Curiously, I once considered adding to my notes on rhetoric the entry “Always Psychologise!: If your opponent criticises you more than once, he is evidently obsessed/ fixated by you, you are being stalked by him etc, his objections are to be reread as ‘symptoms’ of his disorder etc…”. My only advice would be, make sure it is indeed more than once. Or, indeed, even once.
Coincidentally, Norman Geras has posted a tetchy and rather odd response to a recent post of mine, alleging I have a ‘fixation’ with him. He kicks off in avuncular chuckling mode but then cedes the initiative to the underlying irritation. Finally, he offers the following counsel:
“Here's some free advice for him about his fixation. Get over it. It will long have become evident to even the slowest of minds that I do not have the 'correct' left balance of views according to a certain blogospheric clucking company.”
As they say these days, “what’s that about?”. As far as I know, I have linked to Geras’s blog perhaps four times in seven months. Or, if you prefer, probably about two dozen words in 50, 000. Generally these have been extremely brief and either neutral or favourable. Recently I linked to him only to quote a passage he had quoted himself. The last (offending) passage referred to him again briefly on route to some more general and admittedly pretty sketchy thoughts on universal moral imperatives. If this is a fixation, it is indeed an ‘exquisitely indirect’ and intermittent one, so deliciously indirect as to work almost entirely by neglect and omission.
The peculiar thing, however, is that what Geras took as an ‘exquisitely indirect’ attack on himself was, rather, a direct and unexquisite post about something else - ‘universal imperatives’ , and merely posed a couple of open-ended questions in relation to these. I referred to his and Stephen Pollard’s sites in the way that bloggers do to indicate the path whereby they arrived at a certain place. I cheekily half-nicked a phrase from Geras to use as an example. This was obviously unwise judging by the misunderstanding it has produced, a misunderstanding utterly out of proportion with its polemical object. If you surgically subtract the assumption that the post is ‘about’ Norman Geras, you’ll find it makes rather more sense (You’ll find, for example, that the open-ended questions are actually genuine questions and not circuitous accusations). So yes, Norman, I alluded to you in passing on my way somewhere else. ‘Get over it’.
Perhaps we can now lay the matter to rest with one of those diverting little normblog games guessing which bloggers constitute the nameless ‘clucking company’ alluded to above.
Incidentally, for the record, I think ‘indirection’ can indeed be an interesting device. One alludes to, gestures towards one’s interlocutor without really specifying an argument. The interlocutor, bemused and unnerved, fills in the blanks and constructs an argument of his own which he then refutes. This argument, being entirely his own invention, can be highly revealing of his preoccupations and anxieties.