Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

Stalin in Lipstick

Sarah Palin's folksiness is viewed by right-wing demagogues as being somehow natural, down-home and in touch with "Joe Six-Pack." Leaving aside this shameless exhibition of cheap populism and the unproven connection between how folksy you are and how qualified you are to be Vice-President of the United States (and quite possibly President), there is a sharper edge to the Palin persona than most observers will allow.

For every attempt to construct yourself as a small-town hockey mom involves the Othering of something else, in this case the vague image of the East Coast liberal elite. This is an old trope in American politics, as old as John Adams being portrayed as an aloof British royalist in contrast with Jefferson as the farmer. We need to look no further than the Folkster-in-Chief himself, George W. Bush, playing this game against the wind-surfing, French-loving, swiss cheese-eating John Kerry, who never stood a chance.

But the situation is fundamentally different four years later. Bush and Kerry were essentially the same: both patrician politicians from New England who went to Yale. Bush, scion of an American political dynasty, was cynically and hypocritically deploying a discourse of simplicity that Karl Rove had taught him. Palin, by contrast, is the Real Thing. She really does come from a small town, and one as peripheral to the nation's centres of power (Washington and New York) as you can possibly get. She really wants to bring some "Wasilla Main Street" spirit to the cocktail-party crowd, gosh darn it.

Here's where the Republican Party's ideology comes out from underneath all the political games and rears its ugly, ugly head. Rudy Giuliani's deplorable RNC speech included this remarkable statement: "I'm sorry -- I'm sorry that Barack Obama feels that her hometown isn't cosmopolitan enough." The use of the word cosmopolitan reveals, at long last, the Other the Republicans are attacking. It has both a cultural aspect (multiculturalism and the valuation of difference) and a spatial aspect (small towns vs. big cities), and I would go so far as to say that it's the organising principle of the Republican vision of America.

What does this sound like? Surprisingly, another set of ideologues constructed "cosmopolitanism" as their main enemy a long time ago...they were the Leninist-Stalinists. Consider this call to action from a 1949 article by one F. Chernov: "Bourgeois cosmopolitanism is chiefly aimed against patriotism. Therefore the goal of further education, development and cultivation of Soviet patriotism demands a resolute struggle against cosmopolitanism and absolute victory over such disgraceful vestiges of bourgeois ideology as cringing and servility towards the capitalist West." Anyone who lived in the Soviet bloc is familiar with this language, which did the same rhetorical work as the Giuliani-Palin discourse. The "rootless" big-city bourgeois interests (which often included familiar Others like the Jews) were pitted against the Soviet village full of patriotic peasants. Of course Soviet policies, which destroyed the Russian peasantry, were no better for the village than the Republicans' big business-friendly policies are for "Main Street." But that was never the point. The Soviet and Republican ideologies are not mere abstractions; both Palin and Stalin (who also hailed from a small town at the outskirts of the Russian Empire, in this case Georgia) believe every doggone word they say.

The attack on cosmopolitanism is at the heart of any attempt to build the kind of ignorant patriotism that allows a small band of poorly educated, mediocre bureaucrats to enslave a great nation and its people. This is what Stalin did, and this is what the Republicans are doing. What comes out of big cities and universities (freedom of expression in culture and the arts, intelligent political criticism) always threatens this project. This is why "Professor Obama" can't be President. The only acceptable leadership figures are truly mediocre bureaucrats like the mayor of Wasilla who not only exhibit but celebrate their mediocrity.
Stalin was a man of extremely limited intellectual capacity and brutish cultural taste. One need only compare the kind of literature he promoted, which came to be known as "Soviet realism," with Sarah Palin saying that her favourite author is a columnist for Runner's World Magazine and her inquiry about banning books at the Wasilla Library, to realise the danger we are in. Stalin, an embodiment of mediocrity, ended up ruling the country of Tolstoy and Chaikovsky. Palin could very well end up running a country as rich in culture and intellectual diversity as America, which has the best universities and the most Nobel Prize winners in the world. This simply cannot happen.

It's time to embrace cosmopolitanism and difference as the best way to resist the tyranny of mediocrity. It's time to stop eating Palin's bullshit, excuse me mooseshit, by the spoonful.