The more things change, the more they stay the same — or get worse.
From “Old Literature and Its Enemies” by Claude Rawson, London Review of Books, 25 April 1991.
The identification of theory with a more or less coercive political agenda has been pointed out from time to time, and its more triumphalising publicists are increasingly open and even boastful on the subject. It has merged with the wider issues of ‘political, correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, and one or two other phenomena which have lately attracted worries of a ‘new McCarthyism’. An article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade [below right], wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ‘key committees involving tenure or curriculum decisions’, subsequently affirming that the organisation was ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’. The NAS is said to be dedicated to the preservation of traditional scholarship. The founder of its Duke University branch is James David Barber, a civil rights activist and past president of Amnesty International, which suggests that the association may be something other than a hotbed of reactionary prejudice. At all events, Fish circulated his letter among a handful of ‘trusted colleagues’, one of whom ‘was sufficiently taken aback by its contents to see that it was made public’. When the campus newspaper broke the story, ‘Prof. Fish denied ever saying that NAS members should be excluded from tenure and curricular committees. “It was really strange to hear him say that,” a student editor marvelled. “We had the letter with his own words asking just that, right in front of us.” ’ Fish ‘declared himself unavailable for comment’.
But not for long. Two months later, Fish was being reported in the New Republic (18 February 1991) as having said that he didn’t believe ‘free speech’ was anything ‘more than an expression of power’. A graduate student asked him to elaborate: ‘“I want them,” responds Fish, referring to students and faculty, “to do what I tell them to.” Later, he explains to a small group: “I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will. I’m fascinated by my own will.” ’
At this point, with the issue reduced to the egocentric billowings of an individual, the example would seem to lose its representative status. This is not so, however, for several reasons. One is that coercive egomania on this scale has become an institutional feature of literary studies. It goes with positions of tribal leadership in a discipline not formerly given to the unquestioning worship of intellectual thuggery, and the damage it does to the educational process is something we should be thinking about. A variant case, reported on in Lehman’s book [Signs of the Times], is that of [Jacques] Derrida. An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be elected President of the MLA. It seems evident that such an out-look would not get him very far in the fast food business, which adds countenance to the proposition that people go into English studies because they’re unlikely to make a success of anything else.
Secondly, this style of egomania attracts to itself and to its hangers-on – in the form of salaries, support services, perks, lecture fees and the expensive hoopla of conferences and other promotional circuses – immense sums of money which would be better spent on more urgent educational priorities, including better schools for some of the disadvantaged groups on whose behalf, it seems, Professor Fish and his analogues will only go so far as to limit the free speech of others.
A third feature of this coerciveness is that it has its institutional reflection in codes of behaviour which the university to which Fish belongs is seeking to impose on its members. The New Republic reports, for example, that Duke University has initiated a group with the Committee on Public Safety-like title of ‘Committee to Address Discrimination in the Classroom’. This body, which was given the charge of uncovering faculty racism in the classroom, found very little in the way of overt bias. But in its monitoring of the classroom it did discover examples of ‘disrespectful facial expressions or body language aimed at black students’. The committee has promised to continue its work.
Duke, you may say, is perhaps unusual. Once a traditional and unflamboyant institution, it decided a few years ago to go trendy. With the aid of the entrepreneurial Fish it has collected the biggest and loudest assembly of literature professors dedicated to [Alvin] Kernan’s scenario of doing dirt on literature (a nest of singing turds, as one disaffected wit described them). It is the world’s largest hypermarket of hard theory, as well as of applied multiculturalism, and the launching-pad for more round-the-clock attention-seeking fatuities than there were air sorties in the Gulf War.
But it’s evidently not the only place where a thought police, or body-language police, is getting into gear. A programme at Tulane University in New Orleans is being set up in which ‘faculty and students will be encouraged to report on each other’ for signs of racism and sexism, with every department watched by ‘an “Enrichment Liaison Person” to inform the administration about continuing progress in … the “Initiatives” ’, according to an anguished letter to the press from the Chairman of the Political Science Department. Many universities have more or less avowedly institutionalised the practice, in making appointments or promotions, of preferential treatment on grounds other than the candidate’s contribution to knowledge or his or her intellectual ability.
These not only include the candidate’s race, sex or sexual preference, but the correctness of his or her opinions. One result of this is that departments which used to make themselves mediocre by preferring white males over better-qualified women or blacks are now making themselves doubly mediocre by the same process in reverse, with many of the original second-raters still in place. This seems bad not only for scholarship but also for race and gender relations.
The American press (Newsweek and the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, regional dailies and the campus papers) have picked this up in recent months, with predictable references to Orwellian nightmare and McCarthyism. David Lehman reports the ‘commonplace wisdom among job-seekers at MLA conventions that … if you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist or a feminist. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance.’ There is no doubt that this is the advice given to graduate students when they are considering their research topic, by advisers who may be motivated as much by a realistic estimate of the student’s career prospects as by a political agenda of their own.
***
Lehman’s Signs of the Times examines the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use journalism to decry the journalism of those who reported the Nazi sympathies of their dead leader’s wartime journalism.
What Lehman offers is a survey of the current fortunes of Deconstruction as a professional or ideological routine, and especially as a talismanic or valorising term, in American intellectual life, and of its penetration into other disciplines than literature. He also gives the fullest account I have seen of the known biographical facts about de Man, which apparently include financial irregularities, possible bigamy, a Rousseauistic callousness towards the children of his first marriage, as well as Nazi collaboration and four decades of mendacity or dissimulation on most of these subjects.
Lehman offers good coverage of the gobbledegook and doublethink brought to bear in de Man’s defence: ‘De Man’s entire writing effort is a silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne out by the author’s own catastrophic experience, has occurred precisely as the event of the preclusion – the event of the impossibility – of its own witnessing’; ‘only the trivially guilt-ridden pathology of bitter academics who have always resented de Man’s intellectual, i.e. critical, power would want de Man to have inscribed himself in a conversion narrative’; and, especially startling as refutations of alleged anti-semitism go, ‘are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction somehow overwhelmingly Jewish – as Jewish as anyone, in our multinational 1980s, can be?’
The fullest coverage is reserved for Derrida’s responses in the journal Critical Inquiry, which assail the assailants with the finesse of Ubu Roi and the conciseness of Castro. The second rejoinder, engagingly entitled ‘Biodegradables’, is longer than all six answers to his first defence put together, and must be the most voluminous mixture of Shandean self-exhibition and vulgar abuse ever to have been allowed into a journal professedly committed to rational discourse. The English text of these pieces incidentally suggests in places that Derrida and his translator do not have between them a sufficient knowledge of both English and French to know that he doesn’t mean what he is sometimes represented as saying. Since Derrida regularly lectures in America, and since his American readers read him in translations from the French, the potential for misprision opens up as an abyss of truly continental proportions.
Derrida’s inordinate polemical scripts are the written counterpart of his lecturing style, an advanced case of galloping logorrhoea. The audiences are vast, but with definite signs of shrinkage as the days go by, and Lehmen wonderfully describes a scene at Cornell in 1988: ‘The undergraduate sitting behind me whispered excitedly to her companion, “He isn’t God,” in the tone of one who is trying to persuade herself of something.’ The subject was ‘The Politics of Friendship’. On the Monday,
he commenced his lecture by quoting Montaigne, who was himself citing Aristotle:
‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ The two parts of the sentence are incompatible,
Derrida observed. If there is no friend, to whom am I speaking? Or, with a shift
in the formal emphasis: if I can address you as my friends, how can I say there is
no friend?
The following Wednesday, with his audience halved but still running into hundreds, he addressed ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’:
‘Fraternity? Cela suffit!’ he said. Fraternity … was exclusionary … True friendship
is understood as possible between two men but never between a man and a woman
or between two women. ‘The double exclusion privileges the brother, even above
the father,’ Derrida said – fighting words in a discourse in which patriarchy is in as
much disrepute as, say, phallogocentrism ….
On Friday it was question-time. The scene switches to a ballet of ingratiating interrogations, fielded with deprecatory simpers or oracular condescension. But watch the punchline:
A professor of Romance studies tossed him a verbal bouquet, or tried to. He observed
that a certain passage in Montaigne’s essay on friendship is ‘the most Derrida-like
passage in Montaigne’. (Derrida disagreed.) … With the air of the star pupil, a literature
professor returned to ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Was the ‘asymmetry’ in
the apostrophe not an example of the ‘breakdown between performative and constative
language’?
This afforded Derrida an opportunity he could seize. ‘The asymmetry of the sentence
makes one wonder which half of the equation is subordinate,’ he said, then launched
a monologue that concluded with the observation that ‘one of the most interesting features
of phallogocentrism’ is that ‘you can’t have an animal as a friend.’ Question: ‘You said that
women are excluded [from traditional concepts of friendship], yet Aristotle likens friendship
to the mother’s desire to know her child.’ Answer: ‘Mothers are not necessarily women.’
Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.
Go to Source
Author: The Best American Poetry
