Marjorie Garber
Loaded Words

What is the other, or opposite, of knowledge? Ignorance? Uncertainty? Undecidability? Theory? Belief? What is the other, or opposite, of belief? Unbelief? Disbelief? Doubt? Atheism? Agnosticism? Certainty? Knowledge?

How we define the range of signification and connotation here will shape the way we think about these contestatory, overused, and ultimately unsatisfactory terms, terms that are both empty and loaded. Empty because they can mean so many different things in different disciplines, practices, and semiotic schemes. Loaded because they are stuffed, even overstuffed, with meanings and implications, like a sofa or a foie gras duck or a comic farce. Or a loaded gun.

We are familiar with the theatrical truism about a gun onstage: if it's there, it will be fired sometime before the close of the play. Its very presence implies the necessity of an action. So too with these loaded words. They will go off, somehow, somewhere, within the frame of our expectations as we saw in the public dialogues on the question of, say, Darwinian evolution versus "intelligent design." Or "faith-based" charities, and politics, and tax exemptions, or Supreme Court nominees. Or Terry Schiavo and the definition of life and death. Or the intentions of the authors of the U.S. constitution.

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MARJORIE GARBER is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English and American Literature and Language and of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University, where she is chair of the department of visual and environmental studies and director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Author of, among many works, Shakespeare after All (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Christian Gauss Prize, she is currently working on Patronizing the Arts, a study of art patronage, cultural institutions, and mutual misprision.