The safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine

What with Ray keeping it up and (thanks to a commenter for alerting me) this over at Crescat Sententia; and this link to a Cambridge Review piece (PDF) - why it's practically an Empsonic boom we're hearing.

Here's a little thing from Empson's Collected Poems, "Your Teeth are Ivory Towers" - whose title, Empson's economical notes inform me, is a spoof on a toothpaste ad jingle, 'Your Teeth are Ivory Castles and Must Be Defended'. (Rather before my time.) The poem seems to me to speak in some vague way to themes ... oh, I'll just quote. Otherwise I'd mention I. A. Richards and you'd hit the back button. Bad enough that Leavis is actually in the poem. Ahem:

There are some critics say our verse is bad
Because Piaget's babies had the same affection,
Proved by interview. These young were mad,

They spoke not to Piaget but to themselves. Protection
Indeed may safely grow less frank; a Ba
Cordial in more than one direction

Can speak well to itself and yet please Pa.
So too Escape Verse has grown mortal sin.
This gives just one advantage; a mortal Ha

Can now be retorted in kind. Panoplied in
Virtuous indignation, gnawing his bone,
A man like Leavis plans an escape. To begin,

With brickbats as your basis of the known
Is to lose ground, and these ones were compiled
From a larger building; the safety valve alone

Know the worst truth abut the engine; only the child
Has not yet been misled. You say you hate
Your valve or child? You may be wise or mild.

It goes on but, frankly, isn't wonderful, is it? The brickbats, babies and valves are nice, mind you. But Empson's note, explaining what comes next, exceeds what comes next in brief twinkle of deprecation: "Then the poem drifts off into the stock defence that poets have to be obscure because something has gone wrong with the public."

I like the man's tone.

All this dovetails with a point I've been meaning to make for a while about critics who lean heavily on this well-worn crutch - Adorno and his followers; Judith Butler, for example. I think it's a fallacy; maybe it's an aspect of codependency. An impulse to blame the victim: the public must read obscure stuff, due to something wrong with the public. The shortest statement I can find is from Jonathan Culler: "Butler has a distinctive style, determined in part by the counterintuitive processes she is describing; there is not a set of given entities that produce certain effects; rather, what we take to be the entities are the performative effects of repetition. Since English leads us to assume that the nouns we use have preexisting referents, sentences wishing to argue that these entities are themselves produced through repetition turn back on themselves in ways that may make them hard to read."

Near as I can tell, this is absolutely dead wrong. The things Culler assumes are counterintuitive and difficult are (once abstracted away from the requisite abuses of Austinian terms of art) easy to grasp: 1) the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes; 2) the fact that we humans, with our social ways, make up these alternative schemes and to some degree impose them on the world, rather than reading them off the world direct and buck natural; 3) the possibility of talking about such alternatives fairly straightforwardly.

By 'quite easy to grasp', I do not mean: we are prepared to offer airtight metaphysical, epistemological and semantical accounts of how all this is possible. Rather - just as we throw a ball without knowing what mathematical function would describe its arc - we constantly encounter, deal with, talk about, people whose concepts are a bit - or quite - different than our own. And we intuit that there are often social reasons for this. it's really no big deal. My daughter has some pretty odd concepts, by my lights. I know this. Often I have difficulty figuring out what she is thinking. Sometimes I can't figure it out. Sometimes, no doubt, I think I understand and don't - she's beyond ba, pa, but not that far beyond. What I don't suffer is the least conceptual difficulty grasping the fact that my daughter has different concepts than I do, or the least linguistic difficulty expressing this fact. (I guess it's possible that I am spectacularly cognitively gifted - or that Culler and Butler and others suffer from some weird deficit that means they need special prosthetics - but I seriously doubt it. Nobody reads Dr. Spock-style books about kids written in the clogged style of, say, Negative Dialectics, for example. Dealing with people who think differently than you never seems to require that sort of thing, near as I can tell. There is simply no reason why it should.)

And by 'no big deal' I do not mean that conceptual disagreements cause no serious, intractable problems. Or that it isn't worthwhile trying to give philosophical accounts of how all this is possible. I'm just pointing out that Butler and Culler are wrong to emphasize the practical importance of starting with the philosophical accounts. This is as wrong as saying you have to work out the math before learning to throw a ball.

A more adult example of what I'm talking about. I just finished The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, by Robert Darnton (on the recommendation of a Blowhard a couple weeks back.) The man's big question is: do books cause revolutions? (Do ideas cause revolutions?) But the more local puzzle is: what's up with the fact that the French regarded books with titles like Le Cul d'Iris [Iris's Ass] as being of the same type as books by authors like Voltaire and Rousseau and Helvetius and Montesquieu - namely, as livres philosophique [philosophical books]. Books 'to be read with one hand', as Rousseau says, are shelved in the philosophy section. (Or they would be, if there were a philosophy section. They are all banned and sold sous le manteau.) I'm sort of meaning to write a longer post about Darnton's most interesting book, which comes complete with three whole banned books. A pornographic novel; the most boring sci-fi novel ever written (by the year 2440, man will develop the technology of all the carts driving only on the right side of the road); and a libellous sex-gossip smear against a politically prominent female figure. Anyway, the point is: although it is by no means easy to figure out exactly how pre-revolutionary French readers saw fit to cram all this under the heading 'livres philosophique', the process of trying to figure out what they were thinking is not particularly philosophically fraught. Even though the term 'philosophy' is itself in play - and even though, let me tell you, there is plenty of performative gender trouble - at no point does Darnton find that he is in philosophical trouble, or in need of sentences that have to turn back on themselves. And, if you think about it, this isn't the least bit surprising. Why should it mess with our heads that the French had a somewhat non-standard, by our lights, conception of philosophy? They still do. I mean: you still want to know the answer to the question: what were they thinking? But it's not like you need a whole metaphysics, epistemology and semantics and so forth to decode the very possibility of there being such a question to begin with.

HINT: I think the best translation of late-18th Century French 'livres philosophique' might be 'hippyporn'. Think Terry Southern, Blue Movie. (Yawn.) But more powder and wigs. The peculiar turn of mind that regards casual sex not just as fun but deep. That is, if you use your safety valve enough, you must know the truth about, like, the whole engine. (Yawn.)

But I digress.

I think these lesser children of Adorno - and probably Adorno himself - are conflating the quite ordinary and mostly unproblematic, in practice, phenomenon of alternative conceptual schemes with something far grander and more (shall we speculate?) Hegelian. Think Hegel telling you at the start of the Phenomenology that you can't even begin to think you are in a position to judge what he is telling you until you've read the whole damn book, and Logic, too. For there are all these conceptual stages to be worked through - childish states of mind and serious safety valvage so that Spirit moving on the face of the waters of history can let of periodic steam. To make a long story short (Hegel never could): Hegel is talking about spiritual and intellectual superiority and inferiority. Inferiors cannot properly judge their superiors. Which, apart from the nice question of who is who, is fair enough. (There are masters and there are pupils.) This is what the likes of Butler are asserting, too - and Culler, on her behalf. But Hegel at least has the decency to build a magnificent palace out of all history's collected brickbats. On sand. That's why he's better than me. He built this crazy damn thing. Fair enough. Butler isn't saying anything nearly crazy enough that she should be pretending that she needs to talk so funny. And she's frankly not forthright enough about just staking her claim to innate spiritual superiority. Adorno is, obviously, a complete aristocrat - as he should be, with a philosophy like his. And so should Butler be. And so I think she is. But - to get back to the point about alternative conceptual schemes - focusing just on conceptual difference, as opposed to opening claiming superiority/inferiority relations, and placing oneself on top of the heap, allows one's aristocratic outlook to be semi-concealed. You talk about this class of cases that are analytically interesting, to be sure - and that often pose practical puzzles and problems - but that, to repeat, do not obviously necessitate full armor, philosophically, before one has at them. And then, armored up in all that stuff - why, one looks very lofty and dignified. Somehow one ends up on a very high horse without every having to say, with one foot in the stirrup 'me, not you, and you'll just have to take my word for that.'

I'm not really making myself clear, am I? Why don't you examine your soul and figure out what you are doing wrong that makes that the case?

Comments

[Russell Arben Fox]

John, you're perfectly clear. (So unlike Butler.) Your example of Zoë is dead on. I love these anti-theory, anti-bad-writing, and anti-bad-writing-which-thinks-it's-theory posts of yours, all of them. Someday you're going to publish your book, and guys like me, who aren't conservative but know they have a point, are going to gobble it up. But I'm telling you now: it's too late. The horse has left the barn. And we have no one but ourselves to blame, you know? I wonder if perhaps we should have been just a bit more guildish, just bit more aristocratic ourselves, and never let anyone doing literary studies read so much as a smidgen of Heidegger. Kept the stuff under lock and key. Wouldn't have worked, I know. But just think how much happier our colleagues down the hall, the ones who only ever wanted to teach students how to read their beloved Henry Miller, would be if we had.

[Rose]

Even scientists, whose verbal perplexities Theory-heads adduce as evidence for the professional necessity of obscurity, are trying to clean up their act.

[nnyhav]

Another take on Theory in Chaos, and on Mumbo-Jumbo ("And here are the deconstructionists, preaching the truth that there are no truths, in language so dense and obscure that when one sceptical academic wickedly parodied it, they at first hailed his insight and then tried to maintain that they hadn't been hoaxed.") [Sokal]. You touch upon hoax in flogging the mule [Panza's?], but I think it more central (e.g. Melville's The Confidence-Man [and embedded Letters of Phalaris bull]; Ossian; Malley [& Spectra] ...) and philosophically relevant (David Stove on Popper and Cole Porter), coalescing into a Bakhtinian Carnival of Epistemology.