An agenda

“Melanie” rides again

May 3, 2007 27 comments

Time for an apology. I am sorry for implying that Johann Hari in general was an “idiot” and an “anti-intellectual”,¹ instead of limiting my contumely strictly to the idiotic and anti-intellectual nature of his printed assault on Zizek. There’s a difference between saying something is idiotic and calling someone an idiot. Another good reason to apologise for this is that, allowing too free a use of such words, we might run out of vocabulary for people like “Melanie Phillips”.

In this recent post, “Melanie” is writing about the recent resignation of Lord Browne, head of BP. Browne has been defended by Matthew Parris, who writes: “What this story is really about is the awkardness of gay sex in the business world and our general fascination with the lives of the rich and (in Lord Browne’s case) slightly famous.” “Melanie” responds:

What extraordinary insouciance towards dishonesty in court. And what a spectacular misrepresentation of the cause of Lord Browne’s downfall. That noise you can hear is the rumbling of an agenda that drives all before it. It is not a pretty sound.

“An agenda”? Time to conjugate:

I have principles;
You have interests;
They have an agenda.

And what is this nefarious “agenda” to which “Melanie” objects? The second half of Parris’s column is about what he calls “a lingering problem about homosexuality and business” in Britain. Obviously, Parris’s “agenda” is to discuss bigotry. What a terrible thing to have on your to-do list. Well, I suspect that that’s not quite what “Melanie” thinks the “agenda” is. Darkly warning of this “agenda” that is “rumbling” and “drives all [all!] before it”, making a sound that is not “pretty”, “Melanie” is really sticking her fingers in her ears and screaming: “Shut up y00 gayz!!!!!!!!”

Of course “Melanie” has no “agenda” of her own. I certainly doubt it has entered into the calculations taking place in her tiny mind that Lord Browne, for example, is widely admired as the head of an oil company who has stated clearly that anthropogenic global warming is real, and caused by burning fossil fuels. Doubtless her post is pure of intention, as far as shrill hatred goes.

Anyway, perhaps we should have a whip-round to buy “Melanie” a pair of earmuffs, to protect her from the horrible “noise” of this gay agenda. Ah, but on second thoughts, if an excellent pair of earmuffs were clamped or stapled to “Melanie”‘s head, we would still be able to hear her, even if she couldn’t hear anyone else: arguably, the worst of all possible worlds. Come to think of it, it’s rather like the one we live in already, isn’t it, readers?

1. In this post, now updated with more handy footnotes for idiots. ↩

 27 comments

Inaccurate

i’m in ur Truth, killing ur ir0ny

May 3, 2007 28 comments

The redoutable Ophelia Benson, still fuming at what she mystifyingly takes to be my insistence that criticism of Zizek is “impermissible”, now accuses me, in a post pleasingly entitled “Ironies”, of misrepresenting her own work in my published review of Benson & Stangroom’s Why Truth Matters last year. Since this is a slur on what passes for my “professional” reputation, allow me to recall that I wrote in the Guardian, at the end of a largely positive review:

Sadly, the authors also follow a modern tradition of lumping Jacques Derrida in with a bunch of his inferiors and slapping him around too, without showing persuasively that they have actually read much of the man’s work.

Benson now claims that this was “inaccurate”:

The inaccurate part is that we didn’t slap Derrida around, we slapped around some of his fans, which is a different thing.

In fact, on pp18-19 of Why Truth Matters, the authors say this:

But does it really matter? Is it worth bothering about? Academic fashions come and go. Dons and professors are always coming up with some New Big Thing, and then getting old and doddering off to the great library in the sky, while new dons and professors, hatch new big things, some more and some less silly than others. Casaubon had his key to all mythologies, Derrida had his, someone will have a new one tomorrow; what of it?

So this casually sneering comparison of Derrida’s oeuvre to the quixotic work of a fictional character, in the context of discussing “silly” “fashions”, is not an attack on Derrida? It’s just somehow about his “fans”? I don’t think so. Benson’s charge that my review was “inaccurate” is without merit: what is “inaccurate” is this defender of Truth’s account of what is in her own book. That’s ironic!

The “fans” do make an appearance later. On pp168-170 of Why Truth Matters, the authors first try a wan appeal to authority in citing Quine’s objection to Derrida’s nomination for an honorary degree at Cambridge, and then claim that the letters of complaint about the notorious New York Times obituary of Derrida (shorter version: French “abstruse theorist” who wrote “off-putting” books is dead) were written to protest the obituary’s “lack of unqualified admiration”: a plainly false characterization. Then they turn specifically to a letter by Derrida’s “fan” Judith Butler,¹ and end up saying this:

As a matter of fact why should we not simply conclude that much or most of Derrida’s renown is the result of frequent mention by Butler and others like her? That he merely has what in US electioneering and public relations circles is called “name recognition,” which is well known to be quite independent of merit and quality. Serial murderers have much higher name recognition than any intellectuals, and it’s not because of their precision of thought (though it may be because their thinking takes some unanticipated turns). [p. 170]

Lol. But perhaps you think that the insinuation that Derrida’s renown was entirely divorced from any “merit and quality”, and the sniggering segue from Derrida to “serial murderers”, constitute another slapping around of Derrida himself and not just of his “fans”, to be counted along with the Casaubon jibe?

Benson & Stangroom’s unserious attack on Derrida is, you will have noticed, rather like Hari’s unserious attack on Zizek (“you end up hating the academics who take this non-thought seriously”). That’s ironic too!²

1. As the first commenter on her new post points out, Benson now misrepresents Butler’s letter as claiming that criticism of Derrida is “impermissible”, by means of selective quotation: Butler’s statement that “There are reasonable disagreements to have with Derrida’s work” is left out from what Benson cites of the letter. Another irony from the indefatigable champion of “reasoned argument and the requirement of reference to evidence” (Why Truth Matters, p.171). To be fair, this might not be a deliberate attempt to mislead so much as an unconscious inability to see anything that contradicts her idée fixe – or, of course, mere incompetence. ↩
2. Yet another delicious irony: when I bother to correct false claims of fact made by OB and her commenters, I am accused of engaging in “nitpicking” or “distraction”. They’d make a great bunch of “postmodernists”! ↩

 28 comments

Postmodernists

Zizek and ‘intellectual suicide’

May 1, 2007 106 comments

Readers who have had nothing better to do on a late Saturday morning than to read my literary journalism over the years might have noticed that there is a possible tension in what passes for my “thought”: evincing on the one hand a kind of Anglo-empiricism, I nonetheless have a soft spot for the works of such writers as Derrida, Baudrillard and Zizek, all of whom are anathema to the Anglophone analytic tradition. Why is this?, almost none of you ask. Well, there was my encounter at an impressionable age, while trying to figure out what one could possibly say about Nietzsche, with Derrida’s Éperons (that’s what you can say about Nietzsche; or rather, at least, that’s how you can say it); there was my personal encounter with Baudrillard, a man as generous and playful as his books; and there was my enjoyment, often baffled but nonetheless sincere, of Zizek’s writings. But perhaps the common factor was this: I was not at all sure that I was as clever as any of these men,¹ and so even when I was troubled by seeming opacity or nonsense,² I reckoned that I had better tread carefully.³

Luckily, the opinion journalist Johann Hari does not suffer from such uncertainty, and has taken it upon himself to denounce Slavoj Zizek in an article for the New Statesman, on the occasion of the British release of the documentary film, Zizek!.⁴ In doing so, he furnishes a useful example of the word “postmodernist” as it is almost always used nowadays, as a kneejerk insult from reactionary anti-intellectuals.

Three times, the opinion journalist Johann Hari refers vaguely to a group or cabal called “postmodernists”, none actually worth bothering to name, who apparently all love Zizek; and he accuses Zizek himself twice of partaking in “postmodernism”. Does it matter that Zizek himself has repeatedly explicitly denounced what he understands to be “postmodernism”? Does it even matter that what is often taken to be the manifesto of these continental clowns, Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), is at least as much a lament for as a celebration of what it describes? Indeed, is not the term “postmodern” and its cognates these days rather like the phrase “politically correct”⁵, existing purely as a handy boo-term for idiots?⁶

I only ask, since the opinion journalist Johann Hari shows no sign of actually having read any of Zizek’s books. Instead he deploys very careful language: “When you first look through the more than 50 books he has written…” (well, at least he looked through them, or, let’s be realistic, some of them); or “as you pore through Zizek’s words” (“pore over” is the more common usage, but our intrepid critic seems to be fixated on “through”: he has to get through this shit somehow or other). Here is the opinion journalist Johann Hari’s considered judgment on Zizek’s oeuvre, so far as he has managed to look or pore through it:

It seems he seeks to splice Karl Marx with the notoriously incomprehensible French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, slathering on top an infinite number of pop-cultural references.

An infinite number? Sokal and Bricmont must be spinning in their as-yet-uninhabited graves. Nonetheless, the opinion journalist Johann Hari finds it within himself to accuse Zizek, in his film performance, of “intellectual suicide”. In another world, it might be considered intellectual suicide to denounce a writer with whose works one has only a hurried and superficial acquaintance, and to throw around the term “postmodernist” as a cheap schoolboy jibe. But, readers, we don’t live in that other world, do we?⁷

1. Update 0: It’s funny how this bit – notice I did not say “I was sure they were cleverer than me”; just I was not sure that they weren’t, this on the basis of such brilliant books as The System of Objects or The Work of Mourning, which by the way aren’t opaque at all – has enraged the defenders of reason etc., who presumably are all sure that they are just as if not more clever than the men whose books they cannot be bothered to read. By what criterion they arrive at this judgment is an interesting question. ↩
2. Update 1: “Even when…” ie the judgment that the writers were clever was not based specifically on the passages of seeming opacity or nonsense, which would indeed be as silly as Ophelia Benson takes it to be. Update to the update: though this hasn’t stopped the hard-of-reading David Thompson from summarizing this post as “Steven Poole mistakes opacity for cleverness, calls people who disagree ‘reactionary anti-intellectuals.’” It’s funny how none of the critics of this post have responded to the point about the lazy use of the term “postmodernism”, perhaps because they all indulge in it themselves. ↩
3. Update 2: “Tread carefully” is not meant as a synonym for “blindly worship their phatic asses”, but rather something like “expend a little more effort trying to understand what they might be getting at rather than dismissing them impatiently as wilful obscurantists, as the telepathic Ophelia Benson does”. I hope that helps. ↩
4. Late update: unfortunately, his account of what is actually in the film is rather unreliable. ↩
5. About which I may one day write a lengthy post. ↩
6. Update 4: as I write here, it was wrong of me to suggest that Hari is an “idiot” and an “anti-intellectual” in general. It seems that it is mainly in the face of what he perceives as a homogeneous postmodernism that he has the habit of writing idiotic and anti-intellectual things, viz. this, and also his previous articles about Derrida, Baudrillard, etc. Also see this post by Antigram. ↩
7. Update 5: The sequel offers some insight into another anti-”postmodernist”‘s standards of evidence and argument. ↩

 106 comments