We hear about "identity" so often now that the word no longer carries much meaning. By extension, the term "identity politics" has become a culture war cudgel, recklessly deployed by race baiters on the right as well as some activists on the social justice left. But Laurent Dubreuil, a professor of literature and cognitive science at Cornell University, has studied identity in ways that plunge far deeper than standard discussions about tribalism and narcissism. He's interested in what an identity-based worldview-and the technology that feeds it- is actually, physiologically, doing to our brains. In this conversation, Laurent talks with Meghan about how social media has undertaken a collective cognitive reprogramming of human beings and the world at large that could have catastrophic effects. He also explains how part of the danger of Twitter is that it's based on "soliloquy," how academia's preoccupation with identity robs students of their rightful educations, and how the recent controversy surrounding the French-Senegalese film Cuties forebodes a time in which we might have to "say goodbye to the arts." Guest Bio: Laurent Dubreuil is a Professor of Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and Cognitive Science at Cornell University, where he founded the Humanities Lab and heads the French Studies Program. His comparative research explores the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. He is the author of more than twelve books and in 2019 he released in French La dictature des identités, an essay on the current state of "identity politics 2.0" in the United States. Laurent's essay Nonconforming: Against the Erosion of Academic Freedom by Identity Politics, appeared in the September 2020 issue of Harper's.
Apologies for commenting on an episode from two years ago. The migration of the podcast to Substack has meant that I'm listening my way through the back catalog.
Thank you for this conversation. Throughout it, I've been thinking about what 20th-century literature from Central and Eastern Europe as well as Russia could mean for the way people in the West read today's media and art landscape. This apocalyptic landscape you and Laurent Dubreil map in this episode.
Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic has compared trends and practices of western publishing to the enforcement of socialist realism under communist rule. It does sound far-fetched at first, doesn't it? However, Ugresic makes a compelling case for the similarities in the enforcement of shared public tastes in several essays from Thank You for Not Reading. "Not reading" is almost like a principle that looms large over the whole dynamic. As you point out, crucial to so many determined "critics" of the movie Cuties was not watching the movie, as if deliberately not understanding what a movie is.
It's as if the category of fiction, of imaginary creation, has eroded to the point of being unreachable to most of the audience. As if large parts of society have accepted a completely didactic model of art -- art as an instrument of enforcing social roles, views, hierarchies, and imagining a very specific predetermined model of a possible future. And so that indeed is socialist realism.
It all just makes me want to reread The Master and Margarita. While that novel is a perfect reply to the tyranny of prescriptive art, it's worth remembering that it was written by a man who wanted to resist writing it, knowing that he would be denounced for it, that it would have tragic consequences for him and his family. He finished it in 1940, friends safeguarded and hid the manuscript for decades, and the first -- censored -- edition appeared only thirty years later.
So, yes, art survived, but in hiding and at a very high price for everyone involved in it. Black markets in art grew across the USSR and the puppet states colonized by it, but they were more dangerous and less romantic than we'd like to imagine. It is wild that today's publishing and art criticism in the West can be compared to these scenarios from a not-so-distant but largely dismissed past in another part of the world. However, maybe it's worth remembering also that history doesn't quite repeat -- it rhymes -- and so there are no ready-made prescriptions for a solution.
Apologies for commenting on an episode from two years ago. The migration of the podcast to Substack has meant that I'm listening my way through the back catalog.
Thank you for this conversation. Throughout it, I've been thinking about what 20th-century literature from Central and Eastern Europe as well as Russia could mean for the way people in the West read today's media and art landscape. This apocalyptic landscape you and Laurent Dubreil map in this episode.
Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic has compared trends and practices of western publishing to the enforcement of socialist realism under communist rule. It does sound far-fetched at first, doesn't it? However, Ugresic makes a compelling case for the similarities in the enforcement of shared public tastes in several essays from Thank You for Not Reading. "Not reading" is almost like a principle that looms large over the whole dynamic. As you point out, crucial to so many determined "critics" of the movie Cuties was not watching the movie, as if deliberately not understanding what a movie is.
It's as if the category of fiction, of imaginary creation, has eroded to the point of being unreachable to most of the audience. As if large parts of society have accepted a completely didactic model of art -- art as an instrument of enforcing social roles, views, hierarchies, and imagining a very specific predetermined model of a possible future. And so that indeed is socialist realism.
It all just makes me want to reread The Master and Margarita. While that novel is a perfect reply to the tyranny of prescriptive art, it's worth remembering that it was written by a man who wanted to resist writing it, knowing that he would be denounced for it, that it would have tragic consequences for him and his family. He finished it in 1940, friends safeguarded and hid the manuscript for decades, and the first -- censored -- edition appeared only thirty years later.
So, yes, art survived, but in hiding and at a very high price for everyone involved in it. Black markets in art grew across the USSR and the puppet states colonized by it, but they were more dangerous and less romantic than we'd like to imagine. It is wild that today's publishing and art criticism in the West can be compared to these scenarios from a not-so-distant but largely dismissed past in another part of the world. However, maybe it's worth remembering also that history doesn't quite repeat -- it rhymes -- and so there are no ready-made prescriptions for a solution.