Want to know which is Wikipedia's 2000th Featured Article?

OK, this is not usual Long Sunday fare (but then what is?). However, right now I am extraordinarily proud of my students.

If you want to know why, look here, and then perhaps here.

the decline of english

(xposted to adswithoutproducts)

There's a whole lot that's right in William Deresiewicz's review / jeremiad in The Nation focused on the ill health of the discipline of English circa now in the US. But don't get me wrong - there's a lot that's way off in the piece too. Let's start with the way off. Speaking of the MLA job list, he takes us on a tour of the silly stuff they're listing nowadays, finally landing in the seemingly safe space of American lit, which is, "well, literature" at least.

When we [get to the literature positions] we find that the largest share of what's left, nearly a third, is in American literature. Even more significant is the number of positions, again about a third, that call for particular expertise in literature of one or another identity group. "Subfields might include transnational, hemispheric, ethnic and queer literatures." "Postcolonial emphasis" is "required." "Additional expertise in African-American and/or ethnic American literature highly desirable."

  This is an old story, but let's stop for a moment to consider what the many ads like the last one, for a tenure-track position in twentieth-/twenty-first-century American fiction, actually mean. They mean that you can be a brilliant young scholar, from a top program, but if you're an expert in Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, or Malamud, Bellow and Roth, or Gaddis, Pynchon and DeLillo, or all of them plus Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Mailer, Salinger, Capote, Kerouac, Burroughs, Updike, Chandler, Cheever, Heller, Gore Vidal, Cormac McCarthy and God's own novelist himself, Vladimir Nabokov, plus Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, but not in African-American or ethnic American fiction, then there are a lot of jobs you just aren't going to get. And there weren't that many jobs in American fiction to begin with. Graduate students aren't stupid, not even in practical terms, not anymore. So nearly everyone is studying at least some minority literature, and everything else--not the totality of what's valuable in twentieth-century American fiction but certainly the preponderance of it--is getting studied a lot less.

The overall focus on the piece is on the decline of English enrollment and the corresponding efforts to adapt to the crisis on the part of the faculties themselves. Later in the piece, we get the big payoff line "the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers." But I'm pretty damn sure that increased emphasis on formerly-marginal groups / literatures has anything at all to do with declining enrollments - probably the opposite is closer to the truth. Given the choice between Morrison and Chaucer, or say Flannery O'Connor over Cormac McCarthy, I'm not sure the students wouldn't pick the former in either case.

This move on Deresiewicz's part feels like consummate culture wars base-touching, like he's filling out the form that a venue like The Nation require those who would write on the literary humanities to complete before proceeding to other issues and arguments. (Why The Nation, ostensibly a left magazine, would implicitly condone or even require this sort of move is a long, long story, and one that is bound up with both micro-histories of the long standing academy vs. grub street turf war that has been going on in NYC for a long time as well as macro-histories of the anti-intellectualism of the American journalistic left... More on this another day...)

To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they're trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: "Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies"; "literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture"; "visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies." The items on these lists are not just different things--apples and oranges--they're different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions--apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism--whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children's literature, even in something called "digital humanities."

It is a bit difficult not to wonder how Deresiewicz's own current project avoids the trap of trendiness that he's describing...

My current project is Friendship: A Cultural History from Jane Austen to Jennifer Aniston. The book draws on fiction, film, television, poetry, and other arts, as well as on insights from the social sciences, to trace the impact of modernity on the ways that friendship has been imagined and practiced in Great Britain and the United States over the past two centuries.

Look, more power to him, but the title sounds exactly like the sort of course listing that people run to boost student numbers,  especially at elite places where numbers really can matter on a course by course basis. Theme X: From Canonical Text Y to the Simpsons. Or was it Buffy? Depends. (Funny to think that he couldn't really call it from Jane Austen to Friends, so Dame Jennifer gets the main billing...) We used to joke that adding the Simpsons to a course description would boost enrollment 1000%. And we joked this way because it was absolutely true. A class on satire that would draw 30 turned into a giant lecture with a squad of TAs if you showed cartoons on the first day of class.

The rest of the piece largely avoids this sort of thing, thankfully, and successfully delineates some of the real issues facing English today. This, for instance, is for the most part right:

  What's going on? Three things, to judge from their absence from Graff's history, that have never happened before. First, the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.

  In other words, the profession's intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers. This is also unprecedented. However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession's internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.

  Graff's critical movements were proud, militant insurgencies, out to transform the world. This year's Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It's not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star--a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom--emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market's long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

  Twenty years after Professing Literature, the "conflicts" still exist, but given the larger context in which they're taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

Now first of all, and while I only have the evidence garnered from my time in a few different English departments over the last ten years as well as the ambient stuff that goes around, he's absolutely right about the declining enrollments. The department (big research 1 state institution) where I worked until recently is in full-on panic, as they've lost half. As far as I know, the place where I did my graduate work (a peer institution to Deresiewicz's current place) is having the same sort of trouble that he describes. And there is absolutely no doubt that the worsening economic conditions - and in particular, the increasing anxiety that college-aged students feel when it comes to the job market that they anticipate entering - has a lot to do with this pattern.

But I can't help but feel that there's something else going on with the declining enrollments as well. After all, just as it's never the wrong time for the Bush administration to push tax cuts (economy goes up, and the government has too much of "your" money; it goes down and its time for some cleansing stimulus), I'm not sure it's ever been the right time to sign on for an English major. I don't have the figures at hand, but it seems to me that there were good reasons in the 90s... and the 80s... and the 70s... and the 60s... to look for a more efficiently marketable degree.

In other words, to my mind, there are other issues here that inform the change beyond what I think Deresiewicz is trying to establish to be a self-reinforcing cycle of faculty desperation and the watering down of the course offerings. I wish I had time to go fully into all of them, and maybe I will in a future post. Just quickly for now: there's the way that however valuable historicism is a scholarly stance, it tends to fall relatively flat in the classroom. I say this as a historicist, a part historicist, myself: given equivalent teaching quality, the students will be hooked by the magic tricks you can perform on The Waste Land via vulgar decon and/or new critical torque far faster than they will by the status of the industrial society in Victorian Britain and the way that it informs Hard Times. There's much more to be said about this, of course, and I will soon... Beyond this, intellectual fadism and the mal-distribution of teaching emphasis probably doesn't help either. There are other factors, some of which Deresiewicz touches on - the farming out of intro classes to part time workers, the soft condescension of letting everyone do creative writing, and so on...

But there's one important issue that I do want to focus on here - and it is one that, for reasons hinted at above, obviously wouldn't make it into Deresiewicz's piece. Take a look again at the timing of the decline as described in the piece:

In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year.

(snip)

It's the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble
revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990.

Deresiewicz has all the pieces of the puzzle on the board, they just need to be put together. The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I'm mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn't much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn't a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I'd mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on "liberal bias" were front and center in the news.

I went to grad school during the last days of theory. We started out in our first years with Derrida seminars and ended scrambling to become textual materialists. It became gauche (!), by the end, to go on about Lacan or Althusser, Foucault or Deleuze. But I also got my first tenure track job in the years of the "war on terror." True to form, true to my academic generation, I am a leftist who apologizes for mentioning Iraq in passing during my classes on Conrad, and who probably advances better critiques of Marx than appreciations of him. Such was the ideological weather on the day I was born to the professoriate - and it's grown to feel like the way the weather is supposed to be, has always been. There are times when I can tell that the students don't want me to pull my punches, but I inevitably do. 

I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major. The politics may have been largely imaginary back before the fall of theory, but the ethos of radicalism was perhaps hugely more attractive than, say, learning about the fruits of some very solid and largely uncontroversial archival work that your teacher is involved in. Perhaps we as a discipline were just holding off the inevitable by becoming, for so many years, the defacto home of left politics in the academy. But it is worth noting, now that the politics have receded and with them the student numbers, that something we were doing was working. And it is further worth noting just how hard it is for us to admit what it was that was different just before the numbers dropped.

We are, in sum, left in a tough, but not impossible situation.... More to come, I promise...

Pomo = LaRouchian wingnuttery?

X-posted from foucaultblog

One of the things one occasionally has to deal with are people's prejudices and misperceptions, bordering on hatred, of anything that seems to threaten the scientific method.

Now personally I'm all in favor of the scientific method in its place, but for many people an interest in say Rorty, Latour, Foucault etc. bespeaks an anti-scientific mind on a par with the outer reaches of weirdness. Or, of Lyndon LaRouch, who is apparently making a comeback on campuses and who attracted the ire of this science-based blog for his interest in physics.

LaRouche is quoted as writing:

Once we recognize that scientific knowledge is obtained, not by contemplating the universe, but by studying how we may generate those thoughts which enable us to efficiently act to change the universe, then the principles of cognition underlying the discovery of lawful physical principles, are the epistemological basis for defining the underlying determination of validatable physical laws.

Now that might not make a whole lot of sense but it seems hamless enough.

Not so! To the rescue rides this commentator:

I hate to break it to you, but your local departments of english literature/women’s studies etc etc etc are almost certainly propagating equally nonsensical propaganda to your students, and doing far more harm than these guys. Officially sanctioned crackpottery is far worse than this kind of random lunacy.

The ramparts are under attack. Hold the line!

Despite a few attempts to keep things civil, a poster named "caveman" replies:

Don’t be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that a straw-man caricature of post-modernism is exactly the same thing as post-modernism.

It's not inevitable that these discussions degenerate into caricature, and debate is good, it's just surprising to see these old warmed over relic opinions from the culture wars.

Regarding the Scull Controversy

Rather than going away as an issue, the Scull versus the Foucauldians debate seems to be spreading. It seems odd to me that people are willing to get worked up over this issue. Afterall, standard periodizations of Foucault's work place The History of Madness outside his developed periods; viz., the archaeological, the genealogical, and the problematization. That is, within the Foucauldian corpus itself, The History of Madness is an outlier (not unlike his commentary on Kant's anthropology, his book on Roussel, or the disavowed Maladie mentale et personnalité). The question, then, appears not to be about the place of The History of Madness in Foucault's own oeuvre - a concept that should no doubt be question by anyone who takes Foucault's work seriously - but, rather, about what "Foucault," that is to say "Theory," signifies in the context of (primarily) (North) American disciplinary politics. (Although, it is worth pointing out that comparing passages from the "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" essay with The History of Madness is, at best, strange - it is wrong-headed to criticize a non-genealogical work for not being genealogical!) Scull is engaged in a territorial pissing match with rivals. His concern, it seems to me, is to reject the work of Foucauldians by nit-picking Foucault's major dissertation. (I guess it is easier to take on a dead guy's dissertation than it is to take on work published by Nik Rose twenty years ago.) Predictably, the "Theory" warriors - themselves derivative hacks of the worst sort - are all to happy to jump into Scull's boat in an effort to push their own agenda within the narrow perspective of American English departments.

(Cross-posted from theoria.)

Prizing Spirituality: Charles Taylor wins Templeton

Link: Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.

NEW YORK, MARCH 14 – Professor Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher who for nearly half a century has argued that problems such as violence and bigotry can only be solved by considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions, has won the 2007 Templeton Prize.

The Templeton Prize, valued at 800,000 pounds sterling, more than $1.5 million, was announced today at a news conference at the Church Center for the United Nations in New York by the John Templeton Foundation, which has awarded the prize since 1973.  The Templeton Prize is the world's largest annual monetary award given to an individual.

Charles Taylor is engaged in contemporary, important, cross-cultural questions such as "What role does spiritual thinking have in the 21st Century?"  For more than 45 years, Taylor, 75, has argued that wholly depending on secularized viewpoints only leads to fragmented, faulty results.  He has described such an approach as crippling, preventing crucial insights that might help a global community increasingly exposed to clashes of culture, morality, nationalities, and religion.

'American' Sociology

For those who - quite understandably - can't be bothered to read the Canadian Journal of Sociology, the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, and the official newsletter of the Canadian Sociology Association, Society, may not know that the disciplinary boundaries of Canadian sociology, as well as the meaning of practicing sociology qua sociologist, has been a heated (insofar, of course, as the veneer of politeness in Canada allows) issue debated by senior scholars, tenure track assistant professors and, indeed, graduate students such as myself. Unfortunately, the meaning of "sociology" and "Canadian sociology" isn't quite as exciting as the so-called "Theory Wars" and, hence, few are likely aware of the debate - including Canadian sociologists (and especially the Canadian social science academy as a whole).

As most will heartily acknowledge, questions of "Canadian-ness" (I'm tempted to think of 'Randolph' Dupree from the occasionally funny "You, Me and Dupree") are always overdetermined, on the one hand, by the proximity to the United States and, on the other hand, the post-colonial legacy (including, of course, the double conquests of the Natives and of Quebec). Consequently, the debate has been primarily limited to "Canadian Anglophone sociology" with the occasional bone thrown to "Canadian Francophone sociology." Likewise, "Canadian sociology" is repeatedly contrasted with "American sociology" with, surprisingly, the odd disparaging remark made at "British sociology." (The Continent, of course, is left out of the picture, except for gratuitous remarks on the perceived influence of Bourdieu, Foucault or Lacan.)

The question, then, has become one of "autonomy" and "professionalization" - what makes a sociologist a sociologist and what makes sociology a sociology. The fractured and divided (a terrible thing, of course) nature of Canadian sociology is thus mocked by the unity and cohesiveness of American sociology. We are constantly told that Canadian sociology would be much better if it were like American sociology - but only if it kept its "Canadian-ness."

My question - to my readers, that is - concerns American sociology: anecdotally, can it be said that American sociology is as 'unified' as the Canadian polemicists claim? It seems to me - once again, anecdotally - that the same fracture is repeated in American sociology as in Canadian sociology: a generally well-organized and well-funded 'applied' or 'scientific' sociology versus a weaker, disparate 'theoretical' and 'theoretico-empirical' sociology.

I'd request comments and observations from American readers especially. Anonymous comments are welcome as publicly speaking out against your own discipline can be dangerous.

(The reason I ask is that I'm tempted to wade into this debate - the voices of graduate students are, as of yet, sorely lacking in the published material.)

[x] Political Thought

Jodi posted an ad for a job in her department looking for candidates able to teach "American Politics/American Political Thought." The idea of "American Political Thought" (the ad gives the example of the Federalists/Anti-Federalists) and wondered what it means to have a national tradition in "political thought." Regarding "American political thought," wouldn't the two main texts be the Federalist Papers and Democracy in America? Tocqueville, of course, was French, an aristocrat and not a fan of democracy - is that "American" or "French" political thought? My copy of Tocqueville's book, the Mansfield edition, says that it is the most important book on America. (Does Martineau's Society in America count as English or American? Does anyone actually read it?) But, does "French" political thought even describe Tocqueville's book? Is there a "French" tradition in political theory? The most famous book of "French" political theory was written by a Genevan, not a Frenchman. This, of course, lead me to thinking, "What would a course in Canadian political thought look like?" Certainly, Canada has produced some fine political thinkers - but there is nothing essentially "Canadian" about them that would characterize their thought as "Canadian." James Tully, Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, G.A. Cohen, Michael Ignatieff, Shumalith Firestone, George Grant, H.S. Harris, Thomas Pangle, (Alan Bloom, IIRC) ... they're all either "Canadian" or spent time at Canadian universities. Does that make their thought "Canadian"? George Grant is likely the only "Canadian political thinker" we've ever produced - but I'm not sure there's anyone who could sit through a twelve week lecture course on his thought.

What's the Matter with Liberals?

At I cite I have a discussion of Michael Berube's What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts?  All but the preface, with its somewhat obligatory nods to psychoanalysis, is pasted below. The larger discussion (which I confess to having neglected) is here, at the Valve.

My basic claim: Berube demonstrates quite clearly what is liberal about liberal arts. But instead of recognizing liberal arts and liberalism as formations of power/knowledge (and hence as in combat with conservativism and leftism) he views liberal thinking as reason (and hence as a universal norm) and dismisses those who disagree with him politically (those on the extremes of left and right) as irrational. Thus, he slides between the university and the polity, rendering those who are politically unacceptable irrational, as if the same measures or standards or conditions of rationality held politically that he thinks hold academically (or in the university).

Continue reading “What's the Matter with Liberals?”

Canada's Nuttiest Professors

Idealistic and optimistic often look to Canada when the going gets tough - recall all those false promises of moving to Canada should Bush be-elected and the popularity of sites such as Marry an American - might think twice. It's likely the case that everything is bigger in Texas and we, to the north, suffer under its ghostly shadow. Were it not enough that we had a shallow replica of "The Weekly Standard" in Canada called "The Western Standard," who, like "The Weekly Standard," views itself as the vanguard publication of "neo-conservatism" and western alienation, but they've also seen fit to erect a pale, ghostly shadow of none other than David Horowitz's The Professors in their recent "Back to School Guide" on "Canada's Nuttiest Professors" [pdf]. But, unlike Horowitz, they were only about to find twelve professors. (Readers will note that the Canadian Association of University Teachers claims to represent fifty-thousand academics.) But, unlike Horowitz (I assume; I haven't read his book), they also conveniently provided caricatures of those nutty professors.

Continue reading “Canada's Nuttiest Professors”

On Classification

Sociologists, of course, have known for quite a long time that classification is not neutral (see Ange's post below - but also this and this) . In an effort to refocus the debate from accusations of cynicism, some selections from Emile Durkheim under the cut.

Continue reading “On Classification”

Academic distinction

While universities continue to be significant in the production of what-passes-for knowledge, theory, science and so on (for reasons that have to do with resources, libraries, payment of relatively high wages and therefore the allocation of time), it's nevertheless also the case that the internet - among other things - has posed significant problems for anyone wishing to protect the status of universities, and perhaps the universities' increasingly shaky monopoly on the authorisation and licensing of expertise, knowlege, etc.

So, while some feel nauseated, I'm actually a little amused, saddened and, from a distance, quite fascinated by the protectionist gesture of academicblogs.org. 

Continue reading “Academic distinction”

Spooked

In Australia recently, a number of universities have advised phd students researching terrorism that, under current laws, the information they gather "might" be passed on to security agencies.  A student in the Terrorism Research Project at Monash University was questioned by Federal Police after borrowing books from the library on terrorism.  At least one prominent sociologist has, after receiving a grant, abandoned research into the motivations of suicide bombers.  A paper by the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre urges universities to do more to counter "extremism" on campuses and insists that researchers should "be willing to share the findings of their work with government before publishing". Responding to questions regarding the conduct of research under the so-called 'Anti-Terror' laws, the Attorney-General insisted that prospective researchers should first discuss their research with him, personally, but urged the research to continue.  In other words, the issue here is not censorship (or not quite), so much as ensuring that academics become either de facto or unwitting spooks.  Somewhat sharpens the meaning of 'informant' as used in Qualitative Research Methods 101, does it not?

fish

Stanley Fish in the NY Times a few days ago:

All you have to do is remember that academic freedom is just that: the freedom to do an academic job without external interference. It is not the freedom to do other jobs, jobs you are neither trained for nor paid to perform. While there should be no restrictions on what can be taught — no list of interdicted ideas or topics — there should be an absolute restriction on appropriating the scene of teaching for partisan political ideals. Teachers who use the classroom to indoctrinate make the enterprise of higher education vulnerable to its critics and shortchange students in the guise of showing them the true way.

Sure, I suppose I agree. In practice even more than in theory. I certainly don't "indoctrinate" in my classroom. But, on the other hand, I certainly do expose my students to the historical record, positions and representations taken with regard to and within the historical record, and in general a more sophisticated, probing way of viewing the world than the one they brought into the classroom, or so I at least hope. All of which is kosher under Fish's rules, as everything is always up for argument and discussion, of course. I never, in arguments and discussion, take sides except for pedagogically productive purposes, a play acting of argument to move things along. 

But, I imagine, given the "ideas or topics" that I teach about, and the quality of my non-indoctrinary teaching, there's a strong likelihood that the students emerge, on aggregate, further "left" than they entered the classroom. In fact, one might well make the argument that the non-indoctrinary approach that someone like me - or perhaps someone like Fish, who knows - takes is nothing more than a subtler, more efficient approach to political conversion - even indoctrination - than, say, the lame dork who shows Fahrenheit 9/11 to his physics class. What if I, in fact, have learned the hidden-in-plain-sight tactics of the mainstream media, constantly staging a debate that in fact is just a show trial, incessantly giving my students the illusion of autonomous participation, when in fact the game is rigged from the start?

It is tough to figure out what Fish would say to this, as he ignores the possibility that the free trade in ideas might itself be deployed in the service of ideological mystification. Is it simply a question of openness to the possibility that the students will truly find their own way? When I was a kid at Catholic school, I learned that the rhythm method was a permissible form of birth control family planning because it demonstrated an openness to pregnancy, whereas the Pill or condoms did not. Fuzzy logic, to be sure. Where does good old fashion coitus interruptus fall on the scale? The nuns didn't go there, strangely enough.

Last semester, so effectively did I not-indoctinate my class that they found a book whose politics I find very intriguing indeed (William Morris's News from Nowhere) entirely ridiculous. I couldn't stop talking about utopia and the limits of fiction and they, almost as a one, took the position that Morris demonstrates through his fiction the absolute impossibility of anarchic socialism. I can't help but think that they, following their teacher's lead, underread the book... But perhaps that was just, for me, an acceptable risk, a write-off, in my grand campaign to have my beliefs metastasize through the student body... L'effet du réel, as it were...

In short, I think Fish too is underreading the situation. Or, perhaps, he's writing in bad faith, fully aware that the free trade in ideas is not only a rhetorical trick, but is in fact the definitive rhetorical trick of our time. "We report, you decide," right? The piece would then be a brilliantly performative piece, engaging in the very tactic of manipulation-via-objectivity that it would be tacticly endorsing.  I wish it were the latter, but I suspect it's the former. One might so easily imagine an entire army of leftist professors with Fish's article in hand, bent on ideological domination of the student masses, all in agreement that the best approach is the one of least resistance. Stage debates, employ the silence and cunning of impersonality, shift the goalpost, and reap the ideological benefits in the end. This already, to my mind, is the case (but from a different ideological direction) in US economics departments, where reality itself is conservatively liberal and the price of admission is the acceptance of the status quo.

One other thing: I wonder what Fish would make of politically-polemical or at least engaged writing on the part of academics. Writing occupies such an ambiguous place in our work. The toughest part of my job for my father, who is distinctly not an academic, to understand is the fact that I need to write - that that is what, almost exclusively as I work at a research university, will earn me tenure. There is no way in but to write, and no way to stay but to write, but we are paid to teach. I have to write, but no one is required to read what I write. So where does this fit in his rulebook?

UPDATE: The Naked Gaze has a good post up on Fish et al...

it never ceases to amaze me

It never ceases to amaze me that people still write and publish stuff like this. But fair warning: it's about another author who complains about the dominance of Theory in English departments. People bored with this topic might quite reasonably give it a miss. Me, it never ceases to amaze. I sent the author an e-mail. I couldn't stop myself. I know it's stupid.

Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak's most 'difficult' or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Sometimes, at best, this is expressed as a bewilderment as to what might be at stake in the argument or, as a slightly different question, as a consideration of what is at put at stake in reading at a particular conjuncture. At other times, with a more or less implicit embarrassment that Spivak herself notes, the readers' gaze is averted from the discussion of 'economics', or better: labour-power and value - which is to say, that which is least familiar and proper to the aforementioned disciplines but which, as it turns out, the essay is about.  Other times, still, the confusion that results from Spivak's indisciplined writing cuts the other way. But, indeed, "before there is language, there are languages", as someone would say  (though, it remains to ask whether this statement exists in its temporal, integrative sense, as the hope or promise of a lingua franca).

Continue reading “Four notes on the periphery of a speculative morphology”

Tronti blogweave

For your quick or leisurely perusal, the compilation of Long Sunday's recent symposium on Mario Tronti's "The Strategy of the Refusal", and some remarks.  The multitudinous, but alphabetised, contributions:

»Jon Beasley-Murray, The new barbarians
»Eric Beck, Minor refusals
»George Ciccariello-Maher, Class and subalternity
»Jodi Dean, Two questions on Tronti [follow-up]
»Roger Gathman Fantasy sites and the conquistadors of the planet
»Nate Holdren, Notes on "The Strategy of the Refusal"
»John Holloway, Adorno meets Tronti
»Doug Johnson, Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions
»Brian Lamb, I would prefer not to bore you
»Craig McFarlane, Refusing to engage
»David McInerney, Tronti and Althusser
»Angela Mitropoulos, When will this labour end?
»Brett Neilson, Five theses on Tronti
»Stephen Squibb, Strategy of refusal of strategy
»Keith Tilford, How no can you go? Part I [Part II]

The preamble to the Long Sunday symposium, which includes links to related texts.  The relevant essay by Tronti is here, and a quick link to Long Sunday's Tronti folder. 

There were also a number of related posts elsewhere:  Destructive Creation, Northanger, Going Somewhere, Philosophy.com, pas au-delà, Attitude Adjustor. (Those are the most directly related to the discussion, though I wouldn't be surprised if I've missed some.)  And, not least, there is always the ongoing reading at Leggiamo Tronti.

My immense gratitude to all those who contributed their writings, readings and questions - those who simply took the time to read along with, and specifically those, such as Matt, who spent much time coding and uploading.

Already, Jon has the ball rolling for another reading, and I'm hoping that blogweaving continues, mutates and grows.  Not only because it creates a shared conversation that cuts across various blogs without converging along the one line, but also because - in ways that have yet to be fully explored - it marks an autonomy of writing, reading and research from the university that, particularly in times such as these, becomes an imperative.  Needless to say, what we read and write is related to how we read and write, no less than it is to the diificult questions of who, how and why this 'we' might appear, in that process.

Many thanks for the adventure.

Intellectuals, the refusal of power, office workers' unions

(The following is a guest post by Doug Johnson, from The Weblog)

A critique of culture means to refuse to be intellectuals.  Theory of revolution means direct practice of the class struggle. - Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of the Refusal"

So far as I know, Steve Wright's tendentious and hackneyed monograph Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism is unfortunately the best (perhaps only?) English language, book length account of the movement from which Antonio Negri arose.  Wright is highly critical of Negri, and basically attributes the downfall of Autonomia to the forsaking by Negri and others of Tronti's insistence that there be "no intellectuals," that "theory of revolution" must always be undertaken by those who "direct[ly] practice class struggle" through time in the factory.

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Cognitive labour

In the Rawhide thread, Matt remarked on the (shifting) relation between blogging and the universities, and IT has been turning over the issue of writing, the academy and writing outside the academy in various ways.  (I tried to find the relevant links in the comments, but it was like wading.)  There are a few things here that might be useful for thinking through and around such questions, which may have already done the rounds, but in any case.  I'd be interested if anyone has any other additions or takes.

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social science

I find myself talking to my students more and more about political 'science' and social 'science.' Understanding the mindset of those doing research is a great aid in assessing the research.

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The Day After President's Day

Harvard University, in a post-President's Day gift to the world, announced today that the second most controversial President in the United States would resign from his position effective the end of the current the academic year.  While not quite as famous as the most controversial President in the United States, who has instituted a torture archipelago, a number of illegal wars, and even more illegal polices at home, Lawrence H. Summers is nonetheless widely -- and justifiably -- loathed for saying a number of really dumb things.  (More dumb things.) By resigning now, Summers dodges a second no-confidence vote by the members of the arts and sciences faculty, scheduled for February 28.

In his letter of resignation, Summers writes:

As fulfilling as they have been in many ways, these last years have not been without their strains and moments of rancor. After a period of sabbatical and reflection, I look forward to taking up the tasks of teaching and research at the University and to returning to my professional preoccupation with questions of national and international economic policy. In the meantime, I hope and trust that we will together move through the remainder of this academic year in a spirit of good will and constructive engagement with the work of the University.

I will treasure the continuing friendship and support of so many exceptional colleagues and students at Harvard. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have served as Harvard's President.

More: Inside Higher Ed, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education.

'interpretation'

I would like to bounce off of Matt's heads-up about Bérubé, titled "Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)" below. Bérubé, for those who don't know, has written a critical, though certainly not 'trashing', review of Theory's Empire, the recently published anthology that wears its hostility to Theory, aka postmodernism, etc., on its sleeve. The discussion in the comments section to that post is interesting, and I urge everyone to take a look if inclined.

The question that discussion raises for me reminds me of an intellectual test that can be performed when thinking about the criticisms that 'postmodernism' and 'theory' tends to attract.

To apply this test, I chose a highly favorable review of Theory's Empire by Michael Potemra, National Review, July 4, 2005.

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Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)

Michael Bérubé has published his review [PDF] of Theory's Empire, for those who may be interested.  It is blessedly short, lucid, responsible and well-aimed, including (but hardly limited to) the jibes at Baudrillard, IMHO.  It is to be compared, if you like, with that of the conservative Peter Berkowitz, who seems to spend most of his time bloviating rather mundanely, and proving––at least to himself or to some imagined choir––and beyond any reasonable shred of doubt, that he has neither a sense of humor about Nietzsche nor any familiarity with Derrida's oeuvre.  In any event, an occasion to update that Theory's Empire page yet again, I suppose.  [Hello, that's odd.  The page--and that page only--seems to have been lined-out, at least under Firefox and Netscape, though it's still clear in IE.  I wonder why that is...any ideas anyone?]

Latest Salvos

Lindsay Waters strikes again, four years ago (there's also a nice article on Perec).   I say, if you cannot beat 'em, join 'em.   The shame-faced and guilty decades-long Theory-pusher makes amends at last.   And why not?

(Update:  It's been brought to my attention that these two posts may be riding a little hard on Lindsay Waters, so for something a bit less snarky-popular and more philosophical perhaps, why not read this review by Steven Shaviro, from May of 2004.)

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The Punchline

Cross-posted from my Live Journal.

An old joke about academia:

Q: “Why are battles in academia so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

At first it seems like a non-sequitur, which means it's not so much funny as silly. But if you think about it, the punchline is true by itself: rewards in academia are quite small.  The salaries are lower than they are in industry; the apprenticeship period (not only the tortures of graduate school, but the poorly paid non-tenured posts that follow) is especially long and difficult; the list goes on and on.  Then the real humor of the joke hits.  It expresses a bitter truth in a terse, relevatory way.  Imagine you've gotten lost in the woods in the prime of your life and you've gotten stuck in a fetid swamp or bog along with other similar unfortunates: after years of struggling against them just to keep from being drowned, you manage to find some tiny patch of land on which you might actually sit and rest.  Think you can take it without a bloody struggle?  Of course not.  Think you can keep it without resorting to dreadful violence?  By this time, your sensibilities will be so coarsened that you probably look forward to such battles.

Believe it or not, I'm not trying to impugn the academic enterprise as a whole (although I probably should) or the young people who want to join its ranks.  The earnest supplicants often don't know what they're getting into (see Dorothea Salo's ‘Straight Talk about Graduate School’ and her harrowing ‘A Tale of Graduate School Burnout’ for details) and every sufficiently advanced society needs intellectuals, and academia is the institution entrusted with producing them, although it generally turns out blinkered, socially inept specialists in micro-disciplines.  Society needs those people too, but the two types shouldn't be confused.  Instead, I want to raise the question: why are the rewards so small?  I don't have an answer, and taking on the question seriously could be a lifetime's work.  But now that I've got the question in your mind, here's a variation on the first joke:

Q: “Why are battles on what passes for the opposition in America so fierce?”
A: “Because the rewards are so small.”

And the question again: why are the rewards so small?  My suspicion: the major organ of oppositional politics in America, the Democratic party, is absolutely committed to being the minority party.

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Reflections on Culture, Empire, and Decadence

From a comment at UFO Breakfast Recipients:

I have hard time differentiating between [dying cultures and dying empires], at least in the US. There is no culture here on a national level, not outside the mid-Atlantic accented, corporate packaged $25,000 smile, the b-mod routines of the workplaces. The haughty affectations of the faculty lounge are not qualitatively different from the banal glurge wisdom mouthed in sports bars. The vampiric logic is the same in both places. They all do that thing with the eyes, where they cock their head a little on the side to catch the glint from the overhead lights. You are wrong by virtue of disagreeing with them, but therapy can help you. You must accept the common ground or suffer.

Link

If such a thing can be quantified, the degree to which conformity, and not competence, guarantees an individual's success is probably an excellent index of the objective decay of an organization or culture. The disquieting point raised here is the extent to which oppositional culture, simply because it is embedded in a larger decaying system, replicates this fault. Adorno makes a similar point in the closing sentences of “The Health Unto Death” in Minima Moralia.

Nixon is supposed to have said, “we are all Keynesians now,” and that may have marked the beginning of the decline of Keynesianism in the US. Maybe, despite our best efforts not to be such, American intellectuals, salaried or not, are all Straussians now. The distance between the exoteric meaning Straussians proper use to hide their intentions and Lakoffian frames isn't as great as either party would care to admit. And in a time of objective decay, nothing is more banal than an attempt to be individual by penning a feuilleton decrying the ubiquity of conformity.

The Neoliberal Imagination in Prep School Novels

Well we don't exactly claim to be on the cusp of anything here, when we get around to claiming anything at all, but in this our (well, let's be honest:  my) quest to be the n+1 groupie par excellence, Crooked Pins has lately been providing ample competition.  In the spirit of generosity, and because I concur with the general sentiment that the article in question is yet another "must-read," particularly for parents and students about to embark on the country club experience that is Ivy League college, I recommend you take a look.  In the spirit of cyber-communism, I'll even provide another exclusive excerpt, available only to subscribers (you really ought to be one) below the fold.  But you could also start with the abbreviated version here (may require bugmenot.com).

And really, their comments thread over there is a bit tired (debating the conservative right's moral authority on race issues by bringing up senator Byrd and the KKK has got to be the most over-used talking-point-that-refuses-to-die EVER, and I suspect we can do better.  The real issue is class warfare, for fuck's sake.)

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Benjamin under Arrest

There is a poem by W.B Yeats called “The Scholars”. I’ve quoted it at CS before. It ends with the line (I’m quoting from memory) “what would they say, should their Catullus walk their way”. The point, made with the sharp brevity of a good espresso, is that the last thing academics would want to encounter is the actual, three-dimensional incarnation of their object of study, its repetition in the present.

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Report from EGS

So our own Matt has spurned me on to this report. I don't know why I didn't get it across earlier. Still digesting, perhaps. I don't want to say much, beyond that it was one of the most interesting experiences of my life.

One can always drink. It's not often one does so around so many brilliant people. It's not often one suffers such a brutal burnout on a daily basis, only to invariably find the energy to be excited the very next day.

Saas Fee gives you The Fear, don't get me wrong. If I could write a new amendment to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, I would certainly write that sending a city boy or girl to a mountain village surrounded by taller mountains, gnomes, and overly-creepily-friendly locals is a crime against humanity. I really mean it. After a week a few of us Really began to lose it, and once or twice search expeditions were sent out to find missing academics who suddenly, in a flash, disappeared amongst the gnomes.

Normal graduate experiences involve one or two socials a year, and as little time spent on campus as possible. And let's face it, the talent is pretty thin at most schools, so who wants to drink with them and their neuroses anyhow. (Of course there are always exceptions - but the remarkable thing about EGS is that what normally qualifies for exceptions here becomes the rule.)

I won't say much about the professors. It was the students I was there for, if I can construct expectations retroactively. The truth is that Zizek and Badiou were delayed until next year, so details on those two superstars will have to wait until then.

I can say that our experience with/of Peter Greenaway approached the surreal. The first day the charismatic artist came in as Daddy figure, enjoining confessions from just about everyone on their medical histories, desires, and what not. Sizing up the situation, a few of us took the piss. The next day he came in saying narrative in cinema was dead, as if it was a new argument, as if there wasn't already an extremely long history of the avant-garde. And in any case, non-narrative is easy; it's a good narrative, today, that is the difficult thing - and the important thing, as Kieslowski teaches us. The following day he pronounced that psychoanalysis in cinema is dead, and that we should move beyond psychoanalytic perspectives of characters. Having just seen his wonderful 8 1/2 Women, I couldn't fight back the painful fuzz that suddenly flooded my brain. What is this movie if not an Oedipal narrative?!

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

There is nothing outside of the text.  And that is neither becasue Jean-Jacques' life, or the existence of Mamma or Therese themselves, is not of prime interest to us, nor because we have access to their so-called "real" existence only in the text and we have neither any means of altering this, nor any right to neglect this limitation.  All reasons of this type would already be sufficient, to be sure, but there are more radical reasons.  What we have tried to show by following the guiding line of the "dangerous supplement," is that in what one calls the real life of these existences "of flesh and bone," beyond and behind what one believes can be circumscribed as Rousseau's text, there have never been anything but writing; there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the "real" supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement. (Of Grammatology Pgs. 158-159)

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Theory, Having Just Begun

Actually I've been enjoying the quality of discussion at both the Holbo and Bérubé empires this week very much, even if the premise and primary target (which is to say the target of the Theory's Empire book––something in its conception at least not entirely unmarked by genre, perhaps, and let's just note again here how the words "French Theory" (or indeed just "theory") were always something of a uniquely Anglo invention*)...even if the general target of this book (the "anthology of dissent" currently receiving so much attention) may never have been in much dispute.  Most literature professors (at least at the undergrad level, and perhaps beyond) who "do theory" exclusively in the Anglo world, do so poorly.  Sure, I guess.  (But are they really an "empire" now? How innocent is this irony really?)  While the ones who do it well, well...they do it without you even knowing what they're up to!

Let's face it, anybody blindly championing "theory" at this stage as a panacea be-all and end-all, pat diagnostic device, pathway to tenure, carte blanche license to avoid the text entirely, or name-drop and cite without the slightest concern for context, logic, or verifiability, seemingly overwhelmed by TEOTOB...this anybody really knows very little about theory, truth be told.  Indeed, this anybody might be living in a cave, oblivious to the current trends of the academic job market, for that matter, or the semi(barely)-covert assault on all things "PC" and "liberal" in cultural studies, literature departments, and so on, as the corporatization (and scientification) of our beloved universities progresses daily.

Anyone else have any thoughts?  We're supposed to be the resent-nik Zizekians, remember!

What do you think, is "doing theory" not one of those faux pas right up there with proclaiming oneself to be "postmodern" (as in, it's just not, you know, something one does, if one wishes also to be taken seriously)?  I put it to the world.

Update:  There's an interesting post up at Savage Minds about this whole book "event" thing, by the by. Update: And quite a bit more...

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Piracy Studies

I teach at a college committed to interdisciplinary liberal arts education. We have a history of 'problematizing' great books by confronting them with multiculturalism, feminism, marxism, and postmodernism. This approach has been a key site of cultural war in the US for nearly twenty years now. Some on the right think that we've gone too far. But I think we can go even farther. In fact, I think that we can make an academic curriculum out of anything! To test this, in the waning of hours of a late night faculty party, some of us produced a new major: Piracy Studies. We think it could work.

From Economics: Econ 101 (macro, neo-classical, Chicago school) and Business 101
From Math:  Applied Geometry (how to use a sextant)
From Geography: Oceans and Coasts, Navigating the Capes
From History: Colonialism and Imperialism; the rise of Capitalism; US 20th Century History: from  Robber Barons to Enron and beyond (with special attention to the great Dot Com redistribution)
From Theater: Costume Making and How to Say "arrgh..."
From Sociology: Group Dynamics (How to avoid mutiny)
From English:  Seminar on Melville

Public? Yes, please!

What is a public?  Jodi Dean lucidly suggests that since calls for the 'public' are voiced, well, in a pre-existing public, such calls are mostly political interventions for a certain kind of public, i.e., one more amenable to one's own orientation.  We might say, then, that these calls for a public are disengenuous, not actually concerned with achieving a true public.  (One can obviously place in this context Republican calls for a less `liberal biased' PBS.)

What, then, is a true public?  Is it the pre-existing public that allows for various factions to fight within it for their particular definition of a public?  The set that exists before the battle to hegemonize its definition and practice?  Does a true public only pre-exist the hegemonizing of the set through the rise of the master-signifier?

Or can we say that, only with the right master-signifier, the right political order, the true public actually comes into being? 

A true public is one without pigeon-holing, where one doesn't automatically place oneself in five seconds of speech.  It's one where you don't know what I am going to say next.  It's where I am not merely offering pre-digested soundbites.  Most of the blogosphere then has nothing to do with this true public; partisan hackery is but more TV (which is precisely why the TV networks can so easily report on this sector of the blogosphere), as are the endless ruminations on what one fed one's cat today.

The true public goes beyond your surprise at my words, my positioning.  I must be surprised myself.  As in the decisive act that overwhelms you, that preempts one's understanding of one's own actions, here I must myself be surprised by what comes from my `pen'.  Only after the fact, upon the establishment of a new order, can I come to understand what I have done.

But then the question is: does the new order in fact get created here, in this part of the blogosphere?  What could that mean?  No, yes, maybe new orders are constantly being tested.  We're playing at being vanishing mediators.  But playing with an enormous sense of responsibility, for the Other.  So maybe, then, Long Sunday is both the `true public' before the hegemonization of the very term 'public', and the Just `public' after the right hegemonization. 

Having it both ways?  Ah, the life of a vanishing mediator...

Zizek writes, in a sort of parallel:

The "political" dimension is... doubly inscribed: it is a moment of the social Whole, one among its sub-systems, and the very terrain in which the fate of the Whole is decided - in which the new Pact is designed and concluded.  (For they know not what they do, 193)