On Distance

It’s no wonder we have anxiety about what we do--or, to reflect on Derek’s and Andy’s posts, about how we represent ourselves, or are represented. Bill Readings asks, “What intervention can be made in the university today, as it abandons its role as the flagship of national culture, but before it embarks irrevocably upon the path of becoming a bureaucratic corporation?” (475-76). We struggle to identify a role for the contemporary university, never mind our own roles within it. We’re not even sure what to teach our students or what to call our courses. A curriculum of ‘Great Books’ is too homogenized, but without it we have no books in common. “The university no longer has a hero for its grand narrative,” (477) claims Readings. Academics are not Prince Hamlet, nor were meant to be. We dwell in ruins.

Plagued by ambiguity, we embrace it, to an almost absurd degree. Let’s not talk about literature anymore; let’s talk about ‘texts’ instead. Texts can be anything, and the term allows to us continue to wonder about--and fight about--what it is that we do. Like Nick, I doubt we need to worry too much about creating conflict, or, as Readings puts it, “refiguring the university as a locus of dissensus” (478). Maybe we haven’t yet descended to ‘epic’ fights, but we’re getting there, if not in the hallways, then at least on blogs.

I think the outcome of all this ambiguity is an extreme distancing, an estrangement, from the work that we do in academe, and from ourselves--hence all the anxiety. MacIntyre argues that “what is needed is some way of enabling the members of an audience to regard themselves from an ironic distance,” but I agree with Camille that such ironic distancing may be easier for white, male heterosexuals than others, and that female students may not be amenable to the discourse of confrontation MacIntyre proposes. Besides, it seems to me that we have plenty of ironic distance already; indeed we have nothing but. What relationship do we have with our ‘texts’ anymore? Of course we can’t talk about the way they might make us feel, or how they might move us, or draw us in. Maybe that sort of subjective involvement belongs to the ancient days when we read literature. Today, we must, to use Readings’ phrase, “think without identity.”

A professor commented recently on a paper of mine, “Go ahead: judge. English studies are crying out for authoritative analyses after so long trying, unavailingly, to proceed without them.” I was startled to realize that I had argued without judging, that I had in fact been hesitant to commit to a personal position on this ‘text.’ Hesitancy, ambiguity, fragmentation, distance--do we love the questions, or are we simply lost in them?