This is not the first sentence of an opinion column. Why should we privilege one sentence above any other? The last sentence, after all, has already been written (in the past), and will continue to sit upon the page (into the indefinite future). One would be ill-advised to search this article for points of entry, for top and bottom. One would be wise to remember that arguments no more begin at a point in space than at a point in time; contra Sartre, our ideas can no more "be" than "become." How, then, do they exist? In short: they do not.
Before one can begin to "share" one's "opinion" - assuming it is not, in the first place, nonsensical to speak of beliefs before their formation, or of formed beliefs before their expression; assuming, in other words, that we use a functional metaphor (does a metaphor ever do? Can it be broken, that is, non-functional? Or does it merely and necessarily perform, as the Latin fungor would suggest?) when we imagine belief (ours, anyone's) as a quantity that can be drawn, quartered, distributed and, what's more, distributed equitably - before this, much epistemological ground must be cleared. Can we ever settle upon such ground, either in the metaphoric sense of the thought-world or in the metonymic sense of the sense-world? Will we ever light upon a patch of ground calling out to us for clearing? Can one - even assuming one has asked the grinning bobcat why he grins - ever sing with all the voices of the mountains? Of course not.
Let me begin again.
Brown students herald their "opinions" daily. But they seldom take the time to problematize the enterprise, perhaps because this phrase sounds so oddly like a Star Trek episode.
What is an "opinion" "column"? One would like to persuade oneself that these words have simple meanings. Or, better yet, that they are not individual words at all, but one pat, indivisible phrase. I need not remind my reader that that of which one would like to persuade oneself may, more often than not, not be the case (cf. Habermas, e.g.).
"Opinion column" has snaked its way into the discourse, and now fairly rolls off the tongue. After all, what is sturdier, more blithely masculine, than a column? That symmetric symbol of Roman dominance over nature - not to mention dominance over the "natives" who fell to Caligula's to make way for the empire? What is a column but an exercise in unrepentant phallogocentrism, in unreflective rationalism? I am truth, the column claims, its granite glinting in the Mediterranean sun.
"Ah," the interlocutor interrupts, "but the opinion column has relinquished its claim on objectivity. For is not truth the opposite of opinion?" But this is precisely the point: the very concept of truth, as it comes to us by way of a highly contingent and constructed series of accidents in the history of ideas, rests on the concept of "opinion." Mallarmé reminds us that "nothing is born in a vacuum, not even cows;" and so it is with truth, which exists not in a vacuum, nor in a cow, but in tension with opinion. "Truth" and "opinion" prop each other up in a symbiotic embrace of différance. When we keep alive the spectre of "opinion," we thereby perpetuate the myth of truth. And when we perpetuate myths, the terrorists win.
So we have demonstrated that the "opinion" "column" is not opinion. Is it a column? It is not. One need not even have one's contacts in to see that it is wider than it is long.
In pretending to be a column, the article advertises its virility at the expense of verisimilitude. For what the "column"grammar must deny is the temporality of the speech-act. This grammar is a product not only of our ethnocentrism but of our essentialism, our blithe assumption that the Andrew Marantz writing today will be the same Andrew Marantz tomorrow; that he will wish to ally himself with his former beliefs, etc. It is this implicit essentialism that gives us license to speak of one's "opinions," codified in "arguments," expressed in "writing."
This article has been but one foray into the problematic of the column. If it has not helped us to understand more, I hope it has at least helped us to understand less.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 is working on a Ph.D in psychoceramics.
