The Victims' Revolution Read online

  There are other important Marxists, such as Louis Althusser and Frederic Jameson, as well as several writers who are categorized as structuralists (though some later graduated to poststructuralists) because of their preoccupation with the idea of language as a system of signs: Ferdinand de Saussure, the germinal Swiss semiotician who introduced the popular terms signified and signifier; Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French father of modern anthropology; the psychologist Jacques Lacan; and the French author Roland Barthes, who in Mythologies set out to expose what he saw as bourgeois cultural myths. And then there are the poststructuralists, who moved beyond the basic structuralist preoccupation with signs in a variety of directions—among them Derrida, who invented deconstruction, and Foucault and Judith Butler, with whom we will spend some time later.

  There is no need at this point to examine most of these writers’ work in detail, or to isolate at length the wide-ranging, and invariably abstruse, ways in which each of them affected the humanities in our time. But there are two men, both Americans (of a sort, anyway), whose role in reshaping the teaching of the humanities we should pause over.

  One of them is Edward Said (1935–2003), whose major contribution to the humanities today can be summed up in a single word: Orientalism. His 1978 book of that name made Said—who grew up in an affluent Cairo family and later, as a longtime member of the Columbia University faculty, identified himself as a Palestinian—an academic superstar. His book’s thesis is relatively straightforward: that Westerners’ perceptions of Oriental cultures have been shaped almost entirely by generations of Western “experts” who viewed those cultures through Western eyes and whose accounts of them were therefore colored by prejudice and condescension. These “experts,” according to Said, fostered certain romantic, patronizing notions of Oriental cultures that in turn were used to justify colonialism and oppression. Said argued that instead of listening to these “experts,” however knowledgeable, Westerners eager to know the truth about Oriental cultures should listen to Oriental peoples themselves.

  Said’s book caused an upheaval in the study of Oriental cultures, especially the Arabic and Muslim cultures of the Middle and Near East. In one fell swoop, it scrapped the credibility of distinguished scholars who had encyclopedic knowledge of those cultures. It also had the effect of silencing criticism by Western academics of even the most egregious aspects of those cultures—for what Western readers took away from Orientalism was the conviction that any criticism by a Westerner of any aspect of a non-Western culture was, by its very nature, illegitimate. Instead of thinking critically about other cultures—that is to say, judging them by Western standards—Westerners should approach even their most disturbing attributes with humility and respect, seeking to understand and sympathize.

  The argument of Orientalism lies at the foundation of two insidious and interlocking postmodern disciplines: Postcolonial Studies, which purports to examine the lingering legacy of Western colonialism in various non-Western societies, and Subaltern Studies, which focuses more narrowly on the postcolonial societies of South Asia.

  The word subaltern, which was used by Gramsci to describe people oppressed because of their membership in some group or other, was given new prominence by the India-born and largely U.S.-educated Columbia professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a founding document of postcolonialism, the 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” One of Spivak’s major arguments, which has been endlessly recycled in the contemporary humanities, is that when we choose to tell the “real” truth about an oppressed group we run the danger of “essentialism”—that is, of overgeneralizing about the group in question and thereby ignoring the fact that some members of that group, being at the same time members of other groups, experience their own special kinds of oppression that should not be overlooked. Repetitive hand-wringing about this alleged problem constitutes a very large proportion of the “work” done throughout the humanities today.

  I will not focus at length in this book on Postcolonial or Subaltern Studies, but it is worth pointing out here that all sorts of countries have been colonies and colonized, and the effect of colonialism on colonies has not always been entirely negative. Yet Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies attend exclusively to Western colonizers of non-Western colonies and consistently view this colonialism as negative, indeed evil, painting all colonizers with the same brush. The supposed purpose of Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies is to give voice to the formerly colonized, who are seen by definition as having been silenced under the colonizers’ sway. This unsilencing supposedly entails washing away as fully as possible the traces of the colonizer and allowing the authentic but long-suppressed voice of the colonized, or subaltern, to ring out—although in fact the most justly celebrated postcolonial authors (such as V. S. Naipaul) have plainly profited by their study of the colonizers’ literature and, more broadly, by their education in the colonizers’ culture.

  What Said has done for the Western study of Arabic and Islamic cultures, Howard Zinn (1922–2010) has done for the study of American history. In the 1997 film Good Will Hunting, one sign of the supposedly nonconformist brilliance of the eponymous hero, a drastically underachieving, emotionally troubled young janitor at MIT played by Matt Damon, is his enthusiasm for Zinn’s 1980 book A People’s History of the United States. “If you want to read a real history book,” Damon’s character spits out at one point, “read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. That book will knock you on your ass.” The implication here is that Zinn’s book is obscure and noncanonical, the kind of book only an offbeat genius would know about. In fact it is the most influential history of America in our time, selling more than a hundred thousand copies every year. It is virtually impossible to visit an American university bookstore without running across high stacks of copies of Zinn’s book on the shelves of required reading for history courses.

  As with Said’s Orientalism, the thesis of A People’s History of the United States is relatively straightforward: namely, everything they told you is a lie, or at best a half-truth. American history, according to Zinn, is nothing to be proud of; on the contrary, it is nothing more than one long, disgraceful record of oppression, genocide, and exploitation. Zinn, a Marxist, did a magnificent job of selectively telling the story of America in such a way as to make it look, indeed, like a trail of horrors. For students with little or no knowledge of history, American or otherwise, Zinn’s book is dangerously powerful propaganda.

  What Zinn never tells his innocent young readers is that every country’s past is full of horrors, and that as the histories of countries go, America’s is, in fact, extremely admirable and inspiring. Eager as Zinn is to catalog America’s sins, he is equally eager to dodge the fact that what sets America apart is not its transgressions but its readiness and ability to face up to them, clean up its act, and become more faithful to its founding principles. America had slavery, but so did (and do) many other countries; what makes America special is that it fought one of the bloodiest wars in human history to free its slaves. America’s abiding offense is racism, for which it was routinely attacked by European intellectuals for generations; yet in 2009 America—to the astonishment of European critics in whose eyes American racism was an incurable chronic disorder—became the first Western country to have a black head of state or government. Zinn is a fierce enemy of capitalism, the sins of which he itemizes tirelessly, but he’s equally fierce in his admiration of Marx and Lenin, the fruits of whose ideas—Russia’s gulag, Mao’s Cultural Revolution—he is careful to leave all but entirely off his readers’ radar.

  Indeed, both Said and Zinn make a point of dropping down the memory hole the very best attributes of America—those that not only have made America the freest and most prosperous nation in human history, but also have positively transformed much of the rest of the world—while also deep-sixing the monstrous reality of communism. America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution articulated ideas about individual lib
erty, human rights, and equality that have reshaped human civilization, and America’s example of standing up to one form of totalitarianism after another in the name not only of Americans’ but of other people’s liberty has inspired men and women around the world, bringing to its shores generation after generation of freedom-loving immigrants; but when Said and Zinn allude to these facts, it is only to mock them as sentimental lies.

  One of the pillars of “Theory,” and indeed of all postmodern busywork, is a sociological concept that goes by the name of social constructionism. This concept places language at the center of everything, insisting that language is always and intrinsically unstable and that it plays a far more crucial role in life than has ever been recognized. Building on this proposition, social constructionism argues that many aspects of human experience that we ordinarily think of as parts of nature are in reality human constructions, brought into being by the act of naming, and that the primary goal of pedagogy should be to expose this fact and to identify the invariably nefarious reasons why these constructions have been put into place. To put it a bit differently, social constructionism, in essence, exaggerates to the point of absurdity a valid, simple, and commonsensical observation: namely, that some concepts are so much a part of everyday life that we can easily make the mistake of thinking of them as if they’re as natural as the sun, moon, and stars—even though they are, in fact, human inventions, products of the imagination. One example is the concept of money; another is the concept of “king” or “president.”

  This is an uncomplicated observation and can also be a useful one. What social constructionism does is to push it farther—exactly how far varies from one social constructionist to another. Some very influential members of the breed take it so far as to argue that certain phenomena that most of us, on reflection, would identify as part of nature, and not merely social constructions, simply did not exist before they were named—so that, for example, there was no such thing as homosexuality before the word homosexual was coined in the late 1800s, no anthrax before Pasteur, and no battered babies until that term was first used in 1962. (Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, in their 1994 book, Professing Feminism, attribute these latter two convictions to the French sociologist Bruno Latour and the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking respectively.)

  There are other concepts that figure prominently in the humanities today, and that will consequently figure in this book. Here are some of the more important ones:

  • NEOLIBERALISM: After the Berlin Wall came down, some Western academics began to feel a bit self-conscious about condemning capitalism. So instead they started condemning “neoliberalism.” Or, sometimes, “market fundamentalism,” “consumer culture,” “corporatist culture,” or “brand-name culture.” What is being condemned here? Answer: individual liberty, free markets, privatization, deregulation, and minimal intervention by the state in private affairs.

  • GAZE: Postmodernism, especially when it takes the form of identity studies, has taken from Jean-Paul Sartre a preoccupation with the “gaze.” The idea is that when another person—the “Other”—looks at you, you’re suddenly aware of yourself as the object of that person’s thoughts, which are out of your control; as a result, instead of feeling free to define yourself, you may experience that person’s “gaze” as exerting power over you, redefining you, robbing you of your right to define yourself. You may even, Sartre argued, feel “enslaved” by the Other’s gaze. In identity studies, such logic is often used to depict harmless glances as despotic acts.

  • PROBLEMATIZE: One problem with problematize is that definitions vary considerably. Foucault said problematization was the “totality of discursive and non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of the true and false and constitute[s] it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).” Many use the word in such a way as to suggest that it means “to frame a matter or situation in such a way as to expose inherent problems in it that are not immediately obvious.” In 2000, a contributor to a Women’s Studies message board attempted to illustrate the proper use of the word by saying that to “problematize reproductive choice,” for instance, is to ask: “What are the socio-political/economic conditions that surround the emergence of the concept called ‘choice’?” Other message board contributors suggested that in most contexts problematize could be replaced, without any significant loss in meaning, with discuss.

  • INTERROGATE: Traditional readers read books; postmodernists interrogate texts. The idea is that a literary work should not be regarded with unthinking respect and awe, but should rather be approached as if it were a suspect brought in for questioning. The fallacious premise here, of course, is that before postmodernism, nobody read critically or analytically. (One can also, by the way, speak of “interrogating” a concept.) This word, too, can often be replaced with discuss.

  • DESTABILIZE: Postmodernists view all forms of discourse prior to postmodernism as being fixed and stable—or as being characterized by an illusion of fixity and stability. In their view, all texts are in fact unstable, incomplete, and ultimately unknowable, as is the world they purport to represent; in their own texts, they seek to underscore these attributes—to frustrate any expectation of, and dispel any illusion of, stability, either in other texts or in the world around them. The premise is that by destabilizing texts, one can keep the reader alert to the instability, uncertainty, and unknowability of absolutely everything.

  • INTERVENTION: Critics don’t just write about a text or art work or topic anymore—they intervene in it, a word used because it takes the focus off the work and puts it on the critic, and because it makes it sound as if the critic is actually bringing about some kind of change. When the jacket copy for a recent book of academic criticism described it as “an important intervention in contemporary linguistic and semiotic debate,” “intervention in” essentially meant “contribution to.” Of course, intervene, like problematize and interrogate, can also usually be replaced with discuss.

  • REIFICATION: Reification is kind of like abstraction, only in the other direction—in other words, it means viewing (intentionally or not) or treating (deliberately or not) an abstract concept as if it were a material object, or a human creation as a part of nature. The term, which was popular with Marx, Lukács, and the Frankfurt School, is obviously popular with social constructionists, since they’re preoccupied with the difference between the natural and the man-made.

  There is, needless to say, a lot more jargon where this came from, some of which will come up along the way.

  In the age of secular humanism, students were encouraged to think critically and speak for themselves as individuals, to find their own paths in life and form their own tastes, values, and sensibilities. In the postmodern humanities, every person is, by virtue of accidents of sex, skin color, and sexual orientation, a member of a group for whom the rich, delicate complexities of life are reduced to pseudoscientific rhetoric about oppression, collective grievances, experiences of victimhood, and hegemonic power. Indeed, humanities students today learn that all of life is about power, whether economic, political, or social. In today’s world, they’re told, the West holds all the cards (the humanities establishment has yet to acknowledge that this is less and less true), and in the West, straight white men hold all the cards (never mind the post-sixties institutionalization of preferences at almost every level of society for almost everybody but straight white men).

  The chief objective of the humanities now is to use “Theory” to uncover the workings of that power, the better to combat it in the name of those groups that are purportedly oppressed. This has proved to be a slippery slope. Once humanities professors decided to embrace a notion of the humanities that had at its center the thesis that straight white Western men are all oppressors, and that all others are victims, the door opened to any number of humanities “disciplines” purporting to address, and redres
s, the supposed silencing of an increasingly wide range of victim groups. After blacks came women and Latinos, then gays, transsexuals, the disabled, the overweight, and so forth. These and other self-identified victim groups are now the subjects of their own academic fields, which may be said to straddle the humanities and social sciences. Rooted in movements—the civil rights movement, the women’s movement—that were, at least at the outset, reasonable efforts to secure equal rights, these fields of “study” became possessed by a narrow, irrational fixation on alleged patterns of hegemonic power and oppression.

  The words race, gender, and class, the holy trinity of humanities studies in our time, are especially crucial in these identity studies disciplines. Much of what is said and written in these fields consists of little more than the ritual recital of these words, the incessant assertion of the paramount importance of these three so-called “categories of analysis.” In every form of identity studies, there are books and articles aplenty in which concern about these categories is endlessly articulated. Recent years have seen the publication of such titles as Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology; Race, Class, and Gender in the United States; Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States; Gender, Race, and Class in Media; Inequality: Classic Readings in Race, Class, and Gender; The Inequality Reader: Contemporary and Foundational Reading in Race, Class, and Gender; Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender; Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective; Prejudice: Attitudes about Race, Class, and Gender. Sometimes sexuality or sexual orientation is added to the triad: Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality; Understanding Diversity: An Introduction to Class, Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation; The Social Construction of Difference and Inequality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality.