“When people throw excrement at one another whenever they meet, either verbally or actually, can this be interpreted as a case of wit, or merely written down as a case of throwing excrement? This is the central question of all interpretation.”
Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975)
Picture Galileo, climbing the steps of the leaning tower on a hot Italian summer afternoon. Picture Newton, hiding out under the apple tree and scratching his bugbites as he tries to read. Picture your family doctor, shining that little light up your nose…discovery isn’t pretty. Even my research–trying to figure out what makes people laugh, why some jokes are funnier than others, and who has already said good stuff on this topic–even my research can be ugly.
Some of the world’s most infuriating people have written and written and written about humor. I have one short but cherished list of “Stupid Things Smart People Have Said About Humor”, and one of my favorites is the little gem above from Mary Douglas, an anthropologist studying tribal joke rituals.
So imagine my horror when I came across that very quote in a scholarly book about “everyday conversation.” Somebody else had already made the joke I was planning to make–somebody had beaten me to the laugh at this utterly humorless “insight” into humor. Then, to my relief, I realized the author was quoting Douglas approvingly. Woo hoo! I still have my joke!
Frank Paynter has been taking the piss out of postmodern criticism, bless him. Pity me, Frank–I have to read this stuff, because most modern literary theory is written in this tangled, PC, complex, language that you have to read three times before you are really sure that what the paragraph says is 1) obvious, 2) bullshit or 3) (much less often) useful. Here’s a short sample, from Salamansky himself (herself? none-of-your-goddamn-business-what-my-gender-is-self?):
“However, in Heidegger’s formulation, Rede, the rhetorically “correct,” strives toward systematics of exclusivity and closure in its attempt to screen out as much heteroglossia and dialogism as possible for the sake of clarity–to hone language, if it were possible, to monoglossia, to limit its bricolage of genres and narrative levels. A police officer for instance, making an arrest, is unlikely to wax poetic or relate deep-seated childhood traumas to the accused.”
S.I. Salamensky, Talk Talk Talk: The Cultural Life of Everyday Conversation (2001)
6 responses so far ↓
1 The Children's Liberation Front (actually, Yule) // Jun 25, 2003 at 4:48 pm
I have an economic theory about pomo “discourse.” Humanities scholars increased their discourse’s complexity precisely in relation to their income decrease as measured against the 1990s increases in MBA, lawyer, and techie incomes. That is, a humanities scholar goes to school for a million years and gets paid between $25-35K upon entering academia, has to gypsy around for several years doing 2- or 3-year stints at various temporary academic postings in the diaspora, and if lucky finally snags a tenure track job that lets him or her make in the $60-70K range eventually …say, 3 years before retirement. A Harvard college drop-out (say, Bill Gates) works like the devil for some years and makes more money than Croesus dared dream of. Many another college grad went to law school for a couple of years, or got his or her MBA in one or two, and found an “entry-level” job that annually paid more than what the humanities scholar could make in 5 years. (Yes, yes, lots of lawyers & MBAs didn’t make out like bandits, but many did. Aside from Edward Said and maybe Simon Shama and other humanties stars like them, I can’t think of many humanities profs who made in the 6-figures in the 90s.) The less money they made, the more convoluted their prose. This compensated for, one, their actual lack of status in our money-obsessed world, and, two, the fact that they had to compete in the same markets for the same commodities (housing, etc.) against much more highly-paid professionals. Their language became increasingly exclusive, even if their cars, houses, clothes, etc. didn’t.
2 jr // Jun 26, 2003 at 3:19 pm
Cop’s not likely to tell perp about his excrement childhood.
I see your problem. In this case the context dictates the humor. Those “10 Dollar” words, besides making my head spin, makes it one of the funniest things I’ve read, also one of the saddest.
3 Frank Paynter // Jun 26, 2003 at 6:31 pm
Heh-heh… of course the cop’s as likely to wax eloquent about her history of victimization as she whacks the heck out of the perp as not. The whole pomo attempt at contextualization is pathetic at best (if it’s simply projection) and stupid at worst (if it denies the obvious scientific methodological prospect of “let’s wait and watch and see what this cop’s likely to do”). But the pathos and the stupidity aren’t what I find as off-putting as the terrible truth I sense in Yule’s comment. These sad people really have traded the beauty and truth of their profession for convoluted political rhetoric, trite philosophy, a posturing exclusivity that traps them each in a hamster wheel of career advancement and status seeking that simply tires them out without permitting them to contribute from a creative center.
The public intellectual has always found solace in the exclusivity afforded by the elegant isolation of his or her position. The $50,000 a year gig for the PhD with 20 years experience is and has been a trade-off for the opportunity to live the life of the public intellectual. (You don’t find many actuaries trying to decide whether to lecture out of doors on a sunny spring day, nor sitting in a comfortable library chair at 10 in the morning). How sad that so many scholars have been trapped in the web of so-called theory at the expense of scholarship, tangled in “theory” at the expense of creativity.
4 The Children's Liberation Front (actually, Yule) // Jun 26, 2003 at 10:23 pm
Frank, your points are well-made, but consider also that the $50K/annum public intellectual is increasingly a rarity in this age of “adjunct” faculty, which the universities are relying on to an ever-greater degree. Adjunct faculty in the humanities gets paid c. $2500 per course at a public institution, $3800 (maybe) at Harvard Extension, about $5-6K at Tufts, and about $10-12K at MIT or Brown (this is pay for the same course, and only at a place like MIT does the appointment come with TAs who help with the grunt work of grading; everywhere else you’re on your own). The figures I quote are real, and come from personal experience in the 90s. The faculty that does exist at the established institutions is busily cranking out more humanities PhD’s who will never-ever get real academic postings, and who will be the fodder for adjunct positions, if they’re lucky. (And since a department’s success is measured by how many “good” grad students it can attract, you can bet your bum that no faculty member is going to expose the real market picture to any potential applicant: no, departments will fight for the bestest and the brightest, especially the ones who show that they can master the jargon perfectly.) The comfortable library chair at 10 a.m. has become a relic of the tenured class that’s now retiring, but which is not being replaced by new tenure-track faculty. They will be replaced all-too-often by the adjunct faculty member, typically female, working with no benefits, working at several institutions simultaneously or adding an extra clerical or administrative job, working without a contract, without teaching assistants, and for very little money.
PS: I like Foucault, by the way, and find him very readable. If you want difficulty, try Adorno. As for Salamensky, I think that writer is just trying to find a nice way of saying that Heidegger was a fascist.
Ooops, now I’m gonna get it.
5 Frank Paynter // Jun 27, 2003 at 5:27 am
Where do pomo mofos stand on unionization? As the universal sophomore, my own analysis lacks nuance, but a linear extension of what I know about Nietzsche woven into the rhetoric of the University of Chicago pseudo-econ crowd (oops! sorry Uncle Miltie, sorry Nobel Committee)… my sense is that union might not have a place in a true postmodern context? Am I wrong?
6 Betsy Devine // Jun 27, 2003 at 6:10 am
The rise of “adjunct faculty” mirrors the way other powerful employers hurt powerless employees, and unionization is IMO an excellent idea. This whole discussion should be its own blog entry. BTW, my translation of Salamansky: “working” language (as opposed to schmooz) is terse and to-the-point.