Ignorance as Critical Practice

Below is the transcript of a discussion I had two years ago with my friend Rob about the Sisyphean task of teaching university freshmen how to engage in academic discourse. He and I are both of the conviction that the rhetoric of such writing can only be approached once one has acquired appropriate habits of mind, such as a healthy skepticism toward received knowledge and the critical awareness that this skepticism engenders. While among many, critical thinking and writing are highly valuable skills, the sad fact is that it for a vast many more, these skills are simply recherché, like the talents of the blacksmith or wheelwright, which find a market only in the incredibly small domain of touristy pioneer village mock-ups. Perceived as the relic of an era in which people had little else at their disposal to beguile their leisure, critical writing becomes as obsolete as the dusty Commodore VIC-20 in your parents attic. Thus confronted with having to deal with the rigors and demands of a mode of writing that to them has no perceivable connection to the cash nexus, the typical freshman reacts with impatience and hostility, itching to move on to the more practical concern of enhancing his future earning power, which, though he may not have the foggiest idea how this is acquired, to his mind certainly does not involve English 101.

Now an editor of a major magazine and himself a blogger of the first order (read his blog at http://marginal-utility.blogspot.com), Rob had been for several years a freshman composition instructor like me. We both speak from several years of experience, and though I regret the cynical tone of our exchange, I maintain that, given the ever-worsening state of affairs in higher learning, cynicism is inevitable.

* * *

Rob: How's your academic life going? Still wading through internecine bullshit?

UJ: I am exhausted, but mostly from teaching freshman composition. My students are impervious to anything remotely intellectual. In fact, they are extremely suspicious of anything that even smacks of intellectualism.

Rob: Just like Americans. I keep explaining in cover letters why I had to stop teaching, and I end up saying things like that. That probably doesn't raise my hireability threshold.

UJ: And they are overly willing to submit to my authority when choosing topics, not because they respect me, but because they're trying to get me to micromanage their essays at every stage.

Rob: —Very tempting, because it provides the illusion of accomplishment when you fashion the product for them. You can pretend the product and not the producer is important, but then you are in the same position as the factory manager. I used to want to write all 25 essays for my students, which seemed to me a more efficient process. I lost sight completely the whole goal of teaching: thinking rather than achieving a tangible end.

UJ: Yeah, my sharper dialectics put me in an enviable position, because I could exploit them at every turn, but I'm ethically obliged to restrain myself from the very thing that would conduce to my financial success in the corporate world: i.e., exploiting the effort of others.

Rob: Ethics, haven't you abandoned them by now? Hasn't the recent election [of Nov. 2002] convinced you there is no good fight left to fight?

UJ: Yeah, but my reasoning is that my ethical conduct prevents ethics from disappearing altogether. I've become rather antinomian as I've aged.

Rob: With social politics generally irrelevant, I guess a personal politics is worth preserving. I wish there were a way to escape the culture's tendency to make us squander our energies mounting small-scale ethical battles with ourselves. Faith is all there is, I guess, to see a meaning in the personal war; we can't ever have enough perspective to see what it might mean—the same with classroom efforts.

UJ: What profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul in the bargain? Or something like that.

Robert: Who said that? Dick Cheney?

UJ: Ken Lay. . . . I have found that the recommended rhetoric for essay end comments to students has either stifled me utterly, or has forced me into totally ridiculous phraseology: e.g., rampant use of passive voice, anthropomorphizing the essay, etc.

Rob: It's a surreally euphemistic form of writing.

UJ: My grading practice and mind have been colonized by simpering relativist nabobs!

Rob: Maybe you should do the "grading conference" where you can rub their nose in the essay: "What did you do here? Come on, come on, tell me! What were you thinking! Why did you write that! What made you choose that word, hmm?" Then you can make apparent the social conditioning, encoding, and brainwashing inherent in the writing process. . . .

UJ:—Which are reinforced by my comments.

Rob: . . .Your true role as monological disciplinarian comes to the fore. You could say, "If you don't speak the hegemony, and thus think the hegemony, how can you enjoy your hollow life within it?"

UJ: The feigned disinterest of the rhetoric of marginalia is totally bizarre; it disconnects any sort of agency between the student who writes and the document s/he writes. The document just becomes this miraculated text, finding its way into the world without any sense of it[s] being created. I think that this is a subtle form of the convictions underwriting many of the tenets of pomo victim politics. The paper just is.

Rob: Holding the student accountable for it seems like some kind of rape on the student's dignity. When in fact the mollycoddling presumes the dignity of an independent sentient being who already doesn't exist. Best to teach them how to write cover letters, the only document that they will feel truly invested in.

UJ: Exactly. And they are so ready to read personal affronts into these comments, which I've labored to make as oblique and insipid as possible.

Rob: I tried to circumvent that by being as impersonal in the classroom as possible, to be remote, and as though I didn't know any of them. But in our narcissistic society no one feels empowered to produce anything difficult unless they feel that it is personally demanded. Everything has to be personal or else they don't care.

UJ: Why is evaluating quality of thought forbidden? Am I always already some sort of fraud?

Rob: They are used to everything seeming like ads, as though directed solely at them, and their life become the baseline for what is meaningful. They are used to everything in their lives apparently pandering to them. . . .

UJ: —Ah!

Rob: . . . All discourse seems to single them out as special, but our classroom discourse doesn't, so they tune it out, behave as though it can't be significant—it belongs to the denatured discourse that their essay belongs to, produced by and for no one.

UJ: They are defiantly and professedly complacent, and thus make themselves spectators of their own lives. But they are duped into thinking that this passivity has allowed them to penetrate what they see as the obfuscative tendency of academic discourse, and thus made them hipper, savvier.

Rob: That is so true; ignorance passes as a kind of criticism, a critical practice. . . .

Quid Es Veritas?

Is there anyone more postmodern than he who utterly rejects postmodernity?

Rejection is never negation; rejection is negation thwarted. Even the Amish, who reject modernity, cannot negate modernity, or its sequel, postmodernity. The cautionary day-glo triangles that adorn the Amish’s buggies betray an implicit awareness on their part that, for the rest of the world, it is no longer the nineteenth century. If anything, these orange triangles stand as emblems of the Amish’s defiance of the dialectical progression of history, as ensigns around which they arrange their insular society in order to keep at bay the encroachment of modernity. The Amish way of life is history brought to a halt by an act of sheer collective will. All time is one for the Amish, as it is for St. Augustine’s God. But are the Amish aware of the dialectical nature of their own identity? Isn’t Amish-ness only possible in a modern or postmodern age?

Two Sundays ago I had an encounter with Catholicism's own version of the Amish, namely, Catholics who continue to celebrate the Tridentine Mass despite the reforms of Vatican II. I have long been fascinated with the Tridentine Mass. For some time I had wondered about the enduring appeal of the pre-reform Mass. Thus I had been planning to attend one of these services, offered every Sunday at 5 PM at Holy Family Church here in Tucson, but, plagued by some vague apprehension, I continually quailed at the last moment.

Before I continue my narrative, I should perhaps better explain my interest in the Tridentine Mass. Generally, I celebrate my postmodernity and the theoretical discourse associated with it. I relish the latter’s explanatory power, and I feel fortunate to have been thrown into history at a moment when the complete demystification of the world, and humanity's relationship to it, at last seems possible. But, as I have grown older, and as I have crammed my head with ever more abstruse theory, I have discovered that my enlightenment exacts a price in the form of an ever-lurking nihilism that at times threatens to overwhelm me. According to the claims of many contemporary theorists, certainty is altogether impossible. Yet, despite this knowledge, I still find myself standing on the shifting sands of postmodernity looking ruefully upon the seemingly effortless religious conviction of such figures as John Henry Newman, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy (Catholics all), who not only managed to weather the epistemological gale of modernity, but who also managed to diagnose with a certain serene sprezzatura all of modernity’s various malaises. For these individuals, Catholicism remained something more than rank superstition. I suppose I am dissatisfied with what I take to be the cold comfort of modern secularism. Thus I contemplated exploring the Catholicism of my pre-Vatican II brethren, anticipating one of two possible outcomes: either I would rediscover the spiritual plenitude of the faith in which I had been raised--a plenitude that I had never before recognized, or I would at least derive some aesthetic pleasure for the solemn pageantry of the mass, that I would, like Philip Carey”s friend Hayward in W. Somerset Maugham’s *Of Human Bondage,* be able to luxuriate in the sartorial splendor of “the gold and silk that clothes the priests of Rome.”

Sadly, my experience attending the Tridentine Mass proved anything but consoling. It was, in a word, terrifying.

Though I had arrived ten minutes before the mass began, I entered the church while a recitation of the rosary (a pre-mass tradition of the former Catholic era) was still in progress. I quickly found a pew at the rear of the church, moving with the furtiveness of someone who perceives his entrance a disruption. Almost immediately, I felt like an intruder on my own faith.

As I surveyed the parishioners, many of whom knelt over the backs of the pews in front of them with rosaries wrapped firmly in piously folded hands, I fully expected my head to be one of the only ones not gray or white. I was, however, surprised to find many parishioners who appeared to be around my own age, some with as many as four children (O, thou fecund faithful!). As the service began, many of these parents harshly whispered their progeny’s eyes forward, or crisply swatted the fidgets from them. All of the trappings of the old faith were in full display: the women's doily-like head coverings, the spiritual shepherd with his back to the flock, muttering almost inaudible Latin prayers, the kisses planted on the foot of the life-sized crucified Christ. On the whole, the Tridentine Mass was alien enough for me not to know when to sit, stand or kneel, which, as any Catholic will tell you, is quite remarkable, because most of us have internalized this liturgical choreography so thoroughly that it has become second nature to us. (Return and lapsed Catholic to mass after a hiatus and she will fall in step with the others like she has never been away.) The celebrant’s homily was a soaring discourse on that perennial curriculum of perdition, namely, abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. His invective provoked in me fugitive, heretical thoughts. I resented his thesis, but I resented even more the dogmatic absolutes with which he adorned it.

There I was, a secularized apostate among the faithful remnant for whom 1962 never happened: among those who still move to the staid pulse and rhythm of the liturgical calendar: among conservative Catholics, who are in many respects indistinguishable from mega-church-going evangelical Christians. Like the evangelical, the conservative Catholic goes in for cheap political ostentation: American flags set in car windows, bumper stickers proclaiming the driver’s abhorrence of Roe v. Wade or uncritical support of the present administration, and so on. Thus I realized the reason why Mel Gibson’s *The Passion of the Christ,* which I understand is steeped in singularly Catholic theology, full of iconography and lore that the evangelicals’ forebears would have derided as “Papistickal claptrap”--could achieve such pan-Christian appeal. It was because the making of this film was more a political act than a devotional one. It gave both conservative Catholics and evangelicals an excuse to drop the cudgels of a centuries-old antagonism and rally around the pet project of a well-heeled schismatic madman. The film became an emblem of insularity and the absolute rejection of the liberalizing tendency of the last hundred years. The film is a fasces in the pure etymological sense—an axe carried before both the conservative Catholic and evangelical Christian with the purpose of smashing the coupling between them and the train of history. Amish, evangelicals, and conservative Catholics all live as if the twentieth century never happened.

It appears that I will have to revise my original assertion that rejection is thwarted negation, because rejection in postmodern age is, for all intents and purposes, equivalent to negation. Postmodernity’s peculiar brand of skepticism allows for the rejection of postmodernity itself. In other words, the consummate postmodern gesture is the rejection-negation of postmodernity by willfully comporting oneself to a reified and eternalized ideology. Thus, if someone were to ask, “Show me those individuals completely at home in postmodernity,” I would say to him, “Look at the Amish, look at the evangelical, look at the conservative Catholic, and there you will find those you seek.”

The Degree-Zero Morality of *Less Than Zero*

I happened to catch *Less Than Zero,* a film based on Bret Easton Ellis's novella of the same name, on Bravo late this afternoon. It wasn't the first time I'd seen it, but I hadn't seen it in so long that it was as if I was watching it for the first time.

I recall that the film--featuring such eighties bratpackers as the eternally pubescent Andrew McCarthy, a particularly unctious and reptilian James Spader, and, in an eerily prescient casting choice, the soon-to-be recidivist substance abuser Robert Downey, Jr. as the troubled, substance abusing Julian--struck me at the time of its release as being an important, unblinking exploration of the plight of the spectacularly wealthy, whose main problem seems to be their spectacular wealth. Watching it now, in 2004, I cannot help but think that the film's singular attraction rests in a certain lurid relish in seeing the beautiful folk of Beverly Hills plummet from high atop the ramparts of the house that Reaganomics built, and endure a series of picturesque humilations as they descend. In other words, we seek in the film the frisson of fabulous devastation.

Which brings me to my point: as cinematic tragedy, *Less Than Zero* fails utterly, because it constucts a world in which morality is almost entirely absent. The film eschews this ponderous convention altogether and opts instead for the pseudo-effects of spectacle. This choice on the filmaker's part, however, becomes deleterious to the film, reducing it to a series of gestures, poses, and set pieces of such calculated slickness that the net effect upon the viewer is one of estrangement. She sees constructed before her a demimonde of such moral vacuity as to be nearly unrecognizable. Ignoring for a moment the film's commercial enticements--the now laughably garish late-eighties couture and the various other items of conspicuous consumption--one is left with an intensely derivative film full of cliché dialogue, stock poor-little-rich-girl-and-guy types, and contrived situations. Thus, instead of eliciting our sympathy, Julian's fall from his plush aerie high above L.A. to the decidedly unglamorous back rooms in which he fellates strangers takes on all the dumb inevitability of a hurricane. We feel as if we are watching something monstruous and misbegotten that must surely collapse and suffocate on its own bulk--which, if we are totally honest with ourselves, is often our attitude when witnessing the extravagances of the filthy rich.

Hence the strategem of *Less Than Zero*: it begs the audience to supply it with the moral context it cannot itself provide. To borrow the language of of neo-Aristotelian literary critic Wayne Booth, *Less Than Zero* constructs an ideal viewer who is such a well-conditioned creature of popular culture that she will reflexively endow the film with the gravitas it itself foresakes in its pursuit of spectacle. All she must do is respond to cues: a suggestive glance, insouciant mugging, the figure of a dishevelled Julian pensively smoking on the beach. However, should this ideal viewer never materialize, or, if present, prove refractory, then the film falls on the sword of its own irrelevance. *Less Than Zero* value, then, ultimately remains historical. It remains a curious relic of a strange and sinister decade--a decade that managed to be both puritanical and decadent, consisting of strange juxtapositions (The PMRC and DIY video porn, "Morning in America" and McMartin Preschool). A decade that, despite its being characterized by gross economic injustice and insane foreign policy ("Mutually Assured Destruction"), has become quite an object of nostalgia for the under-thirty set. It will perhaps be these individuals who restore *Less Than Zero* to its glossily vacuous glory.