An illegitimate tone
Right, Hamid Dabashi and his rebuke of Azar Nafisi. Good stuff, is it? Readable? Persuasive? Eloquent? Reasoned? Thoughtful? Fair? Dispassionate?
No.
Let’s sample it.
This body of literature, perhaps best represented by Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), ordinarily points to legitimate concerns about the plight of Muslim women in the Islamic world and yet put that predicament squarely at the service of the US ideological psy-op, militarily stipulated in the US global warmongering…”Islam” in this particular reading is vile, violent, and above all abusive of women–and thus fighting against Islamic terrorism, ipso facto, is also to save Muslim women from the evil of their men. “White men saving brown women from brown men,” as the distinguished postcolonial feminist Gayatri Spivak puts it in her seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
The distinguished postcolonial feminist, mark, in her seminal essay. Already (this is only page 2 of 11 in the printed version) we are in deadly familiar territory, where the in-crowd is always awarded nice little heaps of flattering adjectives like ‘distinguished’ and ‘seminal’ (those are both favourites – it’s remarkable how predictable Theory-heads allow themselves to be) while the out-crowd is scrupulously forbidden such wanton luxury. Already, only on page 2, we begin to feel the familiar queasy disgust at the mix of abuse and sycophancy. And we read on, and the mix gets more so and then more so – until we feel so sick we can’t read any longer. And it’s only page 4.
…one can now clearly see and suggest that this book is partially responsible for cultivating the US (and by extension the global) public opinion against Iran, having already done a great deal by being a key propaganda tool at the disposal of the Bush administration during its prolonged wars in such Muslim countries as Afghanistan…Meanwhile, by seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire, Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India…through the instrumentality of English literature, recycled and articulated by an “Oriental” woman who deliberately casts herself as a contemporary Scheherazade, it seeks to provoke the darkest corners of the Euro-American Oriental fantasies…Rarely has an Oriental servant of a white-identified, imperial design managed to pack so many services to imperial hubris abroad and racist elitism at home–all in one act.
And so bloody on. Veering from spit-flecked abuse to vulgar testosteroneish sneering but never losing the overwrought inquisitorial tone – as long as he is talking about Nafisi; but when the Good People enter the picture, of course that’s another story. (Dabashi fumes about Bush and the axis of evil but is apparently too stupid or too excited to realize that he thinks in exactly the same terms himself.)
In his study of the cultural foregrounding of imperialism, Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said examined the overlapping territories, as he called them, between the literary and the political, the cultural and the imperial, in the Euro-American imperial imaginary. This, as he was never tired of repeating, was not to reduce European literature to the political proclivities of any given period, but in fact conversely to posit the political fact, in his proverbial contrapuntal hermeneutics, as the principal interlocutor of the literary event–of the European literature of the period in particular. In her similarly groundbreaking work on the relationship between domestic and foreign policies of an empire and their cultural manifestations, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture (2002), Amy Kaplan has demonstrated the link between domestic and foreign affairs in the manufacturing of such an imperial project. In this extraordinary work of literary investigation, Amy Kaplan demonstrates how at least since the middle of the nineteenth century etc etc…From the other side of the same argument, in her pioneering investigative scholarship, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, Gauri Viswanathan has traced etc etc…The study of English literature, as Viswanathan has ably demonstrated etc etc…
Why is this combination of spraying thuggery on the one hand and groveling ass-kissing on the other so repulsive? Because (I guess) it’s a combination of spraying thuggery and groveling ass-kissing. The two just do make a nasty, repellent, stomach-turning pair. Vituperation and accusation immediately followed by beaming smirking licking are a sign of something horribly amiss, of someone with too much bullying rage and too much slavish bootlicking unpleasantly yoked together in one person. And the combination is, of course, especially repellent in an academic. In a corporate executive or an advertising genius or a marketing guru or an entertainment boffin it wouldn’t be attractive, but it wouldn’t be all that astonishing or out of place, either. But academics really aren’t supposed to be that out of control. The writing in that article is just intellectually out of control. It’s swamp thing.
And the guy teaches at Columbia. I don’t want to go all Horowitzy on everyone’s ass, but I find that…disconcerting.
He thinks Nafisi is in cahoots with an influential group of politicians and intellectuals who want to invade the country of his birth. Wouldn’t that make anyone a little intemperate? He hasn’t called for her work to be banned, or for her to be harmed, which would definitely be out of order. Perhaps I’ve been in too many internet flame wars, but I don’t see his response unacceptable in tone.
Notice how both sides of the character expressed in the essay – vituperative nastiness and lickspittle behavior – are part and parcel of the authoritarian personality? Hmmm…
“He thinks Nafisi is in cahoots with an influential group of politicians and intellectuals who want to invade the country of his birth.”
Or he pretends to think that. He doesn’t have much reason to think it, so the fact that he’s worked himself up into a rage about his own wild claims is not particularly impressive.
Makes sense about the authoritarian personality. But why it has such a fatal attraction for many Theory fans – is puzzling. I think it is a version of axis of evil thinking – our enemies are bad, bad, bad people, and our friends and heroes are – distinguished and groundbreaking and starry and just rilly great.
It’s depressing.
Ophelia,
The Wikipedia entry on Dabashi is also worth a visit. See, especially, the “Philosophy” section.
Here’s a taste:
“Among the distinctive aspects of Dabashi’s thinking are a philosophical preoccupation with global geopolitics and the transaesthetics of emerging art forms that correspond to it. Dabashi’s principle work in which his political and aesthetic philosophy becomes historically anchored is his work on the rise of national cinema. There he contends that the only way out of the paradox of colonial modernity is the creative constitution of the postcolonial subject via a critical conversation with the historical predicament of the colonial subject. Dabashi argues that it is on the aesthetic site that the post-colonial subject must articulate the politics of her emancipation. In this respect, Dabashi’s major theoretical contribution is the collapsing of the binary opposition between the creative and the critical, the true and the beautiful, the poetics and the politics etc. On the colonial site, Dabashi argues in a memorable dialogue with Nietzsche and Heidegger, the Will to Power becomes the will to resist power.”
Now I understand why Rana on CT dismissed it as a “gushing postmodernist paean”…
If he is an intellectual Manichean, then why is Damashi complimentary about Niall Ferguson? Isn’t he a cheerleader for the British and American empires, or at least an historian who attempts to normalize them?
Oh, brilliant, I’ve mispelled his name throughout.
Thanks, Lynn. A pretty display of fawning if I ever saw one. In fact it’s more of the same kind of thing. Why do Theorists gush over each other that way? Don’t they know how it looks?
The only mention of Niall Ferguson I’ve read so far was not at all complimentary.
Ha! Look at the categories at the end of the (very, very, very long) Wikipedia article on Dabashi – he’s a sociologist, a literary critic, an art critic, a film critic, a historian, and a postcolonial theorist.
To look at that article you’d think he was Einstein and Crick and Wilentz and Mozart and God and whoever invented pizza, all in one.
He mentions Ferguson as one of those intellectuals who are genuinely trying to understand US power, contrasting them with what to him are lightweights:
“What is peculiar to this empire is the paucity, scarcity, and utter poverty of ideas that seek to sustain, legitimize, and promote its legitimacy. I am not talking here about dime-a-dozen native informers like Foad Ajami and Azar Nafisi, or even their superiors and elders like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. Quite to the contrary. I am talking about people who are trying to understand the way this empire works—theorists like Michael Hard and Antonio Negri, historians like Niall Ferguson and Chalmers Johnson, groundbreaking literary theorists and cultural critics like Amy Kaplan, Judith Butler, and Zillah Eisenstein, namely those who are trying to configure the nature of this beast, and the way it seeks to generate and sustain legitimacy for itself. ” (Znet, August 2006)
And in a similar spirit here:
“such historians as Niall Ferguson have in fact sought to theorise the historical domains of the emerging US empire. In his Colossus: The Price of American Empire (2004), Niall Ferguson has fortuitously called the American empire “the imperialism of anti-imperialism,” namely a form of effective global domination that does not like to be called by its proper name–and that in fact posits itself as a liberating force. (Al Ahram, June 2006)
“To look at that article you’d think he was Einstein and Crick and Wilentz and Mozart and God and whoever invented pizza, all in one.”
You can’t blame him if someone over-praises him.
Thanks for Ferguson refs; as I said, I hadn’t seen any so far; I can read Dabashi only in small doses.
One, I’m not necessarily blaming him, I’m commenting on the over-praise; two, yes I can blame him if he attracts sycophants. There is something very suspect about that level of frothing. Just for one thing, I can blame him for not toning it down himself. A reasonable person would cringe at that article, cringe and blush and change it.
You’re not blaming him and then you’re blaming him. That’s unfair and incoherent – you should be a postmodern theorist ;-)
To be fair,I’m not surprised you can only read him in small doses. His prose is like treacle, but without the compensating sweetness. I feel sorry for his students. Still, what do you expect from someone who praises Negri and Hardt. I’ve tried Empire and Multitude and they read to me like the ramblings of a senile Marxist with random moments of lucidity. Emperor’s new clothes?
It’s the lack of any sense of proportion that amuses/repels me. To how many people outside the walls of a very small part of a restricted portion of Western academic culture are works like Amy Kaplan’s ‘groundbreaking’???
‘The Origin of Species’ or Einstein’s theory of relativity – THAT’S groundbreaking.
There’s quite a groundswell of militancy in Cairo right now, which is where the organisation who published this are based. I’m not convinced it was aimed at academia in general.
“You’re not blaming him and then you’re blaming him. That’s unfair and incoherent”
Nope. I said, one, I’m not necessarily blaming him, and two, I can blame him. That’s not incoherent.
Yeah, the lack of sense of proportion is also typical of Theory-heads. I’ve pointed that out before. Like the guy at Oregon State (Oregon something anyway) who said Judith Butler is the smartest person in the world; like some other guy who said Judith Butler is a household name. Yeah right.
It’s weird that that kind of thing is so typical of Theory heads and not, that I’ve ever noticed, of anyone else. Why is that? What is it about Theory that causes people to go insane in this way? I really wonder – because it really is bizarrely consistent and predictable. They really do call each other distinguished, they really do fawn on each other in a way that people in other disciplines just don’t. So what happens to them?
Somebody should do a study. In fact somebody should do some sociology of knowledge. Right away.
Is that true? I’ve always thought tribalistic praising and damning was pretty universal in academia – and out of it. But anyway…
At the beginning of the comments, OB suggested that ‘he pretends to think that [Nafisi is in cahoots with Bush et al]. He doesn’t have much reason to think it…’
I suppose whether or not he has reason to think this may be dependent upon how far it is true that Nafisi lied in RLiT. If, as Shiva suggested in the comments to ‘Without being co-opted’, Nafisi’s work contains outright lies then perhaps that could constitute a reason to suspect her. (Of course, even if Nafisi did lie that would not necessarily indicate she was in cahoots etc, but it could be interpreted that way to someone inclied to look for conspiracies.)
I was hoping to hear more from Shiva on all this: RLiT was quite pivotal for me, so if it is essentially a work of fiction I want to know it. Likewwise, if it is not then I want to know that, too!
I think it’s true. I’ve never seen the kind of repetitive and exaggerated each-other-hugging that you get in Theory. Mutual flattery is at least more subtle and modulated and lightly disguised in other departments, I think. Of course, I haven’t seen everything there is to see! But I do read quite a few academics in quite a few fields, and I just don’t think they go in for this kind of blatant licking. And they talk more about merit and much less about being ‘celebrated’ and ‘distinguished’ – they’re less obvious about telling everyone how important they are. Less blush-making.
Part of why I say he has no reason to think what he claims about Nafisi has to do with his own claims rather than with whether or not she lied in RLT. He tells [cough cough]. I’ll give some examples in a post. He is, to put it mildly, grossly unfair; he also contradicts himself all over the place.
I’m not interested in defending the guy on any counts, really. I mean, is it like his opinion really matters to anyone (as Chris Whiley put it above) ‘outside the walls of a very small part of a restricted portion of Western academic culture’?
I guess the only thing I was asking when I said what I did about the tribalism thing is whether the attitude and sentiment is so unique – is it really a different approach or just a lack of subtlty? I’ll agree it’s good for cheap laughs… dunno if it’s worth too much vitriol, though.
Nafisi really has had an impact (I guess that’s fuelling Dabashi’s resentment!) and for that reason the question of her integrity is really meaningful. Dabashi? Who he?
“They really do call each other distinguished, they really do fawn on each other in a way that people in other disciplines just don’t. So what happens to them?”
That struck me too. At least in my field, you wouldn’t write “The brilliant and distinguished Dr. Frankenstein writes…”, you’d write “Frankenstein writes…”. You could praise the writing itself, i.e. “Frankenstein brilliantly exposed this and that” but heaping praise on the academic himself does strike me as odd, in academic writing at least.
Thank you. It sounds odd as a three-dollar bill, to me.