Penta Hostilities: Deconstructing the NAS
K., Joe
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALS PENTA HOSTILITIES: DECONSTRUCTING THE NAS What follows is a report on the June 1990 convention of the National Association of Scholars, written by Joe K, an undergraduate...
...But this trip into enemy territory has tipped the balance in favor of Professor de Woman's political commitment...
...Granted, Cheney includes two women, two (three...
...The only bright spot occurs when two of the panelists, Decter and Shaw, enliven their presentations with sarcastic caricatures of people like me and my professors...
...Here they are, a couple of hundred white males (and a few tame females), eighteen stories above the )00C-rated movies, live sex shows, and hookers of Times Square...
...Little do they realize that their precious organization has been infiltrated by an outsider, someone who has studied with such cutting-edge, discipline-busting academics as Jock Laddida and Paula de Woman...
...I am deeply troubled by this thought, because to tell the truth, I found the speakers at this conference amazingly good at sustaining that ever-so-seductive illusion of reasoned clarity...
...this image of dead, dehumanized, ready-to-be-consumed femaleness was the ultimate text of the NAS conference, and indeed of the whole mechanically repressive patriarchal capitalist society in which we live...
...Forget Times Square...
...Communists and one black...
...As I stared at that quivering, headless shape, with its truncated limbs and gaping body cavity offered up to the sharp cutlery of the white male elite, I suddenly realized that here was the truth...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALS PENTA HOSTILITIES: DECONSTRUCTING THE NAS What follows is a report on the June 1990 convention of the National Association of Scholars, written by Joe K, an undergraduate at Earle University's Non-Center for the Anti-Humanities...
...V et despite this epiphany, my agitation persists...
...On the one hand, Professor Laddida says that even the most radical project of deconstruction commits the logocentric error of assuming that by Joe K. some words, at least, possess meaning...
...Forget the high-flown rhetoric...
...D y the time this final session is over, 1) I have had a snootful of the NAS...
...Professor Laddida would say that my acceptance of the truth-claims of Professor de Woman's feminism implicitly opens the door to all other truth-claims, including those of racist, sexist, fascist organizations like the NAS...
...Yet I should add that my education would not be complete without Professor de Woman, with whom I have experienced (albeit vicariously) the agony of being female in a linguistic/cognitive system that is abusively phallocentric...
...the lady next to me suggested stewed baseball gloves...
...At times like this, it's difficult to reclaim that vicarious agony, that willed empathy with the experience of being female in the belly of the patriarchal beast...
...That's right...
...The only alternative is passive conformity to structures of domination established by Dead White European Males...
...When I listen to Professor Laddida's risk-taking, unpredictable lectures, I long to model myself after him: a butterfly fluttering, in virtuoso linguistic display, over the void...
...Standing here, wine spritzer in hand, scanning the excited faces of the crowd, I suddenly feel my consciousness ratcheting to an even higher notch...
...Next there is a discussion of NAS strategies, featuring Herbert London, John Agresto, Peter Diamandopoulos, Joseph Horn, Donald Kagan, and John Reist, Jr...
...By itself, it provides sufficient grounds for smashing the NAS...
...sitting in for Peter Greer) detail what they see as a decline of standards in primary and secondary education...
...Finally the group breaks into "Disciplinary Subsections," which I do not attend, because, as a student at the Non-Center, I know that the concept of separate academic disciplines is inherently phallocentric...
...The only explanation I can offer is that, as a white male, I have allowed myself to be tempted...
...Professor de Woman may not be as sharp a dresser as Professor Laddida—in fact, the students make jokes about her long grey hair...
...When a student objects to this paradox, Professor Laddida laughs, tosses his lecture notes into the air, and quips that logic is the disease, not the cure...
...Not surprisingly, the effects of the film linger into the next morning, and I show up at the conference full of disgust at my own white male impulses...
...I sit here thinking how seductive this illusion of reasoned clarity must be to the theoretically uninitiated...
...In an agitated mood, I leave the hotel and stride uptown on Broadway, hoping that the fresh air (it's a beautiful day) and the vivid signifiers of the sex industry will clear my head...
...I try not to imagine how some of these excited academics will spend the rest of the evening...
...Thanks to the film I had seen the night before, I was sensitized to the subtextual significance of a certain object plopped onto my plate by an elderly waitress...
...The rest of the morning is taken up with a panel on which Adam Scrupski, Chester E. Finn, Rita Kramer, Gilbert Sewall, and John Reist, Jr...
...This is followed by a banquet luncheon hosted by NAS president Stephen H. Balch, at which Stephen Thernstrom and James S. Coleman (recipient of the Sidney Hook Award) describe their experiences as white males under attack by progressive forces...
...Because this white female eschews the politically correct term, "chairperson," I deduce that her sole claim to power is passive submission to Dick Cheney, the current master of the American war machine...
...This is frightening, because I have absorbed a lot of theory, more than the vast majority of students and professors in this country...
...Admittedly, all this exposure to high-powered theory has left me in a dilemma...
...As a victim of patriarchal oppression, she must fight for a radical restructuring of the way human beings have thought and written for two millennia...
...Needless to say, Professor Laddida would mock the illusion of reasoned clarity set forth by the NAS...
...If the NAS can have this effect on me, then what dangers might it pose to the academy as a whole...
...rr o return to the conference, I note 1 that the title of the first panel is "Academic Utopianism...
...Then they proceed in a manner that signals their unmistakable attachment to the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 33 elitist mystifications of referentiality, civility, objectivity, logical argument, tolerance, and truth...
...Imprisoned in the self-referential linguistic/cognitive system of Western civilization, these people believe that their excitement stems from a principled attachment to the mystifications listed above...
...I'll never forget the day she demystified Othello by comparing it with the hardcore video, "Black Bucks, White Sluts," tracing the pattern of gender/race signifiers in each work...
...what matters here is the powerfully incarnated intertextuality that links the traditional structures of dominance reinforced at this conference with the ongoing exploitation of women and minorities, for which the sex industry is only the most self-problematizing text...
...In other words, the only way to tell the truth is to lie...
...Thanks to the lavish resources of Earle University, I am familiar with both sides of today's hottest literary/philosophical/theoretical debate...
...Even when the waitress described the object as a "boneless game hen," I couldn't touch it...
...Most panels at the Non-Center begin with impressive displays of problematizing the title and casting ontological doubt on the very possibility of discussion...
...This internal struggle leaves me ill-prepared for the speech delivered by Lynne V. Cheney, the "chairman" ofthe National Endowment for the Humanities...
...But then the rude awakening comes, as she reels off the names of Jesus, Socrates, Franklin, Jefferson, Bacon, Newton, Locke, Washington, Mason, Henry, Madison, Marshall, Plutarch, Whitehead, Robespierre, Euclid, Saccheri, Gauss, Kant, Lobachevsky, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Tocqueville, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Eliot (T.S...
...I'm beginning to see why Pickaxe asked me to cover this convention...
...K during the conference's banquet luncheon...
...But even when she adds the Cochita potters, Public Enemy, and the female authors of Harlequin Romances, her list still reflects a gross imbalance between the culturally authorized and the culturally marginalized...
...Much as my mind tries to focus on the really crucial texts, such as Times Square and the boneless game hen, it keeps straying back to the arguments and anecdotes of the past three days...
...As I said, I admire the man's flair for mixing the joyful play of signifiers with solid institutional prowess...
...As my mother's copies of Ms...
...What a relief...
...With Professor Laddida, I've experienced the ecstasy of interpreting every text as if it were the world, and the world as if it were a text...
...Personally, I head over to East Fifty-Ninth Street to see The Cook, The Thief His Wife & Her Lover, a profound meditation on the female body as a signifier of counter-hegemony in a system of bourgeois rapacity and greed...
...Yet unexpectedly, Cheney begins with a sensitive account of a previously marginalized art form, the Cochita pottery of New Mexico...
...So he recommends the "erasive action" of crossing the words out while leaving them legible...
...I am also exhausted, so I retire to rest up for the Sunday morning panel, a discussion of the professoriat with Barry Gross, Alan C. Kors, Thomas Short, and Carol Simpson Stern...
...Originally commissioned by Pickaxe, a journal of radical feminist deconstruction-ism, the report was rejected on the grounds of political incorrectness...
...Plus he has a humongous grant...
...That way, he winks, you can unsettle the heritage without undermining your institutional base...
...Thus I am amazed to see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Midge Decter, John Grey, Paul Craig Roberts, and Peter Shaw begin by simply defining their terms...
...When she responds to a perfectly straightforward question about the role of right-wing politics in the NAS by calling the questioner a "wise guy," the illusion of reasoned clarity is effectively broken...
...For example, Decter scathingly depicts the typical college student as making a pilgrimage to Nicaragua to enjoy "the embraces of a Sandinista peasant," then rushing back to Aspen for the ski season...
...After listening to such a brilliant example of subversive deconstruction, it was hardly necessary to read the play...
...It hit me during lunch...
...My agitation surprises me, because on the most immediate level, the conference has forced a resolution of the aforementioned dilemma...
...These- people obviously take me for another dark-suited, pale-faced soldier in the battle to save so-called Western civilization...
...Then she alludes to the TV soap, "Days of Our Lives”—and for a brief moment, I feel transported back to Earle...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990...
...It was subsequently leaked to The American Spectator by Martha Bayles, who sat next to Mr...
...The whole process is dizzying—especially since, as Professor Laddida explains in his influential essay, "Like the Sound of the Flush Deep Within a Commode," modern thought has proved that there is no such thing as truth...
...H ere I am on the eighteenth floor of the Penta Hotel, only a few blocks from Times Square...
...magazine used to say, "Click...
...As a white male, I certainly blend in with the crowd...
...But appearances don't matter whenyou read Professor de Woman's classic Close Your Eyes and See, or attend her lectures...
...and George), Plato, Austen, Churchill, Stalin, Marx, King, Beethoven, and Coles...
...The only escape from the linguistic/cognitive prison, he would assert, is constant acknowledgment of your own imprisonment...
...Now it's Friday evening, and the group assembles for a reception...
...No one at the table could identify these objects—one man said they looked like pig's knuckles...
...Not surprisingly, Professor de Woman dislikes Laddidadian irony...
...But to someone who knows how to interpret the world as text, their excitement stems from a different source...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
