On Cultivating “Genius” (Part I)

a conversation w/Elle Griffin about maybe everything

The Panthéon to French “Genius” (photo by a fellow Substacker)

Abstract: the subjectivization of language (and so, too, the term “genius”) began in earnest when the structuralists and post-structuralists brought all language—and so all of existence—into question.

The above sentence is meant to obfuscate confuse you.

It confused me and I wrote it. What the hell am I trying to say?

Over the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of exchanging with

Elle Griffin

on a variety of topics, ranging from a discussion about what modern literature actually is to why Elle gets annoyed by dead French writers and why I don’t:

Why I’m Not Over Dead French Writers Just Yet

Last week, Elle Griffin asked me to respond to her recent writing prompt, “How should we cultivate genius?”

What follows is my initial response to the prompt. The conversation is ongoing, because as we’ve found with our other conversations, a philosophical discussion about a term like “genius” never really ends.

On the cultivation of “genius”

When it comes to the very nature of language itself, we seem to live in an era wherein many of the most intelligent amongst us use language more as a gavel for control than as a tool for communication.

Let’s reconsider that first sentence up above: the subjectivization of language—and so the term “genius,” too—began in earnest when the structuralists and post-structuralists brought all language—and so all of existence—into question Sometime in the 1960s, everything ceased to have clear and present meaning.

At that point in the world of intellectual discourse (I personally believe approachable French philosophy ended with Absurdism), it seems that sounding smart became more important than actually communicating much of anything.

This is the problem I had (and still have as a teacher at the Sorbonne) with academia through two master’s degrees, which taught me little about understanding the structuralist ideas of (almost exclusively French male) thinkers like Lacan, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Althusser and it-doesn’t really-matter-who-else-because-I’m-already-getting-bored-with-this-list.

Genius Academics Citation Machines

Annoyingly, or hilariously, depending on your proclivity for academic jargon sense of humor, most of the structuralist/post-structuralist texts I’ve read on the nature of language remain incomprehensible, making all but the most “genius” amongst us feel grossly inadequate by the use of obtuse semantics endlessly confusing language and pompous brain-vomit referential complexity to uphold the house of cards that is the business of higher education academe.

Consider the following dialogue, which summarizes the life-changing seminal experience I had at University College London when I realized I didn’t want to be “an academic”:

“Hello professor,” I entered the graduate seminar. “I know I was supposed to give a presentation on Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Structures and the habitus,’ but try as I might, I simply couldn’t understand it, let alone how the run-on-sentence of a first paragraph got past an editor.”

“Interesting thought,” the world-renowned professor replied. “Why don’t we ask the others. What do you all think?”

Another student chimed in. “Well, it’s quite impossible to understand Bourdieu without understanding Althusser. Have you read him?”

“No.”

“Oh, well, no wonder you’re confused. Surely you understand Althusser’s departure from Marx in relation to Bourdieu?’

“Okay, sure, but no, can you just tell me what this opening paragraph means?”

“You have to read it through an Althusserian lense.”

“So you can’t tell me what this first paragraph means?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

‘Round and ‘round the round-table we went, an esteemed group of graduate students at an elite university … and nobody had an answer for what the opening paragraph actually meant, not even the two world-renowned professors who, to many, are considered academic geniuses.

In praise of simple honest language

I’m damn grateful for that moment, not only because it saved me from pursuing a PhD that would’ve turned me into a citation machine, but also because it revealed the extent of academia’s thinly-veiled ploy to “cultivate genius” by pigeon-holing everything into a niche until the niche consumes itself, the intellectual equivalent of a black hole.

One of my favorite academic texts ever written is an essay called “The Professor of Parody” by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, which is a beautifully scathing critique of the philosopher Judith Butler’s all-but-impossible-to-comprehend-feminist theory:

“Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.”

That was written in 1999.

Fast forward to today, and to the idea of “cultivating genius,” and we still live in a world in which this very conversation seems to be limited by calcified academic ideals. Because while I happen to agree with a lot of what

Erik Hoel

says in his piece, I'm less interested in the lack of a "genius boom" that should've occurred with the Internet than I am in why, according to almost all of us, the term "genius" remains reserved for white European men who lived during the 15th-19th centuries, and why geniuses are only usually ever considered in the worlds of science and mathematics.

So here’s my question before continuing with my thoughts on why artistic geniuses don’t just come from private tutoring, but can also come from places like Compton and 8-Mile:

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about “cultivating genius”?

What does the term “genius” mean in the 21^st century?

Part II: