Do we have to talk to each other this way?

Do we have to talk to each other this way?

This message is a follow up on one I sent last week in which I asked for 
bibliographical suggestions that could help introduce feminist film 
criticism and theory to bright but totally uninitiated young undergraduate 
students.  As has happened in the past when I asked similar questions 
there were very  few responses, and of those few most were patently 
unsuitable [such as asking them to read Camera Obscura].

One of the better suggestions was to use the volume on Feminist Film Studies by Janet McCabe in the Wallflower Press series of introductory texts, and 
it's true that this volume at least tries to accommodate readers with no 
previous experience of film theory.  But I have to emphasize "tries" 
because, at least from my point of view, it is only partially successful 
in this effort.  Here, for example, are some phrases chosen from just the 
first two pages of Janet McCabe's introduction, that part of the book 
that, presumably, should work hardest at inviting in the uninitiated: "new 
knowledges concerned with deconstructing representation"; 
"de Beauvoir genderises transcendence and immanence"; "self-confirming 
parameters that institute gender hierarchies."  It's not at all clear to 
me how I can expect my students to make any sense at all of these 
locutions.  These pages also seem to take for granted that the reader will 
have some familiarity with such concepts as post-structuralism, 
post-colonialism, queer theory, transnationalism, to say nothing of 
ideology.  My students, usually eager to learn, struggle with these terms 
and concepts,  but sooner or later they give up, for without lots of help 
this stuff ultimately becomes impenetrable to them.

This raises three questions for me, and it is these questions that I want 
to share with the list.  First and most immediate, is there anything at 
all out there that will ease my students into this stuff?  Perhaps in a 
course introducing feminist theory, or even film theory, I could devote 
lots of class time to talking about this.  But my courses are usually much 
more broadly based and I can barely find the time to explore such things 
as the studio system, continuity editing, and auteur politics.  Film 
theory, not just feminist theory but theory in general, has to get 
whatever little time is left over after working on more fundamental 
matters.  So when some students, picking up on the little we can do in 
class, want to go further in this direction, where can I send them?
[To avoid misunderstanding let me be more explicit about the audience I 
have in mind.  Imagine that you're trying to explain your work to someone 
whom you like and whose intelligence you respect, but who has absolutely 
no experience of the kind of discourse we take for granted ? including 
such things as using the term "discourse" to talk about what I'm talking 
about now.  Think of a teen age cousin,  or your significant other whose 
moves in entirely in non-academic circles, or your jogging partner,  or 
your grandfather.  Think of someone who has probably heard the term 
"patriarchy" but isn't sure what it means; someone for whom "intervention" 
is anything but a discursive act; someone who perhaps, on hearing the word 
"argument," immediately thinks of an angry dispute and not of a reasoned 
exposition of an idea.  This is the audience I mean to address.]

Second, if?as I suspect?there is little out there that systematically 
introduces these terms, premises, concepts, and arguments, then it would 
seem most students and scholars in the field [and I suspect this may well 
mean you] learned this stuff the way I had to, more or less piecemeal, on the fly, 
improvising as we went along, hoping to get it right but often unsure. The 
result is?and here let me speak only for myself?that while I can talk the 
talk I sometimes find that I can't really walk the walk.  I can certainly 
sound as if I know what I'm talking about,  but while I usually have a 
pretty good idea of what's going on in any theoretical discussion, too 
often I find that my understanding is not as solid, not as comprehensive, 
not as clear as I want it to be?and, not coincidentally, not as clear as I 
expect my students' understanding to be when they write papers for me.
[And this may well account for a peculiar and ironic pattern I've 
repeatedly discovered in young scholars over the years:  as a member of my 
department's hiring committee, I often get to interview job candidates 
with sterling credentials, candidates who?judging from their CVs?seem to 
have a far more acute understanding of the issues that concern me than I 
do.  Reading the applications I find myself thinking, "wow!!! -- we must 
have this person here."  But then in the interview, when I begin to 
explore the issues and raise problems that I myself face in the hope that 
the candidate will be able to address them, I too often find that the 
candidate understands less than I do, and  has merely mastered the sleight 
of language that counts as a sign of one's being an initiate.  ]

I wonder to what extent this kind of discourse is necessary, and to what 
extent we [and here I certainly include myself among the guilty] use it 
largely as a way of affirming our belonging to a specific scholarly 
culture and?more perniciously?as a way of excluding those who can't talk 
the talk.  I of course know that some jargon, some terms of art, are not 
only inevitable but necessary.  That's not the problem.  The 
problem?actually a set of interrelated problems?is that no one seems 
prepared to introduce this discourse from the ground up; that those who 
use the discourse may have learned it in the most haphazard way; that at 
least some of these people have a less reliable understanding of this 
discourse than they should. 

There's one other aspect to this set of problems that seems to me 
especially compelling and troubling in the wake of last week's US 
elections.  One midwestern voter was quoted in the NYTimes as saying, in essence "We don't need no east coast elite telling us 
what's good for us and who to vote for."  While it's not likely that the 
discourse of film theory is the cause of this voter's distrust of an 
"intellectual elite,"  the remark?like the election results?has a wider 
resonance.  For it suggests that, despite the importance of contemporary 
marxist thought in the university, we still have not figured out a way to 
make our most challenging and important work actually seem important to 
those whose lives and destinies we are programmatically engaged with. 

This is obviously a big, messy problem, and I don't suppose this is the 
place to explore it in detail.  But it did seem to me to be worth 
flagging, and I'd be most eager to hear how others on the list feel about 
it.

And, by the way, if anyone can tell me how to explain "new knowledges 
concerned with deconstructing representation" to my students, I'd be most 
grateful.

Best 

Mike

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