Further to my article on the stunningly fraudulent Carolyn Guertin, some readers have suggested that the “radical cyber-feminist” is merely an anomaly, albeit a vivid one, and not a reflection on her corner of academia. I’ve subsequently argued that one has to ask how Guertin’s “work” survived evaluation and peer review, and how she has come to find an audience “at conferences and events across Europe.” The fact that Guertin has been employed, and is still employed, by otherwise reputable institutions suggests a systemic dysfunction. Indeed, I’d suggest that Guertin is merely a symptom of a much broader malaise – one that has rendered large areas of academic study irretrievably tendentious and intellectually worthless.

Evidence to support this view can be found via Durham in Wonderland, where the estimable KC Johnson casts a gimlet eye over Duke University’s history department and its postmodern leanings. One faculty member, Professor Pete Sigal, will soon be shaping young minds with courses on colonial Latin American history and a seminar titled Sexual History around the Globe. A synopsis of the seminar asks, somewhat breathlessly:

“What does it mean to sexualize history? How does the historical narrative change as we use sexuality as our reading practice? What happens to the sign of history when confronted with the sign of sexuality? …When we read a military history, we will ask not just about sexuality as a topic within the military (Did soldiers have sex with other soldiers? Did soldiers impregnate prostitutes?), but also about sexuality as a reading process. What happens when we centre our entire analysis of the military by sexualizing the bodies of the soldiers?” 

Heavens. Somebody hand that man a towel.

Professor Sigal is, clearly, eager to “confront” students with the question: “What happens when we focus a feminist and queer analysis on history?” To resolve this burning issue, Johnson turns to Sigal’s previous scholarship, most notably his book, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. The “historical” themes explored by Sigal include The Phallus Without a Body and Transsexuality and the Floating Phallus.

In the comments to this, a reader, Vitruvius, posted an extract from Alan Charles Kors’ 2003 essay, Can There Be An ‘After Socialism’? I think it’s worth sharing, as it touches on a number of recent comments here, most notably with regard to oppositional posturing, redefinitions of prejudice and the ideological denial of reality.

“Until Socialism… is confronted with its lived reality, the greatest atrocities of all recorded human life, we will not live ‘after Socialism.’ It will not happen. The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture – free markets and individual rights – that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life…

The cognitive behaviour of Western intellectuals faced with the accomplishments of their own society on the one hand, and with the Socialist ideal, and then the Socialist reality, on the other, takes one’s breath away. In the midst of unparalleled social mobility in the West, they cry ‘caste’. In a society of munificent goods and services, they cry either ‘poverty’ or ‘consumerism’. In a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives, they cry ‘alienation’. In a society that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians to an extent that no one could have dreamed possible just fifty years ago, they cry ‘oppression’… 

In the names of fantasy worlds and mystical perfections, they have closed themselves to the Western, liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction. Like Marx, they put words like ‘liberty’ in quotation marks when these refer to the West….”

The full essay can be read here. Related, this and this. Let the rumblings begin. And, of course, feel free to make a donation.

Further to yesterday’s post on Judith Butler and her opaque prose, I thought I’d add a few thoughts. One commenter, Dr Dawg, has argued that Butler is making a point, albeit badly:

I think this misses an important point. The issue, I think, hinges on whether you regard the opacity of Butler’s statement, and of many others I’ve highlighted, as a result of ineptitude or something more deliberate. Is it a mistake, a technical necessity, or a stylistic affectation and convenient camouflage? It seems to me that mere clumsiness doesn’t explain the prevalence and uniformity of those “mistakes” among leftwing PoMo academics. It seems much more likely that this habitual and remarkably uniform obscurantism is a determined effort – specifically, an attempt to hide the slightness of certain ideas and their various assumptions and contradictions.

The issue, as I see it, is one of bad faith. Hiding a small and tendentious idea, or no idea at all, inside Very Big Language is not a promising indicator of good character, honesty or wisdom. As I’ve argued elsewhere, one might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is. In this respect, one might see the PoMo phenomenon as not so much a loose collection of often disreputable ideas, but more as a rhetorical tactic employed by narcissists, ideologues and academic shysters.

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.

Further to this, here’s a little more from Keith Windschuttle’s lecture, History, Truth and Tribalism:

“One reason I chose to cite this passage from Bhabha* was because… it contains terminology such as ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’, which no self-respecting, theoretically correct postmodernist would use today. For these are terms that derive from the now out-of-date theory of structuralism, which has since been completely superseded by the theory of poststructuralism. One index of the achievements of academic theory today can be gauged by its waste matter; that is, the range of concepts and methods jettisoned along the way to its present position. The great majority of these concepts were adopted not because of their intellectual weight or clarity but because they were mouthed by whoever was the then prevailing theoretical guru…

No-one bothers any more with once solemnly-made distinctions within the field of semiotics between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ or between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Indeed, whatever happened to semiotics? All these concepts are now museum pieces. Yet in the 1980s, each was taught as gospel by the same people who are now recommending a postmodernist or a cultural studies approach as the definitive word on their subject. One can only feel terribly sorry for the generations of humanities students once forced to dutifully learn and regurgitate these now dead and useless concepts.”

*Homi Bhabha, former professor of English at the University of Chicago and a “leading voice in post-colonial studies.”