A letter:
I'll tell you, buddy, those are the last climbers
I'll ever accept from that college. Every traverse they've got to stop and
talk it over with each other. Thompson
Steep, two of them with their heads together, looking at me, mumble mumble
domination mumble mumble paternalism mumble mumble, ism, ism.
Cooper Spine it's worse. Mumble, mumble, privileged status structure mumble mumble hegemonic
masculinity mumble mumble.
When they get to "the master gaze" at
Jones Ledge I turn on them.
"Stop right here," I say. "I know your trouble and it needs to be cleared up. Start with that rock Alissa's foot is
on. It's a real rock. Part of mountain reality. And don't look off at the mountain-tops
when I use the word 'reality,' Steven. I'm not talking about what there's no foundation for, a
world independent of our constructions.
I'm talking only about what we've got to take into account when we climb
a mountain. Rocks that look like that will, according to my experience — and I
will, regardless of any power I have, call this 'knowledge' —
sometimes give way under you, in which case you will be left dangling on your
rope or, if your companions have not believed me about fastening their picks,
in a heap in the scrabble down below, along with the rest of us." My gaze was on Alissa's foot. It may have been an imperial gaze or a
male gaze but it was a necessary gaze, since my failure to assess her foot's
position could have kept us from getting to the top of the mountain, or back
home, rather than down in the scrabble.
I was starting way back but I thought that while I
was at it I might as well establish the essentials (woops, another hot word) —
well, show them the foundational beliefs (oh my god, worse). OK, what mountain-climbers postulate. The simplest metaphysics in the world,
as you and I know: that there's something unconstructed out there that keeps us
from getting what we want just by willing it. However we describe it we must conform our will to it.
I don't know whether it was really there or not but
I see doubt in Steven's face. "What do you mean must?" So I take the opportunity to explain
logical necessity (yes, I actually
used those words, "logical" and "necessity"). "Wanting the end entails wanting
the means. If you want the summit
you want the steps toward it."
I left it to them to figure out the consequences of
this for the other big word they had been using, "power." Like that wanting the steps entails
wanting knowledge of the steps, which, if you don't have it, requires a grant
of power to the one you go to for help, me here but elsewhere any teacher. The power (or "authority") to
speak to you in the imperative voice: "Put your foot here, not
there."
I did take the opportunity to point out that the tone
of that imperative, or any other accidents of its utterance — the race, the
gender, the history, the bourgeois origins, all extra-mountain power
relationships — was, however lamentable, irrelevant to their goal, getting
their live bodies to the summit. Their
goal, not mine. We teachers at the
clinic don't have a goal until students give us one. "Long's Peak?
Check. Here's how."
So all their suffering, all my insufferable exercise
of authority, all their onerous obedience, all docility in their bodies,
followed from their grant of power, which followed from their own desire. They were doing this to themselves;
they were their own oppressors.
I thought that given time to think (there's plenty
of it on a mountain; so much is just plodding) they'd work out these consequences,
but when we got to the next ledge only about half of them had. And they are all such arguers there's
no way they could stay out of a big one with the other half. They tried to keep their voices down but
I did hear the crusher that ended it:
"Better our bodies inscribed by him than by those sharp f---ing
rocks down there!" That was Carla, and I thought she had them all convinced.
I even thought they'd had the mountain-flash we all
wait for: climbing is choices and
choices are trade-offs. Decide
that all goals are mountains, all putting of means to ends is climbing, that
climbing is 95% of life, and very few need to go to India.
But not so.
Though the Real Worlders (I'll call them) had won the argument, and
nobody on the other side could refute them, a few were still putting their feet on rotten rock. Deliberately. Defiantly.
How could they be defying reason? Why would educated people no longer listen to reason? As the last plod went on I grew more excited. Why, why, God tell me, why are they
acting this way? "And
why are men in the upper-class suburbs of New York, dense with college
graduates, pressing the button for Donald Trump?" suddenly came a voice
from the mist. "Why do
rational men ever behave irrationally?" came an echoing voice, and
another, and another. We had
reached the heights of the eternal mysteries.
Note for
colleagues further out of touch than I am: In being guided by the French philosopher
Michel Foucault the group above is special, but not extremely special. By 2007 Foucault was the most often
cited author in the humanities (Thomson Reuters), so influential that,
according to one of his followers (Jared Silverman) his "concepts have permeated modern
scholarship in such widespread ways that we can easily say of him what the poet W.H. Auden (1979) once said of Freud: that he is 'no more
a person now but a whole climate of opinion.'"
If you know him only as one
of those postmodernists who took down objectivity and the unitary self you need
at least to check the Wikipedia entry, which will tell you that "Foucault's
discussions on power and discourse have inspired many critical theorists, who
believe that Foucault's analysis of power structures could aid the struggle
against inequality. They claim that through discourse analysis,
hierarchies may be uncovered and questioned by way of analyzing the
corresponding fields of knowledge through which they are legitimated." Obviously you need to know more (or
possibly you don't need to know more) than I can supply here. However, a few of his widely quoted
statements might help a little, at least with the mountain story:
Power is everywhere.
Truth is...produced only by virtue of multiple forms of
constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society
has its regime of truth.
The body is the inscribed surface of
events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated
self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual
disintegration.
Good one!
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