Author: Ophelia Benson

I sort of hate to agree with The National Review about anything, but then it’s not my fault: if the left will insist on being so silly all the time, they have only themselves to blame. Anyway this is a very funny piece about Jacques Derrida and his inexplicable hold over the minds of far too many literary critics and other “theorists”.

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida…is that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States…into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale.

This is something I have been wondering about for years. What is it about literary critics that makes them so easy to fool? What is up with them, that they can be buffaloed into thinking someone is a profound and original thinker in a field not their own when all the other thinkers in that field could have told them he’s just a popularizer with a dash of vaudeville? Literary critics used to be such decent, modest, hard-working people, quietly reading their books and pondering ambiguity and metaphor, a nice harmless activity and, when done well, quite interesting and stimulating to youthful minds. But that’s all in the past, now they do Theory, and they are very keen for you to know that they do Theory and how important it is and how omniscient it makes them. Chaos theory, quantum gravity, paradigm shifts, de-centering the discourse of the hegemonizer, valorizing the signifier of Otherness, none of it is too much for them.

The fact that Derrida’s influence is least felt in the very discipline he claims to practice testifies to the ascendancy of dilettantism in the humanities.

Oh dear. It’s true. One has met a few such dilettantes in one’s time, and one has read or skimmed a great many of their books. They are out there, neglecting the metaphors and ambiguities for the sake of a bogus High Theory about every subject except the one they actually wrote their dissertations on. They are the snappiest dressers though.

This is a very peculiar comment in the Guardian. John Sutherland recommends that Blair and Labour imitate the American way of getting more racial minorities into higher education: via athletics. Why? He never really says. He does say he thinks it’s a good idea and that it’s been a great success in the States, but he doesn’t say why he thinks it’s a good idea, or in what sense it’s been a success. He does say that the athletics programmes created open doors through which not only black athletes, but also non-athletic blacks, could enter, but then he fails to explain what he means. He says the figures speak for themselves, but they don’t, at least not clearly enough so that I can understand them. What connection is there between the number of non-athletic blacks and the presence of athletic blacks? Do the athletes make the non-athletes feel safer, or less isolated? Do they have some unspecified effect on the admissions office? Sutherland doesn’t say.

He also says, oddly, that college athletes are held to high standards academically. He says they are required to maintain a B average, but fails to mention the well-known phenomenon of grade inflation, which makes a B a pretty low grade, frankly. Not to mention the pressure on teachers not to mark athletes down. He says athletes have to get 820 on the SATs…but doesn’t add that that is a very low score indeed. The fact is, there are plenty of people, black as well as white, who are not so charmed with athletics as the path to university for blacks. There is the implicit insult, for one thing, and there is also the implicit devaluing of academics as the logical criterion for an academic institution. There are the periodic scandals about corruption or flouting of the rules, there is the diversion of everyone’s attention from pesky old books to ball games, there is the amount of money spent on athletic programmes while teachers are fired and library hours are reduced. It’s not such a raging success as Sutherland says.

We all know history is written by the victors. It’s also worth remembering that it’s written by a lot of other unreliable witnesses besides. By participants, loyalists, traitors, friends, enemies, people with various kinds of axe to grind, people who were paying only selective attention (and who ever pays anything else?). Which is not to say that it’s all a fairy tale, that no history is more accurate than any other so there’s no need to be careful with the evidence or the conclusions we draw from it. It’s only to point out how tricky it all is. This story in the Guardian is a good example. Tony Blair and the people around him are quite sure they have influenced George Bush to enlist the U.N. in the conflict with Iraq. They talk of a crucial meeting between Bush and Blair at Camp David in September last year. But then the Guardian story points out that other people don’t seem to see it quite that way. Bob Woodward seldom mentions Blair in his book Bush at War. There, it is at a dinner with Colin Powell in August that Bush becomes persuaded of the merits of the UN. Perhaps Woodward has it right and the Blair people are deluding themselves. But then again…

But the fact that Mr Powell plays such a heroic, single-handed role may have something to do with the fact that Mr Woodward depended greatly on the secretary’s version of events for his book. Mr Blair was not interviewed.

Ah. Woodward doesn’t have a god’s-eye view either, does he. The account he gives does depend on which people he talks to. Naturally. And we’re all the heroes of our own stories, aren’t we. No doubt if Woodward talked to Powell’s cook and Blair’s driver, they would play a more central role than anyone suspects. A conversation in the car, mind-altering spices in the paella. It all adds up.

Speaking of Fresh Air…there was an interesting display of Pathetically Reduced Expectations on that show a few days ago. The political ‘commentator’ David Frum was on to talk about the year he spent as a speechwriter in the Bush White House. He has an unctuous, soft, childishly enthusiastic voice, and he kept getting in a flutter of excitment and admiration at things that were not worth getting in a flutter about. It was all too depressingly reminiscent of what we used to hear about the Reagan White House, when people would tell anecdotes that proved the President was actually conscious and awake as if they proved how brilliant and perspicacious he was. One example in particular struck me by its naive glee. Frum assured us that the President pays close attention to what his speechwriters actually write, and he has (oh boy!) a big marking pen with which he scribbles in the margins (gosh, really?). In one speech someone wrote ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ and our dazzlingly clever Chief Executive wrote next to that: ‘duh’. Wow! Is that impressive or what?

Frum also confirmed something I’ve long suspected, which is that the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have been outlawed in the American language. It is, as I thought, official. The boss of the speechwriters has a lot of rules for what can and cannot be said, and among those rules is one that outlaws the word ‘parents’. It has to be ‘moms’ and ‘dads’. Because…what? The word ‘parent’ is too long? Too high-falutin’? Too elitist? No, I know, don’t bother to explain. It’s not cozy enough, not cloying enough, not sentimental and intrusive and folksy enough. Duh.