Stanley Fish usually annoys the he’ll out of me, but this editorial is pretty good.
In the brief period between the bombing and the emergence of McVeigh, speculation had centered on Arab terrorists and the culture of violence that was said to be woven into the fabric of the religion of Islam.
But when it turned out that a white guy (with the help of a few of his friends) had done it, talk of “culture” suddenly ceased and was replaced by the vocabulary and mantras of individualism: each of us is a single, free agent; blaming something called “culture” was just a way of off-loading responsibility for the deeds we commit; in America, individuals, not groups, act; and individuals, not groups, should be held accountable. McVeigh may have looked like a whole lot of other guys who dressed up in camouflage and carried guns and marched in the woods, but, we were told by the same people who had been mouthing off about Islam earlier, he was just a lone nut, a kook, and generalizations about some “militia” culture alive and flourishing in the heartland were entirely unwarranted.
I wonder why this is.
August 31, 2010 at 1:48 pm
In this regard (although not on precisely this subject), I strongly recommend Claude Fischer’s recent book Made in America. Fischer argues that American culture is actually characterized by voluntarism, rather than simply individualism. Great read, and actually half as long as it looks (Literally 50% of the book is notes and bibliography. He’s a stickler.)
August 31, 2010 at 4:16 pm
[...] 31, 2010 Levi BEAT ME TO THIS ONE, but I want to echo what he says there. Stanley Fish can be annoying, even inane, a large portion [...]
August 31, 2010 at 10:46 pm
This wheel turns smoothly enough: “If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile, interests and agendas are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the malefactor from everything that is going on or is in the air (he came from nowhere) and characterize him as a one-off, non-generalizable, sui generis phenomenon.”
But is there an alternative to this either-or and to these motivated appeals? Would Fish hold both that there are no purely individual acts and no acts determined by structures/cultures? If so, what would be a non-volunteerist and non-stucturalist account of culpability, responsibility, ethics? Or does he only want to point out the rhetorical commonplaces that rule here?
Inversion doesn’t work: McVeigh represents a culture, Mohamed Atta, a “sui generis phenomenon.” That sounds like something I might have wanted to say–but not anymore. So, is there either a., a middle ground or mid-level approach that reduces neither to the other, or b., an approach that displaces the terms? Or is it case by case? There likely are “lone gunmen,” on the one hand, and soldiers, on the other. So how should we proceed?