Juxtapositions and Nonpositions
“Postmodernism swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is.” – David Harvey
“Rorty . . . ends up insisting that the only role of the philosopher, in the midst of the cacophony of cross-cutting conversations that comprise a culture, is to ‘decry the notion of having a view while avoiding having a view about having views.’ ‘The essential trope of fiction,’ we are told by the postmodernist writers of it, is a ‘technique that requires suspension of belief as well as of disbelief.’” – David Harvey
“Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own.” – Terry Eagleton
Rut
I wish I could think of something (consider something) more sublime than suicide.
()
The sexual harassment from my students (not from colleagues, thank goodness) is constant, and if I ever grow visibly upset I get “they just think you’re pretty–don’t worry about it” and “isn’t it just flattering?” and “you don’t have to be scared of him–he’s just playing around,” and I know and I agree and of course I’m not afraid of them because they’re my students and I know and love them and I know they’re just well-meaning but immature and inarticulate and they’re still respectful, but while it’s true that I’m not afraid of them it’s also true that they make me afraid, because they make me afraid in general, remind me of all the times I have been afraid and will be afraid and should be afraid under similar but less friendly circumstances, and I hate the fact that saying I’m afraid seems to put all the blame for this on the one or two guys who triggered the fear even though I’m not afraid of them and have no need to be and understand that fully; I wish I could explain the depths of my fear without drowning any individual males in it because it’s never his fault, or his, or his, it’s just there.
Someone else has it backward too.
In a fit of frustration, I told my students that I’d rather they cussed than cracked one more joke about someone’s momma or ethnicity or dissed one more thing by calling it gay. They were floored. I told them that swearing was something I don’t do in a professional environment like school but do not object to elsewhere, whereas I find racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like offensive and wrong in any context. They remained prostrate on the metaphorical floor. Then one said, “So you don’t believe in God?” I said, “I don’t think believing in God has anything to do with swearing,” to which they replied “But it’s a sin!” At that point I ended the conversation, but I was dying to ask them whether they really thought their God was stupid or mean enough to prefer words that hurt profoundly whole groups of people (or even one person, right?) to words that strike some as rather crass but do no more than that. I can’t say that to them, though–and I don’t even think I should be able to, but it still chafes.
Someone has it backward.
Samuel Beckett can spew forth endless comma splices and they are considered great and intellectual precisely because it is assumed he knows the rules and is consciously choosing to break them. My students can spew forth endless comma splices and theirs will be considered unintellectual and in bad taste precisely because it is (rightly) assumed that they do not know the rules and therefore break them unconsciously.
When I received a jury summons the other day, it told me that a knowing refusal to follow its instructions would be punished by fines, implying that unknowing deviance would be tolerated (if, say, I never received the summons or could not read it).
I realize that rules are not laws and a faux pas is not a crime, but really, it would be nice if I could stop telling my students that the only way their criticisms of “the system” will sound credible to others is if they first prove that they can exist successfully within that “system” by mastering all its rules and customs and adhering to them faithfully for a period of time. I can criticize Harvard and Yale because I attended them; if I hadn’t, I would be afraid of sounding like Aesop’s fox dissing the unattainable and therefore sour grapes no matter how valid my criticisms. A student expounding on the follies of English grammar would find a small enough audience, even among sympathizers, unless her expositions exhibited perfect grammar.
Another Little Image from Beckett’s Brain
“Ah if only this voice could stop, this meaningless voice which prevents you from being nothing, just barely prevents you from being nothing and nowhere, just enough to keep alight this little yellow flame feebly darting from side to side, panting, as if straining to tear itself from its wick, it should never have been lit, or it should never have been fed, or it should have been put out, put out, it should have been let go out.”
News
“Stimulus Plan Would Provide Flood of Aid to Education“
I hope the article doesn’t overstate the case…
More Beckett
“Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?” -”The Unnameable”
I don’t know.
Great books
The eternal debate reappears here in a more satisfying fashion than usual. I can decide neither whether articles like this are absolutely central or laughably marginal to existence (whatever that is) nor what my fascination with them says about me (even sidestepping all the issues of race, gender, class, geography, and so on that are the most horribly obvious and indisputably valid criticisms of the conversation).
Title
I really wish English had a word for “Schadenfreude.”
Irony
“And sometimes I say to myself I am in a head, it’s terror makes me say it, and the longing to be in safety, surrounded on all sides by massive bone.” -Beckett, “The Unnameable”
G.B. Shaw, in a surprise move, presents the eugenicist’s motive for establishing Communism.
“To cut humanity up into small cliques, and effectively limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone the Superman for eons, if not forever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is incompatible with property.” -The Revolutionist’s Handbook
How’s this for a classroom model?
“There is sufficient clearness to enlighten the elect, and sufficient obscurity to humble them. There is sufficient obscurity to blind the reprobate, and sufficient clearness to condemn them, and make them inexcusable. -Augustine, quoted in Pensees 577
Well, this turned into a polemic.
“We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of self from which to be alienated.” -David Harvey
A more shamelessly aestheticist version might replace “the classical Marxist sense” with “the post-WWI European modernist poetry sense.” Or maybe that’s just what I would do. In any case, the resulting claim would mean that The Waste Land and its contemporary works, though all about fragmentation, yet present their fragments as pieces of still-imaginable, even desirable, wholes, whereas in postmodernism the fragments are, paradoxically, the most complete things that have ever existed. Yes?
Harvey also quotes someone’s discussion of David Salle and his postmodern tendency to “collage together incompatible source materials as an alternative to choosing between them.” Now my whole senior essay in college was about how Virginia Woolf does just that (plus some bunk about the metaphysics of David Moore and how Woolf used aesthetics to translate them into ethical arguments against fascism). Does that mean Woolf is “postmodern” despite being an archetypal Bloomsbury modernist and best buddies with T.S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, and the rest? The supposed modern/postmodern dichotomy is beginning to get on my nerves (most dichotomies do), especially when it’s used by devotees of “postmodernism” to argue that the “modernists” were just a bunch of late-blooming Victorians. Postmodernism needs to stop arrogating all intelligence, all ability to see that some wholes are illusions and that the world just might not make sense, to itself.
Harvey also says that “real revolutions in sensibility can occur when latent and dominated ideas in one period become explicit and dominant in another.” That is what happened when modernism turned to postmodernism.
In other news, I do want to know more about how to conceive of Marxist alienation now that selfhood has been exterminated.
Mega-meta
“Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not saleable.” (-Deleuze and Guattari, quoted by David Harvey)
Recall (I hate when writers tell me to “recall”) that the modernism/postmodernism chart posited schizophrenia as the postmodern malaise in contrast to modernism’s paranoia, alienation, and depression. Of course, in doing so the chart assigns a definite identity to postmodernism, which is a problem… Things would be much more consistent if schizophrenia, not to mention multiple personality disorder, had no one set of criteria for diagnosis in the DSM but was rather a combination of seemingly inconsistent diagnoses found scattered haphazardly throughout the book. Then of course neat charts about postmodernism couldn’t exist, pages of text describing depression would turn blank, the idea of description would cease to exist, and subject and object would live happily or confoundedly ever after. Okay, I got off track. Got off topic. Changed course. Went off on a tangent. Damn these metaphors–there’s no escape from them (see, there’s another). Strayed. No. Meandered. No. Digressed I turned to took up ended this paragraph by discussing a topic that I would not have foreseen predicted I would discuss at the time I began the paragraph. There.
I quote this to point out the absurdity of homophobia, not to imply that women suffer more than men.
“Probably the fear of male physical force, coupled with male sexual aggressiveness, is an important factor [in homophobia]. Male homosexuals are perceived as potentially combining these two forms of force–and using them against other, perhaps weaker or younger men. This threat is an intolerable one to men, who psychologically must retain the initiative of force or action, in order to be ‘men.’ This same threat is, however, a daily fact of life for most women.” – Phyllis Chesler
