Remora
Michael Thomas' column in the NYO, which is a jackdaw's nest of various bright and shiny objects (not that Limited Inc, in the nest of our own iridescent preening, objects) includes a little attack on Homi Bhabha. It flows from reporting that the Harvard football team beat the Yale football team (sports news of trifling importance) to this graf:

"That very same morning, The New York Times practically gasped with orgasmic excitement in reporting at length on another Harvard triumph: the appointment to a tenured professorship of one Homi K. Bhabha, a well-known spouter of multiculturist twaddle, bunkum and flapdoodle, formerly of the (it figures!) University of Chicago. This is an appointment that henceforth obliges us to capitalize the "cant" in "Cantabrigian." I have had my eye on this Bhabha for some time now, since I encountered him by chance on that invaluable Web site, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com), and his stuff has to be read to be believed. He makes Derrida and Foucault sound like Orwell. Do you remember the ridiculous diction affected by the late Alec Guinness in the role of Professor Godbole in A Passage to India? Mr. Bhabha to the life! And now Godbole�s back, and Harvard�s got him!"

Now, Limited Inc has no love of jargon. But the idea that Foucault and Derrida are fonts of jargon, which seems set in stone among a newspaper commentariat whose contact with de la Grammatologie or Surveiller et Punir was limited to that sophmore class with the skinny Marxist prof, seems comic to us. The fact is, these guys only know the Frenchies by way of the jargony that were quoted about 1981 in New Criterion and have been recycled ever since. But this doesn�t mean we think Bhabha is on that level. No, reading this man, one is reminded less of Derrida and more of Faith Popcorn, or Tom Peters � basically, he aims at telling the tales of the tribe in the approved manner of the tribe. The tribe, of course, of lefty academics who are, at heart, simple souls, but are as ashamed of that simplicity as Adam and Eve were of their nudity when God made the housecall. So Bhabha�s usual course is to intro in ineffable Timespeak (an idiolect parodied to a t by Robert Coover in The Public Burning) and proceed in a confusing, affectless theory-speak, in which there�s no outside world, no test for whether an idea is good or bad, but only a high sensitivity to whether it is politically right or left. Here's a fragment from Bhabha's snoozer, Nation and Narration:

�Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye. Such an image of the nation - or narration - might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force. This is not to deny the attempt by nationalist discourses persistently to produce the idea of the nation as a continuous narrative of national progress, the narcissism of self-generation, the primeval present of the Volk. Nor have such political ideas been definitively superseded by those new realities of internationalism, multi-nationalism, or even 'late capitalism', once we acknowledge that the rhetoric of these global terms is most often underwritten in that grim prose of power that each nation can wield within its own sphere of influence. What I want to emphasize in that large and liminal. image of the nation with which I began is a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation as a sign of the 'modernity' of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.�
And so on. The nations like unspecified narratives (narratives, in this world, don�t really exist, they are simply all ineffably one, all immersed in the cosmic cum of just being that magical word, narrative) losing their origins in the myths of time is so close to National Geographic, circa 1959, having them lose their origins in the mists of time, that I wonder if there isn�t some homophonic thing goin down, here � if Dr. Freud is in the house, please call. But after we lift ourselves out of these myths of time (hmm, I wonder if he is talking about the castration of Chronos, here? Otherwise, I have no clue as to what myths of time these are, or why they are myths, or how myths aren�t narratives tout court, or whether the narrative of national progress is the same as that myth of national regress by which, for instance, 19th century German nationalists sought to unify the Reich as a competitor to France and Britain (but here, of course, I�m indulging in the myth and the mist of history -- aberrant factism is banned, as we know, from the Island of Laputa)), we make the long climb through narcissism and liminality to the vecu � the lives, ah yes, of those who are living �it� � the it of course being language, or ambivalence, or the liminal image, or something. But we are with those living Volk ourselves, we are united with them, in Homi Bhabha�s world.
In the room the women come and go/talking of Michaelangelo, after all.