Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I wouldn’t want to invoke the name of George Steiner too often, but his observations on the anti-intellectualism of English culture certainly carry weight. Whereas in continental Europe, epithets like Thinker and Intellectual are used all the time in a neutral descriptive sense, or as approbation, in England they sound inevitably presumptuous and are handled only with sneering inverted commas.

Any thought not fastened to the here and now, not concerned with fixing some local difficulty is deemed an indulgence. Any idea without an exact equivalent in sterling or status is automatically suspect and marks you as a fool. The peculiarly English phrase ‘Come off it’ hints at the culture’s default position: that things have a perfectly plain significance which they wear on their surface, and if you wish to deny this commonsensical meaning and replace it with some other, you’d better have a bloody good reason.

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So anyway, while at B’s house, I read a section of Francis Wheen’s ‘How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World’. The book is - how to put it - eccentrically eclectic: Structuralism and New Age Mysticism are, it seems, helpfully placed in the same category - just as, I suppose, Italian and Spanish food are simply sub-categories of ‘Foreign Food’.

It’s difficult to characterise Wheen’s treatment of certain French thinkers. ‘Cursory’ is way too generous (as, indeed, is ‘treatment’). His remarks on Lacan appear to be borrowed wholesale from Sokal, everyone’s favourite refutation by proxy of continental philosophy, postmodernism, whatever you like. The Sokal book was a fair trade off – around 8.99 to have your prejudices returned to you in tact + official permission not to have to read all that incomprehensible nonsense.

Anyway, Wheen’s benignly taken Sokal’s argument on trust. He quotes one of Lacan’s little formulas, adding that any numerate (!) student can see this is nonsense. Like his Authority, Sokal, he seems to think that Lacan is offering some kind of mathematical proof. Had he made some attempt to read the object of his ridicule he would find, for example, this:

At the risk of a certain amount of opprobrium, I have indicated how far I have gone in distorting mathematical algorithms in my own use of them

At which point one is tempted to interject that one of the ways mumbo-jumbo enters the world is when people attack authors they haven’t read relying on the arguments and authority of others.

Too late, however, Wheen has already moved on to Deleuze. A single paragraph, picked at random, constitutes the case for the prosecution. It’s enough to conclude that Deleuze is a peddler of unadulterated gibberish, his corpus of writing nonsense. Just pause, if you will, to ask what you’re being asked to believe here: that a man spent his professional career writing page after page, book after book without any discernable meaning. That in itself would be some feat. One would think that meaning might flare up here or there though some chance concatenation of words. Having to sustain meaninglessness so vigilantly, so systematically, allowing no loophole for sense, over decades - this would probably be enough to explain Deleuze’s suicide. Anyway, not only to do this, but to persuade others that you were articulating new and difficult concepts, to have, even whilst you were alive, created a whole army of earnest commentators, explicators of non-existent meanings– all this is nothing short of miraculous and, you would think, worthy of some begrudging admiration from Wheen.

Anyway, try Wheen’s trick yourself. All it takes is that peculiar fusion of arrogance and ignorance endemic to a certain strain of English anti-intellectualism. Simply pluck a passage at random from any philosopher – Hegel, Kant, Spinoza, in doesn’t matter – parachute this exotic bundle of philosophical matter into the everyday life of your reader, pausing to confirm his/ her complicity, his/her ignorance of and indifference towards the philosophical tradition from which the author in question speaks, sit back and enjoy the chortle chorus. This can be performed endlessly to endlessly confirm your own robust common sense, which is seemingly in need of constant reminders that it is the proper and default response to reality.

While you’re at it, make sure you forget a lesson so elementary that I insult you by stating it: That if you abstract from its context a language which presupposes/ requires a certain philosophical education and training, a familiarity with the philosophical sense of certain words (‘singularity’, ‘event’ for example) as opposed to their everyday sense, if you place this language before a readership who lack not only the necessary pre-understanding but the desire to acquire it, it will indeed appear as without meaning – just as an object on the far horizon will always appear smaller than one in the foreground.