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PARTISAN REVIEW
our language; then we can talk." Kimball replies, "Your language, from
the start, is tendentious."
Kimball's writings offer weapons of resistance to such indoctrination.
Against the dogma of the cultural Left, they set a traditional criterion:
the lessons of history, ordinary experience, beauty, reality. In
Experi–
ments Against Reality,
the choice is, obviously, the latter. The title
comes from Hannah Arendt, who conceived it as a description of total–
itarianism, in which "gullibility and cynicism" mixed and citizens came
to believe "everything was possible and nothing was true." Kimball
claims that the formula a lso app lies to the "cultural relativists of today,"
to the theoreticians of "competing barbarisms": postcolonialism,
Lacanian psychoanalysis, cultural studies, "Sensation"-style art, and so
on. Their language gainsays the simplest observations of objects; their
ideas distort the past into an unrelieved nightmare of repression; their
politics ignores the events of the last decade, from the crumbling of the
Wall to the opening of KGB archives. The cu ltura l Left is totalitarian in
that it recognizes only human forces in the world. Reality is a construct,
history the record of those in power, experience the crystalization of ide–
ology. Such revisions are cast as breakthrough insights. Moreover-and
this may be their prime attraction-they assign the critic a heady task:
not just to evaluate artworks, but a lso to transvalue all things.
The examples are legion. When Derrida opens
Dissemination
with
"This (therefore) will not have been a book," he shakes the reality of the
thing readers hold in their hand. When critics praise the art of Gilbert
and George-"two men, often naked, sometimes in various obscene pos–
tures, occupy the foreground . . ..The background usually consists of
photographic images of bodily fluids or waste products"-as reminis–
cent of classical nudes by Michelangelo and Raphael, they not only
ignore canons of taste, but also annihi late every historical element save
the naked male body. When Foucault asks of the postwar era, "What
could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin's
USSR and Truman's America?" he concocts an equiva lence that many
would judge fantastical. Sartre casts all human relations in terms of "'the
Other,' as if this strangely impersonal, dehumanizing locution named
our most common experiences of other people." Grand theories like
Hegel's dialectic "clean up the untoward messiness of reality," absorb
any circumstance into a sweeping, adroit design. Indeed, while the term
"theory" originally signified a "contemplative attitude of beholding," it
now "involves the willful imposition of one's ideas upon reality."
Kimball broaches this reality-distortion through sixteen chapters,
each devoted to a single figure. The portraits illustrate mental aspects,
