So, if the question “can writing be taught?” means “can a teacher turn student writers into professional caliber writers who have a shot at getting published?”, the answer is a resounding, “No.” This, of course, is precisely the question people outside the academy mean when they ask about the teachability of writing, and I’m sorry to tell them that it’s absurd to think that 15 or even 30 weeks is time enough to turn anyone into “a writer.”

However, people inside the academy (inside composition studies, anyway) mean something quite different when they ask this question. In fact, they mean a lot of different things. Sometimes they mean, “Can we introduce students to the basic concepts of written academic discourse?” Others mean, “Can we give students basic critical thinking skills?” Still others mean, “Can we teach students how to do thorough research in a university setting?” The ideological among us mean, “Can I teach students how to question and transgress the norms of American society?” I think the answer to these questions (at least the first three) is, “Yes, probably.”

So, while the field’s queries about “teaching writing” are now limited to issues of “teaching critical thinking, research skills, and academic discourse,” the more general question about “teaching good writing” still nags some of us. However, even this question calls for complication: what is “good writing”? Some scholars (i.e., Xiao-ming Li) have discussed the notion of good writing from a cultural standpoint, concluding that each culture has its particular set of ideals for what it thinks is good writing. This is probably indisputable, although scholars like Li point out that overlaps do exist between the cultural ideals. Other scholars have complicated the notion of good writing from an ideological standpoint, concluding that good writing is whatever rich, white people say it is. I suppose there may be some truth to this, at least in terms of standardized writing, but overall it’s a bit of a simplistic point. My working-class Hispanic mother and her sisters enjoyed reading H.G. Wells as children; the eloquence of Martin Luther King and earlier black leaders draws much of its power from Western ideals of good writing.

There are other ways to look at the issue. I’m of the opinion that we should define “good writing” quite simply as writing that does not strike a reader as particularly bad. In any event, most scholarly conversations on “good writing” have concluded with the not earth-shattering conclusion that “context” is a major factor in crafting good writing; and from that conclusion, scholars have recognized that it’s best to view good writing as a situated transaction, a situated practice, not as a set of skills or stylistic markers. This, of course, is exactly what our best writers have always told us: writing is something you do, and something at which you excel only if you do it a lot. Depending on the discursive and physical location of that practice, a person will “do” different kinds of writing. In other words, writing rap lyrics is a different practice from writing Beat poetry, which is a different practice from writing Western literary fiction, which is different from writing journalism. Each practice has its own discursive space, its own traditions, its own practical methods.

So, can good writing, as situated practice, be taught? I still think, “Probably not.” But at least scholars have recognized that it’s useless to talk about teaching good writing until we’ve decided whose good writing we want to teach.

This recognition leads to a related question: can the skills developed from writing in one discursive space be transferred to another? In other words, can a person who has mastered journalistic writing move effortlessly into a mastery of literary fiction or beat poetry? (Or, to put in academic terms, can a student who has mastered writing the way his English teachers want him to write move effortlessly into writing like an engineer or a lawyer?)

Here, I think the answer is, “It depends.” I think the learning curve would be shorter than it would be otherwise, and, of course, there is more overlap between some pairs of writing practices than between others: moving into legal writing would be easier for a journalist than moving into rap lyricism would be for a legal writer.

Still, the original question remains, even though we’ve complicated it: “Can good writing be taught?”

Thinking about writing as practice, as craft, as something you do, makes me think about rock climbing, which is clearly something else to be thought of as an active practice. So let’s ask the question about climbing: “Can climbing be taught?” Well, no, but that doesn’t mean a new climber can’t be helped along by seasoned climbers. When I first started climbing, I read a few climbing manuals, and I learned a bit from the pictures that showed how to position your body on a cliff: back-stepping, foot-flagging, heel-hooking, knee-barring . . . Of course, I learned a whole lot more from going to climbing gyms and local crags to watch real climbers back-step, foot-flag, heel-hook, and knee-bar . . . I learned best of all by putting on my rock shoes and trying to back-step myself.

Now, it’s common knowledge among climbers that climbing at a gym is much different from climbing on a crag. What’s more, climbing at one crag is different from climbing at another. And climbing at crags is different from climbing big walls or Sierra ridgelines. So we can ask the same question about climbing that we did about writing: do skills transfer from one context to the next?

Some do, and some don’t. Once you learn how to back-step, it’s generally easy to back-step wherever you go. However, knee-barring on an exposed route is a thousand times more committing, difficult, and mentally challenging than knee-barring in the safety of a gym. Crimping on granite will prepare you to crimp on limestone . . . there’s still a learning curve, albeit a shorter one than if you’d never crimped at all.

So is climbing a good analogy for good writing? I think so, and I’m starting to think about teaching good writing in terms of teaching climbing. It’s fine to start with climbing pictures (or general writing formulas and templates); it’s better to watch real climbers in action (or to read great writers in action); it’s best of all to try climbing yourself (or to start writing). As a beginning climber, I fell a lot. I was bruised, broken, and miserable at times. I kept climbing because seasoned climbers supported me, helped me, and pushed me to do better. And so, as a teacher, I should expect my beginning writers to fail quite a bit at being “good writers.” But this doesn’t mean I fail them. I support them, help them, and push them to do better. So, teaching good writing, like teaching climbing, is chiefly a matter of encouragement, and of providing a safe space for learning. That’s about all we can do as “writing teachers.” It’s up to the student to do the learning . . . or, more properly, it’s up to the student to do the writing.

Now, in my ideal world, the government would neither legalize nor ban gay marriage because it wouldn’t incentivize marriage one way or the other. Nor would it legitimize marriage beyond registrar purposes. Marriage is a social and religious contract, and as such, it would ideally be sanctioned (or not sanctioned) by social and religious parties. If the Baptist church won’t marry two men, the Episcopal church down the street will be more than happy to marry them and ordain them while they’re at it. The state, however, should have nothing to do with it.

Alas, we don’t live in my social libertarian paradise. But nevertheless, I’m both glad that Prop 8 was put up for a vote and glad that it was overturned, because it’s a topsy-turvy mess of values that forces us to come to terms with an unfortunate fact: many people don’t actually believe in the ideals they say they believe in. The debates over Prop 8 have demonstrated, apparently unbeknownst to the debaters, that the Leftists who praise ideals of democracy and civic engagement really don’t care about democracy or civic engagement; and the Right-Wingers who spout ideals of individual liberty don’t care about individual liberty.

If all the Leftist academics and journalists who praise “democracy” and “civic engagement” honestly cared about democracy, they would be on the lawn at the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals, protesting these anti-democratic elitists for overturning a proposition that, from beginning to end, was a perfect image of democracy and civic engagement. (Prop 8 seems to have brought urban blacks and white Mormons together around a common cause.) On purely democratic grounds, then, the overturning of Prop 8 is a terrible injustice. Yet so-called supporters of democracy are now running for the courts because they don’t like the results of democracy.

And if all the Right Wingers really cared about individual liberty, they wouldn’t have put Prop 8 into motion in the first place. They would have been satisfied to let people live the way they want to live, not approving of the gay lifestyle but at least tolerating it in the name of individuality and personal happiness. Instead, they rallied like hippies to get the government to squash the dreams of a statistically miniscule number of individuals. Odd how so-called supporters of individual liberty run to the government when it’s a matter of something they don’t like.

Undoubtedly, there is a great deal of truth to this denial of objective truth. However, Charles Bazerman’s essay acts as an important corrective, reminding us that principles of logic, rigor, thorough research, and  warrantability need not be abandoned even if we admit that elements of fiction are never removed from our scholarly work. Bazerman seems to be asking us to work toward objectivity as best as we are able, and to work against the temptation to abandon our work to purely ludic or ideological ends. “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial.”

Ostensibly, “Theories of the Middle Range” is presented as an overview of historical research, but its insights can be applied to any type of research in rhetoric and writing studies. For the sake of presentation,  the steps in Bazerman’s method are presented in a step-by-step framework,  but Bazerman rightly notes that the “program” he describes is “neither simply bottom up nor top down” (315). That is, the steps can be mixed and matched. The list is not a recipe or a chemical experiment; it is a heuristic for developing and answering successful, meaningful research questions whose answers will hopefully fall into a “middle range” between the grandly unfalsifiable and the blandly specific.

Generate originating questions: these are the sweeping yet fundamental questions our field seeks to answer. Without these originating questions (i.e., What are the mental processes involved in writing?), it would be pointless to do any work in the field at all because that work would not be tied to issues of human concern. These are the questions that inspire us to become researchers and upon which the entire field is built.

Generate specifying questions: these are the questions that bring our originating questions to a manageable level. Trying to resolve the originating questions in and of themselves will lead to answers that “inevitably exclude many of the complex dimensions” of whatever it is we are attempting to study (301). Instead, we should develop questions that “focus our research” to things that can be answered in a more empirical, falsifiable fashion, but that are nonetheless important if we are to build toward empirically-based answers to the originating questions. (Bazerman gives the following example: An originating question might be, “How does writing function in society?” A specifying question might be, “How does writing function differently in different academic disciplines?”)

Commit to a focused research episode: I’m not entirely sure what Bazerman means by “episode,” but nevertheless, this part of the process involves looking for a specific site where we can seek answers to our specifying questions. In other words, committing to the process of research is its own part of the research process, one at which many graduate students probably find themselves stuck.   “At this juncture, the researcher moves from puzzling over questions, theories, and happenstance observations to an active and systematic search for evidence and answers” (304).

Find the strategic research site: This continues the thrust toward specificity. Even with specific questions in mind, it would be empirically uninteresting to answer those questions “in general.” So, we look for a site that best fits those questions; however, neither should we focus too heavily on particularities divorced from the larger originating questions. A particular research site will have a specific advantage for answering our specifying questions, but the site must also promise to deliver answers that potentially are “broader than the research site,” thus providing warrant for inductive movement back toward the originating questions.

Develop site-specific questions: This is the final move toward specificity (a specificity which nonetheless remains ultimately wedded to our more general questions). Site-specific questions will fine-tune the specifying questions to the “character, opportunities, and difficulties” of the site at which we are pursing those questions (306).

As I said at the beginning, Bazerman continually reminds us that his methodological steps must never devolve into a rigid formula. They are guides, but we must always be looking for “serendipity,” the possibility of new directions, more fruitful questions, better sites, and better texts that fit our questions. We should not be afraid to let our heads ache with the “complex mix” of primary sources, secondary sources, notes, and citation trails that accompany research; nor should we be afraid to engage the “creative process” that underlies all efforts at knowledge-production (311), which may mean moving in new, serendipitous directions at a moment’s notice. “Kill your babies” is the way it’s put in the world of screenwriting and filmmaking: you have to be prepared to jettison all your work if you come across something that will work better.

However, as I also said at the beginning, Bazerman’s highly useful essay reminds us that efforts at knowledge-production are not to be wholly abandoned to playful or ideological creativity. Our efforts must be anchored to “methodical reasoning and investigation” so that our claims, striving to answer questions of great human concern, will be “empirically supportable” and “rise above local happenstance” (315). So, our efforts must commence by leaving our grand questions temporarily behind, and by looking for “middle range” questions that we can approach empirically.

“Without contraries is no progression.”

“Opposition is true friendship.”

“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

“Songs of Innocence and Experience.”

Blake may have been a lunatic, but he nonetheless had an acute awareness of binary opposition 300 years before the advent of critical theory. Of course, the most obvious reason he isn’t mentioned in rhetorical theory is that his work has been lumped into the “British Romantic period,” making Blake the domain of literature. Another reason is that his work is decidedly individual, iconoclastic, and creative; he may well critique the social, but he critiques it in a prophetic/poetic mode that simultaneously divorces him from the social. He offers no support for the communitarian ideals that drive most contemporary rhetorical theory.

However, insofar as the business of rhetorical theory is the business of “composing” the world, there is much that Blake can teach us.

“I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.” His drive to escape all but his own system means that our reading of his work can be supported in a million different directions: some of his poems can be read in a church; others are gleefully heretical. But as much as I enjoy Frye’s masterful readings in Fearful Symmetry, I don’t think that reading Blake’s system is the point. For Blake, the entire point is creative composition, not reflective reading.

Blake’s vision is singular, and so he encourages us not to understand his vision but to create our own. Importantly, however, his is not an encouragement toward communal visions . . . for therein lies the tendency toward tyranny and the creation of Systems in the pejorative sense, Systems which, in time, will be new forms of enslavement. Each of us is responsible for his own composition of the world, his own Imagination, his own re-mixing of binaries, his own bringing of heaven to earth.

Moving beyond the individual genius (which we all are), we begin to Systematize one another’s visions into one bastardized vision, thus crushing the creative spirit and marching toward the autocracy of the mob . . . which is, of course, one kick-step from dictatorship.

Or, as Blake would have it: “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”

Of course, some things in this genre are god awful . . . but that’s par for the course in genre fiction. At its best, the western, like science fiction, is an artistic vehicle not only for grand storytelling but also for moral and existential exploration. In film, John Ford’s The Searchers inaugurated the tradition of incisive, artistic westerns, and the tradition probably reached its zenith with Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In literature, the current masters, in my humble opinion (with all due respect to the magisterial work of Larry McMurtry), are Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy.

Now, as contemporary masters, both authors have moved well beyond the confines of traditional western conventions. They have “transcended the genre,” as movie critics often say. But the Wyoming Stories of Proulx and the novels of McCarthy nonetheless draw their power from the western tradition and the western ethos (and mythos): the Western landscape features heavily in their work, to the point where it becomes a ubiquitous influence rather than a mere backdrop; the stoic nature of the old gunslinger (or at least the idealization of that stoic nature) imbues almost every character; and the stylized dialogue captures the simple beauty of the Western vernacular.

Though writing in vastly different styles, McCarthy and Proulx complement each other. McCarthy writes a Western America that is violent and crying out for redemption; Proulx writes a West living in the aftermath of that violence, a West that has given up on redemption in exchange for pragmatic makings-do. McCarthy’s world, though comedic at times, brims with the tragic and ironic symbolism of the Old West, where each character and event within it acts as an objective correlative to some philosophical strain. Proulx’s world, though tragic at times, brims with the comedic symbolism of the New West, where each character speaks on his own isolated terms and each event may be nothing more than bad (or good) luck. McCarthy presents a Calvinistic vision of human fate, in which God has let the principalities of the air take dominion over the earth. Whether McCarthy is writing of Cowboys, Indians, or Mexicans, chaos and murder are the common denominators of his West, and of the characters who inhabit it; his protagonists are the elect who manage to do and be good despite the risks to their own well-being, despite the customs of violence and injustice that pervade every aspect of their lives. Proulx, on the other hand, presents a vaguely Jewish vision of human fate, in which God figures as unknowable when he figures at all. Of his shit situation in “Brokeback Mountain,” Ennis Del Mar says, “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it.” Elsewhere, Proulx tells us that in the great sweep of evolutionary history, God doesn’t owe us all that much.

Both authors explore deeply human issues through the stark western landscape and the stoic, pragmatic personalities who inhabit it. They tell wonderful stories, of course, but, like all great story-tellers, their stories can hold up to critical, philosophical investigation. And like all great story-tellers, McCarthy and Proulx refuse to offer easy answers to the human issues they explore. They let the world work the way it’s going to work, inscrutable to the individual but no less inhabitable or emotive because of it.

With the exception of “Hombre de la Esquina Rosada,” which is told with much vernacular flair, the Spanish translates pretty well into English. In fact, I’ve been pleasantly surprised these last few months by the syntactic similarities between Spanish and English. There are differences, of course, most notably in the placement of pronouns in the indirect or direct object position, as well as in the more ubiquitous usage of reflexive pronouns. Compared to German, however, Spanish is much more similar to English at the syntactic, lexical, and idiomatic levels. This is just to say that translating literally from Spanish to English will give you a passably understandable sentence a lot more often than translating literally from German to English. We’ll see how quickly this similarity degenerates when I leave the world of standard literary and journalistic texts and enter the world of the spoken vernacular . . . (If the comments sections on Spanish news sites are any indication, the similarities don’t degenerate entirely, which gives me hope!)

Now, back to Borges. He is known primarily for his later stories, como “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Aleph,” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” These stories are justly celebrated as a foretaste of magical realism; they are mind-bending concoctions of genre and existential philosophies;  they have earned Borges a place in the Universal Canon, despite his decidedly unfashionable stances (academically speaking) as an anti-Peronist and anti-Marxist, and his beliefs in Classical Liberalism and individualism against the state: “Need I remind readers of Martín Fierro or Don Segundo that individualism is an old Argentine virtue?”

However, in spite of Borges’s legacy, not much attention has been paid to his early work in A Universal History of Infamy. Admittedly, Borges himself shrugged off these stories as the idle wanderings of a young mind. But they are nonetheless exemplars of literary craftsmanship. Each story distills an entire life into a few vivid sentences; each story conjures an expansive sense of place with a few metonymic phrasings, singular words that take the place of an entire universe. To me, this is one of the skills of a great writer: the ability to create a vivid, emotionally charged world in a short amount of page space. Of course, “show don’t tell” has been the Great Commandment of Western fiction since the time of Thomas Hardy, and there have been beautiful things written that sought specifically to break that commandment. Reading Borges’s stories, however, has reminded me how awe-inspiring it can be to watch a master wordsmith at work. In these stories, Borges is a true and efficient craftsman, but one who knows when to embellish: he is like a Baroque Hemingway, if that makes any sense . . .

In the current academic and cultural climate of didacticism, it’s refreshing to read stories that take pleasure in the sheer delight of storytelling and sentence-creation. Like the stories of Juan Rulfo (and most of Borges’s later works), these stories have no moral, political, or ideological bent, despite telling the stories of some iniquitous characters: a pirate, a slave rustler, a gangster, and Billy the Kid, among others. Irony and comedy are at the heart of each story, so, if there is a certain philosophical bent in the telling of the tales, it can be summed up quite simply: “Que sera, sera.”

5. Rango

This is the best non-Pixar CGI film ever released. Its humor goes from dark to quirky to slapstick and back again to dark. The characters likewise run the gamut between grotesque and . . . well, grotesquely adorable. Johnny Depp’s voice-acting is solid, Clint Eastwood makes a cameo as God, and mariachi owls provide the narration. What more could you ask for?

4. The Tree of Life

Terence Malik has out-Maliked himself with this one. The director of Days of Heaven, The New World, and Badlands, Malik is a master of lush, mournful, slow-moving films that are not so much films as exercises in visual philosophy. With The Tree of Life, Malik takes his philosophizing to a whole new level. He hardly bothers with a storyline. Hell, the first 45 minutes of the movie play like a Discovery Channel documentary on acid. But who other than Malik could make it work? Who else has the filmmaking prowess to cut between a raptor stalking its prey in the Jurassic Era and a young boy playing in the streets in 1950s America? It’s pure visual poetry, and it works.

3. Crazy, Stupid, Love

I already wrote a post praising this film. It’s probably the best American romantic comedy in decades. Definitely not predictable, definitely a little edgy, and a definitely great soundtrack. Throw in a pitch-perfect performance from Ryan Gosling and you’ve got an eminently re-watchable film.

2. The Descendants

Alexander Payne, director of Sideways, continues to bat a thousand with this entry. Payne is a master of quiet, subtle emotion. In this film, as in most of his films, you don’t realize you’re watching a poignant drama until you catch yourself crying into your popcorn. You laugh with the characters for 90 minutes, which makes it perfectly natural to cry with them during the last 5. Most of the emotional weight falls on George Clooney’s shoulders, and he delivers. Boy, does he deliver. His performance alone is worth the price of a DVD rental.

1. Drive

Honestly, I don’t think I have the words to explain how perfect this film is. Brutal violence, smart car chases, an electronic soundtrack, and a superb vision of L.A. county. But this is more than an action film. It’s art house action. It’s intelligent action. It’s existential philosophy with guns and strippers. Actually, I’m not sure what it is, but it’s definitely more than the sum of its parts. It probably won’t win any awards, but there’s a damn good reason it scored a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Go rent it. Now.

The picture is not so different from pictures of tribal peoples we see on the Discovery Channel or in the pages of National Geographic. Why has this particular image made it onto the daily cycle of news items?

One answer is that we moderns have a Rousseau-like fantasy about returning to the “simple native life.” We hear “uncontacted tribe,” and our minds begin a Romantic journey into unspoiled wilderness where humans live together in harmony, take only what they need from the earth, commune with nature, and listen to an Enya soundtrack that plays from the sky.

Another answer is that we moderns are fascinated by the “unknown.” We love to daydream about the dark spots on the map, the places where no man has gone before. We are fascinated that, in the year 2011, there still exist humans who have no dealings with our nation-states. To meet them would be almost like meeting aliens from another planet. Certainly, it would be like meeting natives as a colonial explorer. The excitement of it all!

A final answer is that we (and this “we” includes groups like Survival International) like to think of ourselves as protectors. We moderns find something that is rare and not like us, and, if we don’t kill it, we put it into a box so someone else can’t kill it. In this case, we rally to keep the “uncontacted tribe” as uncontacted as possible, to keep them in a putative “natural state.” Like we do with endangered animals, we put them on lists, encircle them with natural parks, and keep the tourists from feeding them.

Now, I have no interest in commenting on this particular tribe or on any so-called “uncontacted tribe.” It is indeed an interesting fact that indigenous peoples live with little or no contact with the outside world, but it is far from my realm of expertise, further still from my geographic location, and furthest of all from an issue that deserves comment from people not intimately involved.

What is interesting from my perspective, however, is that most peoples’ reaction to the picture, whether it takes the form of Romantic Rousseau-ism or social justice rallying, betrays a strange indignation toward contemporary life. Most of the reactions seem to presuppose one of two ideas: “They have it better than we do” or “We have no right to force modern existence upon them.” I think that, ultimately, both ideas deny the accomplishments of the modern world: air travel, central heating, medicine, iPods . . . I agree 100% that a society has every right to its own ways of being, and so I would be the first to argue against “forcing” any kind of contact. But this is different from saying “We have no right to force modern existence upon them.” I would argue it in the opposite direction: “Allow them the sovereignty to do as they wish.” Modern existence has nothing to do with it.

The first reaction to the picture (“They have it better than we do”) is, of course, nonsense. A simple life of hunting and gathering may sound nice from the comfort of a temperature-controlled bedroom, but precious few modern humans could be happy, in the long term, living like the indigenous people in that photograph. I spend much of my free time faking a “back-to-nature” existence: spending weeks living out of a backpack in the forest, digging holes when I need to take a shit, curling up on beds of shrubbery, huddling in caves when it rains, walking 100 yards to a river when I need more water. It’s great fun as a vacation. But even the most rugged climbers and mountain men I know won’t refuse a hot shower, a clean bed, and a warm bar full of pretty women.

So why do people, who would be miserable in indigenous conditions, feel so strongly about letting other people stay in that condition? Is there a collective guilt about having forced so many other natives into modern assimilation?

Whatever the reasons for the reactions, I nonetheless see a deeper issue here about how we view indigenous people: the fact is, in the year 2011, no one is indigenous. I have serious problem using words like “native” or “indigenous” or anything that implies that the people in the photograph (or any “indigenous” people met long ago by conquistadors) are living in some kind of pure, perennial state. If our scientists are right, 50,000 years of human history have elapsed since humans began to migrate from Africa. That’s a lot of history. As pockets of humanity separated from each other, they formed countless different cultures and went through countless evolutions. Empires have risen and fallen; trade routes have opened and closed; art has flourished and declined; languages have evolved and devolved; religions have populated the earth with long forgotten gods; wars have been waged; vows have been exchanged, lovers have mated, and children have been reared. The people in the photograph come from a society that has gone through tens of thousands of years of change. They are no more “indigenous” to the land than Hugh Grant is to Britain. The DNA may be more directly linked to the past, but the culture and the language surely are not. (To my knowledge, Grant is not worshipping at Stone Henge or speaking proto-Gaelic.)

Apparently, the tribe in question has managed to stay separated from most of Peru’s complex history throughout the last 500 years. During those 500 years, I’m sure their culture has changed just as ours has changed, perhaps for the better and perhaps for the worse. Perhaps they are the remnants of a people colonized by the Inca, which would explain a cultural fear of outsiders. If news reports are to be trusted, they have a custom of kidnapping women from other tribes, so perhaps this tribe’s culture isn’t the best to preserve in the name of justice. Perhaps their lifestyle implies a culture in decline rather than a culture in a natural state. Perhaps their customs do trace back thousands of years.

We can play this game all day long. The point is, we should be careful how we re-create such peoples in our own images. To look at that picture and assume they are some romantic link to a pre-colonial or pre-historic past is to take away their full humanity. They, like the rest of us, are travelers in history, and their culture, like ours, is no more or less deserving of long-term survival.

We drifted (not too far) from these questions into a discussion about imperialism more generally. Post-colonial theory is a popular thing in the humanities, and I was making the point that even post-colonial theory, created as a “resistance” against the legacy of European colonialism, nonetheless becomes a colonial endeavor by describing the British (or Spanish or whoever) in terms that fail to capture the complex ideals and practices upon which these people built their colonial projects.

As described in post-colonial terms, the British were up to all sorts of hegemonic wickedness. But did the British see themselves in these terms? Of course not. Reading the texts of the time, it becomes obvious that many men and women (even immigrants like Joseph Conrad) honestly believed that English Imperialism was lighting the world in the name of science and progress. The British were the torchbearers of “the way the world is meant to be.” Divine providence and all that. And, too, there was the economic angle: the foreign lands have resources, the natives don’t seem to be using them, why not show them how to exploit the resources (so long as we keep most of the profits)? There were also political considerations, military considerations, personal ambitions, simple avarice, not to mention the religious fervor with which the priests sought to save the damned . . .

The point I was trying to make was that the terms of post-colonial theory describe colonialism in a way the colonialists themselves would not have understood. It doesn’t seek to understand imperialism “on its own terms,” terms that were clearly complex and manifold. It doesn’t describe the complex experiences of the colonized, which also ran the gamut of complexity. By thus distilling the complexities of imperial history into a pre-determined set of ideas, post-colonial theory reproduces a textual colonialism all its own. It reads history on theory’s terms, not on history’s terms.

Now, I must apologize right away for comparing European colonialism with ivory tower theorizing. I have no doubt that the imperial project was violently oppressive in a million ways; most imperial projects are violently oppressive. Nor do I doubt that the residue of colonialism continues to haunt the globe; most of history continues to haunt the globe. My point was that, as history, post-colonial theorizing tells us all about how post-colonial theorists read history and nothing about how the history was actually lived and breathed.

But this is just what history is, isn’t it? Whenever an author writes about someone other than himself, he will probably “read into” that other person’s practices and beliefs, and fail to write about him “on his own terms.” And whenever an author writes about a group of people that he doesn’t know intimately, he will inevitably fail to represent the complexities of that group. The author puts his real-world subjects “into his own terms,” and I see this as a kind of textual imperialism. It’s particularly imperial when the author’s terms land him tenure and a wage increase.

However, as long as we continue to write about each other, textual imperialism remains as inescapable as real-world imperialism. As long as I continue to see something that looks interesting to write about, I’m going to write about it in my own terms and hopefully convince people to see it the way I see it. Likewise, as long as someone else has something that I want, I will probably look for ways to make him think that he wants to give it to me.

That’s the cynical view, anyway, and I’m nothing if not a cynic. In my optimistic moments, I do believe that empirical, scientific rigor can lead us out of our own subjectivity. If it can’t lead us out entirely, it can at least give us a wider perspective of history (and contemporary life) that is not based solely on our own pre-conceived theories. And yet objective, empirical data, such as statistics or physical artifacts, will only tell us so much, and they still need to be interpreted.

Ludic postmodernism is essentially a critique of positivistic thinking, showing how no utterances (even in the physical sciences) escape the play of signifiers, the constant slippage of manmade semiotic systems. It is about undoing the false binaries that underlie many Western philosophies, encouraging us to realize that things are much more complicated than binaries let on. It is about forcing us to come to terms with the relation between words and meanings, and how meanings emerge from meanings opposed to it, a complex interplay of difference built into language systems. Without getting into the complexities of Derrida and other godfathers of ludic postmodernism (I don’t understand much of it myself), we can still read the point of it all as being a corrective to the hubris of Western Science and Progress (especially Science at the service of State) in believing that it had mapped out the knowable and amassed unassailable theories of everything . . . What the trumpeters of science forgot, of course, was that their theories and maps were made of language, which itself is not so knowable . . .

While I have much more trust in reason and empiricism than most in my field, I also find value in Derrida, Rorty, Foucault, Lyotard, and de Man because they encourage me in the direction of skepticism, always toward skepticism and away from metanarratives.  And while I do think that science can map much of what is knowable, and while I think analytic philosophy is important, I’m glad the work of the ludic postmoderns is there to keep me and everyone else from placing too much trust in our own rational abilities.

The newer breed of resistance postmodernism is not quite my cup of tea, for many reasons, not the least of which is that I disagree with its basic commitment to collectivist ideals over and above individual freedom. However, just as Derrida et al. are important correctives against scientific and philosophical hubris, the resistance postmoderns write important critiques against power in the political and social arenas. They seek to bring voices into the academy that hitherto may have been neglected or kept out altogether (though for reasons much more complicated than they themselves may admit). I think that Christine Sutherland puts it well: “Feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism and all postmodern theories which are often also ideologies have valuable critiques to offer: but I see them as correctional, as restoring a necessary balance.” Insofar as these resistance postmodernisms “speak truth to power,” as it were, or, perhaps, “speak critique to power,” they offer a valuable set of analytic tools. However, as Sutherland says, “taken too far they do not promote the peace and understanding” that they supposedly seek to promote. Quite the opposite.