What a weird format! I’m writing this essay on an airplane currently flying over the North Sea, and it’s hard not to feel like an overeager seatmate muscling my way into a neighboring conversation with the proverbial “I couldn’t help overhearing…” Maybe that’s the “sense of the social” The Immanent Frame wants us to explore—the strangeness of our constantly reconstituting conversations, sometimes prompted by the arrival of someone we didn’t know was listening?
I’m fascinated by the conversation between Henry Cowles and Caleb Smith, two scholars whose work I admire, on some of my own deepest fascinations: discipline, science, sociality, feeling. I spent a lot of time on Weber and vocationin a book I wrote about scientific affects. One of the conclusions I reached is that Weber’s lineage of interpretation in the United States, which takes it as given that scientific disenchantment is also scientific tedium, needs to be rethought. It’s another secularization story that won’t hold water, and besides Weber said nothing of the sort. For Weber, the vocation of science is not affective blankness. Instead, science lures us through its promise of affective intensity. “An inner devotion to the task,” he writes of this vocation, “should lift the scientist to the height and dignity of the subject he pretends to serve. And in this it is not different with the artist.” Science is the labor of “brood[ing] at our desks and search[ing] for answers with passionate devotion.”
It’s exactly because scholars find so much fascination in the labyrinth of facts and ideas that science manifests as a vocation or a calling (beruf) in the first place. There’s a misbegotten tendency to see Weber’s scholarly obsessives in “Science as a Vocation” as identical to the pitiable moderns locked in the iron cage at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, but they’re really more like the ardent Puritans. “The Puritan,” Weber reminds us, “wanted to work in a calling [beruf]; we are forced to do so.” That contrast is key.
We can bring Latour into this conversation too. I’m sympathetic to Latour on most counts (and adhere to Tanya Luhrmann’s quasi-Whig model of science. I also think Latour is entirely wrong to define “religion” as a mode of “experiencing” in opposition to “science” as a mode of “knowing.” Science may not give us ultimate “meaning” (whatever that means), but it still draws us into its own realm of intensified experience. The disciplinary force of science unlocks that realm rather than sealing it off. That’s what makes it an object of devotion and the subject of vocation.
I was fascinated by how Smith linked the question of scientific affects (and scientific disciplines) back to his own experiences in the hardcore scene. Punk and its derivations—and most youth subcultures, really—often repudiate the disciplinary impositions of adulthood. The endlessly unfurling banner of teenagerdom is: I don’t wanna. And sometimes, yes, rebellion is about not even caring enough about video games to get good at them. But very often, too, youth subcultures develop new obsessions, new fascinations, new aesthetics, new self-transformations and self-modifications that take hard work to perform well. So Smith writes: “When I say we were mimicking discipline, I mean it. In the church of Fugazi, we wore combat boots and cropped our hair close…. As for me and my friends, to make music and build a community, we had to do some discipline.” Rather than detachment, punk was about the experimentation with new forms of scrupulousness.
But the objective of this diligent attention is not, as Foucault would contend, to pulverize feeling. “Sexual austerity in Greek society,” Foucault reports in his post-Discipline and Punish corpus, was “a philosophical movement coming from very cultivated people in order to give to their life much more intensity, much more beauty.” John Tresch touches on this correlation of practice and experience in his contribution here: “To have the experience requires practice—work, training, and repetition. The things that people do are much more important… than the things that they believe or say.” We don’t discipline to extirpate feeling—never have, never will—but to devise new forms of feeling.
Two things came to mind when I read Smith’s discussion of youth subcultures. First, as Brent Nongbri points out, scruple is actually a pretty good translation of some of the earliest iterations of the Latin term religio, which eventually gives us “religion.” He mentions the second-century BCE playwright Plautus, whose line “Revocat me ilico, vocat me ad cenam; religio fuit, denegare nolui” was being translated as “He calls me back directly and invites me to dinner. I had scruples, I could not decline” at least as late as the early twentieth century. As a religion scholar, my default stance is that Is x a religion? never quite arrives at the level of a necessary question, but the genealogical crossbreeding of the concept “religion” and its ostensive others are always worth tracking down. This means we’re talking about science, secularity, and subculture, discipline and rebellion, and something like religion all at the same time.
Second, it brought me back to a passage I’ve always found compelling—but cryptic—in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, in her chapter on the political potency of shame. She lists a catalogue of “movements that deal with shame,” which include “the menacingly exhibited abjection of the skinhead.” Why exhibit your own abjection? Why the desire to menace? What is it about shearing yourself that creates that mode of expression? Smith explains “when I went from the church to the underground club, I was not getting away from discipline”—even if it was discipline by another heading. It’s discipline in the service of rebellion and yet no less powerful for not having the blessing of the name.
How does discipline feel? How does it feel to be self-abnegating and then to show everyoneyour own self-abnegation? Pleasurable in some way, it would seem, at the same time that discipline presumably denies its own pleasurability. The textbook reading of Foucault would advance this view. Indeed he begins History of Sexuality, Vol. I with a lampoon of the “repressive hypothesis,” that specimen of progressive orthodoxy that insists that capitalism has taken sexual pleasure away from us. “Something that smacks of revolt,” Foucault sneers, “of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression. Some of the ancient functions of prophecy are reactivated therein. Tomorrow sex will be good again.”
But Foucault’s analysis of this prophetic cadence is as eccentric as it is devastating when read more carefully. He argues ultimately that the overarching mode of sexuality qua control of sex was not one of self-denial, but of self-affirmation—the bourgeoisie sought to assert their own distinctiveness against aristocratic bloodlines. And the ostensibly liberatory counter-repressive prophetic voice is only another instar of the same kind of thing, another discipline: both the built-out regimens of sex-control and the arsenal of techniques for sexual renaissance—psychotherapy not least among them—are disciplines we desire. “Those who had lost the exclusive privilege of worrying over their sexuality,” Foucault proposes, “henceforth had the privilege of experiencing more than others the thing that prohibited it and of possessing the method which made it possible to remove the repression.” In other words, these efforts at distinction are all just new ways of being more punk than the rest.
This brings me to one last observation about what Smith calls “the church of Fugazi.” There is something insurmountably cyclical about this riptide of generational rebellion: A successful “club of nonconformists” ultimately becomes the canon of conformity. Your parents wore pressed suits and starched dresses and coifs and locked in over the nuclear family? You don denim and leather and grow your hair long and careen into free love and communal experiments. But your kids respond to you with spikes, piercings, buzzcuts, glares. They black out the color palettes that seemed so obviously the fullest flowering of freedom. Maybe they flirt with unforgiveable threats exactly because they knowit’s the most efficient route to trigger you. (They know perfectly well what triggering is, again avant la lettre, and enjoy it often.) Or they swivel in the other direction—repairing to conservative Christianity, cheerful chauvinism, pressed suits and coifs again.
Today, it seems that the liberal imperatives that defined early twenty-first-century culture wars wield opposite meanings. Where queerness was once seen as the quintessence of rebellion, it’s been normalized by Hollywood, television, fashion, and music—and become an orthodoxy of any number of corporations, government agencies, and schools, which blare anti-bullying campaigns into classrooms and display pride flags along their facades. Smith rebukes the pastoral style of moralism—but who owns moralism today? Rebellion takes a new flavor, a giddy Gen Z conservatism that plays dress-up with mantillas and MAGA hats. Its proponents want to go back to being able to say “retard” and “pussy” and God knows what else. Lauren Berlant saw this coming in 2016: “The Trump Emotion Machine is delivering feeling ok, acting free. Being ok with one’s internal noise, and saying it, and demanding that it matter.”
I think this emerging “trad is punk” ethos laces in with George Aumoithe’s observation elsewhere in this project—that “today we see the frameworks of relativism being wielded most powerfully by a revanchist right.” But these new conservatisms also prompt their own forms of discipline: farming, baking with home-made ingredients, the grind of child-rearing, and for the boys, muscular Christianity. (And as Webb Keane notes in his contribution, the imperative to take conservative impulses seriously on their own terms was the visionary insight gifted to us by Saba Mahmood—even when that liberal, sympathetic imperative would be rejected by conservative actors themselves. That dynamic is part of our current political crunch, both intractable and also, I suspect, more fungible than we might realize—in part because the next generation is already studying us and thinking about their next move. What they’ll flamboyantly cast off. What they’ll meticulously, diligently put on.
Deadlocked or not, that still leaves activists in the bind of wanting to both unplug and mobilize at the same time. Foucault mused in his final interview about how “recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on.” The hollowing of curiosity and the shallowing of attention are emerging as the hallmarks of the twenty-first century story. And suspicion toward discipline, including the affectively rich forms of scientific vocation, may be making it harder to resist those rapidly accelerating trends.