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Remembering Paige Baty, II

Remembering Paige Baty, II Mark Reinhardt (bio) Repeatedly in the weeks after Paige Baty died, I caught myself expecting to hear from her. In these reveries, I imagined receiving a phone call in which she began by announcing that the reports of her demise had been greatly exaggerated. Other friends report similar experiences. Paige loomed larger than life, so it is not surprising that, on some level, we did not believe in her death; she was always in motion, so it was hard to accept that her voice had been stilled. Maybe there is some truth in that disbelief. Perhaps her extravagant voice has not been completely stilled after all. It was as much written as oral: it found expression in her books. These remain, and they help us to remember a woman whose central theme was the politics of memory. What I will most remember is how Paige produced them. She wrote as if her life depended on it. Not that there was anything dutiful about the performance. She needed to write, and she wrote constantly, but always with pleasure, often with exhilaration. The necessity was inner, a drive to create, an urge to articulate, a joyful propensity to refashion the word and reckon with the world. The writing itself is unusually ambitious. Most of us who pursue what we call “political theory” engage in one or another form of commentary on the great works of earlier thinkers. Paige knew and loved the works, and was capable of reading them with real originality, but she was less interested in writing about them than in following their example: she wanted to make sense of how the polity was being remade in our time. For her, that required expanding the boundaries of what counts as politics, examining places and practices that often fail to register on the radar screens of political science. American Monroe, for instance, explores tabloids, daytime TV, popular conspiracy theories, assorted consumer goods—the flotsam and jetsam of the National Entertainment State—in order to reveal how memories circulate, communities are fashioned, and identifications are forged in the late-twentieth century. The book has a lot to say, especially, about the formation and political importance of icons. For me, though, the work can’t usefully be reduced to a series of discrete theories or substantive claims. The book stands out less for a propositional argument, a contemporary Monroe doctrine, than for the sensibility suffusing the text, and the striking local insights generated by the distinctive way in which it is written. Paige’s method was inspired association: her work makes breathtaking cultural connections. She loved puns and wordplay, which were the means through which she made the most interesting connections of all. By playing with language, she was able to wring extraordinary meaning from ordinary situations, thereby casting a fresh and illuminating light on everyday life. Her writing is performative: it enacts a way of viewing the world. To read American Monroe is to experience a remarkable form of perception. This experience is what I value most about her work. Paige refined her method in the writing she did after American Monroe. The later work continues her dizzying and dazzling play with language but does so in a sparer and more graceful idiom. There are moments in the partly autobiographical Email Trouble that are almost Thoreauvian in their simplicity, and Representative Women shows the inspiration of Emerson in style as well as title and organizing premise. It wouldn’t do to make too much of the resemblance, of course. If Paige was not on their level, she was no acolyte or imitator, either (for one thing, she was funnier). She learned something important by turning to that earlier America, but her voice emerged from the encounter stronger and more distinctive than ever. Representative Women was unfinished when she died and it is not clear what will become of it (the completed chapters deserve publication as articles), but Email Trouble is forthcoming soon (Texas, 1998) and should generate much discussion. There is nothing quite like it. True to form, Paige did not leave quietly. While her writing was sui generis, she stands, in some ways, as another in...