Sunday, November 29, 2009

Agreeing and Disagreeing with Terry Eagleton

I jumped into this text knowing a couple of things about Eagleton: (1) he is a marxist, (2) the last piece we read by him was just this side of unintelligible. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to find the blurbs on the book to be accurate: Eagleton is both articulate (something the other article was surely not. Intelligent: absolutely; Articulate: absolutely not) and witty.

(I suppose writing must be like abstract art, demonstrate that you are able to communicate in the medium so that Joe average can understand you for a long enough time and you then get blanket permission to be incredibly obtuse and impenetrable in any further attempts at communication with the public. Ah well. But I digress...)

I have posted several times this semester on the fate of knowledge in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. I maintain my argument developed in a previous post that the accepting of any givens in this intellectual climate is an act of faith, as there are no longer universal givens to which we can appeal even at a cultural level. Renee, in replying to my previous post suggested that it can be a form of intellectual laziness to reject truth as it allows one to sit back and refuse to do any heavy lifting intellectually or morally ("if not everyone's take on reality carried equal validity--well, just how many apple carts would that upset? At very least, many individuals would need to make some substantial changes--this would involve getting up off their butts [figurative and literal]"). Relativism, in this view would be the equivalent of ditching one's homework, or refusing to take responsibility for one's actions/life by abdicating all decision making on the grounds that all choices are absolutely equal and it is impossible to determine between them. How much rage can be generated over a crimes or injustices of any kind and how hypocritical is any form of law or restriction if we truly believe that there is no truth, that there are no absolutes?

I agree with Eagleton's arguments in favor of truth, and with Renee's about the intellectual laziness underlying relativism. When Eagleton said that "Principles can be flexible and still be principles" (144) I wanted to stand up and cheer. (Incidentally, I think if you injected that thought into the brains of those "serving" in Washington, most of their heads would explode.)

Unfortunately for Eagleton, comparing arguments about the truth of physical statements (There is a tiger in the room, for example) with arguments about truth and other abstract ideals is comparing apples and oranges. Given our limited knowledge of Reality and the mind's shaping power in creating the world we perceive, one has to make certain assumptions that Eagleton takes for granted before one is even able to have the discussion he wants. Eagleton is able to make these arguments and they appeal - indeed, they seem ultimately logical - to those who agree that there is some center around which the world functions.

It isn't necessary to agree on that center, or even to have an entirely clear idea of what that center is, only the agreement that there is one is necessary. If it is there, than there is truth (at least of a kind) and we can then move to discussing its nature. In comparing Marxism to postmodernism and post-structuralism (or at least in comparing Eagleton's marxism to these theories) one discovers that Marxism has far more in common with traditional, idealistic thought than it does with these modern "theories." Marxism assumes a center - history, i.e. class struggle - and attributes everything at (varying removes) to the effects of this conflict. This is far closer to putting the Gospel at the center of one's world view than it is to accepting a centerless, relative world. In fact, the de-centered reality posited by post-structuralism and postmodernism is anathema to Marxism, because if history isn't the center (or if it is one of many centers, or if there is no center, or the center is unknowable) than not only their argument but their world collapses.

The point? At the risk of beating a dead horse the systematic destruction of all of the pillars of epistemology on which our culture was built by the extreme ends of rationalism and postmodern/post-structuralist thought makes the choosing of any center arbitrary. Without a center there are no givens, everything is truly in freeplay. As Eagleton's argument assumes a number of unvoiced givens, it requires a center to make sense.

Nothing has yet replaced these traditional ideals and values as unifying elements in this brave new world. Instead as Eagleton notes, we are left with freedom alone to guide us, and we find that threatening, because in our experience on this planet anything goes generally means a whole lot of bad stuff happens. So we cast about in search of something to cling to, something that will make this existence tolerable. Or alternately, we ignore the implications of the thought shaping the world around us.

Before we can accept Eagleton's arguments as common sense and move toward any of the reforms he implicitly calls for we must discover givens that we can share (Eagleton posits several here: truth, virtue, species-nature, love [agape], not to mention good old history/class struggle) at least enough to create a common world where we're able to talk to each other and begin the process of developing that "consensual morality" that President Obama talked about on the very first day of class. Only once we have discovered the value in greater unity as a goal, and stopped fetishizing change and difference for their own sake, will we even be able to get large numbers of people sufficiently together to begin the conversation that Eagleton demands in this text. We must literally restore a common reality (at least to a greater extent than we now have one) before we can move forward in any significant way.


Sunday, November 15, 2009

What if it's ALL constructed?

As I have most enjoyed looking at our two "Posts" this semester (Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism) I was fascinated by the following quote from page 139 of Barry's "Lesbian/gay criticism"chapter: "all identities, including gender identities, are 'a kind of impersonation and approximation...a kind of imitation for which there is no original.' As the text goes on to point out, if this "anti-essentialist" line is taken to its logical conclusion, "identity [is seen] as a a series of masks, roles, and potentialities, a kind of amalgam of everything which is provisional, contingent, and improvisatory" (140). If that is the case, than these identity based theories of culture and literature seem to be baseless...of course if Postmodernism and Poststructuralism are right, everything is meaningless, as there is not and cannot be a center, and even the idea of meaning as we have traditionally understood it is impossible because nothing is fixed.

So whither then the identity based politics and theoretical approaches we've encountered so very many times throughout our varied associations with literature in schools of whatever level? If this is true they would seem an inadequate way of facing the world, much less trying to understand it. An interesting point is made by Barry, which I am embarrassed to say I hadn't thought of, because it seems so obvious after the fact (that's how smart people work though, right? They challenge us by making new and complex ideas seem obvious and straight forward...if only I could do that....), that the opposite of identity politics is class politics. Duh! The opposite of the individual is the group, the opposite of individualism is collectivism, and the opposite of identity politics is group or class politics.

However, by the nature of the argument - one pulling on poststructuralist and postmodernist thought to demonstrate the failure of dualities - the idea of class politics as a replacement must also be questioned. Interesting. If we don't have identity or class politics (because the failure of one half of the duality must mean the failure of both if this self/other dichotomy is interdependent as Barry indicates [139]) what are left with? Would we stop beating each other over the head with meaningless labels and try to accomplish something? Heaven forbid.

The great result of the twentieth century's pursuit of theoretical knowledge is to prove over and over again that such knowledge is impossible, because, according to our greatest modern thinkers, we have no comfortable, accepted epistemological basis from which to know or understand anything, nor can we. Everything, including sexuality etc., is in post-structuralist freeplay, nothing is real: "everything is a model or an image, all is surface without depth; this is the hyperreal" (Barry 86). If followed to its logical extreme, modern thought cuts us all off from each other, denies our existence (If there is no individuality, no free-will, however limited, we don't exist at all, we are merely manifestations of outside forces. And, if nothing is real, and then what is doing the constructing of these identities that we don't actually have?), and leaves us with no possibility for proving otherwise, because modern thought invalidates all means of knowing. Reducing any claim to knowledge to an act of faith that must first arbitrarily choose its own givens and overcome postmodern/poststructuralist doubt over the very existence of reality itself.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Pathetically late without excuse!

I have to admit that arriving at the end of the introductory piece in which Greenblatt asserts his essentially Marxist premises and then being tantalized by the beginning of chapter two in which he actually employs the ideas of new-historical co-reading as discussed in Barry (172) was disappointing, that was the aspect I was interested in...but I digress.
Greenblatt spends the first chapter revealing the clear ties to Marxism that underly New-Historicism:

1. There can be no appeals to genius as the sole origin of the energies of great art.
2. There can be no motiveless creation....
6. There can be no art without social energy.... (12)

"The theater is manifestly the product of collective intentions" (4).
"The theater manifestly addresses its audience as a collectivity" (5).
"There is no escape from contingency" (3).
"They are signs of the inescapability of a historical process, a structured negotiation and exchange..."(6).

These as well as the emphasis on the transference and exchange of social energy as the purpose of artistic endeavor, and the emphasis on the practicality of nearly everyone involved in theatrical production, and the constant reference to the controlling influence of political factors on artistic creation, all reflect a distinctly Marxist tie.

It is left to us then to distinguish why it is we read this piece when it seems so clearly repetitive. And that must be that the emphasis on history qua history and not only on history as process. while the understanding of history (with the insistence on exchange, different forms of capital, and political control of artistic production) seems pointedly Marxist, it is not a general reading of economic factors reflected in the text, but a grounding of the text very specifically and independently in the history of its time in a dialectical manner. Greenblatt emphasizes that there is a co-creation between the history and the art. The Play creating the audience as the audience helps create the play.

Therefore, to my reading, I would conclude that the ties between history (class struggle) and art are (while not "vulgar" and strictly deterministic of the entire nature of any given piece) at least a lot closer than our previous Marxists (Hello, Eagleton) allowed for, and seems to stretch to encompass some of Biordieu's various forms of capital with perhaps a new one in this social energy...I'm not entirely sure what it is. I mean, art is the product, the effect of social energy, but while energia was defined I was never satisfied that I understood what was meant by social energy.

Ah well, given the speed with which it is written and the lack of time to read it over I am forced to assume the incoherence of this piece, but I'm now - perhaps even more than last week - out of time.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Beware the Thought Police

I am at pains to determine whether Bourdieu approves of the things he is saying/doing or if he (like a good descriptive grammarian) is merely describing what he sees of society.

For example: he continually discusses the language of women, particularly women who are part of various dominated linguistic competencies as "docile," "submissive," etc. and often refers to the sexual division of labor, which seems obviously (even here) to be a product of society. However, I'm having difficulty determining if the position of women as he describes them is due to society and the sexual division of labor, or if he sees these character traits that he attributes to them as somehow natural.

Again, the language arts instructor (and by implication the literature instructor/student/producer - which, is by implication all of us as students specializing in literature and literary theory, composition and rhetoric, and or creative writing) is labeled quite clearly as at least the unwitting tool if not the agent of the dominant forces in society (see pages 48 - 49 for the education system in general and, grammarians in particular, pages 55 - 56 for "training" and its implicitly unequal distribution among various classes/competencies, and pages 59 - 61 for the effect/role of not just literature, but the very idea of literary language as a conservative force opposed to popular speech). In fact Bourdieu names "the schoolmaster" a "maitre de penser" or "master[re:teacher] of thinking" whose primary function is to socialize the students to linguistic norms and therefore - how would one say it? - thought norms: "'In teaching the same clear, fixed language to children who know it only very vaguely or who even speak various dialects or patois, he is already inclining them quite naturally to see and feel things in the same way; and he works to build the common consciousness of the nation'" (Davy as qtd. in Bourdieu 49).

Bourdieu makes a compelling case for the symbolic violence inherent in such a situation. In another location (one I cannot find in the text at the moment - alas, the dangers of reading without a pencil!) he refers to the education process inculcating the dominant linguistic form or official language, as a way of killing the mode of expression of those whose linguistic competence is other than the dominant form. And he is right. He indicates that the teacher of language is primarily a socializing influence, working to enforce the strictures of a dead language (in that it is a variant of the living language that exists only in artificiality) in order to banish the undesirable elements of the various varieties (dialects, patois, "popular speech") which are arbitrarily deemed unacceptable by those in the power to determine the strictures of official language. He points to the tying of the linguistic market to the labor market in that the requirements for acceptance into the higher levels of the labor market are limited to those who demonstrate academic (and thus linguistic) proficiency. Thus the educational agenda (re: socializing agenda) is pursued under the guise of promoting the future economic opportunities of those being educated. He even refers to trying to promote the speaking of a given language or style at home in the interests of the children's welfare.

Given his effective and stringent critique of language as a form of capital and of linguistic capital as a good unequally distributed and of the public schools as tools in perpetuating the domination of those with the highest linguistic competencies, what are the alternatives?

I am about halfway through the text and Bourdieu has got me fired up for the presentation of some alternative (other than an anarchic existence in which nationhood is dropped so as not to oppress anyone by enforcing/creating the necessary uniform manner of communication for any basic type of unity) to the status quo, but at this point there isn't any, and in the appendix to part I, it seems that as teachers, the "cult of virility" of the lower classes ensures that we cannot reach them and provide them with the linguistic competencies to advance their situation even if we wanted to.

I guess I'm looking for some practical application of the ideas that would offer an alternative to the status quo. As far as I can see, Bourdieu seems to be indicating that this situation is inherent in the nation state as it exists. Does that mean that we have to achieve utopian anarchy before we can apply these ideas in a constructive fashion? Some hope, please!