“In this new globalized context, the victories of identity politics have amounted to a rearranging of the furniture while the house burned down” -Naomi Klein, page 123 of No Logo.
While reading Naomi Klein's No Logo a few months back, I came across this segment of the book where she criticizes the focus of university campus culture--which she blamed for the mostly unchallenged corporate takeovers of university campuses. “So there they all were, fighting about women’s studies and the latest backlash book while their campuses were being sold out from under their feet" (Klein 104).
She does not cite specific universities, but she seems to be speaking from personal experience, and is addressing academia's focus on identity politics in North America from the late eighties onward. Klein is pretty harsh in her criticism, and I'm not too sure how much of it I personally agree with because I've felt much of the same frustration in the few Women's Studies classes I'm taking in university right now.
“In the outside world, the politics of race, gender and sexuality remained tied to more concrete, pressing issues, like pay equity, same-sex spousal rights and police violence, and these serious movements were--and continue to be--a genuine threat to the economic and social order. But somehow, they didn’t seem terribly glamorous to students on many university campuses, for whom identity politics had evolved by the late eighties into something quite different. Many of the battles we fought were over issues of “representation”--a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language” (Klein 108).
Her description of what identity politics is about is still pretty accurate with some of the classes I've taken in recent years. Basically, what we've done is dissect/"deconstruct" popular media (literature, movies, commercials), the curriculum, and the English language and show how politically incorrect it all is. We see how negative stereotypes of women/non-able bodied persons/ethnic minorities/persons with non-hetero sexual orientations/people of lower economic classes are perpetuated, and which few works actually subvert/challenge and essentially break these stereotypes. Identity politics in academia has frustrated me with its obtuse analytical approaches and unclear connections between interpreting a work as "subversive" against patriarchal norms and it actually leading to social change... especially when the most "subversive" work appear to be preaching to the choir. How can niche-media effectively change the status quo if only literature majors read it, much less interpret it to be that socially progressive?
“So outraged were we media children by the narrow and oppressive portrayals in magazines, in books and on television that we convinced ourselves that if the typecast images and loaded language changed, so would the reality. We thought we would find salvation in the reformation of MTV, CNN and Calvin Klein. And why not? Since media seemed to be the source of so may of our problems, surely if we could only “subvert” them to better represent us, they could save us instead. With better collective mirrors, self-esteem would rise and prejudices would magically fall away, as society became suddenly inspired to live up to the beautiful and worthy reflection we had retouched in its image” (Klein 109).
Klein trivializes the "Culture War of Political Correctness" in Academia, but she has a point. I am not belittling theories or approaches that deal with social constructionism, and it obviously has to play a large role in certain disciplines, especially Women's Studies. Simone de Beauvoir after all famously said that women are a social construction. No one is born a woman, instead--people become women through the process of socialization. One can be female but not "womanly". Social reality is not quickly explained by biology. So how people are socialized to become women, interact with women, perceive women, and do all the same activities towards the rest of the categories of the Politically Correct hit list is pretty important. But my personal question is, how effective is it to wage this culture war of political correctness in academia in actually fostering social change? Maybe I'm just missing the point here, that people in academia can just theorize and analyze things for the sake of theorizing and analyzing... but I thought that feminist analysis and methods were all generally supposed to be for social change?
“For a generation that grew up mediated, transforming the world through pop culture was second nature. The problem was that those fixations began to transform us in the process. Over time, campus identity politics became so consumed by personal politics that the all but eclipsed the rest of the world. The slogan “the personal is political” came to replace the economic as political and, in the end, the Political as political as well. The more importance we placed on representation issues, the more central a role they seemed to elbow for themselves in our lives--perhaps because, in the absence of more tangible political goals, any movement that is about fighting for better social mirrors is going to eventually fall victim to its own narcissism” (Klein 109).
“What I question is the battles were North American culture warriors never quite got around to. Poverty wasn’t an issue that came up much back then; sure, every once in a while in our crusades against the trio of ‘isms, somebody would bring up “classism,” and, being out-P.C.-ed, we would dutifully add “classism” to the hit list in question. But our criticism was focused on the representation of women and minorities within the structures of power, not on the economics behind those power structures. “Discrimination against poverty” (our understanding of injustice was generally construed as discrimination against something) couldn’t be solved by changing perceptions or language or even, strictly speaking, individual behaviour” (Klein 121).
I agree with several of Naomi Klein's criticisms, but I am not so quick to say that the Culture War of Political Correctness is mostly useless. I do think that politics of representation are overemphasized at times, and the economics behind the oppression gets mostly ignored in the few classes that I've attended, but I'm not sure whether it's a problem inherent in academic dealings with the politics of representation, or the discipline just ain't for me. There's a reason why I'm not a Women's Studies major or a Literature major. But last time I checked, there weren't a whole lot of Economics courses being offered that were mildly critical of the forces of globalization and its socially unethical and undesirable effects.“The prospect of having to change a few pronouns and getting a handful of women and minorities on the board and on television posed no real threat to the guiding profit-making principles of Wall Street. “The real guilt of P.C. ...,” wrote SUNY professor of literature Tim Brennan in 1991, “is not its supposed intolerance or rigidity, but that it is not political enough--that it is impersonating political struggle” (Klein 122).
So, if anyone out there in the internets has read my rambling blog post, feel free to post a comment if you have well-informed thoughts on the matter. It's just something that had been bugging me ever since I signed up for my first Women's Studies course. So, the Culture War of Political Correctness in Academic discourse, vital or mostly useless?
Works Cited
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Random House of Canada Ltd, 2000.
It is often said that you need to know the author's background to fully understand his/her work. The author is part of the story, no work stands coherently without proper context. I have realized that few people can go on much from my tagline of being a "pomophobic cyborg feminist activist from the dystopian future" and really understand where my personal politics and personal bias comes from. So here is a personal account, a breakdown of all the various socially, culturally, and politically relevant categories that I have been identified with and I currently identify with.
Pomophobic
afflicted with the irrational fear of the use of post-modern/postmodern theory, or anything pertaining to post-modernism/postmodernism in general -- including but not limited to architecture, literary theory, media studies, feminist academia at large, vague political theory essays, and visual art.
Not entirely opposed to Foucault but is apprehensive of anything or anyone that yells out his name in the first line and does not make distinctive working definitions of key terminology.
Also apprehensive of impractical cost-inefficient attempts at making expensive non-functional furniture, which are frequently passed off as being an experimental examination of what is Art and Design. Needless to say, the line often blurs between the two -- but both have a copious amount of crap.
Cyborg
an organism composed of organic and synthetic parts, part human and part machine. The uncomfortable gray ground between human and android.
Gendered portrayals of android and cyborg females in Western media usually show them as being
(1) steely-cold war machine/assassins showcasing speedy and admirable physical prowess (see Gibson's Neuromancer, Lang's Metropolis, Ghost in Shell)
(2) mercenary in personal attachments and loyalties (see Gibson's Neuromancer, Ghost in Shell)
(3) dangerously sexual femme-fatales, with no real regard for sexual partners and are a threat to the status quo (see Gibson's Neuromancer, Lang's Metropolis, Ghost in Shell)
On a side note, it is interesting that the representation of android and cyborg females are identical to the construction of the Asian ("oriental", aka yellow) female in popular Western media.
Whether the rise of Oriental Android-Cyborg mercenary femme-fatale war-machine women will spell out doom for the entire structure of Western culture is not clear. It is also not clear whether this image of Oriental Android-Cyborg mercenary femme-fatale war-machine women are a tool of the patriarchy -- a modern myth designed to put cyborgs and oriental women alike down and keeping them from attaining full sexual prowess, or this image should be reclaimed as being feminist and can be instrumental in empowering women cyborgs, Asian women, and women all alike.
Feminist
a person who is concerned with gender inequality and has some form of attachment to the Western women's movement.
Contrary to popular opinion, the quest for gender equality is not necessarily a zero-sum game, it does not necessarily create new problems (as it merely addresses existing grievances silenced before), it does not necessarily make men victims, it does not necessarily make women victims, it does not necessarily snub other quests for equality and think that its own quest for equality is paramount, it does not necessarily ignore cultural diversity, it does not necessarily assume that all "liberated" women in the world should behave or think like the "liberated" women in individual-rights-oriented Western societies, and it doesn't necessarily make people lose their sense of humor and ironic appreciation of exploitation film.
And contrary to popular opinion, people who label themselves feminists (acknowledging the fact that some people who quest for gender equality do not identify themselves as feminists) are not a homogeneous mass of white women that emulate antics from the radical feminism of the 70's and 80's. Really, the population that calls itself feminist is pluralistic, diverse, differ a lot, and disagree a lot. Just like in any other group, some are tall, some are short, some are attractive, some are ugly, some are sane, some are insane, some are really smart about their politics, and some are really stupid about their politics. Simple.
Activist
a person who promotes social or political change. The level of coherence in their ideology or methodology varies.
Dystopian
a society or planet that is the polar-opposite of the ideal. Frequently portrayed in popular media or less popular media as having elements of cyberpunk, a large amount of corporate ownership that infringes upon a healthy sense of a public sphere (Jurgen Habermas’ definition of a public sphere) or non-corporate civil society, smelly, an illegitimate government, and sentient monstrous creatures living in underground metropolitan sewer systems. Sometimes is also portrayed with androids and cyborgs. Sometimes has a lot of explosions. Oftentimes has a lot of hacking and identity-theft.
Many films depicting a dystopian future think that such a place would dominantly have electronic music, but some people propose that no-wave and first-generation British post-punk would be great in the soundtrack too. But one thing is for certain: there sure would be a lot of Joy Division.
Future
the dark unknown blurry bit of space-time. It would probably would have cyborgs, it probably would be dystopian, and it probably would have a lot of Joy Division.
Sugar-coated meadow landscapes swim before your eyes. Color-coded mushrooms coil around the trees, the fungus between the bark glistens with a saturated hue of an edible yellow. You wonder whether you’re dreaming or the shrooms are getting to you again, or whether the shrooms are getting to you again while you’re dreaming. Either way, you can feel the sugar from the grass sweeten your toenails, especially with the syrupy morning dew in the early pink sun. You are sentient. You are sensing. Also, you really really need to piss.
You make one giant step for sentient-humanoid-life, and you feel like you are moving through molasses. There is a graceful slow-motion to your movements, the beautiful simplicity of moments captured in the most minimalist of forms. You make another giant step for sentient-humanoid-life, presumably towards a washroom facility, then you realize, you are in the woods. You are in the woods, and no one sees you. It also fails to occur to you that you are also butt-naked, so the search for privacy is futile at best. Nevertheless, your cognitive system manages to conclude that you should just whip out your prick and piss any goddamn place you feel like.
Then it hits you. How the fuck can you piss in this place?
The shadows are purple. The weeds are liquorices. Pollen dance gracefully on tiptoes, waltzing to the wind, landing lightly on the bubble-gum creek. This landscape has a delicate ecosystem, completely wholesome in its own. You are the external variable. You are the rapid tropical frog species that accidentally got on that shipment of desktop computers, and managed to land on an entirely different continent, propagated, and completely eradicated the local frog species. Your piss would pollute the bubble-gum creek.
The bubble-gum creek murmurs in assent.
So you sigh and put your prick away, much to the satisfaction of the creek.
And between the sighing and the putting the prick away, a misled butterfly manages to fly itself into your mouth, and you only realize what has happened when the butterfly is already tangled between your network of gums and teeth, and your muscled tongue is inadvertently tearing its wings apart.
You cough in shock and gag in reflex, as your mind tries to wrap its own head around the matter of how-why-what-when-where and how to solve this peculiar issue. But your mind isn’t processing things quite normally right now. So while your mind does the colour-spinning wheel of death, your tongue is already making fairly good headway on-- the head of said butterfly. Your tongue flicks, and licks, and rolls without your conscious awareness. It moves, tears, and tastes. It tastes cotton candy. It tastes the rainbows in the sky. It tastes Skittles. And you really like Skittles.
Your toes curl from the sheer pleasure of that much rainbow Skittles. Especially the yellow ones. Then you realize, oh fuck, I just ate a fucking butterfly.
And it tasted so good.
You begin to thirst. You completely forget that you really needed to piss just a few seconds ago. Now, you are looking at the bubble-gum creek again, with completely no recollection of your previously newfound respect for its relative independence.
What ecosystem?
You step gently into the creek, while large brightly colored stones submerged in the thick waters indicate the level of depth you were stepping at. The brown chocolate stone means that you are one feet below sea level. The blue raspberry one means two. The red apple one means three. Purple grape – four. Pineapple yellow – five.
You are tasting pineapple, which clearly means that you are mostly completely underwater and could drown if you slipped on its oily surface. Fortunately, you have your Class 9 Open Water Swimming certificate, so you can hold your own out in the pink seas of irrationality. You gracefully dog-paddle, with your head bobbing with such regular consistency, you could have been a mass-produced bobble-head and clock on a trucker dashboard. You could have been so much more. You could have kept time. You could have kept the worker disciplined and in check. You could have reminded Nick not to stay too long at the diner joint. By some cruel chance of fate, if you were indeed a bobble-head and clock on Nick’s dashboard, he would have been on time for his Tuesday shipment, and he would have run over the entire first generation of the invasive tropical frog species precisely at 9:45 am—and saved entire marshlands in continental North America.
But you weren’t, and so he didn’t.
You paddle. You push the water in front of you away from you, and you push the water from behind you also away from you. You make way through the seas. You think back to a bizarre translated passage from Sun Tzu. Good armies are like water. You find the holes, the weak spots, and you flow into them knowingly. That’s what you are doing in this bubble-gum creek. You are being a good army, and so beautiful too. Oh so beautiful.
You set up a tranquil routine. Motion, wave, motion, wave. But strangely enough, the water you pushed out is starting to bounce back with an unnatural elasticity. You wonder if that is probably just a property of thick pink creeks. Peptobismol does that in your mouth. It makes perfect sense.
But the water bounces back with more aggressive force, and for a split second you actually don’t get to bob your head in time.
You start to sweat, but you don’t feel it at all as you are swimming. You perspire. Your hands are getting clammy. The water bounces back again, not just the water in front if you but the one behind you as well.
And then the waves start to crash.
You begin to do what your swimming coach always told you not to you. You flail frantically with no rhyme or reason in the irrational bubble-gum waters. You thrash about, you gulp air and mostly fluid. You spit, you choke. You lose your buoyancy in the water, the surface breaks and swallows you in.
You sink into the darker cool body of water that lies below the surface layer of the creek. It wraps around you like an oversized envelope, and pulls you in slowly and gracefully. Eventually thrashing just got too tiring, it’s hard to move your limbs around a lot in thick liquid. You look up, and see the water’s surface close from above, with none of the pink sunlight penetrating the layer of water that you are now in. Peptobismol fills your lungs, and the world closes in on you… and you aren’t quite sure if the dark pinkness that you see is the water or the back of your eyelids.
The last thing you taste is cinnamon banana.
The bubble-gum creek murmurs along happily, as pollen twirls continuously in its ballet-like motions onto the surrounding landscape. The shadows are purple, and the landscape is sugary. All is well in this delicate marsh. Only change is that, the creek has appears to have developed a rather pungent pig-like flavour.
-“the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’ What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany?” (Kerouac 7).
Kerouac is an amazing writer. There is this rushed, confused, stream-of-consciousness exhilaration throughout the entire novel. Most of it comes from the fact that this is mainly autobiographical, and it is so brutally honest and from his soul, completely devoid of political correctness or any form of censorship. This is embraced subjectivity at its finest. Sal/Kerouac is such a skilled narrator that you cannot help but occasionally succumb to his world vision, and see Dean the way Sal sees him -- a misunderstood prophet -- rather than the chauvinist, car-stealing, law-breaking asshole that everyone else sees him as. It is also an incredibly realistic portrayal of their road trips, there is absolutely no attempt at formulating a linear plot, or really any plot for that matter. None of the characters really have a goal which propels the story, they travel from one end to the country to the next on a whim, but it is a journey of reflective self-discovery in the midst of hedonistic excess on the fringes of mainstream culture.
I would call this book a classic, and I would recommend this to anyone, but I don’t think that there is any point in overromanticizing any of it. It is an honest account from a great writer, but that great writer had some really asshole friends and a disturbing self-absorbed frame of mind. There’s so much of this book that is beautiful, and there’s so much of it that is ugly. There was so much racism and sexism in post-WII America, and these young men were mostly blind to it while they enforced it, and they didn’t seem to care. At some point, it was Sal (or Kerouac) who thought that he was the disadvantaged one:
“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I brought some and ate it, strolling in the dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but I was so drearily, a ‘white man’ disillusioned. All my life I’d had white ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned such a good woman like Terry in San Joaquin Valley. I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast -- ‘Hello Joe!’ -- and suddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.” (Kerouac 164).
Passages like these make me feel so conflicted inside on what to think about Kerouac. On one hand, a white boy who thought like this in the late 1940s America was progressive, as he saw his subjectivity, and saw his ‘white ambitions’ as not being universal and not being the only legitimate value-set paradigm that exists. But in finding value in the fringe culture of colored people, he romanticizes it and makes caricatures out of real people and is unable to actually interact with them with sincerity. He describes colored people and especially colored women with sentimental sensual language. He essentializes them as being anchored to the irrational, the sensual, the passionate, the flesh, the carnal -- the “sins” of post-WWII America. Instead of understanding and appreciating difference, he instead perpetuates the discrimination by only relating it to his own selfish hedonistic tendencies.
Kerouac was an amazing writer, but his eyes were the eyes of a tourist -- seeing all the black people as jovial, all the colored women as sex objects, and the entire colored world as a world of indulgence and hedonism for him that is neatly segregated from his drab clean and rational white man’s world that he can step in and out of whenever he pleased. It pains me that he was so earnest and insightful, and yet so damn blind. But still, I am going to read this book over and over again, because it is just that good.
... soon.
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