[Discussion] latimes

[Paksoy, Hb]

latimes.com   
September 1, 2002    

HOW ONE GADFLY PUBLICATION PROVED THAT SIZE REALLY DOESN'T MATTER
Small Is Beautiful 
 QUICK STUDIES: The Best of Lingua Franca, Edited by Alexander Star, Farrar,
Straus & Giroux: 514 pp., $18 paper
  
  
By RUSSELL JACOBY, Russell Jacoby is the author of "The End of Utopia" and
"The Last Intellectuals," among other books. He teaches in the history
department at UCLA. 


When Lingua Franca, a plucky review of academic life, abruptly ceased
publication in 2001, its readers were left stranded, but who else noticed?
Los Angeles may have a book festival and New York may be book country, but
few citizens read periodicals devoted to cultural and intellectual matters.
Americans, who routinely fork over 30 bucks for a month of television, just
as routinely resist paying even a part of that for a year's subscription to
a serious magazine. The numbers reflect the dollars. Television programs get
bumped if they draw only millions of viewers. But cultural magazines partake
of another world.

A basic category in the National Magazine Awards is for periodicals with
circulation "under 200,000." The term "under" should be emphasized. Many
serious periodicals have circulations under 25,000. I used to write for a
magazine whose circulation was 1,200. We joked that an American city of
200,000 people might have one subscriber; Chicago's readers could gather for
a meal.

Yet small (if not beautiful) may be important. Small magazines play big
roles. Their impact cannot be measured in numbers. No one would calculate
the significance of the 1930s Partisan Review by its circulation figures;
the same could be said of earlier journals like the Lively Arts or the
Masses. Such magazines are passed around; they are commented upon. They
serve as places for authors to try out ideas and for readers to find new
writers. Invisible on the surface, the small journals are the intellectual
arteries of the body politic.

Enter Lingua Franca. In 1990 a former professor of French literature at
Yale, Jeffrey Kittay, had the inspired idea to put out a "review of academic
life." The academic establishment supports, of course, many professional
magazines and one plump weekly newspaper, the Chronicle of Higher Education,
directed mainly to administrators. Kittay realized these periodicals omitted
the snap and crackle of academic life: the gossip, the lawsuits, the
academic stars and their critics, the trends and counter-trends. He sought
to publish a smart and brash journal that would capture the campus sizzle.

In "Quick Studies," Alexander Star, the editor of Lingua Franca for six of
its 11 years, has assembled a representative sampling for the millions of
Americans who never subscribed or saw a copy, since the journal never broke
the 15,000 circulation barrier. He notes in his introduction that the time
was ripe for an irreverent academic journal. Campuses were riven by
arguments about the "cultural wars," political correctness, speech codes,
multiculturalism, affirmative action, postmodernism and the like.

Lingua Franca came out fighting with well-written forays that frequently
stepped on toes or, at least, raised eyebrows, most famously with the
brilliant hoax by Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist. When the
opaque pretentiousness of humanist academics irritated the straight-shooting
Sokal, he submitted to a cutting-edge cultural studies journal an article of
patent nonsense, dense but filled with fashionable references and phrases.
Social Text, and its theoretical bigwigs, took the bait and published the
piece--titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity"--only to be stunned by the next issue of
Lingua Franca, in which Sokal confessed he had hoodwinked the editors.

The Sokal brouhaha brought to the fore disputes about recent turns in
humanist disciplines, mainly the rise of postmodernism and cultural studies,
to which Star devotes the first section of this collection. He includes the
pathetic response by the editors of Social Text, as well as another
confession, of an "ex-literary critic" who admits that the arid prose and
rote politics served up by literary theorists (including himself) killed his
love of literature.

Several of the pieces review the jargon of the new academics. To be sure,
the phenomenon of English professors who cannot write English is not new,
but it has been elevated into a militant program by cultural studies
exponents. Its leading figures often appeal to German philosophy to justify
their inability to link subject, verb and object; they maintain that the
language of humanism must be ungainly to be deep. Lucidity equals
superficiality.

Star includes an angry letter by Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley professor of
rhetoric, who had been awarded first prize in a "worst writing " contest.
Butler accuses Lingua Franca of cheap and tawdry journalism. Jim Miller, a
New School dean, explores the issues in an essay that is almost too
magnanimous, "Is Bad Writing Necessary?" The question can be answered
simply: No. But this is not to say good writing must be simple-minded.

Lingua Franca ranged far and wide; it took up everything from the troubled
relationship between Milan Kundera and his translators to academics as court
witnesses and the mysterious murder of a University of Chicago professor.
For its readers, every issue offered goodies: news about books and academic
life, often featuring a central profile.

Star signals a long essay on Jane Gallop as a Lingua Franca model. Gallop, a
feminist professor, was accused of sexual harassment by several female
students. Like the other piece in this collection on sexual harassment, the
article borders on the surreal. Gallop's decision not to write a letter of
recommendation caused a student to lodge a complaint of harassment. In the
lingo of "sexual harassment," Gallop's refusal demonstrated an intolerable
"power differential." The university seriously investigated the charge,
although it was finally dismissed.

Though Lingua Franca's profiles were frequently entertaining, and sometimes
illuminating, Star may have inadvertently played into the hands of critics
who called the journal a People magazine for professors. Often numbingly
detailed, the profiles succeeded each other even as the ideas receded. One
learns, for instance, that Gallop touched the chair of a student with a bare
foot but nothing of her intellectual contribution, except that she was a
"famous" feminist scholar.

Profiles like these begin to feed off the American obsession with fame. We
revel in details about the famous, the almost famous or the wannabes, but
what are the issues? To be sure, Lingua Franca ran challenging pieces, for
instance an essay on the highly regarded literary critic Paul de Man who hid
his anti-Semitic past. Yet such pieces became scarcer, and it is perhaps
indicative that Star leaves that article out of this collection.

What killed Lingua Franca? Several explanations might be offered. For
academics, the magazine lacked status. To be published in it brought no
credit inasmuch as it was regarded as lowly journalism. To be covered by it
was a dubious honor, because you could be not only celebrated but
besmirched.

The journal was passed along but few professors wanted to be caught with
their name on the subscription label. Lingua Franca existed like Playboy
among the Boy Scouts, well-circulated and thumbed but rarely purchased.
Moreover, probably as a response to Lingua Franca, the Chronicle of Higher
Education added more cultural and intellectual coverage, as did the New York
Times.

Finally, Lingua Franca exposed the open secret about small journals of
culture and opinion in contemporary America. For all their repute, with one
or two exceptions, they do not make a cent.

The New Republics, Harper's, the Nations, and, of course, the Lingua Francas
require dedicated souls with deep pockets to pay their bills. After 11
years, a backer of Lingua Franca decided enough was enough and pulled out.
Nearly 280 million Americans did not notice, but some of us mourned its
demise.