A Brokeback Challenge
Fall 2005
Some conservative friends of mine do not want to see Brokeback Mountain, the new film directed by Ang Lee which centers on a homosexual relationship. Many films interest me not a whit, so I would hardly grudge anyone a movie choice, but there is an interesting line of reasoning that I hear repeatedly: the film approaches homosexuality from a “liberal point of view”, or with a “pro-gay ideology”. The assumption being that films cannot be neutral, but must represent a moral point of view, and any film portraying homosexual love in a positive light must surely be under the influence of the other side.
It is hard not to see some truth in that, since artists, whether movie directors or writers, do have convictions about social issues and express those convictions in their work. Not infrequently their work comes out as thinly veiled propaganda—that is, aimed directly at guiding the audience to a certain opinion. In the current cultural environment it is hard for anyone to get a clean shot at a charged issue such as homosexuality, shunting aside the temptation to score points against the other side, and I admit I went to Brokeback Mountain somewhat nervous at the prospect of hearing a sermon.
Thankfully the film was not a sermon. The love between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) hardly gets a free pass, and one can see the personal damage as they marry women they cannot love. The mismatch between the tough and silent Ennis and young Alma (Michelle Williams) especially calls for compassion as we watch a family fall apart over an issue neither principal can talk about honestly. It is this unflinching attitude to the costs of a homosexual relationship that even opens the door for conservative commentators to get a critical foothold. An analyst on homosexual issues for Focus on the Family is cited in an on-line review: "Contrary to the nearly ubiquitous modern portrayals of homosexuality, in Brokeback Mountain the lifestyle is neither glamorous nor normal and healthy.”
If the film is not propaganda, then what is it? My suggestion is that we should think of it as art. Quite a few cultural artifacts get bundled into that term, I realize, but for our purposes we could define art as any form of representation that is particularly truthful and honest in its portrayal of some aspect of our world. That is not to say there is no room for the distortions of genre and abstraction, but nevertheless we recognize something genuine, some moment where we think: yes, that is how it would feel. That is not a rare feeling in Brokeback Mountain. It is hard not to sympathize with the turmoil into which Ennis and Jack are thrown.
That sympathy shows exactly the usefulness of phrases such as “from a liberal point of view” or “motivated by a pro-gay ideology.” They serve as useful means to turn aside from what is otherwise a carefully worked representation of our world, allowing a person either to justify not watching the film at all or to walk away from it unwilling to consider its view of the world.
This mental shorthand is yet another example of a phenomenon increasingly being pointed out: the adaptive conservative use of arguments often excoriated by them as “postmodern.” Last month Stanley Fish pointed out in an article for Harpers (December 2005) the specific example of the use by Intelligent Design proponents of the tactic of “teach the conflict”—a strategy pioneered by social liberals in order to allow students to understand the clash of ideas not fully resolved. The notion that there is no neutral ground and that every opinion carries some ideological load could be straight out of cultural critic Edward Said’s body of work. In the hands of social conservatives that decidedly liberal opinion becomes a tool for non-engagement with views of the world that are opposed to their own. In refusing to watch Brokeback Mountain they are not—in their view—flinching from reality, but avoiding a loaded and subtly propagandistic version of reality. And since everything is, in the end, a form of propaganda, why not limit oneself to one’s own propaganda?
Down that path lies the creation of a mental system impossible to broach. If there is any value in representations of our world, such as films or novels, it is in the possibility of broaching those assumptions and allowing a complex reality to overflow our mental dams. Narrative art forms present purveyors of moral values, conservative and liberal, with a challenge: can their version of the world be portrayed in a realistic fashion, or does the audience recoil at the actual enactment of their abstract values. Ang Lee succeeds in portraying a believable version of homosexual love, and the collateral damage that occurs when people are not able to be honest with the world about their feelings.
The challenge for the religious conservatives who oppose a film such as Brokeback Mountain is to imagine a work of narrative art that reflected their views on homosexuality yet at the same time came across as compassionate and not cruel. I have serious doubts that any portrayal influenced by those connected to Focus on the Family could ever be satisfactorily compassionate. The moment views like those were put on stage their cruelty would be evident. The movie would either be flat and unbelievable, or painful in its insistence on silencing the desires and internal strife of its homosexual characters. But let them take up that narrative test if they wish to prove me wrong.
No Success Like Failure:
An Appreciation of Augie March
April 2005
I needed a book to take with me for a summer in Damascus. Something I could not finish too quickly, but also something which would be meaningful in an environment where American values are suspect. What better than The Adventures of Augie March, a book that begins: “I am an American…” I had already read Saul Bellow’s novel, but a return to it seemed the perfect pleasure.
Augie March, whose voice narrates the novel, comes of age at the beginning of the Depression, and the central events of the novel fall into that period. Yet for a novel that includes scenes of hopping freight trains, there is little that resembles some dust bowl ballad. And for a novel that includes divers scenes of work in and around Chicago , there is little of the “city of big shoulders” blue collar heroism. Which is to say, this is a different kind of Depression era novel, one which looks forward to who we would become as Americans.
There are two distinct visions of that American destiny, embodied in two brothers, Simon and Augie, with two distinct visions of the good life. Simon is acquisitive from the start and learns to construct a personality that could win in America. Told by a different narrator, less attuned to spiritual values, Simon’s story could have been a rags-to-riches success story. But for Augie the story of his millionaire brother is a cautionary tale of a man with big goals, who learned the American arts of success, but failed at love and meaning.
Augie is on a different path. We follow him through episode after episode and only slowly learn how to appreciate the sensibility of the character. Simon represents the business school ideal, always working for something up ahead, but Augie is a type not so often idealized. One notices a certain rhythm of failure as the novel progresses. Here is Augie losing jobs, getting caught up in movements for which he is unsuited, failing at relationships, not interested in school, just getting by. Recounting talented people he has known, aimed at various professions, Augie notes:
I had no special eagerness of this kind and never had been led to think I should have, nor gave myself anxious cares about being revealed a profession. I didn’t feel moved to take it seriously.
This is not to say that Augie is a dropout in the sense we have become accustomed to since the 60’s; he is working hard and engaged with the people around him. It is just that he keeps telling everyone “no,” and refusing to go down the life paths that individual after individual points out to him as the correct way to go.
Eventually this ability to say “no” is transformed into a philosophy of life. Augie finally puts words to the way he sees the world:
[humanity is] made up of these inventors or artists, millions and millions of them, each in his own way trying to recruit other people to play a supporting role and sustain him in his make-believe. The great chiefs and leaders recruit the greatest number, and that’s what their power is. There’s one image that gets out in front to lead the rest and can impose its claim to being genuine with more force than others, or one voice enlarged to thunder is heard above the others.
And for a novel that advocates a gentle “no” to all the recruiters and adopters and visionaries that cross our paths, there is remarkably little recruitment directed at the reader. Augie’s narrative voice is not the type that delimits and impresses the reader with a unified version of the world.. which is simply another path to recruitment. At one point Augie provides a rationale for his attempt to set down his life, freestyle: “…my pride has always been hurt by my not being able to give an account of myself and always being manipulated. Reality comes from giving an account of yourself…”
Augie is a different kind of American success story. There are no riches at the end of his personal journey, unless one counts love as some foreign currency. Love had always been on Augie’s mind, and he follows the wealthy and beautiful Thea down to Mexico on a mission to train a proud eagle—these are some of the most colorful passages in the book. We root for the couple, but slowly learn that love can be another form of recruitment when it demands some ideal strength, when it wants more than what is faulty and human.
Love comes with Stella, and it is a love that is without effort or demands: “Nothing could be put over by effort any more, and there was nothing to try.” Each morning in Damascus I read a little more of this long novel, and with the entrance of Stella near the end I could not help but think about my own new love, with whom I was daily corresponding by e-mail. We had only met once, but everything was coming so effortlessly that we both knew where the relationship was going.
Clem had urged me to be engaged for six months, in view of my personality and make-up. But this advice was good for people who were merely shopping, not for someone who had lived all his life with one great object.
Augie had no desire to waste time, and neither did I. We were engaged two weeks after my return from Damascus , and married about two months later. I knew Augie would approve. I knew that life was not about effort and acquiring things—whether wealth or knowledge. It was acceptance of human imperfection and willingness to love.
The novel is one that I should re-read every year.. and perhaps someday I will attempt something like that. I should since it is so easy to forget the terms on which Augie succeeds, and his acceptance of failure. If I read through the novel regularly, I would recall more often that my goal is not to specialize.
I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn’t much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you’d be dealing with other experts. You wouldn’t care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what’s there to be a specialist about? I had Padilla’s slogan of “Easy or not at all.”
It is a slogan that queasily fits with an academic life, as I know. And maybe that is why in six years of graduate work I have yet to encounter a class for which Augie March or any other novel by Saul Bellow is assigned. Perhaps it is different in other regions of the country, but I also have an idea that Bellow’s non-specialist evocation of human choices and values is deeply contrary to the spirit of today’s academy.
Obviously an appreciation of Augie March is simultaneously an appreciation for Saul Bellow, his creator. I never met Bellow, who died last week, but from his insistence throughout his career on drawing these passive and personally searching characters, I can hazard the guess that he embodied some of these same traits. And certainly Bellow was never a recruiter, always a gentle no-sayer.
Minding the Gap
March 2005
After eight days the London Underground seemed easy. We knew when to let the District line train pass and wait for the Circle line. Although we were on vacation, the rest of London was in the midst of a normal work week, and late in the afternoon trains were thronged with people going home, and it would strike me: in Atlanta all these people—young, old, trendy, business-like—would be getting to work in their own private car.
London provided the kind of experience possible in only a handful of American cities: the common way to get around was public transportation. When we thumbed through the local magazine Time Out looking at the theater and museum listings, each entry prominently listed the closest London Underground stop. Someone living in New York or San Francisco might wonder what is so strange about that, but if you live in Atlanta or Los Angeles you will find it a novel experience. I remember how well acquainted I got with my Thomas Guide book of street maps when I lived near Los Angeles—there was one way to get somewhere: my car.
Arriving back to Atlanta at the crowded Hartzfield-Jackson International Airport, we had occasion to use the MARTA rail system, which conveniently connects to the airport. Some differences from our experience of the previous week in London immediately stood out.
Instead of the stylized weave of different colored lines that marks the London Underground map (we even saw large color posters carrying the design), in Atlanta we were faced with a simple intersection of a north-south line with the east-west line (it would make a boring poster). Had we been tourists new to Atlanta, we could have found our way to a central hotel, but other major sites would have been tricky at best. Certainly the newspapers do not provide listings about the closest MARTA stops or the best combination of MARTA rail and bus routes. That is all information that a needy, car-less person must figure out.
We chose to live in a house that is located reasonably close to a stop on the east-west line, and so we count ourselves lucky to be able to return from the airport by a MARTA train and a short walk. On this particular return a rather obvious fact stood out for us: public transportation in Atlanta is overwhelmingly a black experience. This is not so obvious when one boards the train at the airport, since Atlantans of all colors and types take the train north to several convenient free parking structures, but when we got out at Five Points and made our way up to the platform for the west bound train, the division was clear. A large majority of regular MARTA users are black.
There is of course nothing inherently black about the experience of public transportation, as millions in London or New York could testify. Yet public transportation is nevertheless a remarkably segregated experience in Atlanta, and perhaps the rest of the South as well. It is interesting to remember that a signal event of the Civil Rights movement was Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama. The story is well known, but it also gives us an interesting snap-shot of public transportation on that December 1, 1955: the implication is that there were many whites taking the bus that day, which is the reason she was asked to vacate her seat. If segregation were still in force today there would be no reason for a Rosa Parks to move. There would be no conflict since many whites no longer seem to have an interest in public transportation.
It is tempting to speculate about the reasons for the retreat of white Americans from public transportation in many parts of the country. It suspiciously coincides with the legally mandated mixing of races in public places that was a result of Civil Rights. Seen in this light private vehicles and the expansive world tax-payers have constructed to support them become a strategy to avoid mixing with different people, to avoid sitting next to a Rosa Parks. I am not sure how else one can interpret the steady refusal of predominately white Atlanta suburban counties such as Gwinnett and Clayton to support public transportation.
These are occasional essays on the imagination and life, not on social change, yet my point throughout these essays will be that social change is often not a matter of convincing people to do what is right—what is environmentally sustainable—, but rather a matter of getting people to imagine their world differently. For now, from many different angles, the private space of a car is the preferred way to imagine getting around. The challenge is to make a different system appear desirable and optimal, and big cars ugly and cumbersome, with their hassles and tax-payer supported infrastructure—their lakes of concrete.
A trip to London is one way to get a new view of the transportation question. Tourist shops are comically full of Underground paraphernalia. The instantly recognizable underground logo is sold on T-shirts, mugs, and anything else a tourist might buy. I wondered about who buys all this stuff, and why. I would guess that it is not bought by visitors who are used to an extended public transportation system where they live, but rather by people for whom this kind of reliance on public transportation is a novelty. The fact that people enjoy their experience is evident by the popularity of these products.
Anyone from America will certainly be struck by the quaint warning “Mind the Gap”—meaning to stay behind the yellow safety line as the train approaches or departs. More importantly an American will be struck by the convenience of getting nearly anywhere, movies, restaurants, or work. The buses and trains are not on a once-every-forty-five-minutes schedule, so it is just a matter of showing up at the correct stop and waiting for a few minutes. Even at bus stops a digital readout lists the times for the approaching buses. It is enough to make one not just buy a T-shirt, but wonder about the gap between this and the normal American experience. Why do we not live so richly?
Hyperborean Life
Spring 2005
The winner of a contest at one of the great panhellenic games might hire a poet to sing about his athletic triumph. Pindar is preserved as the greatest poet of praise from archaic Greece . His arresting opening for the first Olympian ode (476 BC) captures his esteem for excellence:
Best is water, and gold like burning fire
stands out, like man-magnifying wealth.
But if of athletic contests you wish
to speak, my dear heart,
do not look to any star shining more warmly at day
through the empty air besides the sun,
nor will we declaim a contest greater than Olympia!
Each of the piled-up images points to something preeminent in excellence—the best. Praise for Hieron, the powerful ruler of Syracuse in Sicily, follows naturally on this general reverence for excellence. At the close of the ode, Pindar wishes: “…may it be that I join with victors at all such times, being foremost in wisdom among Greeks everywhere.” So added to this list of a few of the best things, comes naturally the best poet.
But what a strange world, where powerful victors hire a poet to compose a song, performed during a joyous victory revel or around a feasting table. Something old was not best, but rather the new: “Praise old wine, but the blooms of newest hymns!” (Olympian 9). That demand fueled the livelihood of poets. Pindar was the pinnacle of the praise tradition, but other local poets must also have fed the hunger for a beautiful celebratory song. We can call a concrete space, such as these performances in honor of a victor, a cultural niche. A niche such as this demands new composition and trained artists—for these were not performed by a single standing poet, but by a troupe of dancing singers.
We could diagram our own cultural niches. Perhaps we spend half an hour getting to and from work—opportunity to listen to the radio or to get through a book on tape. We work 9-5 on weekdays—opportunity for “prime-time” television shows on week nights. You have a weekend off—the leisure time for a film or to continue with a novel. Every art fills a niche, which is just a way to say that art does things: it fills certain leisured time periods; it fills walls; it provides music for dancing. It brings us some form of pleasure within a bounded cultural role.
We can go a long way in our American world without needing to commission a new song. For a wedding or birthday celebration we turn to recorded music, or quote somebody else’s poetic lines. Even in churches, those cradles of so much past musical innovation, it is common to hear taped played as backup for the special music. The easy presence of CDs and radios makes music more common, more at our fingertips, than ever before. But these devices in turn have come to clog the creative niches. We have not multiplied the creative centers as our population has increased, but rather multiplied the profits for a handful of creators—our best-sellers and chart-toppers.
Sometimes we speak of the “miracle of Greece.” And it is odd to imagine classical Athens, where Herodotus knew Sophocles, where Aristophanes satirized Socrates. A traffic jam seems to have formed about the excellence of genius. One can say something similar about Elizabethan England. At the birth of William Shakespeare in 1564 the population of all England was perhaps as high as three million people. From among that same three million we must number every prominent writer and scholar of the cultural efflorescence that we know as the English Renaissance.
In each of these cases one is tempted to subscribe to some version of the myth of the golden age, and shrug that we have now declined from those peaks. Greater Atlanta , where I live, has many times more people than Athens , and more people even than the entire population of Elizabethan England. So what else could account for our lack of great writers? We can discount the idea that somehow our imaginative ability is any less than for those living in Elizabethan England. An important difference is the number of unoccupied cultural niches where creative work can be profitably done. We rely much more on the creative work of others—those funded by deep corporate pockets.
Atlanta has a local music scene, like most large American cities. Local theater exists. But it hardly matches the local cultural demand in Shakespeare’s London . In his biography of Shakespeare, Park Honan describes the London theater.
The company in good, or ideal, times acted on every afternoon except Sundays and during Lent; they put on a different play each working day of the week, though some plays would be repeated in the weeks ahead. For example, the Admiral’s men typically put on fifteen different titles in the course of twenty-seven playing days. An actor usually had to keep at least thirty parts in his memory, many more if he doubled in minor roles.
That is a system bound to produce and draw exceptional talent. Why can this not be duplicated in a greater Atlanta which has a population that dwarfs Elizabethan London? Simply because the audience is not there: we watch the same movies that show in every other big city in America . Local theater inevitably caters to sub-cultures whose concerns are not addressed by the larger culture and its generalized entertainment.
“Hold the oar!”, Pindar sings in Pythian 10 when he wants to change direction, imagining his song as a boat gliding over the water. Why change directions? “Because the best hymns of praise, as a bee, flit from one theme to another.” Constant change was the goal, and Pindar served up mercurial and twisting paths of words. Song was part of the good life, as is clear from his description of the happy life of the Hyperboreans, living beyond weary human cares:
The muse is not far distant
from their ways. Everywhere the dances of maidens,
the sounds of lyres, and the ringing of pipes are in commotion.
Having bound their hair with golden laurel
they feast joyfully. [Pythian 10]
And the muse does not have to be so far distant from us, if we could only imagine our own daily life with a few more niches for the imagination. Technology thus far has been harnessed to limit and centralize expression, but there is no reason why this should continue to be the case when the tools for our own photographs, our own writing, and our own music, even our own movies, are so near at hand. We can resemble a little more those mythical Hyperboreans, blessed by Apollo, and singing their own songs.
The Inner Light
Spring 2005
We were discussing George Fox, the itinerant Quaker, and a man across the table defended Fox’s 17th century outlook: Fox was unable to go to the source, since he was living in a world that was completely Christian, but we today are able to translate his thoughts into a language that is more understandable and go directly to that source—God—without getting sidetracked by Christ. The friends around the table were sitting in First Day school, and afterwards we would attend meeting. The language was infused with Quaker particularities, although shorn of thou’s and thee’s, but at issue was the continued relevance of the thought of the man George Fox.
Old Roads is a web site dedicated to preserving and making relevant ideas from the past, and this process of translating the 17th century thoughts of George Fox into a modern framework could well be understood as parallel to our own. There are, however, a few points through which the difference in our positions can be made clear.
The idea of a “source” is a place to start. The implication of the statement is that, getting on 400 years later, we now are better able to judge of final truth and to understand the general religious truth sprinkled liberally throughout religious traditions. This idea that we have a clear view of this source distracts us from the fact that we are living in our own historical time period. Our current idea of what this source might be is as true a reflection of our own historical moment as Fox’s was for his.
The use of the word “translating” might lead one to think that the goal is to update an outmoded way of thinking by restating it in accordance with modern ways of thinking. The assumption here is that we can put into the mouth of an historical writer what he would have said if he had had the luck to be born in our own time—“If he had been me, this is how he should have expressed that thought.” But if such is our practice, historical writers will on the instant lose their uniqueness and become ventriloquists for our own views. Translating ought to remain a work for languages, not for thoughts.
The notion that George Fox was bound to see his world only in terms of Christ and the Bible is also questionable. Fox did not step out of a dark age, but out of 17 th century England . When he was born Shakespeare had been dead for 20 odd years, Marlowe for 50, and there was no absence of critical and irreligious viewpoints. Fox had choices which reached beyond Christian doctrine. He lived at a time of religious ferment, it is true.. but then so do we. Fox was no more bound to take the path of an earnest Christian, and to use the language of Christ and faith, than we are today.
Our position is that we live in a time when the possible ways of viewing the world are being pruned. Choose whatever side you will on the political spectrum, this is the case. My Quaker example comes from the left, but the “book of suburban virtues” version of this process is just as evident on the right. We want the past to look like us, and we are hasty to translate their views into our own.
Our primary duty to each thinker from the past should be to preserve and note their singular vantage on our world. The result is not a neat anthology of voices speaking as they might have if they chanced to live in our own time, but rather a contradictory mob of voices speaking against each other and against us, and that is the point. We are not out to make thinkers sound the same, but to make evident how different they all are.
What will be our benefit from this? I like to think about plants in the Amazon rain forest. The oft-stated goal of biologists is to preserve biological diversity. Perhaps this will bear fruit in coming years when some plant produces an unknown chemical that has medical applications, but at the very least it will give us a fuller picture of life on this earth. In a similar fashion, the ideas of the past could someday have startling application, but their preservation also enables us to grasp something of human possibility, something of the breadth and depth of the human imagination.
The Quaker idea of the “inner light” is a case study. The attraction of the idea is obvious: people are able to distinguish and sense truth for themselves without the mediation of external authority. Whether George Fox himself understood the “inner light” in such a convenient sense is another question. His journal—portions of which we have been reading for First Day school—suggests that whatever the inner light might be, it is bounded by scripture. Even when Fox speaks in words that hint at revelation, look closer and there is scripture behind it:
…But the Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people’s hearts; for both Stephen and Apostle Paul bore testimony that he did not dwell in temples made with hands…
As William Penn states in his preface to the journal: “[Fox] had an extraordinary gift in opening the Scriptures. He would go to the marrow of things..” However we try to understand his sense of direct revelation, it did not function outside scripture.
It seems that as we approach a writer from the past, such as Fox, we turn almost immediately to our own “inner light” of interpretation. The promise is much as George Harrison sings about in his song “The Inner Light”: “Arrive without traveling/ See all without looking.” And that is fine for personal religious experience, but when applied to writers of the past it cuts away the fine challenging edge of their thought and leaves us surrounded by mirrors.
Our work at Old Roads is rather to strive to make these writers stand out with all their strangeness, with all their unorthodoxy, and with all their flaws. That clear, we can come back around and see what might be of relevance to us now, what oddity might challenge the way we live.
Derrida's Influence on the Academy
Spring 2005
Jacques Derrida died on October 9th of last year, less than a month before the presidential election last November 2nd. That confluence leads me to ask about difference—that is, what difference Derrida made in that election. Derrida had an immense influence in the academic world. On the web page “Remembering Jacques Derrida” one can find signatories from all sorts of humanities departments, and a number of those signatories are professors or students at the university where I am now, Emory University.
My question leads to a broader question: what difference did the academy make in this election of 2004? College towns are easy to spot in the general sea of red on election maps. Austin, Athens, Chapel Hill—they show up as islands of blue in the midst of red. These university spaces are also magnets for money, both from the government in research dollars and from private business, and numerous tenured professors think and write in the shelter of these institutions. An immense amount of work—including dissertations, presentations at academic conferences, and journal articles—has had negligible influence on America as a whole.
I first heard about Derrida’s death through the obituary in the New York Times. In the next few days I was surprised to get a number of departmental e-mails protesting his treatment in the obituary and urging me to sign the above mentioned web-site in support of Derrida. The obituary on Derrida was written by a reporter, and reportorial in style. He had written an obituary in July entitled: “Carmine de Sapio, Last Tammamy Hall Boss, dies at 95.” Kandell sketched Derrida’s career and did not neglect to mention that Derrida had been a controversial figure in many quarters of the academy.
The response was furious, leading to a long list of signatories on the web site supported by UC Irvine. Along with these signatures are about a dozen open letters protesting the obituary, and these letters I find telling. On response is by Judith Butler, a professor of comparative literature at Berkeley. She opens her letter: “Jonathan Kandell’s vitriolic and disparaging obituary of Jacques Derrida takes the occasion of this accomplished philosopher’s death to re-wage a culture war that has surely passed its time. Why would the New York Times assign the obituary to someone whose polemics are so unrestrained and intellectual limitations so obvious?” First, I am not sure what advanced world she lives in to dismiss the idea of a “culture war” as past its time. The sea of red on the electoral map and the popularity of Fox TV makes it clear that there is nothing “past its time” about the culture war. More importantly, there was no evidence from the obituary that Kandell was out to do anything more than sketch what he understood as a controversial career. This was no hack job, and Kandell did not deserve to have his “intellectual limitations” pointed out. One gets the feeling that it may require a Ph.D. to write what Butler considers a fitting obituary meant for the general reader of the New York Times.
Several more criticisms of the obituary mentioned the title: “Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74.” It is the adjective “abstruse”—apparently as opposed to “profound” or “brilliant”—that stirs up the antagonism. “Mr. Kandell sets the tone right away, already dismissing Derrida as an ‘Abstruse Theorist’ in the title of his hatchet job”—that from the letter by Yve-Alain Bois from Harvard University. But really, what word could be more fitting for Derrida and his work than “abstruse”?
My own induction into the world of post-structuralist thought came upon my arrival to Emory, where I was starting on a Ph.D. in comparative literature, a field particularly receptive to Derrida. It was in one of my first seminars that the professor mentioned that some undergraduate students come to class actually believing that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was about love, and not the failure of language. I sat silent at that, a little nervous about the fact that I did see something about love in Romeo and Juliet, and even more alarmed because I was a graduate student.
I am tempted to launch into my own critique of Derrida and to vent some of my frustrations over the kind of orthodoxy that has formed around him. But any attempt to criticize Derrida is immediately tied up in subtleties. How not, when his thought centers on the failure of language itself. I like to compare Derrida to a porcupine sitting in the middle of a road. It is devilishly hard to attack the porcupine. An attack that assumes the straightforwardness of language will simply be turned around against the attacker. Incidentally, that kind of philosophy also makes an obituary tough to write. If one does not talk about the “impossibility” of writing an obituary, then one will be untrue to Derrida.
An important flaw within Derrida’s thought, and poststructuralist thought in general, is the unwillingness of the theorists to present ideas that can be debated and understood by a group of relatively well-educated and inquisitive people. One has the choice of either learning the meta-language that allows one to talk about talk, or being doomed as a living example of language’s ultimate failure. Luckily there is another option: one can simply walk around the porcupine and not worry too much about it, as it sits there in the middle of the road.
Why should one not worry about it? Because it has become a hindrance to talking about issues that matter. My department is hosted a conference this past fall entitled “The Event of War.” War is of course an important topic, and what does the academic call for papers look like? Here is a taste: “How can approaching war as an event impel us to read it differently? The event has been defined, according to Lyotard and others, as radically singular. Its moment of “happening” does not disclose its “true meaning” but rather the unique presentation of its occurrence. The event of war comes as a surprise and as such breaks continuity, producing, in the language of psychoanalysis, a trauma.”
Derrida is, to be sure, more eloquent than that. But this nevertheless serves as an example of the discourse surrounding the study of Derrida’s work. (Lyotard is himself an important post-structuralist and the one time I heard Derrida lecture in person was a lecture given at Emory as a memorial to Lyotard, who had recently died.) To my mind this kind of discourse takes us nowhere. It first of all manages to make the reality of war into an abstract discussion instead of taking us to the very real world of personalities and ambitions and delusions that bring wars about. But secondly it is the kind of language that scores a zero in the red covered electoral map of the United States.
I am not proposing some new radicalization of the academy, or trying to make up some kind of new activism. I think it is highly doubtful, anyway, that a radical campus would do much either to communicate with most Americans. I am proposing something a little more modest: simply that academics begin to speak in a language that is clear and approachable, a language that people can understand and that does not instantly become grist for the Bill O’Reillys of this world who lie in wait for new academic absurdities. If a fraction of the money and time that gets poured into papers delivered at a distant university that have a handful of listeners, or into journal articles read by God knows who, or into narrow books published by academic presses.. if only a fraction of that was invested in talking to non-academics, then the academy could perhaps help unite our divided country. A first step to addressing this group of people is to leave Derrida behind, and start down our open road.
