Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I wish that McGurn had talked with some English professors. As it happens, some of the most exciting critical thinking in English right now—of the very sort he laments as long fled—is happening precisely at the intersection of Shakespeare studies and what he would likely call “political correctness.” In Shakespeare and medieval studies, for example, there have been recent engagements with how the incorrectly assumed whiteness of the past has caused us to critically misunderstand historical texts. This, in turn, has allowed them to be enlisted by white supremacists. Scholars working in the context of the Race Before Race conferences are responsible for much of this work, and some of the insights from these scholars have started to filter out under the #shakerace Twitter hashtag, which aims at an improved understanding of the connections between race and early modernity.

Within ten minutes of opening his 1977 album Bat Out of Hell, here are the feelings that performer Meat Loaf has already felt to completion:

• Desire
  
• Anguish
  
• Desperation
  
• Perfect, adolescent faith in the attachments of the flesh
  
• Motorcycle—not classically a feeling, no, but what else can be said about the lyric “I’m gonna hit the highway like a battering ram/ on a silver-black phantom bike” except that it encapsulates the feeling of Motorcycle—that is to say, motorcycle-qua-motorcycle, the Springsteenian motorcycle, the emblem of masculine longing to get out?

That’s five feelings, more than I allow myself to feel on a good day, and he cranks them out one after another in the span of a single song! And as if that weren’t a severe enough display of emotional generosity, he’s still got six songs to go!

Now, Spinoza tells us about capacities—and there is an ethics to moving towards things that increase our capacity. Note, this is not the same as the Obligation to Do that haunts the current moment. Neoliberalisation, while it talks the talk of capacity-building, tends to walk the walk of trashing or using up those we have. We end up, for one thing, marooned in the Imaginary Register where the Ego eats us Alive, and where we cease to worry about our impact on others, but rather worry about how our recent behaviour impacts on the Image that Others Have of Us [expletive in italics, vowels repeating like a forehead hitting the keyboard…]
We’re told that audiences have shorter and shorter attention spans. For me as a movie-viewer this can make a stimulus-every-minute-or-so pretty exhausting and frankly stupid at the commercial cinema. There is a noxious loop that instigates here. The less we can bear a stretch of time without jolt, the more we stimulate ourselves constantly, and then the more we are bludgeoned and the less we can bear a stretch of time… The coil tightens as we all know from phases where we check our phones repeatedly like dolts, seeking a paltry kind of pleasure that is none at all, but losing our taste in the same gesture for more languorous, sultry and drawn-out sensibilities. What has been stunning to watch, as iDevices keep us enthralled, is how much humans are addicted to working. We are all working for Google. For free. Isn’t our generosity face-melting…