All in the Game

Minimalism

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

In one of my favorite moments in Milton's Paradise Regained, the Son of God responds to Satan's request that he be permitted to come and talk from time to time. Even God your Father, the arch fiend points out, allows reprobates like Balaam to "minister/About his altar, handling holy things." On that example alone, he argues, "disdain not such access to me."

Jesus's reply neither affirms nor denies the aptness of the analogy; instead, he zeros in on the presumption -- implied but not foregrounded -- that the permission is his to give: "Thy coming hither .../ I bid not or forbid; do as thou find'st/ Permission from above; thou canst not more." Or in other words: Your request presupposes that our comings and goings are ours to control, whereas, in fact, the actions we perform are those God allows us; whether or not you return depends on His will, not on mine and certainly not on yours.

It is the parsimony of the reply -- its refusal of the invitation to engage in casuistry and its insistence on identifying the true issue obscured by the Satanic distractions -- that constitutes the force of the Son's performance; and it is a parsimony that the poet matches (or at least imitates) when he comments on it: "He added not."

That is, he didn't say any more than what was required; he didn't ramble on; he didn't editorialize; he didn't leave any handles for his interlocutor to grab on to; and neither shall I. Point made, case closed, don't look any further.

There is a lesson here, and I would call it the lesson of minimalism.

It is no accident that my gloss on Jesus's and Milton's lines is longer then they are, for as Hilton Kramer once remarked, "The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation." Minimalism of course is the name of a style of art. Peter Schjeldahl calls it "the dominant idea in art of the past forty years" (The New Yorker, May 30, 2004), and Jonathan Freedland summarizes its characteristics in a few phrases: "stripped of artifice," "pared down to the bare essentials," "anti-emotional and anti-subjective," "not a representation of another thing" (The Guardian, December 200l). "What you see is what you see" explains the painter Frank Stella. Richard Lacayo offers a more discursive (and therefore not minimalist) account in his review of two recent exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles:

As much as possible, the art object should be based on a single form that announces itself all at once or on a repeated form that produces a similar effect. It should not involve varied surfaces or a balance of different compositional elements. It should appear manufactured, not uniquely handmade. It should not make a reference to any thing, feeling or idea outside of itself. (Time, May 24, 2004).

Lacayo dubs minimalism the "art of exemplary refusals," and he might well have been describing the whole of Paradise Regained, a poem whose hero spends four books and thousands of lines saying (repeatedly), no thanks, I'd rather not, some other time maybe, not my kind of thing, and I bid not or forbid. The point of the poem is to teach us how to do it, how to say just enough and no more lest by adding we err in one direction or another.

It is a lesson many have not learned. John Kerry failed the minimalism test when he tried for days to explain the difference between medals and ribbons and what throwing them away or not throwing them away did or didn't mean. Enough already! He should have just said, "Whether they're medals or ribbons, I earned them with my sweat and blood; what I do with them is for me to decide, as it will be for you when you earn yours." By stooping to entertain the questions posed by his opponents, Kerry gave up a position none of them could occupy. Instead of paring down to the essentials, he allowed them to be buried. (George Bush, in contrast, is a minimalist by instinct and the instinct serves him well politically.)

And minimalism is nowhere in sight in the long night of the Academy awards when winner after winner forsakes the simplicity of "thank you, I am honored" and turns the moment into an opportunity for settling old scores, or initiating new ones, or giving advice to Congress, or laying bare emotional wounds of a kind you wouldn't reveal even to a therapist, or rehearsing the triumphs and travails of a life in anticipation of the made-for-TV biopic.

If minimalism is advisable for politicians and actors, it is essential for college and university administrators who, in addition to the usual temptations of self-aggrandizement and self-justification, are beset with the temptation of philosophy, the temptation to regard the matter at hand as an occasion for producing wisdom.

"There's a general principle here," one mutters to oneself, and no doubt there is, but it is best to leave it for another day and follow the general principle favored by Justice Felix Frankfurter: Decide every case on the lowest procedural level available.

That means when a faculty member or department head writes you a long letter of complaint and demand, replete with asides on the purpose of higher education or the incompetence of the upper administration or the venality of the board of trustees, you write back a brief memo saying something like "we can do this, but we can't do that," or, "your requests cannot be addressed until the budgetary situation clarifies," or (at the very most), "I appreciate your concerns but they do not fall within the purview of this office."

In short, say (by not saying) I neither agree nor disagree with your fulminations; I speak only to the points that fall within the scope of my authority.

The strategy of refusing an offered engagement will be sorely tested in a face-to-face meeting where you will be tempted to reply in kind to an obvious provocation. A department chairwoman asks for five positions and complains that you are destroying her department. You want to remind her that just last year you gave her one of the few precious lines at your disposal and you want to point out that the department is down in numbers because it runs bad searches and seems unable to hold on to its younger faculty members. But instead you say (or should say) that her department is obviously in need and that when the college's fortunes improve you will keep its plight in mind.

Another chairman comes brandishing a statistical survey that demonstrates, he says, that by national standards the department receives less than its share of resources. You want to reply that the departments cited in the survey are 10 times better than his and that the resources he has are in excess of what he deserves. But you say that resource allocations are made in relation to internal measures and that when the funding stream increases all boats will ride higher.

A senior administrator wants a list of all the courses taught by all the faculty members for the last five years and, along with it, a detailed justification of course loads lower than the norm, and she wants it in 24 hours. You want to say, "You can't give us an answer to a simple question in 24 days and you ask for this tomorrow?" But you bite your tongue and say that you will do what you can. Later you will mutter many words into your pillow, but those words will never come back to haunt you.

I am not counseling avoidance or evasiveness. I am merely advising that (like the Jesus of Paradise Regained) you identify amid the profusion of reasons, personal appeals, justifications before and after the fact, potted histories, inapposite (or even apposite) comparisons, ad-hominem attacks, not-so-veiled threats, and displays of high-mindedness the narrowly defined issue to which you are obligated (by virtue of your position) to respond. Then respond to it, directly and concisely and without rising to the bait offered by all the other concerns which may, in their way, be legitimate, but are not ones you are authorized to consider or rule on, at least not at this moment.

The point is clearest in the context of formal grievances. Someone who files a grievance typically includes in the formal statement every slight, imagined or real, he or she has ever experienced.

What is being asked for is not redress of a particular injury, but validation of an entire life: Here are all the disappointments I have suffered, all the times I was not given my just deserts, all the raises I failed to receive, all the promotions that never came or came too late, all the courses I never got to teach, all the offices that were smaller than everyone else's. What are you going to do about them?

The answer is (or should be) "nothing," unless it can be shown that the disparity between what the griever believes to be his or her due and what has been given can be attributed to an act of discrimination based on gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnic identity, race, or some other interdicted category.

Many who grieve fail to distinguish between negative judgments with which they disagree (and who, after all, will agree that the denial of tenure or of a merit raise was warranted?) and negative judgments that have been rendered on bases that are illegitimate. Only the second kind of judgment is grievable; the first comes along with living in a world not constructed so as to reflect back at every moment the evaluations we make of ourselves.

Of course not all situations an administrator encounters are grievance situations, but every situation offers the possibility of mistaking it for something larger than it is -- an opportunity to stand up for higher education or to strike a blow for freedom of speech or to defend the tenets of democracy or to rail against the interference of legislators. All things you may want to do at some time or other, but not things you should do when a specific question of policy or procedure has been put to you.

Answer the question as precisely as possible and then stop. Don't complicate, don't explain, don't pontificate, don't muse, don't speculate, don't be reflective, don't be creative, don't take offense, don't be defensive, don't take anything personally, don't take anything in any way.

Just stick to the point conceived as narrowly as possible so that it can be said of you that you added not.