World Literature and Dissent

Lorna Burns, Katie Muth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351357715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

World Literature and Dissent reconsiders the role of dissent in contemporary global literature. Bringing together scholars of world and postcolonial literatures, the contributors explore the aesthetics of resistance through concepts including the epistemology of ignorance, the rhetoric of innocence, the subversion of paying attention, and the radical potential of everydayness.

Addressing a broad range of examples, from the Maghrebian humanist Ibn Khald?n to India's Facebook poets and examining writers such as Langston Hughes, Ben Okri, Sara Uribe, and Merle Collins, this highly relevant book reframes the field of world literature in relation to dissenting politics and aesthetic. It asks the urgent question: how critical practice might cultivate radical thought, further social justice, and value human expression?

PART I

Dissent (in theory)

1

Dissent in the reign of ignorance, or parsing the epistemology of empire

Djelal Kadir

DOI: 10.4324/9780203710302-2

Wilful ignorance is a powerful enablement – so I was taught by Harold Bloom, a most able agonist in the gladiatorial arena of poetic discernment and my first poetry teacher in an ordinary place in New Haven, Connecticut, some time in the last century. By the beginning of the current century, I found ample confirmation of that insight in the realpolitik of the world, a substantiation that corroborated for me the worldliness of literature as world literature and the transferability of critical comprehension into political awareness. The distance between wilful ignorance and belligerent ignorance, I have come to realise, can be scant and easily traversed. And whereas poets create worlds by an act of will, historically politicians and those for whom they rule define the world for convenience by bellicose acts of expediency directed through self-serving management of the intricate ratio between knowledge and ignorance, a process glibly encoded in public discourse as ‘spin’.

The efficacy of managing knowledge to purpose becomes foregrounded in periods of hegemonic ascendancy when the world to be ruled is ruled with greatest efficacy as the world that is to be known. The declaration of ‘critical languages’ and the rubric of ‘area studies’, the institutional framework for academic pedagogy and scholarly discourse on the world throughout most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, is a compelling instance of this connection between knowledge management and the pursuit of worldly mandate. This is the historically repeated confirmation that yokes epistemology to empire and links knowledge management with colonisation and hegemonic occupation. Optimally, the hegemon comes to realise, what is not known becomes just as important as, if not even more crucial than, what is known. As with the paradox of negative theology, where faith is predicated on what cannot be known, the doxa of imperial epistemology rests on what must be kept from being known, that is, on what perforce must be strategically ignored. Hegemony’s understanding of the potential of ignorance, in other words, makes the production, management, and sanctioning of ignorance of paramount importance. And the ratio between the level of accountability and the credibility index of those who do the managing of knowledge and the purveying of ignorance can be quite stark, even if conveniently dismissed by the governing operatives and their media apparatus. As the latest polls by TruePublica and Ipsos MORI, who have been conducting surveys of the British public since 1983, demonstrates, what they call the ‘Veracity Index’ for 2015 was 22% for government ministries and 21% for government officials and politicians (Vanbergen 2016). Given the disparity between government action and government accountability to the public, it should not be surprising that 78% to 79% of the people in the UK think that their government and politicians lie to them all the time. The results of any such poll in the USA, if indeed they should be allowed to become public, are not likely to be any better. Trading on ignorance, or ‘manufacturing consent’, as the Gramscian title of a 1988 treatise by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky would have it, then, is the trademark of the modern imperial era, and no more so than now, when media are consolidated into monopolistic corporations, monolithic ideologies, and univocal echo chambers. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and the man who in the twentieth century legitimated propaganda under the name of ‘public relations’, lived long enough, over a hundred years, 104 to be exact (1891–1995), to see what he termed ‘the engineering of consent’ rule the world. Any theorisation and pedagogy that would countenance and aim to ethically contest hegemony, colonisation, and the predations of imperial extraction cannot do so without taking the measure of engineered ignorance and its paramount potential when purposively instrumentalised. In our task of searching, diagnosing, managing, and purveying knowledge, then, we cannot overlook the fact that the possibilities, virtual and actual, of ignorance may well be infinitely greater and pragmatically more potent than any knowledge curriculum or discursive formation, whether theoretical, practical, or aesthetic, if indeed any such differentiation could be sustained.

It should not be surprising, then, that the vehemence with which programmatic ignorance has been instrumentalised as hegemonic and neocolonial stratagem in the first decades of the twenty-first century has spawned a specialism and field of research called agnotology, literally the science of ignorance, most suggestively explained in a couple books from the past decade, one by specialists in philosophy and the other by experts in the history of science. The first is a collective volume of essays edited by two philosophers, Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007). The other, a collection of essays by various specialists in the history of science and the public interest, is edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008). Neither volume draws the connection between epistemology and hegemony, despite the fact that their areas of investigation are intricately enmeshed with colonialism and imperial history. The first is focused on the question of race, while the latter is trained on the management of information dealing with product safety by the tobacco industry. The appearance of both volumes in an epoch of hegemonic control of information and the programmatic production of ignorance, what is known as the era of ‘spin’, ‘branding’, and ‘marketing’, may not be altogether fortuitous. George Orwell might well see the emergence of this discursive phenomenon as a manifest symptom of what is elided in public discourse, including, alas, in the protocols of university governance, namely, the doublespeak of a neocolonial, imperial era that reigns by purposive occlusion, disinformation, and the manipulation of knowledge for management and imperial expediency. The corrosive role of the media in the entropy of public discourse and the vitiation of any possibility for truth in the first two-and-a-half decades of the twenty-first century echoes the beginning of the previous century, but incisive analyses such as Upton Sinclair’s 1919 book The Brass Check that exposed those orchestrated catastrophes in the service of capital and its hegemony always seem to have a penchant for getting waylaid somewhere in the warehouse section of the library. The waning of analytical critique in our own scholarly discourse, a lamentable development blithely hectored by certain literary critics (Felski 2015), may not be altogether unrelated to this symptomatology, but it should serve as occasion to countenance, once again, certain ethical imperatives that should be categorical for our profession, despite the structural impediments in our university governance and the institutionalised lassitude of our intellectual discourses.

The paradox in finding ourselves living simultaneously with the most advanced state of global communication tele-technologies along with the super-valuation of ignorance production and management should be no less compelling for our own labours in critical thought and analyses of patterned language, poetic or prosaic, than it is for philosophers and historians of science. Especially since the paradoxical convergence of these phenomena are integral to narratives of literary production in such twenty-first-century works as William Gibson’s 2003 novel suggestively titled Pattern Recognition and Umberto Eco’s last novel, Numero Zero (2015).

Wakefulness to the proscriptions that circumscribe and condition knowledge, critique, and the juxtaposition of discursive performance and linguistic structure has been integral to critical thought and pedagogy in the Western tradition since time immemorial. We are instructed from the earliest stages of our formation that an unexamined life is not worth living. This imperative may have never been as critical as it is at this moment, when examining and interrogation are hijacked and reframed as the monopoly of the state and the sanctioned violence of its industrial scale security apparatuses, from whose perpetual scrutiny none of us are immune. Under these circumstances, it may well be imperative to spectralise that venerable philosophical injunction and ask, as well, is an unlived life worth examining?

This crucial juncture in our life world where the imperatives of critical reflection, analytical critique, and the pragmatics of precarious existence intersect is the pivotal moment of dissent and of ethical self-assessment. Inasmuch as dissent comes at a cost, it may well be a test of the courage of our commitment as to whether we are capable of meeting the demands of an ethical imperative we signed on to when we committed ourselves to profess as professors of knowledge and to critically interrogate the known, the knowable, and the possibilities – felicitous, fateful, or nefarious – of the unknown. The alternative to rising to the occasion and meeting this responsibility could well risk implosion into that warped sanity Emily Dickinson, a most knowing poet of world literature’s dissenters, called ‘assent’, namely, a capitulation, willy-nilly, to what is given as it is given. That given, or datum, in our outsized age of hyperbole and hyperpuissance comes in the plural and on an inordinate scale, that is, as ‘mega-data’. The degree of any success in our discernment, limning, and conveyance of knowledge may well be the degree to which we succeed in interrupting the engineered proliferation of ignorance and its elaborate web that ceaselessly seeks to circumscribe what can be known and how it may be known. Given the ubiquity and global insidiousness in the capabilities of current informatics and tele-technologies, the ramifications of knowledge circumscription and epistemic management of knowability are immense, as is the profitability in the capitalisation and control of those capabilities. Hence, the economic and political incentives and Darwinian, not to say Hobbsian, competition for governing their functionality. The unprecedented shift toward privatisation of the commonweal and monetisation of public resources that convert the state and its governing apparatuses into franchise and enforcer on behalf of capital lie at the heart of this materialistic Darwinism, a materiality we certainly cannot afford to overlook, especially as it proliferates in our institutions, pitifully flimsy and mean as the material stakes of that proliferation might be.

We should not be surprised, then, by the fact that the twenty-first century is ushered in by a momentous lesson in hegemonic epistemology, delivered by the mouthpiece of the most powerful, certainly the best funded, government agency on the planet – the Secretary of Defense of the United States of America, Mr Donald Rumsfeld. At a news briefing from the Department of Defense on February 12, 2002, in response to a reporter’s question on preparations for the imminent invasion of Iraq, on the lack of evidence on weapons of mass destruction and on the spuriousness of claims regarding the Iraqi government’s supply of such weapons to terrorists, Mr Rumsfeld gave a reply that is now indelibly etched in the annals of hegemonic epistemology and the expedient management of ignorance and obfuscation as instruments of sanctioned violence. Here is the voice of empire’s epistemic reason: ‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.’ The page with the transcript of this news briefing has since been taken down from the Department of Defense website (www.defense.gov), thus demonstrating yet another twist in the management of knowability, of knowns, unknowns, and what is foreclosed as possibility for being knowable.

Foot soldier and mouthpiece of the New World Order that had recently been decreed by George Bush the Elder, Rumsfeld was engaged in the verbal legerdemain Orwell called doublespeak on behalf of the impending imperial act of aggression with which George Bush the Younger ushered in the new century and the new millennium, thus setting the stage for a self-declared and still enduring perpetual war. Rumsfeld’s centurial, millenarian, and apocalyptic rhetoric that echoed the evangelical zeal of the born-again Younger Bush, was, in fact, a mimetic iteration, as most self-convinced novelty is prone to be, of a poem by D. H. Lawrence from the previous century and another war that was to have ended all wars, a poem resonant with apocalyptic echoes that date to the visions of John of Patmos in the last chapter, Revelations, of the Christian New Testament. Lawrence’s poem carries the Johannine title of ‘New Heaven and Earth’, and serves as a reminder to students and scholars of world literature of the worldliness of literature and the poesis, or making of the world as mimetic iteration of literature. For some this might be a startling reversal, a spectralisation, as the ghostly critical idiom would have it, of the commonplace understanding of the relationship between world and literary representation. Poems like Lawrence’s, in other words, trouble that reductive view of the existence of literature as manifest symptom of the world in which it is embedded, on the one hand, or of literary production as promissory note of a perpetually anticipated imminent futurity, on the other. Lawrence’s poem is neither. It is at once an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: World literature and dissent
• PART I: Dissent (in theory)
• PART II: Dissident literatures
• Index