Oops! Jane Fonda Made a Terrible Mistake. She Didn't Mean What She Said About Israel. She Meant the Opposite.

" It means that there are no real truths ... or even real facts. "

Norm Geras says about these theories: If there is no truth, there is no injustice.

Israeli films that I have seen and are well worth watching:

A Late Marriage

Walk on Water (Very recommended)

The Secrets (Sodot)

The Visit of the Orchestra

The Bubble

Beaufort

The Syrian Bride

"Actually, the word "narrative" is one of the curses of the intellectual life. "

A truer thing has not been said here in a long, long time.

Appelas to "narrative" is the refuge of the pretentious and cowardly intellectual.

I tried to read through Fonda's HuffPo entry--very wordy and very morally self congratulatory it was, brimming with ostensible rabbinical wisdom-- and sort of did.

In it I found what I think is glaring confusion.

She says she is sorry she signed the letter because she wasn't attentive enough to what it said or rather did not say: omitting this and that, not coming from the heart, not entering the heart and so on and on and on.

But then as I read her she essentially goes on to make a case, not the strongest, but a case nonetheless, for no such boycotting whatsoever of the Israeli flims about Tel Aviv at the festival.

But she doesn't repudiate the letter, the clear impulse behind it, the supposed moral case for it, in its entirety. She, as noted, merely complains about not being attentive to some of what the letter said and did not say.

Am I missing something?

I think that's a little extreme, JD. The word "narrative" in, say, political discussion is often a useful reminder that we grasp experience less in terms of discrete ideas or concepts, and more as an unfolding of events that form a meaningful passage over time.

For example, I think most people don't think of 9-11 in terms of an abstract notion of terrorism or a concept of civic preparedness but rather as a series of events that turned the events of their day into something shockingly memorable -- as with JFK in Dallas, the story of what happened becomes intertwined with one's own "story."

This doesn't mean that ideas or concepts or principles can't be the subject of discussion. It just means that human beings are "narrative beings."

One would think that after all these years, Jane Fonda would find some way to gracefully fade away from politics. She always came off with the stridency of the most zealous autodidact, so many times commenting on issues that she really did not have the background or intellectual discipline to sort through. This is yet another example. Her metier was playacting the professor to all those ill-schooled young actors who saw Jane as Somebody Who Sounded and Looked Wise.

ironyroad “. It just means that human beings are "narrative beings."”

Well, no, we are language using animals which is to say we talk a lot. We use language in all sorts of ways, we express ourselves in language, we also use language inquisitively, we tell stories, we also lie of course, but then we also like to catch each other in lies, which is to say we search for what actually happens. (I wouldn’t reduce human beings “to story telling animals” any more than I would to “homo ludens.”)

All of these ways of using language go beyond mere narrativity which is merely one function of language.

Moreover, when people do that they do so in order to deny that there is such a thing truth that us mortals, being merely “narrative beings,” can lay hold.

Hence the bluster of an obsessive George Walton who likes to say that all description of events are fictions especially when someone articulates a meaning that he disapproves of, usually in defense of Israel.

In any case, narrative theories have their place in literary discussions, however, these days many politically minded people have jumped on these theories in order to discredit what they don’t approve of. Then everything becomes ambiguous.

People like Walton have no problems with Arab narratives they denote truth but when it comes to Jewish narratives, well, then ideology or bad faith or both are at play. This isn't ambiguity it's hypocrisy.

Marty:

Actually, the word "narrative" is one of the curses of the intellectual life. It means that there are no real truths ... or even real facts. Hail the subjective. Pity them who cling to such narcissism.

george:

How dare he blaspheme MY favorite narrative!!

But then denigrating the narratives of those who don't share his own narrative [in the woefully narcissistic...solipsistic...world of moral and political value judgments] IS his narrative, of course. Just as denigrating that narrative is mine. Just as denigrating mine is yours.

But Marty gets confused about words like this in a way that, say, physicists hardly ever do regarding the relationship between Jane Fonda, Israel and, to site but one example, gravity? You see, the laws of physics work the same for both Jane and Marty, for both Palestinians and Israelis, for both The Good and The Evil.

Marty thinks that something is objective because no one can demonstrate that it is merely subjective. That's like insisting his God exists because no one can demonstrate that He does not.

And though there are hundreds and hundreds of conflicting and contradictory narratives about Israel and Jane Fonda, that doesn't stop each self-righteous proponent of his or her own from insisting it is the one true objective narrative.

In fact, whether Marty or the other Objectivists are right or wrong about this pales next to the psychological succor they suckle on in believing they are and that the others are not. Either/Or. Sweet and simple.

Now, I don't know how close Marty's narrative about Fonda and the Israeli film industry is to "the facts". But Marty's narrative is such that you really aren't all that interested in finding out because you know that "the facts" are as irrelevant to The True Believer here as they are are the only thing that matters to the physicists.

The physics of value judgments?

Right.

george walton
d/a

JD, I don't think I said that we are only narrative beings. That would be wrong. I think however that we like stories and that that particular universal trait (no human group does without narrative) is probably there as a way of making sense of events that would otherwise be distributed across time with no coherence.

I don't believe it's a bad thing at all to use concepts from literary criticism to illuminate political discussion (or indeed other kinds). In fact, as a literary critic I find it good that one can apply some of one's skills, such as they are, in another area. The classical theorists and practioners of rhetoric would be surprised to find that e.g. poetry and public speaking are supposed to be completely detached and separate from each other.

I don't know that it's only used to discredit something: the figure who comes to mind is George Lakoff who spotted that rightwing theories about American politics were being deployed more effectively than Democrats' theories because the Republicans were better at constructing a narrative while Democrats were more adept at quality of argument.

But, as Lakoff pointed out, quality of argument means little if the story has already been put in place that neutralizes the logic. He strongly recommended that the Dems develop a better narrative for what they want to convince the public to support.

ironyroad
"JD, I don't think I said that we are only narrative beings.....

But, as Lakoff pointed out, quality of argument means little if the story has already been put in place that neutralizes the logic. He strongly recommended that the Dems develop a better narrative for what they want to convince the public to support.”

OK, but the Demos won in spite of Lakoff not because of his ideas.

btw: I don't think the Republicans had a better narrative, its just that they pretended that their narrative was the same as that of the voters. The Demos used to be much better at that than the Republicans from the 1930's to the late 50's which is why they constantly won.

Then came the 60's and the Demos found critical theory and the only people who shared their narrative were college profs and a few self styled intellectuals and most of them didn't vote.

another boring and pretentious post from george walton d/a (dumb ass George).

The Democrats were a lot better than the republicans in the 1960s too, and most decades since. They didn't offer the best candidates for president and were rather soft with the Soviet Union, although it didn't make much substantive difference in the end as the Soviet Union was not going to "attack" us and their worldwide influence, mostly in central america, was evicted by the vote and not by the sword (despite the lunacy from maniacs in the reagan and bush administratons) and the system imploded, without a shot fired.
No, the professors were basically correct.

"The Democrats were a lot better than the republicans in the 1960s too, and most decades since. They didn't offer the best candidates for president and were rather soft with the Soviet Union, although it didn't make much substantive difference in the end as the Soviet Union was not going to "attack" us and their worldwide influence, mostly in central america, was evicted by the vote and not by the sword (despite the lunacy from maniacs in the reagan and bush administratons) and the system imploded, without a shot fired."

What a fantastic comment.

On many issues the Democrats offered better policies and there were Democrats like Scoop Jackson whose foreign policy was right on, but in general when it came to the communist bloc Demos like McGovern were dead wrong and this is the ideology that the Professors supported.

The idea that change would have come to Central America without the use of force through the contras is not supported by the evidence. The fact that supervised elections were held at all was a sign that the Sandinistas didn't have a choice. Of course they also thought they were going to win, but the people fooled them as they did the Mullahs in Iran and they would have done in Eastern Europe given the chance.

Not only the were the Professors wrong then as they are now, they were dead wrong as they are now.

Then came the 60's and the Demos found critical theory and the only people who shared their narrative were college profs and a few self styled intellectuals and most of them didn't vote.

I really think that's nonsense, JD. If by "critical theory" you mean the Frankfurt School's codeword for a marxist type of social science, then nobody has been interested in that for decades except academics and a few independent lefty intellectuals -- certainly not the people in charge of Democratic Party campaigns in the normal run of events.

Two exceptions to the lost FS legacy might include the Adorno "culture industry" analysis, some of which is common consensus today, and the kind of survey of authoritarian attitudes that was done in the early 1950s, based on earlier work in Germany. The latter is everyday stuff now, as we often see political loyalties reflected in social attitudes and vice versa -- even if those correlations don't always work on the individual level, they seem to make sense in larger units.

Many Frankfurt school types worked for the OSS in World War 2, incidentally. They were well placed to be able to grasp and explain the political and social structures of Nazi Germany, which weren't quite as plain as many believed.

ironyroad

“I really think that's nonsense, JD. If by "critical theory" you mean the Frankfurt School's codeword for a marxist type of social science, then nobody has been interested in that for decades except academics and a few independent lefty intellectuals -- certainly not the people in charge of Democratic Party campaigns in the normal run of events.”

You know better than that, Irony. No, not the Frankfurt school critical theory which was always practiced by a minority within academia (i.e. Fred Jameson) and some of whom like Paul Piccone (the Telos group) were either unaffiliated or left the academy.

Nor did I mean the New York Intellectuals like Irving Howe who fought a brave lonely fight against the wreckers of academic standards and French Fried critical theory.

Adorno is a difficult thinker which is why he type of dialectic never took hold.

Ok, so whom/what did you mean, when you used the term?

ironyroad
"Ok, so whom/what did you mean, when you used the term?"

I am surprised you had to ask.

Try those who professed French critical theory and radical politics. Try Professors like Chomsky and Edward Said, etc.

Oh ok, you're using it in a very loose sense. I tend to regard that way of using "critical theory" as essentially meaning "everything I like/don't like that's happened in the humanities since 1960." That kind of CT could include many literary and similar scholars who have not had any political profile to speak of or who don't see their work as being a kind of political activism, but who have explored the whys and wherefores of genre, rhetoric, and language (e.g. every one from Ian Watt to Stephen Greenblatt to Helen Vendler could be said to be using critical theory, or extending it).

I think that the kind of Frankfurt School-influenced critical theory I understand as being a critique of positivism (an investigation into the grounds and validity of particular knowledges) is something rather different from what Chomsky does, who academically is a linguistics scholar. His political writings/activism and his academic history seem to be very separate from each other.

Said on the other hand is probably a slightly unusual but generally representative case, as he basically uses a kind of literary and cultural historicism to argue that the Orient is a fictional construct which can conveniently organize the world into particular hierarchies of values (e.g. western=rational, eastern=mystical) that in turn inform political decisions. Undeniably, it's a kind of CT.

Nevertheless, I think people often tend to throw critical theory #1 (literarature/philosophy of language/semiotics) into the bucket with critical theory #2 (marxist analysis of social, economic, and cultural forms with a view to exposing their ideological underpinnings), as they are not the same thing by any standards. But I don't deny there are some overlaps -- however, plenty of people use modern narrative theory in their work but have no desire to e.g. bomb the Pentagon) .

Btw I think your comment on Lakoff did not deal with my previous comment -- you just ignored it.

I’m going to be kinder to Fonda than Marty is. I give her some credit that when she speaks of "narratives" she is not thinking of entire myths based on self-inclination. She probably thinks the facts are indisputable, but their interpretation differs.

Someone once said that “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

"Narrative" as imported from Literary Criticism (Edward Said's gift to academia) is actually a successful attempt at counter- factual persuasion. It says: verifiable, recorded facts as such do not really matter. What matters is what people believe their history is, what people feel is right. In other words, “narrative” is generated by popular demand for simple and consoling history, history that gives in completely to the narrator’s agenda. There are no two contradictory ideas in a narrative. Every detail is streamlined to fit in with the main idea. And whatever does not fit, gets ditched, jeered, vilified, delegitimized.

"Narrative" stands in contradiction to the work of a historian. Narratives stand in violent confrontation with records and facts. Narratives are self-indulgent, narcissistic devices that allow peoples to believe this or that without having to show any accountability or common sense. Narratives, more often than not, when employed in politics, encourage stereotyping, prejudice and bigotry.

Therefore “narrative” has been comfortably imported into politics. For what is politics if not the art of persuasion by means of lies and distortions and an appeal to universally acknowledged myths?

"Narrative" stands in contradiction to the work of a historian.

I think this is disputable, Noga. Not only is narrative history the type that the vast majority of people read and enjoy -- raw data is a specialist's thing -- but it's very difficult to conceive of a way of presenting one's work to others that doesn't deploy some kind of narrative. And inevitably the act of narration means choices -- of sequence, of tone, of emphasis, of including one item while dropping another -- that go toward defining an interpretation.

Perhaps interpretation seems to be another thing that human beings do, along with storytelling. Things aren't always as they immediately appear.

To take a very contemporary example: Ken Burns's wonderful series The National Parks (running this week on PBS) has done some astonishing excavation work in American social and cultural and political history -- the evidence is there in the material backing the film -- but its power and beauty come from the narrative it organizes and unfolds.

Yes, but that is the term "narrative" as it was used before it became a "Narrative" so beloved of the various postists; for example Obama likes to use the latter in his speeches about the Middle East. Shades of Khalidi.

I watched Ken Burns on Charlie Rose the other night. Towards the conclusion of the conversation he said something like: the stewardship of the land says a lot about its people. I liked that.

O/T: You may find this interesting:

http://blog.z-word.com/2009/10/marek-edelman-zl-hero-of-the-warsaw-ghetto/

ironyroad
“Oh ok, you're using it in a very loose sense. I tend to regard that way of using "critical theory" as essentially meaning "everything I like/don't like that's happened in the humanities since 1960." That kind of CT could include many literary and similar scholars who have not had any political profile to speak of or who don't see their work as being a kind of political activism, but who have explored the whys and wherefores of genre, rhetoric, and language (e.g. every one from Ian Watt to Stephen Greenblatt to Helen Vendler could be said to be using critical theory, or extending it). “

The term critical theory with its Kantian allusion (hence its anti positive bent which you correctly identified) was what Adorno introduced. However, that term very quickly acquired other meaning s as well. The type of vulgar Marxism which he opposed had by the 60’s incorporated that term into its own analysis of Capitalism culture.

Of course they had helped from people like Horkheimer who was also a member of the team 9he coauthored “Dialectics of the Enlightenment” yet was himself no immune from vulgar Marxist notions especially when discussing dialectics.

In any case there are many ways of describing critical theory but no one can copywrite that notion hence it can’t be limited merely to the work of Adorno or the Frankfurt School.

I don’t consider Watt, Greenblatt, or Vnedler as critical theorists even though they are excellent literary scholars. (Greenblatt did in his early books on the social production of the self indulge in cultural theory but that is not the same as critical theory.)

The people I was referring to were Professors who thought of themselves as critical theorists and openly offered Marxists critiques of culture (including academia and saw as their task the subversion of the University which they began attacking in the early 60’s. They also succeeded remarkably well in many humanity departments to the point of excluding any non “radical” work from those departments. By the 70’s they incorporated French (critical theory---Foucault, Derrida, Lacan).

“I think that the kind of Frankfurt School-influenced critical theory I understand as being a critique of positivism (an investigation into the grounds and validity of particular knowledges) is something rather different from what Chomsky does, who academically is a linguistics scholar. His political writings/activism and his academic history seem to be very separate from each other.”

Chomsky considers himself a critical theorists and is so considered by many intellectuals in France and Italy.

Frankfurt school critical theory, in its pure form which is to say as a negative dialectics, is not being practiced today anywhere in the US as far as I know.

You accuse me of using the term critical theory as a synonym for “everything I like/don't like that's happened in the humanities since 1960,” and I could accuse you with more justice of using it in a narrow and limited sense to apply to everything you do like that happened in the humanities since the 60’s.

I suggest you read Telos, especially one of their back issues which deal with the failure of higher education in the US. (Spring 1987)

Noga -- the Edelman story was the first thing I saw when I opened up the NYT online this morning. Their article mentioned the Hannah Krall book but not his own account of the uprising, which was rather irritating. But that reflects his own downplaying of himself as any kind of hero-figure.

His ability to puncture balloons of pious reverence was classic. Edelman got into trouble for saying (in the Krall interviews) that the only reason Anielewicz was put in overall command of the ghetto fighting units was because he was the kind of guy who would make everyone's life a misery if he wasn't put in charge of something.

JD: I have some things to say in response but I may have to come back later. This isn't a great weekend timewise.