Ideology, and the rules of the intelligentsia

While I tend to agree with Michel Foucault with regard to the question of Human Nature—put indelicately, that is that we cannot arrive at a totalized, reliable sense of any innate psychological "Nature" in people that remains unexposed and invulnerable to the social, political, economic, ideological forces of the contemporaneous environment—and therefore the existence of anything but an abstract, temporal notion of "Justice," I have always appreciated Chomsky's democratic attitude toward the problem of social analysis:

"The social sciences generally, and above all the analysis of contemporary affairs, are quite accessible to anyone who wants to take an interest in these matters. The alleged complexity, depth, and obscurity of these questions is part of the illusion propagated by the system of ideological control, which aims to make the issues seem remote from the general population and to persuade them of their incapacity to organize their own affairs or to understand the social world in which they live without the tutelage of intermediaries... In the analysis of social and political issues it is sufficient to face the facts and to be willing to follow a rational line of argument. Only Cartesian common sense, which is quite evenly distributed, is needed... beyond that no special esoteric knowledge is require to explore these 'depths,' which are nonexistent." -from "Politics," Noam Chomsky's interview with Mitsou Ronat, incorporated in the book version of the Chomsky-Foucault Debate.



Click here for an online version of the title debate, sans supplementary arguments and interviews:

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: "Human Nature: Justice vs. Power"

Criticism matters (but all of it?)

Today the NY Times Book Review featured a forum on "Why Criticism Matters," which is nevertheless worth the read if you want to hear where (some of) the general concerns lie for/about the genre of literary criticism. I recommend the contributions by Pankaj Mishra, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman. However, Tim Yu provides a more complete scope about the gimmicks and (often paradoxical) concerns of professional, as opposed to academic and to amateur, criticism in his post: "Does (Paid) Criticism Matter?" He notes that it is a classic example of one-upmanship by the self-marketing, quasi-insular, honorific (bourgeois?) literary scene that wishes to appear as the specialized-though-not-too-specialized arbiters between the potentially misunderstood artist and the ignorant public. As if to appose specialized "esoteric" prose and a terrestrial, "commonsense" content (or, if you like, a time-consuming, tediously prepared meal and the quick, packaged, healthy supplement meal in a candy bar), and ask: Which would you prefer? Yu notes: "Fading into irrelevance themselves, paid critics shore up their position by pointing to the even greater irrelevance of the academic writer." This does seem to be the editors' point, but it is also to advertise, to re-romanticize the life of the paid writer; the very sort of aphoristic tragedy that works to dignify MFA programs (which they discourage ostensibly) as a dying breed. The point is, isn't it rather insulting to lament the wavering interest of the "common reader" (a construct) with a hopeful tone that concessions can be made. 'You may resemble dumb, ungrateful animals, but we can win you back!' Although Anderson's piece makes the case that Criticism plays a vital role in the intertextual production (and play) of meaning, the feature's title "Why Criticism Matters" is pure genre-pandering. The question begged, 'Does it matter?' suggests an unconscious opinion poll. Yu makes it clear: this is an ad campaign for the major reviewing venues. Paid-criticism presents a more palatable alternative for the reader. To me, this seems a greater sin than (arguably, over-)specialized criticism, which doesn't take the reader for an impossibly limited beast. The question is: do paid-critics feel threatened? Does the web's increased access to free content pose a danger to the print/subscription-limited reading industry? Have they failed to build an insurmountable hedge around their commercial production of homogeneous Taste?

Also, we mustn't forget, as Yu reminds the NYT: "The range of books reviewed has become narrower; readers of poetry in particular know that the major book reviews abandoned us long ago."

Art as the Unnameable

A plea was published in the NY Times by Robert B. Pippen, In Defense of Naïve Reading, on behalf of the as yet, and thankfully, uncemented and not well-framed relationship of Literature and scholarship. He mentions an important point along the way about the sort of knowledge/understanding gained through experience of a piece of art that resists purely formalized and theoretical explication, and in turn, any necessary application of "results" in the scientific sense. Radical poets (even tenured ones) recognize and celebrate this reality in their performances/publications that call attention to the inadequacy (and aft-reckoning, really) of academic observations and valuations. Of course, the humanities programs must insist on having methodological criteria so to be taken seriously enough by the populace to receive funding. And given the fear of artistic compromise and assimilation by academic forces of rigid, expositive communication, I think most true, working artists prefer it that way. But what interests me is this casting of Theory as professing to be a totalizing or summative extraction of a "whole" or wholly exploited meaning. Granted, the worst kind of criticism pretends to this very idea. But some, and let's employ that word, the best, critical analyses that I have read typically admit from the get-go their reductive and cognitive mythologizing or archetypal tendencies, and really only crippling one's admiration for works of art (classical as well as modern) when taken as the say to end all says, rather than one ideologically grounded inference within a vast constellation of possible inferences. The business of academic discourse has, so far as I've seen, recently been to detract such monumental positions toward aesthetic experiences/investigations. Drawing one's own sense of several critical perspectives can be daunting, but we already (hopefully) do it with the two-party political system, acknowledge this and that exaggeration or misstep, and being widely informed enough to justify voting for/against a party-sanctioned candidate. Of course, this is my take, not necessarily yours.


"Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or 'researched' by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of 'first level,' an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language. This response can certainly be enriched by knowledge of context and history, but the objects express a first-person or subjective view of human concerns that is falsified if wholly transposed to a more 'sideways on' or third person view. Indeed that is in a way the whole point of having the 'arts.'"

Scholarship Overhaul (front page)

"After all, the development of peer review was an outgrowth of the professionalization of disciplines from mathematics to history — a way of keeping eager but uninformed amateurs out."

Scholars Test Web Alternative To the Venerable Peer Review

What they won't tell you is how much, surely where the humanities are concerned, the (quite often "uninformed") academy owes to independent scholarship by dedicated, acutely studied, and non-funded outsiders who perhaps, if placed before a tenure panel, would stand out as anything but amateurs. I don't mean to say that the bureaucracy and benchmarks should completely disappear from selective reviewing, but if the professional gatekeepers want their institutions to continue providing dynamic, challenging, and (yes) with-it learning opportunities, they should be less afraid of having to trudge through the great influx of truly original ideas and perspectives that exist with or without academist sanctity. Of course, such a meager proposal would require professionalized scrutiny before even being considered, since, as Laurie Anderson puts it:
"Only an expert can see there's a problem,
Only an expert can deal with the problem."