Okay. Okay. Hello? I would like to begin. If you don’t mind – I – okay. Tell you what: I’m going to start talking, and those of you who would like to listen are welcome t -hello? Hello? I – hello? HELLO?
GOOD LORD, IS THAT GWEN STEFANI?
Ah. My mistake. But, while I have your attention: some students have been asking for an extension on their first assignment. I find this rather odd because I have not, in fact, assigned you anything yet. Extend away.
With that little bit of unpleasantness out of the way, today I would like to talk about subtext creep. Does anybody – yes? A Batman villain? Oh. Very droll. Do you know how they say that some jokes never get old? That one is drooling into a cup in a home even as we speak. No, don’t feel bad for offering that answer. It’s special interactions with students just like that that make early retirement so inviting.
Subtext – let us begin with that. Subtext is the unspoken yet evident idea behind what a person actually says. When your girlfriend says “I love you” but really means “If you don’t stop telling jokes from Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo I will stab you in the spleen with a shrimp fork,” the threat of violence is the subtext.
Now, under ordinary circumstance, you – well, not you, actually. An older and wiser version of you. Somebody who has actually taken the time to get to know how other people think. Let me start again. Under ordinary circumstances, an older and wiser version of you who has taken the time to get to know how other people think will be able to discern the subtext of a statement from other evidence.
Let us consider the case of the psychotic girlfriend. As she tells you how much she loves you, her nostrils may be flaring. Her eyes may be bulging. She may be wielding her shrimp fork in a threatening manner. There may be a history of attacking people with unusual eating utensils in her family. Sometimes, the subtextual clues can be quite subtle.
Consider the following passage: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.” What is the subtext in this statement?
Anybody? Any guesses? It’s Judith Butler…from an article in the journal Diacritics. Very famous passage…by a Berkeley professor. No? No one? I thought this would be easy for you: the subtext is: “Help, I’m being imprisoned in an ivory torture tower and I can’t seem to make sense of anything any more.” Perhaps it helps to have studied in Berkeley.
Another example may help to clarify the concept: “It is the moment of non-construction, disclosing the absentation of actuality from the concept in part through its invitation to emphasize, in reading, the helplessness — rather than the will to power — of its fall into conceptually.” What is the subtext of this statement?
Paul Fry, a professor of English, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, yes, I know, you might never have guessed from the quoted passage, but, I assure you, it is, in fact, English. This is from A Defense of Poetry – ah, yes, that does make things clearer, does it not? Well, then, subtext, anybody? Sub – yes? Ah, no. Nice try. And, it’s “ivory torture towers,” actually. Look. While it’s true that many professors like students to repeat back to them what they’ve just said, I am not among them. At least, not in this instance.
Nobody willing to give it a go? Clearly, the subtext of this passage is: “Gee, that coed in the front row is hot. Focus, Paul, focus. Can’t do anything until the tenure committee reports back. She is really, hot, though.” Fry’s subtext was a little more subtle than Butler’s – it’s no surprise that you had trouble figuring it out. Not to me.
Now, if you actually listen to somebody’s statements over time, you can – yes, what? What could you possibly not understand about that? Listen. What you’re doing right now. With your ears. Time. The eternity that these classes seem to take. It doesn’t so much pass as ooze – I’m sorry, what was your question?
Oh. No, that’s 321b. B, as in bastard. This is 32la. A as in – oh, you get the idea, do you? Very good, then. Off you go. One less 321a for me to have to deal with.
Now, as I was saying, if you actually pay attention to what somebody says over time, you will often notice that the subtext of their statements subtly changes. By paying close attention to what is not being said, it is often possible to make sense of the nonsense that is actually being said.
Examples are often helpful to those for whom abstract reasoning is but a distant hope, so allow me to introduce the subject of torture. No, I am not talking about my lectures – you are a grand wit, sir. May I enquire as to your name? Gwen Stefani? Oh, ha ha. No doubt. You should do stand up. Indeed, you should. It would be so much easier to kick you out of the room if you weren’t sitting down.
In any case, until about the year 2000, nobody spoke of torture. This silence was part of a general agreement among civilized people that deliberately inflicting pain on another human being was not what civilized people do. Except for modernist poetry readings, of
course. And Lars von Trier movies. Fortunately for the cultural elite, artistic torture is not covered by the Geneva Convention.
After September, 2001, people – and, when I say people, I don’t actually mean human beings, but, rather, political pundits – started to ask the question, “Is physical torture acceptable?” They quickly answered: “No, no, no, no, no, of course not, civilized people don’t do things like that.” As if they knew what civilized people do!
Notice, though, that by just asking the question, the intellectual subtext had undergone a sea change. (Seas, like fish tanks, need to be changed twice a week or they go all murky on you. You learn something new every day, don’t you? Almost like that’s what a University is for, isn’t it? The fact that – oh, sorry, let me get out of these parentheses. Just a moment…shouldn’t take -)
Ah, that’s better. Now, the fact that the question was even asked meant that the pundit allowed for the possibility that the answer could be “yes.” This is obviously a fundamental shift in thinking, all the more insidious for the fact that it went unstated. Insidious. Look it up. Yes, online dictionaries count. No, do not look it up while I am speaking.
More recently, discussion in the popular journals has focused on the pros and cons of torturing specific individuals. Here, I use “discussion” in the medieval sense of the term, of course. Much has been made of the fact that most of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and other glorious American contributions to the 12th century are innocent of any involvement with terror. Again, the hidden assumption – the “subtext,” if you will – is that there are actually people – “terrorists” – who deserve whatever treatment they get.
So, in a few short years, we have gone from an absolute ban on torture, to allowing for the possibility of torture to wondering if we should torture specific individuals. This creep, hidden as it is in the subtext of the debate, has gone largely uncommented upon.
Does it end here? Certainly not. Having established that subtext creep has developed on this issue, we can extrapolate what – what? Ex-tra-po-late. Project into the future. No, sorry, that’s not a crystal ball in my pocket, but don’t assume from that that it’s you that I’m happy to see.
We can extrapo – we can look into the future. What are we likely to see? A debate over why so many of the guests at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are Arab. At this point, the subtext will creep from “Should we torture this individual?” to “Should we torture people from this ethnic or religious minority?” I would argue that it is here that the subtext creep will be complete, that in a few short years the supposedly civilized countries of the world will have gone from Plato to Hitler.
Okay, that’s a great leap that I know you’ll want to carefully consider while you’re waiting for Worlds of Warcraft to load, so – oh, what? Okay, we have a question. And, the question is: is the President’s declaration that Intelligent Design should be taught with evolution “to expose people to different schools of thought.. .so people can better understand what the debate is all about” a form of subtext creep?
No. The text itself is creepy enough. Alright, seeing that there are no further questions -and, yes, the subtext is we all want to get out of here right, away – I’ll see you all next week.