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I recently published a short piece on cultural appropriation in Persuasion. Some of my fears about its reception quickly came true. Within hours of its posting, I had the singular misfortune of being linked approvingly by the odious cornball Ben Shapiro. In no time at all I was being followed by all manner of know-nothing right-wing riff-raff, people I do not respect and do not at all wish to affirm in their flimsy little construction of a belief system. This made me think it would be worthwhile to dilate somewhat more longwindedly on the topic here, in the hope of making it clear to those people the many respects in which I am not one of them, and also in the aim of reflecting a bit on how it is that we have arrived at this strange conjuncture, where defense of cultural appropriation is interpreted as a right-wing talking point, and on why I still believe it is essential to win it back from them.
I’ll say in passing, before getting to the main part of my reflection, that in part I blame the structures of information-flow, in which we are all forced to (pretend to) communicate today, for the automatic channeling of this topic to the side of the right. The algorithms on which the social-media parody of a public sphere operate are dichotomous in nature, and every statement has to be channeled in the one direction or the other. You can fight against these structural constraints, speaking your mind as your conscience dictates, etc., but all the forces are against you. Persuasion is itself an effort to defy the dichotomy, and so far, from what I have seen, it is maintaining a rather delicate balancing act. As for me, I find that my conscience comes through most clearly when I am writing on my own website— but this is only because it stands somewhat further apart from the structures that support all media interventions in the proper sense. Which is to say that the only way for me to say what I really mean, and not to be misunderstood, is to accept that I will be read by far fewer people.
But on to more pressing matters. I have been thinking a great deal recently about the intellectual debt that I owe to a generation of scholars who were formed in the sensibilities of the 1960s. I have many debts, of course, but this is the one that I have recently come to feel it is important to call by name, to draw out into the light, and to defend against the currently prevailing tendencies in humanities scholarship. I am thinking in particular of a cluster of scholars, working in various disciplines, all of whom share some significant family resemblances, including: Walter Burkert, Hans Peter Duerr, Johannes Fabian, Carlo Ginzburg, Frits Staal, R. Gordon Wasson, and --the true heroine of today's story-- Wendy Doniger. From an earlier generation, one might also mention E. R. Dodds, Mircea Eliade, and Aby Warburg, whose disciples continued to promote at least some of their aims and interests into the 1960s and beyond.
Now, one thing that those in the know might quickly point out is that this cluster of thinkers leans pretty far toward the crackpot side of the spectrum. They are all real scholars, there is no question about that, but in at least two or three of the cases my guys went dangerously far in the direction of self-delegitimisation through flirtation with forms of thought that render the scholarly project meaningless: forms of thought, namely, that may be described as “mystical experience” or as “higher states of consciousness”, that part ways with the normal state of consciousness in which, by common agreement, a typical reader of a scholarly publication is expected to remain.
Note that I exclude from this list certain figures, such as Carlos Castaneda or C. G. Jung, who veered so far to the crackpot side of the spectrum as to no longer feel any responsibility to account for their veering. Not that there is anything wrong with that: Castaneda and Jung are surely powerful sources of inspiration for contributions to the creative arts, and some scholars, notably Gilles Deleuze, have shown themselves able to go dreamwalking with Castaneda's Yaqui shaman, for example, and subsequently to come back and still be taken seriously by at least some sober-minded people, even if most today try to skip over all the zany errancies that may be written off to the intensity of the early post-'68 moment. Of course one should not skip over such things. The excesses of the 1960s counterculture, and the way these seeped into scholarship, are just as much part of the historical record now, just as deserving of study, as anything else. But anyhow, here, in attending more narrowly to the cluster of scholars I identified above, I am trying to stay focused on scholarship that may still be recognised as such today, even if it belongs as indisputably to a bygone era as, say, the fin-de-siècle Viennese sexology of Richard von Ebbing-Kraft.
Some of the scholars I've listed (e.g., Ginzburg, Burkert) were never particularly countercultural to begin with. But one thing that they all have in common, and that clearly comes to them as part of a broad cultural inheritance from the psychedelic turn of the 1960s, is an abiding interest in the question of ecstasy. I mean this term literally, as the experience of getting outside of one’s self. Different thinkers pursued this topic in different ways. Some studied ancient mystery cults, others the anthropology of witchcraft and vestiges of paganism in early modern Europe, others tantric sex rituals, others the role of hallucinogenic drugs in premodern societies, others the cosmic disruption of the shedding of animal blood compensated by the ritual of sacrifice. While they often focused on records from antiquity and early modernity, there was a broad interest in forming hypotheses about human experience extending back to the Paleolithic, and in this connection many set themselves up, among other things, as prehistorians.
There was, moreover, a general commitment to the belief that ethnographic or ethnohistorical data drawn from one cultural setting was just as useful for drawing general conclusions about the human predicament as any other. Thus in his delirious 1978 magnum opus, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, Duerr moves freely back and forth within the first few chapters between proverbs of Nietzsche, Bantu songs, Sepik proverbs, classical Greek mythology, court documents from early modern witch trials, and his own autobiographical reminiscences of talking to a Hopi man at a Greyhound station in Albuquerque: all in the course of explaining to us why native cultures (some of them European) in all times and places have conceptualised caves as “the vagina of the earth”. Even in its era Duerr's work was seen as over the top, yet it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and triggered considerable scholarly debate and criticism over the course of the early-to-mid-1980s. There is simply nothing remotely comparable happening today.
Now to the extent that we think about it all, we are used to thinking of this psychedelic quest for ecstasy, this desire to get outside of one's own body and one's own quotidian state of mind, as primarily a desire to take drugs and make everything “go kablooey”, as Jerry Garcia memorably put it, perhaps to commune with djinns or angels or God himself thanks to the entheogenic properties of the ingested substances, and then perhaps to recap it all later with one's psychonaut peers.
But in the extension of that era's broad quest for ecstasy that I am attempting here, it has recently come to seem to me that an equally important, or perhaps even more important, dimension of the effort to get out of one's own head was, precisely, seeking out cross-cultural experiences that, at least to some extent and at least temporarily, permitted a person to transcend his or her own cultural origins, the mere contingencies of birth, in favour of an experience that was universally human.
Of course, often, the two sorts of ecstasy were combined: one went looking into other cultures precisely because of the belief, justified or not, that those cultures had preserved more powerful forms of self-transcendence, through ritual and ethnobotanical knowledge and so on, that the modern west had lost. But in any case appropriating other cultures, in the literal sense of making them one's own, was central to the goal of ecstasy as I have identified it. And to account for the loss of this interest in ecstasy as a motor of scholarship is also to tell at least part of the story of the current dismal state of the humanities, which makes it so hard to make oneself properly understood when one declares today that what are generally bracketed off as “other people’s cultures” are very much one’s own business too.
***
The thinkers I have invoked are all roughly my parents’ age, so I am far too young to claim membership in their generational cohort. I was born in 1972, which means that even if I am too young to be one of them, I am at least old enough to possess a living memory of the era when their idea of humanistic inquiry floated around in the air. It helps in this connection that I grew up in California, which is in many respects the spiritual homeland of the sensibility I am attempting to describe. A single visit to a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue at the age of ten may have done more to shape me, or to damage me if that is how you see things, than all my subsequent years of graduate school.
I have previously described myself as an “ecstatic rationalist”. I will not rehash here the basic commitments this entails, other than to note the one that is most relevant to the present matter, namely and again, the belief that other people’s cultures are my business, and that the prime directive as it were of humanistic inquiry is to undertake the hard work of thinking your way into forms of life that are not, in the narrowest and dullest sense, your own.
While acknowledging what is obviously true of standpoint epistemology in concrete examples where it is invoked (e.g., police officers who commute into inner cities from the suburbs are less likely to have a sympathetic understanding of the life-world of the people they are policing than officers who are from the same community), nonetheless as a principle that governs and limits what it is that we should be trying to do in relation to others, I reject standpoint epistemology utterly. It is not just a failure of the imagination to suppose without effort that you cannot really know what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, but a failure of conscience. You think you can’t know what it’s like to be, say, in a refugee camp? Standpoint epistemology lets you off the hook; ecstatic rationalism tells you you’re just not imagining hard enough.
***
Those of us who resented the field known as “cultural studies”, as it developed over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, did not know how to appreciate what in retrospect appear to be its charms. Notwithstanding its excessive preoccupation with the ephemera of life under late capitalism, and its corresponding lack of interest in the sort of ecstatic experiences sought out by the generation of scholars with whom we began, it is interesting, now, to look back and note the positive celebration of appropriation within cultural-studies scholarship.
While earlier theoretical engagement with culture maintained a barrier between high and low that blocked any real understanding of what we may call culture's “flow” (think for example of Theodor Adorno on jazz, or, far worse, Allan Bloom's mandarin dismay at the peacock-like “strutting” of Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson), cultural studies sought to track the way pop-cultural signifiers move out from their points of origin and eventually are taken up and given new life and new purpose by communities that have no legal or financial power over the production and management of commercial icons.
Thus Disney-oid characters show up in some sorry dilapidated theme park in the Balkans, and Calvin (of comic-strip fame) ends up on some enormous Ford pick-up truck's mudflaps, except now his face bears a malign expression and he appears to be urinating on a Chevy logo, something Bill Watterson surely would never have condoned. When we see such symbolic migrations, the cultural-studies pioneers argued, we should sooner celebrate than condemn the inexhaustible creative power of the people to make of our cultural detritus what they will. We never agreed to live in a world in which we are bombarded from birth by trademarked figures, of Garfield or Mickey Mouse, so who dares to tell me I cannot reach up out of my cradle, grab whatever anthropomorphised mascot happens to be dangling from the mobile, and claim it as my own?
Nor is it only commercial ephemera that impose themselves in this way. This is also the basic operation of pop-art, as when Jasper Johns reclaims a symbol as ubiquitous and overbearing as the American flag. And it is also in evidence when the outlaw bikers and anarchist punks take up the swastika, that most charged and untouchable symbol of the twentieth century, and make it their own.
In a strange inversion of the hierarchies so important to Enlightenment thinkers, many today believe that it is the power differential that dictates when a certain instance of appropriation is acceptable or not. The Balkan theme park with the knock-off Mickeys and Donalds is engaging in acceptable appropriation, according to this calculus, since a multinational corporation has more power than a scrappy post-Yugoslav nation-state. By contrast the European who takes an interest in Native American art forms is in a position of relatively greater power, on this line of thinking, and so is engaging in impermissible appropriation.
But power is many-headed, and defies simplistic calculi. Though Euro-American hegemony on the North American continent is as undeniable as it is lamentable, Native American recitative art may still have powers unknown to European poetry. If I may be blunt, it is my considered view that in general the art forms of the Europeans are today sickly and withered, gasping for breath, for something really worthwhile to do, in the aftermath of the past century's various crises and horrors: the famous “No poetry after Auschwitz” problem. Yet there is still the possibility in the poetic forms of the Seneca, as I attempted to suggest in the Persuasion piece with the story of my friend Jerry Rothenberg's “summoning of the animals”, of speaking in the voice of a bear. And if that is not real power, I do not know what is. What hope do the Europeans have of achieving something nearly as great, if they are prohibited even from learning to speak in the voice of their fellow human beings?
It is in relation to this question of power that the idea of ecstasy, as I have explained it, proves particularly useful, and also affords us an opportunity to retrospectively discover at least something of a shared spirit with the academic discipline of cultural studies as it was pursued in the 1980s and '90s. The early modern Inquisition was powerful. But old women who anoint themselves in psychoactive salves and undertake an ambulatio animae are powerful too: they have the power to experience something their pious persecutors will never know in their own sad little lives. Those who are ever looking for ways to get out of their heads --whether through summoning animals, ingesting a witch's brew, or simply reading and learning about the life-worlds of other people-- have hidden superpowers that the apparatuses of discipline and control will never know, and will never be able to fully suppress.
***
Speaking of pious persecutors, my principal contention in these further remarks on cultural appropriation, what I hope you will experience as the “kicker”, is this: first (for it is a double kick), the enemies of cultural appropriation, the people who believe that it is an expression of moral uprightness to discipline others into “staying in their lanes”, are the latter-day descendants of the persecutors of witches (imagined or real); what remains the same across the centuries is the perceived need to suppress ecstasy. Second, what permits these persecutors to rise up at particular moments is the opportunity to grab for some power. Today that opportunity has been opened up by the neoliberal devastation of universities, and their consequent abnegation of the role of preservers of the mission of humanistic inquiry as this had been conceived since the Renaissance.
When I taught in Montreal, in an underfunded philosophy department, the upper administration told us at one point we should try to follow the model of the new “Irish-Canadian Studies” department down the hall, which had recently received a large gift from an association of Irish-Canadian businessmen. But philosophy is not an ethnicity, and there simply was no Philosopher-Canadian business community to which we might turn. And so we remained, for the remainder of my time there, in the dean's dog-house.
Later I was on a committee to evaluate a newly launched MA program in “East-West philosophy” at an American university. The program was to involve a strong component of Indian philosophy, and it did not take much questioning before I learned that it was being backed by a local Indian-American financier with a pronounced fondness for Narendra Modi's populist BJP party. I would subsequently learn that it is in fact very difficult to study Sanskrit or classical Indian civilisation in the English-speaking world without sooner or later coming into contact with diaspora representatives of Hindutva ideology, always happy to find non-Indians who will testify to the broader world of the singular greatness of India.
There was a time when to follow a course of study in, say, Sanskrit philology, or Norse philology or whatever, required the cultivation of a distanced attitude to the object of study. There was a high scholarly premium placed on understanding the object of one's study in global and comparative context. But the more money that filters into American universities from the largesse of Indian businessmen with ideological agendas, or indeed the greater the presence the Confucius Institute is able to establish in the same setting, the more we will find students undertaking degrees with a focus on, say, India or China, and coming out the other end speaking in a way that suits the ideology of the governing regimes in these countries: affirming that there is evidence in the Vedas of a mastery of aviation technology by the ancient Indians, to cite one particularly egregious claim that any aspiring Indologist will encounter soon enough.
These days what we might fairly call the populist model of the human sciences reigns in universities: you study a particular culture in order to have confirmed for you the greatness of that culture, and you are invited to think about that culture as if it alone existed in the world, or at least as if every other culture is locked in a zero-sum battle for attention with it, rather than being a reflection of the same underlying human capabilities that give shape and meaning to every other culture. This zero-sum battle, moreover, is part of the same all-encompassing war that pits academic units against one another in competition for dwindling perks.
And it is the same, too, as the one that pits newly minted identity groups against one another online. We have witnessed a Cambrian explosion of new social kinds over the past few years --our species now has more genders than a slime mold, for example--, and the way their members cultivate their own self-understanding and fight for recognition, in the parody of a public sphere that is social media, is substantially the same as the way that ethnonational groups, some of which have been around for millennia, advocate for their own collective interests under neoliberal austerity.
***
Consider in this connection the deplorable twist in Wendy Doniger's late career. A reputed scholar of Hinduism since the 1960s, a specialist in the history of tantrism, Doniger always had a particular knack for drawing out jaw-dropping anecdotes from the civilisation she studied, such as that of the Vedic ogress Dirgha-Jihva, who sprouted vaginas all over her body, in a sort of genital arms race with her many-penised lover. Everything I have read suggests to me that Doniger sincerely loves what we may call, for shorthand, “Indian culture”, and knows a great deal about it. Over this past dark decade, her love and dedication have not proven sufficient to keep her safe from censorship and death threats issued by extremist Hindu nationalists, who do not like to see a non-Indian, and a woman at that, enjoying the delightful excesses that Indian history has at certain (happier) moments shown itself capable of generating.
This is where the suppression of what Americans are now calling “cultural appropriation” inevitably ends up. There is nothing progressive or liberatory about the campaign against it. This campaign is, on the contrary, one local modulation of the same global sickness that we are perfectly able to recognise as reactionary when it is happening far away.
Whatever country you are in, whatever century, beware the enemies of ecstasy.
