On Commitment
In a recent essay for Harper’s, Thomas Chatterton Williams, the now somewhat notorious liberal writer and critic, responded to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s call for a new and explicitly political writing. For Nguyen, the Trump years were a boon for a certain type of writer who was able to finally pull the scales from their eyes that had developed during the “warmth” of the Obama years, and to finally, in these newly troubled times, “awaken [writing] to politics.” Yet, for Nguyen, the problem is just how marginal such politically-active writing is – it mainly being written by those groups who are themselves the most marginalised, those who bear the brunt of a system of unequal social power: the “writers of color, queer and trans writers, feminist writers, anticolonial writers.” What we need then, for Nguyen, is to generalise such writing, to make the political aesthetic.
In his response, Williams pokes at some of the already gaping holes in this call. Nguyen’s weak activism (“many writers, like me, texted voters, donated to activist causes, got into bitter fights on social media and wrote Op-Eds attacking the Trump administration,”) is swiftly dispatched, as is the distinction between the political involvement of a writer vs “a writer’s political obligation within the work”. But what really rankles Williams, though, is that “Nguyen would have every author become a strident advocate on and off the page.” A few months earlier, Williams levied a similar charge against political writing, this time in defending himself against Tobi Haslett’s stunning and excoriating essay on Williams’s book Self-Portrait in Black and White.
Haslett charges Williams, and liberals like him, of an “incoherence”, the “specific genre of chin-stroking, brow-furrowing, “eye opening” sophistry that’s now robustly represented in mainstream newspapers and magazines.” It’s the kind of intellectual gallimaufry that’s come to predominant contemporary Anglo-American politics and culture, with its exponents picking and choosing from the intellectual smorgasbord to suits whatever they happen to be criticising that day, whether it be the left or the right. As Haslett says, it’s “a kind of ideological dim sum”: “These pundits are the opposite of adherents; all hail the Incoherents!”
What Williams charges Haslett with is a form of dualistic thinking. “In a Manichaean world such as ours,” Williams says, paraphrasing Haslett, “the degree to which one refuses to become not just a partisan but an ideologue—or, just as likely, a recycler of ideological talking points—is the extent to which one descends into ‘incoherence.’” What’s on the other side of incoherence then but “adherence to some party line”.
I probably don’t need to explain the sophistry of this particular line of argument, but it is particularly sticky point. It’s obviously not Haslett here who falls for the trap of dualistic thinking but Williams. On one side if the free thinking individual, and on the other a range of totalitarianisms, from those who like Haslett would force some form of political and intellectual coherence on your work, to whatever other forms of universality, state or otherwise, that are ranged against the individual.
The call for “nuance or self-doubt” is thus not an argument against dualism, but merely the resurrection of another, irreducible dualism, that of the individual against the mass, the singular against the universal. Williams lets this slip when he quotes Barack Obama on purity. “This idea of purity,” said Obama a few years ago “and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.” On one level, both Williams and Obama are right here, the world is messy and ambiguous, and such ambiguity shouldn’t prevent action in the world – a point I think that Haslett would endorse as well. What we don’t need though is Williams’s slippery liberalism, nor Nguyen’s marginal writing. No, it’s commitment.
There’s perhaps no better guide to the dangers of both communitarian identity politics and Williams’s brand of liberal individualism than the work of Gillian Rose. In her late collection Mourning Becomes the Law, Rose similarly tarries with the messy, complicated world around us. Where the dualisms of postmodernity, with its discarding of metaphysics in the search for a new ethics, and both its communalist and individualist aspects, Rose sets another, a third, position: as she says, “it takes three to make a relationship between two.”
If postmodernity was a reaction to the failed promises of both state-centred liberalism and state-socialism, both of which were seen as the harbingers of the totalitarianism of universality over and above the individual and the community, then our present moment with its calls for a liberal compromise against a commitment seen as ruinously sullied by its political intolerance is equally anti-universalist. And yet, we must also learn the lessons of history, gather the wisdom that spreads its wings at dusk, that works between the expectations and outcomes, utopian dreams and messy reality.
Rose, in the first essay in the collection “Athens and Jerusalem” wishes to tell a “tale of three cities”. If Athens is the city of politics and rationality, and Jerusalem is the city of the new ethics, what is this third city? Postmodern anti-rationalism is the abandoning Athens for Jerusalem, politics for ethics. The third city is between the two of them, represented by the women outside of the city, engaged in the work of mourning, of Antigone burying Creon against the laws of the city, of Phocion burying her husband’s ashes. The third city is the act of justice, “when the completed mourning returns the should to the city, renewed and reinvigorated, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city.”
The lesson of the three cities is that there is no justice without risk. Athens is pure power and rationality, it is modernity itself. The New Jerusalem is the search for a pure, perfect community “without the perennial work which constantly legitimises the transformation of power into authority.” The third city is that which is always staked in the quest for the transformation of Athens and Jerusalem, the quest for a good enough justice. It is, then, a commitment that bares the weight of the mismatch between expectations and outcomes, that stakes itself, risks itself, despite the chance of failure. That, through the work of mourning, returns once more to the life of the city and is capable of wisdom and action.