Author: Ophelia Benson

A couple of brief update items. Azam Kamguian emailed me to tell me what an informant in Norway told her – that there apparently is no reason to think that Samira Munir was murdered. Which is a relief. No less sad for her, of course, but the fewer murders of this kind there are, the better. So that is, in a limited way, good news.

And I was inaccurate in what I said about Michael Bérubé and Meera Nanda and B&W. I thought he’d first read Meera here, but no, he read her 1997 article in Dissent – and, as he put it, realized he was going to have to worry about it sooner or later. Seeing her work on B&W just prompted him to start the worrying process.

Michael’s got a great story about dentistry, needles in haystacks, beef jerky, promises, garbage, pizza and such today.

A spectre is haunting the place. No doubt you’ve already read or heard about the Fulham cops.

…the author Lynette Burrows went on a BBC Five Live show to talk about the government’s new “civil partnerships” and expressed her opinion – politely, no intemperate words – that the adoption of children by homosexuals was “a risk”. The following day, Fulham police contacted her to discuss the “homophobic incident”. A Scotland Yard spokesperson told the Telegraph’s Sally Pook that it’s “standard policy” for “community safety units” to investigate “homophobic, racist and domestic incidents”…”It is all about reassuring the community,” said the very p.c. Plod to the Telegraph. “All parties have been spoken to by the police. No allegation of crime has been made. A report has been taken but is now closed.”

It’s pretty staggering. All this ‘reassuring the community’ crap – can I be the only one who is developing a violent allergy to the very word ‘community’? A community right now seems to be a very unattractive and annoying specimen. A whining, nose-running, pants falling down, sleeve-plucking, feeble, knock-kneed, spiteful, tattling, nagging, droning, sniveling, self-obsessed pile of ordure. Why is everyone expected to keep reassuring it all the time? Why isn’t it expected to grow up? Why is it allowed – allowed? encouraged, urged – to run screaming to the police and the courts and the monarch and the armed militias every time someone ‘offends’ or ‘insults’ or ‘wounds’ or ‘blasphemes against’ or ‘disrespects’ its horrible poxy tiny closed airless stupid little beliefs? Why does it get to push all the grown-ups around all the time with its high-pitched noisy demands? Why doesn’t everyone with one voice tell it to shut up and piss off?

The community in question is not even a real community, it’s a spectral community, The Community as it exists in the minds of people who think it has to be reassured all the time. That community is not only whiny and covered in snot, it’s also damn dangerous. It’s a shut up device, and it works a treat.

Mark Steyn gets one thing quite wrong though, I think.

Mrs Burrows writes on “children’s rights and the family”, so I don’t know whether she’s a member of PEN or the other authors’ groups. But it seems unlikely the Hampstead big guns who lined up to defend Salman Rushdie a decade and a half ago will be eager to stage any rallies this time round. But, if the principle is freedom of expression, what’s the difference between his apostasy (as the Ayatollah saw it) and Mrs Burrows’s apostasy (as Scotland Yard sees it)?

Well which Hampstead big guns are we talking about? Some of them precisely did not line up to defend Rushdie fifteen years ago, and isn’t that exactly when all this sickening community-reassuring got going? With a good many Hampstead big guns saying Rushdie was a bad fella and that the feelings of devout Muslims ought to be respected? Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. And I strongly doubt that the people who ‘lined up’ (what else should they have done, pushed and shoved?) to defend Rushdie would all approve of the Fulham police work in this case. Hitchens for instance? That seems vanishingly unlikely. Steyn seems to have his enemies confused here (not for the first time).

A little more on the Chronicle’s newsflash that Theory is hardly at all very much influential or mandatory or orthodox any more.

Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, Ian Duncan, a professor of English and the department’s chairman, reports via e-mail that “postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing” while New Historicism “does not exert the hegemony it did 20 years ago, although I think it’s fair to say it’s been digested by many of us and maintains a strong presence.”

And yet a lot of wacko people go on saying that Theorists seem to be interested in everything but literature – it’s staggering, isn’t it? Why would anyone think that? When postcolonial, national/transnational, race and comparative ethnicities studies are flourishing just as they should and all is right with the world?

“We believe in a broad intellectual training,” says Toril Moi, a professor in the literature program and the Romance-studies department at Duke University. “So that means students should know some theory, right?” In practical terms, she observes, theory has become “part of a cultural-social-historical conversation.”

Well of course it has. It’s quite impossible to carry on any kind of cultural-social-historical tragical-comical-pastoral now stop that right now conversation without ‘knowing some theory’ – by which is meant of course knowing the right some theory, as opposed to the wrong some. Some Foucault and Derrida and Butler not some Abrams and Rawls and Nussbaum. Which just goes to show how distant Theory is from conformity and groupthink and orthodoxy – how endlessly unpredictable it is. It’s pure coincidence that all the emails in this article mention the same few names over and over again and ignore all the others. There’s ‘broad intellectual training’ for you!

Mr. Keith, of Binghamton, cautions that “trying to map out alternative ways of knowing is going to be inherently difficult and demanding.” Complex concepts sometimes require complex terminology, and hurling abuse at theory for its “excessive difficulty has been used too often as an overly quick strategy of dismissing and not engaging.”

There there. There there. We know. It’s so unfair. You guys are so deep, and Deeply Informed, and you’re sooo smart, you know how to do such difficult and demanding things, because you’re so smart, and can use complex terminology – and then people just hurl abuse at you. It’s totally unfair. Obviously you can’t map out alternative ways of knowing by endlessly recycling the same ten writers over and over and over again, without using a lot of complex terminology. Can you?! Of course not. This is hard stuff. This is big, important, difficult, complex, grown-up thinking. Not like that simple easy childish shit that people like philosophers and physicists do, but really complex and difficult – and alternative. Therefore needs complex terminology. Much more than boring old positivists like Hume or Bacon or people like that did.

In his essay “Theory Ends,” Mr. Leitch offers up one final definition of theory: “a historically new, postmodern mode of discourse that breaches longstanding borders, fusing literary criticism, philosophy, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, and politics.” The result, he says, is a “cross-disciplinary pastiche” that falls under the increasingly wide banner of cultural studies.

Yeah. Which is great, because it’s six for the price of one. It’s like one of those all-you-can-eat places, or like a garage sale. Where before Theory you just got the one thing, now with Theory (even though it’s over) you get multitudes. You get a literary critic who is also a philosopher, a historian, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, and a political scientist. Isn’t that great? Six fields in one! Because Theory fuses them all, you see. It doesn’t draw from these other fields, it doesn’t inform itself by reading and thinking broadly, it fuses them, so that it is in fact just as much sociology as lit crit and psychoanalysis as history. One wonders why the people in the other fields don’t do that. Why don’t historians do that fusing thing so that they too can be six things at once? They must not be as clever as Theorists. Or as Theorists used to be before Theory was over.

Mr. Williams points out that as universities lose funds, the humanities have come under more pressure, external and internal, to justify themselves, “not by saying that we do this high-research thing called theory, which nobody seems to care about, but to deliver the goods in a way that engineering does.”

Oh yeah. High-research. You bet. That’s one of the many impressive things about Theory: how research-driven it is. Funny that it all ends up sounding exactly alike then – unless all theorists do their research in the same place? But then wouldn’t they jostle each other over the archives? But maybe the Complicity & Hegemony archives have very very big print, so that there’s room for all.

So there you are, Theory is over, so it’s time for everyone to stop making fun of it now and let all those nice mappers-out of alternative ways of knowing get on with their high research and their deep informedness and their complex terminology and their fusing of many disciplines. And the sun sinks slowly in the west as we climb the hill, pausing for a last look back at the theorists’ peaceful little village [cue music, fade up]