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I don’t understand the strong emotional reactions most of the rest of the class seemed to have to Kauffman, and I don’t understand why I didn’t have that reaction. Many of you seemed to think that she was arguing against the personal, against its validity, its value in a general sense, or even against its existence.

But who was Kauffman addressing? Feminists? Or academic feminists? She writes:

I clearly believe that our intellectual work as feminists is directly related to our personal histories; that our subjective experiences influence our politics, that our psychic traumas affect our teaching and writing …

I dislike the “our” in the previous paragraph; among many other assumptions it takes for granted, the one that is probably most accurate is therefore most troubling: “we” all do the same kind of labor, i.e., feminist work in higher education in America. Are “we” feminist scholars solipsistically talking only to ourselves? (pg 259)

Although she doesn’t like it, Kauffman acknowledges that the conversation in which she is engaging is mostly a conversation among feminist academics. “I want feminist scholarship to reach an audience that transcends the academy …,” though she says this in the context of criticizing how feminist scholars have been treated by the institution (261). Her priority is the much smaller community of feminist scholars.

She often talks about ‘feminists’, rather than feminist academics in particular. Here is one such usage: “Society tames the feminist through the story in particular, the allure of personal testimony in general. Are feminists succeeding in finding ways to make their work inaccessible to the usual forms of “recuperation”? … I am arguing that such recuperation infects not just feminist criticism, but reader response criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, materialist criticism, and even post-structuralism.“ (pg 262, italics hers). I think she may be using ‘feminist’ as a short-hand for the particular kind of feminist she assumes she is addressing, the feminist engaged in literary criticism, the feminist who works in academia. The subject of the essay as a whole is the practice of feminist literary criticism, the practice of feminist literature. Not feminism on the streets, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. Kauffman is addressing the professional, who gets paid to be an academic, if not to be a feminist. She is pointing out how a certain kind of use of personal testimony is unprofessional because it makes for less effective feminist literary criticism by limiting the possibilities for dialog and inquiry.

And I read this text as an aspiring academic, not as a private individual. Perhaps that is the difference? I was the intended audience.

Only, I’m not sure that Kauffman had a clearly envisioned audience. Anyway, who cares about authorial intention?

Perhaps what we can take from this essay is that, as feminists if that is what we are, is that getting in touch with our emotions and expressing them is just a starting point. “Writing about yourself does not liberate you, it just shows how ingrained the ideology of freedom through self-expression is in our thinking” (269). Writing about ourselves is not insignificant, because for so long females rarely had a voice. But simply finding and using that voice over and over again will not lead us anywhere.

Kauffman does not advocate subduing our emotion – it’s clear that she is angry about the lies we tell ourselves, about the harm certain mythologies do to us (‘we’ being Americans). She does not advocate not writing from one’s experience, if only because that is completely impossible*. She is alarmed at the erosion of civil rights, she is angry at the hypocrisy and sullying [reword] of the way the Right “has turned the rhetoric of equality against its citizens” (272). She asks, “What can I as a feminist literary critic do? I can address the misapprehensions of representation: What has led us to view symbols and representations as dangerous menaces, the dissemination of which must be controlled? ” (273) The ivory tower provides a different view, a birds-eye view, away from the dust of each individual narrative. Kauffman wants feminist academics to know how to see through their own dust, or how to sit still so that the dust settles and the air is clear. She continues, “I can use my own personal history to critique the underlying assumptions about person and story, as I have tried to do here. Moreover, I’m the perfect candidate to critique “women’s ways of knowing” and “sentimental power” because my first book, Discourses of Desire, was at some points an implicit endorsement.” Find your personal narrative, and know yourself, she says. But in a professional sphere, in the sphere of the craft of literary criticism, be careful how you use it and keep the dialog open. Don’t give them impression that you know best, even if you don’t think so.

I think this is what made me upset: that others saw one or two things which seemed offensive to them and focused in on those things, to the point of misreading (in my opinion) the essay as a whole. In class, people really did seem to think, at one point, that Kauffman was against the personal as a general notion. And it wasn’t that my classmates seemed to me to be in error that made me angry, but that they didn’t seem to hold back for a moment to give Kauffman the benefit of the doubt, they didn’t ask, “Is this really what she’s saying?”

Many of you got distracted by her opinion that feminism is about justice, not happiness (274). This is a question worth addressing, but not at the cost of understanding an essay which is about something different. Kauffman’s thesis is not that feminism should be about justice, but about the perils of using personal testimony in an academic context. That personal testimony “reinforces the blind belief that we are all intrinsically interesting, unique, that we deserve to be happy” (274) is only one of the possible perils of this particular American myth. We use it to distract ourselves from the erosion of civil rights. That forms a much more integral part of her argument, and if you want to evaluate her essay as a whole, you might start there, with her supposition that the grifters are on Capitol Hill.

Let the silt sink to the bottom. And if the glass I’ve prepared for myself to drink is muddier than I like to admit, stop me in mid-swallow and point out what I have unconsciously ignored in order to bolster my own initial reaction and opinion. Perhaps, on some points, I am in error.

And let me speak to you, student to student: you don’t win the class by disagreeing with that day’s reading. Sosnoski would have cried to see you all competing with Kauffman. I remember the first time I read Foucault. There were students in the class already familiar with that thinker, and the first one who was called on answered the professor’s opening question perfunctorily and then went on to disagree with Foucault. At length. That’s an extreme example. But we’re all trying to be Sosnoski’s Magister Implicatus already, and because of this sometimes we miss the point entirely.

As a sort of post-script, I have a few questions:

In the last paragraph, Kauffman writes: “Growing up among grifters, I learned early how illusions are fabricated, how false piety smells. That doesn’t mean I have no illusions, hopes, dreams, etc. It does mean that I want continually to cast doubt on the status of knowledge – even as we are in the process of constructing it – a perpetual project … Rather than mythologizing ourselves or the past, can’t we total those disabled vehicles and – at long last – wave goodbye to all that?” (pg 274-5) Earlier, she wrote: “But (here’s the grifter’s voice again): Americans are hooked on authenticity and sincerity.” (pg 262) What does she intend with this very pointed use of personal testimony?

She wants us to “wave goodbye to all that”. Goodbye to All That was a novel written by Robert Graves about WWI. Why is that the closing line?

The Long Goodbye is the title of a Raymond Chandler novel (a murder mystery), and a movie based off of it. Either she didn’t realize that the title was already taken, or she’s playing two very different novels off of each other. I haven’t read either.

*“Is it even possible to write against the grain of individualism?” (261)

“…the individual cannot be confronted in isolation, separated from a complex matrix of international politics, environmental issues, multinational economics, and global military conflict” (pg 265).