My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

16 REVENGE OF THE POET· CRITIC
forms that challenge, confront, exhilarate, provoke, disturb, question, flail,
and even fail.
It is the continued fate of the new to be misunderstood by some in exact
proportion to the intensified comprehensibility it provides to others.
What I am talking about here is the production of ignorance that is
enforced by restraints on complexity of thought; political, social, and aesthetic
content; and form.
Universities can be a crucial base of opposition to the construction of
ignorance, but not if they view their role as merely ameliorative. Indeed
the production of ignorance is aided by the passivity of the scholarly community
in accepting narrow definitions of disciplinarity and specialization
that enforce irrational constraints on the nature of research and writing,
supposedly in the name of professionalization but actually in the service
of containment and control. Insofar as professors choose to see their work
as only scholarship and so hardly writing, they evade the possibility that
their work can have social force. In judging the value of writing or
research, the criteria should not be whether a work meets with the current
norms in the field as currently defined, but rather whether each of its
sentences and paragraphs is necessary to say. Otherwise one is only aiding
and abetting those inside and outside universities who are all too willing
to capitulate to the idea that public discourse can only be written in
"simple" sentences; or that compound-complex sentences, or long paragraphs,
are not "clear".
The idea that complex or unfamiliar ideas, indeed that compound-complex
sentences, are "elitist" must be countered as demagogic populism and
quasi-totalitarianism. It is not that writers and artists and intellectuals, any
more than listeners or readers, are ignorant; but the constraints enforced
in public spaces produce, protect, and defend ignorance. With the instigation
of media consultants and large foundations, the noncommercial
sector has too often copied the worst features of the commercial sector
(though usually stripped of the dynamism of the market that makes commercial
culture so vibrant). It is commendable for noncommercial venues
to try to get the largest possible audience for the programming they produce.
However, it is destructive to determine your programming primarily
on the audience it is able to get.
So what I am advocating, then, is the production of public cultural work
in unpopular modes and on unfamiliar subjects.