I do appreciate your deepening of what for me is a critical insight into the ethics of satire. Diogenes the Cynic against Alexander the Great is not a fair contest -- yet Diogenes wins. Swift, I think, or his friends, had qualms about some of the satires of people of low estate like Partridge the Astrolger. The satires are funny, but so cruel, and the fight so uneven as to sadistic and bullying. But to bully your betters? For the adjunct to satirise her Department Chair?

You had posted a long time ago about Grub street, pamphleteering, the coffee houses, and the rise of democatic discourse (and satire) in the same era.

If you can keep this conversation going, we might be able to put what we know together and make it more convincing, or provocative, to those who yet see the importance.

We are now in another where satire, democracy, and empire (of government authority and corporate hierarchy) are contesting with one another.

Cheeky? Yes, but you a know a better or more apt word? Insubordinate.

upstart

This is something I keep trying to impress upon people. For instance, reportorial doggedness and refusal to consider the feelings of the investigatee/interviewee is good when directed at the rich and powerful (which it hardly ever is now-a-days), vile when directed at the poor and miserable. I don't know why this is so hard to grasp.

Thanks for the notice, HT. Here's a very strange thing...I wrote this piece about Diogenes a few days ago, before you'd posted your own strong identification with him.

I don't know how much I have to contribute. (Well, actually, I've thought about issues like this incessantly for years, but they matter way too much to me, so I become constipated whenever I try to write about them, and I've pretty much given up trying.)

But you've persuaded me to post some long quotations from Sloterdijk from time to time. He's really a good provocateur on this topic, despite the fact that the argument travels bumpily from Germany to America (the celebration of satire is much easier to make in a historically melancholic culture than a "happy" culture which punishes melancholy; nothwithstanding, however, the tools he provides allow for their own self-correction and anyway his argument is not nearly so binary as my summary above would imply).

As for Jeff's objection: well, this is going to be very, very curmudgeonly. But I think there is only one reason to treat poststructualism with respect--that's because "poststructuralism" serves as a metonym for "intellectual inquiry" in the hostile mass media propaganda of an anti-intellectual culture. Ninety percent of the time, diatribes against "deconstruction" are actually diatribes against intellectual work of any kind whatsoever. In these cases, one is obliged to defend the antifoundationalists for trying out a theory that offends commmon sense, which all "theories" since Plato have done. It won't do to work off your particular antipathies toward Saussurean assumptions or crypto-Hegelianism if the argument is taking place on Fox News. First you have to assess whether the subtext of the argument is gauging the merits of one theory over another or whether the subtext is to kill off all "theories" altogether and return to a world where men wore hats and had no thoughts beneath them. There are numerous contexts in which a respectful defense of poststructuralism is a defense of being allowed to think *anything* provocative, and in those situations I defend it.

Aside from that, though, I don't think poststructuralism has much ground-clearing ethical provocation to show for its thirty years of hegemony. Is the problem with postmodernity that people "still" cling to "absolute" notions of good and evil, or to "absolute" notions of true and false? This is wholly unconvincing to me.

Poststructuralism often reduces to gleeful attempts to read this kind of "absolutism" into other people's discourse, and the glee (along with the standard invocation of Nietzsche) suggests that the real accusation is not about epistemological justification but a rather "logocentric" accusatory assumption about the opponent's inner character. I would characterize the response of the academic posty left to the New Right as something like: "Well, you have all the power and the money, and you run the opinion mill, and you've won the hearts and minds of the people, but you are still more emotionally needy than I am, because you need your comforting absolutisms. Whereas I can gaze into the abyss, and see it gazing back at me!

A kind of terminal comfort, I suppose, before the knock comes at the door.

Well, hey, "left Nietzscheans," it sure looks like "slave morality" to me.

I guess it helps having had my undergrad political science classes with Straussians. I understood early on that the New Nietzschean Right was far more cynically "postmodern" before breakfast than the crit-theory-left crowd could manage to be after ten years of Derridean ju-jitsu capped with a marathon three-weekend screaming est seminar.

The right is *already* operating quite effectively on a terrain of "believing without believing." (cf. Sloterdijk: cynicism as "enlightened false consciousness"). The anxiety about "foundations" over there seems to me pretty close to zero (foundational "effects" are still in vivo rhetorical weapons, but we're moving toward a place where they will be quite comfortably declared unnecessary.) Meanwhile left pomos try to convince themselves that these needy "logocentric" libertarian repubs would quake in their boots at a copy of Beyond Good and Evil, hands shaking as they held up the garlic. This turns out to be a reason for self-respect. "They have all the power but see, they're really the weak ones! They're afraid of us!"

Please.

If there's anyplace ready for a Diogenic plucked chicken these days, it's this whole poststructualist self-conception as the heroic Nietzschean abyss-watcher. This posture simply does not contribute to political or ethical alertness. And I think it completely misreads the "motives" (in the K-Burkean sense) which inform rightwing discourse.

On the underside of the rock of left-Nietzschean "dissemination" is a secret conception of unified strong-weak "character" so humanistically binary that it makes comic books look like, well, comic books. No less among comp litters than among adolescent Ayn Randers, this is hidden rhetorical reason for its appeal (and perhaps for the weird Stockholm-syndrome affection of the left for Nietzsche).

Speaking of comic books, Ray: during a year of trying to get me to read Watchmen, Zoot kept insisting that I was *Rorshach.*

Well okay then!

Got more ideas on this probably, but not while the methyl xanthine from Sumatra is suffusing through my personage still.

This is a good topic. It's worth some hashing-through, so I hope folks will whip out some more ideas about it.

My main concern is from the aesthetics of satire, because I enjoy satire, but it is a low form of art, always running the risk of seeming mean-spirited and cheap.

Seems the aesthetics of satire walk a tightrope over the ethics of it. Big abyss.

We're in an era of plain old sarcasm, ourselves. I've been on top and I've been on the bottom, and no matter where you are, there is someone who thinks you are fair game for abuse. (Most satire people come up with just ain't funny, so calling a spade a spade, it's abuse dressed up as humor.)

I have noticed, however, that the sting when I was "king" was nothing to what it was when I was some kind of "low guy" and the little local indie-film tycoons were yelling unbidden diatribes in my window and tossing shards of half-eaten lobster from their dinner parties out their window into the driveway, "aiming for the trash barrel," and missing. What pigs.

Let's think about this satire thing a little more. There's something to be figured out here.

I will contribute the conjecture that what we lack in our Jerry Springer Reality is an idea of legitimate authority, and a recognition that subordination is appropriate in some cases and inappropriate in others. To some, no insubordination is acceptable; to others, all is. To all, it seems, authority is subordinated to desire. So the only authority that is honored is the authority that can conk you on the head, or fire you; and the honor accorded it is sneaky and begrudged.

I'll break it off with this, unfinished. Rejoinders?

ZOK

We all deserve to be satirized--ship of fools, a million maggots in a silk hat, etc. Maybe the most effective satire has no obvious single target. Ideally we should all feel the prick. Good satire both diverts and unsettles, because our participation in the farce is implied.

Who do you think does it well these days? George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia) seems to me one of the more talented practitioners. He's imaginative, morally engaged, an acute observer, funny and not cruel. Others?

I haven't read any recent satirical work, but on my slate are Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson, which looks like it might be cool (I picked up the hardcover for $8 used!), and something called Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Service, which someone has given me a copy of.

When I can pull my head out of my multi-threaded work life, I am nibbling at The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon. It's not satire per se, but it's got satirical strands to it (they steal a freaking golem, okay??? damn!), and it's a very delightful book.

Now another work that I've been nibbling at, which has some family resemblance to satire, is Come Hell On High Water: A Really Sullen Memoir, by Gregory Jaynes. The author insists he takes great pains not to spare himself, so we take this at its protested value to be unsparingly nonfictional.

...which brings me to the theoretical nip for the day, the question of reality capable of satirizing itself (Paul Fussell, a man capable of marathon-duration self-satire, as we learn in My Kitchen Wars, spoke of The Great War as an echo in reality of the cultural trends Hardy's Satires of Circumstance partake in).

Satire amplifies details; it draws a caricature. Its action is akin to metaphor with the incongruities it plays on. It can be a distortion that highlights a truth; and it can do violence to a subject by making some features recognizable, and then grafting on others that are slanderous, things "everybody knows" that are only so in some self-styled in-crowd's imagination. "Look, I'm more real than reality. Wouldn't it be nice if you couldn't see that this is about something in the world?"

If the reality you see is so silly it breaks continuity with the world you thought you were in, maybe it can pass for satire. Satire by slippage. (cf. mise-en-scene?

What's humor, offhand? I think I've got a formula that specifies it, which I haven't heard elsewhere. But I'm curious what some of you folks have to say.

Immanent (yeah?) but unspecified,
ZOK

I'm interested in reading other people's lists of good satires, but I feel unable to offer my own. H. G. Wells' Tono-Bungay was one of my favorite comic romps once upon a time, and given its concern with the nexus of commercialism & imperialism it would appear that the time is ripe for a rereading.

But it's just rereads for me these days. Among his many gems, Ray offered this beauty awhile back, in which he distinguished between two types of academics:

Proselytizers, who love to teach and have been given the opportunity to teach, or who love to research and have been given the opportunity to research Apostates, whose disappointment often blocks not just their hoped-for careers but their pleasure in scholarship itself, like a post-sick repugnance to chocolate or tequila

Oh my God yes, that latter is me.

When I read that, I remembered the first time I went to the MLA--the only time I've ridden a train anywhere in the U.S. On the way home I ordered some pizza from my favorite east coast chain in the diner car, and ate it in my seat as I incubated some kind of terrible virus. I held it awfully down for a couple of hours as the countryside whooshed by. I released it even more awfully when I got home. I was never able eat that particular brand of pizza again--a single bite would make me feel ill even though it didn't taste bad, exactly.

Reading books is like that for me now.

My relation to texts is now entirely intensive rather than extensive: I Talmudically reread Sloterdijk, Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi, Kenneth Burke, some Buddhist scripture, the Stoa, Diogenes Laertius, Geoff Waite. Maybe a little Melville or Beckett. That's pretty much it.

Those are the ones that helped me survive the nineties. They still help. Beyond that, the horizon of learning just induces waves of puking; it really is a lot like a hangover.

I wish I could contribute something to this or any other booklist, but there you are.

Ah well. You live with what you're dealt.

CTA

Conditioned taste aversion.

A Professor told his senior class about his field, introducing the course. "Just don't expect to find a job in it. There aren't any."

I saw how he worked. I saw how the others worked. I was one of two students in my graduating class who was considering a career in his subspecialty. And I was passionate about it.

Maybe I'm lucky, because I didn't want to go to graduate school without a clear idea of exactly what I would do in this field at the apex of so many intersecting disciplines. I wanted to plan my route to a dissertation before I even applied.

I also saw how Adjuncts worked. Oh my god. To be paid like that, with none of the institutional resources of a tenure-track Professor? And to be treated like that, though I had a doctorate degree?

If I have a conditioned taste aversion, though, it's by extrinsic associations, to events of the time. I entertain the thought of going back out into that storm of revelations to do something with what I learned, before outside events intervened and sapped the strength I would have needed for graduate school.

My only Talmudic rereading is of Watchmen. * I was never too literal about the comparison of Turbulent Velvet to Rorschach, of course, but I'm getting a chuckle out of it right now. ** For my part I crunch through the books when I get the time to, continuing a multidisciplinary scholarly project no one has ever expressed more than passing interest in, but which I have pursued since I was 22. And I rabble-rouse Turbulent Velvet to collaborate now and then.

Vagus nerve, though. Tenth cranial nerve. Visceral reflexes. The thing about Turbs is, he charges into things inexorably enough for it to display faith. I put on my little fireworks show without any hope it would end up in a career, and it didn't.

But satires? Yup, we've got 'em. If I get in fighting trim, I will publish one or two of them. Bam! Not nice! ;)

But oh so silly...

provisionally (but with many keystrokes),
ZOK

* maybe i exaggerate
** i did insist he read Watchmen, but i can only remember calling him rorschach once! ;)

T.V., I don't know if you'll find this comforting, but I know quite a few people (myself included) for whom the aversion you cite passed, in time.

I grant I haven't read much historical Ibero-Latin linguistics in the last five years... but I've read plenty of other stuff of similar density.

Dorthea,

Thanks. I think it will probably turn around in time, though the time in my case may be longer rather than shorter.

I've got other things to do, though, like get a life, so it's okay for the time being.