An impossibly smart matron—who, now that I write about it, may just be precisely Koons's audience—wrote this to me concerning the world's best-selling extant artist:
'To me, Jeff Koons is as good a self-promoter as Andy Warhol and as shallow an artist. What do you think people see in their so-called art?
Are they hoping for a contact cool?'
The oldest story at Sotheby's. And yet: Who doesn't want it? And also: People don't buy art for their health.
Must one be saved from oneself? What is the excuse? Can we pass off such indulgences with a gesture toward irony? Sensual pleasure after modernism? Is displeasing Terry Eagleton sufficient?
The brief presentation I gave in Tunis this week for the Fulbright conference left the audience, I am afraid to say, rather traumatized. It was not an unhopeful sign.
I very briefly outlined my reading of social distance in Bataille—which naturally required a discussion of feces and Freud and difference's desiring-production—and the structuring role it plays in my present 'empirical' consideration. By the time I mentioned 'hierarchy of filth' in a question-and-answer exchange, gasps and giggles were elicited.
I was later approached by a number of graduate students—who are themselves in the throes of navigating Theory's use-value in both their own research and in social science on the whole— interested in the audacity of (1) presenting a theory of subjection and diachronic humanization purportedly 'over-the-heads' of audience-members and (2) a methodology hostile to verifiability pretensions. The response I gave to the first concern is that no one deserves to be subjected to a writing or talking down. The discussion addressing the second concern ultimately arrived at a point where the conversation stressed the importance of surpassing Theory's overwrittenness.
'Bad Theory' abounds, especially in the banal and tired overtures to Foucault and Said (both of whom are, in multiple senses, overwritten at this point) passing for engagement with post-structuralism so often. The conclusion drawn from the post-presentation conversations was that blank stares in an audience of would-be social scientists is indeed a necessary sign.
Sarah Williams Goldhagan, in her review for The New Republic of Sejima and Nishizawa's new New Museum, evidently thinks so. While she finds the project's exterior 'pleasing,' Goldhagan basically determines it to be an unnecessary retread. More significantly, she seems to suggest that the architectural progeny of Judd are spent:
'SANAA's New Museum is a freeze-dried packet of desiccated minimalism. It is in no way miraculous. We are in more trouble than I thought if this is the project that is supposed to restore faith in New York City or point the way toward the future of architecture. The most that can be said in its favor is that in the New Museum, as in the firm's other projects, SANAA raises provocative questions about the value of minimalism in architecture.'
Perhaps programs of radical simplicity, with surprise no longer at hand and maybe impossible altogether, must at this juncture carry rather minimal expectations. Besides, simply because statements literally built have foregone subtlety—the play on transparency and light is quite appropriately apparent, even if one does not read the architects' written statement—that fact does not render them less sophisticated, or, more significantly, less important. Isn't the museum's ebullient appearance on the Bowery's east side enough?
Ah, the marital dyad remains a curiously durable structure. I would also say that part of the durability here is that the production of what is designated dominant and submissive—for the boys as well—is formed in anticipation of the structure (regardless of the permissibility of legal initiation into marriage). That is, the dyadic division of sexual labor is an effect of the marital structure both before and independent of the union itself. Hypothetically, were we to desist from recognizing marriage as a legal matter—and, were social convention (i.e., religious organizations) to simultaneously desist—we would still be forced to face this division for a substantial period.
So it is that the magazine which rarely fails to deliver the latest from the cast of the administration has released upon us all a piece by Jerry Z. Muller, a historian at Catholic University, arguing that 'ethnonationalism' emanates—yes—'from the human spirit' and is therefore ineradicable. In 'The Clash of Peoples' or 'Us and Them' (have your iteration: cover or 'in-book'), the conclusion that Muller conjures from this notion of the 'nature' of the human is that international policymakers should basically accommodate 'ethnonational' claims, because to deny them is to risk exciting a bloodbath between nationalists and the minorities or polities which they hope to do without. 'Partition,' Muller assures us, 'is often the least bad answer.' He later asserts that with it comes finality and a lower price tag in terms of international peacekeeping.
The allusion to Huntington's 1993 'Clash' is more than titular: The magazine is hoping to make a similarly spectacular provocation by employing a seemingly different thesis that, on consideration, seems (if we can steal Muller's unfortunate appropriation of terms with Hegelian baggage) to emanate from the precise spirit that animated 'Clash' fifteen years ago. While Huntington, by his own avowals, was setting forth a bold and provocative description of affairs as they were and would be, it became gradually apparent that he was more deeply implicated and invested in the conclusions than he may have wanted critics to believe.
So forgive me for experiencing a tad of déjà vu with 'Us and Them' and the case at hand:
'But if ethnonationalism has frequently led to tension and conflict, it has also proved to be a source of cohesion and stability. When French textbooks began with "Our ancestors the Gauls" or when Churchill spoke to wartime audiences of "this island race," they appealed to ethnonationalist sensibilities as a source of mutual trust and sacrifice. Liberal democracy and ethnic homogeneity are not only compatible; they can be complementary.
One could argue that Europe has been so harmonious since World War II not because of the failure of ethnic nationalism but because of its success, which removed some of the greatest sources of conflict both within and between countries. The fact that ethnic and state boundaries now largely coincide has meant that there are fewer disputes over borders or expatriate communities, leading to the most stable territorial configuration in European history.'
The retroactive fallacy upon which nationalism is necessarily built—we must, for virtually the entirety of Western Europe, speak of the precession of the state—is at the same time concealed (he presents the European 'nation state' synchronically, as it were) and summoned forth by Muller: The ethnic project arouses, as the above passage makes clear, the author's sympathy, by virtue of its continuing powers of cohesion. And here we see that Muller's piece is also a lesson in understanding Theory's burden in the social sciences. The most basic insights into the dissemination of culture will receive acknowledgment only, by way of that precise acknowledgment, to then receive summary dismissal. 'Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity,' Muller offers near the end of the essay. 'It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim.' And yet: 'They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power.'
Does this disclaimer near the conclusion of the essay acquit Muller of the work's persistent treatment of ethnonationalism as entirely superstructural? And what of the fact that, with few exceptions, the majority of any given populace remains ambivalent to indigenous nationalisms? Would not partitioning merely defer to those with the biggest guns and largest printing presses? Does Muller's determination that 'partition is the least bad answer' simply happen to coincide with his recognition of ethnonationalism's social benefits? And, if, as is more likely, nationalism 'emanates' not from the 'human spirit' but from configurations among economic strata, would partition solve a problem likely to reiterate itself despite new lines on a map? Nationalism's empire—an absurdity that manages to approach the object—knows no limits so long as the basic fissures of which it is an effect (and thus also an affect) are extant. Its work will complete itself neither of its own accord nor by a simple rearrangement of decidedly novel linguistic categories. Sort of like Theory's.
Theoretical moribundity makes me think of International Relations—the academic field, that is—with awkward pretensions that find its practitioners caught between the 'hard science' pressure to identify independent variables (that language!) sufficiently robust to survive localized controls (i.e., that are sensible across circumstances unfortunate enough to be deemed [ahem, and produced] 'case studies'), on the one hand, and to grandly pronounce sonorous and significant theoretic narratives on the other. The IR impulse is what brought us some of those eccentric and entertaining 200-level course debates over such creations as 'rational actors' and other bewildering anthropomorphizations of the state, generally pilfered from economists and adorned with some strung out Enlightenment gestures toward 'human nature.'
These debates are so broad and therefore vulgar that one can but sympathize with the recent clamoring among IR faculty over 'game theory,' which, one supposes, is sonorous and clever enough, but which, at the same time, might remind one of set theory's deployment in early Kristeva. These fads—which may, in another context, bear a vague semblance to some Malcolm Gladwell piece in The New York Times Magazine—tend to take hold of a discipline desiring more precise-sounding adornments to explanatory powers whose capacity does not much change. Perhaps I am, after all, also writing of Political Science on the whole. Who cares? Slaking the desire for a topping of the gram with the matheme has generally produced unattractive results. The question must become: Just how many metaphoric layers must one be forced to lick to reach the center after all?
Meanwhile, I have no trouble heaping the blame for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Consensus magazine with, I suppose, a rather severe case of journal anxiety, at the door of the IR department. I will refrain from hammering home the point that virtually the entirety of Foreign Affairs looks to be ghostwritten, an observation charitable neither to the magazine nor to the would be foreign-service members sidelining for celebrity authors. The entire thing could be produced by the human relations department in the basement of State. In any event, Foreign Affairs is always given top-shelf treatment—yes, that's it, just to the right of US Weekly, the not-necessarily-less-worthwhile magazine celebrating celebrities of another variety—and it seems to give its readers the feeling of reading some thorough academic research of some sort. One can rarely be fully certain of a publication's constituency, but I would venture that the chap most likely to be impressed by Foreign Affairs would be what Christopher Guest might call 'of the catalogue generation,' replete with latte and chinos and Borders on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, the image is too much already.
