The Inspector-General of Misconception (15 page)

In a mature culture such as Australia, it does not mean the production of only hybrid forms or creativity inspired by overseas movements. But an economically weak or under-resourced culture can be overwhelmed by a more dynamic outside culture such as the US, at least temporarily.

Government policies have been used to ‘protect' the culture from outside influences, especially in some Asian and Islamic countries, but also in Australia from time to time.

The big virtue of the Cosmopolitan Tradition is that it is inclusive.

It would find things to admire in writing which came out of any of the above ideological positions: the reverse is not true.

And finally, the Cosmopolitan Tradition has woven in it a certain raffishness. It proclaims a disdain for art which defends itself as socially redeeming.

The Cosmopolitan Tradition does not, at its best, seek political or artistic respectability.

It is, to quote Oscar Wilde's mother (for once) in describing her family, as ‘above respectability'. It is a position that, like the Wildes, can be romantically
arrogant about the supreme rights of the imagination.

However. The interesting thing about the above chart of the literary or arts ideologies is that they have not yet been debated at conferences or festival panels.

They remain hidden in committee argument.

Some, such as the Separatists would argue that ‘open discussion' is only part of the oppression.

But it is perhaps about time that the positions were dragged out from their smoke-free back rooms into the intellectual glare.

The Inspectorate has been asked as a matter of urgency to investigate the alarm around the words ‘deconstruction', ‘post-modern', and ‘post-structuralist'.

Author Christopher Koch raised the flurry on the prize-giving night of the Miles Franklin Award when he said that deconstructionism (and ‘post-structuralists') ‘seeks to discredit and destroy all natural genius, all true originality. Behind it stands the shadow of totalitarianism; of thought control.'

He called on the young to rise up against their deconstructing masters.

In the
Australian
newspaper a few days later, he was joined by Jonathan Bowden, a painter, who further stirred the flurry by stating that deconstructionists (and post-modernists) wanted to destroy beauty.

‘So far as they say anything at all, they say do whatever
you like, believe whatever you like, think whatever you like.'

We would like to say at this point that this does not sound to us like a prescription for totalitarianism. It may be a prescription for mindlessness but not for control by an encompassing state doctrine.

Whatever other charges may be substantiated against the demons (we will consider deconstruction, post-structuralists and post-modernists as the one defendant for purposes of this controversy), we dismiss the charge of post-modernism or deconstruction being a ‘totalitarian' movement
by definition
.

Editorials expressing the fear of deconstruction have also appeared in some of the major newspapers.

We inquired of those scholars around us. What is deconstruction? What is post-modernism?

The short answer came back thus: Deconstruction, a theory which took hold in the seventies, is an intellectual tool by which the critic attempts to know things about an imaginative work that the work cannot know about itself (that is, if the critic is good enough and the theory being applied useful enough).

At its most benign it is a critical search for the other ideological meanings concealed within the work and an investigation of the political or philosophical main-springs of the imaginative work. It is also an investigation of the philosophical basis for ‘art'.

The Inquiry applauds this. We, ourselves, enjoy a good hidden meaning.

However, we have found that some ‘searches' for
hidden meanings are usually undertaken in the service of ideologies or value systems which are themselves deeply problematic eg. Marxism, or still-emerging, gender theory.

The value or weight or precision of most ‘hidden meanings' when allegedly discovered are themselves open to sophisticated dispute.

And it is ever thus. And it is true that we cannot suspend all judgments until our hypotheses have matured. We should though, tread softly and temper our judgments conscious of the central truth which cultural studies gives us – that is, the unreliability and changeability of ideologies and critical systems.

The Old Lefties were true Enemies of the Imagination and their state systems demonstrated this, rather than the deconstructionists who are, in fact, seen as enemies of the Left.

Marxist literary critic (although his Marxist credentials are now under question by whoever it is that questions Marxist credentials these days) Fredric Jameson argues that, ‘pleasing, exciting and beautiful stories promote an acquiescence to, and even identification with, the relations of domination and subordination so peculiar to the late capitalist social order …'

‘Nothing can be more satisfying to a Marxist teacher,' says Jameson, ‘than to break this fascination for students.'

Paul de Man, the leading deconstructionist theorist, does share something of this incapacity to enjoy art as art. But deconstructionists are not a state-in-waiting.

He was determined not to succumb to the seduction
of art and his work offers negative accounts of the aesthetic pleasure.

As Wendy Steiner, a former student and now leading literary scholar says, ‘It takes a real devotee [of de Man] to be satisfied with only such theoretical revelations.'

She says that although his discoveries are often breathtakingly ingenious, it is ultimately a limited story that he has to tell.

To quote de Man himself, ‘The intention of art is to give knowledge neither of empirical reality nor of transcendental Being, but of its own particular being.'

No great truths in little old novels, for Paul de Man.

As frightening to the imaginative writer as these statements may sound, the Inquiry feels that they show a limited intellectual understanding (by the critics who speak like this) of the complexities of the readers' involvement with the works of the imagination.

These Old Lefties are anti-deconstructionist because of deconstruction's preoccupation with art (rather than politics and economics).

They see it as a ‘throwback … to the dandyist aestheticism of the 1890s, a displaced religion of art.'

Deconstruction does try to spin a theoretical narrative in competition with the imaginative work and in doing so, as many have noted, at its best, spins its own beguiling imaginative work.

At its most common, it spins jargon which has as its purpose the testifying to the academic writer's claims to be a member of the cult.

The Inquiry identifies the following Five Great Bogeys of Deconstruction:

a) that it says there is no fixed meaning of a book and that everyone reads it differently thus diminishing the traditional mastery of the author (and, presumably, the theorist as well).

Ruling:
There is empirical evidence in reviews and discussion that a consistent set of meanings can be conveyed by a book and that, at the same time, every reading is a private and unique reading. This is not contradictory. We all bring the same and different things to a book – our shared socialisation and our highly personal experiences.

b) that deconstruction, by analysis of ‘those things the imaginative work cannot know itself or teach itself' destroys beauty and frustrates the appreciation of artistry.

Witness McKenzie Wark answers: ‘What is beauty? A philosophically trained mind responds to such a question by reasoning about it.'

McKenzie points out that the aware person both enjoys the sensation of exposure to what they perceive as beauty as well as being able at times to inquire into the nature of beauty and to ponder the disagreements about the nature of beauty.

That is, the aware person has Proust on his shelves
and
Roland Barthes.

Ruling:
We rule that the book can be read both for the pleasure of the pure entrancing power of storytelling and its use of language and it can also be read as a social artefact revealing much about the author and the society which produced it and its times, and read as an example
of the philosophical dilemmas of ‘art' (which is not to deny that some critics do not know how to
enjoy
the game of art; that some critics ‘hate' art and can only enjoy theorising about art, including perhaps de Man himself, as, in turn, some who enjoy art cannot enjoy theorising).

Marxist critics such as Jameson and deconstructionists who hold to this position are unable to chew gum and play the yo-yo at the same time. And they mistake the cheque book for the money.

It reminds the Inquiry of the fear that once existed that Freud, by enabling us to study sexuality in a new way, would take away the pleasure of sex. We have evidence that it didn't. And he was another theorist who is used in attempts to ‘unmask' art.

c) that deconstruction reduces all written work to the same level – Shakespeare to the level of a bus ticket.

We call Rosemary Sorenson, former editor of
Australian Book Review
. ‘The point of the early structuralist theorising was not that there is no difference, but that it would be helpful for people who are trained and committed to language study to develop theories that could be applied to all kinds of writing, whether it's a bus ticket or a legal document, a novel or a cave painting … we know there's a difference … the theories of the deconstructionists … are attempts to further our knowledge, not to destroy our pleasure.'

d) that the literary theorist will emerge as more important than the imaginative creator of a literary work.

We rule on proposition (d) without further discussion:

Our Ruling:
Fat chance
. The power of the imagination is forever illustrated by the variety of critical theories thrown up in efforts to come to intellectual terms with the imaginative works (and the Inquiry wishes to state that theorising itself sometimes creates fascinating intellectual narratives and speculations).

It should also be pointed out that those who studied with the great theorists did not themselves all become disciples. Wendy Steiner studied at Yale under de Man and did not herself become a deconstructionist nor did others who studied under de Man and who went on to teach literature.

Deconstructionist theory is not a universally compelling nor convincing theory before which all students fall down and worship.

Good academic teachers are able to present a cultural overview rather than being simply disciples of someone else's theories.

Good teachers have the special talent of teaching all sides of a critical theory. They can do the full circle.

They see and teach the history of intellectual fashions and movements knowing that their own favoured theoretical explanation of reality is just as likely to sink into the chasm of the history of ideas.

The Inquiry has found that the Fear of the Professors is common among writers and it goes back some distance in time.

The Inquiry has before it an earlier example of the Fear of the Professors.

At the outbreak of World War One, there was a theory
‘that the transformation of the German people from a beneficent moral force to an evil one is all the work of false philosophy advocated by a few professors and writers … the war has but one basic and fundamental cause: the false theories of the professors, the false ideals of the ideologues. Nietzsche, Treitschke and their school …'

Of fearing the critic's power, more later.

e) that at its extreme, deconstructionism argues that there is no universality in art.

The Inquiry feels that this is so obviously true that it hardly needs proving (a person from the stone age is hardly going to enjoy Eliot's ‘The Waste Land') and nor is most of the population of either contemporary London or Eliot's London.

The Inquiry would have thought that it is of even greater interest that some imaginative works continue to have power both with the intelligentsia and wider readerships across centuries and across cultures if not universally.

We now turn to the fear of being destroyed by the Professors experienced by imaginative writers.

The felt fragility of a work of the imagination and the likelihood of it being misunderstood or failing is a torment of great agony. That much imaginative work is created in isolation over a long period also places the creator at the prey of demons.

Most writers wish to be treated in the way described by Jonathan Swift in his ‘defence' of
Gulliver's Travels
and his argument that the work is ‘critic proof'.

And so, in conclusion, we now call the former lack
adaisical Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, and iconoclast, Jonathan Swift.

Swift said of his work
Gulliver's Travels
:

Well put. Thank you Dean. The dream of every writer.

Quite unusually, the public gallery and the staff of the Inspectorate broke into applause of appreciation of the delicious irony of this now quite elderly writer who has survived many waves of critical theory since 1726 to arrive again before us, this time in a television adaptation of
Gulliver's Travels.

However, we rush to state that the Inspectorate is not
resting in the false security of Ho Hum, as in ‘ho hum, it has all happened before'.

The Inspectorate acknowledges that at some times there are real and serious threats to the freedom of the imagination and readers may rest assured that we will continue to pursue such enemies relentlessly.

The Inquiry believes that it is important that arts education does two things: To preserve, appreciate, explicate and provide for the orderly communication of our arts heritage; and to teach students to think critically so as to be able to test any claim or assumption of any authority using any method that human intelligence and reason can devise.

Art, along with theories, has to be able to withstand any testing or contest.

But in this controversy we fear that the demons are within.

Final Ruling:
Calm down, everyone.