Context
Babel and Babylon
Lindsay Waters
“But when the tower fell, and the tongues of
men were diversified by various sounds, the whole earth of humans was
filled with fragmenting kingdoms." I
have a confession to make. I had a major hand in the profusion of
seemingly incomprehensible theory books, and I regret my part in
erecting the Tower of Babel. I argue that to accept the babel of
multiple and incommensurable publics is to surrender to the Babylon of
an alienating governance such as the Jews fell under during their
Babylonian captivity. The political activism that we rightly associate
with the time period that runs from the 1930s to the 1960s was
connected to the idea of the "integration" of peoples, but
"integration" is a word that has all but disappeared from the
vocabulary of political activism in our day. Some of us have thought we were tearing down the Bastille; maybe we have been helping forge manacles.
—Sibylline Oracles 3:105-107
In this time, an age of incommensurability,1 when the bond of my ethnic belonging is supposed to be the limit of my
world, there really is no public to fracture into multiplicity. The
ship’s been splint to splinters; it’s sinking fast. There is no public,
no society, no res publica. Almost all the public hospitals that were
in every town in the U.S. have been shut down and replaced by corporate
health operations, and British Rail does not belong to the public but
to businessmen who put the public at risk to earn their lucre.
Society as we knew it is gone, so I believe we have to be on guard
against the idea of the proliferation of pseudo-publics. These are
diminished publics, hardly public at all, that some thinkers have
argued must be spoken about in a language of nearly inarticulate
hybridity characterized by ambivalence and equivocation, the language
(precisely) of Babel. In the discourse of Babel, binary oppositions
proliferate to the point where no one can tell up from down, because
even the most basic means of orienting one’s self in the world—like the
distinction between my right hand and my left—has been deconstructed as
a distinction that makes no difference. When the wicked messenger from
Babel comes he shows us how a mind works that multiplies the smallest
matters. The game he plays is always 52-pickup. This is why the
promoters of Babylon usually love this strain of postmodernism to be as
its house philosophy, because incommensurability suits neoliberalism’s
notion that privatization should rule over the attempt to define any
thing as a public good.2
I believe the questions some of us who have made our home in the
academy and related institutions of learning and cultivation of the
arts ought to find imperative now are: How do we write differently? How
do we think differently? How do we feel differently? We have been over
the last twenty years of growing prosperity within the United States
too satisfied with refining and polishing up a superior attitude in
ourselves rather than reaching a public and rather than hearing what
the public had to say to us or would have said to us if we gave them
half a chance, such as: What do you make of this attack on the
humanities profs by Allan Bloom? What do you make of this sidestepping
of literary theory by Camille Paglia? What do you have to say about
Waco? Oklahoma City? Abortion? Pornography? The phasing out of
full-time faculty in the humanities and the use of adjuncts in their
place? The hole in the ozone layer? Eating meat? None of these are
simple questions. I can see why the learned evaded trying to think
about them out loud in public or at all and instead wondered how to get
on board the gravy train that was carrying a few academic superstars to
higher and higher elevations of salary. This was the moment when Lingua Franca flourished,
the moment of envy and resentment, the moment when a few kept hopping
jobs in pursuit of greater and greater emolument all carefully recorded
in the charts at the back of each issue of Lingua Franca.
Over the last twenty years under the guise of developing highly
professionalized standards of performance, many of us in the humanities
and related social sciences have accepted and endorsed a circumscribed
humanities. Perhaps we did it because we thought it was the only way to
survive in a university where TT (technology transfer) was what
intellectual exchange had been reduced to? Never heard of TT? Well, get
used to it.3 It is now "the knowledge most worth having." Look at the new Norton Anthology of Literary and Cultural Theory.
It has been lovingly assembled and edited by a superb team of people,
and in it a subject people—I mean you and me—could learn many of the
key ideas of literary theory so that they could write responsible,
professional essays for the PMLA and Critical Inquiry, but why did my heart sink when I saw the book—a vast, pitiless,
mausoleum of a book, a veritable Forest Lawn for all literary theory?
It seems to say to me no one gets out of this place alive, neither
contributor nor reader. As someone who published many of the authors
whose material went into the book, once upon a time, long ago, in
day-glo wrappers in the Minnesota THL series, I ask myself: Is this all
there is? Is this what the work of a whole polyphony of publishers was
all about, to make this monument? Many of the essays that make up this
book were supposed to set the world on fire, and some of them did.
So I say let us bury the lifeless bodies and start anew! Better yet,
let the dead bury the dead! We have at our disposal all the tools of
rhetoric and persuasion. How do we begin anew to build the public? I
hope it’s clear, but I fear it’s not, that encouraging critical writing
was meant to reignite criticism as a public activity, not credentialize
a few priests and nuns who get by on ungodly salaries that mimic those
of the corporate elite. We should not forget to think about the status
of the humanities in the university. The liberal arts have been part of
the university since Day One, as it were, back in Bologna and Paris;
but more recently, since the nineteenth century, they have been allowed
to play an enhanced role on the condition that professionalism prevail
in their pursuit, a professionalism that would warrant that teaching
the humanities would set off no fires in the minds of their students.
The job of the humanists in the nineteenth century was to find the
Noah’s Ark and stake out the borders of the Holy Land for each and
every Western nation in line with the most advanced methods of
scientific philology. The humanists had a civic duty to perform;
otherwise they tried to conform to the very model of a modern major
scientist.
The arts themselves? Well, beyond making the case for the existence of
a defined people, it was best to control them. The arts are like the
smallpox virus, nearly uncontrollable. And in those days, our
forefathers promised we’d put the subversive element in the arts into a
Pandora’s box where they’d be available to inflame future generations.
We’d make sure they never touched this generation of students.
But take a look around you, people, we are being refined out of
existence. Phased out. In the era of neoliberalism, in Babylon, when
money is king, nobody wants the arts or people who say they are devoted
to the arts. So the idea is this now: Even the teaching of the arts
needs to be privatized. Buy it on the open market at Hollywood Express
and do it at home, but do not expect the state to support arts
education. Isn’t it ironic? Back when everybody in the arts community
was wailing that the state had stopped supporting arts production, the
state surreptiously took advantage of the publicly waged Culture Wars
to cut back on arts education at the tertiary level in a massive way.
Arts education was central to education in citizenship in the United
States since before the U.S. was formed. Learning to read your letters
on a slate was learning to evoke yourself as an individual from the
tabula rasa of inherited biology from the seventeenth until the early
twentieth century.
The arts have now been utterly privatized, and no longer can be
understood or practiced as a way of restructuring social relations,
which is for me what the arts do. Unless the artifact leads to the
restructuring of social relations, it isn’t art no matter what your
betters tell you. We who are in the humanities, we who talk about how
lovely it might be to think we now have "multiple publics" rather than
any public thing or res, we ought to think about the ways that with a lot of our talk we have
played into the hands of those who really want to deconstruct the arts.
That’s deconstruct as in demolish.
Consider all the happy talk about the "death of the subject." With
every passing day it becomes clearer to those of us who hang out in
these dusty hallways that our job as humanists is the production of
subjectivity.4 Can this dust be made to take form and dance? Subjectivity is what
James Brown calls "soul power." With the elimination of the subject the
experience the subject might undergo goes under erasure. That is to
say, it becomes extinct. There is something profoundly ecological about
these developments, because as subject and experience melt away, so
does "culture."
At this dark moment, in fact precisely at this hour of darkness, it
makes sense to talk about seizing back the polity from the accountants
and their corrupt clients. It is a time to reorient the humanities
around a very specific—if exceedingly idealistic—task, reclaiming the
U.S. for the ideals of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Why
the polity? Because, as Masao Miyoshi writes, what Miyoshi calls the
state and I call the polity "is the only political structure now that
could protect people from ungovernable and unmediated violence."5 This is the moment of the "stochastic shock" like the Oil Crisis of
1973-74, when globalism has reached a crisis because some want to keep
it going with no pause for reflection and others want to bring it to a
halt. Because of the event that brought this phase of history to a
dramatic pause, we may never be able to sort out whether the reason the
train stopped was because it jumped the tracks, because it was going
too fast, or because it was derailed by saboteurs. In any case the
pause will allow many people to consider, when they try to get normal
life up and running again, the question of what the limits of growth
really are.
To many of us it has long seemed that there are limits to growth. To
speak of the realm that we in the academy might be able to speak about
most knowledgeably, the academy itself, we will have to come to realize
that the idea of the university as set forth by John Henry Cardinal
Newman has sustained huge damage over the last fifty years as it has
been too rapidly absorbed into the economy and restructured along the
lines of the U.S. corporation.6 What was a soul train has been turned, indeed, into the gravy train for a few and the salt mines for many.
How many great movies do moderately talented actors and actresses make
after they have a big box-office success and they start acting like
stars? Usually, none. The same question must be asked about the "stars"
of the academic world. Is the university conducive to the life of the
mind? The university has never been a good place for the maverick
thinker like Charles Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, or Kenneth Burke.
Hannah Arendt worked well with universities by keeping her distance
from them. Some great figures from the university of the mid- and
late-twentieth century were given their positions by deans and
administrators with a knack for seeding the academy with brilliant
minds. R. P. Blackmur, who had no college degree nor even a high school
degree, was given his post at Princeton by a foresightful administrator
on the Board of Trustees who foisted him on the school, and the results
were fabulous. I have heard from Dan Bell himself that the great
sociologists Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer were granted Ph.D.’s at
Columbia by Jacques Barzun on the basis of their previously published
work, and not dissertations, because he knew the academic world would
need such free-thinkers, but they’d never get Ph.D.’s if the usual
ability to connect the dots criteria were employed.
Let us stop kidding ourselves: Corporatism has triumphed, and it has
triumphed precisely under the cover of fog caused by the overuse of
words like "subversion" and "oppositionality." The administrators have
to be happy now, because they know all the brave talk is nothing but
verbiage that makes the co-opted forget about their compromises. The
corporatist university "knows that the university harbors hardly any
subversives now," to quote Miyoshi’s straight talk once again.7 Corporations want peace and prefer it to real intellectual development.
Can you blame them? You cannot, but we can blame ourselves for
accepting this situation. Becoming too comfortable in the university is
part of the problem. The star system encourages complacency. Biblical
scholarship points out that the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews was
decisive for them because they came to define themselves as exiles and
not the lords of the manse. They came to distrust any club that wanted
to make them members and embraced perpetual exile. They refused to
identify with the system. The perks, such as they are, are getting in
the way of our work.
There is deep uncertainty now inside universities about goals for the
university as pertains to the humanities. Whatever goals we might have
as humanists need to be articulated as clearly and as forcefully as we
can make them now. We can stop crowing about the supposed virtue of
ambivalence as a style of radical will. We need to reach a public and
help constitute that public that stands apart from the state yet is
profoundly interested in its every move. We have been too decadent as
all the changes that have transpired over the last twenty-five years
have taken place. Maybe we didn’t want to get our hands burned. Maybe
we didn’t want to get our hands dirty. But getting caught up in the
blame game now would be just another way of continuing with our bad old
ways. A vast army of right-wing thinkers is eager to encourage those
who are not conservatives to engage in bloodletting. They’ll enjoy our
making fools and worse of ourselves. "See, just what we predicted."
Avoid that like the plague.
However, we do need to reexamine some of the ideas we have been
developing over the last several decades. I will give several examples:
1. The death of the subject. This has been a key idea of the
postmodernists who pick it up from Michel Foucault. Some leftwing
postmodernists do not seem to realize that Foucault renounced this idea
long before he died. He did an about-face and began to develop a whole
set of ideas that go under the name of the "care of the self." Anyone
who still promotes the death of the subject now is allying him or
herself with the conservative ideology of Reaganism and Thatcherism.
Thomas Hobbes laid out the philosophy of Reaganism centuries ago, and
it boils down to this: You do not need to have an ego as long as the
sovereign ruler convinces you he does and will let you share in his in
a spell-binding spectacle of power. Reaganism is the postmodernism of
the Right, celebrating the death of the subject and entertaining the
citizenry with a series of small-scale wars that you can sleep out
because they are all under control. All you need to worry about is
finding the remote.
2. The incommensurability of peoples. This, too, has been one of the
key ideas of some postmodernists, who have argued that only those
inside a community can dare say a word of criticism about the practices
within another community. The Ilingot of the Philippines are
headhunters, and that is OK because if you could get inside their
culture you would be able to see how killing others and making trophies
of their skulls allowed them to let off steam in ways that are
productive inside their culture. We should be similarly sympathetic
when we hear about the tribal code of honor that calls for Pashtun men
to kill any relative who sullies the family name. Cultures are
incommensurable absolutely.8
3. The society of the spectacle. Following up on the work of Guy Debord
and Raoul Vaneigem, many postmodernists have sought to understand how
symbols work to enforce unity within a population, but cultural studies
is an incomplete project and the most the general run of cultural
studies analysis has done is to provide further tools to enable
practices the professors of cultural studies pretend to subvert. The
businessmen are usually way ahead of the profs, as Thomas Frank argues
in The Conquest of Cool and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello lay out in detail in their Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (Gallimard, 1999).
I suggest one general principle for future work: Each and every field
is too important to be left as the exclusive preserve of the people in
it. Gain your professional skills the hard way, but seek ways to fly
your teachers never taught you. Find your place of maturity and, if I
can coin a word, amateurity.
Against the triumph of professionalism that now terrifies young job
seekers in literature to go to interviews dressed as if for a position
at a Wall Street firm, we need now a rampant amateurism. We have all
had the experience of seeing the word "interdisciplinary" bandied about
in college catalogs and university statements of purpose: I ask you
wherever you see that word to push and see if you are not touching the
mush of soft rot. Of course, the best researchers are flagrant
scofflaws about disciplinary boundaries, but most of the rest of us
scoff them at our peril.
My realm of amateurity is Asia. Ever since the incidents at Tian An Men
in 1989, I have been drawn to Asia and China, as if to counter my own
Europhilia. This is a great moment for freer developments of ties
between China and the U.S., for example, because, while neither
government is interested in fostering ties among the humanists from
both countries, they also are not dictating how contact happens. Yet. I
have found the opportunities for working together with colleagues in
China to be boundless so far, and the eagerness of the Chinese
colleagues is sincere and deep.
Where do the problems lie? I suggest they lie in us. The middle-aged
profs are the Old Guard we heard about when we were young. What caught
us off guard was that we thought the old, obstructive group would be
aged from 55 to 65, but it turns out they are aged from 45 to 55. A
hundred years ago the academy went through the same changes happening
now in which a generation that thought of itself as revolutionary
became upholders of the status quo. The Gilded Age had its Genteel
academics, and so does our Gilded Age. Anthony Grafton gets the sad
situation just right, alas, as he addresses you and me: "Well, my
masters, we have now progressed so far in our enlightenment that we
have gone back to the future. It’s 1898 again. We—the proud public
intellectuals, the brave subverters of ‘late capitalism’—maintain the
genteel culture of our fin de siecle." But, warns Grafton, the kids of
the 1890s did not buy the Genteel at their own self-estimate, and
neither are the kids of the 1990s and the Zeroes. They don’t "want to
take part in our endless debates about who may say what about whom, our
rehearsals of meta-theory."9
The idea of multiple publics blurs—or, worse, dodges—the issue of what
we ought to be doing in the academy, the issue being to my mind how we
ought to try to think about the public as a unifiable but not now
unified field. Ambivalence and equivocation rule the clouded minds of
the "transnational corporation" intellectuals of the present.10 But I have a preliminary problem. We have been talking in the academic
world for the last fifteen years about "public intellectuals" and
"intellectuals," but I frankly doubt whether there are very many public
intellectuals. About ten years ago several mainstream journals were
squawking out the news that they had just discovered that the U.S. now
had some black public intellectuals. The truth of the matter is that
they’d really have been something to write home about if they could
prove the existence of some white public intellectuals. What it
means to be a public intellectual was established in the U.S. in modern
times by W. E. B. DuBois. There have been few white public
intellectuals since his time and a goodly number of black ones, so the
qualifier "black" is not necessary when you use the phrase "public
intellectual."
Are you an intellectual? You may be an academic, but are you an
intellectual? I think a lot of academics assume that being an academic
and an egg-head automatically entitles one to the name intellectual. To
try to think through this problem with you, I have devised a few simple
questions for you to ask yourself in the privacy of your own study to
help you think about whether you are an intellectual. I did not craft
the list in any systematic way, as you will see, but I think these are
worthy questions:
1. Have you ever been outside the U.S. to a non-European country to the
extent of really getting your feet on the ground? The elite in the
U.S., the academics and the rich, tend to spread their wings only in
Europe, and the paths over there for the American elite are all pretty
well marked.
2. Do you read outside the box? Do you read outside your field in some
areas where you spend enough time to really understand how the natives
think so that when you appropriate a cool quote you understand why the
people in that field might understand that it signifies something very
different to people outside the field? Another way of putting it, when
you seek to add some local color from another field to your writing is
your way of doing so smash and grab or do you develop a certain
expertise in the other field?
3. Have you ever helped build an alternative form of communication by setting up a website, starting a journal?
4. Have you written essays or books that could lead you to be accused
of being a dilettante? Unless you have taken the risk of saying things
that might be perceived as impertinent you probably really are not an
intellectual. (As I said, these questions were not devised in a
systematic way; they contradict one another.)
5. Do you consider science and technology to be the opposite of
whatever it is you pursue most fervently? Because, if you do, you might
be an intellectual elsewhere, but you cannot be one in the United
States. In the U.S. the pursuit of science and technology go hand in
hand with all the arts and all intellectual pursuits.
6. Do you think you are, for better or for worse, implicated in the
same set of structures of feeling that your fellow citizens—of whatever
unity of governance you vote in—are caught up in? And do you wrestle
with those structures like Jacob wrestling with his angel? If you do
not, you are probably not a public intellectual.
Those who seek to be active intellectuals in the academic worlds have
their work cut out for them now: We have to raise the stakes and
"change the language," as Carrie Brownstein of the rock group
Sleater-Kinney says. We must use our tools, the words and the media,
and respect our machinery. When the members of the group Sleater-Kinney
first saw some of the riot grrl bands play in Olympia, Washington, in
1991, they were immediately energized. Why? Because in the effort of
the group Bikini Kill they saw for the first time "feminism translated
into an emotional language." We have now over the last twenty-five
years a vast body of professional feminist discourse, but very little
of it—alas, like almost all professional literary theory—ever gets
translated into emotional language. A humanism that is worth its salt
would speak in a way that is persuasive to humankind. Bikini Kill and
Sleater-Kinney dare reach the public because they dare form a public.
In his commentary on a performance by Sleater-Kinney in Dolores Park in
the Mission District in San Francisco in June 2000, Greil Marcus wrote
in the New York Times—a
paper from which he had been fired as a columnist—that their
performance showed that "you too can stand up and speak in the town
square, even if you have to create the town square yourself."
The riot grrl movement has been "a kind of public secret society," but
with the emphasis on "public." It was a kind of music that did not get
airplay because it would have made everything else around it on a radio
show seem "cowardly."11 Despite all the talk about "subversive intent" among the academics, the
university has for the most part not fostered any such thing because it
would make everything else around it look pedestrian and cowardly
intellectually. What I observe is that the university powerfully
self-censors to allow for the triumph of the Genteel. I have found that
if I, as an editor at a university press, publish authors with strange
and new ideas, I have to help their books reach an audience beyond the
university first, because only if a book is so successful beyond the
university that it can no longer be ignored by the academics—because
people keep asking them what their views are about it—will they read
it. I have seen this pattern over and over again with the writings of
Catherine A. MacKinnon, Richard Rorty, Patricia Williams, Greil Marcus,
Walter Benjamin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Adam Phillips, and
more.
It was ever thus. Nietzsche says that educating the educators is the
toughest task. Their minds are closed like steel traps, because they
think they are already in the know. Jonathan Lear has written well
about the twin sources of the mysterious yet powerful resistance to new
ideas—knowingness and then the resentment against anyone who would rise
above the norm. I close with a line I have taken from rock historian
Stanley Booth and turned to my own purpose: In the Sixties we believed
in a myth—that ideas and arts had the power to change people’s lives.
Today we also believe in a myth—that arts and ideas are just
entertainment.12 We need to wake up from our long, self-induced torpor.
——————————————
1 See my "Age of Incommensurability," boundary 2, vol. 28 (2001), pp. 133-72.
2 In China the favorite philosophy of those promoting unchecked economic
development is postmodernism. See the writings of Wang Hui.
3 Corynne McSherry, "A Prehistory of Technology Transfer," in her Who Owns Academic Property? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 146-54.
4 See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 195-97; Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press.)
5 Masao Miyoshi, "Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy," in Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires, eds., Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), pp. 55.
6 See Readings, Miyoshi, McSherry.
7 Miyoshi, pp. 59.
8 On the Pashtun code of honor, see Anne Barnard and Yvonne Abraham, "Pashtuns key to Afghan future," Boston Globe,
25 November 2001, pp. A1 and A27. I have tried to analyze the insidious
effect of the idea of incommensurability in my "Age of
Incommensurability."
9 Anthony Grafton, "Error Messages," boundary 2, vol. 28, no. 3 (2001), pp. 203-4.
10 "Binarism is out, blurriness is in. Today’s ‘anti-Orientalists’ are
deeply imbued with Orientalist arrogance and exclusivism. Worse, the
ex-colonials want to remain both inside and outside; thus they insist
on the privilege of ‘hybridity’ as their birthright. And they join the
postmodernists for whom the ‘multiple subjectships’ are the official
agent of the new socialist strategy. Ambivalence and
equivocation—contradiction and evasion, really—rule the TNC
intellectuals." Miyoshi, pp. 62.
11 Greil Marcus, "Raising the Stakes in Punk Rock," New York Times, 18 June 2000, Arts & Leisure section, pages 1 and 29.
12 We now have "intello-tainment" the way we had "info-tainment" a few years ago. I cite as prime examples an issue of New York Times Sunday Magazine devoted to "The Year in Ideas" and promising its readers "An
Encyclopedia of Innovations, Conceptual Leaps, Harebrained Schemes,
Cultural Tremors & Hindsight Reckonings that made a difference in
2001." New York Times, 9 December 2001, section 6. This is a pronounced trend, a fad, like hula hoops. See Time Magazine for 17 December 2001, and its section entitled "[Thinkers] Innovators:
Time 100: The Next Wave, What’s the Big Idea?" on pp. 62-69.
