In an earlier post I quoted, only half tongue in cheek, Shakespeare’s line about the Dyer’s hand being subdued to what it works in. ‘What it works in’ was in that instance polemics, with all the obligatory gestures one is duty bound to employ, the pre-scripted moves and countermoves, the directives given by the ego - never to be countermanded - to destroy the ego of the other. Today, following up various links, I came across the following reaction, a self-confessedly visceral one, to Noam Chomsky (again). The author begins by dismissing Chomsky’s putative ‘defenders’
The Chomsky defenders--and there seem to be a surprisingly large number of them--seem to form a kind of cult. Arguing with them seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato's Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.
Lovely. Anyway, after applying himself to some 17 pages of a Chomsky Pamphlet, the author pronounces this summary judgement:
I had had more than enough. He's a sleazeball.
Frankly, I find it rather dispiriting to read sentences like this - ungenerous, snooty, lazily abusive. Easy rhetorical noise. More dispiriting when one is then lured to respond, to play the game. But to play it is to lose, because to play that game involves a politics all of its own, irrespective of content. It's a politics that Foucault identifies in an interview:
the person he [the polemicist] confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is harmful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.
polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself.
Now i'm sure we can all think of examples. I wouldn't be surprised if some of us thought of the same example.
A reader has drawn my attention to Ed Herman's rebuttal of Delong and Delong's subsequent reply. Delong, who packed in reading Chomsky's pamphlet after some 17 pages, now confesses to being 'bored' by Herman's page length response. What he would call his own considered judgement thus looks suspiciously like attention deficit syndrome. Meanwhile, the quality and tenor of Delong's remarks suggest that he is to satire what a certain Deptford tavern was to Christopher Marlowe.