Author: Ophelia Benson

The old ‘how do I look in this attitude’ problem again. The old ‘get me, I’m so transgressive’ problem again. Funny how persistent it is.

What chiefly surprised me about last winter’s list was its lack of any humor, any irony. The self-styled most important journal of theory was going to inform us – so it told us – what an objective method revealed about who the most important theorists were in its pages. How? By counting citations to theorists. Behind the rhetoric about discovering “the identity of our journal” lies an implicit assumption: If you’re cited in Critical Inquiry, you’re the best of the best. Sometimes the folks in Chicago get a little pumped…

If we like you you’re the best of the best. Okay, that’s one way of measuring. Possibly not the most self-effacing or non-risible method though.

The authors of the ranking, Anne H. Stevens, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Jay W. Williams, Critical Inquiry’s managing editor, note that “Benjamin’s works are cited nonargumentatively,” which I think is a nice way of saying his ideas are just window dressing, not engaged with. That must be why he ranks high as one of the most perfectly citable authors of all, because you can cite him reverently without having to figure out what he said. With Benjamin a citation is the academic equivalent of the purely ritual move, like a ballplayer’s sign of the cross. But the genuflecting to Benjamin points, perhaps, to something hocus-pocus about this whole counting exercise. The essay that accompanies CI’s list crows that the theories featured in the journal “share a tendency to question received wisdom and accept few absolutes or foundations.” Yet this list seems like a monument to CI’s importance.

That, exactly, is what makes my skin crawl about ‘theory’ at its (all too abundant) worst: that dreadful and endemic habit of citing totemic names ‘nonargumentatively’, of using names as window dressing rather than the ideas of the names as something to be engaged with, of citing people reverently without having to figure out what they said, of genuflecting. It’s a great marker for the presence of empty attitudinizing as opposed to real thought or inquiry. That’s why I sometimes, as a reader pointed out last week, criticize the writing of X about Y on the basis of what X said without necessarily having read Y, because it is what X has said about Y, rather than Y, that I’m talking about. It really is possible, in fact it’s pretty easy, to spot nonargumentative citation window dressing when you bump into it. It’s nothing if not obvious.

Another review. JS sent me the link. It’s…well it’s a good review. It sees the point, for one thing. That’s rewarding. Excuse me for just a second here – this is very cringe-making in a way – but I do want to say something.

In this book, Benson and Stangroom are wide-ranging in their knowledge and in the thinking about what they know, and so the book appears laid out almost like a collection of essays that are connected by the theme described above. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, feminism, philosophies of various sorts, and the policies of Nazism are all touched on or addressed. Each chapter is interesting in its own right, but the background and source materials are so comprehensive, the reader may need to put in some effort to integrate them and keep the theme in focus. This is not a bad thing — readers usually benefit from adding their own effort.

I love that last thought. Quite independent of any particular book, I love that thought. We had a running argument about exactly that throughout the writing: about how careful to be not to throw anything at readers that might seem too arcane or obscure or academic. The arguments were rather fierce at times. That’s because I worry about leaving out things that are interesting or enriching or thought-provoking or necessary merely because one hypothetical reader somewhere might not have heard of it. I don’t think it’s worth doing that, beyond a certain point – I think it’s worth risking stretching people a little. But JS had a serious point too, which is that it’s not worth risking making people feel stupid. I agree that it’s unkind to make people feel stupid, but I also feel rather strongly that we don’t always read about what we already know backwards and forwards; that if we never read about anything we don’t already know inside out, we never learn anything; and that to some extent people choose to feel stupid instead of feeling stimulated to learn more, and I don’t really want to pander to that. I think it works as a kind of auto-impoverishment. I’m serious. I’ve heard apparently sensible people arguing passionately that such and such book made them feel stupid because it was full of references they didn’t recognize. But why didn’t they feel inspired to learn more, I wondered. I think that ‘feeling stupid’ response is a learned, indeed a political response; it’s rather like the ‘feeling offended’ response to cartoons and paintings and operas and plays and novels. I think it’s somewhat sinister, and I worry about encouraging it. So I was really thrilled to read that ‘readers usually benefit from adding their own effort’. That is exactly what I think, and I think that’s a generous view (I don’t mean I think I’m generous for holding it, I mean I think it’s the generous way to go).

So – what’s on at Folk Life this afternoon?

This review of Rousseau’s Dog is odd.

How silly can clever men be? For anyone on more than nodding acquaintance with university professors, the answer is clear: ‘very silly indeed’. For the fortunate majority denied first-hand experience, this account of the relationship between two of the wisest fools in Christendom will fill the gap.

Well, of course, clever university professors can be extremely silly, especially moderately clever ones who think they’re more than moderately clever, as moderately clever university professors often do, on account of spending several hours every week looking at the upturned faces of dear little undergraduates who know less than they do (see ‘Socratic deformation’ in The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense). But some are sillier than others, and not all are silly. Let’s not get carried away here. Just because clever people can be silly, it doesn’t follow that Hume was as silly as Rousseau.

There are plenty more such good moments in this wonderfully readable account of two very silly men.

That’s a silly concluding sentence on this subject; it’s a lot sillier than anything Hume ever wrote. (Yes, I have; every word.)

Carole Angier is much better. Much less, one might say, silly.

…our authors seek to discover what really happened between Rousseau and Hume, and to adjudicate between them. The debate, as they present it, is between sense and sensibility, rationality and feeling, and they come down on the side of feeling. In the case of Hume, the opposition is simplified. But if, like me, you choose sense, you’ll want to argue with E and E on almost every page.

I do choose sense. Feeling (of course; obviously; indisputably) is essential, but it needs to be checked by rationality. Rousseau wasn’t always terribly good at that, and he certainly wasn’t always generous. Hume was immensely generous to Rousseau, and Rousseau was immensely ungrateful and vindictive in return. There is no contest between the two of them.

It’s the accepted view of Hume they want to challenge: le bon David, universally admired for his decency and serenity. They certainly show that, about these events at least, he was far from serene; and not always decent either…we’d probably all agree that he behaved badly in publicly attacking poor, tormented Rousseau, instead of maintaining a charitable silence. They show that Hume was human. But they go much further than this. They always find the best possible explanation for Rousseau, and the worst possible one for Hume.

The trouble is…wanting to challenge an accepted view is an agenda like any other, and it can cause one to distort the evidence just as any other agenda can. It’s yet another distortion-device that one needs to be careful about.

Rousseau’s Dog traduces and misinterprets Hume like this throughout. He grounded his moral philosophy on the human capacity for altruism and fellow-feeling, and he practised both in his life. He failed with Rousseau, but so did everyone else. E and E suggest that the encounter with brilliant, unbalanced Rousseau made Hume temporarily unbalanced himself. I fear the same has happened to them.

Funny that it didn’t occur to them that there might have been a reason that Hume was universally admired for his decency and serenity and that people ended up fleeing from Rousseau. Maybe they’re rather silly clever people too.

God, what a horrible morning. I spent a couple of hours or so re-writing an article that an editor had re-written, trying to do a delicate balance of keeping what the editor wanted and restoring what I wanted while weaving it all together without big knots showing – which made me get all tense, the way I do. I finally did it to my exigent satisfaction and sent it to the editor, only I didn’t, I somehow sent something else, and the one I had worked on had vanished never to return. Windows wouldn’t find it and Google desktop wouldn’t find it. Oh, my, I was cross. I was too cross and tense even to swear; I just wandered around with my stomach hurting, occasionally yanking on my hair. Then I re-did the article, which was agony, because I kept being completely unable to remember what I’d done and the un-re-edited version kept getting in the way, making my brain freeze. But I finally finished it – having blown most of the day on it, with not nearly enough work done.

By that time I had desk chair fever, so I went out and strolled down the hill to Folk Life. It’s Folk Life this weekend. I go every year; it’s good fun. One of the many benefits of living in this neighbourhood is that it’s just a twenty minute walk down the hill. It wasn’t great this afternoon, but it was okay. I found some Celtic fiddle music, and some zydeco, and let it go at that. Some days are better than others: some days you don’t happen to find just the right things, you turn up just as they end, or they’re already full, or you find a lot of okay things but nothing that raises the hair on the back of your neck. But that’s okay, because other days are great. Yesterday was great. I looked at a program and saw a Ukrainian dance item was starting soon, so rushed off to the Bagley Wright theatre, and a good thing, because I came in for the end of a Bandura duo, which I wouldn’t have known to seek out, but it was enchanting. They did four or five songs in the time I was there. I got slightly lachrymose. I always do. People laugh at me, but I can’t help it. I’m getting lachrymose now, thinking about it. You know how it is – there they are going pluck pluck pluck, with such skill and dedication and joy, and it’s so pretty, and you think O if only people could always do just this, and not the other stuff. Why can’t they. Why don’t all the people who hate each other and kill each other just have big Folk Life festivals every weekend, and play music together, and go pluck pluck pluck, and be happy, and see the point of each other. Sniff, sniff. It was so pretty. The guy was perhaps a novice, he said he couldn’t keep up, but the woman just went like the wind, and filled the place with music, in her Ukrainian blouse and skirt. So that was lovely, and I blew my nose, and ignored the laughter. Then the dancers danced, and the theatre filled up, and everyone screamed and yelled at the end of each dance. It was good.

When it was over everyone went outside and there were some gospel singers on the stage just outside, so I listened to them for awhile. They were good too, even with the churchiness. There was a very punkish young couple sitting on the grass; the guy had those big things through his ear lobes, stretching them out – hollow things the size of the neck of a wine bottle. They had two little girls with them; the bigger one was wearing a Hello kitty sweatshirt. The combination amused me a good deal. Even I shed some of my misanthropy at Folk Life.