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"Maleuvre, Didier"
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The Disappearance of 1984
The Open Syllabus Project, a large-scale internet database, mines over one million collegelevel syllabi across 5 English-speaking countries, among which the United States, and is able to extract statistically accurate pictures of the most and the least frequently assigned books in universities. Written by a man of notoriously socialist sympathies, it yet insists that the gravest danger to democracy is not capitalist moguls in top hat but statist technocrats; not unprincipled men whose goal in life is profit, but puritanically principled ones who aim to install a utopian order ruled by an intellectocracy-or, as Orwell writes in 1984, a \"new aristocracy. of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians, [.] less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious . and more intent on crushing opposition\" rather the ruling class of old.2 For his misgiving about the intellectual zeal to apply top-down \"solutions\" to the tangled plural imperfections of social existence, Orwell was deemed an embarrassment and a turncoat. The notion that Orwell writes too clearly for his, and our, own good gives ammunition to a final reason for the disappearance of 1984, which is snobbery. 1984 has so far remained a fixture on highschool reading lists, and it may be thought that what is good for secondary education (naively honest prose) may be either superfluous or out-of-date in college. [...]it wasn't long after its original publication, as the novel was already gathering a large public, that literary critics held it to be a negligible piece of literature.
Journal Article
Bougainville Against the Tide
[...]modern philosophy championed the humanist idea that human beings can and must reason their way to a better life. \"Let us begin by laying all facts aside, as they do not affect the question,\" begins Rousseau who, if he did not invent this metaphysical a-priorism, turned its characteristic disparagement of reality into a pessimistic dismissal of civilized existence.7 The three volumes of Rousseau that earned him fame, and did most to shape the exotic imagination that concerns us here are the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), which declared knowledge, technology, science, craft, commerce, books and libraries, theaters and cities, material affluence and art to have debased humankind, and made Europeans an especially unhappy, sickly, crabby, devious, and stunted branch of the human family. By Diderot's report, the essay made a sensation \"beyond all imagining\" in Paris.8 Its author upped the antes four years later with the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality (1754) which maintained that man's malevolence and unhappiness wax in tandem with socialization: the more civilized we are, the more wretched we grow. Out of the thesis that knowledge corrupts and innocence dignifies, Rousseau forged a treatise of pedagogy, Émile or On Education (1762), which lays down \"the incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right\" and therefore charges the educator to withdraw the child from society, his family and relatives, and withhold from him the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of civilization for as long as possible.9 What is extraordinary about these theories is not that they were incredible (even Rousseau disavowed them even as, by the time of Émile, he appeared to profess them).
Journal Article
The Trial of Paul Gauguin
The painter Paul Gauguin has been the object of criticism linking him to the sins of colonial occupation and European imperialism. This essay examines the case against Gauguin. It asks the reader to examine closely the assumption that representation is necessarily a form of appropriation. The larger aim is to establish a more careful idea of the moral relation between art, especially modernist art, and reality.
Journal Article
Must Museums Be Inclusive?
This article reflects on the project of creating multicultural inclusive museums. By definition, an inclusive museum honors the cultural constituencies it is paid to serve. Yet in reality, cultural sensitivity is one thing and education another. Blurring the distinction risks sacrificing education, a moral mandate, to the ideal of equality. My article points to examples where, for fear of offending, a museum betrays its educational mission. I trace the affinity between inclusive museum politics and consumerist culture and consider the case of the Creation Museum-a museum that, as per the multicultural ideal, tailors science to the sensibility of its customer base, in this instance the sensibility of American biblical literalists.
Journal Article
Rembrandt, or the portrait as encounter
‘A good painter’, says Leonardo da Vinci, ‘is to paint two main things, namely man and the workings of man’s mind. The first is easy, the second difficult’.¹ As portraiture came into its own during the Renaissance, it became accepted that a good likeness alone does not make a portrait. The able painter must convey, besides mood and affect, a sense of who the sitter is: their personality and, deeper still, the sense of what it is like to exist as this person. In other words, portraiture is a matter not just of aesthetic proficiency but also of moral and
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