November
4, 1998, 12:34 p.m.
| academia
sucks
Some days I'm
convinced I don't belong in academia. (Most days.) That is, um,
let's face it: academia is a series of market places and some
of the goods being produced (certain books, certain articles,
certain methods) have more value than others. In my department
what I do --being sometimes transnational, always feminist and
pretty fucking queer cultural studies-- isn't exactly top dollar
stuff. That is, what I do is seen as fluff, intellectual masturbation,
theorizing. (This last accusation is usually accompanied
by a shudder.) Because I'm a blasphemous girl, I haven't dedicated
my academic career to this amorphous thing everyone keeps bringing
up to justify their work and to dismiss mine: "the people."
Nope, I have no charts, no graphs, no "useful" suggestions
for "community organizing" or "uplifting the masses."
(My annoyance is no secret in the department, I say it all the
time to professors and other students.) I fist-pound for parody,
poststructuralism, dystopian moments, ambivalence, sex, and ghosts.
Because it's theory, and worse, feminist and queer theory (with
a dash of performance and film), it's "inaccessible"
and "unclear." Pointless, is the suggestion. "The
people" can't use the stuff, or don't care. (This
works only under the assumption that "the people" are
all male and heterosexual. Which, I think, is the general
assumption or at least the not-so-neutral ideal of "community"
some people are working with.) I don't have a problem with "disciplined"
work, I think there's a time and a place for it but cultural
studies --especially feminist and/or queer-- isn't afforded the
same breathing room. That is, other kinds of work are granted
more value than mine. It's a little annoying.
Writing, in
my department, has to have purpose. A political purpose. You
(a general "you") write because you want to better
the conditions of "the people." If I can't offer a
discernible blueprint for social justice, well, why am I wasting
my time writing? Why am I in this department and not, say, film?
Maybe I'm just
paranoid. (It's entirely possible.) In any case, Trinh Minh-ha
addresses some of these questions in an essay called "Commitment
from the Mirror-Writing Box."
Commitment as an ideal is particularly dear to Third World writers.
It helps to alleviate the Guilt: that of being privileged (Inequality),
of "going over the hill" to join the clan of literates
(Assimilation), and of indulging in a "useless" activity
while most community members "stoop over the tomato hills,
bending under the hot sun" (a perpetuation of the same privilege).
In a sense, committed writers are the ones one write both to
awaken to the consciousness of their guilt and to give their
readers a guilty consciousness.Such a definition naturally
places the committed writers on the side of Power. For every
discourse that breeds fault and guilt is a discourse of authority
and arrogance.
Do
the masses become masses by themselves? Or are they the result
of a theoretical and practical operation of "massification"?
Nothing
could be more normative, more logical, more authoritarian than,
for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose
that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved,
steeped-in-convention language of "clarity." Clear
expression, often equated with correct expression, has
long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric,
whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. The
language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible
but rife with paradox does not qualify as "clear" (paradox
is "illogical" and "nonsensical" to many
Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion.Clarity
as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical
feature of language, namely, its instrumentality. Writing is
thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought maybe used to orient
toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute
an act in itself.Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity.
Obscurity is an imposition on the reader.
My undergraduate
students in women's studies eat this up. (The Trinh Minh-ha piece
was assigned to them last week.) They're right there, critically
examining this amorphous call for "community" and breaking
that shit down in seconds flat. They know there's no given collectivity
of "the oppressed," that the experience of oppression
doesn't automatically lead to an oppositional consciousness (they
know because not all women are feminists), they know that they're
in the "first world," way privileged as recipients
of a "higher" education in an elite institution even
if they're black, mestiza, et cetera, and this has meaning when
they talk about "third world" women. They're already
careful about their language, thinking hard about the ideological
baggage attached and recognizing that language structures social
realities.
I think they're
awesome and they're definitely the best part of my semester.
But there's
a lot of resistance to Trinh Minh-ha's critiques in my department.
We'd rather not see ourselves as complicit with Power when we
presume to outline the whys and wherefores of "social justice"
for "the masses" we invent --condescendingly averaging
"the people" out, making assumptions about who they
are and what they want-- and when we insist on that loyalty to
"the community," even if "the community"
doesn't want some of us (me) because we're queer or a little
too feminist for our own good. (Not me sold out my people
but they me.) When we insist on "clarity" and "accessibility"
in the language when we really mean, "This theory
is too hard for 'the people' to understand." (Need I point
out how bad that is?)
Or, importantly,
when we pretend that we're not complicit with academia as a market
place. (We are.) And when we suggest that certain kinds of writing
are more "useful" than others, we assign them "use
value."(Who decides? What counts as "useful"?
Do charts about demographic spreads really uplift "the masses"?)
And so we ascribe to the cultural logic of capitalist exchange
because some kinds of writing with more "use value"
get circulated more, are "superior goods" that get
traded on the market place for what? Careers? Respect? Book contracts?
Job talks? Tenure? (Yes, this is me, cynical.) So that if I invented
a "tradition of resistance" (even if this meant imposing
a structure on the past, dropping out the complicated stuff)
within a "community" (never mind who might have been
violently excluded from said "community" or why) and
inspired all the children with my work (propaganda) I'd be way
more likely to get a job than if I did what, well, I do now.
(Although I might get more noteriety, which I like better anyway.)
Or at least in the department I'm in. It's entirely possible
that my work would have more value elsewhere, which I actually
believe to be true.
But see, I
accept that I'm a graduate student getting my PhD. and I'm happy
to tell you that I love theory passionately, all kinds. I have
no guilt because I'm lucky to even be here. Refugee girl makes
good when and where she can. I accept that I'm a "first
world" intellectual (okay, gagging a little on that last
part, or maybe giggling) and I'm aware of all the privileges
attached. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I accept
and cuddle with my many contradictions. Still, I don't know that
I have the constitution to be in this space (being academia).
It may make me insane and that's bad.
Okay. Out of
my system.