Recently, in a graduate course on theory, I decided to end the semester with a reading of Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, a compelling critique of biopolitics by the trendy Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben. When I reread it for the final class, I was struck by the work’s powerful and applicable insights. Indeed, one of the graduate students told me how engaged and excited he was about the material, and he even dragged himself to class with stomach flu to participate in the discussion.
By contrast, one of the brightest and most voluble students in the class -- let’s call her Pandora -- came in having obviously not read the book. She hadn’t even bought or borrowed it. During the discussion she looked bored, and at the end of the class she said to me, “I don’t think much of Agamben, judging from what I heard today. Who is this guy? And if he’s so great, how come I’ve never heard of him?”
The import of her comments, that if Agamben was so good, she would have known about him, was sobering. Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining his importance, I Googled him and got 71,000 hits. Of course, compared with Jacques Derrida, who had 816,000 hits; bell hooks, who snagged 711,000; and Edward Said, who got a whopping 10,600,000, Agamben is a small fish.
Despite his relative obscurity, Agamben’s work is affecting many disciplines, including philosophy, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and Holocaust studies. Special issues of journals are being devoted to his work, and conference panels are discussing the implications of his theories. Compared with Chomsky, Foucault, or Said, he is a relatively new voice. But so were Chomsky, Foucault, and Said when their work first became known to a larger audience.
Pandora opened a box that got me thinking about how the two poles of academic fame and obscurity too often trap us in academic ignorance. We choose ignorance when we conclude that a thinker’s work is a “must read” if he or she is famous, and not worth reading if the scholar is obscure. A genuinely inquiring mind can have thoughtful opinions about a thinker only after reading his or her work. When one actively ignores a thinker, trend, or way of thinking, one is engaging in academic ignorance.
Of course, it is possible to conclude, after reading and hearing about a thinker, that his ideas are abhorrent and that therefore his work is not worth reading. In the 1960s some people viewed the work of Arthur Jensen, a psychologist, and William Shockley, a physicist who had won the Nobel Prize, as inherently racist and therefore undeserving of further attention because those scholars claimed that African-Americans are intellectually inferior because of their genetic makeup. In our time academics in disability studies routinely scorn -- without reading his work -- the bioethicist Peter Singer, for his view that severely disabled people should be euthanized. And many folks, myself included, can’t stand Camille Paglia or Harold Bloom and won’t read a thing either of them writes. That kind of academic shunning can be called prejudiced because the reason for not reading the work is based on a personal or political judgment that assumes those writers will discuss ideas the reader finds distasteful or infuriating. While I don’t condone that attitude -- in fact, I disapprove of it -- I understand it, if only because I’m guilty of it myself. If we were better academics, we’d read the work of people we don’t like, if only to know that our prejudice is firmly based.
But the example of Pandora highlights a different kind of ignorance, one that limits interest in an entire field by one’s lack of knowledge. In part, I blame my generation of academics -- call us the 60s generation -- which has promoted certain “reforms” with unforeseen consequences.
One is the notion that “the personal is the political.” The larger meaning concerned how the choices we made in our personal lives would affect the people and institutions around us. In our scholarship, a swerve toward personal writing would, we thought, liberate us from the worst excesses of the ivory-tower intellectual who wrote only for an initiated few. (I have written a memoir and consider my personal writing as part of my scholarly work.)
But our attempt to balance the misleading objectivity of earlier scholarship has probably created too strong a tilt toward the purely personal. Students have become so focused on their personal likes and dislikes that they tend to discount the importance of objective reality and the wider world. We’ve put the “moi” back in memoir and taken out the “liberal” from liberal arts.
A second trend, which has come to be known as identity politics, has exaggerated excessive subjectivity even further by making it possible to insert one’s personal identity into the core of any discourse. You can get away with a lot by prefacing your academic argument with, “Well, as an X, I believe that ... " In this case, X would be any kind of minority or oppressed group. So, for example, when I say, “Speaking as a Jew ... " or “Speaking as a child of deaf adults ... ,” few in the room will disagree with me unless they can also claim Jewishness or deafness as part of their identity. My personal credentials are more than biographical; they are a warning to others: Don’t challenge my knowledge unless you can match my biographical qualifications. To a degree, that kind of turf claiming makes sense because, for example, as a child of deaf parents, I probably do know more about deafness than someone without that background (although there are plenty of exceptions). But such identity claims often create a purely personal way of knowing that excludes or ignores the visions and viewpoints of others. In addition, it implies that you can teach about a certain identity only if you have that identity.
It is legitimate for people’s experience and background to form a basis for their scholarly interests and activities. But identity politics and the “personal is political” dictum have gone too far when the personal experiences of scholars -- and students -- become the primary basis for their judgments and knowledge.
A third double-edged trend that my generation has promoted is a curriculum based on choice rather than requirements. This is a good idea in theory but a tricky one in fact. It makes it possible for students at many colleges to avoid a wide range of courses and to enroll in courses in a random, unrelated sequence. The supermarket model of course acquisition has had the intended effect of allowing students to create their own shopping lists, but the unintended effect of allowing bad intellectual nutrition and binge academic eating. Students who consume a mono-diet of courses in their own particular area of interest will end up with serious deficiencies and little sense of how ideas connect and develop historically.
I now teach a course on the 19th-century novel. I began my first class by asking the students if they were familiar with the 18th-century novel, since some kind of historical knowledge might help them understand the ideas, methods, and feelings that created the setting for later works. I did not expect every student to have read 18th-century novels, nor did I expect students who had read them to necessarily understand certain influences from one century to another. But I was shocked by the response: The students confessed, as if it were no big deal, that they didn’t “know dates” -- that is, that they had no idea when the novels they had read were written. One asked if Crime and Punishment was an 18th-century novel. Another wondered if The Sound and the Fury was.
I’m not telling this story to put down my students or be smug about how ill informed they are. I like them and think they are smart. What interests me is that they are not being educated to think that it matters when a novel is written or when a historical event happened. If they think that Faulkner preceded Dickens, their judgments about the historical development of ideas is going to be a bit off. Devoted to the private world of their own experience, such students are basically concerned with whether they like a book or its characters, or whether a historical event is one they can “relate to.” In that line of thinking, they might be interested in whether the author falls into any of the known categories of racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and so on. Students’ concerns are essentially personal, as proved to be the case when I asked those in one group what was the most important thing in their lives that had helped them to understand literature. The entire class, except for one person, responded, “Family.”
I don’t blame the students. I blame myself and the educational goals of my generation. While we were right to attack the idea of core requirements and the canon, we may have overreached. Mind you, I’m not allying myself with right-wing academics who defend the literary canon and warn of the dangers of political correctness. I am simply saying that in trying to avoid the pitfalls of false objectivity; institutional racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia; and pious literary humbuggery, we may have gone too far in the direction of emphasizing the virtues of the personal and of identity with a specific group.
Too much of the personal becomes apolitical. Navel gazing, whether in the privacy of one’s home or in area-studies departments, is a solitary activity. Perhaps concentrating on their own lives makes people less open to the personal lives of others around them. If you focus solely on your own identity -- gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability status, racial group -- you may end up living in a kind of intellectual small town. Provincialism breeds ignorance and intolerance.
One could argue, of course, that knowledge of others begins at home. If you understand the history of your own life and your people, you can sympathize and identify with the plights and pleasures of others. I agree. But the goal then should be to create inter-identity studies, interpersonal studies, just as we have interdisciplinary studies. Conditions are not particularly ripe, however, for scholars who want to do such inter-identity work. There are some white professors who specialize in race, some male professors who specialize in women’s studies, and some nondisabled people involved in disability studies, but they are exceptions to the rule. People tend to study their own kind.
That wasn’t the original intent of identity studies. The notion was that we could learn about the diversity around us by reading the literatures and studying the cultures of marginalized groups. The good news is that many students do exactly that -- they read and major in literatures and histories that are not their own. Of course, far more do the academic version of joining a gang -- they stick to their own kind. An understandable response, but not an intellectual one.
Academic ignorance needs the remedy of the “borderland crossings” that Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chicana novelist and scholar, has suggested and that is now in vogue in identity studies. Anzaldúa recommends that we study the way in which people negotiate the borders of their own and adjacent cultures. A true commitment to identity studies requires that students put the “multi” back in multicultural through a kind of cosmopolitan knowledge of the literatures of the Muslim world, the world of the deaf, and the culture of the Basques, for example, along with the more traditional multicultural fare.
Furthermore, professors should be willing and daring enough to challenge the provincial points of view that come from shallow observation of only one’s own niche. If a student or colleague says, “Speaking as an X ... ,” that person should be challenged about what kind of understanding his or her identity brings, and how that special knowledge can be extended to other groups and cultures.
But there is hope on the horizon. In fact, Pandora sent me an e-mail message a few months after our encounter, informing me of a forthcoming conference on Georgio Agamben. I don’t know if she’s read his work yet, but now at least she has heard of him. I hope that her journey from local ignorance through border-lands to a wider world of knowledge has begun.
Lennard J. Davis is a professor of English, disability and human development, and medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions (New York University Press, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 51, Issue 37, Page B13
