The Wandering Scholar

HE ANDERING CHOLAR T W S 11/19/14 3:58 PM WS Small Book.1.indd 1 2 WS Small Book.1.indd 2 11/19/14 3:58 PM THE WANDERING SCHOLAR 11/19/14 3:58 PM WS Small Book.1.indd 3 WS Small Book.1.indd 4 11/19/14 3:58 PM Katrien Jacobs I left my home country Belgium when I was 22 and never returned. I have kept moving and meandering intellectually and can no longer imagine a different kind of life-style. I wrote a few books that are structured like journeys and walks. Walk- ing became an existential condition and I felt better if and when I could write up my ideas that way. I have had some bad luck with these books in how they were evaluated in academia. The message I received over and again is that they should be classified as my non-academic work. I am against the process of streamlining complex ideas and frustrated intellectual journeys into one type of prose. I cannot understand why the form is so stable and monotonous, that it does not have empathy with the wide range of experimental languages around us. It honestly makes me sad and so I invented a ghost-figure to deal with it. Her name is Sister Ping, she died of unfulfilled longing and became a ghost. I have written a film script about her and I am planning to make a movie about her. One of the sites that I imagined for her is located right at the edge of the 5 WS Small Book.1.indd 5 11/19/14 3:58 PM Chinese University of Hong Kong campus, on the way to the small Shek Nai Ping village where some old graveyards are located. It was a long-time wish of mine to walk there with a group of people, to pay tribute to the underworld through a ritual of burning. As Peter Chan explained it, it was not meant to be a destructive ritual, but a playful one through which we rethink a crisis of academic discourses which are our livelihood and our privilege. 6 WS Small Book.1.indd 6 11/19/14 3:58 PM 7 WS Small Book.1.indd 7 11/19/14 3:58 PM 8 WS Small Book.1.indd 8 11/19/14 3:58 PM Ian Fong: A “Weak” Response to Academocracy Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. - Dante I am often criticized by peer reviewers that my writing meanders and is too frag- mented. It exists as a patchwork. The following is a peer review report on one of my papers: It is sprawling and rather all over the place. It doesn’t seem to have real thesis; the abstract is utterly unclear. It quotes massive amounts of text and sort of puts together lots of names and books … without making any clear point. It lacks fluency throughout and is stylistically, as well as conceptually, meandering. Essayistic perhaps, but slack. In fact, a piece … wouldn’t exactly be appropriate for an academic journal like ours … 9 WS Small Book.1.indd 9 11/19/14 3:58 PM Am I incapable of being a scholar? Barthes’ response to Raymond Picard’s critique in 1966 does serve as a support for my existing work.1 Barthes wrote Sur Ra- cine (On Racine) in 1963. It can be read as an example of French “new criticism.” Directly aiming at Sur Racine, Raymond Picard, the Chair of French Literature at the Sorbonne who in 1956 published, La Carrière de Jean Racine, in 1965 published a monograph called Nouvelle Critique ou nouvelle imposture (New Criticism or New Fraud?) which criticized “new criticism” as a “movement of fraud” (“intellectually empty, verbally sophisticated, morally dangerous”). (29) “It’s” to Barthes, “an ex- ecution” (La Croix). (30 & fn.) It is “a primitive rite of exclusion of a dangerous individual from an archaic community.” (30) Barthes in 1966 wrote Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth) to respond. The orthodox requirements for “critical verisimilitude,” “objectivity,” “good taste,” “clarity” are the product of the ideology of bour- geois-oriented French criticism in Barthes’ time. In response to the usual comment, “Why not say things more simply?” (50) Barthes asks, “Is old criticism so sure that 1 For the background of Barthes-Picard literary debate which had “important educational, social and political implications” (10) in his time, see Philip Thody, “Foreword,” to Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, ed. and trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 7-13; and Keuneman, “Preface” to English-Language Edition of Criticism and Truth, 15-25. 10 WS Small Book.1.indd 10 11/19/14 3:58 PM it too does not have its own gratuitous floweriness?” To him, the language used by them is “clear only to the extent that it is generally accepted.” (50) We know that old criticism cannot write in any other way unless it begins to think in some other way. For to write is already to organize the world, it is already to think (to learn a language is to learn how one thinks in that language). It is thus useless (though critical verisimilitude persists in expecting it) to ask the Other to re-write himself if he has not decided to re-think himself. … Certainly the problem of the limits of his reception is a very serious one for a writer; but at least he chooses those limits, and if it happens that he accepts narrow limits, it is precisely because to write is not to enter into an easy relationship with an average of all possible readers, it is to enter into a difficult relationship with our own language: a writer has greater obligations towards a way of speaking which is truth for him than towards the critics of the Nation française or Le Monde. (50-1) If I am unwilling to re-think, to give myself up to an academocratic environment, do I need to re-write? “I am here defending the right to language…” (52) “How can I live my language as a simple attribute of my person?” (52) “The prohibition which 11 WS Small Book.1.indd 11 11/19/14 3:58 PM 12 WS Small Book.1.indd 12 11/19/14 3:58 PM 13 WS Small Book.1.indd 13 11/19/14 3:58 PM you cast upon other forms of language [knowledge] is simply a way of excluding yourselves from literature [scholarship]…” (52) The “what-goes-without-saying”2 way of writing an academic paper should be demystified. I need to teach a lot in order to survive. My writing is frequently interrupted by teaching on a daily basis. Writing can only be done during breaks in which I do not need to fulfill any teaching obligations. My situation is similar to women’s writing, as described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own.3 Ab- sence of uninterrupted time for writing creates loosely knitted patchwork-like writing. Absence in French means both “lack of the person” and “distraction of the mind.”4 For the latter, absence nurtures an ability which concentration can- 2 See Roland Barthes, “Preface,” Mythologies, 11-12. 3 Woolf says, “ If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, - ‘women never have an half hour … that they can call their own’ - she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required.” See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Flamingo, 1994), 73. 4 Roland Barthes writes that in French the amphibologies are extremely (abnormally) numerous. “[I] n general, the context forces us to choose one of the two meanings and to forget the other. Each time he encounters one of these double words, R.B., on the contrary, insists on keeping both meanings, 14 WS Small Book.1.indd 14 11/19/14 3:58 PM not have.5 When writing is always distracted, there is a possibility of reading and writing otherwise. Absence, for the former, carries the meaning of poverty. Poverty may mean lack in some sense; but, to Hardt and Negri, it is more significant to read it as possibility.6 To them, thinking in terms of poverty has “the healthy effect of questioning traditional class designations and forcing us to investigate with fresh eyes how class composition has changed and look at people’s wide range of productive activities inside and outside wage relations.” (xi) Then, poverty has “the healthy effect” of exploring alternative ways of scholarship. There should always exist possibilities of knowledge which cannot be disciplinized, institutionalized or academocratized. Walter Benjamin writes, as if one were winking at the other and as if the word’s meaning were in that wink …” See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 72. 5 On the importance of distraction, see Walter Benjamin, “Theory of Distraction,”The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London: Belknap Press, 2008), 56-7. To Benjamin, distraction, rather than concentration, is the best way to respond to modernity.

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