For my contribution to session 2, I have chosen a forthcoming article entitled: 'Stupid White Men: Toward a Political Mapping of Stupidity.' Because it exists as a pdf file, I can't post it here and will instead email it to group members. Don't feel obliged to read it! However it may be of some interest.
The essay tries to tackle the question of the apparent power of 'stupidity' as a pose, or a performance, in contemporary American culture. In a way, the most obvious example was in the way that George W Bush's 2000 and 2004 election campaigns promoted Bush's persona against that of his opponents - that by being ignorant, Bush was a dependable normal guy, while his Democrat opponents were untrustworthy because they were too intelligent (and hence lacked sympathy/understanding of ordinary people.) Thus stupidity works here in a tradition of American anti-intellectualism. This tradition was mapped by historian Richard Hofstadter in the early 1960s, as discussed in the essay.
In the wake of McCarthyism, Hofstadter identified the power of stupidity as belonging to the political right. However, since the early 1960s things have become more complex. First, people across the spectrum use stupidity - Michael Moore for example. Moreover, as Europeans, we have to guard against the self-serving assumption that we are cultured/sophisticated/clever and Americans are dumb. In the article then, I tried to work out some of these issues, by starting to map out some ways in which 'stupidity' functions at the intersection of politics and culture in the USA.
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So, how did my piece come to be written?
1. In films like Forrest Gump, and in the personae of people like Bush and Kerry, I noticed the performance of 'stupidity' vs. intelligence as a problem, that needed to be understood.
2. I searched for critical and theoretical approaches to 'stupidity.' 2 major texts underpin my essay: the widely known and seminal Hofstadter, 'Anti-intellectualism in American Life' (1963), and Avital Ronell's 'Stupidity' (2002). Hofstadter is a classic of American Studies, but obviously is too early to deal with post 1960s developments. Ronell is a high theorist, a philosopher. What I tried to do then in the essay, was to blend approaches and methodologies from both. So (p.191) I use Hofstadter to outline the ambivalence of 'stupidity' in US politics. I use Ronell in two ways. First, to get a grasp on how stupidity is a philosophically and linguistically slippery concept (pp. 192-3), and then (p. 197) to erect a critical framework, distinguishing between 'stupidity' (ignorance as certainty, lack of doubt) - i.e. a bad thing, and 'idiocy' (ignorance as doubtfulness of one's knowledge) - i.e. a good thing. This framework then enables me to analyse critically the 'stupidity' of George W Bush, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Forrest Gump, versus the 'idiocy' of Conrad Vig in Three Kings.
Two further things.
I register in a footnote (n.10) how, even though I find Ronell's framework very useful, I disagree with her philosophical approach, favoring a materialist, American Studies approach.
Bubbling under the whole essay, which appears in a collection on 'Transatlantic American Studies' is the need to break out of the facile Europe assumptions of American 'stupidity', and, equally, American deployments of 'stupidity' as a force.
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