How to Wield a Machete

The following are a couple of half-jocular little progymnasmata I jotted down in my paper journal. I had thought about posting them here, but someone I trust told me people might be offended (hey, that's anti-intellectual!). Nevertheless, it is a joke, sort of. I have to post them now that I've read a recent post by Amanda in which she writes:

But well before the end of [MLA], I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else's main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn't take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else's article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.

These observations are based on articles I read over the break, and while I think they're partially valid, I feel the need to qualify them. Yes, of course it's very important to read critically and to speak up when one finds a problem with a theory or argument. Of course it is.

Lessons Learned from Academic Discourse

• Whatever you do, never agree with anyone. It makes you look like a naïve neophyte, a passive, uncritical dullard. Maybe you read an article and agree with it; maybe you think, old so-n-so has it all figured out. Keep that opinion to yourself.
• The only time it's ever acceptable to agree is when you agree with a theorist who is disagreeing with another theorist. Ex. "I agree with Haraway that there are myriad problems with MacKinnon's theories."
• The goal is to discredit, but ostensibly to "make knowledge." (Yeah, this one is too caustic, perhaps beyond the pale. Oh well, it was in my notebook, so it goes here too.)
• Posture until you get the upper hand, or as Linda Alcoff puts it, the "privileged discursive position":
  

  If, as teachers and scholars we retreated from the risk of representation, punctiliously refusing any occasion of speaking for others ourselves and vigilantly pointing out any instance of metaphoric substitution in others, we would avoid making a theoretical error. But, as Alcoff points out, "the desire to find an absolute means to avoid making errors comes perhaps not from a desire to advance collective goals but a desire for personal mastery, to establish a privileged discursive position wherein one cannot be undermined or challenged and thus is master of the situation" (22).

  (Susan Jarratt, "Beside Ourselves: Rhetoric and Representation in Postcolonial Feminist Writing," Feminism and Composition, p. 175).

  Ugh. I know so many people like that.

• Always find a problem with every idea/theory/interpretation. Don't stop looking until you do.*
• Use academic jargon when it benefits you. Use it all the time unless you're slamming someone else for using it.

*Having a hard time finding problems with a given idea/theory/interpretation? Not to worry, I've assembled a handy cheat sheet! Got more? Please shout 'em out in the comments.

List of Standard Charges

• Essentialism
• False Dichotomy (Binary Thinking)
• Reductionism
• Intellectual Masturbation/Self-Indulgence
• Positivism
• Determinism (Biological, Economic, Linguistic, etc.)
• Phallogocentrism
• Elision
• Dogmatism
• Agenda-Pushing
• Anti-Intellectualism
• Reification (of identitarian categories, etc.)
• Hegemonic Interpretation
• Revisionism
• Reclamation Project (Doing a)
• Misrepresentation
• Overgeneralization