"What we have here, is a failure to communicate"

eye | opinion

I ran across this article called "How did ‘Art bollocks’ become the default way of writing about visual culture? Could Mao have the answer?" by David Thompson and it addresses a problem I've been having lately with a lot of the feminist writing I'm seeing. Just as the split between the rich and the poor is growing and creating a weaker economy, so the split between the masses, who are increasingly illiterate, and academic "elites" who have become so addicted to post-modernism that they're indecipherable, are combining to create a culture where no one can speak English anymore.

This is not about immigrants learning to speak English - I think everyone should be welcome in America and we should be tolerant of people trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. This is not a white country, no matter what the Anglos claim. What I'm talking about here is two distinct groups of born and bred, mostly white-bread, Americans who can't speak their own language. The first group, the barely literate, are hard to miss. They're on the news, on daytime TV, on "Jay Leno's Sidewalk All-stars," in the office, at school and possibly at your dinner table. If you're reading this blog, I hope that means they are not represented in your mirror. In any case, it's easy to take shots at people too lazy or poorly educated to conjugate a verb, so we'll leave that to other discussions.

The second group is whom the Wing Nuts on the Right like to call the "Liberal Elite." For the most part, that term is an oxymoron. Rich people are the true elites who populate Ivy League Schools and the highest positions in government and society, and they are, overwhelmingly, Republican. The Conservative Elite like to paint themselves as regular joes who go to church and pay their taxes, though they rarely do either. The Far Left, for the most part, is made up of artists and academics who have little money or power. They may or may not comprise a sort of Cultural Elite, but they are guilty of a type of elitism that is hurting the culture as a whole. Consider these examples from the linked article:

A cursory scan of Mute magazine (issue 27, January 2004) revealed the following nugget, from ‘Bacterial Sex’ by Luciana Parisi, a teacher of ‘cybernetic culture’ at the University of East London: ‘This practice of intensifying bodily potentials to act and become is an affirmation of desire without lack which signals the nonclimactic, aimless circulation of bodies in a symbiotic assemblage.’

Elsewhere in the same issue, I found this: ‘To be mediatised literally means to lose one’s rights. Hence, what happens to the idea of government by the people and for the people if the “false” is produced as a third relation which is not the synthetic union of two ideas in the conscious mind of the citizen or the general intellect of the organic community, but is a statistical coming together of variables?’ The article in question, ‘Bombs and Bytes: Deleuze, Fascism and the Informatic’, was written by Anustup Basu, a Cultural Studies Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh.

---snip---

The extracts above are the considered musings of serious thinkers, employed by supposedly serious academic institutions, and published in a supposedly serious arts and culture magazine.

On one hand, those are academic articles written for an academic audience, and they are expected to use the "jargon" of "post-modern deconstruction":

David Lehman’s Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Poseidon Press, 1991), a lamentation on the state of English departments, in which he recounts being told: ‘If you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist, otherwise you’re not taken seriously. It doesn’t matter what you know. What counts is your theoretical approach. And this means knowing jargon.’

You say 'jargon', I say 'slinging bullshit.' I'm not the only one. Thompson relays the story of one man's clear illlustration that all those 10 dollar words add up to nothing:

Alan Sokal’s infamous hoax article, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. Sokal’s essay – supposedly demonstrating the political ramifications of subatomic physics, and complete with ludicrous annotations – was accepted for publication by the journal Social Text (issue 46-47, Spring 1996). Social Text, published by Duke University Press, describes itself as ‘a daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, [focusing] attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment ... and publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists’.

Sokal attributed the acceptance of his parody to the proliferation of ‘a particular kind of nonsense’ among left-wing theoreticians. Specifically, he suggested that the editors of Social Text liked his politically fashionable conclusion and therefore saw no need to analyse his ‘evidence’ or his arguments, or the relevance of those arguments to the purported conclusion: ‘Nowhere in [the essay] is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.’ The credulous publication of Sokal’s meaningless article was widely reported, with amused and scandalised coverage worldwide. Sokal’s mix of Heisenberg and Derrida was not only funny but utterly damning. Yet the fact that Social Text is still published demonstrates a postmodern imperviousness to humiliation.

In other words, the language is so complex that it can't be proven wrong, nor its writer embarrassed, because it doesn't really say anything. The combination of this pretentious and pointless speech with feigned Marxism is an oxymoron as well - the hoi polloi don't understand this drivel, nor would they have any need to. You'll see critiques about "democratizing art" while the critic is making hes own opinion inaccessible. It would seem all but impossible to be elitist and populist at the same time, but the worlds of art and academics have people making a living from it.

Maybe I'd feel differently if I had a formal art education, but I've read all the same books they have and I still think art should be, above all, visceral. When I look at what I call a good piece of art - Van Gogh's Sunflowers, or an Odalisque by Matisse - I react emotionally. I don't need it deconstructed for me. There are technical aspects that are interesting, and helpful if I want to create my own art, but they aren't necessary to the enjoyment of the art itself.

I've read the curator of a major museum claiming that art should never be political. This article talks about a trend that insists art, and art criticism, must be Marxist. Personally, I think all art is political on some level because even the simplest drawing or painting speaks about its creator through the use of color, composition, and choice of subject. You can't even reliably determine the education or ability of an artist from most work.

Art and language have one goal, and that goal is communication. If a work of art makes you think or feel, it has communicated something to you about yourself and about the artist. It doesn't matter if you think it's crap, or your "feeling" is that you are repulsed by it - it still did its job. The same can't be said of the types of articles that were quoted. They communicate nothing. At best, they gave someone a line about being published on their c.v. and it made someone feel they had earned their salary, but there was no information transmitted.

This relates to feminism in that it is largely caught up in this academic trend and I believe this approach is anathema to feminism's goals. We aren't going to change the system by becoming a part of it. We can't care about being "taken seriously" if we don't take ourselves seriously first. Feminist academia is a rarified environment and too often the people with the most access to express their opinions are people too removed from poverty or entrenched in the patriarchy to oppose it. Look at the favorite canard of the media, the so-called "mommy wars." That's only an issue for the very wealthy. Most families need two incomes and most single parent homes, as well as the majority of households under the poverty line, are headed by women. Feminism is the ultimate populist movement.

I've said many times that the state of women is the state of the culture. Successful societies are those where women are treated fairly and children have adequate health care, education and supervision. That makes America a largely unsuccessful culture right now. We have millions of homeless kids, our schools and our infrastructures are crumbling, and women struggle to obtain child care and health care needed to care for their kids. The rate of homelessness is growing in the richest country in the world. If wanting kids to have roofs over their heads is Marxist - whatever. If someone's feminist critique is offended by my emphasis on motherhood - again, whatever. I don't have kids myself. I don't think that makes me "less" in any way, nor does the fact that the homeless kids in this country aren't mine mean that those kids mean any less to me. Strong, healthy, well-educated children are necessary to this culture. That doesn't lessen my commitment to the idea that working women should get the same pay that men do. It doesn't mean I accept cultural blocks to women doing any job within their capabilities.

It does mean that I value teachers and nurses over almost anyone, especially corporate women who act like men and treat other women as the enemy. It means I think every person should get Social Security if they need it, regardless of employment. It means I think every person in this country should have the health care they need.

If feminism is going to accomplish anything, it has to speak to the working classes. It has to retain the attitude of opposition to oppression, and you can't oppose the system while you are propping it up. Another result of obscure academic criticism is that it cuts normal people out of the conversation. Mark Twain said that "the man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read good books." The person who does't write intelligible English has no advantage over the person who cannot write English at all. If you have nothing to say, say nothing. If you have something to say, say it clearly.

I'm finding lately that any form of elitism irks me. Not everyone has the same interests or the same capabilities, but access should be egalitarian, and in too many places in this culture, it isn't. There are too many cliques, clubs and secret societies. Anything that speaks of exclusivity seems suspicious to me. Transparency is important to freedom. If a government can't tell you what it's doing, it probably shouldn't be doing that. If academics are going to teach, they need to present material in an accessible form. If you write a critique, you should have an opinion. If feminism is going to be effective, moving forward again rather than continuing to slide backward, it has to speak to all people - men and women, rich and poor, child and adult. A rarified feminism is no feminism at all.

Today marked an important day in history. Nancy Pelosi was sworn in as the first woman Speaker of the House. This could be a milestone in feminism or another nail in its coffin. It all depends on whether Nancy remembers her roots, or is entrenched in wealth and privilege. The raise in the minimum wage is promising, but there's a lot more to do that will take going against the system that put her in power in the first place.

Like the academic who has to use special jargon to keep her job, Nancy has to speak the language of her colleagues to be taken seriously, but she's got to transmit the message the people are trying to send the government. Competence won't be enough, though that will be a refreshing change on the Hill. She has to swing for the fences. I personally think that means investigations and articles of Impeachment. Anything less in this political climate will be taken as weakness, and people don't respond to weakness. She has to take the plain language of the street and translate it into Gov-speak, and she has to do it better than anyone has done yet. This is no time to hold back.

If you want to be understood, you need to speak clearly. You need to say what you think in a clear strong voice. Too many people in positions of power are treading water by spewing nonesense. The teachers that want you to write a 5 page paper on a one page subject have climbed too far up the ladder, and it's getting in the way of getting the work done. Let's drop the pretense and get on with it, shall we?

Title swiped from a Clint Eastwood movie. Hee.