Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Helene Cixous
Thinking the unthinkable
Frank Furedi was the guest speaker at an event at York St John University today, ‘Thinking the Unthinkable: the Loneliness of the Critical Thinker in Higher Education (Exploring the importance of Critical Thinking in Higher Education).
As is often the case with such events, there was something of preaching to the converted. Nonetheless it was a worthy talk. Without wishing to undermine the need for skills (Furedi was quite clear we need skills), the main argument was that critical thinking should not be allowed to be hijacked by the current vogue for teaching skills. Indeed, the point is that critical thinking is not a skill as such. Furedi tended to consider it a broader engagement with a subject or field. And one member of the audience suggested we consider it a disposition. There is something vague in these formulations, but the underlying point is to regard critical thinking as a culture of engagement, different to a toolkit of skills to be applied to specific situations. Two of Furedi’s remarks illustrate this point, and raise concerns about the current climate, which has seen an undermining of intellectual life in general (see his books, Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism; and Wasted: Why Education Needs To Be Saved From Itself). He noted that the current propensity in schools to push hard on literacy is having the desired effect of raising standards, but does little or nothing to raise children’s appreciation of literature and books general. In effect, literacy becomes more about handling information, than anything about reading and writing.
He also remarked upon the certification of ’soft’ skills. Learning how to fix a car engine, do plumbing, or attend to a patient, are vital ‘hard’ skills we all need, or need access to. But there is a culture of offering training on pointless or overly obvious skills such as using a telephone or other so-called ‘people’ skills (as if somehow we weren’t quite a full person until trained up). As Furedi put it, what do you do on a telephone skills course, you learn how to dial and say hello? To make matters worse, at the end of these ‘courses’ you get a certificate, which he rightly pointed out is a perfect example of alienation. We are given back what we already possessed, but as if we have acquired a new skill or attribute. Should we feel grateful for this recognition? The certificate is an underhand way of disempowering us, because it gives authority to something we should have had authority over for ourselves.
Of course the problem is not simply about being controlled from on high, as if there is some group who exercise this power. The situation is far worse. We are all partaking in this system. In a seminar session following Furedi’s talk, one participant described a sign she had seen at a supermarket check-out. It asked the customer a series of questions to check up on the level of service (including asking if you have been greeted, offered bags, given a receipt and told to have a nice day etc). If anything on the ’script’ is found wanting the customer is encouraged to make a complaint, with a free batch eggs offered as compensation. So, not only is the customer encouraged to catch the member of staff out, the whole ’bad faith’ of a script being delivered is foregrounded as if a virtue. It is too simplistic to see this as the supermarket controlling its members of staff, since it is unlikely that the giving away of a batch of eggs is of any specific concern to managers. It is all just part of a vacuous process of customer service, in which we all dance however badly. The whole thing reminds me of that wonderful line Woody Allen delivers in Annie Hall about ‘needing the eggs’:
It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know … this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and uh, the doctor says, ‘well why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it…because…most of us need the eggs.
No matter how much we think about things, it is unthinkable not to want those eggs! So, how can things change? One participant asked Furedi how he felt critical thinking related to the rise in importance of the broader ’student experience’. It just so happened he has written a piece for the Times Higher Education Supplement on this question, published this week. The case is very clear:
…the ethos of consumerism directly contradicts the fundamental premise of an academic education. From the standpoint of service providers, the customer is always right. It is not the service providers’ job to question or challenge the tastes and values of potential customers. By contrast, academics are often in the business of educating their students’ tastes and encouraging them to question their values. Indeed, one of the most distinct and significant dimensions of academic and intellectual activity is that it does not often give customers what they want. Academic dialogue and instruction does not provide the customer with a clearly defined product. It does not seek to offer what the customer wants, but attempts to provide what the student needs. That is why forcing universities to prove themselves to their customers fundamentally contradicts the ethos of academic education. (Furedi, THES, Now is the age of the discontented)
A significant facet of critical thinking is that it is rarely comfortable or stabilising, as such it is never really going to become institutionalised – indeed that would generally be a contradiction in terms. Put another way, critical thinking only exists because of the difficulties and inequalities that surround us. Critical thinking’s raison d’être is to stand up to the unacceptable and the unthought-through. It is that action of ’standing up’ that is most particular to critical thinking, rather than offering up specific solutions – since solutions are only likely to need further critical attention someway along the line. Rather than asserting change (which will only ever likely be change for some and not all), it is more important we remain ever vigilant to what goes on around us.
One significant ‘goings on’ as we sat in the lecture theatre was the country voting in the European Election. A ritual vigil, at least a media vigil over the next few days will ensue, not least as the Prime Minister’s standing is as much implicated as are the seats in the European parliament. In light of the Election Day, the event organised a ballot of its own, to nominate the most significant Critical Thinker (in up to 30 words). A grand prize was awarded by Frank Furedi for the best nomination at the end of the day. Whilst it was a secret ballot, this was my entry:
Why her? (…and not him?)
Non-theoretical / theoretical
Palpable / inteligible
Pathos / Logos
‘Once upon a time…’
Non-theoreticaltheoretical
Palpableintelligible
PathosLogos
She speaks to me without opposition
Makes ‘me’ thinkable
Hélène
———
Cixous
Needless to say I didn’t win.
(In case you are interested, the winning entry was for Hillaire Belloc with:
He inspired the critical use of honey.
‘I eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
It makes my peas taste funny
But it keeps them on my knife’
…so, there you have it.)
Remembering You Have Forgotten Something…
…given the way things are, it is not easy to return to writing here. It feels late in the day, but I did always promise to write something about Perfume and today, of all days (though whilst in the grand scheme of things needing not to be significant), seems as good as any to get this out.
The last time I was in London I did two things. I collected my copy of Classen et al. (1994) Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell and I watched the film of Perfume. Both were in preparation to write something about Süskind’s novel. Amongst other things I think I was going to say something about the complication of trying to find words for the unsayable of scent. And I had thought the film would struggle even more than the book. I think in a sense it did, but I much preferred the ending, which visually – sculpturally even – was rather nicely done and importantly managed to undo the somewhat clumsy messiah routine of the book. I had always been primed for the film to be like a feature length Christian Dior advertisement. But, in fact, I was reminded of one of those Stella Artois advertisements. Something of the mise-en-scene, the milieu, the class of people perhaps, but also the film of the book is similarly over dramatic and funny for all of that. (Although the wit of the beer commercials – contained within 3 minutes – is inevitably much shaper).
But this all seems superfluous now (and perhaps it always was). If before I had wanted to ’say’ things here, now I am not so sure; hence my growing absence. My words have severely depreciated over the months, which is doubly sad: I don’t like to lose them, but equally I don’t like what I lose because of them (because here they just continue in all emptiness…)
Those who know me will understand when I say I had to ‘rescue’ Aroma from the smoke-dust climes of my family home. Ironically, then, my copy of the book carries its own potent aroma (though the time it has taken me write something has been sufficiently long for my eyes to stop watering as I turn its pages). To my surprise the book contains a direct reference to the novel:
Peter Süskind’s enormously popular book Perfume is a case in point. The keen-scented protagonist of the book, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is both ’idiot’ and ‘pervert’ – as well as an offspring of the ‘degenerate’ lower class. Grenouille exercises his abnormal passion for scent by murdering maidens in order to sniff up their sweet fragrance. In the end, through his de-scenting of maidens, Grenouille is able to invest himself with an odour so attractive that he is torn to pieces and eaten by a frenzied crowd.
If Perfume makes for a ‘good read’, it is not only because of its unusual topic and engrossing story line, but also (and perhaps more fundamentally) because of its confirmation of the validity of many of our most cherished olfactory stereotypes – the maniac sniffing out his prey; the fragrant hapless maiden; the dangerous savagery inherent in the sense of smell. (p.4)
I can’t say I recognise any of these ‘olfactory stereotypes’ – at best they seem obscure and a little harsh; at worst they conveniently establish something the authors wish us to believe need debunking. The novel is indeed a ‘good read’ because of its story and story-telling (barring a few didactic sections, particularly a middle section in which Grenouille retreats to the mountains and returns like some pesudo-Nietzschean Zarathustra), but for me the real (and only) impetus to read the book (and read it quickly) came from the hands that gave it to me. The book was an offering, with the potential to know something about myself and another. Sadly, I don’t think we ever really discussed it. Never the right occasion.
…the words of Aroma leave me cold, but the words that fell out of the book (on a scrap paper I inserted back when I had my initial idea for an entry here) seem – where at least I can read my own writing – a little more poignant:
There was a day when you mentioned in email that you were having trouble getting hold of your usual perfume (and you might try another). I never said anything at the time (perhaps because one ought not say these things), but I was struck in terror at your words. …I was doubly affected. Perhaps I wouldn’t get to experience that brush of your perfume again, which was sad enough, but added to which I was struck with the thought I had no idea what it was I was missing. I don’t have a memory of your scent, I just know/knew it because of you… and these unaromatic words simply take me further away…
The strangest of things: to remember something you have forgotten - ‘it is on the tip of my tongue’ we tend to say (what a lovely phrase). The hint of a perfume of someone you long for is a delicate thing. You stand there next to them and that is everything (so you think); but then, just occasionally, playing on the tips of the invisible boundaries between one another, the faint curls of a scent you can only know as being them, when with them. And no sooner does it reach you, it dissolves too.
Perhaps the moment of such scents and of words need not be so different. In A.S. Byatt’s Possession there is a line about people’s handwriting: ‘Certain handwriting can turn the stomach, after one, after five, after twenty-five years’. Here the sentiment is negative, but equally it can be the other way. The mere hint of another’s writing – like a scent you recongise in them – can have an immediate, overflowing sensation.
In writing about the ‘presence’ of her own writing, Cixous notes:
I need writing; I need to surprise myself living: I need to feel myself quiver with living: I need to call myself into living and to answer myself by living: I need to be living in the present of the present: I need double-living: I need to come into life: I am afraid that writing will take the place of living: I need writing thinking of living: I write celebrating living: I need to accompany living with music: I need writing to celebrate living: this morning, I perfumed myself with essence of orange flower water: on the phial of essential oil there is the original label covered with Arabic signs that spirit me away on their sweeping curls to an unknown but imaginable neighbourhood in Baghdad: I adore scripts: and the two most beautiful scripts in the world are Hebrew and Arabic, languages I neither read nor speak… (Cixous, ‘(With) Or the Art of Innocence’)
The infusion here of writing and perfume seems particularly sweet. The to and fro of those delicate languages we barely even read or speak need not be unfathomable scripts – they can the senses of scents or all those messages we pass between one another over the days, months, years… Again, I think of lines from Possession: ‘Letters … are a form of narrative that envisages no outcome, no closure … Letters tell no story, because they do not know, from line to line, where they are going. [...] Letters … exclude not only the reader as co-writer, or predictor, or guesser, but they exclude the reader as reader, they are written, if they are true letters, for a reader’. But… but, I know… I sense it… I’m afraid I don’t adequately ‘answer myself by living’, even if that is not how it feels right now.
Imaging a painful outcome (renouncing, leaving, etc.), I intone, within myself, the exalted hallucination of closure; a vainglory of abnegation seizes me (renouncing love but not friendship, etc.), and I immediately forget what I would then have to sacrifice: my madness itself – which by its very status cannot be constituted as the object of my sacrifice: who ever saw a madman “sacrificing” his madness to someone? (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
…and it is surely the little indefinable and beautiful moments - like the near remembrance of another’s scent – that keeps awake the madness that would be a true madness to sacrifice.
Once the exaltation has lapsed, I am reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance (the natural dimension of real fatigues). I suffer without adjustment, I persist without intensity: always bewildered, never discouraged; I am a Daruma doll, a legless toy endlessly poked and pushed, but finally regaining its balance assured by an inner balancing pin (But what is my balancing pin? The force of love?). This is what we are told by a folk poem…
Such is life
Falling over seven times
And getting up eight(Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse)
In the vernacular I know it to be a ‘Weeble-Wobble‘ which never falls down. How mad they must have felt all those times so nearly hitting the ground, yet recovering due to an irrepressible balancing pin. I am due to go to London again next week, though I really wonder what I will do, how I will remain on a level. This time I carry with me another book. I’ve kept it wrapped in the manila envelope in which it arrived. It bore no note, nothing. I only know it was obtained by its owner (with the fabulous handwriting) in 1999. And I know also, because it was one of the last things we said (and in such a matter of a fact kind of way, which was odd given it was the last time we allowed ourselves to be together), that it had been remembered it had been forgotten, having previously been placed next to a copy of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-between (which of course seemed so apt at the time). But what is this time in which I have to read it?
…keeping in mind that Perfume is a murder story of sorts, I sense myself being on the run. I am a criminal, a thief in the night of my own thoughts and feelings: ‘The sentiment of an accumulation of amorous sufferings explodes in this cry: “It can’t go on…” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse). Indeed these words must stop…
…the remembering of something forgotten is a perpetual loss; only ever remedied by the ‘thing’ itself, that which goes beyond any words to describe it…
Why do I/we note everything down?
I don’t know why I note down everything. Everything? It cannot be otherwise. Everything that I am apt to note down: everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation. Sometimes I am tired. For example for dreams. A voice whispers: don’t note it. I am tempted. I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail. (Cixous)
Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop (Barthes)
When writing, Derrida suggests, there is ‘a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself … Nothing intimidates me when I write’. Yet when he is just falling asleep – in the midst of a dreamscape - a panic of the subconscious sets in, “You’re Crazy to write this!”. Characteristically, Derrida then attempts to deconstruct this moment: ‘…in a certain way,’ he remarks, ‘I am more unconscious [when awake] than in my half sleep. When I am in that half sleep there’s a kind of vigilance that tells me the truth … when I’m awake and working this vigilance is actually asleep’. Yet, in noting everything down, when (in) writing, Cixous refers to a tiredness, ‘[f]or example for dreams’. What does she mean and how does this relate to the ‘truth’ of one’s half-sleep? Cixous would seem to be looking the other way. In obeying the whispering voices she seems to be responding directly to that same certain vigilance: just as Derrida’s subsconsious panic is like being scolded, Cixous is weighed down by all the dreams she writes…
I had been saying to you how I just couldn’t write here at the moment. I have lost my ‘voice’ I said. And we had been saying whether I was going to do anything ‘interesting’ with this afternoon of my own. I think I got it right when I said I can’t plan to do anything interesting, it will simply take me by surprise. I was going to tidy my desk and complete the correspondences sitting in my inbox, but in doing so… I happened to look at my copy of Seneca’s ‘On the Shortness of Life’, the one that was going to appear at the very end (beginning) of that article about blogging (about being a virtual scholar) and I just found myself opening up the various books I think link together (across the gulf of time, like that grand arc of time in Woolf’s Orlando). Although, underneath it all, it was your prompt that set it all off. So…
You can go to Technorati.com to see ‘what’s percolating in blogs now’ – all and sundry are at it and writing writing about everything and nothing (at the time of writing this blog is apparently ranked 4,696,975 – whatever that means!). According to eMarketer (May 2008), there were 94.1 million US blog readers in 2007 (50% of Internet users) and 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12%). Worldwide, Universal McCann (March 2008) report that 184 million peope have started a blog and 346 million people read blogs, estimating 77% of active Internet users read blogs. Fitting with Benjamin’s seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ the potential is for ‘the public’ to be the ‘examiner’ – for all of us to become the resident critics and experts. But of course, as we know from the ‘Artwork’ essay, that comes with the admonition that this ‘examiner’ is generally ‘an absent-minded one’. Nevertheless, as Zoe Corbyn reports for the Times Higher Education, in her article ‘By the blog: academics tread carefully‘ 9 October 2008, UK scholars too are slowly but surely contributing to these statistics – adding no doubt to the state of absent-mindness. Are we all now potential writers? And what does that mean anyway?
…which leads me to think back to Roland Barthes’ piece ‘The Writer on Holiday’ in Mythologies, which opens with the line: ‘Gide was reading Bossuet while going down the Congo. This posture sums up rather well the ideal of our writers ‘on holiday”. Perhaps there is a similar sort of posture we might idenitfy with all those that write blogs – whilst ‘going down the Congo’ or at least some form of being on the move, all these millions of ’writers’ are ‘on holiday’ – everyday is a potential holiday from the mundane. For Barthes, the point was to uncover a certain myth residing in the activity of the writer on holiday – the idea of being on holiday means that writing is then just another form of work (from which you need or deserve to take a break): ‘To assert that this phenomenon can henceforth concern writers, that the specialists of the human soul are also subjected to the common status of contemporary labour, is a way of convincing our bourgeois readers that they are indeed in step with the times’. So, if we turn this around, if we suggest the holiday is no longer a reified thing, but actually a constant possibility – we’re all on holiday, or certainly on leisure time, we’re all ‘in step with the times’ - we come to the point in which all of us as holiday-makers are writers (…with a few clicks of the mouse: welcome to your blog). So, instead of the writer being on holiday, it is the holidays (offered through hypertext) which make us all writers (should we choose to be).
But, for Barthes there always was a delicate twist:
What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he [must it be he?] unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing. So that he is a false worker, a false holiday-maker as well. One is writing his memoirs, another is correcting proofs, yet another is preparing his next book. And he who does nothing confesses it as truly paradoxical behaviour, an avant-garde exploit (Barthes)
…but, as we trace through our day by partly being at work, yet equally finding ourself on the phone to a loved one, or at home, but catching up on the work mail, we all seem to be false workers, false holiday-makers and perhaps also false-writers (after all anyone can write a blog)… yet we keep writing (to one another) and reading, maybe because we don’t want to be on holiday, because being on holiday is only ever a temporary location.
So what do we write about, now that there is all this time upon our hands? As Cixous might suggest, ‘everything that happens every day to one of us and that I can translate. Everything that is woven between us…’. But it is this need to translate that can lead us astray, or can be make for a thread, weaving between us, so that the translation becomes the original. We are writing our own trail. Equally the translation can simply get in the way – where do I start? No longer a blank sheet, but a blank screen. …yet if the words breathe life into ‘everything that happens every day to one of us’, then I suppose it makes sense we try to find ways around the white void of words.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labour.
[...]
If this myh is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, the proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of duing his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. (Camus)
In locating my copy of Camus’ book to write out this quote, I am thrown back some 13 years by a hand written message. To anyone else it is simply a birthday greeting, but to me it evokes all those (dark) whispering voices that were present even then – encircling me like thieves. I never knew how to note them down (and I suppose I still don’t). The temptations remain (some now much lighter, though no less engulfing): ’I note it anyway. I obey. The notebook. It’s not fine work. I paint crudely. I follow the trail’. I probably do need to make that trip by plane to see the person who wrote the note back then.
I always wondered why the rules were added in with pencil. I never did ask at the time (and the reason by now is surely forgotten). It always read like a inserted quotation and that is how it remains. Like everything ‘that is woven between us, and everything that is in preparation’…
Apparently, whilst I could never have discovered this with such ‘wikipedia ease’ back when I was given my copy of The Myth of Sisyphus, Pascal Pia (1903 - 1979), a French writer, journalist, illustrator and scholar (and close friend of Camus) is said to have expressed absurdist and nihilistic sentiments. At the end of his life, he claimed the ‘right to nothingness’, prohibiting others from writing about him after his death. Which would have worked had we all not had this compulsion, however crudely, to note everything down.
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