Author: Ophelia Benson

Want more? Want more bad writing combined with bad thinking? Right then.

This is from a review by Azfar Hussain of Dis/locating Cultures/Identitites, Traditions, and Third World Feminism by Uma Narayan.

Narayan’s preoccupations with the problematics of the representations of sati in Western feminist discourse indeed remain intimately connected to other representationalist discursive areas, namely dowry-murders in India and domestic violence-murders in the United States — issues that she takes up in the third chapter of her book. Narayan takes a hard, critical look at the ways in which dowry-murders in India are framed, focused, and even formulated in US academic feminist discourse, while pointing up the dangerous problems kept alive by Western culturalist epistemological approaches to Third-World subjects, identities, traditions, and cultures. She argues that while crossing “borders” in the age of globalization, images, narratives, and the entire chain of events pertaining to the Third World lose their national and historical differentia specifica under the homogenizing epistemic logic of some readily available connection-making apparatuses. As Narayan further argues, such apparatuses — informational, ideological, and mediatic as they are — continue to provide visibility to dowry-murders in India and relative invisibility to domestic-violence murders in the US, thereby serving the hegemonic.

Thereby serving the hegemonic, you see. Perhaps if Hussain had said what he says more clearly, he would have been too embarrassed to say it – which is one use of jargon: it makes it easier to say absurd things. But then one has to wonder why people want to say absurd things. Why do Hussain and Narayan want to argue that Western feminists should not ‘frame, focus and formulate’ dowry-murders in such a way that they are made more visible? Why do they want to summon all this portentous suspicion about the whole thing? Isn’t there enough real oppression and racism and colonialism in the world, without going to all this trouble to translate moral or humanitarian attention into something that ‘serves the hegemonic’?

Just a bit more, by way of edification and entertainment.

Such a self-critical interrogation begins to complicate the very question of identity itself in ways in which the continuing “colonialist” process of constructing “Third-World” identity and also even the practice of conjuring the ghost of authenticity haunting that very identity (as exemplified in various brands of counterproductive, essentialist identity-politics these days) are all brought into productive crises. For Narayan, indeed, the question of identity continues to constitute a predominant concern throughout the book. And her insistence on historicizing and contextualizing identity and difference within the deeply specific national contexts — instead of just celebrating or, worse, fetishizing them — seems right on the mark. According to her, the fetishization of difference and identity only renders them vulnerable to ongoing hegemonic appropriations in the metropolis.

Oh, those ongoing hegemonic appropriations in the metropolis. Don’t you just hate that? You know, you can’t get a cab, and the restaurants are all booked, and everything is so expensive, and then on top of all that – ongoing hegemonic appropriations! It’s unbearable!

A reader of ours seems to think I haven’t actually read any bad writing. He’s wrong about that. He tells me to quote some that’s recently published. Very well. Mind you, I wouldn’t do it just to please him, but I’ve been meaning to anyway, when I got around to it, so I’ll get around to it now.

This is from a book published this very year, 2003. It is called, elegantly, The Futures of American Studies, and is edited by Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman. Here is a sample – highly representative, I assure you – from the Introduction:

Like most founding gestures, this one gave monumental status to an origin retrospectively invoked, thereby giving the past authority over the present in a management strategy that seemed aimed to contextualize, if not override, the present threat of rupture and incoherence. In so doing, Wise sought to repair the conceptual ground of a field whose fissuring into multiple programs and subfields at once reflected and gave expression to the aspirations of social movements that had exceeded the ‘founding’ field’s epistemological grasp. The canonical objects of analysis, protocols of reading them, and the interpretive narratives that had secured Wise’s field identity were brought into the ambit of the crisis he diagnosed. In the wake of this encounter, Wise strained to invent a paradigmatic drama that would enable him to feel at home in any of the possible trajectories of the emergent field.

Stop, that’s enough! I want to go on, each sentence is more delicious than the last, so I keep typing, but there is such a thing as copyright, after all. So there you are. I must say, breathes there a soul so dead that that passage doesn’t inspire it with uncontrollable mirth? And it’s all like that. The intro is 38 pages long and it’s all full of that dark suspicion, that insistently paranoid rhetoric, that fatuously portentous jargonization of nothing very much, that wishful mention of ‘social movements’ as if this kind of thing were sort of the academic version of the Flint sit-down strike.

This bit is from the article by Robyn Wiegman, ‘Whiteness Studies and the Paradox’:

I am interested in Forrest Gump as the specific instance and the popular imaginary as the general context for thinking about the academic emergence of an antiracist knowledge project designed to interrogate and historicize whiteness: whiteness studies…If social construction has been used to de-essentialize the racially minoritized subject – to wrestle subjectivity from its oversaturation, indeed reduction to embodiment – then whiteness studies evinces the anxiety of embodiment on the other side of racial power hierarchies, an anxiety that is in itself the consequence of counterhegemonic race discourses that have put pressure not just on what but on how the white body means.

Again – it’s all like that. Page after page of it, treading water, going nowhere. Straining after profundity until the veins stand out on its poor hot forehead, and achieving only polysyllabicality. And then thinking there’s something radical about the whole thing! And there’s something so cringe-making about the sheep-like adoption of Lacanian terminology for no apparent reason, and something so risible about the conjunction of Forrest Gump with a project to historicize something. But there – perhaps I’m just dense, and this sort of thing is terrifically profound.

The Ruddick essay I discussed in the last N&C was published, as I mentioned, in November 2001, but it was revived and discussed again on several blogs last July. This comment or brief essay by Timothy Burke is particularly interesting.

It’s noticeable what a lot of words there are in both pieces that have to do with social pressure, conformity and group-think. From Ruddick’s article: accusations; how inhibiting these tensions can become; the necessity of adhering to the critical norms of the moment; dominant thinking; rules that I thought were very limiting; disgrace; I was still afraid I’d be attacked; this fear of attack can be utterly compelling; a caution bordering on ventriloquism; disciplinary taboos on certain words and ideals; the threat of ostracism by the group; subtle regulations for speech and thought that are pervasive. From Burke’s essay: the game being played is theoretical one-upmanship; the tyranny of theory; it somehow became shameful to say that I had been drawn to African history simply because it seemed interesting.

Why is that, one wonders. Of course, naturally, there is always some of that in any field, and academic fields are no exception. There are norms and standards and conventions, there is a right way to do things and a wrong way, there is pressure from colleagues to do things the right way – and a good thing too. It’s no good pretending pure anarchy would be preferable. It’s a fine and desirable and necessary thing that scientists should teach and shame each other not to fake their evidence, not to ignore disconfirming data, not to cherry-pick only the studies that support their hypotheses. Same with historians, sociologists, inquirers and researchers of all sorts. It’s fine that philosophers point out logical errors, and chastise confusion of rhetoric with argument. But when necessary demands for rigour and good evidence devolve into heresy-hunting and orthodoxy-enforcing, that’s another matter.

And of course literary ‘theory’ is exactly the sort of discipline where heresy-hunting will flourish – because what else is there? One can present quotations, of course, and say ‘There – you’ve misinterpreted that.’ But it’s always open to people to say simply ‘No I haven’t,’ and that’s that. Especially in a field where deconstruction has dismantled binary oppositions and postmodernism has revealed the futility of Grand Narratives, where Foucault has shown that everything is a power-play and Derrida has undermined phallogocentrism. So all is opinion, and you can’t tell me I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted or got my facts wrong, but I can tell you that your approach is positivist or Eurocentric or bourgeois or Orientalist and at any rate conservative, and you will feel shamed and guilty and I will not.

So a boring repetitive parochial uniformity is imposed, and some people get out and others censor themselves, and students shrug and sign up for business administration or law instead, and it all seems very unfortunate.

There is a fascinating article about the discontents of professionalization here. It was written shortly after September 11, but what it says is still of interest. I don’t agree with absolutely all of it, but what of that; I do with most.

Readers in a variety of fields may identify with the experience of a soon-to-be Ph.D. in English, someone who has always worked hard and played by the rules intellectually, who told me that since the terrorist attacks, she’s derived less comfort than she expected from working on her dissertation. She also confessed that she can’t blame the people who look at our discipline from the outside and say, “If you’re not getting at anything that sustains people, what’s the point?”

That’s the main bit I don’t agree with. Sustaining people isn’t the only thing scholarship does, and there is plenty of point in doing non-sustaining (I take sustaining to mean consoling, helping to bear up) things – epistemology for example, or scientific or historical research. The truths that researchers find may well not be in the least sustaining or consoling, but there can be many other sorts of reasons why they’re still worth finding out.

I was in great conflict about continuing to observe certain intellectual rules that were a part of the dominant thinking — rules that I thought were very limiting but that I couldn’t challenge without courting disgrace. Specifically, I felt I had to hide or smuggle in my convictions about what sustains people — my faith, for example, in some quality of shared humanity that makes literary experience meaningful…I was writing about Joyce’s insights into the touching human need to bury, burn, or otherwise take care of the bodies of the dead — an impulse that is universal, however differently loss and the communal response to it are experienced across cultures. I drew support for the notion that this is a universal phenomenon from the field of historical anthropology, which explores what is common and what changes across cultures and eras. Yet I was still afraid I’d be attacked for “essentializing” — for supposing that there are shared features that constitute the essence of being human. For some reason, this fear of attack can be utterly compelling, particularly if your intellectual position can be dismissed on moral or quasi-moral grounds because it has something in common with ideas widely held on the political right.

Indeed it can, and that fear and its compelling quality is the evil demon. That’s the very demon B&W was set up to exorcise. The fear is an understandable one – I experience it or a close relative of it all the time, as I’ve mentioned here before, for instance when I find an interesting article on a site belonging to the Cato Institute or similar. One does not want to assist people who have an agenda that one does not share – that’s simple enough. The Cato Institute’s chief agenda (as far as I can tell) is that of promoting the idea that the market and profit ought to be the final arbiter of everything, and that’s an agenda I dislike intensely. But if an article there makes an important point or has useful new facts to consider – then which political commitment is happy to hear it should be irrelevant. Indeed one could argue that that’s a useful thing – discovering facts or ideas one can agree with in a political stance that is the opposite of one’s own could get all of us into the habit of considering ideas on their merits rather than according to the company they keep, hence could make all of us far more reluctant to be blindly loyal to bad stupid counter-productive harmful or unjust ideas, or untrue or badly-founded facts.

In Disciplined Minds, the physicist Jeff Schmidt claims that professional training in physics, and by extension many other fields, has something in common with brainwashing, and that survival is a bit like deprogramming. The impediment to deprogramming in any environment is the threat of ostracism by the group…Many professions (conceivably all professions) bind initiates to themselves by inducing a subtle spiritual depletion — what the legal theorist Duncan Kennedy, in his 1983 manifesto Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, called the “sneaking depression of the pre-professional.” In a superb book called Nuclear Rites, the anthropologist Hugh Gusterson describes how weapons scientists are subjected to training that involves rules of secrecy that have a debilitating effect on reasoning and moral judgment…Systematic demoralization seems to be a hidden feature of many kinds of professional training, though each field develops its own mechanisms for producing this change. The theoretical models that have dominated English and the related disciplines in the last two decades are especially effective tools (along with the institutional factors that have always existed) for creating demoralization.

Physicists, lawyers, weapons scientists, ‘theorists,’ all receiving training that empties them of qualities that they probably need. It’s a fascinating and fairly alarming idea.

Yesterday a reader and fan of B&W’s emailed me to express her admiration of Meera Nanda’s new article, and her work in general. She also alerted me to another example of scholarship under attack by the Hindutva brigade. I’m extremely glad she did: I was entirely unaware of the campaign against the historian Romila Thapar. Read about it here and here. This whole subject is immensely depressing and dispiritng – it always is dispiriting to see humans determinedly marching backwards, and patting themselves on the back for doing it.

While 72-year-old Thapar’s appointment was greeted with applause by serious students of history, little did anyone realise that acolytes of the Hindutva brand of politics, primarily those in the Indian diaspora, would unleash a vitriolic campaign against her built on name-calling and the disparaging of her professional qualifications…Thapar’s academic work is controversial with the Hindutva lobby because it is grounded in professional methods of historical investigation, rather than in the pet historical theories of Hindu extremists relying on extrapolation from Sanskrit texts…Thapar’s documentation of early Indian life is at odds with the Hindutva preference, grounded in a regressive Hindu orthodoxy, of seeing India as a purely Hindu civilisation, the political implications of which for contemporary India being obvious.

Nanda also talks about extrapolation from Sanskrit texts, in her case in science, so the connections are obvious, as are the implications for scholarship, independent thought of all kinds, knowledge, truth, public education, democracy. Never mind research or evidence, just consult The Book, be it the Bible or the Koran or Sanskrit texts. Books are excellent things, but infallible books, no.

With the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) assumption of power at the centre in 1998 and its ongoing attempts to remake the educational curriculum in its own chauvinistic image gaining momentum, intellectuals and academic positions at odds with the Sangh Parivar’s view of history have come under attack under various pretexts. The BJP has pursued a concerted effort to malign and delegitimise scholars and intellectuals at odds with its view of India’s past.

Well, if B&W can do anything at all to throw a monkey-wrench into that effort, that alone will justify our existence.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the new intolerance is the official sanction it receives through ministers and leaders of academic institutions which have been unscrupulously and ruthlessly saffronised, including universities, councils of historical and social science research, and the National Council for Educational Training and Research. Soon after the BJP took over the Indian Council of Historical Research, it banned volumes in the Towards Freedom project edited by distinguished historians Sumit Sarkar and K N Panikkar. NCERT has revised social science textbooks in a blatantly communal manner.

It’s all really very alarming (all the more so of course given the weapons the BJP has at its disposal). Rewriting history, down the memory hole, banning volumes of a history project – it all makes playful attitudes toward truth and universalism seem about as fun and useful as playing with gelignite.