Nirvana Tanoukhi Discusses “Hating and Relating:

Last month The American University of Paris was pleased to host Professor Nirvana Tanoukhi of Dartmouth College for a guest lecture titled: “Hating and Relating: Trump, World Literature and Kant’s Theory of Taste.” The talk, held on April 19, was based on a recent paper by Tanoukhi of the same title, and examined what she termed the “rise of the relatable.” In the paper, Tanoukhi intriguingly applies this idea to the 2017 US presidential election, placing it in the context of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Most writers pin the value given to the term “relatable” to millennials. Opening the discussion, Tanoukhi quoted journalist Rebecca Onion, a vocal critic of relatability. Writing in Slate in 2014, Onion recalled encountering the phrase while teaching college classes. “My students understood the word as a compliment, applying it to texts, situations, and characters. At first, I liked hearing the adjective – yay! I picked the right, resonant thing to assign! –  but I soon noticed that the comment cut conversation short.” Tanoukhi explained that this was precisely the fear many educators voice: in falling back to whether something is ‘relatable’ when judging its cultural merits, we remove the important opportunity to be challenged by something unrelatable, which is “often the whole part of academic inquiry.”

There are however, Tanoukhi cautioned, defenders who see relatability as a useful and potentially even laudable evolution in cultural discourse. In an op-ed for The New York Times in 2014 titled “Should Literature Be ‘Relatable’?” Anna North explored the value of readers approaching works with this frame of mind. The debate, Tanoukhi argued, opens up a further conversation about what it means to read about lives like your own, and who gets to have that opportunity. Tanoukhi quoted North as writing that “relatability, whatever its status, may be hard to come by,” and added that among millennials, “saying that something is relatable merely registers the comfort of seeing oneself somehow reflected in a work of art – like a selfie.”

With her latest paper, Tanoukhi is particularly interested in connecting the phenomenon of relatability with the 2017 US presidential election. If we look at how the election played out, Tanoukhi said, the campaign coverage zeroed in more and more on Clinton’s form, her supposed lack of relatability – her candidacy was perceived as “stiff, stilted, staged.” For Tanoukhi, the Clinton campaign responded in the worst possible way within this paradigm. She noted that the discussion prior to the election wasn’t a question of Clinton’s credentials, but her perceived relatability – or rather, her lack thereof.

Prospective voters consistently returned to how they felt in the presence of the candidates and whether they were attracted to or felt repelled by the candidates. As Tanoukhi summarized: “Do you feel you can overcome the distance between them and you? This is the logic of ‘he is rich but approachable. She is a woman and yet even women will not vote for her.’” Tanoukhi argues that this modern preoccupation with relatability is not about difference, but distance – can I overcome the distance between me and it in order to relate.

Further layers of complexity are added when Tanoukhi applies the theories of Kant to the issue, linking relatability to the 18th-century philosopher’s ideas on universalism. “It’s been 30-40 years of theorization about difference and cultural relativism, and this is why people have left Kant behind,” she said. Because Kant teaches that the only way we can make an aesthetic judgment of taste is when we use our viscerally negative reaction to something to decide it is wrong and from that we believe that for that same reason anyone looking at it would feel the same way.

Joining the debate, David Palumbo-Liu, Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University and Tanoukhi’s former professor, agreed that he clearly saw relatability, and indeed Kant’s views of this common visceral experience, at play in the example of the 2017 election. “My feeling was not whether I can relate to Trump or not, but I’ll admit, I can relate to Trump voters,” Palumbo-Liu said. “Because there was this whole animus against the Washington establishment that it felt she deserved it. And the sense of entitlement felt wrong.” And this common appeal of elements within the Trump campaign extended beyond Trump voters. For Liberals in the US, Tanoukhi added: “When Trump was the cartoonish candidate who would never win, of course they loved him because they saw him as an aggravation to the party, a positive aggravation. Kant would say, judging him aesthetically they could see the appeal.”

For millennials, the value of relatability is not that they are saying, “this relates to me,” but rather that they are saying: “anyone can relate to this – and I know that because I felt it.” Tanoukhi cited the popular meme ‘that feeling when’ as an example of this phenomenon. A part of the humor, she said, comes from the relief in discovering that we are not alone, making relatability, at its core, a version of universalism.

“We are trapped in a crisis in the humanities right now. Do I [as someone who is not African-American] have the right to judge an African-American work of art? Or is the sensorium divvied up and we all just sit in our corners?” This crisis, she says, was precisely the conflict raised by Kant. “Because we think we ought to agree, but we actually disagree, the conditions are right for adjudicating our common values. But what did we see in the last election? No one was talking to no one.”