Date: Sat, 30 Mar 1996 20:07:09 -0800 (PST)
Subject: PROBLEMATIZE THIS!  VARIABLE CULTURAL CAPITAL


I admit I'm a masochist, but my excuse was: I can't pass up a
freebee.  Since spoons was kind enough to forward the invitation,
I attended today's free conference at George Washington University
called "Intersections", whose keynote speaker was John Guillory,
author of CULTURAL CAPITAL.  The balance of the day's events
consisted of English Department graduate student dweebery:
ideological deconstruction following the formulas of postmodernism
with heaping doses of petty bourgeois feminism.

Graduate students frighten me on G.P., but English Dept. people
are the creepiest.  There are several reasons for this.  First,
they all seem to be of one physical type, if you will permit me to
essentialize.  They are all emaciated, cerebrotonic, will o' the
wisps -- pale, skinny, non-material beings who appear to live
their real lives in the ethereal world of abstractions, not in
physical existence.  I don't go for skinny people anyway, but when
an area of study consists exclusively of one physical type, I
think one should be suspicious.  Guillory himself was a skinny
little wimp with a high-pitched voice.  Judging by his mannerisms,
he could be gay, but I don't care about that one way or the other
-- it is this wimpy emaciated type that repels me so, and repels
me all the more because the intellectual lives of these people are
as thin, lifeless, and repulsive as their material selves.

Another thing bugs me about grad students: I can't imagine people
getting into any cultural career devoid of real life experience
outside of a rarefied artsy-fartsy existence.  Sure, they have had
some taste of real life: maybe delivering pizzas, waiting on
tables, flipping burgers, or other menial pursuits to bring in
that needed cash, but their actual base of life experience is so
limited, how can they possibly get outside the world of pure
ideology long enough to have some real life to compare their
ideological life with?  (Or is there really nothing outside the
text?)  Can you imagine people who have lived an entire lifetime
within English departments?  It is a frightening thought.

Also, what happened to good English, being able to speak and write
in crisp, clear, sentences?  Why is the art of clear communication
not inculcated, as we were taught back in grammar school?  Why
must the most common word in their vocabulary be "problematize",
followed closely by "problematic"?

And why is it that literature in their hands loses any distinctive
personality or individuality it may have had, to be treated as so
much sausage to be processed indifferently through the grinder of
"criticism", losing all distinctive, individual, and substantive
character?

And why is it that meaninglessness and pointlessness are
considered to be revolutionary and subversive?  Why is it that
every speaker, for all his/her basking in precious
self-consciousness, nonetheless remains persistently unconscious
of obvious yet unasked questions like "what's the point" or "why
does it matter?"

How interesting it is that people in this profession have made
irony the centerpiece of their study, and see irony everywhere but
in their own social existence.  For they have no sense of irony
about themselves or their social role.  Can they imagine that
there might be an outsider among their midst laughing at them, who
sees through all _their_ social assumptions?  Is this the
contemporary role of the cultural bureaucrat, the professional who
problematizes everything but his own existence, and when that
happens it never goes beyond narcissistic guilt?  We see a
profession preoccupied by the notion of "difference", but yet the
profession itself is self-identical.  It is only within and about
itself.  Poor souls lost in the professional commodification of
cultural existence, employees of Alienation Inc. lost in the
mysterious division of labor.  Is this not the ultimate mode of
alienated existence and the fetishism of commodities?

People who lack a sense of the ridiculous will forever dwell in
the realms of mystification, especially when they think they are
too hip to be taken in.  The Dungeons and Dragons of the literary
intellectual is a less honest and transparent game than the real
thing.

Guillory himself seems to have a greater awareness than the other
dweebs, for he makes connections between real material existence
and professional and ideological existence, though from the
perspective of someone buried deep inside a constricted form of
professional and ideological life.  However, the measure of social
awareness of any social grouping is always: "How do you treat the
outsider or newcomer to your midst?"  Are you thinking of why what
you say might be of value to the uninitiated?  Or do you assume
everyone is just like you?  To these people the person outside of
their professional specialty is always the "Other", one whose
effective nonexistence is axiomatic for their continued
existence.

I have not read Guillory's CULTURAL CAPITAL.  I don't think I will
do so, for canon-formation and disciplinarity is not sufficient
motivation for me, in spite of my interest in the sociology of
knowledge.  I suspect that Guillory understands nothing of what
cultural life could be like outside the circuits of cultural
capital in which he dwells; therefore he has nothing to say to me.
For the fact is that there must be hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions of people throughout the world, whose personal
appropriation of literature is outside any concerns of
canon-formation, social status, or the usual avenues of
institutionalization.  This by itself does not make such people
free of ideology or imprisoned with the same ideology that
imprisons the cultural cognoscenti: one doesn't know until one
investigates.   But the question is: if Guillory cannot even
recognize that someone might come to hear him speak who stands
outside of the subculture in which he lives, moves, and has his
being, and if he cannot incorporate such awareness into his own
conception of his social role, then what could he possibly have to
say about the use value of intellectual and cultural phenomena?


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