The left intellectual’s contempt for “elitism” is an inverse form of self-regard. The intellectual imagines that something we might call “knowledge justice” or “cultural justice” (that is, the equitable distribution of cultural goods to all) hinges upon her own knowledge and cultural apparatus. When she scorns the theorist, the poet, the queer, the modernist or whomever for “excluding” The People, she is unable to imagine that people pleasure themselves and each other differently.

It’s all very bourgeois and Protestant, like so much of what passes for left discourse in the US academy. Sociologists from Adorno to Bourdieu have noted that no one propounds high culture with more passion and volubility than the parvenu, the prole or petty bourgeois who has made it to the demi-monde or the schools. See, for instance, Adorno’s magnificently un-P.C. reflections in Minima Moralia on why non-westerners cannot be trusted with the revolution because they are too in (resentful) love with the various goods of the West; because the tradition is not internal to them, they cannot hate it properly, he says. But I would like to turn this dialectically back upon Adorno here: what is internal to the parvenu is the denial of difficult intellectual pleasure. The danger for the intellectual who has never known the parched cultural climate of the lower middle class is that he will not be able to hate popular culture and folk religion properly (not, of course, that Teddy had this problem).

Anyway, there is no such thing as The People. The People is an illusion created by mass culture so that power blocs forced to accountability by democratization could have an interlocutor or a proxy in order to carry out what they’ve always been doing, and this is as true of the vanguard party as of the Republican Party. There is no The People, there are only people, and people get off on all sorts of things.

I have worked alongside or otherwise known people for whom repairing air conditioners or cars, or cutting hair, was a profound pleasure, a tactile and intellectual engagement with the world.

Imagine, if you will, a plumber who loves his work. Imagine his satisfaction with the tools of his trade, imagine his sense of accomplishment at a job well done. Imagine the moral terms in which he figures his work to himself: he unclogs the world, he puts the workings of society back on track. Imagine, too, that he treasures the interactions with others brought on by his occupational itinerancy.

I do not share his knowledge, and I do not share his pleasure. If something were to go seriously wrong with my toilet, I would be utterly at his mercy. And yet no one speaks of the “elite” of plumbers who excludes poor folk like me from his hoarded knowledge of pipes and wrenches. No, we gather that the world needs plumbers, and some people like to plumb, and anyway if the job sometimes gets one down, it’s fairly well-remunerated.

No one thinks of poets or theorists this way, though; and this partially because the poets and theorists themselves think they’re better than plumbers, even when they pretend to hate themselves, especially when they get into a funk because the plumber does not share their knowledge and talents; and yet they think it unremarkable that they do not share the plumber’s knowledge and talents.

But there’s something more sinister than unacknowledged self-regard at work in the left intellectual’s anti-intellectualism. There is too a solidarity with private and public totalitarianisms. Because The People must be included in everything, their chimerical wishes must be respected; thus, state and private interests conjure those wishes out of surveys and statistics which tell one everything about people except for what one would actually like to know about them. Then state and private interests integrate all culture for The People, excluding everything that does not fall within the statistical average, and this in the name of protecting the poorest among us, even though it’s as likely as anything that the hairdresser’s daughter will love Lacan and the the aristo heir only football. That is the public totalitarianism.

The private totalitarianism occurs when The People’s wishes are so respected that actual people’s certainties are never disturbed. So, for instance, we hear from cultural studies types that family or church or Twilight or whatever is a fragile shelter for those deracinated by individualist capitalist modernity, and yet we never here that these shelters may be in their stultifications, their coercions, worse than the storm. We scorn as elite the products of a poor colonial lower-middle-class scribbler like Joyce, and celebrate as populist the extremely expensive productions of massive corporations.

Who, anyway, is the intellectual but the Jew, the queer, the hysterical woman? Anti-intellectualism is always a disavowed worship of the norm, thus a racism, sexism and homophobia. For don’t we always give the intellectual the name of the despised enemy? For McCarthyite America, the intellectual was a commie (and pervert); for communist regimes, the intellectual was an imperialist running-dog (and pervert). This goes on in persecuted communities as well as in hegemonic ones, as when feminists champion the sorority at large over the sister who wishes to go her own way, or when black nationalists accuse the black intellectual of being white. (Again, I am forced to observe the profound complicity between the identity politics of oppressor and oppressed.)

Finally, it’s not as if anti-intellectualism never killed anybody. From literature departments, you’d get the idea that “art for art’s sake” was the world’s most murderous ideology, and yet it’s exactly the kind of anti-intellectualism championed by mavens of cultural studies which enabled the various reigns of terror from Mao and Pol Pot to Reagan and Bush, all of whom legitimated themselves by abjecting the intellectual. After this, I am supposed to fear Joyce, Stein, Derrida, Woolf etc.? To the left anti-intellectual I raise my middle finger in populist salute.

Anthony Lane has, much like Alan Moore, always loved Nabokov; and his recent misreading of Watchmen (the book, not the probably meretricious film) reminds me a lot of Nabokov’s misreading of Don Quixote.

Both books, Cervantes’s and Moore’s, parody the genre of heroic romance, and both use violence in a particular way to do so: medieval romance before Cervantes and super-hero comics before Moore were violent, but in a cleaned-up way that would not disturb the binary sentiments the genre existed to inspire. Moore and Cervantes restore to the types of events these genres describe the sheer ugliness, sordidness and horror that would naturally attend them. The gore and brutality are necessary to reframe the heroic romance, to make it seem as distorting an idealization as it is.

But both works also feed on heroic romance to lend some of its idealistic colors to the oft-contemned everyday. The fat and vulgar country squire and the fat washed-up old super-hero, like those met on the Spanish road and at the corner New York newsstand, participate in a drama which really does bring ideals into conflict with what would thwart them. Neither Moore nor Cervantes are at all cynical; they merely suspect that some idealizations, closely related to murderous ideologies (the Inquisition for Cervantes, capitalism and communism for Moore), can potentially do great harm if they’re not brought into some humanizing contact with the earthly, the secular, the quotidian and plebeian. Both texts become novels in the Bakhtinian sense when they turn the romance inside out.

Lane’s worst misreading comes when he implies, possibly taking his cues from that idiot Zack Snyder’s movie, that the violence which ends the book is gratuitous—a foolish claim, since Moore and Gibbons carefully acquaint us with so many of the people who will die at the end, and this as much as anything else stands as an indictment of Ozymandias’s plan.

I can see how Watchmen would appear to someone who isn’t familiar with the state of the genre in which it intervened in 1986; to look back, after grim and gritty comics, after Fight Club and Kill Bill and Saw and everything else, might be simply to perceive to origin of mass-marketed squalor. But that’s no excuse not to read it, and I suppose I don’t understand how anyone who really read it could fail to see how humane it is, how great an effort it makes to drag its subject matter into the orbit of a humanistic dignity.

Anyway, a good feminist critique of Moore waits to be made. Lane hints at it, but not very cleverly. I think it would have to be fairly psychoanalytic, and would start here: the squid monster, edited out of the film, is the socially/industrially-constructed but still primal force that everyone in the book wants to control, starting with Moore and Gibbons and their rigid nine-panel grid and their tight recursive plot. It’s said that fans always refer to this creature as “the squid monster,” but when I was a teenager, my friends and I referred to it as “the vagina monster.” Now that’s how a feminist critique of Watchmen would begin; I suppose it would be a bit racy for The New Yorker.

(A propos of this and this.)

We’ll know we’re in a new cultural moment when we stop using this stupid word “modern” to define ourselves, even negatively.

Read Laura Miller’s review essay on Elaine Showalter’s new book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, and then read the letters.

The comments are almost all terrifying examples of why contemporary American men and women are, in their culturally-produced differences, so fucking stupid. But the scariest thing is the way in which the stupidity of the men reproduces the patriarchal consensus in business and science while the stupidity of the women reproduces the institutionalized feminism of the English and history departments. In short, though I as a rule try to avoid striking the elitist note of besieged intelligence, we are ruled by, if not the foolish, then certainly the complacent.

The patriarchal complaint I have dealt with elsewhere on this blog and its shortcomings are too obvious to merit commentary: women are narrow, unambitious and stupid, Darwin and/or God said so, only men can be geniuses, etc. Boring.

The feminist complaint is more interesting because more widespread in literary circles. This says that women’s writing is neglected because women’s concerns (childrearing, domesticity, being a victim of something, etc.) are neglected. And not only this, but also that aspects of literary art such as experimentalism in structure and language, metaphysical speculation and a concern for ideas rather than plot have been concocted by some male conspiracy against women’s natural desire to read domestic romances in plain prose.

I’ve stated the case rather hyperbolically, but I do intend to reveal the egregious sexism of this “feminist” position. Indeed, how can we even distinguish it from a patriarchal argument? Duh, chicks like love stories and big ideas hurt their little brains. That’s what I hear when self-appointed academic feminists say that “women’s concerns and interests” are neglected by literary culture.

Their solution to this problem over the course of the last thirty years has been to construct the spurious category of “women’s literature” (“a literature of their own,” in the Woolf-hating Showalter’s earlier formulation), a category that mixes female geniuses like Emily Dickinson (the greatest U.S. poet of the nineteenth century) and George Eliot (the greatest British novelist of the nineteenth century) with a pack of boring hacks (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, etc.) In my darker moments, I perceive two consequences of this logic in the future: 1.) a men’s rights movement will emerge and demand on comparable terms the canonical reinstatement of bores like Longfellow and Whittier; 2.) we will eventually be congratulating ourselves on the recovery of that great neglected twentieth-century female voice, Ayn Rand.

Here’s the thing: the kind of women who are ambitious to become great writers don’t tend to share a conservative conception of “women’s interests” (dinner, diapers, the holy home) because these things are prisons to which patriarchy unjustly consigned all women by robbing them of any choice in the matter. The freedom to experiment in art, politics, philosophy, should be for everyone; not everyone can be great, but no one should be excluded from the effort. There is no “women’s literature” because Emily Dickinson and George Eliot and Colette and H.D. and Hannah Arendt and Flannery O’Connor and Elizabeth Bishop and Zora Neale Hurston and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag do not want to sit at the ladies’ table or come to a tea party. And if feminism is not about that, then what is it good for?

Two quotes to finish, first from Sontag herself:

If Rich (hardly as ferociously as some of our sisters) is going to start baiting that heavy bear, the intellect, then I feel obliged to announce that anyone with a taste for “intellectual exercise” will always find in me an ardent defender. Truth has need of all kinds of exertion. Although I defy anyone to read what I wrote and miss its personal, even autobiographical character, I much prefer that the text be judged as an argument and not as an “expression” of anything at all, my sincere feelings included.

Adrienne Rich, whom I have always admired as poet and phenomenologist of anger, is a piker compared to some self-styled radical feminists, all too eager to dump the life of reason (along with the idea of authority) into the dustbin of “patriarchal history.” Still, her well-intentioned letter does illustrate a persistent indiscretion of feminist rhetoric: anti-intellectualism. “One imagined Sontag not to dissociate herself from feminism,” Rich observes. Right. But I do dissociate myself from that wing of feminism that promotes the rancid and dangerous antithesis between mind (“intellectual exercise”) and emotion (“felt reality”). For precisely this kind of banal disparagement of the normative virtues of the intellect (its acknowledgement of the inevitable plurality of moral claims; the rights it accords, alongside passion, to tentativeness and detachment) is also one of the roots of fascism—what I was trying to expose in my argument about Riefenstahl.

And the second from Marilynne Robinson’s interview in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers:

There were very great women in the nineteenth century, and I’m afraid it would be hard to come up with their equivalent in this enlightened time, which is a frightening thought. But they were women who were well and optimistically educated with the assumption that they certainly could be great. Which I think is not really by any means characteristic now. Instead I think that women are being very largely educated, frankly, to plead a case against the world at large, as if what they have to do is be fascinated by what has happened that ought to disturb or anger them, rather than by the possibility of doing something else. They’re not making the space that other women I think in another two generations will want to occupy. [...] I think that things are being ascribed to gender that are not gender determined, and it’s tending toward limiting distinctions in the same way that people were doing in 1810.