Texts and Attitudes, Part 5

Reading Clusters of Titles 

as a Defensive Strategy

Sometimes there are conjunctions or happenstances that illuminate what you are reading. For one project I have been going through the essays in the catalogue for the important Te Maori (1984) exhibition that toured New York and other overseas cities.  Though I had often looked through the book, examined the pictures and their captions with interest, I never bothered to study the essays on Maori art and culture.  One essay by a famous anthropologist in New Zealand, proved very interesting, but like the other authors in the museum catalogue, something didn’t seem right.  Not that they were poorly written or seemed weak in their presentation of facts, but after twenty years the shine has gone off the arguments, at least for me.  I have grown older, matured (I hope) in my understanding of art and anthropology, and made sensitive to the implications and sources of post-modernism and its politically correct ideology.  So when she capped off her essay by citing from Martin Heidegger, the light went on—brighter than usual, as a few hours earlier on the same day I read a brief discussion of a translation of the German philosopher’s Black Notebooks. 

It is not that everyone interested did not know about Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazis in the early 1930s and his role as a university chancellor in dismissing his Jewish colleagues, but most people—meaning most of the post-modernists who felt drawn to his basic ideas—tried to rationalize away his political propensities.  Like his one-time graduate student and long-time mistress Hannah Arendt, they made themselves believe that his racist views and cooperation with Hitler’s regime were, if not aberrations, then at most strategic acts, and that he really was not an anti-Semite or a fascist himself.  The Black Notebooks clinch the matter.  They reveal his deep-seated hatred for Jews and his commitment to National Socialist ideology.  Heideggerian ideas are deeply embedded in post-modernism, manifested in his idealization of unreason, and thus in the tendency to be anti-American and anti-Zionist, as well as anti-Semitic which marks so much of contemporary (extreme) left-wing thinking and teaching in academia these days.

Thus what had seemed twenty years ago like real insight into the nature of Maori art and the rejection of Eurocentric paradigms of art history and anthropology and also a willingness—an enthusiasm—to accept the tribalism and so-called spirituality of indigenous traditions in the place of scholarly objectivity, logical analysis and historical relativism, becomes suspect.  Some of this also is now bolstered by Edward Said’s ideology of Orientalism, not only rejecting western science and historiography as products of colonialist, imperialist and racist politics, but accusing the great pioneers of linguistics, ethnography and iconography of working on behalf of insidious or at least cynical European governments in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  There are, to be sure, many reasons, for treating those early efforts with caution today: information was far from complete, knowledge of the indigenous languages still in formative stages, overly logical positivistic ideas clashed with Darwinian notion of progressive evolution; but the anti-Orientalist ideology goes much further in imputing secret agendas, conspiratorial actions, and complete arrogance in the minds of the individual scholars, their various institutions and associations.  All colonial “projects” are treated as equally pernicious, and even as equal, though many western nations did not create their colonial empires until quite late in the nineteenth century. 

Moreover, as in the case of the essay we started to discuss above what is left out are the efforts of non-scientists, especially philosophers, poets and artists to make sense of the creative efforts of so-called “primitive” or “exotic” peoples: they wished often to do something other than disparage, trivialize or expropriate such art—turning the works of art into specimens of undeveloped “savage” thinking processes, flattening out distinctions between very different kinds of societies with varying geographies and histories, placing them in “storerooms” or display cases in museums, and stripping them of their cultural and psychological contexts.  That is certainly not what Gauguin, Matisse or Picasso were doing when they tried to integrate African or Oceanic art into their own work, or to seek through imitation to cleanse their own minds of what they understood to be the detritus of a dominant bourgeois and materialistic culture in Europe, to reach some original and purified human vision. 

The question therefore is how much do we take into account the political motivations or implications of an author, be it scholar or artist or critic, when judging his or her work?  A recent drive to counteract the drive to boycott, divest and censure Israel (BDS) by asking university authorities, scholarly editors and trade publishers by authors for revision of theses and articles written in the past--to delete or modify annotations, references and citations from formerly respectable sources now tainted by their political views and actions; this is being asked for on the grounds that such morally offensive and politically dangerous positions undermine the authority of those sources and place any use of them by other parties suspect at best and collusive at worst. 

In other words, there comes a time when reading discloses undercurrents and crosscurrents of relationship less on the surface where they can be monitored and evaluated properly but of out of immediate sight—hidden in jargon, disguised by fine liberal-sounding discourses, manifest only in the deepest swirls of allusion and implication; located, that is, at second and third levels of influence. In those places where paradigms of persuasion and concentric circles of coherence lock into shape the invisible metaphors, myths and metonyms of delusionary common sense and constructed naturalness.  Though accidental conjunctions sometimes spark the light that reveals these subversive aspects of cultural activity, self-trained exercises in juxtaposition and inter-textuality force the unseen into the light, make the fragments of distant speech fit together in audible patterns, and refocus the mind so as to shift attention from the periphery to the centre and vice versa, invert and elongate the surfaces, and so upset the illusions of stability and logic.