Author: Ophelia Benson

This morning I read Mark Bauerlein’s article in Theory’s Empire, ‘Social Constructionism: Philosophy for the Academic Workplace’, originally published in Partisan Review. It’s great stuff.

When someone holds a belief philosophically, he or she exposes it to arguments and evidence against it, and tries to mount arguments and evidence for it in return. But in academic contexts, constructionist ideas are not open for debate. They stand as community wisdom, articles of faith. When a critic submitted an essay to PMLA that criticized constructionists for not making arguments in their favor, the reader’s report by Richard Ohmann rejoined that since constructionism is universally accepted by academic inquirers, there is no need to argue for it anymore.

That’s either hilarious or infuriating, or probably both. Constructionism is universally accepted by academic inquirers!! Is it really!

No, it certainly is not, and the fact that someone doing a reader’s report on such a book thinks or claims to think it is, is…shocking, absurd, risible, maddening. Talk about groupthink.

Commentaries on ideological origins and ethical results far exceed conceptual analyses and logical expositions. Evaluating concepts and arguments by their political backgrounds and implications has become a disciplinary wont, a pattern of inquiry. It is the natural method of constructionist epistemology, the outlook that will not distinguish between a truth and its origination, which is to say the outlook that is not really an epistemology at all. It speaks an epistemological language, but it has no epistemological principles.

Just so. Evaluating concepts by their political implications: the very definition of unepistemology.

If constructionists mean by “truth” merely “what passes for truth,” then the contradiction disappears, but now we are no longer talking about truth in epistemological terms, but in historical terms, that which is accepted as truth in this or that time and place. The acceptance of something as true is one thing, the truth of that belief is another. Establishing the latter is a routine epistemological task. Documenting the former is a traditional historical endeavor, carried out by Gibbon as well as by Sedgwick.

‘If constructionists mean by “truth” merely “what passes for truth,”‘ – as they so often do, and as journalists and others writing about them also so often do – witness Morris Dickstein in that article a few weeks ago. I pointed out at the time that he was confusing the two – which people really ought to stop doing.

This polarizing, personalizing rhetoric indicates that social constructionism has an institutional basis, not a philosophical, moral, or political one. It tramples on philosophical distinctions and practices an immoral mode of debate…Instead, what has emerged from social constructionism is not a philosophical school or a political position, but an institutional product, specifically, an outpouring of research publications, conference talks, and classroom presentations by subscribers…In a word, it is the school of thought most congenial to current professional workplace conditions of scholars in the humanities.

And why? Because (in the US at least) academics have to publish a book within 3 1/2 years of being hired, or they won’t be tenured. Social constructivist books are easier to write than those that rely on evidence and time spent in archives. All a bit of a misunderstanding, it seems.

I listened to part of an Open Book on libaries earlier today. Michael Holroyd talked about how important the library was to him when he was a child – ‘It was a place of light.’ Yes – so it was to me when I was a child. I had two libraries: the public one, in an old brick colonial house painted yellow on Nassau Street, which had a wonderful library smell that I can conjure up whenever I think of it, and which fills me with an intense nostalgia; and the one at school, which was a series of three rooms (painted dark green I think) with arched doorways: it was usually empty (it was a tiny school), and it was a refuge.

Holroyd got his education in libraries, he said – he never went to university. Score one for libraries (score several, actually). Then Open Book interviewed some people in Waterstone’s or someplace to ask them if they use the library as well as bookshops. Some said yes, others said no. ‘Why not?’ Libraries not very good, small, not many books, rundown – and some closed altogether, the one in Deptford for example. Ah, thought I, already thinking of doing N&C on the subject (libraries are a subject that get me going), and Jeremy told me last year the one in Sutton was closed – I can say that. So, Open Book said, libraries often small, rundown, without many books – but now we will go to a library that is none of those things – the brand new central library in (wait for it) Sutton. So I snickered a bit. Well at least that explains why it was closed.

But then things got very bad. Very bad indeed; really terrible. There was a lot of stuff about how the new Sutton library has a machine for checking books in and out that makes a fart noise when the books are checked in, and a ‘Sound Shower’ you can stand in to listen to new music without having to wear headphones (and the sound leaks out a bit, Open Book noted). Then Open Book asked the librarian, ‘Does anyone ever ask people to ‘be quiet’ here?’ And she answered happily, ‘No, never. We encourage people to make noise.’

That’s when I put my fist through the wall.

See, we have the same thing here – everybody has it everywhere – it’s universal. It has been decided and decreed (where? by whom? when? why? why wasn’t I consulted?) that libraries must now be ‘welcoming’ which means – well I thought it meant allowing people to make noise, I didn’t quite realize it had got to the point of actually begging them to do so.

Because they have to be ‘attractive,’ you see. The librarian told us that (and we already knew it, having looked into this subject a bit over the years). And ‘attractive’ for libraries means (why? why? why?) ‘as noisy as possible’ rather than quiet so that you can read and think and browse the shelves without being distracted by people shouting and cell phones chiming – let alone study and do research and write and really think hard. What, in a library?! Are you mad?! That’s not what libraries are for!

Well what are they for then? No, seriously – what are they for? Borrowing videos and CDs, mostly, it seems, and you don’t need quiet to do that.

But all the same, I have some basic questions about all this. One – why is noise considered ‘attractive’? Why is it thought to make libraries more ‘attractive’ if people are not only allowed but encouraged to make noise there? Why isn’t that thought to make them unattractive as opposed to attractive? I ask because I’ll let you in on a little secret: that’s certainly the effect this policy has on me. The louder a library is, the less attractive I find it, and that’s a fact. I don’t go into a library that sounds more like a rock concert and think ‘Wow, this is the most attractive library I’ve ever set foot in, I’m going to come here all the time.’ No. I think the opposite.

Two, why, even if it is true that some people find a loud library more ‘attractive’ than a quiet one, do the people in charge of libraries give them what they want instead of giving people who find a quiet library more ‘attractive’ what they want? Because there are more people in the first group? Because the second group is considered (I bet you can guess what word I’m going to use here) ‘elitist’? Because they think there is something old-fashioned and priggish and tiresome in liking quiet libraries? Because they think that quiet and reading and thought and study are horrible nasty regressive posh activities that ought to be stamped out in favour of nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting?

But even if they do think that – why can’t they let the nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting go on in the many many places that are intended and designed for nice healthy gregarious loud running around and shouting? Like playfields, parks, community recreation centers? Why do they have to take over the libraries too? Why can’t the libraries go on being what they were before: places where you go to find books, and read them, and use the reference books, and study and write? Especially for people who have no such place anywhere else? Why is it necessary to abolish libraries as places for quiet reading and thinking? Is reading and thinking such a sinister way of life that it has to be stamped out not just most places but everywhere?

Just the other day, someone I know told me she heard the young daughter of her gardener say she wanted to go to the library. ‘You want to go to the library!’ this acquaintance imitated herself exclaiming in amazement. ‘Shouldn’t you be asking to go swimming or something?!’ I don’t think she meant to sound scornful, but she certainly did. ‘Brilliant,’ I thought, ‘make the kid feel stupid and wrong and clueless; nice going. Just because you don’t like libraries doesn’t mean no one does.’

Same to those people who think cacophonous libraries are more ‘attractive’ than quiet ones, and that it’s worth attracting people to libraries that are really playgrounds. Just because not everyone likes to read and think doesn’t mean that no one should ever be able to.

Of course, it’s not just London. It’s never just London – or anywhere else.

It’s a suicide bombing in Iraq which killed more than twenty people, along with more bombings in Mosul and Kirkuk. It’s six Afghan policemen beheaded by suspected Taliban guerillas. It’s at least twenty people injured by a bomb in a litter bin in a tourist resort in Turkey. And this month is the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre when eight thousand Bosnian Muslims were killed and dumped in mass graves.

All part of the routine.

Now for another attempt to return to normal programming – at least for a moment.

I’ve been following several literary discussions lately. There is Daniel Green’s comment on that Judith Halberstam article – the one that Michael Bérubé commented on last month and I commented on the month before, at such length that I had to do it twice. That one – Daniel’s – ended with some comments that I’ve been musing about (on and off) ever since. About the distinction (and whether there is one) between literary and non-literary experience. Michael said one thing, Daniel said another, I said a third, Michael answered – and I’ve been trying to figure out what I think ever since. I’ve been thinking, to boil it down, about whether the pity and horror we feel at Cordelia’s death is in fact different from the pity and horror we feel at a comparable death in real life. I think it is. I think it hooks up to the way we feel about it in real life, but I think the feeling itself – the what is it like to feel this feeling – is different. Partly because Cordelia (and literary characters in general) is stripped down, as is the situation. Real life is so full of extraneous material, irrelevancies, and extra information, memory, experience, thoughts, that anything that happens there has to be different from what happens in literature, however detailed and encyclopaedic and complete it tries to be. Plus there’s the fact that reading novels and seeing or listening to plays is different from a lot of things we do in life. Plus there’s the whole question of rhetoric – of how Shakespeare got the effects he did with Cordelia. Plus more, but that will do to suggest the kind of thought.

Then Michael did a long post – an article, really – on Mark Bauerlein’s article here. That also prompted a lot of interesting comments, and Kevin Drum did a brief post on it, which brought a whole different crowd of readers. I was particularly interested by this comment of Michael’s:

And just to make my final point completely clear (because I didn’t quite nail it in the sixth comment above): the fact that Theory / anti-Theory so often appeared, when you and I were graduate students, as a struggle between the firebrands and the deadwood was not necessarily a good thing for Theory. I think it exempted some aspects of theory from skeptical scrutiny early on, and then led to a number of wagon-circling manueuvers in the 1990s as the P.C. nonsense and the various cults of personality took hold.

Exactly. That firebrands v. deadwood trope confused the issues all to hell, in my view. Which I said (sort of), and Michael’s answer clarifies things even further.

My recent thinking about this (still very much under construction) has been informed not only by challenges from the Valve, B&W, and the younger generation of the ALSC but also by my experiences over the past two years with the intro-to-grad-study course, about which I’ll say more in a separate post. (I’d place the second generation a bit later, Mark, but I’d agree that the discipleship—particularly around de Man, about which Guillory has written compellingly—was decisive.) So I’ve been trying to parse out just what in the anti-Theory response is a critique of (a) the celebrity phenomenon and its attendant wagon-circling, (b) the faddish leftism associated with theory, which is not identical to (a) but can go hand in hand with it, (c) the forbidding and/or unappealing prose of some theoretical modes, and (d) the actual arguments, point by point, of one or another theorist.

There you go; that’s just it. Items (a) – (c) can get so thoroughly in the way of (d) that one can’t even always find (d) – because one is so busy being distracted and irritated by (a) – (c).

This subject may begin to get somewhere. The Valve discussion of Theory’s Empire starts next week – July 12. Should be good.

A few more salient comments. From the Iranian commentator Amir Taheri:

But sorry, old chaps, you are dealing with an enemy that does not want anything specific, and cannot be talked back into reason through anger management or round-table discussions. Or, rather, this enemy does want something specific: to take full control of your lives, dictate every single move you make round the clock and, if you dare resist, he will feel it his divine duty to kill you.

Specific enough.

With the advent of Islam all previous religions were “abrogated” (mansukh), and their followers regarded as “infidel” (kuffar). The aim of all good Muslims, therefore, is to convert humanity to Islam, which regulates Man’s spiritual, economic, political and social moves to the last detail.

That’s it, you see. The part about regulating all our moves in every department to the last detail. We know that from the Taliban. No music, no kites, no Bamiyan Buddhas; for women, no leaving the house, no school, no work, no medical care, no nothing. Puritanism, in fact. Life as nightmare.

But what if non-Muslims refuse to take the right path?…Some believe that the answer is dialogue and argument until followers of the “abrogated faiths” recognise their error and agree to be saved by converting to Islam. This is the view of most of the imams preaching in the mosques in the West. But others, including Osama bin Laden…believe that the Western-dominated world is too mired in corruption to hear any argument, and must be shocked into conversion through spectacular ghazavat (raids) of the kind we saw in New York and Washington in 2001, in Madrid last year, and now in London.

Well, we just won’t be converted, that’s all. We’ll stay mired in our corruption. Lovely beautiful wonderful corruption. We will not give it up.

Johann Hari in the Independent:

There is an awareness here – although not yet in the rest of the country – that the Bin Ladenists who planned these massacres despise democratic, non-violent Muslims who choose to live in the West as much as they despise the rest of us. Anybody who tells you these bombers are fighting for the rights of Muslims in Iraq, occupied Palestine or Chechnya should look at the places they chose to bomb. Aldgate? The poorest and most Muslim part of the country. Edgware Road? The centre of Muslim and Arab life in London and, arguably, Europe.

Which is why Tariq Ali’s assertion that ‘The principal cause of this violence is the violence being inflicted on the people of the Muslim world’ is sheer cant.

This is not a fight between Muslims and the rest of us. It is a civil war within Islam, between democratic Muslims and Wahhabi fundamentalists who want to enslave or kill them.

Victory to democratic corruption.

Harry thinks Galloway may have done for himself now.The thought had occurred to me. I saw both his grandstanding (get me, I’m defiant, I’m brave, I’m passionate, I’m taking the unpopular view) in Parliament and his ridiculous performance on Newsnight – thanks to good old C-Span which (amid the desert of dreck that is US cable tv) has shown Newsnight in its entirety the last couple of days, and the news conference with Ken Livingstone and Ian Blair yesterday. What can I say? He comes across as an obstinate buffoon. (Of course, I already thought he was that, a predisposition which must shape how I view him now.)

Hitchens is a relief from obstinate buffoonery. (Drink-soaked ex-Trotskyist popinjayism goes head-to-head with obstinate buffoonery. How I wish Galloway had accepted that challenge.)

I remember living in London through the Provisional IRA bombing in the 70s. I saw the very first car-bomb explode against the Old Bailey in 1972. There was no warning that time, but after a while a certain etiquette developed. And, even as I detested the people who might have just as soon have blown me up as anyone else, I was aware there were ancient disputes involved, and that there was a potential political solution. Nothing of the sort applies in this case. We know very well what the “grievances” of the jihadists are.

Well, some of us do. Others of us apparently don’t. Others insist that the ‘grievance’ is the war in Iraq and that if it weren’t for that, all would be peace and harmony. A view which at the very least overlooks some hard facts about chronology, as many people have pointed out.

The grievance of seeing unveiled women. The grievance of the existence, not of the State of Israel, but of the Jewish people. The grievance of the heresy of democracy, which impedes the imposition of sharia law. The grievance of a work of fiction written by an Indian living in London. The grievance of the existence of black African Muslim farmers, who won’t abandon lands in Darfur. The grievance of the existence of homosexuals. The grievance of music, and of most representational art. The grievance of the existence of Hinduism. The grievance of East Timor’s liberation from Indonesian rule.

The grievance of seeing, I would add, not just unveiled women, but mobile women, out of the house women, working women, studying women, autonomous women, talking women, thinking women, arguing women, free women, running women, lawyer women, doctor women, scholar women, strong women, teacher women, journalist women – unsubmissive women. Women who own themselves as opposed to being owned by men, women who decide for themselves rather than asking men for permission. That’s a huge, colossal, festering, obsessive grievance; clamping down on wild out-of-control women is the first thing that happens when Talibanists win.

The grievances I listed above are unappeasable, one of many reasons why the jihadists will lose. They demand the impossible – the cessation of all life in favour of prostration before a totalitarian vision. Plainly, we cannot surrender. There is no one with whom to negotiate, let alone capitulate.

Just so. The grievances are unappeasable. That was the point of my rhetorical questions to Tariq Ali yesterday. It’s not possible to surrender, because the demand is for a nightmare life. A life of being buried alive – almost like being stuck in a Tube tunnel 250 feet below ground, forever.