Author: Ophelia Benson

My head hurts. Or is it my stomach. Or is it some finely-tuned moral or cognitive or aesthetic sense situated somewhere between the two – somewhere mid-gullet, perhaps, or resting on the back of the third rib. Whatever it is, it comes of reading this. What is it that’s so irritating about this…

The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s led some of us to believe that the end of the canon, the end of seemingly objective appraisals of “aesthetic complexity” through close readings, the end of the representation of the culture of white males as culture per se, meant that some major battles in the politics of representation had been won. Some scholars however, suspected that the battle had simply shifted elsewhere and so while the critiques of the canon held strong, while courses on queer theory, visual culture, visual anthropology, feminist theory, literary theory began to nudge the survey courses, the single-author studies and the prosody classes aside, the discipline itself lost currency faster than the dollar.

Oh, god, I don’t know. It’s the scare quotes on ‘aesthetic complexity,’ for one thing, as if that’s a stupid or pathetic idea. Well fine. Sod complexity. Up with simplicity. Paint everything one colour, play one note, say one word. Obviously doing anything else is a plot of white males. And then it’s the pathetic lost-in-the-fogness of thinking of this kind of thing as a ‘battle’ – it’s the stupidity of thinking that that’s meaningful politics and something to boast of. (That is a very boastful paragraph, if you look at it carefully. You’d think she’d just got back from the Spanish Civil War with her arm in a sling. Please.) It’s the idiot self-hugging over all those ‘theory’ courses. It’s the crap writing. It’s the whole damn package.

The Birmingham School in England in the 1970’s probably brought an end to English as we know it by proposing that the study of a small selection of texts written in English by a small group of mostly male white writers served to legitimate certain class interests in the university and elsewhere.

Really! Did it! Just like that! A few people in one place say one thing at one moment, and that’s all it takes? English (understood as an interest in Anglophone literature) has been brought to an end! How about that. Here’s me still liking things like ‘The Prelude’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Henry IV part 2’ – don’t I feel silly.

The work that emerged from the Birmingham School and that came to be called cultural studies has combined with postcolonial studies, black studies, queer studies, ethnic studies and women and gender studies to create the humanities as we know it and to spawn the constellation of debates and arguments about empire, subjectivity, hegemony, resistance, subversion, imagination and representation that currently occupy contemporary academics and that briefly but powerfully impact the lives and consciousnesses of the students who pass through humanities class rooms and others who interact in a public sphere with versions of these conversations.

Ohhh, is that what happened. Cool. So ‘English’ has taken over first all of the humanities (which would surprise some historians and philsophers of my acquaintance, among other people) and then the rest of the public sphere – by spawning debates about ’empire, subjectivity, hegemony, resistance, subversion, imagination and representation.’ Really. You know, I wouldn’t have guessed that. I really wouldn’t. Because, see, when I want to think about empire, the first place I think of to look is not, oddly enough, the English department, not even what used to be the English department but is now called the Theory Studies department. See, I tend to think there are other scholars who know more about the subject, so I read their books, instead of the books of Study Theories scholars. Hidebound of me, but there it is.

The beauty of English as a discipline in the last decade has been how flexible the field became, how receptive to new scholarship, how hospitable to queer theory, feminist studies, the study of race and ethnicity, political economy, philosophy and so on. “English” is in fact the anachronistic name we give to a far more protean field of interests and animating concerns; and the fights that we now have over English, over its relationship to the interdisciplinary forms it has given rise to, are really the aftershocks of an event that is well past.

Flexible. Hmm. Yeah, that’s one word for it. But another word (or pair of words) would be mission creep. Or not so much mission creep as mission spread all over the place like watery syrup. Why don’t they get it? Why don’t they get it that nobody wants to learn about political economy or philsophy from people in the (former) English department? Why is it that people in English-turned-Theory think they’re omnicompetent? Why is that? I’ve been wondering for years, and I’m no closer to an understanding than I ever was.

I propose that the discipline is dead, that we willingly killed it and that we now decide as serious scholars and committed intellectuals what should replace it in this new world of anti-intellectual backlash and religious fundamentalism. While we may all continue doing what we do — reading closely, looking for patterns and disturbances of patterns within cultural manifestations, determining the complex and fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies — once we call it something other than “English,” (like cultural studies, critical theory, theory and culture, etc.) it will neither look the same nor mean the same thing and nor will it occupy the same place in relation to the humanities in general…

The fractal relations between cultural production and hegemonies – ain’t that great? Original, too. Man, I wonder what it would be like to take a course from Judith Halberstam. I’m not tempted to find out, though.

In the process of changing from women’s studies to critical gender studies, these programs have rearticulated their theoretical projects and shifted the emphasis away from reclamations of lost pasts and affirmation of neglected perspectives and towards the consideration of transnational feminisms, gender and globalization, gender and sexuality in relation to race and so on…These interdisciplinary programs emerged as the result of shifts in the discipline that English could not accommodate and, in my opinion, they should be able to replace the traditional English department in the future by recognizing the impossibility of studying literature separate from other forms of cultural production and by exposing the counter-intuitive logic of building Humanities divisions around departments dedicated to the study of the literature and culture of the British Isles…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.

Argh. Those last quotes come less than halfway through the article. It’s all quotable, and it’s long – so I’m going to have to stop! But how depressing. Note how bad the writing is, just for one thing. Note the boilerplate, note the endless empty listing of approved words, note the self-congratulation throughout. Note all that, and then be glad you’re not stuck in one of those departments. Life has its rewards.

Maybe – as a lot of people have said – it’s not such a bad thing that Ratzinger is pope. Maybe we should all be rejoicing, and singing Te Deums and lighting candles and pretending to see baby Jesus on our pizza. Maybe he’ll wake a few dozy people up to what the Catholic church is and what it’s for and what it’s about. It’s not a pretty silk brocade and red velvet backdrop for a sweet old guy who wanders the globe ‘blessing’ people, and it’s not the best place to look for social justice or equality or critical thinking or – much of anything good, really. At least nothing that I can think of. Just ask anyone who grew up in Ireland a few decades ago, for a start. The priest was more like a local tyrant than anything else. And then there were those prisons for girls who – well, you know. For girls who even looked as if they someday might, in some cases. Extraordinary stuff – and not very long ago.

So maybe Ratzinger will remind people of this obvious reality. Maybe the US media will stop talking about the pope as if he were a combination of Mr Rogers and Doctors Without Borders. Maybe people will get a clue, or a grip, or both.

Items like this one should help.

”It would be hard for any Catholic editor not to say, ‘Well, if this happened to ‘America’ magazine, perhaps it could happen to others,’ ” said the Rev. Pat McCloskey, the editor of St. Anthony Messenger, a 311,000-circulation Franciscan monthly based in Cincinnati. ”I’m afraid that a move like this one will cause more and more Catholic thinkers to say that they want to write for publications that are not identified as Catholic and to teach at schools that are not identified as Catholic, because there is more freedom there.”

Well, yes. If it’s freedom, especially freedom of thought, you want, a Catholic anything is not the best place to look for it or expect it, is it. Freedom is not (to put it mildly) what the Catholic church is about.

On the other hand of course it is a bad thing, because since the Catholic church is not going anywhere anytime soon, it would be good if it could change and reform and become better than it is. But it would be even better if everyone would just up and leave.

”A lot of people were unhappy with ‘America,’ including people in Rome,” said the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, a New York-based journal on religion. He said he knew many Catholics, including bishops, who were unhappy with Reese’s stewardship of America, which, he said, ”had kind of a carping attitude toward the pontificate of John Paul II. Just as you don’t expect Planned Parenthood to give a platform to the prolife position, there’s no reason why a Catholic journal should provide a platform for positions that are clearly contrary to those of the church…”

Yup. So go write for secular magazines and teach at secular schools. Pope-free zones are easier on the nerves.

Joseph Epstein has a rather irritating review of Elaine Showalter’s new book on the academic novel. I don’t like Epstein’s writing much. It’s rather stale and uninspired and labored, I think.

The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.

Lucubrations. Perfectly delightful. Propensity. Intrepidly. Yawn. Yawn, yawn, yawn. About as fresh as last week’s oatmeal.

And in this review he says silly and very banal and untrue things about what it’s like being an academic. Obviously being an academic beats being a coalminer any day, but the hours are not as short and the vacations are not as long as he pretends. Like so many people (but he ought to know better, being an academic himself) he counts only the hours actually in class, and ignores the time spent preparing, grading exams, in meetings and the like. Yes, still much better than coalmining, but not a part-time job, and it’s anti-intellectual Fox newsy stuff to pretend it is. Plus he’s blithely casually hostile to feminism. In short he’s a pain in the ass, and pompous with it. But he does praise Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From an Institution, good, and also Rebecca Goldstein’s The Mind-Body Problem, even better. Furthermore, he mentions one of my favourite bits of The Mind-Body Problem, Renee’s idea about the inverse proportion between solidity of findings and concern with presentation of self. So he gets points.

Ms. Goldstein is quoted on the interesting point that at Princeton Jews become gentilized while at Columbia Gentiles become judenized, which is not only amusing but true. Goldstein’s novel is also brilliant on the snobbery of university life. She makes the nice point that the poorest dressers in academic life (there are no good ones) are the mathematicians, followed hard upon by the physicists. The reason they care so little about clothes–also about wine and the accoutrements of culture–is that, Goldstein rightly notes, they feel that in their work they are dealing with the higher truths, and need not be bothered with such kakapitze as cooking young vegetables, decanting wine correctly, and knowing where to stay in Paris. Where the accoutrements of culture count for most are in the humanities departments, where truth, as the physical scientists understand it, simply isn’t part of the deal. “What do you guys in the English Department do,” a scientist at Northwestern once asked me, quite in earnest, “just keep reading Shakespeare over and over, like Talmud?”

No. Not any more. They did once, but now they keep tracing Foucauldian circulation of energies problematised by the hybridization of the performative otherness of the Other – or the same thing only backwards and while wearing a beekeeper’s hat. So obviously they’re going to care whether everyone thinks they’re hip or not.

And Epstein gets another point for kakapitze – much less yawn-inducing than ‘lucubrations.’

Don’t I feel stupid. Sometimes I miss comments here. I don’t have one of them there RSS things, so no little bell goes off, no stoat leaps out of a hole in the corner of the screen, no spark ignites a small charge of powder to explode the ‘k’ key and get my attention. In short, nothing alerts me that a new comment has been posted, and so…if some days have passed…and I’ve forgotten what number they were on…then I overlook them. I feel guilty sometimes, as if I’ve been snubbing people, or ignoring them when they say something interesting. And I miss good stuff, too. I should get one of them there RSS things, I suppose. But I’ve been busy, and…

Anyway, I missed two valuable ones on a post last month. First of all – Brett – The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. There. I mentioned it. Never mind feeling guilty – just read it! Actually – here’s a helpful thing. Just start it. The bulk of it is illustrative – and it’s great stuff, and you should certainly read it if you have time, but it’s illustrative of the basic point. In other words you shouldn’t miss the first part because you don’t have time to read the whole book. I hope Jonathan Rose wouldn’t mind my saying that. It’s not that it’s not all worth reading, but that if you have time only for part, you should read part!

Second item – hardindr (you don’t mind if I call you hardindr do you?) – thanks for telling me Bérubé had struck back! Too bad it took me two weeks to notice, but I got there in the end. And laughed a lot when I did. Inexplicably, he didn’t seize the opportunity to say what a self-satisfied preening buffoon I am (probably figured it was too obvious to need saying). Anyway apparently my recommendation to refrain from reading his blog caused such a stampede of eager readers that his server immediately collapsed in a smoking pile of htmls. Well great. Am I humiliated or what. I tell people not to read a blog so what do they do they all rush off to read it. There’s authority for you! Fine. Fine. Don’t listen to me. I don’t care. Hey, go spend all your time reading Keith Burgess-Jackson, it’s no skin off my nose.

No but seriously, to be fair, Chris Martin had a point: Bérubé does have a terrific style. The rattlesnake line is hilarious. So don’t listen to me. (I seriously don’t recommend K B-J though. Just look back at that ‘dispute’ he had with Richard at Philosophy Etcetera if you wonder why.) Bérubé is funny, and he spends energy rassling with Horowitz.

What’s especially curious about this most recent spike in readership is that it comes just after Butterflies and Wheels did not recommend this blog…When I read that, my heart just sank. Butterflies and Wheels does not recommend my blog – and it was personal, not business! Readers, you know perfectly well there’s no way for me to keep the style and bag the preening. So I figured I might as well fold my little blog-tent and go home. I mean, sure, this humble blog has been, from time to time, smugly self-satisfied and absurdly self-aggrandizing, but self-infatuated? Ouch! Surely my days were numbered. Imagine my surprise, then, to be hit not only with Ms. Benson’s stern disapproval (which hurts quite enough on its own), but with a series of overage charges to boot. April is indeed the cruellest—and the busiest—month.

Mock mock mock, as Margo Ledbetter liked to say. Some people like to aggrandize themselves, other people like to dispense stern disapproval, especially if they then get to have little girls’ beloved tiny dogs killed. I am proud to say I am one of the latter. We are what we are.

But a comment I did not miss came in today and alerted us (thank you, Stewart) to this gorgeous item at the Onion.

“Unlike Scientology, which is based on empirically verifiable scientific tenets, Fictionology’s central principles are essentially fairy tales with no connection to reality,” the AIR report read. “In short, Fictionology offers its followers a mythical belief system free from the cumbersome scientific method to which Scientology is hidebound”…Fictionology’s central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church’s ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted—even encouraged—to view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

Exactly what I’ve been waiting for all this time. Now I can pray to the Pillsbury Dough Boy and Kramer and the Mercedes hood ornament. Bliss.

“Scientology is rooted in strict scientific principles, such as the measurement of engrams in the brain by the E-Meter,” Kurz said. “Scientology uses strictly scientific methodologies to undo the damage done 75 million years ago by the Galactic Confederation’s evil warlord Xenu—we offer our preclear followers procedures to erase overts in the reactive mind. Conversely, Fictionology is essentially just a bunch of make-believe nonsense.”

Remember a couple of months ago when some Vatican honcho (no, not Ratzinger, some other honcho) pitched a fit about people believing all the silly nonsense that’s in The DaVinci Code? Dang, that was funny. I bet that’s what gave the Onion the idea. Way to go, Oniers.