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 his
guy gives a piece of matzoh to a blind man. The blind man says,
"Who writes this stuff?"
Now if you
don't get that, it's probably because you don't know what matzoh
is — it's that flat, crackery unleavened bread my people first
started eating when we had to blow out of Egypt in a rush. The blind
guy thinks it's Braille… get it?
Now, consider
this:
If, for a
while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline
soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific
theories, superstition, spurious authorities and classifications
can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally
the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the
rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
If you don't
get that, it's because you are a relatively smart and reasonable
person.
Maybe I'm revealing
too much about my middle-brow-ness, but I think the bumps on a piece
of matzoh are more decipherable to a blind man than this passage.
Who wrote it?
Well, Homi Bhabha of course. Who's Homi Bhabha? Where've you been,
buddy? Homi's one of the hottest "post-colonial theorists"
in the world — which is not unlike saying "the best Octoberfest
in Orlando."
When Harvard
snatched this "prize catch" from the University of Chicago,
according to the New York Times, it was "regarded as
a major coup, as if Sammy Sosa had defected to the Boston Red Sox."
The chairman of the English department declared, "He's manifestly
one of the most distinguished cultural theorists of the postcolonial
and diasporic experience in the world." Henry Louis Gates Jr.,
chairman of the Afro-American studies department, told the Times,
"It was our dream to get Homi Bhabha."
Now, don't
worry, I'm not going to spend any more time on postmodernism and
post-colonial gobbledygook today. I'm not even going to talk about
Homi Bhabha that much. Though I should note that the above passage,
by the "Sammy Sosa" of the academic world, came in second
in Philosophy and Literature's annual bad writing contest.
The winner came from Judith Butler, a gender theorist at Berkeley.
Her entry:
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 cram so
much indecipherability into a single sentence is the linguistic
equivalent of stuffing ten pounds of manure into a five-pound bag.
Anyway, I have
nothing to say about the "substance" of Ms. Butler's comments
either — largely because I have no idea what she's saying (though
my college exposure to much more gender theory than post-colonial
theory makes it a bit less indecipherable than the other passage,
I'm ashamed to say).
Denis Dutton,
the editor who launched the bad writing contest (and who launched
the incalculably valuable site Arts
& Letters Daily), summed it up nicely: "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."
Orphaning
Orwell
I'm not sure I totally agree with that. In fact, I think miscommunication
has everything to do with it. But I'm sure Dutton would agree with
me when I say that if George Orwell were alive today, he would beat
these people into submission with a London phonebook.
Why drag Orwell
into this? Well, because he is the secular saint of clean writing
and clear thinking.
Orwell argued
that bad thinking and bad language are, in the parlance of today's
twelve-step culture, mutual enablers. "A man may take to drink
because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the
more completely because he drinks," Orwell noted by way of
illustration. The English language "becomes ugly and inaccurate
because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language
makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."
This was especially
true in the realm of political speech. He noted in his brilliant
1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" that "In
our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of
the indefensible." The "transfer of populations"
or the "elimination of unreliable elements" were, for
example, what people say when they really mean, "I believe
in killing my opponents when I can get good results by doing so."
Orwell's essay
could have been written today, and if you haven't read it, you should.
Indeed, some of his observations are flatly depressing because they
reveal how bad things have been for so long. For example, Orwell
writes: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except
in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" Anybody
who's listened to some college kid — or professor — denounce
some new on-campus parking policy or a change in financial aid as
"fascist," knows exactly what Orwell's talking about.
That the English
language has not improved much since Orwell's day in a sense makes
the current plight much more unforgivable. Orwell was writing during
perhaps the most political age in human history. In the period from,
say, 1930 to 1950, more people's lives were changed or ended by
the demands of politics than during any other. Orwell often wrote
about the moral obligation he felt to write on political issues
because politics was killing people. As he illustrated in 1984,
the crime of totalitarianism was only secondarily that it destroyed
language when it made lies into the truth — "War is Peace,"
"Freedom is Slavery," "Ignorance is Strength,"
2+2 equals whatever the state tells you it means.
No, the crime
of totalitarianism was first and foremost that it killed and brutalized
people. The abuse of language was just the cover-up which, like
with booze and the boozer, made ever more heinous atrocities possible.
Orwell writes: "People are imprisoned for years without trial,
or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic
lumber camps: This is called elimination of unreliable elements.
Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling
up the mental pictures of them."
Standing
Orwell on His Head
Today, the situation is reversed. Here in America — the very
place the Homi Bhabhas and Judith Butlers denounce as "hegemonic"
whatchamacallits and "enunciatory" thingamajigs —
there are no totalitarian crimes. They do not exist. America is
a lovely place. We are not "transferring populations"
or anything of the sort.
In Orwell's
day, the fog of jargon was a smoke screen to conceal real horrors;
today the jargon is just so much smoke, to hide the fact that there's
no fire. Read pretty much anything by Cornel West and you'll find
all sorts of euphemisms brimming with racial or anti-capitalist
sound and fury, signifying nothing.
This, in and
of itself, can be a moral horror of a different sort. Take the word
"ethnic cleansing" — a truly Orwellian word, worthy
of Stalin when describing what happened in the former Yugoslavia
or Rwanda. But here at home it turns Orwell on his head. Here it
is a euphemism to allege or elevate a "crime" that has
not occurred at all. For example, when Rudy Giuliani proposed curtailing
a remedial-reading program at City College, Bob Herbert of the New
York Times compared the move to "ethnic cleansing."
Imagine if Herbert had instead said, simply, "Mayor Giuliani
wants to round up underachieving black and Hispanic students and
shoot them in the back of the head." Using the plain meaning
of the phrase doesn't reveal the truth of Herbert's point of view,
it reveals that he's hysterical.
Start looking
around, you'll find dozens of similar examples. The common comparison
of various diseases, "global warming," and even the Florida
vote recount to the Holocaust comes to mind. So do the constant
misuses of the word "terrorism." Ken Lay isn't an "economic
terrorist," you know, he is at worst a white-collar criminal.
In fact, I like the word "terrorist" less and less in
any context. We aren't at war with generic "terrorists."
We are at war with Muslim fanatics. Calling them "terrorists"
may be more convenient for diplomatic purposes, but it is indisputably
less accurate. That is, unless you can point out a lot of radical
Presbyterians in al Qaeda.
Tyranny
of Euphemisms
Today's intellectual elite — the stars of Harvard and Berkeley
— speak in such gibberish precisely because if they spoke plainly,
clearing the smoke from their ideas, we'd learn that their views
cover the spectrum from boringly unoriginal to sand-poundingly stupid.
So-called "new theories" and "path-breaking approaches"
are most often little more than novel, but increasingly ugly, arrangements
of the same old deck chairs on the Lido deck of the Titanic.
Think about
the euphemisms in common currency on today's campuses. Invariably,
they're new clothes for old ideas the young and enlightened are
scared to admit they still enjoy. The "socially aware"
aren't left-wingers, and neither are "activists for social
change." The seeming neutrality of the phrases belies the obvious
fact that they imply a very specific form of "social change"
— otherwise the KKK would be activists for social change too.
It also reveals the deep arrogance of the people who use them, because
their language assumes an objective truth. "Sustainable growth"
can only mean one form of Swedish economics, for example. "Tolerance"
means accepting "sexual minorities" — but mocking
religious majorities at every turn.
But, hey, that's
what makes them euphemisms. If "economic justice" could
mean something other than some flavor of socialism, they'd have
to come up with a new word for it. If "minority" could
refer to Finnish Americans, they'd have to run back to the drawing
board and come up with something else.
Last November,
the New York Times visited a guest lecture by Homi Bhabha
to a Harvard anthropology class. The course was entitled "Idealism
101," its mission to contemplate how to become "ethically
serious global citizens." Mr. Bhabha's remarks received "a
sustained round of applause," according to the Times.
This was "proof positive," said the class's regular professor,
"of what an agent of social change" Bhabha is.
The Times
story concludes: "Afterward, Emma Firestone, an 18-year-old
freshman, said that Mr. Bhabha had made a positive impression. Nevertheless,
she admitted, 'I couldn't exactly follow everything he said.'"
Of course,
if Bhabha was capable of explaining his ideas cogently, he would
either be teaching at some third-tier community college or he'd
be writing for The Nation. But one thing is certain: He'd
have bored little Emma Firestone to death.
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