Context

Last spring a good friend of mine, a seasoned activist, agreed to take part in a weekend confab here at NYU: "Intellectual Activism: Coalitional Politics and the Academy." It looked to be an edifying get-together—an "attempt," as one blurb put it, "to encourage dialogue between grassroots activists and institutionalized academics in roundtables and workshops." It isn’t often that such distant cousins get to shoot the breeze, and so my friend, always up for dialogue, looked forward to that meeting of the minds.

When, over lunch, I asked her how the thing had gone, she went all tactful and evasive, as if she’d spent an evening with some relatives of mine and had had a really lousy time. I am myself an academic, after all, and these were colleagues, so she was trying not to hurt my feelings. But with a little coaxing, she came out with it.

Some of those who spoke made sense, she said, but there were others who seemed just as batty and abstracted as the most eccentric tweedy types of yesteryear, despite the Marxian lingo and the earrings. For every thoughtful improv on, say, sweatshop labor, global warming, U.S. prison policy and other such grim features of (to use a vulgar term) reality, there was a spiel far weirder—someone angrily soliloquizing on another planet. One professor quaintly urged the audience to embrace "irrationality," which struck my friend as rather poor advice. ("Hey, someone could get irrational right upside your head!" she noted wryly over her stuffed shells.) Another of the academics went on an extensive rant that started with the reasonable proposition that we intellectuals have to "go to meet the people where they are"—and ended, twenty minutes later, by insisting that an intellectual "has to have a theory." He did not say exactly why an activist requires "a theory," but was insistent that, without one, you can’t "meet the people." With that non sequitur my friend—who meets the people all the time—was unimpressed: "I felt like I was in grad school again, and hungry for lunch."

Not long afterward I had a similar experience, although this time I was there myself to see the show: Homi K. Bhabha, Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, distinguished visitor at Princeton, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, and author of (most recently) Nation and Narration, came here to give a talk entitled "On Cultural Respect."

It was a memorable appearance. Before an audience of several hundred (grad students, mostly), Prof. Bhabha started strong: "I’d like to begin tonight by thanking four women," he announced grandly, and, as the crowd purred its approval of so cool an opening, he thanked the chair and dean who had invited him, thanked Toni Morrison (an old friend, in attendance), and then: "Finally I would like to thank Sarah Vaughan, for her song ‘Respect’—that marvellous Motown recording that in part inspired the title of my talk." He then added something about No Respect by my colleague Andrew Ross, and then was off and running.

Now, some might have faulted the professor for not knowing that Aretha Franklin did "Respect" (and for Atlantic Records, not for Motown). Mistaking one black woman for another could easily be taken as a sign of mandarin obtuseness, or worse—and would be, if that error had been made by, say, Robert Bork, and not by a famed champion of the world’s neglected masses. Although it was embarrassing, however, Prof. Bhabha’s gaffe was at least comprehensible, whereas—as I would soon discover—nothing else he said made any sense at all. From a winking reminiscence of his days at Oxford, Prof. Bhabha wheeled abruptly into a faux-Foucaultian reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, he said, deplorably extended its protections only to the citizens of sovereign states—although, he added in a dense parenthesis, there was, in fact, no such restriction in the Declaration. Expanding on his theme, whatever it was (humanism? immigration? alienation? power?), he said something long and quasi-Gramscian about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, made some long and highly dubious comments about Franz Fanon, and ended with a most dramatic reading of a long-seeming poem by Adrienne Rich, about the fraught relationship between a teacher and her student.

All of this Prof. Bhabha offered up in sentences of such protracted and pretentious emptiness that you might have thought that he was kidding, although not a single snort or titter ever broke the church-like silence of his auditors, the youthful hundreds rapt or scribbling reverently, and the man himself showed not a trace of irony. What with that ecclesiastic atmosphere, and, as usual, the speaker’s stunning overuse of unavailing Latinate neologisms (e.g., "liminality," "hybridity," "dialogicality," "vernacular cosmopolitanism"), and, no less, his BBC-worthy mellifluence, my mind, I must confess, soon started wandering, or maybe it was trying to escape. From time to time it would come edging back to me, check the speaker’s progress and then run like hell. But nothing lasts forever. Finally half-awakened by the strong applause, I stumbled out into the night, and paused, there at 4th and MacDougal, to try to size up the departing crowd.

Among the lithe and avid youngsters blithely exiting the building there was (as Adorno might have said) an incommensurable figure: a heavy-set and frowzy-looking man, looking both bewildered and morose, as if some stranger had just punched him in the head for no apparent reason. It was, in fact, another friend of mine—a well-known human rights activist and media reformer, who had been instrumental in focussing U.S. attention (i.e., the attention of the network news divisions) on the struggle in South Africa, and who had done much else besides. It was because he looked so flummoxed and disheartened that I hadn’t recognized him, he being ordinarily upbeat, even irrepressible—indeed, insanely optimistic, as someone in his line of work must be.

I watched him watch the crowd. Two young women were excitedly comparing notes, and my friend—now coming back to life—affably accosted one of them: "Did you like that?" "It was great!" the taller one replied, both women vigorously nodding. "Well," he asked then, slightly changing tone, "what did he say?" The two exchanged a quick reflexive look of knowing exasperation, and the first one clucked indignantly ("It’s—! He—!"), but really couldn’t answer. My friend turned toward me, and when he saw me his pugnacious look turned sheepish, as if I’d caught him dipping someone’s pigtails in the inkwell. "Did you . . . like that talk?" he asked me timidly—expecting, like my other friend, that I would brook no disrespect toward any other member of my tribe. I made my own take clear to him at once. Obviously grateful for that flash of candor, he started groping for the words that might express his incredulity.

These memories recently came back to me on reading, in The Wall Street Journal, a predictably gung-ho review of How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), by one Harry Stein, a self-professed ex-lefty who is now showily committed to "the values of old-fashioned liberalism: a bedrock commitment to fairness and individual liberty." Stein is, in short, a born-again Republican, and therefore now as thoughtless a proponent of that party’s "values"—making money, feeling pious about fatherhood, despising homeless people—as he was as an alleged proponent of the "values" of the so-called "left"—i.e., bending over backward not to be a sexist or a racist or a classist or a homophobe. (I write "alleged" because Stein’s version of his p.c. past is not entirely credible: "Women Against Right-Wing Scum"—to which, he says, his wife belonged back in the bad old days—sounds like something that G. Gordon Liddy would make up in jest.) Such an "odyssey" cannot be very promising, inasmuch as Stein has merely shifted from one camp of simple thinkers to another (although he’s obviously making much more money nowadays): a tale that was already told (repeatedly) by Jerry Rubin, and that is now retold (repeatedly) by David Horowitz and P. J. O’Rourke, among others.

Despite its triteness, neocon reviewer Roger Kimball finds much to like in Stein’s "thoughtful and entertaining" apologia, which, he argues, finally gives the "vast RWC" the credit it deserves. Starting his review with Irving Kristol’s well-known claim that "a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality," Kimball—the author of Tenured Radicals—tortuously works his way into an anti-academic fulmination that, while thoroughly dishonest, does inadvertently shed light on both the U.S. right and the academy today, and on the vast neglected space between them.

Kimball heartily applauds Stein’s take on education: "Liberals want to use education, he notes, to ‘change the world.’ Members of the vast RWC look to education to help preserve a world." Kimball recommends a study of Stein’s "harrowing statistics about what’s happened to America’s schools and colleges," then takes this turn:

If further evidence is needed, there is always the latest product from a distinguished university press. One such product, just out from MIT Press, is the English translation of a book called Histoire de la Merde, in which the author, Dominique Laporte, attempts to relate human waste to . . . well, you figure it out: "The imperative of profit marks the return of a repressed fantasy of which utility is merely the displaced reversal, that is, the dream of satisfying all need and thus liberating the subject from lack. Hence the primordial status of philanthropy and hygiene alongside the supposed ‘three sources’ in the genealogy of Marxism."

If you read that passage and think—"How interesting! I do hope my children will be assigned Ms. Laporte’s book when I bankrupt myself sending them to college!"—then Harry Stein has a few things to tell you about reality.

Since we’re concerned here with "reality," we should note first that Histoire de la Merde is not a recent work, even if the new translation is indeed just out from MIT; Kimball’s deft insinuation that Laporte’s fantasia represents the "latest" thing is just a stroke of propaganda. There is no other book remotely like it on MIT’s list for this year—nor could there be, since the French edition first came out in 1978, whereas nowadays no one is writing theory quite like that, not even in Paris. (And we might add that Dominique-Gilbert Laporte—d. 1984—was not a woman, as Kimball might have found if he had read the book’s brief introduction.) Indeed, History of Shit (as MIT has accurately rendered it) is sure to be assigned primarily in courses on the history of post-war cultural and literary theory—which means that it is destined largely for the graduate seminar (perhaps along with some of Homi Bhabha’s works), and therefore not to be inflicted on those "children" whose tuition fees could "bankrupt" readers of The Wall Street Journal, as Kimball poignantly observes.

Still tracking "reality," we should note too that History of Shit, although no easy read, and certainly chock-full of Gallic jive, c. 1978, is still more interesting than you might think from reading the above Lacanian effusion. The modern (i.e., post-medieval) history of "human waste" may be unappetizing, but it’s no more trivial than the modern history of sex or violence or table manners, and Laporte, for all his fashionable lunacy, begins to shed some light on certain of its aspects. (A prior reading of Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process—which Blackwell has just reissued—would help to put Laporte into perspective.) In any case, such snide quotation is a propaganda trick that you can play with texts of many kinds, including some—the Bible, or The End of History and the Last Man, or any work by Leo Strauss—that Kimball no doubt thinks he should revere. Surely anyone who "look[s] to education to help preserve a world" should not demand that every paragraph in every book assigned or mentioned be as clear as day to every student (and to every student’s parents) after one quick reading. Such universal e-z access would require a national academic Gleichschaltung that even Kimball might, perhaps, resist.

But with such righteous satire we should not go overboard—for there is a grain of truth in Kimball’s screed, as there often is in propaganda. While his tardy slam at Dominique Laporte is neither fair nor honest, there’s no denying the point of that attack: that the academy now lies submerged in hogwash. If Karl Marx were alive today (and mellowed somewhat by experience), he might attempt an explanation of the theory fetish that has overcome the universities. As Kimball sees it, all such blather is a leftist emanation pure and simple, related, somehow, to what he calls "the entire menu of left-wing social initiatives, from feminism to radical multiculturalism." (He is, of course, unbothered by the bull that they turn out abundantly in poli-sci, economics and international relations, because such stuff is highly orthodox, albeit just as murky and inelegant as any foreign import.) But the theory fetish that prevails in the humanities today is more complex than that. In fact, it really is not a creation of the left, but a product of what we must call the bourgeois university.

It would take a book—a good book—to treat this subject properly. Suffice it here to say that there is, first of all, an economic basis to the theory craze. The academy’s eccentric market system calls for unrelenting publication by untenured faculty, and by the tenured few who want to rise (while countless migrant "adjuncts" do the gruntwork in the classrooms). That constant economic pressure has necessitated "theory" as we know it: a dense and ever-shifting bog that offers ample ground for further output (a/k/a "interventions"), without which you don’t have a job, or, in many places, get a decent raise.

But that material explanation pertains only to the institutional function that the theory fetish serves. On the other hand, it sheds no light on the peculiar tone of most current academic theorizing—the militant obscurantism, combined, absurdly, with the constant pretense that such work is somehow for the masses. That contradiction, and the theorists’ evidently inexhaustible desire to flog the dead horse of High Culture, do indeed suggest, if not descent from, a certain temperamental kinship with the Stalinists of yesteryear. But there’s this crucial difference between then and now: Whereas that Marxist-Leninist critique was all about the scourge of capital, and placed its hopes in an awakened working class, what academic theory analyzes—or, rather, demonizes—now is merely "power"; and its collective hero is the (putatively) "powerless."

"Power" is an elastic concept—so imprecise, that we might best grasp it by personifying it. For there’s a spectre haunting all that theory: a privileged and judgmental white man, elegantly dressed, articulate and sly, who fears and loathes the colored hordes, believes that women should stay in their place (where he can have his way with them), and thinks that homosexuals should either act like "us" or go to jail. That complacent paragon believes in order and decorum, in making sense and making nice, in pretty pictures and in songs that have a tune—but also in the profitable violence of wars and Westerns, wherein other proper white men can remind the world that they—that "we"—are still in charge.

"Power," in other words, does not refer to what a Communist would once have called "the ruling class" or "the bourgeoisie." Nor, concomitantly, does "the powerless" mean "the workers of the world," but refers instead to those "outgroups" whose interests are reflected in what Kimball calls that "menu of left-wing social initiatives, from feminism to radical multiculturalism." Thus women, gays and people of color are "the powerless," as are some populations of the poor—i.e., those that can be understood (or "theorized") as female or non-white. Academic theorists will acknowledge each such bloc only insofar as they can see it as a group locked in heroic opposition to the certainties and/or conspiracies and/or desires of "power." (Thus post-colonial studies, for example, tends to concentrate on those bi-cultural encounters that are easiest to melodramatize—as East vs. West, or North vs. South—while it largely skirts those cases, such as Tunisia, where the opposition never was so stark.)

It is this professional fixation on "the powerless" that the rightist critics cite so frequently, and hotly, as "political correctness," which they see as a collective moral failure—a symptom of "left-liberal smugness," as Kimball calls it. But that view over-simplifies the matter, by neglecting the professional realities that have done much to spread the theory fetish. Let’s face it: People tend to do exactly what they must to get ahead, and often feel completely righteous about doing it—a tendency that is no more unique to "leftist" academics than it is to rightist book reviewers. Much theorizing on "the powerless" is actually about that very fact. Despite its vast "political" pretensions, in other words, a lot of work that’s done in the humanities today is little more than an unconscious allegory of institutional transformation, as those young professionals who are most "radical"—that is, the most productive, and the best-connected—jockey for position in the cool new professoriate. The Straight White Father—that convenient caricature of "power"—also serves a certain purpose here, by making the extrusion of the academic Old Guard (a shift that took place long ago) seem like a righteous stroke of History; and, no less, by representing one’s career ambitions as a sign of revolutionary virtue.

In this situation, theory serves the (literally) repressive purpose of half-hiding what is going on. The merciless abstractness of the prose, with its consciousness-defying sentences, dependent clauses tacked onto (and tucked into) dependent clauses, and almost every word a ponderous multisyllable, inhibits us from noticing how much of all this work is merely self-obsessed and self-promotional. Theory’s heavy leftish filigree, moreover, even has its audience, and the likes of Roger Kimball, thinking that the stuff is radical. Such affectation is especially important in an institution as completely out-of-it, politically, as the academy, whose members mostly never go to "meet the people where they are," because they don’t have time, and don’t know how, and probably don’t even want to, since the institution won’t award them any brownie points for doing it. Thus shunted off into the furthest margins, the theorists wax "political" as if to reassure themselves that they are where it’s happening, and that they do make a difference—but their peculiar view of "power" prevents them from connecting, ever, with reality as most people inhabit it. Indeed, that view induces them to see that very failure as itself politically progressive. Since "power" so values clarity and logic, good grammar and a solid argument, it must be really right-on to do sloppy work. A few years back, Marjorie Perloff read a devastating paper on some flaws in Homi Bhabha’s work, including his tendentious use of Goethe’s Italian Journey, which, she pointed out, he seemed not to have read. She also noted Bhabha’s feeble grasp of German. (The essay is posted on her website.) During the Q&A, Prof. John Carlos Rowe freaked out, and angrily dismissed such detail as irrelevant, so fierce (if vague) he was in his defense of the offended Bhabha.

Although it could be said to show the influence of a kind of anarchism (or, perhaps, dadaism), such a strange yet typical reaction cannot be defined as "leftist." Not only do the theorists, by their perverse insistence on not making sense, forfeit any claim to speak at large—the sort of wide appeal without which any genuine "left" is quite impossible. More fundamentally, the whole "progressive" vision that has long preoccupied the universities is itself profoundly non- or even anti-leftist, notwithstanding all its vehemence and oppositional rhetoric. For any group that fixates on the grievances of three or four selected blocs of "powerless" types, "the people" finally don’t exist at all; and without them—a mass of disparate groups, united in (I blush to say it) a genuine and altruistic solidarity—no progressive change is possible. In short, you won’t get anywhere without a sense of class, and an even broader sense of human decency. Gender and ethnicity per se don’t fill the bill. Far from permitting an authentic leftist politics, those purely physical categories, with their defining pigmentational and/or hormonal traces, smack more of Hitler’s worldview than of Marx’s.

If Roger Kimball were to take some decent courses on the history of the left, including leftist theory—the sort of course that he dismisses as a total waste of time and money—he might have learned that that dreaded "menu" of p.c. initiatives "from feminism to radical multiculturalism" has meant, by and large, not the resurgence of the campus left but its erosion. It is neither theory at its most pretentious nor "political correctness" that inspires the current surge of student activism vis-à-vis the issue of "free trade," but the same sort of nuts-and-bolts political instruction, and careful organizing, that inspired the campus drives against the war in Vietnam, and then the disinvestment drive against apartheid. And as Kimball has a lot to learn, so would M. Laporte rethink his views, perhaps, if he were here today. Whereas a book entitled Histoire de la Merde may well have raised a lot of bourgeois eyebrows over twenty years ago, today its shock effect has largely been annulled by the far grosser products of commercial culture. Laporte’s ironic take on what he calls "the waste police" has surely lost its edge, as he would notice if he went to any multiplex, where mainstream products like Me, Myself and Irene and The Nutty Professor II, aburst with crap and snot and farting jokes, make History of Shit read like The Prince of Tides.

In other words, if you’re going to "meet the people where they are," you should be prepared to have your "theory" be informed by their experience, and not the other way around—as many "leftist" academics like to say. But to say so in a way that no one—no one—really understands is like not saying it at all. The gap between the intellectuals and everybody else is surely real, and probably eternal; but any intellectual who wants to be politically engaged must try to bridge it, and encourage others to do likewise. Only then will it be possible to build the sort of movement that the left demands, and that the people would appreciate, and that the right would have a hard time laughing off.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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