Don’t Know Much About Politics: Tough Questions About the UC Walkout and the Cultural Studies Debate

(x-posted to The Valve)

In the course of a single week, we have seen academics making noise on several different fronts related to politics. First of all, here in California, there has been a large-scale effort to protest against the drastic budget cuts affecting students, workers, and faculty at University of California campuses. All sorts of mainstream media covered the story: some classes were cancelled, some classes were converted into teach-ins, most campuses held rallies attracting hundreds to thousands, and the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) went on strike. It is now Monday; the main lingering protest appears to be the occupation of the Graduate Student Commons by students at UC Santa Cruz, who Marc Bousquet interviewed here.

Meanwhile, Michael Berube was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education to the effect that cultural studies has not been a powerful enough political force in the university and the society at large. Berube argues that cultural studies has not produced much change in the way that the humanities are taught, nor has it been much of an ally for progressive political causes. His article incited some bloggers to write passionate retorts, while others, like the Valve’s Andrew Seal, took a more moderate and reflective approach.

Both of these highly visible controversies concern the relationship between politics and the academy, and more specifically between politics and the humanities, since humanities departments will be hardest hit by the cutbacks at the UCs. They are natural outgrowths of assumptions in place for decades now — namely, that the study of the humanities ought to be a political endeavor, and that because (at its best) it is political work, it makes students and faculty politically knowledgeable and effective.

There is no doubt in my mind about the first thesis. Work in the humanities is political; all knowledge work is, by its nature, inextricably bound up with ideological positions that bear on political issues. I have been, however, greatly disappointed by the fruits of this week’s labor. The protests were — are, in the case of the UCSC occupation — ineffectual. The discussion around cultural studies has been muddled. This is because of a failure to distinguish the differences between political activism and the dissemination of knowledge. Until we academics recognize and navigate this (seemingly obvious) difference, we will not be politically effective. We will not even have earned the right to claim a deep understanding of “the political.” We have to ask tough questions not only of UC President Mark Yudof but of ourselves, and this is not being done.

***

Political Activism Is Not A Seminar Discussion Or A Lecture Class

In a seminar discussion, words themselves carry weight. They are the signs of understanding. If numerous students come to new epiphanies and a new sense of clarity about assigned texts, that is enough — it is, in fact, quite wonderful. For activists, however, words are vehicles for demands. They are part of an ongoing battle that one side must lose by capitulating to the demands of the other.

The protests Thursday did not significantly disrupt the operation of the University. Students and workers will capitulate to the demands of the California government and the UC administration by paying higher tuition and accepting layoffs and furloughs. The building currently being occupied by UCSC students, the Graduate Student Commons, is non-essential to the operation of the campus, which is why these students have not been arrested.

The whole structure of the protests virtually guaranteed that they would not have an effect. They were not ongoing — Friday was business as usual. They were not consistent in mode: if every class was cancelled, or if every class was converted into a teach-in, that would have been noticeably disruptive. Instead, each faculty member and teaching assistant was urged to do “something” in solidarity, and could pick and choose what that something might be. I am not suggesting that the organizers could have persuaded all teachers to participate; rather, the problem was that even those who did participate did so in a diffuse and various manner. Again and again, people involved in planning the protests agreed to take a “decentralized” approach at the cost of efficacy.

The idea of producing a coherent set of non-negotiable demands became equally lost in the shuffle. Read Bousquet’s interview with the students at UCSC. Considering the demands they have listed, how could they ever call off the occupation? At what point could they legitimately claim victory? They are protesting not just problems at the university level, but problems with K-12 public education. They are not just concerned with California; they are concerned with the nation as a whole. Their public document seems to be protesting against Adderall and frat parties in addition to budget cuts. The humanistic modes of freely associative thinking and heterogeneous action, which have their place as desirable educational outcomes, simply do not work as forms of targeted activism.

Furthermore, the protests did not do enough to put those most affected first. The people most affected by these cuts are undergraduates and workers, including those represented by the UPTE. Unfortunately, the most audible voices were those of the faculty, including tenured faculty. The structure of the protests thus repeated existing power hierarchies by making students into recipients of knowledge and bodies to be counted up at the rallies.

Seminar Discussions Are Not Political Demonstrations

Let us be clear about the kind of “political intervention” cultural studies was supposed to represent. It was first an expansion of teachable materials to include popular culture and other kinds of marginalized productions. It was also heir to efforts by the Frankfurt School to produce new, more complex, less reductive kinds of Marxist cultural criticism. At bottom, the link between these two different goals had to do with the ways that Marxist ideals would justify the inclusion of “lower” forms of culture, either because popular culture represented the ideas and contributions of the masses, or else because it demonstrated forms of ideological control over the masses. The odd result was that hostile readings of Dickens became part of the “culture wars,” and so did appreciative readings of Madonna. Berube describes this as a lamentable conflation that happened to “cultural studies” when it was annexed by “cultural criticism,” but it was really a natural result of writers like Theodor Adorno being willing to include essays on jazz and film as long as he was allowed to denounce them unequivocally. Eventually somebody else started writing essays on jazz and film who begged to differ with Adorno about their value — and so on all the way to modern essays about American Idol.

There is no direct relationship between any of this and what I refer to above as “targeted political activism,” any more than a copy of The Communist Manifesto in a bookstore is a sign of an imminent revolution. If students can be taught to analyze novels, they can also be taught to analyze concept albums, and since pop music is a valid aesthetic form it is worth their while to do so. There is no reason for us to respect Stuart Hall’s irritation with new analyses of Madonna or of The Sopranos any more than we would respect a Renaissance scholar getting tired of new books about Shakespeare. Yet his comments strike a chord because of the persistence of drearily repetitive forms of political analysis within these manifestoes on pop culture. Because many scholars of cultural studies treat the aesthetic validity of “low culture” as conditionally dependent upon the critic’s Marxism, a lot of pop culture analysis takes the form of an awkward dialogue between the capitalist ego and the Marxist super-ego of the critic, who is trying to persuade himself and us that he only enjoys what he is watching because it educates him about the newest forms of false consciousness. Berube’s division between “cultural studies” and “cultural criticism” enables him to claim that “cultural studies” hasn’t affected American thinking about economics, but all he is really saying is that American economists aren’t Marxist and haven’t been converted to Marxism by cultural studies. The problem is that most cultural studies scholars haven’t been converted to Marxism either, the proof being that their work shows (as Berube correctly notes) remarkably little solidarity with anyone besides a now non-existent Old Left, and bears scant relation to their actual lives. Of course, into that vacuum of revolutionary poses comes enthusiasts like Malcolm Gladwell, who writes one bestselling piece of cultural criticism after another.

Cultural studies has been extremely successful at opening up humanities classrooms to popular culture and analysis of popular culture. It has also been, pace Berube, co-eval with new forms of the transmission of knowledge, especially the arrival of online discourse, where conversations about popular culture constantly take inspired critical turns — even in (for example) the comments appended to YouTube videos.

However, the cultural studies movement has also been successful in drastically undermining the prestige and political relevance of the humanities classroom. This has redounded on cultural studies itself, which is why its success appears to Berube as a failure. Because of its insistence on treating culture as “all one thing” produced by oppressive capitalist ideology, teachers began to lose track of why a class teaching the Sopranos might not also spend a week on Fox News and the rhetoric of George W. Bush’s war on terror. After all, maybe showing students the parlor tricks behind Bush’s rhetoric would help convince them to vote for Kerry instead. This had a range of effects:

1. It alienated students from their teachers and lent a certain amount of justification to campaigns mounted by people like David Horowitz.

2. It helped disguise the transition from teaching content to teaching skills, such as the conversion of English classes into “rhetoric and composition” classes. Teachers were willing to accept skills-based classes as long as they could teach political content, but this was a devil’s bargain, as the content was of course now practically irrelevant except as raw material to be operated on in the name of more grammatical sentences and smoother transitions between paragraphs.

3. It alienated students and teachers from the curriculum itself. The “boom” period for English departments in particular, and the humanities in general, was the 1960s, when a song like “A Change’s Gonna Come” was considered to be a sort of cultural ally of the Civil Rights Movement, and a book like Eros and Civilization or The Birth of Tragedy could actually be considered part of a large-scale attempt at achieving new freedoms. The purely negative stance toward cultural products old and new, epitomized by texts like The Novel and the Police or Nation of Rebels, backed teachers of culture into a position of real self-loathing and undergraduates into passionless imitation of that self-loathing. If all you learned was that your teachers, who knew a lot about culture, apparently liked it less than you did, you certainly didn’t need to major in it. The more aesthetics and enjoyment became conversations for hobbyists, the less important it was to have professionals analyzing culture.

There should be classes on political rhetoric, which would do well to analyze people like Glenn Beck, and there should be classes on aesthetic categories, including pieces of popular culture where appropriate. Departmental divisions and differences should remain within the over-arching umbrella of the “humanities,” rather than collapsing into one uber-class on hegemony. It is a sorry testament to the way modern academic understandings of “the political” have inhibited political work that academic outsiders like Greil Marcus have produced some of the best and most enduring works of “cultural studies” — books like Lipstick Traces that are much better than the canons of founding fathers such as Stuart Hall, and have no difficulty remaining in print. I agree with Andrew Seal that merely “complicating” existing pictures of neoliberalism and the political economy, as Berube proposes, is not doing enough. That sounds like embroidering a fundamental resignation with colorful, distracting dissent. But there isn’t another, better word out there, because the study of culture cannot begin with a set of political demands. It has to begin with intellectual curiosity and a sensitive ear for what individuals and institutions are trying to express, letting that access of understanding speak to issues of immediate political concern how it will.

Bathos On The Big Screen: Jurassic Park and Sons of Anarchy

(x-posted to PopMatters and The Valve)

Years ago, I remember my father saying that he had managed to watch Pulp Fiction because it was a “comic book.” I hadn’t been able to make it all the way through, because I was sickened — I mean physically, not in some abstract moral sense — by the violence and cruelty. My father pointed out that when Uma Thurman is revived from her drug overdose, and hears somebody ask her to “say something,” she says: “Something.” In other words, at one of the most dramatic and visceral moments in the film, a line of dialogue is inserted to prove that it’s all pretty much a laugh.

Dramatically, this device is known as bathos, a term Alexander Pope invented and which applies to his own writing, above all to his wonderful poem “The Rape of the Lock.” Without wishing to dwell on too many different examples, I would suggest that contemporary film and television are deeply, continually bathetic. Why should this be the case? In what unexpected ways does it reveal cracks and faultlines in our own relationship, as individuals, to our society?

I was reminded of the Pulp Fiction conversation recently when I turned on the television and started watching Jurassic Park. As you might remember, during the scene where Sam O’Neill and his family are being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the dinosaur appears in the rear-view mirror, above a clearly legible notice that says “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” The entire dramatic momentum of the scene is interrupted for this joke, which is there to remind the audience that it’s only a movie, after all. The same pattern recurs later in the film, when O’Neill’s son is electrocuted and falls unconscious to the ground. He had been holding on to an electric fence and counting to three. When he wakes up, he opens his eyes and says “three,” just like Thurman in the Tarantino film. Again, whatever sympathetic investment we may have made in his well-being is mocked by the film.

One could find never-ending examples of this move in a contemporary television comedy like Weeds. To me, it’s even more interesting to track bathos in a show like Sons of Anarchy, which is supposed to be a serious, intense, and gritty biker drama. When the show begins, the biker gang is at risk because one of the bikers forced two Mexican women to fellate him while they were imprisoned in an arms warehouse. (They are illegal immigrants, paying for passage to the United States.) The women are burned alive when the warehouse burns down, and the gang worries that DNA evidence from ingested semen will incriminate the gang. So they arrange to distract local law enforcement and dispose of the bodies. When several of the men return to the grisly sight of the burned corpses, one says “Tell me they looked better than this when they were going down on you.” Rimshot! In a later episode of the show, a friend of the gang has a bullet wound in his buttocks, and a biker has to keep his finger in there to avoid having the man bleed out. This leads to an extended discussion about whether or not the finger in the ass is gay. Hilarious!

Yet as anyone will tell you, the reason to watch the show actually has little to do with the specific one-liners that flow staunchlessly from these various subplots, any more than the reason to watch Weeds is to find out whether or not a small suburban marijuana dealership will survive. Instead, we watch S. O. A. to see three main characters wield power — Gemma, Jax, and Clay — and we watch Weeds to see Nancy Botwin wriggle and writhe her way out of difficult situations. The laughs are a chaser. All of these shows are about getting paid: in Jurassic Park and later in shows like The Wire, characters are paid for being competent professionals, and competency is the point. The incompetent park developer and the incompetent computer guy (Wayne Knight, Seinfeld’s Newman) are juxtaposed with skilled hunters, hackers, chaos theorists, and so on down the roster. Meanwhile, in shows like Weeds, people get paid just for being who they are. Nancy Botwin possesses an almost magical competence regardless of whether she is running her own operation, working as somebody else’s drug runner, or doing a normal job as an assistant for Matthew Modine. Modine actually hires her because she has faked the work experience on her resume. It shows initiative. We might also link characters like Nancy Botwin to supernatural characters like vampires (Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, etc.) or True Blood’s Marianne, who have plenty of money and little to do other than to be celebrities of a sort, impressive in the eyes of others.

In a film like Ocean’s 11, you can see both sides of this dynamic. Some of the characters are there because they have special skills (e.g. the Chinese acrobat), and some are there because they are specialness incarnate and can do anything (Mr. Ocean). Not surprisingly, this divide often falls along racial and ethnic lines, as it does in Soderbergh’s film: the Puerto Rican member of the Sons of Anarchy is the resident hacker, and the accented Scotsman is the medic, while Ron Perlman’s Clay Morrow is simply the President.

This is the real source of our investment in what’s happening on screen. The characters in Jurassic Park deserve to survive the rampaging dinosaurs not because people, generally speaking, deserve to live, but rather because we deem them, in that memorable economic phrase, “too important to fail.” The dinosaurs are a test of their competence, just as the burned corpses are a test of the biker gang. The bathetic sabotage of our sympathies helps to free us from the uncomfortable bonds of compassion, and from enmeshment in a common social order, in shared problems of quality of life. Oscar Wilde eerily predicted our modern situation when he wrote that “it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell.” If The Old Curiosity Shop were produced for television today, a premier actor such as William H. Macy would play Daniel Quilp, and critics would applaud Macy’s “riveting performance” as the Machiavellian hero of the story — who, they would warn us, “only grows more complex” by Season 2. Anxiety is a selfish affliction, and it has a right to be, since it comes from an instinct for self-preservation. Yet in post-industrial societies where the economy has been basically hollowed out, and where the perpetual anxiety of having the wrong skill set is compensated by the hope of being paid simply for being oneself, the dominant mythic narratives come to reflect a frightening loss of sympathy, and a desperate attempt to make sense of ugly things by turning them all into opportunities for excellence. We don’t, personally, want to be dismissed with a chuckle, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Veteran Rapper Grizzly Bear Releases New Street Epic “Veckatimest”

It seems like 2006 was ages ago, doesn’t it? Back then, when semi-unknown thug Grizzly Bear released his first big hit single, “Knife,” it was easy to read the lyrics as a double-edged sword, referring both to his own struggles for survival in Brooklyn (clashing with Jay-Z in a notorious loose-leaf teahouse brawl) and to the excesses of cruelty taking place in Iraq: “with every blow / comes another lie.” This was, after all, seemingly only a minute since Grizzle had dropped his first street mixtape, Horn of Plenty, which had NYC headz bobbin’ but went mostly unnoticed elsewhere in the country. Staring up from a life of grim desolation, G.B. (which sometimes stands for Great Bellower or Gangsta Brawler, depending on when you ask Mr. Rossen) was the self-proclaimed “deep sea diver” who rhymed “a car, a house, and a dog / you got everything that I want,” and sounded ready to take those things by force.

You couldn’t get away from “Knife” in 2006; it had one of those enormous, dancefloor filling Beach Boy harmonies that brought the kids out in droves, whether they were living in the suburbs of Ohio (as I was, a mere struggling columnist for the Dayton Star Review) or riding in low-slung urban vehicles. He got his house — three houses, actually, including a yellow one for his mother, after which the album is named — and the cars and the dog. He was the epitome of cool, the untouchable street poet ready and willing to be the most famous man in America. But you could sense the tension seething in every line, the yearning for something already lost and left behind on the streets: “cords in a bind / knots that we make / fatal mistakes / let’s recreate an easier time.” “Easier,” the second single, was a disappointment commercially but an artistic triumph, a pure slice of the prophet still searching for that “easier time.” Little wonder that he stood in front of an enormous crowd at the Pitchfork Music Festival, saying “you are my people, sing this with me now” and then tearing through a savage cover of the Wu’s “Can It All Be So Simple.”

On his new album, though, atop glittering beats by DJ “Ed” Droste, Grizzle peers out from behind the windows of his fame and fortune to see a world that is passing him by. He sounds curiously resigned on tracks like “Two Weeks” (the period of time it takes to sell a pound of heroin) when he raps “Save up all the days / A routine malaise / Just like yesterday” to an old sampled recording of 4,000 people playing “The Blue Danube” on violin. This inevitably detracts from the force of the album — even when El Griz is back for another swing, full of braggadocio and proclaiming without regrets that “what I did I did,” he is still just going through the motions: “I’m gonna take a stab at this…checking it off my list.” It’s a long way from the visceral immediacy of his earlier stabbing songs, and by extension all the excesses of his “Knife” period: “Can’t you feel the knife?” or, even earlier, “A bear’s teeth extra sharp / that’ll cut you in the heart.”

In the strange, subterranean way of American wordsmithing, which is always re-forging of what has come before, we can hear a weary Grizzle echoing the words of that older, weary traveller, Robert Frost: “I trek alone back home / Shall I trek in the snow?” He is no longer channeling the rage of the streets; rather, he is looking to make an “About Face” in which the “fight for one” can be transformed into “faith with all.” But the bloody lessons of his youth can hardly be unlearned so quickly; he does, indeed, have miles to go before he sleeps. The album’s closing number, “Foreground” begins with a sample of Robert DeNiro yelling “They called me an animal. I’m not an animal!” While the kids may tune out the man behind the bear, Veckatimest shows a way, way more mature Rossen coming to grips with the cyclical nature of violence, which is only a “foreground” to the real villainy happening in his beloved city, behind the scenes, where the streets are bought and sold by those who will gladly “take on another Shaft” (“Foreground”) just to watch him die.

In Which I Continue To Procrastinate Via Books 101-200

Naturally, you can give this pleasant exercise in canon formation a skip, but if the idea holds any fascination for you, consider yourself tagged.

101. The Bhagavad-Gita
102. Complete Works, William Shakespeare
103. Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert
104. Hatchet, Gary Paulsen
105. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke
106. Collected Poems, Pablo Neruda
107. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
108. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
109. Selected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke
110. Short Stories, Ernest Hemingway
111. A Night of Serious Drinking, Rene Daumal
112. The Immoralist, Andre Gide
113. The Literary Life and Other Curiosities, Robert Hendrickson
114. My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George
115. Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault
116. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
117. 1984, George Orwell
118. Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold
119. The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
120. Essays and Dialogues, Oscar Wilde
121. Selected Poems, William Blake
122. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
123. The Science of Logic, G. W. F. Hegel
124. The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
125. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
126. Famous Legal Oratories, Cicero
127. Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas
128. Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
129. Erotica, Anais Nin
130. Zuckerman Unbound, Philip Roth
131. Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley
132. Collected Poems, John Keats
133. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence
134. Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno
135. Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt
136. No-One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman
137. A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud
138. Five Plays, Jean Anouilh
139. Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
140. Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida
141. Rogues, Jacques Derrida
142. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson
143. An Enemy of the People, Henrik Ibsen
144. Echoes of an Autobiography, Naguib Mahfouz
145. Complete Works, Charles Baudelaire
146. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
147. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
148. Are You My Mother?, P. D. Eastman
149. Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats
150. Howard’s End, E. M. Forster
151. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
152. The Complete Lyrics, Bob Dylan
153. Selected Essays, Matthew Arnold
154. The Rebel, Albert Camus
155. Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse
156. The Inferno, Dante
157. The Writings of Chuang-Tzu
158. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
159. Dangerous Liaisons, Choderlos de Laclos
160. The Aristotle Reader
161. Collected Stories, Flannery O’Connor
162. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
163. Selected Writings, Jean Baudrillard
164. Stories, Anton Chekhov
165. Tales and Prefaces, Henry James
166. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
167. Selected Works and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.
168. Faust, J. W. von Goethe
169. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
170. Morphy’s Games of Chess, Paul Morphy
171. Super/System, Doyle Brunson et al.
172. Essays, D. H. Lawrence
173. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
174. Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins
175. Juliette, The Marquis de Sade
176. The Art of Fiction, John Gardner
177. The Game, Neil Strauss
178. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
179. The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies
180. Pragmatism, William James
181. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
182. Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida
183. The Complete Far Side, Gary Larsen
184. The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
185. Stories, Jorge Luis Borges
186. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
187. Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer
188. Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte
189. In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan
190. She, H. Rider Haggard
191. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
192. Romantic Poetry and Prose, ed. Harold Bloom
193. A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
194. The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O’Neill
195. A Room With A View, E. M. Forster
196. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
197. Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
198. The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche
199. The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet
200. Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes

For Facebook: 100 books rather than 15

100 Books That Changed Life For The Better

This replaces the 15 volume lists of books that marked me or did anything of that sort. These 100 books, together, can do anything. They can grow up to be astronauts if they want.

1. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
2. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
4. The Selected Poems of Alexander Pope
5. Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak
6. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
7. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. Dialogues, Plato
9. Selected Poems, Langston Hughes
10. Written on the Body, Jeannette Winterson
11. A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman
12. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
13. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
15. Platform, Michel Houellebecq
16. The Books of Genesis, Ecclesiastes, and Matthew
17. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
18. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Jean-Paul Sartre
19. Ariel, Sylvia Plath
20. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
21. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
22. Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
23. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
24. Praise of Folly, Erasmus
25. Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
26. Bad Habits, Dave Barry
27. Goodnight Moon, (don’t remember the author)
28. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
29. The Counterlife, Philip Roth
30. Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
31. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
32. Cheri, Collette
33. Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse
34. The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
35. Either/Or, Soren Kierkegaard
36. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
37. The Importance of Being Ernest, Oscar Wilde
38. Dune, Frank Herbert
39. Emile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
40. Selected Poems (including the 4 Quartets), T. S. Eliot
41. The Man Who Planted Trees, Jean Giono
42. Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson
43. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
44. Mystery Train, Greil Marcus
45. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
46. The Professor of Desire, Philip Roth
47. The Collected Prose of Woody Allen
48. Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov
49. The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
50. The Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu
51. Ulysses, James Joyce
52. Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman
53. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Lester Bangs
54. The Stranger, Albert Camus
55. Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard
56. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
57. The She-Wolf and Other Stories, Giovanni Verga
58. Possession, A. S. Byatt
59. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
60. Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
61. The Selected Poems of Rumi
62. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
63. My Dinner With Andre (screenplay), Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory
64. Mount Analogue, Rene Daumal
65. Selected Writings, Martin Heidegger
66. Selected Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
67. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
68. Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
69. Identity, Milan Kundera
70. The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault
71. The Art of Living, Alexander Nehamas
72. Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse
73. The Death of Adam: Essays, Marilynne Robinson
74. 60 Stories, Donald Barthelme
75. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
76. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
77. The Ambassadors, Henry James
78. The Selected Writings of Carl Jung
79. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
80. The Selected Poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson
81. Essays, Ralph Ellison
82. Essays, Michel de Montaigne
83. IV, Chuck Klosterman
84. Diaries, Anais Nin
85. Zadig, Voltaire
86. Ecrits, Jacques Lacan
87. The Dhammapada, Buddha
88. Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
89. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
90. The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
91. Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
92. The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard
93. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
94. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
95. Essays (including “The Doors of Perception”), Aldous Huxley
96. The Fall, Albert Camus
97. Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet
98. Poems, Sappho
99. The Vice Guide to DO’s and DON’Ts
100. The Portable Dorothy Parker

A Dream That I Had After Seeing Star Trek: The Movie

In this scene, young James Kirk is fighting, wenching, and drinking his way across Iowa, when suddenly…

OLD GUY WHO GETS THE BRAIN LEECHES LATER: We need you to be a starship trooper! Your standardized test scores are way off the charts!

JAMES KIRK: I don’t remember taking any standardized tests!

OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Of course not! You were totally drunk! But your noble, starship trooper blood sort of took them for you when you were passed out, thus proving to millions of teenagers — once again — that if they don’t perform well on the SATs, they should kill themselves!

JAMES KIRK: Are you saying that I have mitochondria in my blood, like Anakin and the annoying, nerdy kid from A Wrinkle in Time?

OLD GUY / BRAIN LEECHES: Probably!

JAMES KIRK: Well, that sounds kinda derivative, but…Wait a second, if I become a starship trooper, am I going to have to take that test designed by Spock? It’s totally unbeatable.

O.G. / B.L.: Don’t worry, you’ll kick that test’s ass!

JIMSTER: How?

O.G. / B.L.: By cheating.

JIM-BOB: Does that mean I cheated on the earlier standardized tests, too? Because cheating against Spock seems like a normal thing for a hot-blooded kid from Iowa to do. That Spock! He’s so crazy! The token woman/black person wants to have his baby! But on the other hand, cheating on these standardized tests from my mysterious past would pretty much just make me a cheater, which is sort of lame.

O.G. / B.L.: So let’s just assume that you only cheated when it was awesome to do so. Oh God! The brain leeches! I can feel them attaching themselves!

In Which Our Hero Resolves The Question of Nature vs. Nurture

(x-posted to The Valve, of course)

Nature versus nurture, Lodge. Nature always wins.
–Secretary William Cleary, Wedding Crashers

Jenny Davidson’s new book of cultural criticism, entitled Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, is one of the strangest and most elliptical works of its kind I’ve ever read. I say this because, unlike traditional works of historicist criticism, Breeding never makes an overt argument about how modern readers should feel about its subject, the nature vs. nurture debates of the 18th Century. It risks seeming purposeless in order to pit Steven Pinker, a contemporary researcher and author on matters of cognition and evolution, against William Godwin, a pedagogue and Romantic who died in 1836. This fundamental comparison seems to be more an effect of the text than something Davidson consciously intended; she spells out her intentions in the Introduction, citing W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes as inspirations for a text that seeks only to explore the “grid” of an issue and to present its nuances in a tolerant, dispassionate fashion.

In so doing, however, the text is bound to leave us mildly disappointed. It is not that it lacks erudition or insight; in fact, as the great diversity of responses published on the Valve indicates, its plentiful supply of both encourages readers to enter this debate as one might a house preserved from that time, lingering over those artifacts that they, for their own reasons, find most compelling. But I think that, even despite ourselves, we come to a book like Breeding in the hopes that we might end up a little closer to answering those same raw and troubling questions that inspired Locke and Rousseau. That remains, in this case, the road not taken. Still, Davidson’s book suggests, if only by what it chooses to include, some important ways of cutting the Gordian knot of nature and nurture.

***

Davidson claims that the uncertainty produced by the tension between nature and nurture is morally ideal. She writes in the conclusion to the book that “a hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation, a hard-core advocacy of nurture” are both likely to make us, in Godwin’s words, “the helpless victims of a blind and remorseless destiny” (205). The real problem with having a destiny of this kind is that it enables us to be summed up by the controlling forces of society: if society knows exactly who we are, either because of our inborn nature or because of how it has formed us, than it can legitimately claim the right to act on that knowledge, effectively depriving us of our freedom. To this end, Davidson revisits not only the intertwined histories of racism and eugenics, but also quotes Mary Midgley on the necessary limits of nurture: “If we were genuinely plastic and indeterminate at birth, there could be no reason why society should not stamp us into any shape that might suit it” (7).

Over the course of the book, Davidson presents Godwin as a zealous pedagogue who started out believing entirely in “nurture,” but who eventually had to confront the limits of his own theories:

Yet Political Justice’s uncompromising position on the natural equality of men would be modified by Godwin in subsequent editions of the book, a retraction that speaks to Godwin’s intellectual honesty in the face of his experience as an educator of real children (as opposed to a pure theorist of education). (174)

Davidson continues, after quoting Godwin at length:

The irony is that Godwin should have been so perfectly positioned to see and to articulate the workings of hereditary causes in spite of–because of?–his early adherence to an extreme Helvetian position. In the end, he argues for balance [...] Man “brings a certain character into the world with him,” but not “an immutable character,” although elsewhere in the same collection an older position resurfaces.” (178)

Steven Pinker, by contrast, is the modern academic researcher who never exposes himself to the rough winds of doubt, and who is therefore guilty of resorting to “what seems like intellectual bullying” (40) in support of a heavily deterministic, evolutionary interpretation of human nature and culture, one that even “many of his professional peers are inclined to question” (39). Pinker epitomizes the “hard-core commitment to nature-based explanation” that ultimately puts our personal freedoms in danger.

This is, by now, familiar territory for scholarship in the humanities, as both John Holbo and Miriam Burstein have pointed out. Davidson presents herself as a moderate, championing an ongoing process of inquiry as well as the habit of wary scepticism that sustains it. (Pinker, by contrast, calls himself a moderate but is no such thing.) Such an attitude, her text promises, is both a means of potentially making ourselves better than we currently are, and an antidote to dangerous political enthusiasms.

I hope that I will not give offense by describing such an approach, with its focus on self-improvement and gradualism, as comfortably bourgeois, in the same sense in which we might usefully apply the term to both Barthes and Sebald. (After all, Sebald, in the indictment of a very poor meal that Davidson quotes, is not only preparing the way for his description of starving refugee children; he is also railing against frozen seafood and mass-produced tartar sauce.) In writing about our determination to be “better than we once were” (201, quoting John Passmore), Davidson calls New Year’s resolutions to mind, as well our desire to exercise more, to criticize the action rather than the person, to take piano lessons, and to finally itemize our household expenses. (In the context, one wants to ask: do not even the publicans the same?) It is closer than necessary to the slippery pseudo-critiques of American society in Malcolm Gladwell and Freakonomics, many of which reduce down to new versions of old self-help truisms. Politically, it is once again the French Revolution as seen from the perspective of English aristocrats who felt the Terror, and the Napoleonic threat, rather more keenly than the horrors of monarchy or empire.

At the same time, Davidson’s book is potentially much better than its excessively determined beginning and end. In her illuminating discussions of Shakespeare, Defoe, Rousseau, and others, she paves the way for a transformation of the debate over nature and nurture into a conversation about the role of art and imagination in the constitution of the individual, and the importance of defending an imaginative, singular Gestalt against the totalizing claims of reason. Davidson spends considerable time on the popular belief that what women imagined during conception and pregnancy influenced the appearance and nature of the child. She mentions twice that women could bear a child who resembled their husband if they pictured the husband while committing adultery. This led to the unintentionally hilarious theory that “resemblance might be brought about because the mother, lying her lover’s arms, feared discovery by her real husband” (23) and therefore practiced a kind of exculpatory visualization exercise.

This seems like a fairly obvious case of reversal, especially considering how that paradigm has evolved up to the present: the real fear is not that the woman will be thinking of her husband while making it with the matador, but rather that she will be thinking of another man while having sex with her husband. Out of this comes all the scenes in modern comedies and soap operas where a lover shouts out the wrong name in the heat of passion, or somebody confesses to “Thinking of you / in the final throes,” as Amy Winehouse puts it. What is terrifying is that the sexual act, which is supposed to produce a merging of subjectivities, cannot banish the stubbornly personal and solitary nature of the imagination. Furthermore, it is the imagination that makes sense of the present through reference to the past, literally putting its “stamp” on an individual’s perceptions in the same way that the parent’s visage stamps the child. The concept of the association of ideas, which was so central to both Locke and Godwin, leads us to analyze the synthetic processes at work in such phenomena as dreams — it leads us, in other words, toward a Freudian understanding of individuality.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we see imagination and reason divided along gendered lines, with the personal accidents of the feminine imagination always figured as a threat to or disfigurement of the perfect, rational male mind, and the correspondingly perfect body. It is especially noteworthy that desire and trauma, which so heavily determine the gap between ourselves and others, are always the points of reference for inherited characteristics. In addition to the anxieties about adultery, “a desire for strawberries might produce a strawberry birthmark” (21), and “the sight of a mutilated beggar [might produce] a child with missing limbs.” The list of traumas expands to include a child whose ear bears the mark of her father’s dueling injury, and a lamb with wool affected by its mother’s once-broken leg.

What may appear to be unscientific fairy stories touch unexpectedly on truths: children are very much subject to the traumas their parents have experienced, both as individual people and as a couple, and they are also subject to the fantasies, superstitions, and other constructs upon which the adults nearest to them depend. This remains a source of great anxiety, as we see in a story like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, about the suffocating hold of a governess’s imagination over her two charges. On a larger scale, in both The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, we see Dostoevsky driven to distraction by the persistence of superstitions and cults that almost sanction insanity, and which are passed down from one generation to the next. But mixed in with this reasonable complaint, one senses, in this contempt for the impressionable and disordered female mind, an intolerant attitude towards the contingent elements in sensibility and subjective perceptions, because these contingencies produce heterogeneous, ungovernable subjects.

It is unfortunate that a book that deals so freely with the “erotic investments” of Rousseau and the sexual anxieties of Swift, Godwin, Malthus and others should dismiss Freud in a single paragraph:

Rousseau’s discussion would find a famous sequel in Freud’s contention “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” But all such arguments hinge on a foundational act of self-deception or self-contradiction in which the writer only pretends to abnegate a culture on which he depends, however much he may deplore it. (120)

This reading of Rousseau and Civilization and Its Discontents reduces all people to helplessness in the face of whatever happens to be their inherited culture and circumstances. It is anti-literary and perhaps even anti-intellectual in its implications. It is difficult to see why Rousseau’s noble savage should be denied the tolerant attitude Davidson adopts towards Jonathan Swift’s fantastical backdrops for social criticism. The very act of going back to the eighteenth century, and imagining oneself to be observing the impact of dealing with unruly children on William Godwin, is an enabling fiction for historical scholarship. Furthermore, any act of repentance is necessarily an act of self-contradiction, which is why Friedrich Nietzsche opposed such attitudes on logical grounds — to strive for perfection, as Davidson wishes us to do, is to stand in contradiction to one’s own history and past choices. Rousseau and Freud are neither more nor less “counterfactual” than she herself wishes to be.

Rather than dismissing a “return to the state of Nature” as a mere impossibility, it seems to me that we can usefully read Rousseau as advocating encounters with Nature in a manner that must, now as then, be deliberately arranged. If we want to have an experience of wildness, we have to arrange time off from work, and we usually have to drive or fly quite a distance, almost as though there were indeed a “deficiency [of Nature's reach or presence] that cannot by definition be anything but an accident and a deviation from Nature” (115, quoting Derrida). Derrida’s attempts to “disprove” the loss of the natural environment lead to what is, I would argue, a very serious misreading of Rousseau’s passage on men “accustomed from childhood to the inclemencies of the weather, and the rigor of the seasons, hardened to fatigue, and forced to defend naked and unarmed their life and their Prey [...] [who thereby] develop a robust and almost unalterable temperament” that their children come to share. Davidson describes this as the judicious strengthening of “a constitution or temperament [...] by culture” (117), which is simply too reductive. If it is part of one’s culture to consume large amounts of green tea, it is nonetheless not the culture that actually reduces the propensity of one’s cells to form cancerous tumors. It is still the compounds in the tea. I say this because of the inclination to discredit everything Rousseau is saying about Nature by linking it to matters of preference and habit that apply equally to other ideologies, as though the content of the encounter itself was therefore rendered irrelevant.

If we think of Freud and Rousseau as proposing encounters of a certain salutary kind — with the traumatic past and with the bracing impersonality and grandeur of Nature, respectively — then it is not so hard to see them as akin to us in their pursuit of perfection, or rather, to see their stamp upon our own endeavors. In all cases it falls to the individual to bring into harmony that which is contradictory and unresolved in her own experience: the country and the city, the past and the present, theory and practice. We do not know what combination of bitter experience and inbred melancholy produces a Swift, but both are encompassed and transcended by the creative triumph of his work, which he leaves behind as his legacy. (Nor do we know the proportions of myopia and gentleness in the visions of Monet.) Because we have Swift, and Sylvia Plath, and the Sex Pistols, and de Sade, and the rest, we can say, like Fuckhead in Jesus’ Son, “All these…weirdos, and me…getting a little better every day. I had never known…I had never imagined even for a heartbeat that…there might be a place in the world for people like us.” But the search for that place, or rather the heterotopia of many such places, still puts us violently at odds with the general drift of the society, still strands us in the hope that such personal visions, sealed up inside of art, can be awoken into a real and common life.

Good Paulina, lead us from hence,
Where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part
Performed in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissevered. Hastily lead away.
–William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

I Guess White Boys Feel It More

(x-posted to the lovely PopMatters)

I’ve done a bad bad thing
Cut my brother in half
–Little Dewey Cox in Walk Hard

The new millenium has been kind to biopics of musicians. We have, most of us, seen the blockbusters, including Walk The Line, Ray, and Notorious, and these have been accompanied by more minor films like Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, Cadillac Records, and Jenna Maroney’s unforgettable Sing Them Blues, White Girl: The Jackie Jomp-Jomp Story. Some of the recurrent themes of these films, such as drug abuse, became so predictable that they were easily satirized in Walk Hard.

But in thinking about how these films diverge, after finally reaching the (somewhat confused) end of Notorious, I realized that in both the earlier film 8 Mile, the semi-fictional story of Eminem’s life, and in Walk The Line, the white performer comes to a moment of emotional overload that threatens his very ability to get on stage. In Cash’s case, this is because he is re-living his brother’s death; in Eminem’s case, it is because he has to face a hostile, mostly African-American crowd as a white rapper.

By contrast, in their respective films, neither Ray Charles nor Biggie experience this kind of stage fright. Instead, particularly in Notorious, there is an utterly natural transition from the private work of practicing and writing to the public arena of performance. This is even the case despite Ray’s having undergone, like Cash, the death of a brother while very young.

At the heart of this difference are problems of authenticity. For the white perfomers, the “backstage” moment of emotion re-assures the audience that the art they are making is authentic. Cash feels so darn bad about his brother’s death that it makes perfect sense for him to travel to Folsom Prison, there to perform a song about a man he (didn’t kill) in Reno just to watch him (not) die. Eminem is so tortured and vulnerable without the beat to sustain him that he deserves to do black music so selfishly, and to use it to get himself wealthy.

The point here is not to criticize Cash or Eminem, both of whom have done landmark work. Rather, it is to observe that these strategically placed tantrums obscure the imaginative leap involved in creating universal art. We don’t think Bruce Springsteen actually is Johnny 99, but the character lives and breathes regardless. Eminem is a great artist not because he’s remained the factory worker from Detroit, but because, over the course of several albums, he’s led us through the dizzy territory of being too many people at once, and nobody.

When Biggie steps up to the mic to record “Juicy,” the film presents it as though he is bringing his “street realness” to the silky, Sean Combs approved sample. In fact, if one considers what Biggie’s life was like at the time, most of “Juicy” is an act of pure, indulgent fantasy. He could barely afford to feed his family, which is a long way from sipping champagne when you’re thirsty. Later, when he actually had everything he’d been chasing, the songs were both more ironic (“Mo Money Mo Problems”) and, compared to his blistering first album, a tad anemic.

So, on the one hand, you have white performers who adopt fictions (of being black or of being a murderer) in order to express what would otherwise be an inexpressible storm of “real” emotion, and on the other, you have black performers who simply need an avenue for dishing up their “realness” to the world. But this demand for authenticity is misguided, and so is the reaction against it. TI vs. TIP was a casualty of T.I.’s guilty conscience about not being real, as was The Life of Chris Gaines. Meanwhile, flights of sheer, baroque fantasy like the Decemberists’ recent album The Hazards of Love suffer from an off-putting hermeticism. The characters talk to each other, but not to us, because they don’t reflect, unlike a successful piece of pop song fiction, who the singer wants to be, regardless of who they are. T.I. got back on track with his latest album because he succumbed to a new fantasy: he now wants to be a preacher.

In Walk the Line, Sam Phillips tells Cash, “If you was hit by a truck, and you was lyin’ in that gutter dyin’, and you had time to sing one song, one song that would let God know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up…” It’s a powerful statement, but it might mislead us into thinking about the sum of our experiences, when art calls for the sum of our desires. Tyler Durden has it right when he puts a gun to the head of a convenience store clerk named Raymond.

“The question,” he says, “RAYMOND, is WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE?”

***

PS. If you have any doubt that Cash wanted to be the killer in “Folsom Prison Blues,” check out your local karaoke night. Somewhere, right now, a guy is singing that song, and when he gets to the part about shooting a man in Reno, the audience will go nuts.

Absolutely Fun And True Fact #9: The University As It Could Be

Dear readers,

I thought I’d give us two glimpses of what higher learning might look like if we followed Mark Taylor’s excellent advice about “ending the university as we know it” in favor of a non-specialized, interdisciplinary series of collaborations. These are based on experiences from the past two days. In the first example, we have a situation that brings together business smarts, game theory, wellness, the study of ancient cultures, and an in-depth knowledge of the Federal bureaucracy. In the second example, we have an interdisciplinary conversation that calls upon history, psychology, “guerrilla marketing,” internet business models, advanced strategy, economic modeling, and metaphysics.

SCENE 1: NEAR A POKER TABLE AT THE BICYCLE CASINO

Floor manager: Now what’s that you’ve got, Adam?
Adam: These are my new pills. Absolutely fantastic.
Floor manager, picking up the white and green bottle: Where are they from?
Adam: From China, near my home country. I have already sold about two million advance orders.
Floor manager: What do they do?
Adam: They do everything, they help you as a man, they burn fat.
Floor manager: How many should you take per day?
Adam: As many as you need for your own personal goals and performance.
Floor manager: Well, you see, I probably should take them, because I’m looking to lose about twenty five pounds. I don’t think I’m a fat man, you see, but I am a little, you know, thick. I’m physically a bit thick, and I should exercise, but I just don’t working these hours.
Adam: You could probably lose forty pounds taking enough of these. I’ll tell you what. You take this bottle right here, and if you like them, then tell your friends. Free of charge.
Floor manager: Well I’ll do that, and I’ll have some customers for you for sure if these things work.
Nearby player: Have they been approved by the FDA?
Adam: Almost! Maybe by June. Right now they are on the FDA list for “special grasses.”

SCENE 2: NEAR A PASTRY TABLE AT A BAGEL PLACE

Guy with a greasy moustache: I mean, I think all of this has to do with strategy. It’s like a game of chess. Do you like chess? I used to play when I was a kid. Actually I won a big chess tournament at the age of twelve.
Guy with a shaved head: Yes, um, I don’t play chess as seriously as that, but I like the idea of the game. Game of kings. So you say that this strategical stuff can also work with marketing?
Greasy moustache: I’m not saying it can work with marketing. I’m saying that it IS marketing. Everything else has been left behind.
Shaved head: Where do I get the rest of these books? And how do I apply them?
Greasy moustache: Well applying them is the hard part. Because you really have to make it a part of your daily life. That’s why hypnosis has been so good for me, because I don’t have the discipline actually. But I must have had the desire bouncing around somewhere in here, because I wanted to see the hypnotherapist so that I could make guerrilla marketing more central to my approach. And boom, that office is just five minutes from where I work.
Shaved head: And now there’s a second book?
Greasy moustache: That’s right. And I tell you what. I want you to get that second book so bad that I am going to give you twenty dollars. Here’s twenty dollars. Go on Amazon and order it, and if it costs more than twenty dollars, you contact me and tell me and I’ll make up the difference.
Shaved head: But you say these aren’t new strategies.
Greasy moustache: Well, to you and me they are new, to the general public it’s like wow, I’ve never thought of that, fantastic. But actually it’s all very old. Alan Greenspan was talking about it five years ago. But the real revelation is that Abraham Lincoln was thinking about these things during the Civil War, and that’s why the South lost.
Shaved head: I heard something like that. I love this because it’s like a springboard to my own thinking, you know, the stuff I’ve been able to pick up.
Greasy moustache: Exactly. Which is why these books are like soil for other books. That’s what I call them. Because they take readers and turn them into authors. And at that moment where you say–
Shaved head: –”I’m an author”–
Greasy moustache: Yes, and you recognize that in yourself, the Author Moment, something metaphysical happens, and that’s synergy. Because, you know, if I thought that there was absolutely no synergy, no authorship, and it was all just sell sell sell, I couldn’t do it. I would lose heart.

The NYTimes Says “End The University As We Know It”

Dear readers: every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in. I don’t know why the New York Times published Mark Taylor’s op-ed on “ending the university.” If they hadn’t done so, I could have kept on with the work of figuring out how to write my dissertation without a teaching position, as UCI will probably not renew its TA contracts for seventh-year graduate students. Alternatively, I could have simply focused on writing about music in my spare time. Y’all should be sure to check the PopMatters “Sound Affects” blog for the upcoming post entitled “Just Say No To Dylan.”

But instead, I have to add to Marc Bousquet’s characteristically wonderful reaction piece my own observations about Taylor’s faddish and wrongheaded plan for academic “reform.” Thankfully, Bousquet has saved me the trouble of responding to Taylor’s calls for the end of tenure, and to his off-the-cuff, factually incorrect statements about the job market and probable compensation for so-called “contingent” faculty (who do not have tenure and are not on a tenure track).

I am throwing in my own two cents because still more of Taylor’s arguments compel a response: first, his proposal for re-inventing the dissertation; second, his ideas for re-designing the disciplines, ideas that are very subtly and very insidiously political.

Taylor believes that graduate students should produce multimedia dissertations, along the lines of undergraduate “final papers,” which have been transformed into all kinds of other rhetorical exercises, including websites, video games, films, and so on.

The overwhelming direction of these new assignments options is towards visual media; there is, increasingly, an assumption that visual media (or mixed media with some text) is preferable to plain text. This is not necessarily the case. It should go without saying that a certain depth of analysis usually requires a predominance of text. Of course it is possible to create a film that conveys as much meaning as a book, but the people who can do this usually end up in film school. The reason that most dissertations end up in a dusty attic, metaphorically speaking, is that they are written for a small audience of specialists rather than for Malcolm Gladwell’s audience. The problem is one of content, not one of form. Graduate students could be encouraged to write for a popular audience, but this would naturally lead to a disconnect between the demands of two very different readerships. Perhaps we have reached a point in the cultural history of the West where specialization no longer holds much value for us, other than in practical fields like medicine. Be that as it may, we have to discuss the matter directly, and not dodge it by telling graduate students to put their ideas about Duns Scotus in the form of a theology video game.

On to the second proposal. Taylor writes that we should

…abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

This goes together with his insistence that academia be regulated and reformed in the same way as “Detroit” and “Wall Street.” To begin with, one can only wish that academia received the same treatment as the villains in the world financial crisis, who were bailed out in handsome fashion because their services were deemed indispensable to the society. Moreover, in looking at Taylor’s proposed new disciplines, we discover a very cynical conglomeration of topics that would feel at home in a newspaper’s Sunday magazine, all of which quietly reinforce the capitalist notion of the empowered, optimized, mechanized individual. In other words, Taylor’s naive belief that Wall Street and Detroit are the thriving beneficiaries of centralized liberal planning — as opposed to irresponsible entities exploiting their stranglehold over taxpayers by dragging everyone down with them — is an alibi for Wall Street that goes hand-in-hand with his desire to re-frame academic labor in terms of politically acquiescent “deliverables.”

Consider how ludicrous it is to discuss “Time” as part of a program with a built-in “sunset date” of seven years, after which point it will be either “abolished, continued or significantly changed.” According to this model, the “Time” program is already defined in advance by a “project completion date.” It is unthinkable that such a nebulous “ad hoc” field would produce any radical new insights; instead, after seven years, the researchers would of course come to the conclusion that there are two types of time: managed occupational time, and leisure time, which we need to feel happy and fulfilled. They would cite old studies by Ford, and new ones conducted by Google at their employee complex, in order to help answer questions about how to make workers more productive; they would cite Proust and Bergson in their discussions of “off-duty” leisure time.

The same goes for the rest of Taylor’s categories. Notice how quickly he re-establishes Cartesian dualisms by splitting “mind” from “body”: the former would reduce down to cognition and strategies for optimizing cognition, and the latter would become a faintly nauseating playground for discussions of health, wellness, and sexuality. He invokes “Money” (“Are You Making The Most Out Of Your Dollar?”) but not “Labor.” He calls us to the study of “Life,” but is silent about death. Finally, he comes around to “Water,” the most incongruous discipline, which was his real darling all along. In giving us a quick glimpse of what the “Water” department would look like, he reveals that it is primarily a public works and urban planning department, concerned with problems of distributing water. As a professor of religion, his role would be to legitimize not merely the secularization of modern life, but the instrumentalization of human beings. Notice that he puts “theology” together with the “professional schools,” and apart from the humanities, who apparently do not have professional practitioners: “A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture.”

It is downright frightening to consider how the “religious turn” in academia has been used to justify what ought to be called the “neo-liberal turn.” What on the surface appears to be an interest in religion is really an interest in containing and controlling everything subjective through the definable practices and ideologies of this or that faith. Religion, like leisure time, comes to stand for certain human needs that those at the top reluctantly recognize as extending beyond food and shelter. As long as those needs can still be anticipated and regulated, they can be tolerated and even encouraged. The search for meaning can be doled out, after consultation with the experts, like so many cups of water, and the university as we know it can be brought to an end.