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#Ustoo? Not So Fast! Not So Easy!
Meme Wars: What Lorin Stein’s resignation from The Paris Review over sexual misconduct reveals about the true index of male power
By Wesley Yang
FromThe Tablet: “I know Lorin Stein a little bit. We weren’t exactly friends, but we were New York City friends, with all that entails. I regarded him, and believe the regard was reciprocal, as the sort of person with whom one could work to mutual advantage without the expectation of enduring loyalty. I believed that he was the sort of person—the rare sort of person—who could make writers better than they really were, and whose literary judgment was trustworthy. One of my goals in life was to write a work of fiction that he would judge to be good, and that he would help to make better. Many, perhaps even most, writers of fiction aspired to be seen as worthy of Lorin Stein’s attention. Not many were. He had earned the right to confer this privilege by a long record of editorial achievements for which he is justly esteemed.
People admired Stein for his devotion to his craft. They gossiped about him because of his carefully constructed persona. He could be winning, and devilish. He was often surrounded by women who were smart and personable and pleasing to look at, the kind who wore their erudition lightly, and fed upon, and fed, the leisurely mood he seemed to conjure wherever he went. When he fixed his unblinking, mesmerized gaze inches closer than you were accustomed to anyone fixing it, invading your personal space just enough to make you self-conscious, you were aware of a subtle assertion of power. It takes a great deal of self-assurance to impose yourself in the manner that was habitual to him. Whether it was sheer bravado, an act, or the true manifestation of a lordly nature was a subject of ironic (nobody really thought it was the third option) debate among people inclined to gossip about the tiny world we inhabited, where he was regarded (with a mixture of irony, resentment, affection, scorn, and awe) as a prince.
His image was an uncanny pastiche of a cool, poised, insouciant white man from an indeterminate midcentury American past. It had something to do with his appearance. Someone as frail and narrow shouldered as Stein really needed custom tailoring not to appear awkward. It also had to do with his manner. He sought to embody an ideal of amateur enthusiasm lost amid the corporate bureaucracies that the publishing houses had been subsumed by and become. Even if it was a put on, he carried it off.
When he was up for the editorship of The Paris Review in 2010, I told him that he was perhaps too perfect for the role for anyone to give it to him. But the instant it was announced, it felt preordained. There was an implicit understanding, something too self-evident to say aloud, that Lorin Stein, chiefly on the basis of his taste and skill, but also on the basis of who he was, what he looked like, how he carried himself, would inherit the mantle of leadership passed down from older men, white men, who had founded our esteemed literary institutions, established their style and tone, and who were still firmly in control.
He was also seen as a bit of a scoundrel. This was a term that one could apply to a frenemy, or even a friend, without the moral opprobrium that has since accrued around the practices to which it referred. If we try hard enough, we can remember the permissive world we all used to inhabit in the year 2016. We all knew men who tried to seduce a lot of women and often enough succeeded. We accepted them as part of the normal order of things in a world where no one we knew disapproved of premarital sex, homosexuality, or any private activity between consenting adults. We knew people of both sexes in the art world and the publishing world who mingled their sex lives and the thing they did to earn their keep. For them, the continuous pursuit of aesthetic bliss was co-extensive with the pursuit of sexual gratification. We allowed them this privilege.
We were living, it becomes increasingly clear, in a lawless interregnum between the widespread desublimation that began in the 1960s, and whatever lies ahead of us, when new rules couched in the language of safety and respect will regulate us. You’ll have to seek verbal consent before you kiss a woman or touch her in a sensitive place, or anywhere. Anyone can adapt to this new rule. No doubt someone, someday, will found a new art of seduction on the protocols of affirmative consent. They favor clever talkers.
Stein’sletter of resignation submitted to The Paris Review board conveyed acceptance of the new authority to which we are all now subject, one that has withdrawn the tacit permission once granted to powerful men to pursue sexual gratification wherever they spied the promise of it. He stood accused of dating interns and writers over the course of his career, of creating a sexually charged workplace atmosphere, of permitting his sexual desires to dictate his editorial decisions. He admitted to the first two, and vehemently denied the third. The attitude he adopts is in line with that of other men who have fallen from their perches in recent weeks, men accustomed to power who suddenly know humility, men who declare themselves the chastened beneficiary of epiphanies. These rituals dispel the illusion that the confessor was only ever someone seeking pleasure and giving it, rather than someone charged with power, besotted by it, and wielding it as the instrument of his sexual will and the locus of his gratification. What enrages women about these statements is precisely the recognition that this astonished male innocence is real and that the true index of male power was precisely this ability to bring power to bear, to be aroused by it, get off on it, without acknowledging it either to oneself or others.
“Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” The quote is likely apocryphal, credited to Oscar Wilde by some, but capturing the claims of certain feminist theorists. Originally radicals from an insurrectionary vanguard, they later became a cadre of legal theorists and activists marching through institutions. After decades of patiently boring away at the popular assumptions that stood in the path of the realization of their aims, they emerged as a cultural and political force strong enough to impose their terms on archaic hold-outs and dead-enders. For many years, women sought to persuade the rest of society to adopt the doctrine of affirmative consent in law review articles and popular journalistic books and Tumblr accounts. When it was introduced to the world in the 1990s as the formal policy governing sexual relationships at Antioch College, it was widely mocked and derided as the reductio ad absurdum of feminist overreach. Even today, a general plebiscite would likely find a robust majority of the general public, and indeed, at minimum, a significant minority of college-educated liberals, or even self-identified feminists, rejecting it. But students of social change and the law will tell you that often the changes we later regard as fundamental, such as the attainments of the civil rights movement, were always at first counter-majoritarian, pushed through by legal mandarins conjuring hitherto unsuspected rights embedded in our fundamental law. Later these coups acquire the aspect of historical inevitability. Students of social change will tell you that sometimes coercive force is necessary to impose a norm unreachable through other means.
There has never been any principled defense of sleeping with interns or junior employees or using the office after-hours as a place to have sex. It has never been prudent practice to have sex with writers. It was always inappropriate, if often enough (let’s not forget), avidly desired and sought out by them. Such overt eroticism compromised everything it touched and created a poisonous dynamic for those forced to work in proximity to it in ways that could stymie the growth of a woman’s career. Yet it seemed that most everyone who could do the inappropriate was doing it. Alongside the official prohibition went a practice of benign neglect, lax enforcement. Now, we’re bringing ourselves into compliance with our stated ideals in the way all new disciplinary regimes are instituted: by making a public example out of those who transgressed. The punishment has to be severe enough to serve as a deterrent. One such punishment is to take away the thing someone loved most and did best, and never to let them near it again.
Is affirmative consent what we want? “It’s not what I want,” I recall being told by one female friend who can only be described as powerful and authoritative, and also one of the stronger voices in my social-media feeds cheering on the campaign against workplace sexual abuse. The logical end-state of this movement is the blanket prohibition of workplace desire and adoption of affirmative consent as the norm governing relations between the sexes. Will the campaign founder on such ambivalence, or in fact be fed by it, as we seek to impose legal and moral clarity on aspects of the irremediable tangle of human desire?
What I’ll say for now is we should try to hold in balance two truths. Sex is an intractable conundrum rather than a solvable problem. But that does not absolve us of the obligation to try to make better arrangements to minimize the chance that people are victimized by it. But we should attempt this in full recognition that there may not be a satisfactory way to render safe and tractable the will to domination and subordination that radical feminists rightly see as bound up in sexual desire without summoning up a will to purity and control—and vengeance—at least as destructive as the thing it opposes.
The paradox of a campaign that derives so much of its persuasive force from the image of female victims is that its success is predicated at every level on the fact of female power. Feminism is what happens when a growing cohort of women receive educations equal to or better than those men receive and notice the gap between their capacities and their de facto rights. Radical feminism is what happens when people who have achieved their formal legal enfranchisement notice the persistence of the Ancien Regime. The mainstreaming of radical feminist premises has effected a rolling coup that unseats powerful men accused of insulting the dignity of women. This is what happens when the rising expectations of a class on the march finally acquire means sufficient to its transformational ambition to change the world to suit its ideals.
Nearly a decade ago, a junior-level female magazine employee told me that many had their knives out for Lorin Stein. The world that preserved and protected his anachronistic privilege was on its way out, she told me, and the new dispensation would catch him in the end. As I watched Stein’s ascent to ever greater levels of prominence and acclaim in the succeeding years, I always wondered if and when the reckoning would come, always suspecting that someday it would: Such was the conviction I detected in this woman’s statement. It was easy to intuit the existence of a network of silent watchers cataloging everything and patiently waiting for the opportunity to strike. Surely Stein knew of its existence and blithely thought it would never have the strength to impose its will on him. He misjudged. The other part of failing to acknowledge your own power might be failing to notice the resentment and the resistance it engendered, to the point where you might fail to notice the point at which the powers summoned up against you exceeded your own. At such epiphanic moments, the invisible work of decades reveals itself, as a hollowed out structure of privilege gives way in an instant.
It’s too early to say what will replace it, but not too early to request those designing this new structure to recognize the changes that have already happened to their own status and power. Seventy percent of high school valedictorians are girls. Women under the age of 30 earn more than their male peers. Many colleges can only sustain a female-to-male ratio that does not dip below 60 percent women only through a policy of affirmative action for a class that systematically lags behind their peers: men. The claim here is not that equality has been achieved and that nothing remains for feminists to do. For there is, of course, a wider world beyond the restricted domain of the professional-managerial class in which women only seem to grow ever more powerful. In that unreconstructed world, the majority of women of all colors who comprise the working poor often labor beneath the thumbs of petty tyrants without recourse to the media or a human-resources department. Nor is it that the tables have turned completely for professional-class women. Just that the world has changed, and is changing. As the changes accelerate, feminists should remember something they know well from their own experiences with men: Nobody is so dangerous, to themselves and others, as a person or collectivity that wields power without acknowledging it.
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Thanks to Dickslap I got to know these ho’s Finale and 7 yrs this Friday (at The Seattle Eagle)
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Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
From LARB: “IN 1979, the California poet Robert Hass published his now-famous poem, “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Hass’s poem criticized poststructuralist literary theory (which he called “the new thinking”) for disregarding particulars in favor of “the luminous clarity of a general idea,” and for adopting a pathologically mournful philosophy of language in which “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” As a consequence of this sort of thinking, Hass wrote, “everything dissolves: justice, / pine, hair, woman, you and I.” This eloquent lament did not stop the rise of literary theory (neither did Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s blistering essay “Against Theory,” published a few years later). And, although much has changed in the intervening years — theory is no longer all “about loss,” in Hass’s words — the place of theory in the academy seems secure. Fewer people may “do” theory now, but it survives as a kind of conventional wisdom, a default approach to how literary scholars treat language and read texts.
Nevertheless, if theory was as problematic as Hass’s poem intimated 40 years ago, shouldn’t we be more suspicious of the conventional wisdom that is its legacy? According to Toril Moi, the answer is yes. Her important new book, Revolution of the Ordinary, makes a case for rejecting the approach to language that the “theory project” produced. Like the speaker of Hass’s poem, Moi believes that the way literary theories think about language has corrosive ethical and political consequences. Unlike Hass, she does not counter theory with poetry. Nor does she offer a substitute theory to correct the problems of the old. Instead, she looks to philosophy, particularly to “ordinary language philosophy” — by which she means the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, J. L. Austin, as interpreted by Stanley Cavell. For Moi, this philosophical constellation promises to renovate literary studies by reconnecting our language to the world from which theory severed it.
Ordinary language philosophy is unfamiliar terrain to literary scholars, and it is not always easy for graduate students in literature to get training in this work and its context. To wit: A friend asked to audit a philosophy seminar on the Philosophical Investigations taught by a rising star in the field. The professor replied that, as a graduate student in English, she was welcome to attend, but only if she remained completely silent! So Moi begins her book in an expository mode, introducing her readers to some fundamental ideas in Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, with particular attention to his concepts of “use,” “language games,” “forms of life,” and “grammar.” The rest of her book attempts to show how these concepts can help literary scholars adopt what Moi calls “the spirit of the ordinary.”
Whether or not we want this “spirit of the ordinary,” or should have it, are obviously important questions. Gilles Deleuze once accused Wittgensteinians of being “assassins of philosophy.” You don’t need to be this melodramatic to recognize the challenge that a “spirit of the ordinary” might pose to philosophy or to literary studies as traditionally practiced. There is a sense in which taking words as they are ordinarily meant is incompatible not just with literature, but with the study of literature — and not just with the study of literature but with study, period. For what would be the point of studying something that you already know? To suggest that literary studies should move toward the “spirit of the ordinary” is to swim against a long current of thinking in which literature and interpretation go hand in glove. Hence the impatience and incomprehension that appeals to ordinary language philosophy often meet with in literature departments.
To sell literary scholars on “the ordinary,” then, it’s important to get this word right. As Moi notes, it can easily lead to misunderstandings. Unfortunately, she is a little vague on her key term. She cites the philosopher Richard Fleming’s formulation, in which the “ordinary” in “ordinary language philosophy” does not mean “unreflective, conventional common sense” but rather, “the exemplary, the public, the shared,” or, more grandly, the “necessary order of our common existence.” And yet, as Moi indicates, there is more to the term than this. The appeal to ordinary language is also embedded in an activity: Moi mentions the “spirit or attitude” in which Wittgenstein carries out his investigations. These investigations complicate the way that philosophy traditionally operates. They do not attempt to see through the veil of appearance. Rather, they move in the opposite direction, seeing the attempt to penetrate the veil of appearance in the name of such clarity as the source of philosophical difficulties in the first place. “[W]hat we do,” writes Wittgenstein, “is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”
Ordinary language philosophy thus struggles with traditional philosophy on a very basic level. As Cavell remarks (and Moi quotes), this is an “intimate” conflict. Though she is admirably candid about the difficulties in making Wittgenstein’s vision of language available to literary scholars, Moi’s own text does not preserve the intimacy of this conflict, either with traditional philosophy or with literary studies. Although she is indebted to his interpretation of Wittgenstein, Moi largely ignores Cavell’s penetrating insight that Wittgenstein is everywhere engaged in an almost obsessive struggle with the “truth of skepticism,” nor does she address the formal or literary qualities that many commentators, including ordinary language philosophers, have found crucial to understanding Wittgenstein’s work. All of this is at least ironic, given that one of the major themes of Revolution of the Ordinary is that literary scholars should follow Wittgenstein’s attentiveness to the ways in which questions about the meaning of words can be answered by attending to their use.
There is a further problem with “ordinary.” Despite her enthusiasm for the term, Moi’s attempt to “use Wittgenstein’s thought” to do work in literary studies deviates from the most significant and controversial aspects of the “ordinary” reading of Wittgenstein that she otherwise claims to embrace, namely that, rightly and resolutely understood, “Wittgenstein’s thought” is not a set of tools with which to do work, but nonsense. And not a special kind of illuminating nonsense, but nonsense tout court.Here he is at the end of the Tractatus:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
If we take the “ordinary” reading of the Tractatus seriously, then there is no question of using Wittgenstein’s thought to do anything except leave that thought behind.
Do these interpretive problems surrounding “ordinary” matter? After all, Revolution of the Ordinary is not a book of philosophy or an interpretation of Wittgenstein. It is an attempt to renovate literary studies. So, for literary scholars, the interpretive problems really only matter insofar as they impede the book’s use. They don’t completely do this, but they do end up revealing something problematic about the ends of Moi’s revolution, something that will keep many from signing up.
¤
Revolution of the Ordinary falls into three parts. After introducing the key concepts, the first third of Moi’s book concludes by contrasting this rough-and-ready philosophy of language with the “classical” one governing movements in contemporary theory — particularly deconstruction and intersectionality. The middle third draws out further differences between a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language and the one that contemporary theory extracts from the talismanic notes of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. The final third covers a grab bag of issues, including the compatibility of ordinary language philosophy with radical politics, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and the idea of texts as expressive actions (rather than objects or representations), before concluding with an appeal to the Cavellian idea of “acknowledgment” as a way of explaining how modern writers might help us produce an “ethics of attention.”
As local interventions, some of these are more convincing than others. The criticism of deconstruction’s handling of concepts, and intersectionality’s handling of identity, are particularly strong. So too the analysis of the “materialist” reading of Saussure, which shows how contemporary Saussureans collapse reference, implausibly, into signification (recognizing a sign is not the same thing as understanding what someone means by using that sign). These readings reveal the power of Wittgenstein’s famous remark, which also serves as the book’s epigraph: “A picture held us captive. And we couldn’t get outside it, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us inexorably.” Following Wittgenstein’s example doesn’t help us see through texts to a deeper truth, but rather, it reminds us how theories produce certain results by making assumptions that are not necessary.
And yet, because these pictures lie in our language, it is hard to see them clearly. Some of Moi’s other interventions are not as convincing, and I found myself wondering what sort of pictures might imprison her own language. At first one of those pictures seemed to be a kind of excessive timidity with respect to her subject. Intent on showing the differences between ordinary language philosophy and contemporary theory, she initially seems not to see that, when it comes to making a substantive argument, that’s only a preliminary task. It’s not enough to show that attention to Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell produces a very different approach to language and literary interpretation than most theory does. Why does literary studies need transformation in the first place? And why transform it in the way Moi suggests? Though Moi is right that it is difficult to get poststructuralists and ordinary language philosophers on the same page, she doesn’t structure her book in a way that might achieve this. Revolution of the Ordinary would have been more effective if it began by explaining how the “theory project” fails and then outlining how ordinary language philosophy might succeed. Instead, it assumes what it needs to show.
Moi is cagy about putting her cards on the table. She has a good hand, but some of her cards are wild. Sixty pages in, rebooting her argument after leading her readers through a thicket of Wittgenstein, she writes:
Ordinary language philosophy […] clears the ground for ways of thinking that are more attentive to particulars, to individual experience, more attuned to the ways we actually use language, more open to the questions thrown up by actual human lives, than the standard attempts to “do theory.”
Here we see some of the grand ambitions, but also the grand tendentiousness, of Revolution of the Ordinary. Beyond her assumption that theory has failed, Moi also makes some startling assumptions about what theory was supposed to have accomplished. Grant that ordinary language philosophy is what Moi says it is, and can do what she says it can do better than “doing theory” can. Put aside the important political question of whether literary scholars should think primarily about individualexperiences and not collective ones. Why should “doing theory” in literary studies be accountable to the ways we actually use language in, and to questions thrown up by, actual human lives — as opposed to the use of language in, and questions thrown up by, literary texts? Beyond challenging the ways that literary studies thinks about language, Moi challenges the distinction between literature and life.
The warrant for treating literature as directly responsible to life does not come from ordinary language philosophy but (in Moi’s case, anyway) from the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir. Revolution of the Ordinary reverses the polarity of literary history, so that the ethical concerns of existentialism supplant the formal concerns of structuralism (or poststructuralism). Here, however, the interpretive problems around “ordinary,” and the inevitability of interpretation itself, are not just ironies but obstacles. It’s only because Moi flattens the struggle of ordinary language philosophy into what she calls “emphasizing the importance of the ordinary” that she can deploy it in this revanchist project. The literary antiformalism of Sartre and de Beauvoir does not mesh with the ways in which Wittgenstein and Austin assumed the distinctiveness of literature, particularly poetry, from speech. It does mesh, to a degree, with Cavell’s general approach to literature; but Cavell, for reasons having to do with his obsession with skepticism, produces work that is sensitive to formal considerations in a way that the existentialists were (understandably) not.
Moi’s few discussions of literature in Revolution of the Ordinarysuggest that she does not view literary texts themselves as cases with relevant particularity to which we might attend. Rather, the particularity resides in the experience that those texts occasion for the reader. Access to these experiences seems, implausibly, to require no interpretation. And the aesthetic judgment it involves is minimal. Paraphrasing de Beauvoir late in the book, she writes: “Literature allows us to see the world as it appears to another, not by becoming them, but by being able to let ourselves be imaginatively absorbed by the vision offered by the literary work.” How much one needs to do to even understand the vision of the literary work! Moi assures us that de Beauvoir’s stance is not necessarily naïve. That’s at least debatable. What’s not debatable is that literary artifacts, in this formulation, are transparent to the point of disappearance. Reading in “the spirit of the ordinary” allows ethics to subsume aesthetics once and for all.
¤
To some degree, this is the foregone conclusion of all attempts to philosophize literature. Philosophers make arguments. Literary critics make arguments, too, of course, but they do so about works of art, which are not just arguments, hence the difficulty of turning art into knowledge. Cavell is not remarkable among philosophers for the way in which he avoids this difficulty but for his willingness to extend the consequences of it both ways. Remember the words that conclude The Claim of Reason’s tour-de-force reading of Othello: “[C]an philosophy become literature and still know itself?” Shakespeare knows something about the connection between skepticism and tragedy that philosophy does not know. Coming to know it might transform philosophy into something it does not recognize.
Though Moi dedicates her book to Cavell, she reads as more sympathetic to the traditional philosophical position than he ever does. Her appeal to a version of ordinary language philosophy effects a transformation in literary studies, but it is a literary studies without literature. Thus strong and legitimate criticisms of the theory project come at a price that most literary scholars will be unwilling to pay. Once literary artifacts are as transparent as they appear to be for Moi, is there any reason for literary studies to exist as its own discipline, and not an annex of philosophy? Is this really what we need — even less of a justification for what we do?
Revolution of the Ordinary’s willingness to pay this high price makes more sense when we attend to its author’s politics, particularly her sense of the heroic political responsibility of intellectuals. At the beginning of her book, Moi explains, “In a world in which politicians have long since begun openly to exhibit their disdain for the ‘reality-based community,’ in which ‘truthiness’ constantly threatens to take the place of truth, it is crucial to recover a sense of the value of words.” She echoes this warning in her final chapter, where she also expands on it in revealing ways:
When politicians, advertisers, bureaucrats, academics produce a quagmire of words that don’t mean anything, their words serve one purpose: to make us acquiesce in ideas, actions, and projects we don’t actually understand. This is as dangerous for intellectual life as it is for democracy.
In such a situation we need a philosophically serious alternative to theories promoting the idea that language is in some fundamental way disconnected from reality. […] As I have shown in this book, ordinary language philosophy provides such an alternative.
These passages account for Moi’s willingness to jettison the literary. Any stance toward language that does not reinforce the connection between words and reality effectively complies with a political project of deception and manipulation on a vast scale. Such are the true stakes of Revolution of the Ordinary.
I happen to think these stakes are exaggerated, that even if the intellectual classes as a whole believed that language was disconnected from reality “in some fundamental way” — whatever that means — it would hardly constitute a danger to intellectual life, since a language that was totally disconnected from reality could not exist. More problematically for the coherence of Moi’s argument, however, putting her politics front and center shows how far she is, really, from the “spirit of the ordinary” that she supposedly seeks. You don’t need to be an ordinary language philosopher to grasp the contradiction in claiming that, on the one hand, nefarious parties are producing a “quagmire of words that don’t mean anything,” and, on the other hand, that they are doing this in order to make us “acquiesce in ideas, actions, and projects we don’t actually understand.” If the words don’t mean anything, how could we know they served a purpose, let alone that this purpose was dangerous? The danger to intellectual life and to democracy does not come from quagmires of meaningless words. It comes from words with meaning, and the people who speak those words. Our president, for example.
Moi’s politics, or, rather, her weighty sense of political responsibility, decisively shape her stance toward literature and theory in ways that estrange her from the tradition of philosophy she wants to claim as an ally, and they block her from appreciating (let alone valuing) the tendency of literature to resist the domestications of reason and the reality principle. Given that “so many powerful persons and institutions have a vested interest in making us lose faith in language’s power to respond to and reveal reality,” she writes, “precise and attentive use of words is an act of resistance.” I don’t doubt that this could be true, from a certain modest, sober, liberal perspective. But this view of politics and aesthetics is captive to its own picture of the world. For Moi, responding to power requires revealing the reality it obscures. But what about playing with that reality, reimagining it, changing it? Sometimes the ordinary is not enough.”
¤
