Author: Ophelia Benson

You may remember, I had to bring my loving look at the work of Judith Halberstam to a premature close the other day, because I’d gone on and on and on about it and was still less than halfway through, and the day was over and darkness was beginning to creep over the land, and I had things to do, and the bailiff was at the door, and the orphans were calling for their soup, and the rain was coming in the roof –

So I had to stop. But it troubled me. I have to tell you, honest readers, it troubled me. I felt I had left my work half-done. I felt I had left a duty unfulfilled. I felt there was a wrong crying out to be righted, or at least complained about, and I had abandoned the field. I had left my post, I had dropped the reins, I had wandered off while the fire still smouldered. And it haunted me. Down the nights and down the days, the thought of that misbegotten article has pursued me, wailing like a demon lover – ‘Remember meeeeeeee.’

Okay that’s a little exaggerated. I have had one or two other things to do lately, that have driven the thought of Halberstam from my mind for entire minutes. But still…there were one or two things I still wanted to mumble over. The matter of close reading, for instance, which as Chris Williams pointed out I really should have taken the time to be rude about. I mean, if you’re going to be rude, you might as well be thorough about it.

Spivak argues that comparative literature and area studies, like certain forms of anthropology, constitute a colonial legacy in terms of the circulation of knowledge and that in order to confront and replace such a legacy, we have to reconstitute the form and the content of knowledge production. The argument is typically elliptical but powerful and timely. Surprisingly, however, Spivak does not see the reorganization of the humanities as part and parcel of the rise of cultural studies, queer studies and ethnic studies; indeed, she tends to cast these interdisciplinary rubrics as part of the problem. For example, in an unfortunate move designed to recognize and hold on to the importance of the “close reading,” Spivak designates “close reading” as a usable skill in the new comparative field she envisions and she prefers it to another kind of intellectual labor that, in her opinion, has come to be associated with the entirely “unrigorous” fields of ethnic and cultural studies, namely “plot summary.”

Oh, no – she doesn’t, does she? Really? She designates close reading (or “close reading”) as a usable skill? Well god damn, Ethel, what the sam hill does she want to go saying a thing like that for? Close reading?? What the hell kind of usable skill is that? Far reading, that’s the skilled kind. Good old-fashioned interdisciplinary reconstituted reorganized distant reading, that’s the kind of skill we want in this here brave new world of multiinter studies. Sigh. I mean, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Do we have to spell it out? Close reading means having to be accurate, and pay attention, and talk about what is on the page as opposed to what we want to talk about. That’s no good! We want distant reading so that we can just say any old thing and get tenure for it and be the head of a department. I mean, excuse me, Gayatri, but, like, duh.

But, while Spivak’s investment in the “close reading” and formalism betrays the elitist investments of her proposals for reinvention, I urge a consideration of non-elitist forms of knowledge production upon the otherwise brilliant formulations of The Death of a Discipline. If the close reading represents a commitment to a set of interpretive skills associated with a very particular history of ideas and a very narrow set of literatures, the plot summary indicates a much wider commitments to knowledge production, high and low.

Yeah. High and low. That’s it. Close reading is an elitist investment, because of what I just said – it means having to pay attention, and look carefully, and think, and elitist shit like that. Plot summary on the other hand is anti-elitist and it’s wide instead of narrow (narrow bad, narrow like elitist, narrow bad and investment-related, narrow beady-eyed and cruel and wrong), on account of how anybody can do it without having to work very hard or think much. In short, it’s easy. Which is good. It’s easy to teach, easy to do, easy to stop doing, easy all around. Therefore, obviously, it’s right-on and progressive and a blow against hegemonic discourse and narrow old elitist close-reading comparative literature English canonical reactionary Eurocentric evilness. I feel better already.

We must imagine new categories of jobs: not Victorian Studies but studies of “Empire and Culture,” not 19th century American or English literature but “popular literatures of the Americas” or “modern print culture,” not romanticism but “the poetries of industrialization.” Or something.

I love that ‘Or something.’ Oh, right – or something. Good move, in an article. ‘Hey, I have an idea!’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes! It’s – um – something.’ ‘Great! Can you let me have 2000 words by next week?’

Let’s rename the interdisciplines within which we, and our students, work (Culture and Politics Program, World Literature, Global Cultures, Transnational American Culture) and let’s insist upon a wide range of language study at a moment when the United States is actively imposing monolingualism on an increasingly heterogeneous, multilingual population

Hey, kids! Let’s rename the interdisciplines! I bet we can use Mr Henderson’s old barn, and there’s a big trunk full of clothes in the attic, and Sally can play the piano, and we all know how to sing. Let’s rename the interdisciplines and pretend we’re teaching history and politics – the people in the history and political science departments will be so thrilled. And let’s insist upon a wide range of language study! You know, like the kind they teach in all those language departments, only – um – er – more interdisciplinary!

Okay, I’ve done more than enough again. I was going to say a few words about her writing. About how remarkably, staggeringly bad it is – and she an English teacher (however under protest and with keen desires to rename her department the Electrical Engineering Department). Look at the length and absence of punctuation of many of the sentences – what are called in the mincingly technical language of old-style close-readingy elitist English departments, ‘run-on sentences,’ aka train wrecks. I was going to say a few words along those lines, but night is creeping over the land again, and I must away. Maybe Judith Halberstam will have a brain wave in the night, and decide to become a greengrocer. One can always hope.

Well that wasn’t bad at all. Quite fun in fact. And I wasn’t even awake all night.

I did love the comment ‘You must have pissed yourselves laughing, you two, while you were working on this.’ So exactly right. That’s pretty much all we ever do, really.

Now, enough of that; on to more impersonal subjects. I was listening to the World Service on the radio this morning or rather in the middle of the night, and one repeated story was of the Los Angeles mayoral election. It was extraordinary – all the reports said was that the apparent winner (now the winner) was a Hispanic, and the first Hispanic to be mayor of LA in X number of years – and variations on that theme. Period. Not one thing else. Nothing about – you know – his politics? His policies? Substance? What he plans to do? Just pure unadulterated perfectly vacuous demographics. It was both surprising and, frankly, disgusting. (I’m not blaming the BBC particularly; I’m sure other coverage was similar. I’m blaming the mindset, or the fashion, or whatever this is.) The Beeb has an article that does exactly the same thing. Hispanic blah blah Latino blah blah demographics blah blah. Um – hello? What party is he? Does he have any politics at all or is he just a mannequin with an ethnic label?

It’s exactly like what Jeremy Paxman said to Galloway – are you proud of defeating the only black woman blah blah blah. As if that were the whole point of Oona King! Or anyone! I realize where this stuff comes from, and I’m not free of it myself. I admit it, I’m pleased – even as George Bush is pleased, alas – that we have a black woman Secretary of State. I was pleased about the Attorney General in the Clinton administration. And so on. But – but just because I have the silliness too doesn’t mean it’s not silliness. And when it takes over to such an extent that it’s all that’s mentioned then something is off.

Oona King said as much on ‘Today’ a few days after the election. She said that was the one thing she agreed with Galloway on: that Paxman’s question was absurd.

Communalism is not a brilliant idea, and it would be nice if people would start to catch on to that. Here’s Todd Gitlin on the subject, from The Twilight of Common Dreams:

The Enlightenment erected great structures of thought but also manufactured the acid to dissolve them. It was self-reinforcing and self-devouring. It was a philosophy for leaving home, not least one’s ideological home, wherever that was. To hate absolutism was also to hate the absolutist claims of one’s nation, tribe, family. For precisely that reason, the Enlightenment is not to be disposed of with a wave of the moment’s identity cards.

He goes on to describe Richard Rorty as claiming that people act in the name of their particular tribes, and that when they act altruistically they usually give parochial reasons for doing so – that the rescued Jew was a fellow Milanese or a fellow bocce player or the like. He then cites our friend Norm to the contrary.

But the political theorist Norman Geras examined some eighty accounts of Gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Only one failed to mention universal moral obligations.

It can be a mistake to overestimate human goodness and altruism and the like, but it’s also a mistake to underestimate it. Parochialism and communalism are underestimates.

Oh, who needs sleep anyway. Adrenalin works just as well. I hardly slept at all the whole time I was in London last autumn, and did that slow me down? Not that you’d notice. Except that I had a tendency to fall asleep the instant I set foot on any form of public transport. I seemed to have a terrible confusion between beds in darkened rooms, on the one hand, and moving vehicles packed with strangers, on the other. As a general rule it’s preferable to do one’s sleeping in the former rather than the latter, but I couldn’t seem to get it straight. Oh well.

Anyway I know right now I’m not likely to get any sleep at all tonight, because I have to be wide-awake very early tomorrow morning, and you know how that goes. Even if you could perfectly well sleep for, say, five hours, thus getting a decent (not opitmal, but decent) amount of sleep simply by setting the alarm – you don’t.

Very global, though, which is kind of fun. Three widely separated time zones. 5:30 a.m. one place, 1:30 in the afternoon another, and 11:30 at night yet another. Mixed. Very cosmopolitan.

My colleague and I are doing an interview (or a chaotic giggle-infested interruptive babble, more likely) for this here Australian Broadcasting Corporation tomorrow. So if you listen to it – you can hear us talking. Or rather alternately yammering and snorting with childish laughter. Then in the morning all of Australia will rush out in a body to buy the Dictionary. So who needs sleep? I have too much work to do anyway; a chance to work all night is just what I need.