‘

 
What an impression Kierkegaard makes when you first read him! Especially, I must add, if that first time happens to occur in adolescence. How electrifying, at that time of life, to encounter the statement “Subjectivity is truth.” Perhaps you had suspected that all along. But to have it indited there in black and white in the middle of a 576-page book of philosophy called Concluding Unscientific Postscript is something else again.


As my friend led me to bed, I thought: You really are 21 now. You got horribly drunk, dragged a guy to bed, and then got sick. Just like a made-for-TV movie. These thoughts were accompanied by an odd, abstracted rapture I have come to take for granted. For want of a better term, I’ll call it the rapture of irony. Halfway to my bed, I must have laughed out loud, because my friend asked, “What are you thinking about?” “The narrative,” was all I could manage. I wanted him to know that even in this humiliated, impaired state, I was fully cognizant of the mind boggling paradox of the situation. I may have been a walking cliché but at least I was self-conscious. As I drifted off into a tangle of dehydrated nightmares, I comforted myself with the thought that Theory had suffused my life so thoroughly that I couldn’t get laid, get drunk and get sick without paying homage to Roland Barthes’ notion of the “artifice of realism” or Baudrillard’s “simulacra.” Though now I live a practical life, with more actions and fewer theories, I still struggle with the convoluted mind-set of my higher education. Even after years of trying to acclimate myself to a more concrete world, this odd theology lives in me — so much so that it is only recently that I have recognized it for what it is: a religious doctrine. I am a child of Theory. I avoided this truth because I didn’t want to confront the deep, strange river of pretentiousness that courses in my veins. But lately I’ve begun to think my predicament is less reflective of a private eccentricity than of a weird historical moment. The moment when the most arcane, elitist mental gymnastics — Theory in all its hybrid forms — was reborn as sexy, politically radical action.

 
According to Garber, these feuds are essentially unstable, rife with a “doubleness” that precludes any side from ever triumphing over another. As with cross-dressing, and bisexuality before it, Garber’s point in Academic Instincts is that we should not — we cannot! — help but look beyond the false binarity of these intellectual constructs and appreciate the exhilarating cacophony of “the conversation of mankind,” a phrase she borrows from Richard Rorty (who is, in turn, echoing Michael Oakeshott). “The point is not to choose the right inflection for each term but to show how intellectual life arises out of their changing relationship to each other,” she writes. More succinctly, Garber’s point is never to choose anything. With Raphael’s School of Athens as her talisman (“a transcendent, multitemporal, interdisciplinary moment in which everything in intellectual life is in the process of being discussed, negotiated, and remade”), Garber does what she does best: she champions a relatively uncontroversial thesis — human sexuality is multifarious, dogs are man’s best friend, people love their homes, vigorous discussion enhances intellectual life — with a panache that makes it feel at once daring and completely palatable. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Harvard’s wizened Board of Trustees slipped in a copy of Academic Instincts with its next request for alumni donations.) While her point may not be novel, the way she argues it is fascinating, both for itself and for the style of thinking it represents — a style that has become all too typical in cultural studies. Imagine Garber’s mind as a kind of intellectual black box from which every either/or proposition that enters exits in the form of a both/and conclusion. Once inside the black box, the either/or proposition is processed through a maze of checkpoints — fake segues, tendentious comparisons, deceptive syllogisms, overbroad generalizations, misleading historical precedents, witty wordplay and sheer chutzpah — before being spit out as elegant yet inoffensive soundbites in the conversation of mankind.


What took place in Communist societies was not the murder or the torture of innocent men, women, and children by thugs and sadists, not the theft of their belongings by criminals and recidivists, and not their incarceration in prisons and labor camps; what took place was their “liquidation” by representatives of the “proletariat,” and the “appropriation” of their ill-gotten gains by the “lower classes,” and their “re-education” in “penal institutions.” Along with this abstraction went another kind of abstraction, in the form of a systematic dehumanization of opponents. Again it was Lenin who set the tone. His letters and his instructions to subordinates were full of de-humanizing invective: opponents were “bloodsuckers,” “rich bastards,” “scum.” Kirov, later to become the Party Chief of Leningrad, referred to the “White Guard lice” fighting in the civil war. Strikers were “noxious yellow parasites,” and when they were arrested, were forced to sign confessions of guilt referring to themselves as “filthy, criminal dogs.” (The Chinese later developed their own version of this epithet with the “running dogs of capitalism.”)

 
The ordeal he was facing, the damage to himself or Bennett, were no more or less real than the “hatchet jobs” he had done on various painters. All existed in the world of words, polemic, things that could be argued or wrestled to the mat with sufficient will. Bennett’s family could denounce him, the press could rip him apart, the Crown could take shot after shot at him. But nothing could make him acknowledge them. He was a critic. There was a grandeur to his refusal to feel.


As I arrived, a man on the speaker’s platform was saying, “We cannot permit the President of our country to claim there are only two forces — good and evil. We are not with either.” The Bread and Puppet theatre troupe was carrying a score of what appeared to be eight-foot-high papier-mâché baked potatoes. Asked what this was about, one of the troupe said it represented “naked people being oppressed by clothed people.” Asked again, she said the same thing.


But a lethal and remorseless foe is a troubling thing in more than one way. Not only may he wish you harm; he may force you to think and to act. And these responsibilities — because thinking and acting are responsibilities — may be disconcerting. The ancient Greeks were so impressed and terrified by the Furies that they re-baptized them the Eumenides — “the Kindly Ones” — the better to adjust to them.

 
What is the shame all about? Warner says little here, but he makes it clear that he thinks we are all ashamed of our sexuality because sex represents a messiness, a lack of control, in human lives that anxiously strive for control and harmony. We could add, with Walt Whitman, that sex reminds us of the fact that we will decay and become part of the grass and the earth around us. Most of the time, of course, we would rather think that this will not happen, that we are pure spirits bound for eternity; and for this reason, too, the discomfort with a mortal and animal body elicits shame, a painful recognition that one has not reached a condition of invulnerability that one would very much like to attain.


That is what Jacques Derrida, the creator of deconstruction, meant when he stated the formula “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside the text”). At least, that is what I think he meant, after reading him, his defenders, and his critics with some care. If the radical postmodernist premise is correct, we can never be sure what he meant. Conversely, if that is what he meant, perhaps we are not obliged to consider his arguments further. This puzzle, which I am inclined to set aside as the “Derrida paradox,” is similar to the Cretan paradox (a Cretan says “All Cretans are liars”). It awaits solution, but one should not feel any great sense of urgency in the matter. Scientists, held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful.


There is no constraint on us, beyond the community to which we have chosen to belong. And because there is no objective truth but only our own self-engendered consensus, our position is unassailable from any point of view outside it. The pragmatist not only can decide what to think; he can protect himself from whoever doesn’t think the same. A true pragmatist will no doubt invent history just as he invents everything else, by persuading “us” to agree with him. Nevertheless, it is worth taking a glance at history, if only to see how paradoxical and dangerous is Rorty’s view of the human intellect. The Islamic ummah — the society of all believers — was and remains the most extended consensus the world has ever known. It expressly recognizes consensus (ijma‘) as a criterion of, and indeed a substitute for, truth, and it is engaged in a never-ceasing endeavor to include as many as possible in its comprehensive first-person plural. Moreover, whatever Rorty means by “good” or “better” beliefs, the pious Muslim must surely count as having some of the very best: beliefs that bring security, stability, happiness, a handle on the world, and a cheerful conscience as one blows up the kafirs who think otherwise.

 
According to Maris, there have been cases of people about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when a police officer pulls up and says, “Get down or I’ll shoot.” Usually, the jumper gets down. He may want to die, but he wants to control how.