Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 26

Arriving in Utrecht for an international conference on literary studies, I come up the escalator from the train into the large ticket-hall-cum-plaza. There, I buy myself a city map, before entering a large mall complex that should take me directly to the city centre. Once inside the mall, however, I lose my bearings and wander for a good three-quarters of an hour. I pass all manner of shops, some familiar global chains (C&A, New York City, Burger King, the usual suspects), some unfamiliar, presumably local businesses. As so often in the Netherlands, there is a sense of being in a slightly grubby hydroponic hothouse. I first stroll and then, slightly desperate, hurry through one hall into the next, via escalators and T-junctions and skylighted atria, with occasional panorama windows onto artfully landscaped Grachten, but fail to find anywhere an exit to the city centre. Finally I stumble upon a sort of air-lock that releases me onto a square full of vegetable vendors’ stalls, and soon after that, I arrive at one of the main Grachten that leads me to the building where registration takes place. Several days later, on the way back to catch my departing train, I discover, from outside, a much simpler route into the mall, but by then the adventure has left an enduring impression upon my mood. My getting lost in the mall makes me feel as if I’ve strayed into Postmodernism 101 with Jameson’s (1991: 39-44) infamous diatribe against the Westin Bonaventura hotel atrium as set text. Indeed, the the experience seems to anticipate and then epitomize the entire conference that I am attending.

Laudably, the conference organisers, the board of a big American literary studies association, have ruled that every panel should include PhD students alongside established academics. The PhD students’ papers are really excellent: accomplished, polished and highly sophisticated. They are theoretically astute performances garnered with intricate textual readings. But I have the impression that these displays of intellectual mastery are largely self-referential, their aficionados moving effortlessly through a forest of theory, weaving their own highly self-conscious tendrils of text, context and concept. Essentially exercises in literary sophistry, they are—implicitly of course—almost exclusively addressed to the older academics seated in the audiences who may be future search committee members or tenure evaluators. Of course these students are bound to work in this manner—we’ve all been down that track. Less forgivable, I feel, are my peers, whose work displays the maturity of years of research experience, but nonetheless appears to be equally deliberately aimed at reproducing consecrated knowledge within a closed bubble of academic discourse. Worst of all are the keynotes by the star academics. With the exception of the Africanists, who appear to still have an acute sense of the precarity of life beyond the academic halls and malls of Euro-America, these globetrotters seem to be caught in a glittering cul de sac where their paradigm-shifting ideas turn upon themselves in ever more intricate and tighter circles like cats chasing their own tails. This extraordinarily intelligent, subtle and nuanced intellectual work seems to be entirely calibrated to the fashions and fads of academic discourse rather than the rapid transformations and multiple crises of the world we live in—about which hardly a word is said in the panels I attend.

The double curse of academia—the pressure to be clever (consecrated, in the US-system, by ivy league tenure and University Press publication) and the pressure to gain external research funding (in Europe and in Australia)—seem to vitiate two fundamental ethical imperatives for intellectual work: the imperative to address pressing contemporary issues, and the imperative to address a contemporary audience—as co-actants—that is wider than that of fellow academics. I am haunted by the sense of having got caught in a hall of mirrors. Where in the world am I, or more accurately, where in the world is the world?

Here the temporary seems to have completely erased the contemporary. Theoretical paradigm chases theoretical paradigm at ever more dizzying pace, and my own panel on ‘animism’ may appear at first glance to be no exception. And yet the global now is so close at hand. I sit in various cafés on the Grachten between panels watching the population of Utrecht stroll by. The Netherlands’ very visible Global-South heritage is evident in the faces that pass me, signalling substantial African and Pacific-rim legacies in this north-western European bastion of liberal asylum. Yet the Dutch model of multiethnic coexistence seems to have lost momentum as rightwing populists proclaim in louder and louder voices their strident heckling (Münkler and Münkler 2016: 281). The Dutch liberal majority has just recently pulled itself together however, and without any great display of enthusiasm, gathered around the VVD headed by Prime Minister Mark Rutte so as to prevent Geert Wilders’ right-wing PVV from gaining power. And equally threatening are the recent terrorists attacks at nearby Brussels airport, and a recent bomb scare at Amsterdam’s Schipol. They remind one that although the Netherlands has remained largely unscathed in the contemporary war between state-sponsored big-power terrorism and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, this may merely be a temporary calm.

As I sit on the Oude Gracht with a local beer, my resolve hardens to mark this sense of the exhaustion of temporary academic mores by setting, mentally at least, a sort of a caesura. I must engineer an emergency exit from the maze and craze of article-writing and funding quests—for what we are confronted with outside the pleasure garden is indeed an emergency. As Benjamin (1999: 248-9) reminds us, ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism.’ Remembering Benjamin, I tell myself, without knowing quite how to go about it, that I need to emerge from the funhouse and provoke my own emergency at least. I must turn my face towards the ‘con-temporary’ (Ganguly 2016), with its very present threat of a re-emergent fascism worldwide. The search for an answer to this urgently sensed imperative to turn towards the ‘con-temporary’ has resulted, in part, in this book: personal, political, embodying an ongoing search for a direct link between the two that is the nexus of writing, thinking, inhabiting place, and engaging with others in an effort to effect positive change. Trivial and ‘minor’ these efforts may be, ‘[yet] that future horizon frames in this narrative an understanding of how the future emerges, changed, out of such catastrophes’ as ours today, and how ‘the most intimate, even minimal, acts ... [r]emake the terms for collective survival’ (Lloyd 2008: 37).

I channel all my frustration and fury into my own paper, which I give on the afternoon I’m due to fly out from Schipol. I abandon my original written text and speak directly to my fellow university teachers, from over-worked instructors to lecterned professors, habituées of the classroom one and all, gathered around the same large table as me. I speak about our everyday task of teaching, ‘that most practical aspect of our trade’, as Spivak (2012: 255) calls it.

Teaching, and especially the teaching of future teachers, which makes up the bulk of literary studies scholars’ work in the German academic system at least, feels to me like a genuine site where the literary humanities touch the real (Schalkwyk 2004). I argue for an animism in the classroom—a sense of co-agency infusing every aspect of the teaching environment, including the apparently inanimate actors in the pedagogical project—books, blackboard, biros, desks, chairs, the classroom itself—as a configuration of co-actants out of whose intermeshed work knowledge production is generated.

You never step into the same classroom twice: Carol Oomera Edwards’s Australian Indigenous sense of the classroom as Country (i.e. as an animate landscape where identifiable features of the terrain are the ancestors watching over and giving life to the environment) means that every entry into the classroom invokes a respectful pedagogy of place: ‘Hello, only us mob coming, OK if we camp here again? ... Hello, my name is Tommy. OK if I spend a year with you here?’ (Carol Oomera Edwards, qtd in Muecke 2004: 69). The classroom is a temporary space because it is peopled with beings constantly interacting with each other and thus implicated in constantly recalibrated relationships in which persons (human and nonhuman alike; Vivieros de Castro 2014) ceaselessly make each other anew. This ‘meshwork’ (Ingold 2011: 63-94) has no outer limits. Teaching and learning is a constantly transforming interaction with others on an infinite tapestry that spreads out beyond the four walls of the classroom to connect up with the world.

Several months after my brief sojourn in Utrecht, the sense of a caesura persists—or at least, the feeling, that I have traversed what Heidegger once called a Kehre: a bend in the track that takes one in a quite different direction, although the road is the same and, because other countervailing hairpin bends may follow, the general orientation remains despite the zigzag progress of the route. Much of what I have done for the past two decades seems to have reached its use-by-date. The discipline of literary studies into which I was inducted—at the twilight of new criticism and in the heady heyday of deconstruction and new historicism—has made me what I am, but I have a sense that it has lost the impetus to make me (or more to the point, us) what I (or we) may become.

What now? From fleeting engagement to fleeting engagement with texts and text-makers, from one fragmentary site of word-making to another—onwards step by step in a process of ongoing poeisis in the world with whichever partners, co-writers, colleagues near and far, students, activists, books, languages, places, that may be at hand.

RWP