Dear Poets
Ads Without Products, taking on the advocates of militant dysphoria—by some definitions, “the politics of disaffection,” by Ads’, “adolescent insanity”—draws a useful line in the sand and follows up with a comment that self-consciously political poetmongers in this country would do well to study:
Far too often, the form that “political” work in the humanities took was as follows: reassemble theoretical machine in your apartment. Force literary (or other) texts through machine. Scrape up what comes out the other end—generally a fairly bleak picture of our world and our prospects. Strain and mould into monograph. Just before baking, add a few vague, handwaving gestures about practice – gestures generally way out of sync in either their modestness or their hubristic magical thinking with the bleakness of the portrait you’ve just painted. Finally, bake in the glow of your self-admiration – for now you are a servant of revolution, you have changed the world with your book on, say, racial politics in the 19th century novel.
Then all of a sudden, capital-T theory failed. And then one day I was reading an essay about Conrad and imperialism, and noticed something. What the author was discussing was moderately valuable, interesting even. But the rotely grandiloquent claims at the front of the paper seemed to imply that she was in fact, in writing and publishing this paper, doing something about imperialism, racism, and gender imbalance. She gave a sense (and it’s not really her fault – this is just what one did or does in papers like these – it’s a sort of boilerplate that you insert at the front and the back) that a few more papers like this, and, well, we could expect a major improvement in the state of affairs whose backstory she was tracing.
All of a sudden, this seemed criminally untenable to me. It did because it is.
That seems like the usual clichéd caricature of academic leftism. Has there ever really been such a paper, which gives such a “sense”? And is it really “what one did or does in papers like these”? Have you ever read such a paper? Examples?
(Also: Ads’s?)
I’ve written that paper a couple of times.
Michael,
Oh, I hope not. I’d have no interest in writing such a thing. The idea is to make things matter - I have no interest at all in opposing academic leftism as such. If you’re interested, go read the whole post. I think you’ll get a better sense of what I’m up to.
I’d really rather not get into examples - I’ve probably made enough enemies for myself in the past few days. Trust me - you’ve read some of this stuff or even lots.
Archambeau,
So have we all. The backstory of this - or maybe even the front story - is that I’m working on a book that began as my PhD dissertation. It’s not quite guilty of this thing that I describe, but neither does it fulfil the aims that I’m describing in the piece. I think the next thing I do, which is already underway, is a lot closer. But the fact that I’ve moved on while this book that still needs to be published (for job keeping reasons, natch) remains under revision has caused me no end of problems, angst, disinterest, and the like.
Thanks for linking RB!
From Helen Tiffen, “Post-colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse”:
Addendum: I was going to take it for self-evident that while this paragraph is explicitly talking about post-colonial literatures, it’s also implicitly talking about itself and other papers like it. But then I remembered that nothing is self-evident on the internet, and so here I am again to explain.
Also: I hate apostrophes, but you all knew that.
I seriously am not going to say the paper that I had specifically in mind (in part, because one day I might want a job at said place, and I’m less pseudo by the day) but it was something just. like. that.
Well, I was going to point out that that paragraph is not talking about itself, but if it’s self-evident, I’ll leave it alone.
I dunno, Bobby. I don’t think you should have backed down so easily. I think because Ads is a proper name, adding “s” to the end follows CMS just fine.
Ads is whose name? For plural nouns, even if they serve as collective proper nouns (like the Rolling Stones), CMS is clear: apostrophe only. Now if some dude is called “Ads,” that’s another story; but the author posting as Ads is clearly posting as “Ads without Products,” like when Keith Richards posted in Kent’s Flarf review thread as “Stones,” or when the CEO of Hardees signed his comment in my meat thread “Hardees.” (I also know this because I once got into an argument about it with someone who said the same thing as Joel above, so I wrote directly to the editors of CMS, who backed me up. I don’t care if you make fun of me.)
@Ads: sure thing, but next time you choose a pseudo, I’m going to have to beg you to pick a singular noun.
Like Post-colonial Counter-discursive Strategy.
Ha! Just posted a response to all of this.
http://adswithoutproducts.com/2009/10/06/whatever-ads/
I think of Hall’s essay “Poetry and Ambition” and all those cheers that went up for it.
Never got in to T myself but was oft envious of the energy and sense of purpose among those kids — the bright eyes and enthusiasm of the newly converted. Poets seemed languid by comparison.
Now, I’ve been made to understand the ambitiousness in so much T has reached proportions of self-parody. But, delusions of grandeur are not all bad; they can even lead to . . . grandeur. May in fact be a pre-requisite.