Prout's favourite colour?

Academics are capable of such drivel. I doubt many disciplines are spared this blight, but sometimes, okay often, I feel that the study of literature and of culture (commonly called anthropology–or, How I learned to scientivise my racism and stop worrying about colonialism) are the standout, cancerous growths. Their constant self-reflection, their collapsing of the centre—because it has no "structure"—their pedantic, meandering descriptions of the minutiae of some topic for which the world has no concern, and which, even if they tried, they would not succeed in establishing any meaningful resonances with real situations, all these, and more, annoy me. (I'm not dismissing all such academic investigations out of hand. I am not, as of yet, a marxist literary critic. I do think it is alright, and indeed often very helpful to spend time looking at grand themes, or internal structures, with little or no immediate regard for how they relate to the "outside world". Though I agree that art is usually a product, a good to be consumed, I also continue to believe in its transcendental qualities.)

So it was not without some humour today that I stumbled across a paper on Proust's favourite colour. As I skimmed the introduction, I felt a vague sense of increasing horror. I had visions of the intertextualities between childhood games of "what's your favourite colour" and Proust's own instantiations of his favourite colour coming to the fore, of the recovery of the underlying uncertainty in the text, and of the praxis of transformation as subtle shifts in the visual undercurrents rose to become an active hermeneutic that was itself constitutive of subjectivity. It was not that bad. But it was not much better. Most of the article was simply a description of the places one finds this particular colour in the Recherche.

I don't mean to say that I think all academics are awash in indulgent intellectual flings of premature ejaculation, without regard for the groundwork of foreplay, or the immense satisfaction and depth of sustained endeavour. There are many who make me smile, many who I feel have augmented human knowledge for the better, many who, in reading, bring a joy of both complexity and simplicity. Among many others, I highly recommend Stanley Cavell, Northrop Frye, Judith Butler, Paul de Man, William Empson, Edward Said and Raymond Williams.

(Um, yeah. I should, like, go back to work or somethin'. That stuff I said about anthropology, only half true, I think...I don't really know that much about anthropology)