An empty decade ago, I got my degree in Cultural Studies from Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario. That was the most progressive program at the most progressive school I could find in Canada.
It was ten years ago that I fled in shame--unable to write what I had to in order to receive my Honours. Only today am I prepared to say that I couldn't get my Honours then because there was no honour to be found in what I was doing.
~~~
We must back up, to whatever point little Joey first learned the word, “society.” What a revelation that concept was! I was sure that things could be so much better, saner, safer, and more peaceful if this amorphous, capricious creature called “society” would only get its act together. The utterance was always at the ready, deployed by wee Joey as a mild curse. “Society.”
Clearly individuals were generally decent, but in association I could only see their accumulated error. Somehow good people added up to a needlessly shit social environment, and in my hazy innocence I imagined that understanding and considering the social and psychological exigencies of our conduct could help cleanse us of this need to waste energy on condemnation and habitual idiocy. We suffer not because we deserve it, not because we must, but for want of understanding just how much the inertia of past ages still directs us.
Yes, people weren't the problem, it was society. The terrible disappointment that is humanity was but a mass of waves and murmurations echoing old impulses. It wasn't something inherent in each faulty person, it was old mistakes handed down and uncorrected. Our common heritage was our misperception of things.
~~~
I remember the feeling I had in junior high social studies class, when Mr. Houle explained why Canada was better than the United States. America strove for a melting pot with one standard—he invoked “hotdogs and baseball” and got big laughs, so I know the message stuck—while we enlightened Canucks, in our more refined and elevated moral sense, presented a mosaic of cultures. We were a place where every colour and creed could belong. Our identity was all identities.
It should have made me feel full. It should perhaps have made me feel privileged and proud and overwhelmed with the depth and breadth of the Canadian soul. Instead it made me feel oddly hollow.
Of course other people from other cultures could bring their assorted foods, dances, and hats, and thereby give me a richer palette with which to colour my life, but what could I bring to another country of my own home, my own culture, my own identity? We were everything and nothing, yet I knew there was something more in me than snow and maple syrup.
~~~
The school counselor called me down one day to tell me about a special program at the University of New Brunswick. I got the impression mine was the name from our school she was giving them.
The program was a Bachelor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Leadership Studies. They operated out of an old Victorian home, where I would be living and working alongside my classmates. I took the tour, was shown a project they were working on, something about different perspectives on oil drilling, and then we sat down with the dean.
Eventually he came to that awful, awful question: “Do you have any questions?” I fished around for a moment, and then stumbled into asking him point-blank what the goals and objectives and principles and philosophy of the program were. What were they trying to accomplish in the world?
In response, he reached for the brochure and read me the fucking blurb on the back. It was then that I knew I would not be lead into whatever kind of leadership they were offering.
~~~
My childhood fixation with “society” gradually became more finely tuned and nuanced into a preoccupation with “bullshit.” Yes, bullshit was the problem now. If only society would get over its bullshit.
It seemed to me that English, Sociology, Psychology, History, Philosophy and Fine Arts were all too narrowly circumscribed by their own particular brands of bullshit. What I needed was a degree in Bullshit Studies, but I couldn't find that.
I thought I got close enough when I found the only department of Cultural Studies then existing in the country at Trent. So I went.
~~~
At first it was great. For the first time in my life I felt intellectually stimulated and challenged. It was exciting to have my field of view expanded so rapidly.
It was good to be away from home. I had a board plan for meals and a thousand mandatory flex dollars for personal pan pizzas, I had thirty hits of pretty good acid I brought from Nova Scotia, and it was now possible for me to get old Doctor Who on my computer. Genesis of the Daleks. The Caves of Androzani. Those were good days.
I made one critical mistake, and that was critical thinking. I took a course in practical reasoning in the philosophy department, learned logic, and did quite well at it—my highest mark, with a final of 96, if I remember right.
When my second year began, and I was now taking four cultural studies courses instead of one, a terrible sinking feeling appeared in my gut. I suppressed it as best I could, but I couldn't convince myself I didn't detect a problem.
I thought I had signed on for the study of culture, but it was increasingly apparent that we were studying it in order to impose our predetermined narrative upon it. I couldn't help but notice that this narrative was built on assertions more than data.
I got very good at making those assertions. I realised that I could throw my practical reasoning out the window, as it was irrelevant. Writing in the proper mode was more performance than reason. Eloquence, conviction, and slavish devotion to identity politics were all that was needed.
They had lots of good points and perspectives, but my intellectual conscience wouldn't permit me to ignore that the justification for the sanctification of Marx and Freud was never given. With other names too, we read them to find the ways in which they were right. Everything was interpretation, but there was only one acceptable interpretation.
We disagreed at our own peril. With a breathtaking lack of self-awareness, the professor I most respected once castigated us for not speaking up and participating more often, apparently blissfully unaware that she would routinely make fun of anyone who stepped outside her dogma. I'm almost certain that everyone else in that seminar had the same thought in that moment.
~~~
It wasn't until my third year that I learned about the Sokal hoax. I think I made the mistake of Googling my education. Within moments of wondering how the outside world viewed post-modernism, I discovered that a journal of cultural studies had accepted a paper made mostly of meaningless gibberish because the author had included enough buzz words that they liked.
It was a big scandal and I hadn't heard a peep about it, much less sober discussion about the limitations of our methods. This was pretty fucking damning, but I was so far into my degree that it seemed there was no turning back--and it still seemed inconceivable that a nascent discipline could be quite so fragmented, incoherent, and misanthropic as cultural studies appeared, so I was sure I was missing something, I just wasn't smart enough. This was university, after all. It was grown-up business. There was no way it could be as fucked as it appeared.
~~~
In my final year, I took two 400-level courses with the intention of getting my Honours. The only identity Mr. Houle had left me with was being a good student, so that was what I would do.
One of those classes was taught by a young gay man, the other by an old gay man. Both courses drew heavily from Jacques Lacan, and both professors readily admitted that they didn't understand most of his mystical psychobabble. This was supposed to be the summit of my learning, but my teachers seemed almost as confused as I was.
When it came time to compose my final papers, I could see all the hoops I was to jump through arrayed before me. It didn't matter if I understood what I was saying, I just had to repeat some stuff with my own clever spin to make it sound like an elaboration of a proven idea. I had to adopt a pose and sustain it for however many thousand words, building self-referential loops of nonsense until the mounting absurdity reaches such levels that the mind relents and agrees.
I still believed that we're driven by the unconscious. I still believed that every cultural artifact encodes layers of meaning. I still believed that there exist institutionalised injustices, and I still wanted peace and understanding for all people.
Somehow all this brought me to was a listless self-loathing. I still didn't know what my culture could possibly stand for, beyond slavery, exploitation, colonialism, patriarchy. I still didn't know what I could stand for, other than to be an ally for aggrieved classes.
Indeed, when my nervous breakdown came and I e-mailed my teachers that I wouldn't finish the year, I don't think I imagined that the older gay professor appeared most upset to be losing an intelligent, straight, gentile ally who he had invested in. I hope that's only a vicious projection on my part. The young gay Jewish professor just seemed confused, while my three straight professors, all of them in the philosophy department, expressed various levels of support and concern.
My metaphysics teacher shuffled things around to give me a pass with the work I'd done, so I could still get a degree. Another phoned me in Nova Scotia, when he read my e-mail too late to make a difference, and earnestly tried to confirm I was sure about dropping the course, as I had written a paper he liked. Between the philosophy and cultural studies departments, the difference in reaction when I faltered was striking.
~~~
At that time the problem was academic. It was my own failure, or it was the excesses of my teachers, but it was behind me. I tried for a few years to catch up on the readings I'd missed in the hopes that something would come together, but I only became more convinced that most of my higher education was best ignored. I could retain some psychology and semiotics, film theory and the history of ideas, but as an animating ideology cultural studies was impossible. It told stories of oppression in which I could only play a stock villain or a prostrate ally. But at least it was only professors who believed that shit.
Now I'm actually worried. What I thought ten years ago was a radical academic fringe confined to a hippie school and mentally stuck in '68 is now a swarming horde of shrieking cultural Marxists, determined to remake society in accordance with the dictates of their puny feelings. I just want to convey to the rational men and women, gay and straight, Jew and gentile alike, that from my own lived experience, the ideological underpinnings of the militant social justice movement are every bit as mental as they may appear, and I barely got out alive to tell you so.
No comments:
Post a Comment