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Philosopher Kingwell >> Is Mark Kingwell a media slut or just a good citizen? by JULIET WATERS
But he also has his detractors. I once asked Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Broken Pencil, why they were the only magazine that didn't list Kingwell somewhere in their masthead. "We're the anti-Mark Kingwell," he claimed. Still, the criticism usually seems more directed at how he says things, and how often, and on how many subjects, than at what he thinks. And the praise never seems to be directed at the astonishing fact that he has the time to think at all, given his duties as a full-time professor of philosophy at U of T, a regular contributor to Shift, Saturday Night, This, Descant, Adbusters, the Globe and Mail, the Utne Reader and Harpers, a bestselling author (Dreams of the Millennium, Better Living), and a regular panelist on just about every Canadian current affairs show. Marginalia, a collection of Kingwell's journalism, is finally a chance to assess the content of his thought and to decide whether he is Canada's most ubiquitous citizen or simply its most brazen media slut. The answer isn't found in Kingwell's introduction. In fact, there's something a bit irritating and pseudo-naïve about the counter-attack Kingwell offers to some of his detractors. "I have taken my lumps from crusty colleagues and self-hating media hacks alike for allegedly being interested in too many things. I confess I cannot make sense of that charge." Really? A PhD from Yale, and Kingwell is baffled by the common sense suspicion that an expert on everything might really just be an expert on nothing? It's a fair accusation to level at anyone who puts himself as much in the public eye as Kingwell does. Though, after reading Marginalia, it's probably not a fair one. Kingwell would probably be the last person to claim he was an expert on everything or, perhaps, even anything. Unfortunately, Kingwell's mission doesn't start to come across until the middle of this collection, when he starts to advance his own political philosophy. Up until that point one may waste a lot of time wondering why one is reading this man's ruminations on underwear (the first piece is called "Running Low on Posing Pouches"). Is he really analyzing the absurdity of the sudden proliferation of designer underwear for men? His "marginal" obsessions (such as millennial anxiety, our culture's obsession with speed and the significance of style) are stimulating, but not especially provocative or penetrating. And his television criticism is thoughtful but often arguable. (Maybe Frasier is in some ways the '90s inside-out version of All in the Family, but there's one major element missing: debates on political issues. Do families debate politics anymore? One wouldn't know this from TV.) But when one gets to the essays that are less about his obsessions and interests, and more about his passion--politics--one meets a more interesting Kingwell. Here he writes with more substance about both the philosopher's and the citizen's responsibility to use and understand whatever medium is available to enter political and cultural discourse, and to face whatever information anxiety and complexity the proliferation of technology may produce. As John Ralston Saul argues in The Unconscious Civilisation, it is one of the tasks of the writer and critic to irritate as well as provoke. Once one understands this, one understands that Kingwell is just doing his job, although occasionally perhaps too well.
Marginalia by Mark Kingwell, Penguin, pb, 277pp, $25 |
Mark Kingwell certainly has his fans. "A writer like Kingwell is worth his weight in gold," claims Books in Canada. The Globe and Mail lists him among the top five most quoted people in Canada. "An intellectual with attitude," gushes the Calgary Herald on the cover of his latest, Marginalia, as though this combination is a rare thing.