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proximoception) wrote2011-09-28 12:55 am
proximoception) wrote2011-09-28 12:55 am
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Shouldn't have read Barthes so close to appointed bedtime.
Not that I much mind him. He writes annoyingly, as translated, but I've had worse, and have read bits of him before so knew to expect some such -ness. And his enthusiasm is touching - he really did think he was suggesting something liberating, or naming a liberation already in progress.
And doubtless it is a liberation - not what he's suggesting, but the various stuffed substitutes one can convince oneself resemble how the Barthernet, the text-making about text that knows it's text, might manifest. They liberate from the fear that you might not be doing it right, that you don't understand the work as well as others. Whereas the text, as defined by Barthes, anyone can understand as well as anyone else, after all. He does keep it open to the system people, grudgingly, or anyway the three or four groups of them he presumably had to socialize with. And even if he hadn't left that opening they would have taken it - theory is vulnerable to these folks in exactly the way literature departments were vulnerable to theory: where there is transcendence without certainty the first passing huckster promising their merger, at some cost appearing trivial but in the small print compromising everything, will take over. Transcending transcendence, getting above any measure of high and low, must be remarkably appealing to those who fear they're mediocre, justly or not.
And especially so in a gradated hierarchical system where advancement must be to an inevitably large (but not total) extent arbitrary, like in literary studies. The anxiety that what you're doing might be worthless gets added to your fear you're doing it worthlessly, and in cases where mispromotion has occurred the mispromoted will be dealing with a number of underlings with more talent than themselves at understanding areas where training can only be of limited value. I'd add too the special problem of the increasingly non-fictional orientation in most readers as they age - students of poetry and imaginative essays being less vulnerable to this, maybe, but still affected. You want to put away childish things, or anyway move from a value to a knowledge footing, but value is what got you into this mess: unless you're a true believer, someone who knows just what they found in literature in the first place, the tendency to fall out of love with the works and consequent need to establish some other relationship with them (since they're still your job) will make certainty-movements - including equally certain certainty-destroying movements - awfully tempting.
And there's just enough '60s in there still to appeal to the '60s in some of the young. But - like the rest of the '60s - it's not quite the right kind of '60s.
Not that I much mind him. He writes annoyingly, as translated, but I've had worse, and have read bits of him before so knew to expect some such -ness. And his enthusiasm is touching - he really did think he was suggesting something liberating, or naming a liberation already in progress.
And doubtless it is a liberation - not what he's suggesting, but the various stuffed substitutes one can convince oneself resemble how the Barthernet, the text-making about text that knows it's text, might manifest. They liberate from the fear that you might not be doing it right, that you don't understand the work as well as others. Whereas the text, as defined by Barthes, anyone can understand as well as anyone else, after all. He does keep it open to the system people, grudgingly, or anyway the three or four groups of them he presumably had to socialize with. And even if he hadn't left that opening they would have taken it - theory is vulnerable to these folks in exactly the way literature departments were vulnerable to theory: where there is transcendence without certainty the first passing huckster promising their merger, at some cost appearing trivial but in the small print compromising everything, will take over. Transcending transcendence, getting above any measure of high and low, must be remarkably appealing to those who fear they're mediocre, justly or not.
And especially so in a gradated hierarchical system where advancement must be to an inevitably large (but not total) extent arbitrary, like in literary studies. The anxiety that what you're doing might be worthless gets added to your fear you're doing it worthlessly, and in cases where mispromotion has occurred the mispromoted will be dealing with a number of underlings with more talent than themselves at understanding areas where training can only be of limited value. I'd add too the special problem of the increasingly non-fictional orientation in most readers as they age - students of poetry and imaginative essays being less vulnerable to this, maybe, but still affected. You want to put away childish things, or anyway move from a value to a knowledge footing, but value is what got you into this mess: unless you're a true believer, someone who knows just what they found in literature in the first place, the tendency to fall out of love with the works and consequent need to establish some other relationship with them (since they're still your job) will make certainty-movements - including equally certain certainty-destroying movements - awfully tempting.
And there's just enough '60s in there still to appeal to the '60s in some of the young. But - like the rest of the '60s - it's not quite the right kind of '60s.
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I enjoyed deleuze for describing things that exist in poetry all the time (enormous middleness, interconnection), and also that they didn't take themselves quite as seriously as some of the others.
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The structuralism project wasn't terribly antifascist, but I guess French leftists are never not thinking about fascism - though I think there was a half-artificial coincidence of its entering its terminal, self-critique phase with the political movement that crested in '68. Both did have something to do with disgust at the imperiousness of French education, the practice of absolute answers handed down from on high. But I think the post people actually used the broader political movement as a way to get some power in the French universities - syncing their ideas to the protest bullhorn, in some cases rather incongruously. Their rhetoric intensifies a heck of a lot over a two or three year period, there.
The appeal is this: there is a special revelation that requires special training to understand, connected to gradated institutional success, hence a pyramid scheme, but one that denies it's a pyramid scheme because the alleged revealed truth has to do with taking down hierarchies. Authoritarianism has been reattached to language itself, which ate thought under this system, hence to thought itself - even after the departments were taken over the self-perpetuating priest class could, like, disseminate stuff from that platform that would feed a broader liberation. It didn't and isn't likely to, and that fact is part of what's weakened it. Another part is its own obvious authoritarian developments.
And most importantly the new generation of replacements finds most of this inscrutable when they hear about it - it's not just intricate and obfuscatory, but addresses someone else's needs. But a lot of the terms and cache of theory have been borrowed by people with specific political grievances, and they're still able to recruit because people are still being aggrieved, so even as the boomer set retires there will still be a zombie theory annex about.
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