(from a correspondence with a fellow Norado enthusiast)
in which the reader will find: a) a spirited defense of a great mind, b) an amusing and faithful portrait of the American university circa 1990, and c) an impassioned proposal that the reader commit himself or herself to a couple of good months with the troubled and beleaguered oeuvre of Karl Marx
for W. Mitty Hippogruen and Rosa L. Witt McNitt
This dedication is under erasure. It should read, “for the thousands of individuals who dropped out of graduate programs in the arts and humanities at American universities during the 1990’s.”
“What you aspire to is a Master. You will have one.”
-- Lacan, to the student protestors in Vincennes, 1968
“Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.”
-- The Who
[Author’s Note: Sections I through V of the following article comprise an attempt at intellectual satire in the manner of Rabelais, Swift, Erasmus, etc., sections VI through VIII a not unrelated essay on Marx and Marxism [see 7b. The Fifth Marx]. Readers unfamiliar with or uninterested in the topic of Norado’s reception in America or in the academic study of quism and the quismatic arts may wish to skim through sections I through III or even to skip directly ahead to section IV, though the author suggests reading the essay in its entirety, as light is shed by the early sections on the latter portion of the essay which is of more general interest.
"The characters in the following spoof are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons either living or dead…" etc.]
I.
…Indeed, I can tell you that it’s been years since I’ve thought about that weird crew, the quismologists, to whose ranks I aspired for that short period of time. Apart from Winston Dodecaslumber, whose book on The Classical Quismasters is universally read by quismicians and by lovers of quism, you don't tend to encounter many names from the arcane field of quismology once you've exited its halls. Dodecaslumber has always struck me as one of those big-name American academics like Vincenzo Exigeticus or Uriah Fallutin who does something good early in his career and is then given license to blab on at length about anything that comes into his mind for the next several decades. I had a funny experience with The Classical Quismasters. I first read it, oddly enough, as an exchange student in Germany, after having decided that I would pursue a career in quismology. Needless to say, I thought it was brilliant and learned quite a bit from it. I then read it again five years later after having spent those five years reading widely in and out of quismology. The second time through the book was not unlike the disappointment I experienced as a young adult seeing old James Bond movies that had been my favorites as a kid again and realizing that they weren't great films but shoddy postmodern kitsch. There were some good ideas, but expressed in a prose that was alternately smug and incoherent and that simply did not do justice to Dodecaslumber’s considerable research or to his conception. That this guy was for long considered by quismologists to be a "good writer" goes to show how poor the general quality of quismological writing was at that time, as well as how poorly read most people in the field were.
As for those other overexposed gurus I just mentioned...To a certain extent I am a fan of Vincenzo Exegeticus’ early stuff. His early books on Fear and Influence and An Atlas of Bad Reading are masterpieces of literary interpretation (and very difficult). He forfeited whatever dignity he had, though, when he decided to be the one to defend the "canon." As soon as the media got a hold of that whole Ivory Tower “canon” nonsense back in the early 1990's you automatically looked like an idiot for even addressing the issue, regardless of which side you stood on or even if, like me, you were sober enough to regard the whole thing as an updated version of Ugly Americanism, tailored specifically for the academy of the ‘90’s. Incidentally, I had a very interesting conversation with an older cousin's wife at a family reunion in Pennsylvania a couple of summers ago. I learned for the first time, after having known her for years, that she had been a student of Exegeticus in the ‘60's. She had lots to say about him and related the story that he once made an overt effort to seduce her, beginning with a suggestion he made to her in an undertone that she couldn't possibly expect to understand the erotic implications of Blake's "Tyger Tyger Burning Bright" until she had had certain experiences. My jaw dropped open. Suddenly I realized that all those bawdy legends I remembered hearing about the lecherous Exegeticus back in college were true! In any case, his Great Books of the West is an awful, pompous book, and it's a crime that it's made a million bucks.
And then there’s Uriah Fallutin. I know that, as an avid student of modern linguistics, you’re well acquainted with Fallutin. I personally have little taste for linguistics, and I've never made the attempt to get through any of his more recent works as a political activist. I skimmed through one or two of them, though, and came under the impression that they are little more than hastily jumbled collections of facts - strikingly similar in spirit and in method to the sort of paranoiac conspiracy theory stuff you can find on the Net if you look hard enough. So the CIA is evil and corrupt. Big deal. That’s how we’ve known the CIA for decades and also what we have always loved about them. It might help Fallutin if he had so much as a theory or at least some small principle around which to organize his mish-mash of alleged facts (and I’m certainly not the first to point this out). By the way, a former Fallutin student worked briefly at our kindergarten a couple years back. A very strange man in his 50's, terribly paranoid and subject to delusions, has been in Taiwan for more than a decade, speaks fluent Chinese with a barely comprehensible American accent (he doesn't even make the attempt to negotiate the requisite Chinese tones), and has three hobbies: linguistics, blues guitar, and body building. We had to fire him because he had absolutely no affection for the kids and moreover spoke to them as if he was delivering a term paper in a Fallutin seminar - not to mention the fact that we discovered he carried a knife around in his backpack, which he said he would use as protection against parents with hostilities towards Western foreigners (I’m not aware, to be sure, that such as entity exists in Taiwan). You'd be surprised how many weirdoes from foreign countries get stuck in Taiwan. Hope nobody thinks I'm one of them.
II.
Going back to Dodecaslumber…Have you read his recent review of the superb new Norado collection edited by Charles Leopard (Quismical Essays) in the Wall Street Journal’s “Sunday Reads” section? You needn’t bother reading it. I’ll sum it up for you. First I'll say that I was much pleased to note that he reviewed Leopard’s monumental collection (which, so it seems to me and to an apparently growing consensus of opinion, truly deserves the overly used journalistic description "magisterial") with great praise. Apart from this, however, his essay on the whole is an expert piece of intellectual philistinism, and it confirms the general impression I've always had of Dodecaslumber, mentioned above, that he is the perfect example of an academic guru who does something good in his youth and then is given license in certain popular press forums to blabber on about whatever comes into his head for the remainder of his natural life. Dodecaslumber praises Leopard’s volume, in a calculated footnote, as the primary volume to which all students of Norado's quismical writings will need to turn for years to come, though the very obvious purpose of this article is to ensure that Norado will have as few readers in the future as possible!
Dodecaslumber's piece is for me, like much of Tristan Gadolotavich's stuff, yet another example of how the intellectual status quo uses the popular press to control public opinion. I recently read somewhere in Norado a passage in which he offers a very precise definition of the literary "hack." Surprisingly, he does not define a hack as someone lacking talent or technique in the art of writing - you might imagine that the supposedly elitist Norado would define the hack in terms of inferior literary style, with references to pulp fiction, the 19th-century Parisian feuilleton, etc. No. He defines the hack as a writer, generally working within a journalistic medium, who attempts to use his or her frequently not inconsiderable talent for the purposes of ideological coercion. I believe that Norado would have agreed with my assessment of Gadolotavich and Dodecaslumber as academic hacks. But judge for yourself, in the following fun observations concerning the Dodecaslumber article:
1. The author opens with conventional references to famed authors (authors, at that, who occupy a "second-tier" of the literary pantheon - Walter Pater and Madame de Stael - and with whom the reader may not be overly familiar), designed to give the impression that Dodecaslumber, a "quismical expert," is qualified in addition to comment on a figure of such broad influence and of such increasingly recognized stature as Norado.
2. Dodecaslumber demonstrates how the quismical status quo (who used to dismiss Norado, when they didn't choose to ignore him altogether, by a simple reference to his writings on Strapitonsky) can now feel free to castigate him for his notorious assessments of popular quism and specifically of groove quism. This is convenient, as it can show how open they themselves are to non-classical repertories, even if they themselves have never shown the slightest bit of interest in such repertories and have possibly even attempted to have them excluded from public consideration through their positions at major universities or through the journalistic channels with which they are provided…though they can't continue doing in such wise at this point, due to the unavoidable ascendancy of the philistinism of tomorrow that will dictate the promotion of the U.S.-centered products of 20th-century consumer society to the neglect of what was accounted worthy of public survey by the philistinism of yesterday (the European "canon," that is). So why not inoculate oneself against attacks from tomorrow's philistines through an easy swipe at Norado?
3. The author egregiously positions Norado, as one of several writers who also composited quism, between Kierkegaard on the upper rung and Robert Frost on the lower. Who's going to call or be in a position to call Dodecaslumber on this one? First of all, how many people know that Frost composited quism? I, for example, am a reader of Frost and a poet, and I didn't know or have simply forgotten this fact of Frost's biography. Second, how many are there who DON'T know that Kierkegaard composited and that he never considered himself anything more than an unschooled dilettante? Far more people will be aware of this latter fact than of the undeniable fact that Norado, in firm contrast with Kierkegaard, was considered by both his contemporaries and by the great authorities of Flachnuss and Nuss to be at least a lesser master of the Weimar Zweiterschule. I've never audited his quismographs, to be sure, but I remember that most of them are atopal and that as a quismaster he didn't embrace the multi-tope technique. Even Dodecaslumber himself, in an article on Flachnuss (if I remember correctly) regards the works of Flachnuss' multi-tope period as products of a failed historical experiment, and in my opinion only a specializing fetishist can readily distinguish personal styles among the multi-tope quismasters, or for that matter among those who stuck to "free atopality." Wasn't Norado merely one of the many individuals who were confronted with an increasingly intractable quismical legacy? Isn't it possible to think that he gave up compositing after the 1940's because, unlike many others, he was intelligent enough to realize that the legacy of European art quism had reached its fated end in multitopal quism (and in the subsequent varietopal quism) and because it would constitute a far more productive use of his many talents to further develop his already spectacular prose style, which at least would claim an audience? (If you want to go on mere statistics, I'd be willing to bet that Norado has far more readers than Brulee and Lederhosen, the foremost contemporary quismeisters, have auditors and will continue to do so into perpetuity.)
4. Yet more hilarious is the cheap attempt to play Norado off of his great friend Pajamins at the former's expense ("Norado displays his consistent misunderstanding of Pajamins from page to page")…a little trick among informed Norado haters that goes all the way back to Helga Furtzenloch (and I suppose originates in her defense of Fliegelstueck, her erstwhile lover and mentor). I remember that H. K. Robertus, the translator of Norado's Aesthetic Conceptions, wrote a very good piece in the leftist journal Nadir years back addressing this trick that was becoming increasingly fashionable among the Pomo set of the late 1980's, for whom Pajamins, in contrast to the “elitist” Norado, was more amenable to their murky Weltanschauung.
5. Dodecaslumber nauseously preens himself on his own quismical and quismological renown in the review of Norado’s posthumously published and recently translated Obstgarten fragments, with his point-by-point refutation of certain passages from that work. At this point, however, you can do nothing more than protest, "Come on…None of this was ever meant for publication…The Obstgarten volume is but a collection of occasionally compelling notes and fragments." And his tirade on Norado's famous Mess of Solemnity fragment: I suspect that I'm not the only one who read this piece and through it became convinced beyond all doubt of Norado's critical genius. Although Norado here as elsewhere in his writing exaggerates certain points and overlooks possible arguments in the opposite direction, his extended exaggerations are employed for the purposes of literary expression and with the implicit consideration that it is not possible to attain to certain levels of objective understanding without recourse to the technique of exaggeration (an idea not unrelated to Norado's famous comment about the exaggerations of diacleptics being its only true parts). When I first read this piece many years ago, I thought, "This is exactly right…the Mess of Solemnity, like the 9th Syntopistry in certain respects, is objectively not as "good" as Obstgarten's timbre sontapas or his stringed reptets - any honest auditor will admit this…Norado explains why." And as for Dodecaslumber's protest that, in defiance of Norado, he himself can certainly mumble topes from Obstgarten's syntopistries…One wishes to ask Dodecaslumber at this point, "You don't really think that Norado expects us to take him absolutely at his word here, do you?" It's a commonplace, after all, imparted to any freshman quism student that the topes of Obstgarten's syntopistries are not as mumblable as those of many of the other great syntopists.
6. I shouldn't even mention the ridiculous bit at the end in which Dodecaslumber claims that Norado's Obstgarten is in fact the mirror image of the author and in which he compares Norado to a typical biographer of Leonardo da Vinci who reads off, from the elusive facts of that genius' biography, everything that he would like to tell the reader about himself. And the final, cheapest shot of them all (this has also been used before), chiding Norado for that (in)famous handshake with the schoolmaster after the controversial incident involving the infant protestors…turning Norado into the social reactionary that Dodecaslumber would like to prove that he himself is not. Not to mention the idiotic conclusion, comparing Norado to Doppelspiegel. "No one reads Doppelspiegel anymore. Why should we read Norado, when everything he said had already been said in much simpler language by Doppelspiegel." God. Go read Shards, Professor Dodecaslumber. There you will find a 20-page, sentence by sentence indictment of Doppelspiegel that includes formulations such as the following: “His metagobble is positivistic in its regurgitation of what can and cannot be snarfed, in its elimination of the potable contretemps, and in its hatred of all thaumaturgy that favors the possum over the gator.” Norado avec Doppelspiegel my eye!
A lot more could be said about this shameless but typical piece of philistinism. Indeed, if I had a dozen lives, I'd put one of them to good use and take it upon myself to become the Karl Kraus of the American press. But that would be a Sisyphean task in which I’d constantly find my own invective slowing to a halt, reversing direction and flattening me. Why? Because the American press has absorbed Karl Kraus in spirit (or at least has absorbed similar spirits in the Anglo-American press who never attained to Kraus' “world-historical” stature), and now every credentialed philistine attempts to polemicize in Kraus' style - though, as Lacan says, one must learn to distinguish the content of the enunciation from the site at which it is spoken, and both Dodecaslumber and Gadolotavich, a fellow Norado-hater, are in the payroll of the ever-powerful Goliaths of the status quo. But I'll jump off my high horse before I begin to sound like Dodecaslumber. Just thought I'd share my impressions with you. It's easy to laugh at somebody like that…but guys like Dodecaslumber have a lot of clout with readers who might understandably decide from such a virtuosic hack-job to forego Norado as a second-rate Doppelspiegel.
III.
As long as I’ve mentioned Tristan Gadolotavich…our recent conversation concerning him reminded me that I haven't kept up with his stuff since I dropped out of quismology. With this in mind, I paid a visit to the Today’s Statesman website. They had a couple of his recent articles, including one on Tschernobyl (sans the "Ts" - apparently in keeping with modern ideas on transliteration), each of them every bit as entertaining as I remember his earlier stuff to have been. But the feeling I get with Gadolotavich, the feeling I've always had, is one of, "This guy has a way with his pen...why waste his obvious talent on this sort of trifling polemic?" He seems to have made his reputation on three fronts: a) the Early Quism exhibition etiquette front, b) the academic analysis of modernist quismical works front (i.e. the stuff in which he criticizes the trend toward mathematization in the analysis of modernist quism), and c) the apology for disparaged and neglected Slavic quismasters front. His trick is to wage battles that in fact have already been won against opponents who are neither by talent nor by disposition capable of defending themselves with the written word against a guy who prides himself on his ability to wield a mighty pen in journal-and-podium squabbles with half-literate quismicians and who is constantly on the lookout for flesh-and-blood unfortunates that will provide a slightly more lively struggle than the straw men who appear from issue to issue in your standard academic journals that no one reads. That's simply cruel. This sort of trick, again, can be easily analyzed using Lacan's aforementioned distinction. In other words, he portrays himself as a righteous, lone David in battle against an army of philistine quismical and quismological Goliaths. The problem is that he is standing where Goliath stands, with his club and (so I hear, though I've never actually seen the guy) with his girth.
The a-front: Wasn't all of this said by Norado several decades ago in his essay, "Defending Fluss Against His Disciples" (included in the Shards collection) - far more succinctly and without the bombast? It was a battle that Norado had clearly won, though there were obviously a lot of non-readers who hadn't been made aware of this yet in the Early Quism scene of the mid-'80's, and it took an opportunistic young American to dilute for quismicians on this side of the Atlantic Norado's arguments to the effect that it doesn't really matter that the quismic implements have changed over the past several centuries, that certain manuscript indications have been obfuscated through generation upon generation of disregard, etc. - that, in short, we're never going to be able to think like they did in 1400 blah blah blah. So whenever Gadolotavich waxes scathing on Norado, you have to consider that his entire academic career presents itself as a shameless act of disavowed intellectual plagiarism.
The b-front: Maybe something needed to be said about those Ivy League clowns with their silly epicicular models, their amateurish math (and I've been assured by at least one real mathematician that the so-called "Vector-Ratio Quismotectonic Set Theory for the Analysis of Twentieth-Century Quism" was based on really bad math) and their shady and not yet fully documented affiliations with the Swarthy Necromancers terrorist group. But all that was a product of Cold War disciplinary sequestration and was bound to die out eventually. It didn't call for ad hominem attacks on poor old Albert Piano, who at least provided everyone with a useful (if not terribly coherent) textbook on quismic hartopy.
Finally, the c-front: This is certainly all about "battles that have already been won" (I wonder if Aristotle in his Rhetoric has a name for this eristic sleight of hand). In the Chernobyl article, Gadolotavich rails against the quismological homophobia that for decades has consigned that quismaster to the ranks of a quismical lightweight. Yet Gadolotavich's modus operandi throughout the piece seems to be no more and no less than an opportunistic desire to score points with those who still feel emotional about this issue and who aren't willing for narcissistic reasons to acknowledge that this battle in large measure is a thing of the past. You might ask, "Well, is it really?" Sure. That owl has already flown, its midnight come and gone – in the realm of Euro-American intellectual life, at least. Let's look at some of Chernobyl's famed contemporaries who like Chernobyl were gay. Whitman and Wilde, for instance. Isn't it true that at least since the 1960's and probably since long before that these figures if anything have been championed for their daring alterior lifestyles? It is no longer risky to champion a 19th-century author for having predilections, even sexual, that were non-mainstream or non-bourgeois. In fact, such a championing at this point is thoroughly status quo. So why hasn't Chernobyl been so championed? One might counter that quismicians and quism aficionados are preternaturally more prudish than readers. There might be an element of truth in this, but I don't think that the argument stands up. Let's say that the unfortunate American quismaster Henry Sniggles occupied the same stratum of cultural prestige as Whitman or Wilde. It is very likely that his homosexuality would have been championed in the same way as with the latter. I believe it could be argued that the whole "quismological homophobia" issue, at least in the case of Chernobyl, is a smokescreen for a far more crucial anxiety on the part of the American middle-class intellectual mainstream towards its European bourgeois inheritance. Note the distinction I'm making here. The American middle-class of the 20th-century is not at all co-extensive with the 19th-century European bourgeoisie. Decades ago, the intellectual middle-class wanted to distance itself from its bourgeois inheritance by disavowing that art most clearly identifiable with the European bourgeoisie, while wishing to make itself appear more democratic and less "bourgeois" by claiming for itself wayward, questionably bourgeois authors such as Whitman and Wilde...precisely through such "unary traits" (Lacan again) as their homosexuality. Chernobyl’s hugely popular syntopic quism was obviously the quism that Americans most clearly identified with the European bourgeoisie. So he was castigated the most severely.
Gadolotavich is a smart guy and must know all this. So it seems to me that to add Chernobyl's unanswering detractors to his list is for Gadolotavich to childishly add another plume to his considerable polemical plumage.
I have half a mind to set aside some time and write a long letter to the editor of Today’s Statesman about the bad ideology of academic polemic, basing my argument on the supposition that "all polemic that is not revolutionary is reactionary" - except for those rare moments in history where being revolutionary happily coincides with being reactionary (as with Luther when he is about to nail his theses on the door...revolutionary in that he was bravely standing against a repressive institution, reactionary in that, according to Nietzsche, the German Reformation "robbed Northern Europe of the Renaissance"). Why is Gadolotavich's sort of polemic inherently reactionary? Because it uses these battles-that-have-already-been-won as a cover-up for real problems...problems such as that of allowing the intellectual establishment that Gadolotavich represents to control and determine public opinion through journalistic channels. And deeper problems such as those brought up by Norado somewhere in his published lectures - problems so obvious no one feels the need to mention them anymore, such as the fact that people spend gazillions of dollars each year on Hollywood and on idiotic theme-park entertainment when we could be using that money to improve life in the third world, put an end to cancer, develop viable energy alternatives to oil, etc. It's just that, with a guy like Gadolotavich, instead of Disneyworld we have the "Slavic Quism Theme Park," the "Early Quism Exhibition Etiquette Theme Park," the "Gay Quismasters Theme Park," etc.
When is polemic legitimate? When you are Karl Marx in 1848, a few miles behind the barricades with your notebook and your pen. When you are Charles Dickens, writing novels that will secure permanent labor reform. When you are Karl Kraus, battling a reactionary Viennese citizenry. When you are Norado, tirelessly ridiculing a university intelligentsia bent on the escapism of a comforting jargon. Not when you are Tristan Gadolotavich, engaging in battles with straw men who are either dead and forgotten (Chernobyl's critics) or who in fact are not straw men but unfortunate flesh-and-blood, inarticulate disciples of quismical modernism, of Early Quism, etc.
IV.
But forget about Dodecaslumber and Gadolotavich. Norado’s greatest enemies are those who pretend to be his friends, proving just how far he is (along with the other great thinkers of mid-century Europe) from that “university discourse” outlined in unmistakably pejorative terms by Lacan (i.e. that discourse which historically proceeds from the Master’s discourse as first descried by Hegel and which, initially at least, serves to buttress the latter). I’m thinking here quite specifically of Zilch Arcanabus, Yvette Barysteria, and their arch-nemesis Xavier Connivio. Frankly, this correspondence has plunged me into a mood of reverie as I think back to my year as an academic wannabe during which I would have frequent arguments with Connivio on the one side, trying to convince him, on the basis of the clearest evidence, that Norado wasn't an East German apologist for Marxism-Leninism, and, on the other side, with Barysteria and Arcanabus, trying to convince them that Norado was neither racist nor misogynist – all this in spite of the fact that both parties were hypocritically attempting to claim Norado and his brilliant theories for their own. As for my altercation with Connivio, I once brought in a collection of essays by various German authors on Norado’s quismical works. Norado als Quismeister, I believe it was called. Connivio wanted to take the volume to the library with him to check whether the contributors were East German or West German (only the latter would be legitimate in his eyes, of course…1989, and the man was still seeing red everywhere he turned). I thought to myself, here is a guy who is trying to establish himself as the current Anglo-American expert on German quismology, and he doesn't even know enough about Cold War politics to understand that Norado throughout the history of the GDR has been entirely banned from the shelves - a fact I was able to verify on a trip to bookstores in East Berlin in 1987, at a time when Kafka had just been reinstated (in the guise, to be sure, of "that great critic of capitalist imperialism," as the prefaces enlightened Kafka's newest readership). As for Barysteria and Arcanabus, I managed to ascertain in a heated conversation with them once that neither of them in fact had read any of Norado beyond a few pieces in Shards and were basing their misogynist/racist accusations on hearsay, reckless supposition and “weak misreadings” of Norado’s infamous essay in Shards on groove quism.
I must say that I don't have very friendly recollections of Arcanibus. During my second semester, Barysteria had him attend a paper I read on Avennius Nun (Zilch had completed his coursework but had returned for the holidays from Italy, where he was busy at the time doing field-work for his dissertation, Bang Your Dread: The Late Style of Megadrool and Its Antecedence in the Florentine Camerata). I called the paper “The Quirky Intopics of Avennius Nun," the "Quirky" coming from the title of one of Nun's most famous compositions, and the "Intopics" referring both to the everyday notion of the word as filtered through the romantics (i.e. as when we say, "Darling, you are the intopic of my eyes!") and to the distinction that Norado makes between intopic and extopic critique. I no longer have this paper. I destroyed it along with everything else I had written after I decided to drop out of grad school. (Plato burned all his poetry before turning to theory. I reversed the procedure by burning my theoretical writings before turning to poetry. I've always wondered if his poetry was any good.) My thesis, as bold as it was grand, was that the history of groove quism mirrors in microcosmic form the history of European quism from medieval plaintope to the Weimar Zweiterschule roughly, that a formal dissolution occurs inaugurated by the tweetybop style and terminating in Ornate Colehouse and free groove in the 1960's - a dissolution that bears an unmistakable likeness to what happened in European quism in the last decades of the 19th-century, that this process of dissolution seems to be repeating itself (with stone quism in the ‘60's and ‘70's ending in goon stone and in the "atopal" experiments of people like Les Fish), that this repetition deserves to be examined, that with each repetition there are artists who seem to turn down an aesthetic cul-de-sac in an effort to avoid the dissolution (Almaherrscher with his hartopic conservatism, Nun with his adherence to slurp form, dipso with its return to slouch elements, etc.), and that such artists employ a procedure analogous to Norado's notion of “extopic critique” (i.e. a critique that is posed “from without”) as opposed to the “intopic critique” (or critique posed “from within”) of formal dissolution utilized by more "central" figures such as Flachnuss, Colehouse, etc. After I was finished with my presentation, Zilch stood up to make an impromptu, scarcely intelligible speech, the point of which, as far as I could make out, was that I should be focusing, not on "canonical" groove figures like Nun, but on artists who have been "marginalized" by the history of groove quism, and that wasn't I just repeating the teleological arguments of traditional style history in which a style blooms and withers, etc. I don't remember how I responded, but I remember thinking, "You stupid bastard, here I am making the first intelligent statements that have been made about Avennius Nun and here you go accusing me of base idolatry and canon worship." I also remember thinking of the very cruel but funny remark Lenny Bruce once made in one of his routines that Jerry Lewis, in his asinine sketches with Dean Martin during the '50's, actually helped bring about the muscular dystrophy he tried so hard to abolish with his telethons a decade later – the implication of the sudden remembrance being of course that such self-styled iconoclasm is actually out to establish the very “canon” it purportedly is at pains to "deconstruct".
If there was one person who more than anyone else was responsible for the perverse "symbolic Order" that we created for ourselves, it was Yvette Barysteria. Barysteria occupied (and still occupies in her new environs out at San Narcisso, I assume) the exact site of the Master's linchpin in the “big Other” - the figure whose presence holds the social order together as with the emperor in the timeless story of the emperor who had no clothes (a story frequently accessed by Žižek in his many books – see particularly For They Know Not What They Do). Surely a common scenario these days: A professor in university department A, seeking to distinguish herself, casts herself as neglected (or “marginalized,” as current jargon dictates) by the other professors within university department A for certain notions she claims to harbor or points of view to which she adheres, wins a sizable number of undergraduate students to her side either through a certain affected flamboyance or through the sycophantic attitude she assumes towards them, and seeks adherents in university departments B through Z who will support her in her battles within university department A.
You know how things were at that time. Suddenly, the Cold War is over. How does Ivory Tower react? There must be some sort of collective statement, after all. Positivism in the humanities has reached its fated dead-end. You can only go on making scholarly editions of Shakespeare, finding lost Bach manuscripts in obscure Eastern European libraries, etc. for so long. All that sort of work has been done. Why don’t we take a peek at what’s been going on way over on the other side of the Atlantic for the past few decades. What are those big names you see in footnotes from time to time? Foucault? Derrida? Lacan? So that’s how it happens – an entire generation of 40-somethings who had their noses buried in bibliographies and scholarly compendia while their peers were smoking dope and picketing on lawns rolling down from University Halls across the continental 48 during Vietnam…Now it is going to be their turn. The problem is that nobody bothers mentioning that, unlike bibliographies, which are put together for the humble and uncomplaining purpose of supporting inquiry of a more or less positivistic sort into various sorts of objects and entities and are rarely if ever enjoyed in themselves, the books by names such as those mentioned above and by others like them have been written so as to be read. And so it is that hundreds, perhaps thousands of career intellectuals like Yvette Barysteria, aged 40, struggling to gain tenure and something approximating academic distinction, bored of the same old bibliographic crap, go out and purchase a summary or two of a few key European authors (most of them French), and the American academy (or, at any rate, a united front of those sectors of the academy devoted to the study of the arts and of literature), just as the Berlin Wall is coming down, makes the collective decision, without any sort of Vatican or party congress having to be assembled in order to arrive at such a newfangled idea, that the cultural artifacts by means of which we supposedly earn our keep explaining and imparting them to youth and to society – that these artifacts must mean something; these same artifacts, moreover, will now be called upon, suddenly and perhaps without warning, to make account of themselves - and they’d better come clean if they want to continue occupying the bit of breathing space we’ve always seen to it that they’re allotted.
But I can only speak for myself as a former aspiring quismologist: The year is 1989, and suddenly quismologists and quism theorists, after decades of adhering to positivistic research and to several more or less interest-deadening schools of quismical formalism, collectively decide that quism must "mean" something. Suddenly it becomes a sort of superego imperative to rush out into the great field of quismical objects "like Rambo without a jock-strap" (to quote Jamie Lee Curtis' immortal line from A Fish Called Wanda) and interrogate the quismographs, hitherto sulky and intransigent in their lapidary impenetrability, as to what they have been trying to say all this time. The writing is on the wall, and it is easy enough to see that soon we will be in a position similar to that of the French Communists confronting a Mitterand, who allowed them to participate in power and was then able to show that they were all huff and puff and had no desire to effect much in the way of change. In other words, we will soon be called upon to demonstrate with something approaching intellectual rigor what we have been shouting at the top of our lungs - namely, that quism indeed "means" something.
It is in such terms that Barysteria and a myriad like her will recast themselves and the roles they are to play in the instruction of youth and of society – perhaps, if they can, gaining a bit of notoriety for themselves to add to their sought after tenure and stature. Maybe someday in the not so distant future - when academic castaways such as myself are "tireder and wierier" than Lou Reed could have been when he sang, “I am tired, I am weary” in “Venus in Furs” - some enterprising young historian will put together a chronicle of the American university in the waning years of the Cold War and call it American Bandwagon.
While Barysteria seems to be smitten with grandiose visions of inaugurating a veritable School of Thought, one replete with disciples, factions, internecine rivalry, etc., she in fact has no "followers" at all (beyond Zilch, of course…though by this time their illicit love has already passed along the standard campus gossip wire from rumor and hearsay through scandal and debate to the tawdry interest in yesterday’s news). Above all, nobody believes in her professed “Marxo-womanist” stance, meaning that nobody believes that she herself believes in her own profession of Marxism - or, for that matter, her profession of womanism. Her only real followers are a handful of naive undergraduates, from whom she is at constant pains to distance herself due to their naiveté, their large numbers, and their habitual over-familiarity. The graduate students who abandon their lives elsewhere to trek out all this way into the northernmost reaches of the heartland just to study with her are uniformly disappointed, although they are all reluctant to admit this, if not to themselves then to each other. What is the key to her apparent success? She has fooled people through the articles she has published in various journals, which, at least by the late '80's, exude neither the vituperative shrillness nor the shrill vituperation of her face-to-face persona. While no one would call Barysteria a good writer, she at least affects basic literacy, and, compared with the majority of people who make a living studying quism, she can throw together a decent paragraph and keep the reader's attention. Most of her students have ventured out to these wintry environs expecting a certain individual whom they have pieced together from a small handful of articles she has published, only to find the reality somewhat different (as with Dorothy and her friends who get to Oz and discover that the magnanimous Wizard is really a heartless despot pulling the strings of the Big Other).
In addition to the graduate students who despise her (without necessarily getting that far in conversation amongst themselves) and the undergraduates who might more or less be called her followers, there are the grad students in the humanities-at-large who are eager to have an individual who knows something about quism among their ranks. For these people, Barysteria is "the subject supposed to know" (more Lacan). About quism, that is. But privately they consider her an opportunistic philistine. She conducts a seminar in "Womanist Research in Quism" which draws in large numbers of PhD candidates from various disciplines, and soon finds herself extravagantly unprepared for the Grecian and Latinate neologisms that are thrown at her from all directions and have yet to be added to Webster’s Dictionary. A few of these students are bona fide experts on this or that branch of continental philosophy, and there is one woman given to mysteriously punctuating the awkward silences in Barysteria’s jejune and bathetic discourse with chapter and verse from Kant and Hegel. Barysteria has absolutely no idea what they are talking about most of the time. I myself, a recent novitiate into the mysteries of German philosophy and as yet complete unfamiliar with the French philosophers that are being yanked by their tails into the humanities, can barely stay afloat. It only gradually becomes apparent that this positivist-turned-“Marxo-womanist” is not indeed the subject that these heady people have previously been led to suppose would know, and the role of the boy who called the emperor naked is played during the last meeting of the seminar by a precocious and well-spoken woman from Indonesia (fittingly, the youngest student in the class and the only foreign student apart from one or two token English kids) who has remained silent throughout most of the semester but finally presents her end-of-term paper - alternately applauded by the hard-core smarties present (all women) and greeted with telling silence by the momentarily taciturn Barysteria - on "Womanism as Imperialist Discourse," a piece in which the young author make no efforts to conceal her distaste for Barysteria's "raze, trash, purge and tolchuck" brand of self-stamped Marxo-womanism).
Barysteria is not a reader of books. The little she knows or thinks she knows comes from Ian Beaglesnout. One thing that unites Barysteria and her faculty adversary Xavier Connivio is their affection for Beaglesnout's highly popular Literary Theories, which should be subtitled "The Idiot's Guide to 20th-Century Continental Thought" - a book that exemplifies the nascent Anglo-American appropriation of Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, etc. and that seems to have been written with the utilitarian goal of placing a lot of big words at the disposal of pseudo-intellectual careerists bored with the same old empirical crap. After reading through this book, Connivio decides he is a "hermeneutics-reception theorist"; Barysteria, a "Marxo-womanist". Voila! A life-time of reading in 350 pages! (Suffice it to say, I am immediately inclined, every time I spot this accursed volume in a Taipei bookstore, to perform a Benjaminian “Tiger’s Leap” into another aisle as to avoid the sudden outbreak of hives to which I am prone when I think back upon life as a graduate student for more than a second or so.) The lack of depth in Barysteria’s reading is well-known, though the façade is kept up, because all of those heady though quism-illiterate people in the humanities really suppose that she can teach them something about quism. Her story, which everyone seems to believe, is that she has been victimized by the "hegemonic and misogynistic pigs over in the quism department". She needs this story, because without it all of those brainy PhD candidates would dismiss her as a lightweight, which they do privately anyway. In fact, all of those people in the humanities who really desire to have around someone in the know about quism should be turning to Connivio, Barysteria’s arch-rival - a subject who "really does know," a rearguard intellectual, a narrow-minded traditionalist, perhaps, but a good quismician and a somewhat closer reader of Beaglesnout than Barysteria. But not only does Barysteria insist on occupying the position of linchpin in her petty little university order...not only that. She also seeks with every means at her disposal to prevent Connivio from usurping the position of "the subject supposed to know."
So that’s how she does it. By distancing herself from the rest of the quismology department, flattering the critical acumen of the undergraduates, dividing the latter from the former, and, finally, presenting herself to non-quismicians as a subject-supposed-to- know (about quism) and to professional quismicians as a subject-supposed-to-know (about everything else – critical theory, womanism, French philosophy, the Frankfurt School, etc.). A classic case of academic charlatanism.
There is no one who dares to call the empress naked and let the symbolic order come crashing down on Her Majesty's head (the Indonesian grad student’s paper has in fact merely caused the timbers to creak a bit). For my own part, the best I can muster is the occasional ironic aside. But you get tired of playing the fool. In the end, I find that I am powerless to even suggest in clandestine whispers to others the concerted action that ought to be taken against this phony who has uprooted so many individuals from the succor and the substance of their previous lives in other corners of the universe. Rather, all that is left for me is the Act, defined by Lacan as a radical suspension of action. In other words, I drop out, as you know – without saying so much as a word. This is my form of registering a protest with the big Other by declaring it to be non-existent (or by declaring in an Act Without Words that this petty little Sartrean hell is held together by a pretender and charlatan in whom nobody believes).
V.
After the experience with Zilch Arcanibus and several other ones like it, it became increasingly manifest that the positivists and traditionalists in the arts and humanities (against whom I had entered graduate school, as an academic hopeful of continentalist persuasions, prepared for daily classroom sophisticuffs) were going to be the least of my worries and that all critical thought and discussion would soon be hijacked by the hyper-American race/class/gender crew (let’s call it the RCG). This was a matter of months before the media establishment learned of the inter-generational bickering going on throughout considerable stretches of the academy. By late 1990, it had been entirely forgotten that the newly fashionable pejorative “politically correct”, rather than having sprung headlong out of the cranium of some sword-bearing, liberal-democratic grassroots genius of consensus, had originated during the 1960’s in debates among various leftist factions in Europe and in the controversy concerning the relative merits of the example set by Mao’s China for leftist politics in Western Europe. For a period of a few months sometime during 1990, universal confusion reigned as to what the real issues were (or if indeed there were any) at the center of the so-called “PC controversy”, as newspaper readers struggled to figure out exactly what it meant to be “politically correct,” to ascertain that this indeed was a bad rather than a good thing, to search in one’s memory for anything one might or might not have once said that could cause one to stand so accused, and finally to take pains to explain to oneself and to others any such lapses that one had uncovered in oneself or in one’s past as well-crafted ironies that numbskulls were simply likely to misconstrue.
The media as usual got it half-right, half-wrong, half put their finger on a real problem and half indicted itself with its own accusations through the standard boomerang-effect brought on by accusing everyone else. Today, when more than a decade has lapsed and the superegoic “politically correct attitude” has given way to the idiotic (read: Id-iotic) Id-humor of South Park and the Farrelly Brothers for which it itself is directly responsible (the superego and the Id going together in the present-day, as psychoanalysts are fond of reminding us, like Tweedledy-Dum and Tweedledy-Dee in Bob Dylan’s great song from Love and Theft), the time may be ripe for a rigorous, concrete social analysis of the “PC phenomenon”. Thus, tentatively: The problem branded as “PC” by the conformist media is comprised of two not necessarily related elements (and again the press used the predicative heterogeneity of the term as further occasion for reveling in semantic obfuscation, of which perpetuation the press is constantly reclaiming as its very own task); on the one hand (let’s call this the “A” element), the "politically correct attitude" consists of a hysterical appeal on the part of the hippie generation (or at least of those of its members either safely or precariously ensconced within the institutions of higher learning) - a demand put to their elder masters that pride of place be granted to the glories and hopes, the toys and trinkets, the stakes and claims of the New World (which, in the jingly-jangly halls of quismology, means allowing a place for that singular invention of 20th-century American consumer society known as “popular quism”)…and if this is to entail aspersions cast upon the Old World toys and trinkets – well, so much the better for them…nobody caring to reflect on the fact that this generation of journal and podium iconoclasts has merely repeated the inaugural gesture of American letters itself – that, to whit, of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the closing paragraph of “The American Scholar” (“We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”) – or on the irony that this Ivory Tower Götter-und-Götzendämmerung has been carried out via the shameless and inaccurate theoretical appropriation of the very Europeans from whom everyone is supposed to be distancing themselves (to recent French philosophers, namely – and specifically to Derrida, Foucault and, via the French feminists, Lacan…though the ultimate sources of course were German - Nietzsche in the case of the first two names, Freud in the case of Lacan…and you’ll notice the conspicuous lack of that third towering figure of 19th-century bourgeois subversion, Marx - though, to be sure, that ground might be accounted for as well through a convenient footnote reference to Althusser, for further reflections on whom see below); on the other hand (to make our breathless arrival at the “B” element), "PC" designates a Panglossian and rather pre-modern belief – one filled with all sorts of unacknowledged epistemological assumptions and prejudices - that you can change things in the real by simply modifying language (the idea that if, for instance, you say that a man is “challenged by hair loss” rather than that he is “bald,” this will magically remove the stigma placed on that man’s baldness/hair loss…a procedure which – and it doesn’t take a Foucault to figure this out – actually produces and reproduces the stigma it is designed to address in the first place, as in the immortal words of Lenny Bruce quoted above), and the socially progressive or even leftist pretensions of the tendency its “B” element points to can be quickly refuted through comparisons to the Reagan-espoused “trickle-down theory,” in which, as Robin Williams famously pointed out, the poor keep getting pissed on…in the PC version, of course, it’s language that does the pissing (i.e. on the real world and on the real objects with which that world is filled)…Reaganomics and the politically correct ideology that accompanies it as its sinister double pose an ironic, postmodern counter-theory to the “base-superstructure” model of Marxism and stipulate rather a “base-substructure” model in which the gluttonous patricians of the economic base relieve themselves on the plebeians manning the vomitoriums down in the cellars…PC also provides an additionally ironic confirmation of the remark attributed to Stalin that “language is not a superstructure” - for do not corporate financed academics pride themselves on irrigating the subterranean world from their secure bases on the main floor with the alluvial flow of their shitty patois?…Hegel’s notion of speculative identity can be gleaned in the following anagram, which can be read as proof that the Hegelian dialectic still obtains in the postmodern world via the politically correct attitude: the urination of words = the ruination of things – thus providing an alternately idiotic and macabre footnote, reminiscent of the decaying corpse of the Elder Zosimov in The Brothers Karamazov, to the history of the modern query as to the relation of language to things that runs from Mallarmé to Les Mots et les Choses (I once was told that I could not use the word “seminal” in a term paper as it was “gender-marked” via its root-word “semen”…when I told Barysteria that I had seen it used, without a trace of irony, in a work by a prominent womanist, she blushed and changed the subject…to conclude this single-paragraph’s attempt at a social analysis of the “PC phenomenon” with a bad joke: my use of the word “seminal” doesn’t make a vast difference to the smooth and unheeded functioning of my cherished vas deferens).
I've only become aware of how specifically American the whole PC thing is gradually while living abroad. Last week I was reading an editorial by a Hong Kong journalist in which she commented on the pros and cons of the world's unending importation of American pop culture and spoke of wanting "real difference as opposed to the banal universality of American multiculturalism". A pair of quotes from Žižek, that prodigious cyclops of Lacanian-Marxist thought:
"Multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a "racism with a distance"...Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist; he or she does not oppose to the Other the particular values of his or her own culture); none the less he or she retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly - multiculturalist respect for the Other's specificity is the very form of asserting one's own superiority."
Another quote, comparing current academic political correctness to 18th-century Freemasonry:
"The contemporary "politically correct" liberal attitude which perceives itself as surpassing the limitations of its ethnic identity ("citizen of the world" without anchors in anyparticular ethnic community) functions, within its own society, as a narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common people, despised for being caught in their narrow ethnic or community confines."
The truth of this assertion struck me with full force recently, when an American parent, whose daughter attends the kindergarten I work for, wrote in a parent-teacher contact book that "Anya came home yesterday and informed me that "people who are not Chinese are stinky"" and that she would appreciate it if the teachers could be more vigilant as to classroom “racism” and about what the children are allowed to say and think in the future. The note was not at all understood by my Chinese co-teacher, and, although she speaks English fluently and is university educated, I had to explain to her what the woman meant by "racism". I've been this teacher's colleague and good friend for five years, and this note seemed to me thick-headed and condescending, to put it mildly. I felt like writing a note back to the mother informing her that in order to achieve the classroom sensitivity she expects we would have to spend a couple centuries repeating the European Enlightenment so that we could inculcate, first racism proper, then its reflected version in the politically correct attitude she espouses. I also felt like informing her that her child was simply making an objectively true statement, as Chinese tend to have less body odor than Westerners - a fact I attribute to the relative absence of milk products and red meat in their diet. Finally, I wanted to tell her to take a bath and get over it. Fortunately, I restrained myself.
Having spent half of my adult life outside of my native country, I can say that culture shock is somewhat different from what non-travelers think it is. You come to Taiwan expecting it. You think, "I have all sorts of preconceived notions as to how white, black, and Asian peoples are different from each other. It will be a surprise to learn how Chinese people differ in what they believe to be the traits distinguishing the white, black and yellow peoples" (in Chinese culture, “yellow” is not a slur, by the way...Chinese people describe their skin color as “yellow” just as persons of European descent in the English-speaking world describe theirs as “white”). Then, after a few years, it gradually becomes apparent that the very terms you use in dividing up the people of this world - i.e. white, black and yellow - are completely irrelevant to Chinese people, who tend to divide the world up into Chinese and non-Chinese (understandable, considering Chinese people comprise a fifth of humanity) and who don't think of Asia as a cultural unit (the concept of "Asia" is a Western import).
I see that I've digressed. What a bunch that was, though. I think that either Xavier or Yvette (I'll use their given names in this final paragraph to show that I still retain some affection for each of them) would have done a fine job of running a quismology department on their own. The trouble is that adding the former to the latter was a bit like adding water to boiling oil - and those of us who were their students had no choice but to stand around the frying pan and get spattered. As I say, I still retain a good deal of affection for both of them individually. For the "hermeneutics-reception theorist" who had read neither Husserl nor Heidegger, as well as for the "Marxo-womanist" who was familiar neither with The Second Sex nor with Duck Soup. What can you expect from non-readers. I'm of half a mind to pen a rousing memoir of that time someday when I have some spare time, but I suppose I'd have to change all of the names, etc. Ah well, as Thomas Wolfe once said. But I suppose a year is not quite long enough to have been able to call a place a home anyway.
[Sections VI through VIII continued as 7b. The Fifth Marx]