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Sunday, January 18, 2004
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Everything is shit.
"The notions that life here and now is worth living, or that it could be made worth living, or that it must be sacrificed for some future good, are all absent. The dreary world of the Houyhnhnms was about as good a Utopia as Swift could construct, granting that he neither believed in a 'next world' nor could get any pleasure out of certain normal activities. But it is not really set up as something desirable in itself but as the justification for another attack on humanity. The aim, as usual, is to humiliate Man by reminding him that he is weak and ridiculous, and above all that he stinks; and the ultimate motive, probably, is a kind of envy, the envy of the ghost for the living, of the man who knows he cannot be happy for the other who - so he fears - may be a little happier than himself. The political expression of such an outlook must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because the person who holds it will want to prevent society from developing in some direction in which his pessimism may be cheated." Orwell, Politics vs. Literature I was on a conference panel years ago and had just finished giving my paper. The feminist legal theorist sitting next to me had listened with increasing alarm to my remarks. As the next speaker prepared her notes, the legal theorist leaned into me and whispered: “You do realize, don’t you, that everything is shit?” In reply, I smiled (it seemed, for the moment, the polite and quiet thing to do), which increased her alarm. “Look.” She pressed closer and scanned my face with scowling incredulity. “Everything... is... shit.” I’ve already posted here and there on University Diaries on the curious emotional configuration of American humanities professors, and I’d like to explore the matter a bit further today. Observe this group anywhere - conferences, classrooms, carnivals - and you’ll note a corporate melancholy, a bonding bitterness, an atmospheric agreement that life stinks. The conviction that the world is a surreal nightmare is what Heidegger would call one of the “preconceived objectivities” of the ordinarily objectivity-phobic English professor. There are political and social reasons for this acrid despair. Politically, many professors are revolutionaries. The spectacle of the insane injustice of American social conditions, and the primitive ideological blindness of ordinary Americans, inspires in these professors a pretty constant level of rage [Update: January 20: Howard Dean's gracious demeanor last night tells you a good deal about why he's the candidate of choice for many such people.]. In the mad world of the mad boy-king George, you can look anywhere and find such blatant policy depravity that you can explain his popularity (plummeting fast, to be sure, for all sorts of good reasons) only by assuming the absolute cretinism of the American public. It’s like the tenacious hold of religious faith in the United States - it’s so palpably stupid for anyone to believe that shit that you’re forced to assume the mental retardation of the entire American landmass. The social roots of deprimisme in the humanities professoriate include most prominently the overuse of psychotherapy. Many humanities professors in America have for decades been bathing in an ever-refreshed font of resentment, kicking around in stirred-up ashes. The twice weekly reopening of personal wounds sharpens this group’s sense of very particular - even exotic - deprivations. For instance, at a recent University of Chicago symposium, participants decried America’s lack of gender neutral toilets. Many progressive people so powerfully fail to identify with doors that offer the stark binary opposition MEN/WOMEN that some of them just hold it in, so now you’re seeing a lot of urinary tract infections. Think how often in the course of a day you see the door to a public restroom. Next imagine that each time you see this door you are thrown into righteous writhing torment. Now do you understand what I mean when I say that everything is shit? |