’ — that’s what I do. I’m not sure why you think this mode of living can’t co-exist with a politics of “actual concrete wards, precincts, and feets-on-the-ground positions, stances, and alliances” or would consider such a politics ’silly.’ In fact, the point of this entry was to outline exactly one way in which this coexistence could occur.

Seth: if you want to understand his argument read the first chapter. If you want the implications, read the last.

While we’re still young:…

OK, not really.

But it’s pretty clear why the left doesn’t have think tanks or ideological development programs like the Heritage Foundation or Patrick Henry colllege (to name the topics of two fascinated, worried profiles in the mainstream middlebrow media).

It’s because we’ve got Harvard, Oberlin, and every gender studies, comp lit and cultural anthro department in the country. Those are left-wing think tanks. The plus is you’re allowed to think whatever you want (as long as it passes peer review and pleases your colleagues and is aware, in detail, of Bourdieu, Butler and Povinelli–in other words, as long as it fits a whole passel of subtle constraints). But the right-wing think tanks are under much more obvious constraints: 9 times out of 10 their research has to conclude–surprise surprise–EXACTLY what it set out to prove. An excess of self-respect can be a huge barrier.

The minus with the left-wing think tanks is nobody outside of the fishbowl understands what you’re saying. Maybe a trade-off worth reconsidering. Markell could even help in reconsidering it, if I could figure out what he was saying and whether any specific consequences flowed from it.

Time to finish my book on epigraphy and ancient publics.

Still, it seems to me that one has no choice but to do both. Right, agency and intentionality and identity and all of that are polyvalent and complicated, and one *could* be like the reflective millipede and spend all one’s time considering how to run. Many anthropologists choose a life of such contemplation, and right on to that. But other stuff is NOT complicated — if those same anthropologists aren’t also writing angry letters to public officials, going to protests, and behaving decently in the field as best as they can figure what that amounts to — ie, acting and speaking in the inevitably clumsy ways available to us in the world as it is, well — then they are rotters.

The core of Markell’s thesis–that “the very conditions that make us potent agents also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us” sounds quite a bit like Judith Butler’s in Excitable Speech. They also seem comfortably compatible with Silverstein’s version of identity in his 2003 Public Culture piece on the way ethnolinguistic recognition is conducted 24/7 in realtime.

My question then is what consequences flow from this? Any? “potency—simply having (and being carried along by) effects in the world” sounds like what lots of people already do anyway.

Is Markell basically a Stanley Fish figure, emerging from the Cave to reveal to us that we should continue business as usual?