A little post about a certain ungainly catch-phrase has, wonderfully, turned into something else entirely, a thread about the role and value of different kinds of criticism. I couldn't let a statement like this pass by without comment:
The linguist Jackendoff has noted that our ("iour" meaning the "West's") usage of terms like "irrational", "emotional", and "expressive" to characterize music and dance just underscores the West's prejudice against non-linguistic thought. Academic Scholarship seems to subtley reinforce that bias.
Or statements like this (in response to J.W. Hastings' earlier comments on theories of "false consciousness," which strike me as being a separate matter from the kinds of criticism Steven Berg and David Fiore advocate anyway):
I called that the The Critic-Hero comes to the defense of the Idiots-in-distress syndrome. And really, it's just the apogee of Western Enlightenment anyway, eh?
I won't object to this description of a certain style of criticism; it's the implied attitude that bothers me (and ultimately these comments boil down to little else), the sinking feeling that, in this context, to link something to the Enlightenment is to damn it with guilt by association.
Yet these critiques are possible because they follow the models of inquiry and analysis promoted by the Enlightenment - just as the criticisms of academic scholarship quoted above are made through a mishmash of the very critical terms coined and circulated by that scholarship. Does anyone else in the world criticize rationality and logocentrism and the Western Enlightenment as much as a certain stripe of Western, post-Enlightenment artists and critics? Does anyone else criticize academic theory as much as academic theorists?
The comment thread to my last post is rapidly becoming a handy illustration of how the anti-academic right and the academic left or quasi-left can and often do find common cause. Both groups are engaged in a cultural offensive against various kinds of authority, and both tend to set academic authority in their sights - one group because they're going after their traditional opponents and the other because they get merit badges for going after that person who's just that little bit less radical than they.
Guess which group has prospered more? Guess which translates its cultural offensive into material, political gain?
In a world of violent and expansionist fundamentalisms, of assaults and retrenchments on civil and human rights, the Enlightenment could offer us a set of valuable principles: a model of inquiry we won't surrender and a standard of human dignity from which we won't retreat. Instead, it's become a sneering put-down for academics to launch at other academics.
How unutterably sad.