A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  I believe in truth; or I believe in several truths, including some of Kant’s reason, some of Marx’s economic determinism and some of Freud’s foundational psychiatry. But when I start watching the serpent of truth slither through history, I get a little nervy and cover my eyes in case the truth-snake changes shape again. The problem is, Derrida did not cover his eyes and went on to intellectualise the slippery end of truth. The truth wants what it wants, he says. And then, without a minute’s warning, we have no foundation, nothing to believe in, and suddenly, Mia Farrow is no longer anywhere in sight.

  So what Derrida wants us to believe is that the truth has not just died but that it never lived. We are no longer made of water, souls, history, reason, money or an id. We are nothing.

  Derrida says we have always been nothing and it is with this that I cannot bring myself to agree. But I can agree that his deconstruction is a good enough snapshot of the increasingly meaningless era in which we currently live a bold new Stupid.

  Derrida says that our understanding of existence is structured in terms of oppositional pairs. He says that these oppositions are structured with one half being understood as dominant and the other being understood as subordinate. These might include man and woman; good and evil; reason and emotion; speech and writing. Our entire principle for organising reality is structured in this way so that we can point to anything and look at it in terms of what it is not. This could include the quality of being Australian. This is actually a particularly good example because Australians usually describe themselves in terms of what they are not: an Australian is not un-Australian.

  An Australian is not American. An Australian is not a communist. An Australian is not unfair. An Australian is not easily angered.

  We define Australian-ness by looking at what it is not. This is how we organise all meaning: in relation to what it is not. But those other things against which we are writing the ‘text’ of being Australian are themselves defined in terms of what they are not. So an Australian is not American who is not English. And an Englishman is not a Frenchman who is not fond of bad food. And on it goes, until the bad food ends up being eaten by President Bush the Elder, who deposits it on the Japanese prime minister, who is not American but who is covered in vomit that has now acquired meaning throughout the world. Or at least as much meaning as anything can have because, baby, it’s all relative.

  Derrida, I have neglected to mention, was a linguist and had studied the traditionally understood relationship of the signifier, or the word for a thing, with the signified, or the thing. It had been previously supposed that the signifier bore a static relationship to the signified; that when I said something was Australian’ it was clear what I meant. But Derrida proposes that what I mean never becomes clear and is always (and already) a case of articulating absence when I say Australian. The signifying chain depends only on itself for the production of meaning and there is nothing that is truly Australian, just a whole lot of things that being Australian isn’t, which in turn are things that aren’t other things that bear any relationship to anything outside the chain.

  A common reaction to this is ‘bullshit’, because it seems so obvious that Australian is a knowable quality that exists independently of the word that describes it. But then, when you try to explain Australian with Derrida’s hypothesis in mind, you might find yourself, as I did, in freefall.

  We have always thought of language as an instrument of meaning. But with Derrida, we begin to suspect that the opposite is true: meaning is the servant of language.

  In the beginning, there was the word. And then there were just more words. And now, there is nothing outside the text.

  As he advances toward complete meaninglessness, Derrida becomes more of a sickening threat. He challenges, quite convincingly, the idea that there is nothing in our minds before language and that language is not something we make to fit our needs but we are something for language to rest on.

  There is a passage on meaning I remember reading in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando before I was old enough to realise I was really bored by Virginia Woolf: ‘There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.’

  Orlando, by the bye, is a lady-man lost in time. I couldn’t really say as I didn’t finish the book and the movie with Tilda Swinton was out the day I went to hire it. But it is a book about the fragile nature of identity and gender; at least I said so in my deconstruction exam. And I think this observation saved me from a fail. The book is certainly full of the idea that people are made of the things that constitute their opposite.

  We don’t wear clothes; they wear us. We don’t use language; it uses us. Our identity is a performance; an effect of all the oppositions in the world. If we try, like the hero/heroine Orlando, we can move beyond the idea that we, or anything else, is one thing and allow the parts of the thing that we are not to become more present.

  Orlando would be an example of a conscious deconstruction.

  But deconstruction happens all the time. According to Derrida, we are always-already involved in deconstruction. Deconstruction is something one can perform deliberately, but even then, one is simply making explicit that which was already implicit. So deconstruction is something that we necessarily perform in the creation of meaning. You’re talking, baby, you’re deconstructing.

  This practice of uttering meaninglessness is neither good nor bad; although it is presumed to be healthier, I guess, if it is clearly identified. At a very basic level, deconstruction is the admission that there is no foundation to meaning. So it finds another way to explore the foundation of meaning. It meanders when it is intentional because that is all anyone can ever do. (Not that ‘anyone’ exists, maybe, as a unified speaking subject.)

  Deconstruction remains a minor pastime of literary scholars who will privilege a small part of a text. They might take the subordinate or suppressed element in a binary pair (say, the girlish fragility of Ahab in Moby Dick) and blow it out of all proportion. You could, say, really study the creation myth of Terminator which has a man going back in time to give birth to a future Eddie Furlong and make the entire movie about men feeling alienated from the process of childbirth instead of the apparent meaning of the film which is, of course, that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the greatest man-bot of all time.

  This stuff is fine in literary criticism. And it is, for me, fine as a critique of our times. But the idea that meaning is always (and already!) a closed system more powerful than Skynet is just too much for my tastes. I need to see life as a possibility lived beyond the singularity of language.

  Everything is equally meaningless? Always? And already? I haven’t got a great argument beyond ‘fuck that shit’, but you may be pleased to know that other well-regarded thinkers, including Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, do. To be honest, I don’t have the intellectual temerity or rigour to try to understand these guys’ refutation of Derrida. Because Derrida, who ‘playfully’ describes deconstruction mostly in terms of what it is not, makes it difficult enough to understand what he is saying without throwing some extra continental philosophers onto the grill.

  Everything is meaningless. There is nothing outside the text.

  This sort of relativism is quite dreadful not only for the pessimistic headache it confers—if nothing has any meaning, then we might as well just smoke a bowl and light it with the pages of Plato’s Republic—but because it forces us to assess everything in the world as having equal merit. Even the very Stupid.

  Derrida may currently be unfashionable. He was highly influential, though, and made a significant contribution to Stupid in the areas of literary and cultural studies and the thing we now call ‘journalism’. Even people who couldn’t tell you his name are influenced by his methods.

  High school students of English will now ‘read’ Big Brother as a ‘text’ that has, apparently, all the richness of Shakespeare. Well may you
ask WTF. Now, I earn a partial living as a television writer and have a keen interest in defending good interpretations of reality TV. I actually don’t believe that an erudite reading of mass-media entertainment is necessarily a bad thing and not just because it pays my rent. I know that a critical reading of television can provide a good look at art and anyone who doubts this should read Clive James. But what I don’t believe, and I am now underemployed and alone among my peers as a result, is that television is very often a good way to make statements about the society that produced it. When you allow yourself to believe that a bunch of drunken twenty-somethings living under surveillance in a fake house in the middle of a theme park can produce something as meaningful as Titus Andronicus, you’re fucked.

  And we are fucked. A colossal amount of ‘commentary’ with the belief that everything is meaningful is spewed into our brains daily. People say that ‘positive’ homosexual characters on television show that homophobia is disappearing, but figures on suicidal ideation and homelessness among queer youth ascend. People say that skinny models make women starve themselves, a claim that has all but been refuted by those who specialise in eating disorders. People say that in a time where everything is meaningful, we can look to anything for meaning.

  This is the impulse of cultural studies: to look for evidence of whatever you fancy in whatever you have at hand. In my view, this is a kind of Stupid that has all the gravitas of glitter-and-glue craft collage. You use materials at your immediate disposal to make a pile of shiny shit that is work better left for five-year-olds. It is not a ‘pure’ expression of Derrida but is still very much in his debt. Derrida made it okay for people to privilege the overlooked elements of a text and he must take some responsibility for the cheap French franchise that goes on in his absence.

  Pretending that it has social justice as a central concern, a new writing that ‘calls out’ evil or praises progress in low entertainment has become common and perfectly acceptable. What was once the work of art critics has become a central political project, even for politicians. In 1992, G.H.W. Bush’s vice-president made a speech about moral values. Of the television program Murphy Brown Dan Quayle said, ‘It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.’

  In a longish and madly racist speech, Quayle talked about poverty. He did concede that poverty was, in part, the cause of poverty. But, he said, it really had more to do with poor morals as exemplified by Murphy Brown. Of black America, he observed, ‘There is far too little upward mobility.’ And this was not because people didn’t have access to money. Rather, it was ‘because the underclass is disconnected from the rules of American society’.

  So Murphy Brown, the whitest fictional woman in America, was responsible for poverty. After all, she was the one who enjoined members of America’s black female underclass to have children out of wedlock. It was Murphy who devalued the American father and it was not economic conditions that forced him into unemployment or that tore apart traditional family structures.

  Dr Anne Summers, an Australian feminist academic, popular writer and political adviser to the Keating government on women’s issues, has a similar understanding of the culture. Having freshly delivered a speech on how ‘misogynist’ depictions of then Australian prime minister Julia Gillard on the blog of an unemployed cartoonist engendered ‘misogyny’, Summers was interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald on the matter of some urinals in a high-end Sydney restaurant that were shaped like mouths. The urinals, by the way, were modelled very clearly on the Rolling Stones logo; if porcelain could be said to have a gender, it was male. The urinals, in fact, are still installed in a Rolling Stones museum in Germany. They remain undisturbed in a homosexual men’s club just a few kilometres away from the high-end Sydney restaurant. But the fact of their maleness did not stop Summers from calling the latrines ‘misogynist’ and suggesting to others via Facebook that campaigning for their removal was worthwhile work.

  There is nothing outside the toilet. There is nothing outside Murphy Brown. For the right and for the left, the culture can show us what is wrong better than, say, actual statistics can, because it’s all relative. Neither Summers nor Quayle are the sort likely to concede to the impact of Derrida, but it is here as clear as urine. In a world where everything is held to be of equal weight, we are free to be crushed by the heft of a bold new Stupid. This postmodern century is one that holds all ‘text’ as equally influential and celebrates the democratisation of intellectual merit; or our enslavement by the feudal lords of Stupid, depending on how you choose to see it. These days, every child wins a prize. Even Dan Quayle and Anne Summers, who are hailed for the courage of their Stupid. These days, the scandalous blog post is held to be as worthy as the most cautious journalism. These days, political news is no more significant than celebrity news. These days, one’s self-esteem need have nothing to do with one’s real-world achievements. These days, the average is elevated and the excellent is met with a ‘meh’.

  Derrida is, in some part, responsible for a meh-world that can no longer be arsed using the energy required to declare, ‘This thing is more important than that thing.’ He describes a world where meaning is only ever relative to other meaning and where there is no central meaning. Now, as we will see, Derrida gives us absolutely no hope of escaping from the dreadful truth that there is no truth.

  But sometimes what Derrida sees is a fairly accurate picture of a world that causes some of us to throw up our hands and say, ‘Nothing means anything anymore’. My chief problem with Derrida, save for the fact that he enabled people to make stupid arguments about sit-coms and urinals, is that he says meaning is always absent. I believe this absence is real but it is an event that belongs to the present.

  Whether or not you agree with Derrida’s view, and the broader postmodern view, of nothing meaning anything, you might concede that ours is a world from which meaning has largely drained and continues to drain apace. A loss of meaning is a pretty serious event. And it is for this reason that Derrida’s difficult-to-understand but impossible-to-shake-once-you-do theory of meaninglessness is worth our attention.

  I want you to think about our very common avoidance of meaning for a minute. Think about how we are inclined, as a mass, to remember George H.W. Bush as a man who vomited on a prime minister and not one who was silent on apartheid, noisy about war and who drove US citizens into poverty in proportions unmatched for thirty years. And then had his deputy blame it on television. Think about how Bush’s detractors would rather remember him for an instant of embarrassment at dinnertime and not his policy; how his supporters would rather think of him as the great foreign policy president who was so conscientious in his diplomacy that the poor old guy was sick on a prime minister. Here, we shun real argument by letting comedy and tragedy stand in for facts.

  We are eager to love or hate, to worship or deride. But we are rapidly losing the inclination to examine our reasons for such strong emotions. This doesn’t mean we are by nature lazy and stupid. It just means that the once reliable chain of meaning that would tell us that this instant is important and this instant is just a guy vomiting is wrapping around itself. There is nothing outside the text, the vomit, the urinal or the sitcom.

  We get quite het up about things. We sling insults around like ‘hater’ and we tell people with whom we disagree to ‘go die in a fire’. We are easy with hyperbole and we say that we ‘love’ and ‘worship’ people with whom we agree. Certainly, as we’ll discuss in a later chapter on compassion, we are given to very grand emotion. But we are now more rarely inclined to make passionate intellectual criticisms than we are to react to presidential emesis. When it comes to problems that require understanding that transcends ‘good’ or ‘evil’, we will shrug because, hey, it’s all just relative. A vomit is as good as a complex critique in an age where it�
��s all more text.

  The vomit begins to reveal a little more about what is meant when we talk about the postmodern era. There is a lot more ‘text’ being generated and fewer ways to sort it. There is no centre to our conversations and our knowledge because everything acquires the appearance of having equal weight. And so everything has acquired equal weight. Starved of the nutrition provided by real meaning, we gorge on any junk. We’ll even take vomit. Urinals. Cancelled sit-coms. There is now an acronym to describe the anxiety that one might overlook something important: FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. One can live in FOMO. Or one can accept that one cannot possibly know the difference between important things and trifles. Becoming Stupid in a world where there is increasingly ‘nothing outside the text’ is a pretty valid reaction. Sometimes, it is better not to react than to react and say something Stupid. I am a very talkative person and it took me many years to realise that one could simply not investigate all ‘text’ all the time.

  •

  I remember as a young woman visiting southern California and being unable to detect meaning in the easy grunts of its citizens. I remarked to a liberal American with whom I was doing business that she must be pleased about the Clinton Administration’s plans for universal health care. ‘It’s awesome,’ she replied in a way that could have been exhausted or cynical or glad. A few days later, I was in a bar and news of Rodney King, the African American victim of a vicious beating by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, was being discussed again on the television (the riots which followed this brutality, by the way, were described by Quayle as the work of Murphy Brown). I remarked to my host that such things were awful. ‘It’s awesome,’ he replied in a way that could have been exasperated or mocking or delighted.