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Sunday, November 30, 2003
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YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION
The usually submerged activities of American professors of “cultural studies” have lately emerged, as they will occasionally, into the awareness of the larger educated public. This is the public that has struggled anxiously for years to send its children to the expensive private universities where these professors teach, and it is not really bothered about the odd stuff its children talk under their influence. It knows that just as some freshmen undergo an Animal House phase, so others will spout a bit of nonsense and then outgrow it. Yet this public also reads about the excesses of cultural studies, as when, for instance, The New York Times records the ridicule to which the jargon and clotted prose that critical theorists use is increasingly being subjected, or when prominent cultural theorists win international Bad Writing contests, or when bizarre course descriptions culled from university catalogues are published in mass market magazines. As these Americans scan excerpts from and commentaries on the writings of neo-Marxians, queer theorists, psychoanalytical feminists, and post-colonialists, what do they think? Many Cultural Studies writers adopt a paradoxical rhetorical stance, a mix of heedless what-the-hell head-over-heels confessionalism, and a turgid, pregnant, gnostic, if-I-could-only-tell-all elusiveness. The tone is simultaneously defensive and bellicose, frightened and provocative, self-protective and aggressive, as if the writer has undergone assertiveness training, but not enough of it. The actual writing style -- incomprehensible, ugly, belligerent, and, to the extent intelligible, absolutely flaky -- expresses, above all, total insularity. Within the serpentine infinity of cultural studies sentences lies a combination of self-love and ignorance of the world outside the self. To read this writing is to get a sense of what it would have been like if Blanche Dubois had attempted to write a history of Southern culture. It’s like reading bad mystical writing: something zealous, convoluted, and stupid lives here. The people in this world are clearly desperate to communicate something of importance to us. What is it? In my translation, the message to us is something like this: You perceive yourself as a blameless and comfortable white, straight, moral person; you are in fact a guilty and agonized racist, repressed homosexual, vicious colonialist, and all-’round immoralist. Because of your hegemonic powers over me, and over the world, I have become the twisted and angry person you see here; but my words are a weapon that will force your recognition that you are me. Withdrawal from this sort of writing, and the world it evokes, is understandable. What remains to be understood is the attitude toward it of readers within the academy. This attitude has undergone an unsettling intensification: from an initial enthusiastic endorsement, it moved on to a kind of Beatlemania-like exhilaration, and then culminated in the current dazed idolatry that seems to be encouraging the oracular writing upon which outsiders are beginning to comment. One needs to reach back to Charles Manson’s female associates shaving their heads in solidarity with him during his trial to evoke the intensity of devotion this writing has inspired in its university readers. Roger Scruton recently wrote that the relationship between rock musicians and their fans is “tribal”: “[A]ny criticism of the music is received by the fan as an assault upon himself and his identity.” It is the same thing here. As for the besieged theorists themselves, growing ridicule of their language either provokes them to offer more impermeability, or to maintain a haughty silence which hopes to convey to the outside world what all their writing hopes to convey: You are an abomination. |