Some of my readers may be familiar with the hoax performed by the trio Peter Boghossian, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay during 2017-2018, when, disgusted with the dogmatic and highly ideological jargon produced by American academia, the three academics set out to write twenty papers based on outlandish premises, and they proceeded to submit them to peer-reviewed journals. Seven of these papers were accepted, another seven were given serious consideration, and only six were unambiguously rejected. The premises of the accepted papers went from a narrative of the penis, to dog sex in parks, to a rewriting of a chapter from Mein Kampf from a feminist perspective.
It turns out that I was a forerunner of this genre. Having browsed some old papers, the other day I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in 2010, “Sense, Sensibility and Nonsense,” which I presented the same year at the Conference “Reimagining the Poet-Critic” at the University of California in Santa Cruz. In this paper I made the point that the two major visions of poetry in America—experimental versus experiential—reflect a simplistic dichotomy, that of reason versus sentiment, or thinking versus feeling. To put it very briefly and schematically, many of those who write a “reflective” poetry—usually characterized as “postmodern” or “language” poets—reject the idea of a poetry of feeling, while, on the other hand, those who write a more lyrical kind of poetry very rarely seem to reflect on the images they are describing. Thus framing the debate, and very aware that my audience adhered to the postmodern framework, I invited my listeners to listen to a theory of my own meant to subvert this binary, which I called “Knife-he-she”:
Knife-he-she
is a theory of nothing because there is too much something out there. Interested in the ever-small bodily pointless signifiers—pimples, hemorrhoids, dandruff—knife-he-she doesn’t claim a position of authority in regard to anything because knife-he-she categorically and unambiguously denies the possibility of any authority in relation to any subject at any given time and point in space. Knife-he-she is bisexual, bilateral and bipolar; it separates and unites at the same time: it cuts and saws, transcends and bends. Not having any authority, knife-he-she is open to any ideas, which can become at any moment part of the knife-he-she theory, that is a theory of nothing—where “nothing” should not be taken as the full signifier of a non-existent signified, but rather as a signified whose head has been chopped off by the guillotine of a future time-machine. (Note: the guillotine itself is only a tool in the service of the theory of white parsley, whose whiteness one cannot stress enough given the unabashed competition from the guillotine red, a color recently approved by the Department of Shades and Stress. The theory of white parsley should not be confused with the knife-he-she theory, though they do have in common the convergence of two parallel lines, which, until now have never met. In the space open by the theory of white parsley, two parallel lines can not only meet but also inject their respective libidinal black selves into the paper’s whiteness, thus hybridizing parsley and paper into one big papsley or parsper. One should remember, however, that the theory of white parsley would be nothing without the guillotine—and in this case “nothing” means “nothing.” The guillotine itself, as mentioned above, is only another name for the gallows, a tool which should be distinguished from the more intelligent forms of tools—such as a tulip-he-she—i.e., a recent hybrid between a tulip, a Macintosh and a knife-he-she). Which brings us back to the knife-he-she, an integrated theory of compulsive arrangements and disarrangements, of vows, vowels and entangled bowels, whose movements follow the delicate trope of the gallows suspended in mid-air between sky and rope, thus arresting any future coordination between earth and parsley, a coordination already threatened by the allegiance between the four w’s in vows, vowels, bowels and gallows, an allegiance that can only be accounted for by an act of witchcraft, that is, the craft of a witch. Indeed, to the extent that knife-he-she rejects Christian paternalism, it embraces a revolutionary, socially conscious witchcraft, the craft of doing something out of nothing, or rather of making nothing out of something, that is, of producing non-existent entities that can be elevated to the status of potentially viable tulip bulbs. A tulip bulb is the nucleus of any theory that has ever existed or will ever exist, that’s why it is of utmost importance that the bulb be placed in the earth before the advent of the white parsley, which, as we all know, is a most stubborn plant. No one has ever managed to get rid of white parsley, that’s why it keeps growing to the peril of all other theories, including the knife-he-she theory, in spite of the fact that the latter encompasses the theory of the white parsley.
Although knife-he-she is a theory of nothing, it situates itself in opposition to all the other theories, as if it were something. Not because it lacks logic but because it refuses to acknowledge the somethingness of the latter. Thus, the outcome of the knife-he-she theory is the production of even more nothing (not to be confused with nothingness, a retrograde concept that implies being and essence). Its ultimate goal is the destruction of grammar, for, as Nietzsche has said, God is still alive as long as grammar is.
Nobody cracked a smile. People’s faces bore the usual expression of intense focus they usually have at conferences, and at the end, one or two individuals muttered the usual “I found that interesting” cliché (by the way, I once presented a paper in French at another conference, at the end of which several people expressed laudatory remarks, only to become clear a few minutes later that no one understood French). Now, it’s possible people were confused because the first part of my paper was in good faith, while the “knife-he-she” part was a parody, and I didn’t present it as such. Rather, I deliberately read it without qualifying it, and that is precisely the problem with American academia: as long as you use a jargon that sounds familiar, people can accept anything no matter how insane. Imagine an institution in which people have become so used to nonsense that they can listen with a straight face to the “theory” I presented above.
Hilarious!!!!! We need to get together and tell similar stories. Academia (humanities especially) is a joke.
However brilliant, your parody merely proves this: that insanity can’t be satirized.