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Wednesday, February 18, 2004
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I KNOW THAT MY RECONCEPTUALIZATION LIVETH
Alumni magazines are strange birds. The only one I’ve seen that’s anything other than an arm of the booster club is Harvard’s. Harvard Magazine, while full of the winsome self-puffery you’d expect, is also able on occasion to express criticism of the instititution. It doesn’t avoid controversies which make Harvard look bad, and it’s generous in printing and taking seriously peeved letters from readers. The University of Chicago Magazine on the other hand stays loyal to the rah-rah stereotype. The latest issue begins with a vague bland inoffensive welcome from the president in which he protests that just because he’s a university president he has no intention of becoming vague bland and inoffensive. Here’s a sample sentence: “True, university presidents might be tempted to opine about things of which we know not.” Many readers wrote sharp and intelligent letters to the editor in this issue, protesting in particular what sound like pretty rank political views that a professor opined in the last issue; but although these letters are closely argued rebuttals, no one seems to have been able to find the professor and get him to respond. And then there is the curious puff piece on the University of Chicago cultural theory journal, Critical Inquiry. Time was I found great stuff in CI - I’ve already mentioned [in my post on the tenure manuscript] the wonderful exchange years ago in CI between T.J. Clark and Michael Fried on modernism, and how much it inspired me. But like many other people (circulation, the magazine writer notes, has dwindled), I’ve stopped reading the journal. This had partly to do with its silly editorial decision years ago to publish Jacques Derrida attempting in his suffisant beating-around-le-bush way to suggest that Paul de Man should not be condemned for having been a Nazi symp. Coming from a Jew this was particularly sickening. One of the editors acknowledges that the current small readership (less than 3,000) has in part to do with this: “People who had been interested in Critical Inquiry were no longer interested.” But no one stopped reading the thing because of one absurdity. For whatever reason, CI gradually settled into being a major purveyor of puffed-up has-been pomo prattle. A typical article last time I looked had about fifty pages and ten paragraphs. Each paragraph was the length of a good-sized phallogocentrist and was stuffed full of convolution, abstraction, obliqueness, wordplay, and sneers about appalling reactionary America. Humorless, desperate, and verbose, reprising precisely the deadheads who did it in (the writer concludes the article by boasting that the journal “recently received an essay from Derrida”), CI is now indistinguishable from the dread October [I quoted Eric Michaels on this journal in a recent post]. Faced with the death of theory and the dwindling of one of theory’s champions, CI, the writer for Chicago Magazine might have chosen to do something other than take at face value the Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf-like claims from the journal’s editorial board that victory rather than defeat is just around the corner. |