Friday, April 30, 2010

2 in praise of lucidity

Above all, I found much of Lire Le Capital critically vague. It is perhaps a matter for regret that logical positivism, with its insistence on precision of intellectual commitment, never caught on in Paris. Anglophone philosophy left logical positivism behind long ago, but it is lastingly the better for having engaged with it. The Althusserian vogue could have unfortunate consequences for Marxism in Britain, where lucidity is a precious heritage, and where it is not generally supposed that a theoretical statement, to be one, must be hard to comprehend. (GA Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History)

Post-colonial theorists are often to be found agonising about the gap between their own intellectual discourse and the natives of whom they speak; but the gap might look rather less awesome if they did not speak a discourse which most intellectuals, too, find unintelligible. You do not need to hail from a shanty town to find a Spivakian metaphorical muddle like 'many of us are trying to carve out positive negotiations with the epistemic graphing of imperialism' pretentiously opaque. It is hard to see how anyone can write like this and admire the luminous writings of, say, Freud. Post-colonial theory makes heavy weather of a respect for the Other, but its most immediate Other, the reader, is apparently dispensed from this sensitivity. (Terry Eagleton, Figures of Dissent)

7 comments:

plainwater said...

You started a blog entry with "Above all"! That must be like starting a book with "And" or something.

For this, I love you.

Mark Scroggins said...

And then went down to the ship...

Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla...

Jonathan Morse said...

But have you ever seen the seraphic smile and the mudra that accompany the moment when Gayatri Spivak, with adoring students at her feet, lifts a large beautiful hand to punctuate a sentence containing parentheses within parentheses within parentheses within parentheses and intones, "But let that pass"?

Vance Maverick said...

I follow the blog of my local art museum, which is enjoyably various. Recently they posted abstracts of talks to be given at a symposium, "Is Photography Over?". One was a hideous example of the style Eagleton is attacking, so convoluted as not merely to obscure but to garble the seemingly straightforward ideas beneath. I mentioned this in a comment, calling it no more than "opaque" -- and one of the blog hosts (herself a poet) sent me an angry, even aggressive backchannel email in response. The vogue is not over.

Eddie Brennan said...

The quote from Eagleton is great, and comical.

It's quite frightening when you see an exchange between two people using this type of gibberish. You know that neither one has understood the other clearly. You also know that they have an unspoken agreement to keep the charade going.

Mark Scroggins said...

I try to do the mudras with little success (tho I'm told I have nice hands); one student comments (to my face) about my "freakish hand gestures." I think it has something to do with the speed, the pace, no? Or maybe you just have to be Gayatri Spivak.

Jonathan Morse said...

You just have to be Gayatri Spivak.

For me the Silent upon a peak in Darien Spivakexperience occurred when I didn't even know who it was that was ahead of me as I stood in line at the Palmer House to register for Midwest MLA 1975. All I understood then was that the desk clerk who looked Spivak in the face close up had just been seared to the soul by a supernally self-aware and all but lethal beauty. When you're in that presence for that instant, the entire cosmos seems lucid.