Quite often, I think, politics serves as an anti-anxiolytic that rescues them from a profound dread of non-existence, of dissolving in a wave of abstraction and uselessness. It unifies them, since as a general rule if you are dealing with people who have been granted Ph.D’s, much less tenure, certain basic political commitments can be assumed. There may be Republicans in the Engineering Dept.–and certainly the Business School–but the tribal identity is intact in Dwinnelle Hall, or wherever else they may congregate.
In the response I wanted to make on the Guardian (from a few posts ago), I wanted to contrast Jacques Derrida–as the exemplar extraordinairre of elevated nonsense (but is it nonsense? What do we mean by nonsense? What do we mean by “mean”?), with Edward de Bono.
First, I think if you have read none of Derrida, you should. Here is a small sampling. Now, if it confuses you, I will grant it confuses me. This is the sort of text even academics, even people used to reading difficult prose, have to read over several times. The level of abstraction and self referential word play is extremely high.
What he calls a “ghost” is what I have tended to term a “qualitative gestalt”, an ineffable something that seems to be worth noting, but not strong to enough to call “existent”. As I reread this, I think I could translate it, but that is the point: if it were useful, it would not need translation. It would be clear.
Now, Derridistas would presumably argue that “artificial” (what does this mean?) clarity is the problem, that if we are not ambiguous, that if the would-be “philosopher” does not lead us down a mist covered and barely visible path deep into the swamp, that we are being unduly arrogant.
This is stupid. I use phrases like this because they are in my view useful and apt. It is a cognitive analgesic that will tide you over until the pain eases of having let someone make things refractory on purpose.
The reality is that most academics who like this sort of thing treat it more or less like a Sudoku: something entertaining to decode, but intrinsically meaningless. They will of course argue it has meaning–why else keep them on the payroll to decode puzzles for a living–but it is useful in a formal and concrete way.
I would contrast this with Edward de Bono, who seems to exist outside all academic disciplines. He seems to belong neither in psychology nor philsophy. Where has he done well? In the business world, where his ideas have helped facilitate new processes and technologies, organizational efficiency improvements, better interpersonal communications, and overall USEFULNESS.
It is a measure of the sheer uselessness of most Humanities Departments that they have no use for de Bono. Seriously: how could one measure progress in the interpretation of medieval Viking sagas? How would one evaluate a post-feminist deconstructive hermeneutical exposition of the Shakespeare’s “All’s well that ends well”? I don’t even know what those words would mean, quite honestly, even though I have seen them often. Hermeneutics seems to mean “talking out loud about one’s feelings”. Postfeminist seems to mean “I don’t need to justify my existence any more, so fuck you. Go away”. Deconstructive seems to mean “I don’t have a clear thesis, so I am going to pretend I don’t need one.”
I will never feel the lack of having struggled through any of Derrida’s work. I would rather read Finnegan’s Wake (which will also never happen). But I am glad to have encountered de Bono.
I started this intending to say something else entirely, but it kept going. I’ll have another in a bit.