Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
[…]
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
— William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
(1919/20)
"Way worse than
the so-called political correctness that Trump assails
is the learned helplessness of journalists,
public intellectuals and
anyone else with half a
brain and access to a media platform.
Why be disingenuous
about knowledge and learning?
Why be defensive about
objective criteria for true and false?"
— Marty Kaplan "Professor, You're Fired!
Or, the Education of a Trump Voter"
11 Jan. 2016, HuffPost
Politics Blog
Some significant swaths of the
academic/intellectual Left share responsibility for the lack of conviction that
W. B. Yeats complained about in "The Second Coming" in the early 20th
century, and, far more so, the "learned helplessness" Marty Kaplan
laments in his early 2016 blog on Huffington
Post.
Before
I get to that composite accusation, though, I will make some concessions and gesture
toward "full disclosure." It won't be literal full disclosure — not
even a long autobiography of the tell-all confessional variety will do that — but
it will give an idea of "where I'm coming from," as we used to say,
and what allowances should be made for my biases.
To
begin with a concession or two (there will be more later): some of the
"Sins of Poststructuralism" and schools of cultural and critical
science studies, and the doctrine of "the Social Construction of
Reality" include pernicious attacks directed at science as an endeavor and
the scientific method; on the other hand serious critique of various sciences —
"actually-existing Science" — has been long overdue. From its
beginning through the 20th century, science as an endeavor has known
its own sins, some stemming from the perverse universals of Platonic typologies
and the arrogance of Eurocentrism, to others more nitty-gritty.
For a
striking but, for readers, painless introduction to late 17th and
early 18th cruelty, silliness, and harm done in medicine and biology, see Neal
Stephenson's, BAROQUE CYCLE — plus Stephenson's
arguably unfair but still instructive introduction to the cruelty, silliness,
and harmfulness of Sir Isaac Newton, and his pursuit of preeminence and
dominance in the science (and politics) of his time. "Scientific"
medicine and, so to speak, psychiatry in the early days of the Scientific revolution were licensed barbarism, and for much of the time sick people would
have been better off with the local herb woman. For more recent cruelty in
"rat-running" psychology of the Behaviorist persuasion, see Steven
Pinker's confession in The Better Angels
of Our Nature and elsewhere of carrying out "a procedure that turned out to be
tantamount to torturing a rat to death" for no
particularly pressing reason, to which I'll add my own killing of a significant
number of lab rats in a project my employers would have known to be doomed to
failure if they had done sufficient library research before handing it over to
me. Well beyond rats — "beyond and above" from a human point of view
— there are the Nazi experiments on homosexual prisoners at
Buchenwald, and Jews and Roma and
Russians at Dachau, Buchenwald, and elsewhere. In the United
States, there was "the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis
in the Negro Male" among other abhorrent abuses in the name of science of
people without power; and other countries have had their share of what Salon.com in a reduction to the
grotesque of lists, reported as the "10 of the most evil medical experiments
in history." And to end a very brief
sampling of a long list of horrors, there were the sins of "scientific
racism" examined elegantly in Nell Irvin Painter's fairly recent The History of White People (2010) covering not
just the usual suspects in anthropology and history, but also in economics and
statistical studies.
And,
of course, "totalizing" theories giving people the Truth, the whole
Truth and nothing but the Truth — theories giving the key to history and the
universe — are a justification for fanaticism and when applied to the messy
complexities of human life and politics demand fanaticism to be wholly
believed. (Unless we're at some radically elegant simplicity at the root of
physics, any Grand Unified Theory of Everything
is going to be often wrong, and complete belief will require the epitomizing
fanatic move of ignoring all data that don't fit doctrine.)
So much for now for concessions as such;
here's where I am "coming from."
Back
during the US "Troubles" of the long 1960s, I was a registered
Democrat and a liberal at the University of Illinois at Urbana and got a telephone
threat on my life from the "Minutemen" in
spring of 1970 and faced wordless and less lethal — but far more credible
threats — on a couple of occasions from police (at the 1968 Democratic national
convention in Chicago for one occasion). Moving on to a tenure-track job at Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio, I soon consulted a shrink in part because I worried
about going paranoid. He asked me a couple questions about vast conspiracies —
which wasn't my perception — and then said something like, "Oh, you just
have this feeling there are people in the administration who want to fire
you?" And I said, "Yeah," and he said, "That's not
paranoia. There are people who want
you fired. I've heard that over here in [NAME OF PSYCH BUILDING]. You must be
getting all kinds of signals over on your side of campus. You've got political problems; it's psychologically
healthy to sense real threats." Over the years I got the fuller story, and
it turns out there were Right-wing people of influence at and/or operating on
Miami University who tried to get me fired from the moment my appointment
letter went out hiring me.
Still,
the major annoyance on my politics came from some members of the capital
"L" Left, people into games of "More Radical than Thou" and
for whom "Liberal" was
a term of abuse. I was "the little Lib with
glasses" in their references to me, and the nicest thing one of my
colleagues of the far-Left sort called me at the U of I was — when he saw me
carrying Hannah Arendt's Origin of
Totalitarianism — "Well, I guess you're an educable Lib."
It
was a bit more than an annoyance when I thought I'd gotten accepted for
publication the essay that was going to make me a full professor more or less
on schedule, and not, as with my getting tenure and, later, promotion to
associate — that was possible at Miami U. back then — getting tenure and then
promotion a bit or more than a bit behind the rest of my cohort.
My
PhD was in Shakespeare, and my graduate training was more generally in
Renaissance drama and early British literature. I taught Shakespeare and "Beowulf through Paradise Lost" pretty regularly throughout my academic career,
but as of the 1980s I hadn't published much in the area and was moving into
science fiction and fantasy. And you need to know for this story that my
dissertation centered on Shakespeare's mature tragedies, from which I excluded and continue to exclude
the transitional Hamlet. For whatever
reasons, though — including the possibility of a very large recruiting mailing
list — I was invited to submit an essay for the Modern Language
Association's volume of essays on "Approaches to Teaching Hamlet." Neat! The volume was
already slated to include essays by some major scholars from the first part of
the 20th century, and I could be the new kid on the block,
relatively speaking, with a Bertolt-Brechtian, Maynard-Mackian,
theatre-historical close reading of the play: for an approach I had used in my
teaching with, I thought, a good deal of success.
My
essay was accepted, and I did get promoted to full professor — but eventually
and not because I had made a mark in Shakespeare pedagogy. The essay was
accepted; the volume was put in the queue for publication — and then the MLA
was taken over by its radical caucus, and the Hamlet volume was cancelled, to be replaced by a collection of
Approaches more up-to-date, with it, and in line with what one might call
"the hegemonic discourse in the field" — or what one might call it if
one didn't know that "hegemony" is what's practiced by the forces of
reaction and not by, say, the radical caucus if they take over.
"When elephants fight, the grass
gets hurt," and a few ants get trampled; or, to switch to a milder and
more appropriate formulation, I ended up with a flesh-wound in my career as
collateral damage in a battle over the MLA and the future of "The
Profession of English" and other areas of the academy.
That's
mostly blood long under the bridge; a more immediate occasion for my rehearsing
old sins of old opponents has been living through "the faith-based presidency" of
George W. Bush combined with — more relevant here — the balancing and
complementing Machiavellian cynicism of Karl Rove.
The aide said that guys like me were "in
what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who
"believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible
reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles
and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works
anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously,
as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors […] and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." — "Faith,
Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush"
Without knowing that Rove was the aide
here, Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times for 24 October 2004 could
note that "All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus
where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is
no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is, which
explains why Bush can claim that postwar Iraq is going swimmingly or that a
so-so economy is soaring. As one administration official told reporter Ron
Suskind, 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality [...]."
Gabler
was more right than he knew in citing George Orwell here. "Orwellian
nimbus" refers to the Orwell of "Politics and the
English Language" (1946) and the discussions of Newspeak in the text of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and its appendix, a scholarly
discussion of "The Principles of Newspeak." The satire of Nineteen Eighty-Four also targets
specifically and powerfully ideas "that there is no
objective, verifiable reality at all," no actual facts in a real
world outside of human consciousness. There's a similar if more restrained
critique in E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" from 1909, so the phenomenon
may be cyclical. Anyway, every couple generations it may be that "the best
lack all conviction" because highly trained philosophical types go from useful
and legitimate ideas about the impossibility of knowing absolute Truth and how
literal objectivity is impossible — "The observer is part of the
system" — and start taking the concept of the social construction of reality as an excellent (epistemological)
theory about the limits of knowledge to a literal (ontological) idea of
constructed realities, none more true than another.
Modesty
in making assertions is a virtue, but two points here: (1) Even for a dedicated
poststructuralist professor of cultural or science studies, "There's a car
coming at us from the right" is significantly different in truth value
from "It's clear; pull out" if there is in a good-enough-to-deal-with real world reality a car rapidly
coming in from the right. (2) If enough of us believe reality is constructed
"between our ears," political reality will be determined by the guy
with the gun in your ear.
I grew up on the old Churkendoose record (1947), with the
moral, "It depends on how you look at things" — which is correct, and
part of the epistemological justification for tolerance and humility, or — and
better —acceptance of the Other and celebration of difference. Still, more of
us grew up on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's
New Clothes" (1837), and it is now necessary to stress that
however much "It depends on how you look at things," sometimes the
emperor just is bare-ass naked,
"And that's the
truth": there can exist real, politically-relevant
facts.
==================================
We shape each other to
be human […].
— Ursula K. Le Guin,
"Coming of Age in Karhide" (1995)
In
1966, the same year as Jacques Derrida "subversively declared that
structuralism was finished" and to be supplanted by post-structuralism
(Lehman 97), Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. For Berger and
Luckmann, "reality," in quotation marks, is the subjective world that
we human are "biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit,"
a social world of self and others. For each human, this subjective, learned
world "becomes […] the dominant and definitive reality. Its limits are set
by nature, but once constructed, this world acts back upon nature," e.g.,
determining what of all the biologically possible foods people (ordinarily)
will actually eat, what of all the possible sexual acts most people in a
culture will actually perform. "In the dialectic between nature and the
socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this
same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself" (183
[180])—i.e., produces our social selves, our roles, our identities. Burger and
Luckmann present an excellent and persuasive analysis of a "weak"
form of social construction of reality, but still a powerful thesis. Human
beings are socialized into human identities in specific societies, and those
primary socializations give us, if not our worlds, at least our initial, and
very strong worldviews: "The child does not internalize the world of his
[initial] significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it
as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world […]"; these
primary socializations give each of us, "the world of childhood […,] the 'home world' (134, 136; ch. 3).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MARXISM:
Writing
in 1909, E. M. Forster could see and foresee a world in flight from the human
body and the world of matter. In the beginning of the third and last section of
his far-future dystopia, "The Machine Stops,"
moving toward the end of the imagined world of the Machine, Forster presents
"one of the most advanced" of future intellectuals, an antiEmpiricist
historian who warns his audience to "Beware of first-hand ideas!" and
asserts that "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the
physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation
who could erect a philosophy?" Forster's crank exhorts his audience to let
their ideas "be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they
will be far removed from that disturbing element—direct observation." Actually,
the crank isn't all that crazy in suggesting getting a number of different
points of view on a historical event, in this case, his specialty, the French
Revolution. What is disturbing, though, even to those of us who want knowledge
carefully located, is his idea that the farther away from events we get the
better we can judge, until "[…] there will come a generation that has got
beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a
generation 'seraphically free / From taint of personality,' which will see the
French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have
happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the
Machine," i.e., in their own time, as ideologically constructed. "Tremendous
applause greeted this lecture," Forster's Narrator tells us, because it
"did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men—a feeling that
terrestrial facts must be ignored."
Not
very much later in the century, advanced thinkers will bring back the idea that
"terrestrial facts" don't even exist.
According
to Roy Bhaskar, there is "abundant textual evidence" for Karl Marx's
"simple, commonsense realism," the sort of everyday, colloquial
realism that asserts "the reality, independence, [and] externality of
objects": i.e., that the "real" world we see out there is really
there. Most modestly stated, as a character in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Dancing
to Ganan" puts it, simple realism is "the notion that there is,
somewhere, if one could just find it, a fact" (Fisherman 118), maybe even many facts. There is also evidence,
Bhaskar says, for Marx's "scientific realism": i.e., his belief in
the reality of "the objects of scientific thought" and structures
scientifically inferred — but scientific realism does not concern me here; what
does is that "an entire tradition" of Marxism, i.e., much of
"Western Marxism," has "interpreted Marx as rejecting"
simple realism and has very influentially tended toward "some variety of
epistemological idealism, normally anti-naturalistic and judgmentally
relativistic" (Bhaskar, "Realism" 407, 408).
Bhaskar
traces this tradition back to György Lukács's 1923 History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács rejects "any
distinction between thought and being as a 'false and rigid duality.'" This
anti-realist tradition "proceeds down to the extraordinary claims made on
behalf of Marx by e.g. [Leszek] Kolakowski that the very existence of things
comes into being simultaneously with their appearance in the human mind' (1958 […])
and [Alfred] Schmidt that 'material reality is from the beginning socially
mediated' [1962]" ("Realism" 408). According to Bhaskar, no less
a figure than Antonio Gramsci found "the very idea of a reality-in-itself […]
a religious residue." In his Prison
Notebooks (1929-35), Gramsci redefined "the objectivity of things […]
in terms of a universal intersubjectivity of persons; i.e. as a cognitive
consensus, asymptotically approached in history but only finally realized under
communism." Pushing the matter, Gramsci, in Bhaskar's reading, holds
"that human history is not explained by the atomistic theory, but that the
reverse is the case: the atomistic theory, like all other scientific hypotheses
and opinions, is part of the superstructure,'" i.e., part of the cultural
superstructure raised up upon a deeper and more significant (human) reality. Suggesting
that we take Gramsci on atomic theory quite literally — that atomic reactions
happen because humans theorize atomic reactions — Bhaskar says that Gramsci's
remark here "reminds one of Marx's jibe against [Pierre-Joseph] Proudhon
that like 'the true idealist' he is, he no doubt believes that 'the circulation
of the blood must be a consequence of Harvey's theory" of the circulation
of blood (Poverty of Philosophy, ch.
2, sect. 3). Bhaskar finds Gramsci and some other Western Marxists "in
favour of a historicized anthropomorphic monism," maintaining that
"nature, as we know it, is part of human history." I.e., Bhaskar says
these Western Marxist teach that the world is One and that One is centered in
and made by humanity and our history ("Knowledge" 258-59) — an idea
Bhaskar does not seem to like. Alternatively, we can see these Western Marxists
returning, ironically, to the German Idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831), where "The categories of human thought are […] at the same
time objective forms of Being, and logic is […] ontology"—a path I will
not follow (Fetscher 198).
Whatever
its sources, it is something like Gramsci's vision of reality as the
"intersubjectivity of persons" and "cognitive consensus"
that George Orwell attacks in what is sometimes called «The Grand Inquisitor»
section of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Part
III, section 3-III.5). Orwell's immediate concern was the falsification of history under Hitler and Stalin (see
Crick 119); still, at least for satiric purposes, Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four comes down squarely
for old-fashioned British commonsense empiricism against the extreme idealism
of Winston Smith's Inner Party torturer and instructor, O'Brien. O'Brien tells
Smith,
The first thing
you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in
so far as he ceases to be an individual […]. [I]f he can make complete, utter
submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the
party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second
thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the
body—but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter —external reality as you
would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.
* * * […] We control matter because we
control the mind. Reality is inside the skull[…]. You must get rid of those
nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of nature. We make the laws of nature.
* * * […] Before man there was nothing. After
man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is
nothing. * * * […]This is not solipsism. Collective
solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact the opposite
thing." (218-19; III.3)
I doubt that Orwell's criticisms had
much effect, but there was this much change in Western Marxism in the
generation following Orwell: Jürgen Habermas, in Knowledge and Human Interests (1972), at least according to
Bhaskar, allowed for the origin of "the human species as a purely natural
process" even while seeing "reality, including nature, as constituted
in and by human activity." And Theodor Adorno, a little earlier — Negative Dialectics (1966)—advised
giving up trying to resolve objectivity and subjectivity "and argues
against any attempt to base thought on a non-presuppositionless [sic]
foundation and for the immanence of all critique" ("Knowledge"
260).
I'll
put the matter that, by the 1970s, there was a long-standing debate on the Left
that had pretty well concluded on the impossibility of finding transcendent
epistemological "Archimedean points" outside the world from which to
observe the world. This meant the inevitability of "the immanence of all
critique." We judge situations more or less from within them and cannot
get a godlike overview; we are located at certain points in space-time, and
that is that. So our judgments are relative. At least among people with a lot
of academic philosophy — including those coming from very unMarxist positions —this
lead to a kind of crisis in epistemology. Matters soon got worse. In the words
of my friend and colleague John H. Crow, as I recall them Modernism's "Epistemological uncertainty
yielded (to) ontological instability" — postmodernism.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUISTICS/POSTMODERNISM-POSTSTRUCTURALISM/FEMINISM:
In
the 5th century BCE, in Elea, in southern Italy, the Greek philosopher Parmenides
reacted against Heraclitus's theory of flux by, among other things, composing a
poem "On Nature," privileging among the "ways of research"
the "absolutely noncontradictory way that says only what is, Being, is
really true." If you think something, you assert its existence (an idea
that will get a lot of play later, with René Descartes' variation that one must first
think oneself). Reality, then, is
that which can be truly thought: grasped and communicated, and that which can
be thought and communicated is reality. "The primal source of the Eleatic
philosophy thus lies in the archaic sense of language, according to which one
cannot pronounce 'yes' and 'no' without deciding upon the reality or unreality
of the objects of the statements." So human language is not merely
symbolic but "corresponds to reality in its structure," and it is
"From the premise of the essential coalescence of language and reality
follows Parmenides's theory of Being […]" (Calogero and Starkey 6.526; see
also C. Benjamin 8-10). Parmenides and his school, then, introduced into
philosophy ideas similar to those in magic, myth, and mysticism.
By
the early twentieth century, the linguistic ideas of Parmenides et al. were
again very fashionable in philosophy. Fritz Mauthner, one of the founders of
modern linguistic analysis in philosophy, could hold that "Every attempt
to tell what is true just leads back to linguistic formulations, not to
objective states of affairs" — a position that "bears some affinities
to the views expressed in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Popkin 16.855), another road I
decline to travel. By the middle of the twentieth century, there was a good
deal of emphasis among the intelligentsia for placing reality in words, but there
was some hope that "The Age of Analysis" could produce, a science of
"semiology" or a grounded philosophy of language, or (at least) an
exposition of structures, that could serve well enough as a philosophy of the
world.
As
David Lehman tells the story — hostilely, among other things—that hope was
called into question at Johns Hopkins in 1966 with Jacques Derrida's paper
"Structure, Sign and Play and the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
(coll. and trans. Writing and Difference
1978). The key passage, according to Lehman, takes precisely the view that can
easily, and I stress can, lead to a vision of social construction. The moment
came, Derrida asserts, in the development of the concept of structure
"when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the
absence of a center of origin, everything became discourse […] that is to say,
a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental
signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The
absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of
signification infinitely" (Writing
and Difference 278-80). Lehman paraphrases this — usefully for my point
here, though arguably — as "Nothing exists ahead of language or outside
it; there are no things or ideas except in words." Alternatively put,
"Il n'y a rien hors du texte,"
which Andreas Huyssen renders "there is nothing outside the text." Possibly
looking to J. Hillis Miller's statement that "Language […] thinks man and
his 'world' […] if he will allow it to do so" (Miller 224), Huyssen
couples Derrida on the textuality of reality with the "insight that the
[perceiving] subject is constituted in language" (Huyssen 259). Or in
Lehman's unnuanced reading, "Words speak us," whether we "allow"
them or not: "[…] we are merely passive conductors of language"
(106).
Human
beings, according to such theories, seem to be in a Westernized, secularized,
language-centered version of the relationships among "the personal self
and the Self that is identical with Brahman, between the individual ego and the
Buddha womb or Universal Mind." For the individual human mind, the mystic
Huang Po taught, to go into the state of "no-mind," one "must
not try to think it, but rather permit ourselves to be thought by it"
(paraphrased Huxley, Perennial Philosophy
73; ch. 4). As the comedian George Carlin could state as part of his
early-1970s act, "All we have is words," except Carlin's we in this sentence may also be
constructed by words, so that instead of Universal Mind thinking us, we are
spoken by language.
In
modernism of the J-P Sartrean Existentialist variety, there was no God to
create us; our existence preceded any essence we might have, which was our job
to create. Philosophically, the action was in the perceiving subject rather
heroically making something of himself (and that's himself: Existentialism is
masculinist). Roughly speaking, consciousness was king.
Seyla
Benhabib can sum up for the (post)modern philosophers—and help illustrate a
problem with technical sources in the Theoretical disciplines:
Whether in
analytic philosophy, contemporary hermeneutics, or French poststructuralism,
the paradigm of language has replaced the paradigm of consciousness[…]. [T]he
focus is no longer on the epistemic subject [a potential knower] nor on the
private contents of its consciousness but on the public, signifying activities
of a collection of subjects.[…] The identity of the epistemic subject has
changed as well: The bearer of the sign cannot be an isolated self — there is
no private language as Wittgenstein has observed; it is a community of selves
whose identity extends as far as their horizon of interpretations ([Hans-Georg]
Gadamer) or it is a social community of actual language users (Wittgenstein). This
enlargement of the relevant epistemic subject is one option. A second option,
followed by French structuralism, is to deny that, in order to make sense of
the epistemic object [something external, potentially knowable], one need
appeal to an epistemic subject at all. The subject is replaced by a system of
structures, oppositions, and différances which, to be intelligible, need not be
viewed as products of a living subjectivity at all. (112)
If
our (post)moderns are correct, there is no single, unified, perceiving
"I"; if the crucial structure is language, perhaps there is no world
outside of the discourse among many "subject positions" — the people
who say "I" and construct themselves and the world(s) they talk
about. Again George Carlin: "All we have is words" — literally,
except the words may have us even more. If this theory is correct, all we can
do (and do do) to create the «facts» of our world is tell one another fictions,
stories.
Two points here.
First,
in the quotation above Benhabib really is trying to communicate, and in an essay
in an anthology of essays the editor intended for a relatively wide and
definitely disparate academic audience, using approaches both feminist and
postmodernist and trying to build some bridges. Benhabib's paragraph is still
tough going for the uninitiated and this points at a larger problem. There were
and possibly still are writers of "pomo" who are happy that where the
light has been seen and poststructuralism has become the norm, critical
discourse has become philosophically respectable (although some of my
colleagues in the Philosophy Department demurred on how much respect they'd
show most poststructuralist thinkers). Indeed,
Frederic Jameson's style has been admired at
length by Terry Eagleton (op. cit.), and a difficult style has been presented
in my presence as A Good Thing in slowing down reading and making pinning down
an exact and constant meaning impossible. Okay … but my unvoiced personal
response to unnecessary difficulty is the sarcastic, "Well thank you for being so generous with my time
and effort!" My more political response comes from the memory of Carl
Sagan's warning to scientists on "The Frailty of
Knowledge" — which in my memory
includes a warning to scientists of the dangers of their cutting themselves off
from their surrounding communities. I haven't been able to find the clip with
the warning, but Sagan's authority isn't necessary. When the library at
Alexandria was destroyed, one of the reasons was the enemies of science and
disciplined secular scholarship were "full
of passionate intensity" and too many potential defenders "lack[ed]
all conviction" and/or were too few in number to do much good.
The political problem of much poststructuralist writing is that it is
too philosophically and scientifically respectable in being overly technical,
too easily read by the initiate but unintelligible to the ignorant masses,
including the unphilosophical who
hold PhDs. The hard sciences can afford — if barely — being
esoteric: they lie behind technologies of great power, and if that power
frightens people it also impresses them: the physics that produced nuclear
weapons obviously speaks a language, however unintelligible, of power.
The
social sciences and humanities scare people less, which is both a good and a
bad thing. But there are fairly large groups of public intellectuals,
journalists, policy wonks and others who for a long time were able to read in
our fields and could try to assure a broader public that we in the academy were
earning our keep. When our most in-group respected books and articles in
criticism and critique became unintelligible to this mid-level audience, when lay
readers come to suspect that scholars in fields they'd studied were putting
them on and holding them in contempt — that has been an invitation to trouble. Content
aside, the turgid, convoluted, Continental-philosopher style of much
postStructuralist writing (and the Structuralists before them) — writing
innocent of revision for clarity and often militantly uninviting — has
unnecessarily lost for the humanities and social sciences too many valuable
allies.
Content
is another problem.
If
there is nothing outside texts and we're all just telling one another stories;
if the two stories of Creation in Genesis give us two creation myths and Big
Bang theory a third; if Coyote created human
beings by tricking the other animals is one story and Charles
Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) another, but
just another — then, Houston, we do indeed have a problem. Or no problem:
thoroughly postmodern Karl Rove was just right and "there is no objective,
verifiable reality at all" or at least none we really should insist on if
it would be inconvenient or dangerous to do so. It's not that "the best
lack all conviction," but that The answer to the question, "Why be defensive about objective criteria for true and
false?" is that one shouldn't be defensive or even make a defense of true
and false if "True" and "False" are just words in tales and
sentences inside our heads.
My
one real foray until now into this part of the culture wars was a poem
published in a local anthology, Ambergris
1.2 (1987), and I think I'll end where I began. The poem is called
"Andersen (post)Modernized": "The Emperor's New Clothes,"
tweaked a bit to bring it up to date.
"The Emperor's naked!"
The little boy yelled,
"Bare-assed, buck, stark, unclothed!
"So they grabbed him up (the earplugged men,
silver-eyed)
And threw him into the Official Car,
For quick trip to the Ministry.
Sat him down to discourse philosophical—and
prudential.
Let him know
Reality is made between our ears
(While beating him and shocking him
Raping him and breaking him).
Until the Minister came in
To tell him,
"You've done sacrilege
Finding your view privileged"
And stuck a large pistol (a 45) into his little
ear
And asked him what now was real,"
Relative to Emperors,
sartiorialwise."
And found all monarchs fully clothed
In all Reality that is (or can be)
Inside the head of a little boy
Who's learned how worlds
Get made by human brains and
How guns dress emperors.
Older academics complaining about "Truthiness" on the American
Right, or the contempt for facts from the George W. Bush administration through
the election of 2016, should be pressed with the question, "And where were
you / In '92?": not physically, but where their heads were at. As usual in
human affairs, there's plenty of blame to go around, and Social Construction
and related discourse(s) on the 20th-century Left provided rich soil
in which pernicious trends of the later Right could take root and thrive.
===========================================
===========================================
Selected
Works Cited but not Hyperlinked
Benhabib,
Seyla. “Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard.”
1984. Rpt. Feminism/Postmodernism,
q.v.
Benjamin,
Cornelius. “Ideas of Time in the History of Philosophy.” In Voices
of Time (q.v. below). 3-30
Bhaskar, Roy. “Knowledge.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, q.v.
Bhaskar, Roy. “Realism.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, q.v.
Calogero,
Guido, and Lawrence H. Starkey. “Eleaticism.” Encyclopaedia
Britannica: Macropaedia. 1974.
Crick,
Bernard, ed., introd., and annotations. George
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1984.
Derrida,
Jacques. Writing
and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
A
Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Ed. Tom Bottomore. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1983.
Eagleton,
Terry. "Fredric Jameson: The Politics of Style." Diacritics 12.3
(Autumn 1982): 14-22
Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. and Introd. Linda J.
Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Fetscher,
Irving. “Hegel.” A
Dictionary of Marxist Thought, q.v.
Huxley,
Aldous, comp., commentary. The Perennial Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1945.
Huyssen,
Andreas. “Mapping the Postmodern.” 1984, 1986. Feminism/Postmodernism.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “Dancing to Ganam.” Amazing Sept. 1993. Coll. A Fisherman of the Inland Sea. New York:
HarperPrism, 1994.
Lehman, David. Signs
of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. New York:
Poseidon-Simon & Schuster,
1991.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” In Miller
et al. Deconstruction
and Criticism. New York: Seabury, 1979.
Orwell, George (pseud. of Eric Blair). Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Rpt. 1984. New York: NAL, 1961.
Popkin,
Richard H. “Skepticism.” Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia. 1974.
Voices of
Time: A Cooperative Survey of Man’s Views of time as Expressed by the Sciences
and by the Humanities. Ed. J. T.
Fraser. New York: George Braziller, 1966.
Also note:
Much
of the following comes from "Transition: The Social Construction of Reality
(Background for Four Ways to Forgiveness
and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea),"
Chapter
10 of Coyote's Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula K. Le
Guin.
My handling of social construction is much more positive in that context, as
necessary for understanding how seriously Le Guin played with such ideas in the
linked novellas in Four Ways and the
major stories in Fisherman.
