biolog

If an academic pens writes something that winds-up on the internet, what are we to do with it? Aren’t we used to them chirping in some half-recognizable dialect in another dimension? What brings these theory-generators, these gurus of the referential out from the shadows? That Spring is in the air, is no excuse for lines like this:

“World history tends to abstractions that art can flesh.”

That sentence is meant to be read, not comprehended. How about “History is made tangible through art.”

Now, intelligibly written, we see what a pate, unremarkable–and quite possibly false–assertion we find ourselves confronted with.

An English Professor at the Univesity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee worries over the state of literary theory and what it all means in the grand scheme of everything all over the place and forever. Bombastity never looked so impermeable.

Fortunately, there are glimpses of what appear to be attempts by the author, Ihab Hassan, at clarity.

Admittedly, our perplexity nowadays is partially due to the radically disjunctive legacy of modernism, postmodernism, and assorted avant-gardes in the last hundred years. But haven’t we inured ourselves to the various avant-gardes by now? Haven’t we absorbed their shock? We actually live their scandal, or, rather, we let the media, if not our servants, live it for us. In any case, the arts continue to create their audiences somehow–with the possible exception of contemporary music.

I like that. The media as buffering reagent against the harsh oxidants and bitter ascorbics of the avant-gardes, the technicolor porn of Takashi Murakami or Tom McCarthy and his International Necronaughtical Society. It’s subversive and fresh and probably false.

Like the figures in Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, which he references, Hassan looks, thrashing this way and that, for a spit of land for his literary theories to gain purchase. The world is flat, which really means it’s round, which means globalization begets glib diversity, which leaves us with the human body as final refuge, as a template, “a choreography of blood and bones.”

Hassan asks, “Can the death-heavy body serve not only art but also theory in an age of diaspora and division?” Who’s to say when metaphors are mixed, cliches ressurected and words change meaning without notice?

I’m pretty sure he’s referring to the human body, but wait! Body can also be a stand-in for an abstraction, and for an entity which contains an abstraction, a spirit. Not a spirit in the literal sense, that would be dogmatic and pedestiran, but a spirit in the Wittgensteinian sense, as “everything we mean when we talk about it.”

Had enough? Well Hassan has plans to pack even more meaning into this seemingly simple word we thought we all knew and understood.

body not only as a political or aesthetic entity, the refuge of exiles who sew their lips and artists who mutilate their genitals, but also as the locus of experience, an epistemological ground, waiting to be worked, waiting to be known, leaking away its life.

What Hassan finally gets around to saying, possibly maybe, is that this is the age of “me,” the reign of the “epistemological concept of experience.” And in this age theory falls under ego’s boot. We have to learn or relearn (he isn’t quite clear on that) the “epistemic compact,” known to the rest of us as trust. Keep in mind that evil Globalization has scoured trust from the very surface of the earth.

Trust is a quality of attention to others, to the created world, to something not in ourselves. “All mean egotism vanishes … I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see all.” That’s the vision of the Man at Concord, perhaps the vision of us all when we profoundly trust.

Without trust, Hassan forebodes, critics will fall silent, the artist will put down her brush and picks up a camera, pig plague will run amok, and the heavens will cleave. But trust in what. . . certainly not one another? We are to trust in Nothingness, which means “giving oneself to the void,” or something.

So far so good? Anyway, Hassan, sensing he’ll eventually have to bring his mind-scatterings together, says recursively,

But I know that literary theory in a time of contested globalization will not find legitimacy in sectarian politics or fundamentalist dogma, not in cultural identity or transcendental philosophy. In what, then, beside pragmatic trust?

I don’t know Hassan; that seems a pretty random thing to conclude, considering how you failed to mention why you think sectearin politics or fundamentalist dogma are necessarily hostile to theory. But trust and plurality are nice and obvious concepts to think up when it comes theory, if theory is defined as something we generally agree with.

Whatever Hassan, whatever.