Thanks to a disaffected reader, Louis Proyect, I stumbled across the website of the philosopher and critic, Denis Dutton. If my recent pieces on Carolyn Guertin and Jacques Derrida were of interest, Dutton’s site is well worth exploring. There’s an amusing broadside aimed at Baudrillard and his admirers, and a shot at deconstruction. There’s also this piece on professional obscurantism and attempts to browbeat unsuspecting students: 

“The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself ‘profound’ or ‘moving’ not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere… These kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigour and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is… Prof. Judith Butler*, from an article in the journal Diacritics:

‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’

To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”

As Dutton argues elsewhere, the objective here is to induce anxiety and play the rube – to exploit the trust of people who stare at such things, find nothing of significance, and assume the fault is theirs. I realise the idea that such a thing can happen, and happen frequently, is taboo. To recognise bad faith of this magnitude requires an unseemly kind of honesty. But, as we’ve seen, these things happen nonetheless. And they continue to happen precisely because the very idea is unthinkable.

*Judith Butler is Professor of Comparative Literature and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a “leading queer theorist” and has been described as “one of the superstars of 90s academia” and “probably one of the ten smartest people on the planet.” Related, this and this.

I know, I know. I said I’d be away until Monday. But I felt strangely drawn to the latest efforts of embittered Communist Seumas Milne. Still misinforming Guardian readers with undiminished zeal, Milne once again reheats his “root causes” schtick and denounces Ed Hussein and Hassan Butt as “NeoCon poster boys.” (I’m guessing he’s not too keen on Tawfik Hamid, Tanveer Ahmed or the dissident exile Tahir Aslam Gora either.) Apparently, we mustn’t listen to what jihadists and ex-jihadists tell us about their own motives, because – pah – what the hell could they know? In MilneWorld™, Tariq Ramadan is best described as a “liberal academic” and when middle-class Muslim zealots try to kill innocent people – and nightclubbing women in particular – this must be “retaliation” against imperialist “oppression”. And nothing whatsoever to do with nihilistic fantasies, sexual resentment and an urge to be a player in an Islamist psychodrama. 

With eerie seriousness, Milne argues that,

“If the bombers’ real focus was, say, sexually liberal Western lifestyles, they would presumably be attacking cities like Amsterdam and Stockholm.”

Setting aside the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the effective exile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the numerous death threats against half a dozen Dutch authors, artists and politicians, I suppose we should simply ignore the arrest of nine would-be jihadists in Denmark in September 2006, and before that another four in Stockholm and Malmo in April 2004. And I guess we should overlook the planned terror attacks on a church in Uppsala, and disregard the Stockholm mosque selling cassettes calling for “holy war”. Perhaps Seumas Milne is somehow, conveniently, unaware of the rapid rise of fundamentalist Islam in Stockholm and the sustained campaigns of violence and intimidation against bus drivers, paramedics and firefighters in “Muslim only” areas of several Scandinavian cities. And presumably we should avert our eyes from the repeated targeting of London nightclubs, where “sexually liberal Western lifestyles” would no doubt be in full hedonistic effect.

Regular readers will, of course, remember just how credible and trustworthy Comrade Milne can be.

From yesterday’s Observer: 

“When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy… By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”

More via Norm and Harry’s Place. Related: this and this.

Further to my posts on the preposterous Carolyn Guertin and Jacques Derrida’s unhinged and fraudulent prose, this may be of interest. It’s from a lecture by Keith Windschuttle, author of The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. It’s a longish extract, but bear with me. I think it’s worth your time and, perhaps, grimly amusing. Windschuttle points out how “unproblematic prose” and “clarity of presentation” are regarded by some – guess who – as the “conceptual tools of conservatism.” Thus, if you prefer arguments that are (a) comprehensible and (b) able to withstand scrutiny, you must be a conservative, i.e. The Enemy. On the other hand, if you denounce such bourgeois trifles, you’re “radical” and very, very sexy.

“Though all the great historians I just mentioned were wonderfully clear writers, postmodern academic fashions have declared clear writing to be ideologically contaminated. The editors of one recent collection of postmodernist essays inform us: ‘The ideal of a transparent, tempered and accommodated prose’ is ‘the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.’ (Innovations of Antiquity, ed. Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden, New York 1992). Another has declared ‘unproblematic prose and clarity of presentation’ to be ‘the conceptual tools of conservatism.’ (Mas’d Zavarzadeh, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, cited by John M. Ellis, Against Deconstructionism.) Since today’s typical postmodernist academic would rather be declared to have a communicable disease than labelled ‘middle class’ or ‘conservative’, let me give you an example of what now passes as acceptable prose style among the postmodernist fraternity (and sorority).

This is from a gentleman named Homi Bhabha, a former professor of English at the University of Chicago, who has now been appointed to Harvard. He is writing about nineteenth century attempts by Britain to establish governments in its colonies that mimicked the government of the imperial centre. Rather than examining the evidence of how these colonial governments actually worked in practice, Bhabha instead gives us a deconstruction of the concept of ‘mimicry’. He writes: ‘Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse that Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination – the demand for identity, stasis – and the counterpressure of the diachrony of history – change, difference – mimicry represents an ironic compromise. (To) adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalising vision of castration, then, colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognisable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say…’ (From Tensions of Empire, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, University of California Press, 1997)

I won’t try to translate these sentiments into English. How could anyone talk seriously about the vision of castration? Let me simply point out that they are representative of their kind, containing the usual quota of invented terminology and postmodernist clichés – ‘difference’, ‘irony’, ‘the Other’ – not to mention the obligatory reverent citation of approved gurus. Writing of this kind should remind us of George Orwell’s observation that muddled prose is usually an ‘instrument for concealing or preventing thought.’ Unfortunately, in academic life today, this kind of prose is routinely adopted by the most successful people in their fields. This happens to be a very effective tactic to adopt in academic circles where there is always an expectation that things are never simple and that anyone who writes clearly is thereby being shallow. Obscurity is often assumed to equal profundity, a quality that signals a superiority over the thinking of the uneducated herd. Moreover, those students who put in all the work needed to comprehend a dialogue of this kind very often become converts, partly to protect their investment in the large amount of time already committed, and partly because they are bound to feel they have thereby earned a ticket into an elite. Obscurity is thus a clever way to generate a following.”

The full lecture can be read here.

The last few days here have been a kind of Rushdie and Related Topics Week. Assuming no further Rushdie-related events materialise, I thought I’d wind up this saga, at least for now, with a few words from the man himself. Here’s an extract from a lecture presented by the Centre for Enquiry and given at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on October 11th, 2006:

“I suppose one has to mention the Danish cartoons. I ran into a young journalist working for a small New York magazine who said… his proprietor refused to publish the cartoons because he was worried about his offices getting bombed. This kind of cravenness was worldwide. And the name that cravenness was given was respect. When people said they didn’t publish them out of respect for Muslims, what they meant is they didn’t publish them because they were afraid of their offices getting bombed. And when you create that kind of climate of fear, when you concede… you don’t as a result have less intimidation. I mean as a result you have more intimidation.

I think, with the cartoons, there were two quite separate issues. One is whether you thought the cartoons were good or bad and should have been published or shouldn’t have been… and those are the decisions that every newspaper editor makes every day, and different editors would make different decisions. But the second issue is when the subject of intimidation enters, and the question is how do you respond to intimidation, and do you give in to it or do you not give in to it. I think that when the intimidation became as heavy as it did, the only proper response was everybody should have published the cartoons the next day. And not to do that was a way of showing that threats work…

This is a curious climate that we’re living in, where people are falling over backwards not to name the phenomenon that’s taking place, which is a progressive intimidation of the world in which we live. I’m not talking about these great big geopolitical things going on elsewhere in the world; I’m talking about what is in our own hands to discuss and argue about and fix – what is happening in our town, what is happening in our culture. And the way in which things that we in this room value a great deal are being eroded by this kind of intimidation and cowardice, and by an unwillingness to call things by their true name.”

The full lecture can be heard here or downloaded as an mp3 file. A transcript is available here.