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Sunday, February 15, 2004
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LACANIAN LEASH LAWS
The key claim of most of the theories that people now say are dying in literature departments is that human beings are pitbulls who use so-called reason to cloud and justify their sadism. Take your eye off of any person - Gandhi, Mandela, Helen Keller - for one moment and watch that person become a barking hitlerian. Theory’s here to tell us that we’re bad bad bad and must be kept in line. Harsh lacanian reminders of our innate nastiness, our inability to understand enough about ourselves to have any moral autonomy, our cynical exploitation of metaphysical concepts to give our evil actions higher warrant, intend to snap us back like a choke collar from any sniffing outside foucauldian paths. Much of this attitude came to the U.S. via the postwar French, as Camille Paglia and others have pointed out. The postwar French had good reason, given their degree of collaboration, to worry about their inner himmler. (Paul de Man was a Belgian collaborator.) Many great French novels - Tournier’s The Ogre may be the best - agonize over that nation’s susceptibility to anti-semitism, authoritarianism, and so forth. The word “fascist” for the French has the same broad common-noun provenance as, say, “creep” does to us. The French call everybody a fascist eventually. When I was living there last year the fascist du jour was Brigitte Bardot. Fascist finger-pointing has become endemic among many leftists in the U.S. as well. Paul Berman, in Dissent, reports a conversation he recently had with an acquaintance: "My friend said, 'I'm for the UN and international law, and I think you've become a traitor to the left. A neocon!' I said, 'I'm for overthrowing tyrants, and since when did overthrowing fascism become treason to the left?' 'But isn't George Bush himself a fascist, more or less? I mean-admit it!' My own eyes widened. 'You haven't the foggiest idea what fascism is,' I said. 'I always figured that a keen awareness of extreme oppression was the deepest trait of a left wing heart. Mass graves, three hundred thousand missing Iraqis, a population crushed by thirty-five years of Baathist boots stomping on their faces-that is what fascism means! And you think that a few corrupt insider contracts with Bush's cronies at Halliburton and a bit of retrograde Bible-thumping and Bush's ridiculous tax cuts and his bonanzas for the super-rich are indistinguishable from that?-indistinguishable from fascism? From a politics of slaughter? Leftism is supposed to be a reality principle. Leftism is supposed to embody an ability to take in the big picture. The traitor to the left is you, my friend...'" I wish I had a euro for every academic who’s ever told me someone was a fascist. Literary theorists tend to believe that there are two sorts of people - commendable people who acknowledge their inner pit bull and keep a choke collar on it, viewing passion as much as reason as tantamount to fascism; and dangerous people in denial about their inner viciousness. A positive phobia in regard to conflict of any kind - from geopolitical to interpersonal - often manifests itself among people with these convictions. The late great political theorist Gillian Rose had this to say about conflict-phobia among the theorists: "This decision by the intellectuals that reason itself has ruined modern life, and should be dethroned and banned in the name of its silenced others, is comparable to the decision to stop small children, girls, and boys, from playing with guns, pugnacious video games, or any violent toys. This brutally sincere, enlightened probity, which thinks it will stop war and aggresssion, in effect aggravates their propensity. This decision evinces loss of trust in the way that play (fairy stories, terrifying films) teaches the difference between fantasy and actuality. The child who is able to explore that border will feel safe in experiencing violent, inner, emotional conflict, and will acquire compassion for other people. The child who is locked away from aggressive experiment and play will be left terrified and paralysed by its emotions, unable to release or face them, for they may destroy the world and himself or herself. The censor aggravates the syndrome she seeks to alleviate; she seeks to rub out in others the border which has been effaced inside herself. Philosophers who blame philosophy for the ills of civilisation have themselves lost the ability to perceive the difference between thought and being, thought and action. It is they who expunge the difference between fantasy and actuality, between the megalomania projected on to reason and the irreverent forces which determine the outcome of actual conflicts. They have inflated the power of philosophical reason, conferring on it a supposititious dangerous potency. It is the philosophers, not reason, who thereby degrade the independence of political realities and contingencies. Terrified of their own inner insecurity at the border between rationality and conflict... they proceed as if to terminate philosophy would be to dissolve the difficulty of acknowledging conflict and of staking oneself within it. To destroy philosophy, to abolish or to supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resourceless to know the difference between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realisation. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience. This ill-will towards philosophy misunderstands the authority of reason, which is not the mirror of the dogma of superstition, but risk.” The shrinking from risk as much as reason, from passion as much as propositional statement, has contributed to the odd robotic feel of academic prose in fields like queer theory (Lee Siegel wrote the definitive analysis of this prose in the New Republic), in which, “it is possible to read dozens of papers [in queer theory] without coming across the world [‘love’] at all,” writes Andrew Sullivan in his book Love Undetectable. In Unbecoming, the remarkable diaries he wrote while dying of AIDS, the cultural anthropologist Eric Michaels complains about a recent issue of the uber-theory journal October: “I began to feel I was trudging through a swamp of discursivity, sinking deeper and deeper into a too-predictable rhetorical mud... [By] exempting gays from criticism, [this writing] renders us passive, and so victims in terms of our own arguments... I stuck my tongue (and my arm, and my cock) in some pretty odd places during the 1970’s, and remain unsure about some of that... Is there no way to discuss these things, to evaluate them and possible complicities in our present condition, outside the tacky theologies of guilt and retribution? ... October recapitulates for me my growing dissatisfaction, not merely with deconstruction and discourse analysis, but textuality as a subject/metaphor in general.” Todd Gitlin notices similar problems with the theory of Jean Baudrillard, in which “we leave any recognizable world of life and death and plunge into a world of nothing but language. The dominant tone is [one in which] nothing is real, nothing to get hung about -- except American militarism, American capitalism, America. Al-Qaeda is not much of an enemy, but bad interpretation is.” Terry Eagleton’s recent broadsides against theory say as much - theory dicked around with language in an effort to scare us off of any serious reckoning with ourselves as flawed passional reasoning human beings. It convinced us all we’re fascists or proto-fascists. Reactionaries used to find commies under every bed; theorists find fascists under every flagpole. And they do not exempt themselves: like alcoholics in recovery, they will have to go to AA meetings and write essays about sobriety for the rest of their lives if they are to avoid staggering around killing people. Pascal Bruckner, a French observer, writes that “Europe’s great virtue lies in an awareness of its dark side, its pathologies, the fragility of the barriers protecting it from its own dishonor. But the suspicion that hovers over our most striking achievements always carries the risk of descending into self-hatred and facile defeatism. Obsessive attention to past abominations has blinded us to the horrors of the present. ... The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves, or at least not enough to overcome their disgust and to exhibit toward their own culture the quasi-religious fervor that is so striking in the Americans. ... European democracy resembles a rest cure that its once turbulent peoples have taken after losing their taste for battle.” Many academics have lately slipped free of the choke collar that this view of the world had placed upon them. Ignoring lacanian leash laws, they are now engaged in an exploratory pre-amble along the avenues of actual human experience. |