Author: Ophelia Benson

Well…call me delusional, call me hasty (call me a cab, call me for dinner, yeah yeah, I know), but I can’t help wondering if Salman Rushdie has been reading B&W, at least once. I started with surprise when I started reading this article.

“Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science,” says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol…Evans’ position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle, lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of “intelligent design” — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.

It’s not the Evans thing, it’s the combination of that with Michael Ruse, and then farther down in the article Richard Dawkins appears. Hit the End button and take a look at the N&Cs from the beginning of the month, and you’ll see why I think Salman may have been reading here. Maybe not! Maybe I am delusional. Only Ruse is not all that conspicuous, I don’t think; it just happens that I’m interested in him and why he thinks what he does, and so pay attention when he writes something or is reviewed. Then again…I think a review of Ruse’s new book showed up at Arts and Letters Daily, so maybe it is just coincidence. Still – ! It’s not impossible. There is Ibn Warraq’s address to the UN, for instance, and Azam’s, and there are Maryam’s and Homa’s articles. It’s not out of the question that Salman R has a certain interest in issues of this kind, is it now. Anyway, if so, if I inspired him to write about the Evans-Ruse Plan, then very good! Very useful of me. And if not, if he thought of it all by himself, also good, because I can think how clever of me to think of the same thing, and sooner.

Enough about me. It’s the article that’s interesting. Go, Salman.

Evans’ “Atheism Lite,” which seeks to negotiate a truce between religious and irreligious world views, is easily demolished. Such a truce would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal — if the world’s religions agreed to value the atheist position and to concede its ethical basis, if they respected the discoveries and achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals life’s multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called “revealed” texts. No such reciprocal arrangement exists, however, nor is there the slightest chance that such an accommodation could ever be reached.

Just so. That’s one of the things that made Evans’ piece so irritating. He’s so annoyed with atheists, and so non-annoyed with theists. Wait – huh? Why do we have to do all the accomodating and sucking-up? Why are we the only ones who have to abandon what we think at the door and sit still and be quiet while the theists stomp around and tear the house apart? Why’s he yelling at us and letting the theists just do whatever they damn well feel like?! We didn’t do anything – why doesn’t he go shout at them for awhile?! In fact why doesn’t he just go shout at them, period, and leave us alone.

Nor does the current behaviour of organized religion breed confidence in the Evans/Ruse laissez-faire attitude. Education everywhere is seriously imperilled by religious attacks. In recent years, Hindu nationalists in India attempted to rewrite the nation’s history books to support their anti-Muslim ideology, an effort thwarted only by the electoral victory of a secularist coalition led by the Congress party. Meanwhile, Muslim voices the world over are claiming that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Islam.

Yeah but see that’s okay because religion is art, man, so it’s harmless, and it doesn’t matter if it tries to eviscerate science teaching. No problema.

Meanwhile religions continue to attack their own artists: Hindu artists’ paintings are attacked by Hindu mobs, Sikh playwrights are threatened by Sikh violence and Muslim novelists and filmmakers are menaced by Islamic fanatics with a vigorous unawareness of any kinship.

Yes, they are, aren’t they. As are non-Muslim novelists who ought to be Muslims because their grandparents were. I’m not naming any names or anything, but I can think of one not a million miles from this very article.

Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return. As Evans and Ruse would do well to recognize, atheists such as Dawkins, Miller and Wilson are neither immature nor culpable for taking on such religionists. They are doing a vital and necessary thing.

Yeah! Attaboy, Salman! Sing it! Tell those bastards.

Excuse my warmth. But I do get so tired of all this rebuking of atheists even by other atheists for being too noisy or talkative or definite or ‘adolescent’ for Christ’s sake. I do get so sick of all this ‘Shh, shh, if you don’t talk too loud maybe they won’t get angry and will let us live, over here in this little corner with a heap of rags to sleep on, if only you don’t say anything – oh do please be quiet!’ I won’t be quiet. Why should I be quiet? I’m not the one who’s telling everyone there’s a giant Man in Heaven taking care of us, and that’s why the world is such a perfect place and so free of suffering, am I. They can be quiet. I’ve got stuff to say.

More teasing of the Literary ‘what did I just say?’ Theory mafia, thanks to another link-donation by Allen Esterson. Terry Eagleton was doing his bit all the way back in 1999 – surely before After Theory was even a file on Eagelton’s computer.

Gayatri Spivak remarks with some justification in this book that a good deal of US post-colonial theory is ‘bogus’, but this gesture is de rigueur when it comes to one post-colonial critic writing about the rest. Besides, for a ‘Third World’ theorist to break this news to her American colleagues is in one sense deeply unwelcome, and in another sense exactly what they want to hear. Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of one’s position. It is the nearest a Post-Modernist can come to authenticity.

Bogus! Now that hurts. And from Gayatri herself, too. Angst is good, and masochism is better, and autoguilt-tripping is downright special…but that doesn’t mean people want to be called bogus! Jeez. Especially not by the great Spivak herself. Talk about humiliating. You might as well be called an Orientalist by Said or a logocentrist by Derrida or a power-tripper by Foucault or a whiny bedwetter by Freud.

Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. Radical academics, one might have naively imagined, have a certain political responsibility to ensure that their ideas win an audience outside senior common rooms. In US academia, however, such popularising or plumpes Denken is unlikely to win you much in the way of posh chairs and prestigious awards, so that left-wingers like Spivak, for all their stock-in-trade scorn for academia, can churn out writing far more inaccessible to the public than the literary élitists who so heartily despise them.

Well exactly. Bingo. Get me I’m a radical and that’s why my writing is so deliberately incomprehensible that the public would rather be set on fire than read a word of it. Hotcha! That’s the way to start the revolution.

More charitable readers will see this garrulous hotch-potch as a strike at the linear narratives of Enlightenment, by one whose gender and ethnicity these violently exclude…The line between post-colonial hybridity and Post-Modern anything-goes-ism is embarrassingly thin. As feminist, deconstructionist, post-Marxist and post-colonialist together, Spivak seems reluctant to be left out of any theoretical game in town. Multiplying one’s options is an admirable theoretical posture, as well as a familiar bit of US market philosophy. For Spivak to impose a coherent narrative on her materials, even if her title spuriously suggests one, would be the sin of teleology, which banishes certain topics just as imperialism sidelines certain peoples.

He gets kinder after that – and we don’t want to read kindness on the subject, do we. At least I don’t want to quote it. Where’s the fun in that. So instead read this fascinating item that Chris Whiley brought to my attention. It’s full of interesting subjects and implications. Read about Rahila Khan, and her book Down the Road, Worlds Away which was published by Virago in 1987 in its ‘Upstarts’ series.

Virago accepted her book, an acceptance that, in the words of Professor Dympna Callaghan, Professor of English at Syracuse University and author of a Marxist analysis of the exclusion of women from the Renaissance stage, “seemed to fulfill one of Virago’s laudable objectives, that of publishing the work of a diverse group of contemporary feminist authors.”…The agent was surprised to discover that Miss Khan was actually the Reverend Toby Forward, a Church of England vicar…Virago felt it necessary to stand by its purely literary judgment, namely that the stories were written “with hard-eyed realism and poignant simplicity”—it had to do so, or it would justly have been accused of applying double standards to work by Asian women and white men, which would have revealed a frankly racist condescension. But Virago decided that politics in this instance was the better part of literature, and was more important, indeed, than whether the book had anything worthwhile or important to say. It therefore refused to sell any more copies of the offending work. This, as we shall see, was ironic, because the author was drawing attention, not before time, to the truly oppressed condition of certain women, a condition in which one might have supposed that feminists would be interested. The personal identity of the author thus came to be all-important just at the very moment when, elsewhere in the literary world, the death of the author was being confidently announced.

Ironic, all right. Ironic on many levels and for many reasons. Read the whole article – it’s a complicated and interesting story.

The confusion that the affair sowed was evident in the clotted prose that it stimulated. Here is Professor Callaghan again in her essay, “The Vicar and Virago”:

As we saw in the Vicar and Virago Affair, the problem of identity is exacerbated to the point of hypervisibility in the relation between the cultural inscription of race as color and the erasure of race in the dominant construction of white identity. Whites are feverishly clutching at their/our ethnicities—and everyone else’s—and are threatened by the knowledge that the racially hegemonic invisibility so long cultivated may now spell disappearance. In its worst manifestations, this becomes neo-Nazism, but even at its best, this attempt to register whiteness as a racial identity risks reproducing the notion of race as an objective (rather than socially constructed) spectrum of human identity. “Equalizing” racial categories will only succeed in suspending the history of racism and making whiteness, as opposed to white privilege, visible.

But Toby Forward was actually trying to say something, and people made it very difficult for him to do so.

Unfortunately, the ensuing furor over his identity and whether, again in the words of Professor Callaghan, “the appropriation of subordinate identities by privileged whites demonstrates that endeavours to compensate for the exclusion of racial ‘minorities’ from the means of literary production can become the very means for continuing this exclusion,” obscured the importance of what he was trying to say. Indeed, one might even interpret the furor over these matters as a displacement activity of the intelligentsia, who wanted to avoid having to think of the very difficult and real problems that he had raised in his stories, and which are so distressing to contemplate.

Which is understandable. Not everyone wants to try to solve the world’s problems. But then it is more becoming to avoid posturing as a transgressor or a hero of postcolonialism – it’s more becoming and decent to avoid being bogus.

A brief follow-up on matters of Literary Theory, and eloquence, and the Naming of Departments, and slavering mutual admiration among Theorists, and whither Theory, and which would you rather have as your one and only book on a desert island where you had to live for fifteen years and three weeks with only a rusty knife and a red cusion with ‘1962 World’s Fair’ embroidered on it in cerulean silk thread to keep you company and help you survive – one book by William Empson or several hundred (different) books by Judith Butler.

Allen Esterson alerted us in comments to this gorgeous page at Columbia – full of people trying to outdo each other in saying slobberingly sycophantic things about Gayatri Spivak. Why do they do that? Why do they do that ‘she/he is the most brilliant insightful original surprising stunning amazing profound clever wise thinker who ever breathed with the one possible exception of this other colleague of mine’ thing? Why? What’s the deal? Do they think Spivak is a member of some secret gang or cabal – like SMERSH or one of those – that controls all academic appointments everywhere in the universe? Do they hope she’ll invite them over for Ovaltine? Do they want to borrow her car? What? What makes them come over all – all – embarrassing, when they talk about each other? Oh well, I guess I just answered the question. It’s the fact that they’re talking about each other. Theorists talking about other Theorists. I guess they just think there’s no such thing as piling it on too thick. They’re wrong about that.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline does not tell us that Comparative Literature is at an end. On the contrary, it charts a demanding and urgent future for the field, laying out the importance of the encounter with area studies and offering a radically ethical framework for the approach to subaltern writing. Spivak deftly opposes the ‘migrant intellectual’approach to the study of alterity. In its place, she insists upon a practice of cultural translation that resists the appropriation by dominant power and engages in the specificity of writing within subaltern sites in the idiomatic and vexed relation to the effacements of cultural erasure and cultural appropriation. She asks those who dwell within the dominant episteme to imagine how we are imagined by those for whom literacy remains the primary demand. And she maps a new way of reading not only the future of literary studies but its past as well. This text is disorienting and reconstellating, dynamic, lucid, and brilliant in its scope and vision. Rarely has ‘death’offered such inspiration.

Maybe it is – maybe it is lucid and brilliant. But somehow, reading Butler, one can hardly help thinking it’s not, it can’t be – that if the person who wrote that mess likes it, it has to be another mess.

Take a look at that page; it’s worth it.

And
John Holbo has a post at The Valve that talks about a new book I’m slavering to read, called Theory’s Empire. Holbo links to the Table of Contents – also at Columbia Press, amusingly enough. That table of contents has a lot of friends and contributors and future and potential contributors to B&W in it. Frederick Crews, Meera Nanda, Susan Haack, David Bromwich, Russell Jacoby, Mark Bauerlein, Erin O’Connor. So it’s bound to be good, and quite likely not to write in Butlerese. Almost certain not to, in fact.

Holbo makes an amusing comment:

If ‘theory’ means “speculation on language, interpretation itself, society, gender, culture, and so on” then it is obvious nonsense to say it is something that only got comfortable after 1980. (One of the big achievements of theory is supposed to be laying the gentleman amateur belletristic pontificator in his grave, but then you can’t define ‘theory’ in a way that patently raises him up as an Ur-theorist. What gentleman was ever incapable of ‘speculating about culture’, after all?) Obviously what is being ‘packaged’ as ‘theory’ is narrower than the implied vastness of the definition. Theory is a cluster of figures and styles – a more or less culturally cohesive post-60’s intellectual and literary sensibility – found mostly in English departments. If you want to ‘package’ that, fine; don’t include the old stuff. Dante didn’t ‘do theory’. Maimonides didn’t ‘do theory’. Just include the essential roots. Go back to Kant, fine. (He didn’t ‘do theory’, but he’s essential scenery.) The Enlightenment vs. Romanticism and how that played out to get us where we are, plus a few grace notes from the ancients – Plato, because Derrida. Cramming in other old stuff while squeezing out more contemporary competition looks (ahem) imperialistic. ‘Theory and criticism’ turns out to be a grue-ish cross-cut. Like having a volume entitled ‘analytic philosophy and metaphysics’. Then leaving out Heidegger because … he doesn’t do analytic philosophy. In short, the Norton looks overweight because it is one big Puffer Fish. When attacked, pretend to be larger than you are.

Very grue-ish. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red lentils.