On Rudeness and J.M. Coetzee
Parallax, Spring 2013, Special issue on 'Stupidity'
This article examines three primary modes through which fictional texts demand attention to the politics and ethics of... more
This article examines three primary modes through which fictional texts demand attention to the politics and ethics of art’s capacity rudely to accost readers and critics, and to reduce those they encounter to a state of stupefaction:
i) the artwork’s rude accost of readers, and characters’ brashness to each other, which stuns and then incites
ii) the arresting literary sublime, and aesthetic experiences that overwhelm us
iii) exhibitions of rudely alienating scholarly erudition that alienate common readers/characters.
The Fate of Stupidity
Essays in Criticism, Summer 2012
‘Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin’, wrote Giorgio Agamben: ‘those who study are in the situation of... more
‘Studying and stupefying are in this sense akin’, wrote Giorgio Agamben: ‘those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always “stupid”’.
What is striking about this pronouncement is stupidity’s close association with physical arrest. In everyday use, stupidity is an intellectual shortcoming, or an embarrassing lapse of understanding and rationality. But here, being conceptually ‘struck’ is powerfully corporeal. Agamben’s vocabulary for stupidity is that of the stunned body: ‘the crash’, ‘the shock’, ‘impact’, ‘struck’, ‘grasp’, ‘hold’. To think in this way is to call for etymological attentiveness: Agamben has in mind the ‘stup’ of suspended action that is provoked by wonder or awe, and is carried in ‘stupefy’, ‘stupor’, ‘stupendous’. For him, this arrest is the scholar’s permanent condition. One will ‘always’ be shocked, incited to further study, struck again. Making recourse to stupidity’s etymology, however, is itself a powerful intellectual move. Agamben’s lines might be willing to render stupid the hypothetical ‘scholar’, but not their own act of scholarship.
Focusing on twentieth century British poetry, this article examines our aesthetic fascination with being rendered stupid. From W.B Yeats’ violent historical ‘blow’ in ‘Leda and the Swan’, to T.S. Eliot’s ‘bewildering minute’ and ‘[p]aralysed force’, poets repeatedly return us to the powerful state of being struck dumb and rendered stupid. I attend to contemporary poetry which presents formal, historical, and conceptual-philosophical difficulties that take place phenomenologically, especially focusing on the work of the contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill, in which the combination of arrested corporeality and conceptuality are key.
Whilst critical attention is often directed toward poetic ingenuity and intelligence, it seldom explores literature's attention to their disturbing, even paralysing opposites. I argue that a readerships' temptation to react negatively to being rendered stupid betrays contemporary fears about being overwhelmed, and exposed as ignorant. Arrest rudely reminds us that art is no luxury, but part of a culture’s abilities to make sense, to test existing knowledge systems, and to come up with fresher, or better ones - or to try to. We are dismayed about not ‘getting it’, especially when others do. But also: we ought to be. The violence of being rendered stupid helps us to redraw the epistemological map, to think better, or fail better. This article explores what work stupidity has done in our accounts of literary creativity, taste and reception, and the related branches of scholarship, knowledge and artistic value.
Of Truth and Falsehood in a Spiritual- Materialistic Sense: A Response to Sean Esbjörn-Hargens' Proposal for True But Partial
This is a position paper I wrote in response to a very strange call for papers. The tone is in places unnecessarily harsh, which I regret. I am sharing it because I think the ideas are worth considering as representative of an undercurrent of radical thought in integral studies. First published at Frank Visser's Integral World site.