Give Me Back My Brain!

[dr_pretentious]

I thought culling the books would be enough reorganization of my study for the week, the month, the year. Goodness knows I'd dragged my heels for two years about doing that much, and Dan had started making plaintive comments to the effect that he'd given up hope I'd ever part with a book, any book, ever again. The books aren't even all the way gone yet, since the guy who handles purchasing for the used-books side of Micawber skipped town for Harry Potter week. Being no longer allowed in the house, the culled books are filling up the trunk of my car until my appointment with him (the purchaser, not Harry Potter) on the 28th. Out, Julia Kristeva! Out, Jacques Derrida! No redemption for you!

But tonight I found myself moved, above all else, to cull my files. Since getting home from Seattle, I've been unable to find the things I need for my daily work on the novel, the tutoring, and the Writer's Weekend program. Something had to be done. You know how it is with mounds of old paper: each page has a separate identity, and therefore a separate destiny, and you have to think about each page at least momentarily before you're free to pitch any of it. Old student papers from 1994? Pitch. Anything with my Social Security Number on it? Well, that would describe nearly all of my official paperwork from the university, which means quite a lot of time with the shredder. Personal correspondence from my beloved dissertation director? It won't be necessary to bury me with it, but I intend to hold onto it until then.

The three foot high mound of paper that has loomed over me as I typed over the past, oh, two months is now neatly sorted. The little rolling carts with drawers have been emptied and repurposed. My three microfilm reels of unpublished H.D. manuscripts from the rare book collection at Yale, however, will be with me until somebody has to decide whether to include them among my grave goods. (Again, the correct answer is no, but in general I think grave goods are a cool idea. What is up with my obsession with funerary rites?) I don't know if the spirit will move me to reorganize my Paganism file cabinet. After all, it's not my identity as a priestess that I'm shedding. Probably tomorrow I'll reorganize the cabinets I've been using to file writing stuff. It's still organized around the effort to get the old poetry manuscript published with one of the respectable university presses' first book prizes, back when I was making a desperate bid to enter the race for tenure. Not terribly relevant to my life as a free person.

H.D. would say I've been "dragging the forlorn husk of self" after me. Goodbye, forlorn husk.

Comments

Re: Caution: Post-Grad School Toxicity! Handle with Rubber Gloves!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The effect I think he and his fellow deconstructionists had on the real world was that they led a lot of otherwise intelligent people to believe that no effect on the real world was possible, and that even if one were, all change could only be for the worse. I hold Michel Foucault particularly responsible for the defeatism and quietism of a whole generation.

Early on in my coursework, I went to see the mentor who'd become my dissertation director (herein to be referred to as the Magisterial Presence) and asked her, "Am I on crack, or is Foucault's model of social power vastly more simplistic than Starhawk's?" The Magisterial Presence was doing a lot of work on biblical influences on literature by women, so she'd read widely in the field of feminist theology, including Dreaming the Dark, and she was very glad to find she wasn't the only person who'd seen through Foucault. You know how Starhawk talks about power-over, power-with, and power-from-within? Well, Foucault asserts that the only kind of social power is power-over, and any change a person might try to make in pursuit of social justice is illusory and, in fact, always already doomed to make the injustice worse, so we might as well stay home. Of course, he doesn't call it power-over, he just calls it power, because he thinks there's no other kind. This attitude's prevalent throughout his works, but is famously enunciated in the essay "Power/Knowledge." Apparently knowing stuff is, in itself, morally reprehensible, too.

Derrida doesn't make an elaborate case for this point of view, but regularly points to Foucault's work on the nature of power as if it were definitive. Derrida himself spends many, many pages of The Gift of Death working himself into a ridiculous tizzy over the following: If he is not able to feed every single stray cat on the planet, it's not only pointless to feed even one, it's actually unethical. I am not making this up.

If you want to know why so many otherwise intelligent, otherwise resourceful, otherwise politically aware people of my generation are sitting on their hands while the Constitution burns, well, in many of those cases, it's because in their early college days, when their zeal for social justice could have been reinforced by their professors and classmates, they were being deluged with deconstruction, which told them they only had the power to make things worse, and that total inaction was their most ethical option.