The Kugelmass Episodes Rides Again!

Dear readers,

It’s time to stop with all the cross-posting already, because this blog is dying. You know it, and I know it. Since I’ve put everything I’ve written lately up at the Valve, people are just commenting there, secure in the knowledge that the comment threads there are read by over nine billion people, including a high ranking official with the World Bank. Meanwhile, because of semi-professional nature of the Valve (which, incidentally, is a great thing if you’re an academic with itchy typewriting fingers) my posts here have also skewed overmuch towards polemics about the rather grim situation of the humanities in the United States. Rather than being, say, posts about laundry. I got engaged in February, but you’d never know it from reading this blog until earlier this sentence.

So, if my highest hopes for what I write at the Valve continue to be the sorts of tracts Matthew Arnold once wrote, over here, it’s time to hoist Lester Bangs’s dirty flag again. Let the chaos, the power chords, and all things personal recommence!

See you again real soon,

Kugelmass

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies

(x-posted to The Valve)

Amardeep Singh at The Valve drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long Sunday.

This is Deresiewicz:

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.

CR responds:

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 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.

Amardeep, in his post, links to a terrifically helpful report from 2001-2002 to ground his point that “theory” has not been responsible for the decline of the English major.

I am on my way to responding to a fascinating special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), edited by Michael Szalay and Valve contributor Sean McCann, entitled “Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren’t There,” and featuring Szalay and McCann’s own essay “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left.” So, in some ways, this post is a prelude. It is also a reflection on what it means to be apprenticing for a profession that Deresiewicz, an Associate Professor at Yale, thinks “is, however slowly, dying.” To put this in perspective, the job Deresiewicz currently holds is, for anybody in my position, more or less the pinnacle of their professional hopes ten years out.

***

Rather than letting “the decline of the English major” remain an abstraction, let me give some particulars of my own experience. When I was getting my B.A. in English, of my eight closest friends, five were either English or Comparative Literature majors; all had taken part in an intensive humanities program freshman year that included housing all the participants together. By senior year, there was absolutely no distinction between our academic work and the rest of our time. We were working on essays and theses about Henry James, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Samuel Beckett, and so on; we were writing our own manifestos, poems, and really long emails; we were drinking cheap vodka (or sometimes some new thing purchased with fledgling credit cards, like cinnamon schnapps) and watching Barfly, High Fidelity, or a student production of Dangerous Liaisons. I’d throw a party, my friend would sit cross-legged on the floor, soliloquizing about track 13 on Exile on Main Street and then disappearing home to write a story called “Rocket Queen.” A series of intensely heated arguments about Heidegger, conducted mostly at around three in the morning, led me to an independent study on Being and Time and my first real introduction to Continental philosophy and “theory.”

By 2002, one year after graduation, my girlfriend at the time had completed her M.A. in Slavic Literature at Stanford, with plans to write and direct for the stage; my other five friends had been accepted to graduate programs in English (Cornell, U. of Chicago), Comparative Literature (U. Penn), and Slavic Literature (UC Berkeley). I began graduate studies in English at UC Irvine in 2003.

Of those five people, one is still in graduate school doing literary studies; she is currently on the job market. My friend who majored in Slavic Literature, once he realized the kind of work he would be allowed to do (historicizing work on lesser-known Russian authors), switched to graduate work in computer science. The rest dropped out in order to attend law school.

When my roommate at Irvine, a new friend and a remarkable scholar, and yet another college friend switched from literature to law school in the space of a year, I remember telling my parents that the discipline had lost its edge. Nothing was “happening,” as we say, and young intellectuals were looking for other ways to have a social impact, or other careers to pursue while they worked on their own poems and novels.

In the four years since then, things have gotten much worse. This is particularly true in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger has continually sought to cut funding for higher education, but it is true everywhere in the United States. There are practical problems: increased fees and overhead costs, shrinking budgets for grants, less guaranteed teaching, fewer tenure-track jobs. This financial squeeze is one cause of a rash of damaging wars within literary studies, and academia more generally, that illustrate how desperate the situation has become.

For example, there is the spectacle of professors calling for the reform or elimination of tenure, using the same specious arguments that conservatives used during the first Bush Administration about tenured high school teachers; in essence, the idea is to treat teachers like salesmen working on commission. There are also media outlets like The New York Times calling for taxes on university endowments, then supplementing that with reminders that professors aren’t no better than anybody else, and shouldn’t be so uppity. At his blog Acephalous, Scott Kaufman took on the unenviable job of calling out K.C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who created a sensation by fearlessly exposing “political correctness” among fellow professors at Duke.

About a year and a half ago, at the Valve, I wrote:

The ideological differences between Badiou and Michaels, or Zizek and Michaels, are not trivial. (Neither are the differences between Zizek and Badiou.) I am not suggesting that the well-rehearsed disagreements between Lacanians and historicists can be easily overcome. Nonetheless, my belief in the projects of universalism and equality leave me out of patience with the refusal to recognize common ground.

I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Petulance,” from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain: “What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage” (673, trans. Woods). The great petulance follows the death of Mynheer Peeperkorn in Mann; for us, it has followed the death of the brilliant and charismatic figure of Derrida.

I now believe that the kind of reconciliation I hoped for in that post will not arrive, at least not without significant clashes coming first. It’s the nature of the blogosphere to invite articulate conflict, of course, but even so I’ve watched one conversation after another in which I participated, and which I thought were cordial dialogues about academia, quickly become bitter disputes. (I should add that in the time since that post, it has become clear that Slavoj Zizek can’t replace Derrida. His fatuous and repetitive lists of political “ironies,” e.g. that Whole Foods is just another capitalist organ, have begun to alienate even his most devoted followers.)

As things stand, there are basically four schools of thought about literary studies:

(1) Critical thinking and writing skills. Some academics believe that the primary value of literary studies is in teaching marketable writing skills, along with “critical thinking,” which is basically the ability to separate yourself from received ideas and representations, and fits with old Jeffersonian ideas about a democratic citizenry. These people are usually the most eager to sink literary studies into broader writing and rhetoric programs, and they like to try to reach students by using multimedia and the Internet (e.g. applying critical thinking skills to a YouTube video). Politically, they advocate a sort of deliberative centrism that in the United States reads as “Democratic.”

The biggest problem with this is that all humanities scholars are qualified to teach writing and critical thinking; these general skills have no special relationship to literary studies.

(2) Historicism. Considering historicism as a whole school of thought, one that has gathered momentum now independent of Michel Foucault and even Stephen Greenblatt, the project is a Marxist project that seeks to explain the material foundations for ideological products (i.e. literary works). There is some lingering regard here for the literary in and of itself, insofar as these literary critics believe that literature represents and preserves ideology in ways other artifacts do not.

This approach blurs the lines between history and literary studies, but the deeper problem is one of sensibility: this particular version of Marxism condescends to its subjects. Because historicism suppresses the counterfactual element in literature — imaginative leaps in excess of historical givens, and frequently opposed to them — it comes off as both pedestrian and pessimistic.

If this seems excessively harsh, consider how many historicist works center on claims about a) popular scientific errors of the time, b) wishful utopianism or progressivism, c) wishful literary solutions to real and perhaps insoluble problems, or d) secret sympathies between a narrative and the prevailing social hierarchy.

(3) The mandarins. This group represents the strange alliance between scholars who have disappeared into the labyrinth of theoretical debate, and scholars who have made aesthetics, in some “purified” form, their justification and refuge. It encompasses both spiraling Zizekian or Derridean ironies as well as Harold Bloom’s gasps of awe. This group mainly consists of academics who already have tenure, or other people in relatively privileged situations, and gets some support (at least on the blogs) from people outside academia who like to think of literature and philosophy as lofty, removed realms. Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” columns fall very much in this category.

(4) The militants. A group that no longer exists, and so will have to be invented. In Saint Paul, Alain Badiou writes in the prologue that “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure [on the order of Paul]—even if it takes the form of denying its possibility—called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of this century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant” (2).

I’m amused by Badiou’s notion of a widespread search: it brings to mind comic book scenarios of searching for a hero or a cure, and perhaps also the image of bloodhounds sniffing out a forest. In truth, no such search is really underway. The very idea is horrifying to professors most invested in teaching critical thinking, who see their job as teaching resistance to militancy and dogmatism. It is equally annoying to many other academics who believe that literature and philosophy are not the proper arenas for militancy, either because culture is ineffectual at producing radical change, or because it is a distant Olympus of intellectual pleasure.

What does it mean to speak of militancy within literary studies? It means passionate commitment to a way of living in the world, one that feels itself to be somewhat at odds with its own time. I love what CR has to say about the rise of self-censorship and phony irony during political discussions with students, but I am also certain that the answer is not just making extreme political statements. The vitality of contemporary popular music is based in part on its association with ways of living life: hedonism, excess, self-expression, community. The glamour that attaches to writing fiction and poetry gains similarly from our notion of that life: among recent critical successes, one might look at Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which is joyously concerned with the communities of bohemians and would-be artists in Mexico. This delight in the absolutism of living through art is equally there in Annie Dillard’s ascetic experiments in sharpened consciousness, and in Jonathan Lethem’s version of nerdy urban hip. When I think back on my engagement with literature and art in college, it was an essential part of a whole life I was living at that time. It is not merely that no major theoretical school has emerged since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, as Deresiewicz writes — it is also that one can trace the decline of that work’s meaningfulness in Butler’s persistent effort afterwards to detach her queer studies from the lived experiences of alternative lifestyles, alternative communities, and drag. It is really any wonder that our private conversations come to linger more on the films of Pedro Almodovar or on camp films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where drag is not merely the subject, but is also allowed to be present? Yet that arc repeats itself everywhere in the profession.

In short, militancy is another word for idealism, both in the sense of hopefulness, and in the sense of living according to ideas, taken broadly to include all forms of intentional representation. It sounds very adolescent, surely, and yet there is something strange in Deresiewicz’s complaint that “the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.” This isn’t true at all; the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by the condescending notions of adults about what makes something feel relevant to younger persons, as well as by our own preference for “sexy” topics, identity myths, and multimedia. In fact, the alienated attitude our students adopt derives from the distance we ourselves keep from the literature in question. Furthermore, education always defines itself in relation to youth: without its ardor and skepticism, there would be no Socratic dialogues, no Emile, nor any other treasure of pedagogy.

***

What the profession is experiencing now is less an absolute decline than it is a drop-off following an unprecedented boom in the 1960s; historically speaking, the 1960s were an anomalous period of extraordinary interest in literary studies. In my next post, I will examine how then-popular ideas about culture, identity, and experience created this boom, the backlash against those ideas, and why that backlash has finally led to the presently underwhelming state of literary studies and Continental philosophy.

A Little Something You Can Touch: HBO’s Wire and the Politics of Visual Media

(x-posted to The Valve)

Spend some on a little something you can touch. A new car, a new coat…it’s why we get up in the morning.
-The Greek

You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.
-Marlo

Talking about The Wire, which most of the people I know do twice per day, is like repeating a mantra: Season 1 is the police station. Season 2 is the docks. Season 3 is the streets (or, more inaccurately, “politics”). Season 4 is public schools. Season 5 is the press — I haven’t even seen Season 5, but I must’ve heard that six times already. People talk about each season as though they were separate reports from the President’s Council: “Have you started Season 5 yet? Wait, you didn’t see Season 2?” The show’s schematic design encourages people to talk about it in ways usually reserved for non-fiction, with an emphasis on its structural critiques of one poorer-than-average city (Baltimore), and maybe a comment in passing about the show’s brilliant detective/fuck-up in residence, McNulty.

Yes, McNulty’s no angel, but the terms of the discussion are themselves interesting and relevant to the perspective of the show’s writers. The Wire, unlike (for example) The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, is a show written almost entirely from outside the consciousness of its characters. Whereas, in the case of Tony Soprano or Claire Fisher, we felt their highs and lows, inhabited their dreams, and saw how their psychic lives bled into reality, The Wire keeps its distance from the cast, and does a good job of representing the systems that contain them. This (not the pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand) ought properly to be called the new objectivism, and it is a sign of the increasing dominance of visual representation (e.g. the television serial) as well as of a certain form of functionalist liberalism. I’d expect nothing less of a show whose very title substitutes media for persons, and I’m not critical of The Wire per se — rather, I think of the show as one of the best versions of a paradigm that should not be allowed to foreclose other ways of seeing.

***

First of all, The Wire did not exactly invent the drama of the insubordinate detective who bucks the front office to catch crooks. I’m reminded of the brilliant Dirty Harry parody in The Simpsons:

Chief: You busted up that crack house pretty bad, McGonigle. Did you really have to break so much furniture?
McGonigle: You tell me, Chief. You had a pretty good view from behind your desk.
Homer: Ah, McGonigle: eases the pain.
Chief: You’re off the case, McGonigle!
McGonigle: You’re off your case, Chief!
Chief: What does that mean exactly?
Homer: (yelling) It means he gets results, you stupid chief!
Lisa: Dad, sit down.
Homer: Oh, I’m sorry.

The dynamic goes all the way back to the formative years of noir, which has two particularly interesting features as a genre. First of all, from pretty early on, it had a very cozy relationship with film and television. Works by James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, and Mickey Spillane (among others) were adapted brilliantly for the screen. Film noir directors like Alfred Hitchcock worked with both film and television, and characters like Mike Hammer were used for both. Noir writing was heavily influenced by Ernest Hemingway’s journalistic prose, and emphasized action and things in precise, staccato sentences. It came of age during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and in fact in noir novels one can watch two things begin to fuse: the vicarious gaze of visual media, and a journalistic insistence on unvarnished facts.

Noir was also a genre filled with sins and dark lusts: crime, drugs, deviant sexuality, and whole ensembles of morally gray Machiavellis. It indulged our appetites but retained an antiseptic distance, suggesting more than it showed. The noir hero makes sense of this purgatorial darkness by accepting man’s sinful nature for what it is, and also by martyring himself through a pantomime of corruption. He drinks without getting drunk, kisses almost without changing his expression. He sinks to the depths, and yet the depths do not claim him; he is not aloof, but he does not succumb. He is, in fact, the personification of the camera, and a familiarly American notion of original sin grounds all the “facts” the narrating eye fearlessly reveals.

The best example of how the noir genre then transforms into a politics comes during the third season, when The Wire broaches the subject of legalizing drugs. A renegade major establishes “free zones” in three places in Western Baltimore, enabling drug addicts to purchase and use drugs without interference. The show’s perspective on this is pretty much in line with all the sound arguments for legalizing drugs: violent crime goes down, and some public health outreach becomes possible that would have been impossible before. While the mayor is debating whether he can sell the free zones to the public and the Feds, an aspiring candidate for mayor gets hold of the news and blows the whistle.

So far, so good. Somewhere, in the back of it all, you can hear David Simon saying “If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d favor legalization too,” and I agree with him. That said, after watching the show for three seasons, it begins to dawn on you that you have no idea what’s drawing people to the free zones. You’ve seen the character Bubbles getting high maybe a dozen times, then nodding off — cut. You see McNulty and Bunk drinking Jameson until they fall down on the train tracks, and cut. You see the newly hired soldier in Barksdale’s army walking into the room with a prostitute, and cut.

It is critical to see how up-to-the-minute this strange marriage of invasiveness and incuriosity really is. On the one hand, we know everything the characters are doing — my point is certainly not that the show ought to be more vicarious. The show is called The Wire, after all, and despite being filmed during the heyday of the Patriot Act, the show never has the slightest twinge of guilt about any form of surveillance, including wiretaps obtained specifically by manipulating anti-terrorist statutes to aid an ongoing drug investigation. On the other hand, we only rarely understand why a character indulges in the vices that drive the show, just as it is presently fashionable to be frustrated and impatient with other causal theories of human behavior, such as psychoanalysis.

The synchronicity of journalistic objectivity, visual representation, and the privileging of plot (representation of action) over representations of consciousness ultimately produces functionalism: people are what they do, and they do what they do. If that sounds like circular reasoning, well, it is, just like Avon’s “No Marlo, no game.” “If people are going to do drugs, they might as well be able to do it safely without spreading disease or swamping the criminal justice system.” That’s true, but it’s possibly not as trenchant as Trainspotting, which begins and ends with a snarling (and famous) indictment of the alternative:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else.

At many points, The Wire can’t improve on a paternalistic version of laissez-faire: why can’t the drug trade exist in harmony with the world, like other trades? The pushers sell, the users indulge, and McNulty’s there listening in case things get out of hand. Whereas in The Sopranos, it was understood that the Jersey gangsters were a microcosm for capitalism, and the toll, the proverbial “cut” taken out of every life, was very heavy.

Arguably, The Wire is better as a narrative than The Sopranos, and it is much better than Six Feet Under. The plotting in Six Feet Under was horrible: a subplot about a missing woman that dragged on forever, pointlessly complicated medical drama, multiple drug-induced revelations, and petty (and ultimately boring) villainy. Furthermore, the show indulged a kind of histrionic American WASP self-concern in which nothing beyond the personal appeared to have any existence at all. That said, Claire Fisher’s gradual development into an artist was a credible version of a wayward and often invisible process of individuation. In her case, at least, something came of all that chaotic and destructive desire, in a process that involved both her and us in wrestling with interiority. When visual media have to do this, it tends to jam the narrative machine. Transpotting resorts to the voice-over. Both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under employed talky dream sequences and quoted extensively from Yeats, Wordsworth, and the Bhagavad Gita. It was often insufferable, though other directors like David Lynch can make the awkwardness charming. I’m ready to admit that The Wire may be more perfect for its medium simply because it doesn’t play around nervously and ironically with sermons taken from religious and literary texts.

I’ll end with two characters from The Wire’s second season: Frank Sobotka and Ziggy. If McNulty symbolically martyrs himself on his debauches, Frank literally martyrs himself. He works himself to the bone, up to and including getting involved with every sort of illegal trading, in order to keep the docks he represents alive. He processes a huge amount of dirty cash but sees none of it, passing everything along to his men. He is a creature of such integrity that he actually worries his associate, a criminal boss known as The Greek. Meanwhile, every thing Frank tries to do is undone by Ziggy, his son, who goes even further into crime and then spends the money on fancy jackets and a duck with a diamond-studded collar. When Frank confronts Ziggy about his risky behavior, Ziggy gives a rather pathetic response about the decline of Baltimore’s industries. He’s sad that things aren’t how they used to be, and that’s why he goes into the union bar and sets fire to a hundred dollars. It’s a joke of a causal explanation, and yet Ziggy sees the hopelessness of the situation feelingly, in a way Frank cannot. Instead Frank just keeps going, trying to make it all cohere, until he winds up dead.

We have had a great deal of mysterious badness lately, within and without: Sheriff Ed Tom Bell describes Anton Chigurh as a “ghost” in No Country for Old Men. In the same film, another character says, “Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming.” Whether it’s the dry Texas plains or the Baltimore projects, the people who move across these places are ghosts to us: we see them, but we don’t know who they are. What makes Avon Barksdale turn out so differently from Stringer Bell? Why is Greggs driven down the same path as McNulty? What makes an Omar, a Landsman, a Royce?

I won’t ever know the answer. I’ll have to talk about bureaucracies, and I’ll have to ask people which seasons they’ve seen. But Ziggy? Alas, poor Ziggy! I knew him, readers.

Forgotten Satiric Genius: Christian Schütze

(x-posted to The Valve)

About two-thirds of the way through Theodor Adorno’s admirable book The Jargon of Authenticity, illuminating the entire volume, is a little piece of German satire that nobody has ever heard of: Christian Schütze’s “Stenciled Speech for Festive Occasions.” Its relevance to the present moment is astonishing, particularly in these days of change, hope, changeful hope, and hopeful change. It brings us laughingly to our senses.

Most honored Mr. President, ministers, secretaries of state, mayors, advisors, administrators, and assistants, highly esteemed men and women of our cultural life, representatives of science, of industry, and of the self-employed middle-class, honored public of this festive gathering, ladies and gentlemen!

It is not by chance that we are gathered here today for the purpose of celebrating this day. In a time like ours, in which the true human values have more than ever to be our innermost concern, a statement is expected from us. I do not wish to present you with a patented solution, but I would merely like to bring up for discussion a series of hot potatoes which do after all face us. For we do not need ready-made opinions, which anyway do not touch us deeply, but what we need is rather the genuine dialogue which moves us in our humanity. What brought us together here is our knowledge of the power of encounter in the forming of the intrahuman sphere. The things which matter are settled in this intrahuman sphere. I do not have to tell you what I mean by this. You will all understand me, for in a particular and extraordinary sense you all have to do with people.

In a time like ours—I have mentioned it already—in which the perspective of things has everywhere begun to waver, everything depends more than ever on the individual who knows of the essence of things, of things as such, of things in their authenticity. We need openhearted people who are capable of this. Who these people?—you will ask me—and I will answer you: You are they! By being gathered here you have proven more thoroughly than by words that you are prepared to put emphasis on your concern. That is what I would like to thank you for. But I would also like to thank you for energetically opposing, by your commitment to this good cause, the flood of materialism which threatens to drown everything around us. To say it in a nutshell from the start: you have come here to be given directions; you have come to listen. From this encounter, on an intrahuman level, you expect a contribution to the reestablishing of the interhuman climate. You expect a restoration of that homely warmth which seems to be lacking, in our modern industrial society, to such a terrifying degree…

But what does this mean for our concrete similarities here and now? To pronounce the question means to pose it. But in fact it means much more than that. It means that we expose ourselves ot it, that we surrender to it. That we must not forget. But in the rush and busy work of the day, modern man forgets it all too easily. But you who belong to the silent majority, you know of it. For our problems stem from a region which it is our vocation to preserve. The wholesome perplexity which comes from this situation opens perspectives which we should not simply block out by turning away in boredom. It is important to think with the heart and to tune in the human antenna to the same wave length. Today no one knows better than man that which is of importance in the end.

The Scientistic Fallacy: Peter Kramer, Judith Warner, and the Debate Over Psychiatric Medication

(x-posted to The Valve)

For scholars in the humanities, there is no way to avoid reflecting on what’s ahead for the discipline, a question that branches in two directions. First, how do scholars respond to the perception that they need increasing amounts of “hard evidence,” particularly historical evidence and cognitive research, in order to justify their claims? A strange disequilibrium has emerged: scientists who appreciate and cite cultural materials are heralded as Renaissance men, while literary scholars and philosophers who draw upon work from other disciplines are merely being faithful to the necessity of rigor, and saving themselves from laughable kinds of theoretical speculation. Second, what can we do with the expanding field of cultural studies? Its impact has been enormous: it has eroded traditional distinctions between media-specific fields (art history and literary studies, for example) as well as between modes of analysis (e.g. anthropology and “close reading”). What kind of work can cultural studies perform for the culture?

The real value of cultural studies is the revival of the broad study of rhetoric, with the aim of creating a more self-aware culture. A case in point is the current debate over medication prescribed for psychiatric disorders. For years now, one of the most recognizable voices in this debate has been that of Peter Kramer, a psychiatrist who rose to fame after publishing an anxious little volume entitled Listening to Prozac. Listening to Prozac was, essentially, a plea for caution. Kramer was impressed by what he’d seen then-newer antidepressants accomplish for suffering patients, but he was concerned that they would be over-prescribed or used to enforce conformity. Then as now, Kramer used amateur credentials as a lover of culture (he has, among other things, published a novel) to add depth and shading to his claims. Over time, Kramer has responded to the evolving conversation about psychiatric medication by taking on the new critics of antidepressants. Instead of urging us to be cautious about medications like Prozac, he now works to neutralize the perceived threat of books like Charles Barber’s Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating A Nation.

Judith Warner, writing for The New York Times, recently applauded Kramer’s deeply critical review of Barber, published on Slate. Both Warner and Kramer make extremely poor arguments, arguments whose weaknesses appear to be invisible to them because of their disciplinary confidence and ways of understanding expertise. What is remarkable about both columns is the absolute lack of rhetorical understanding: blindness to the rhetorical function of certain medical practices in the context in a given culture, and a worrisome readiness to ground claims about the culture in irrelevant scientific data. What we need is not Kramer’s misleading “hard evidence,” but rather knowledge of what cultural factors are producing the debate over psychiatric drugs, and a sense of how the discourse can be not “disproven,” but transformed.

***

To begin with Kramer’s ending:

We may—this concern was at the core of Listening to Prozac—be using medication to achieve the assertiveness and confidence that our society demands. Or, as Barber suggests, we may be numbing ourselves. But two other possibilities remain on the table. We may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have. Or we may still be failing to reach numbers of people with substantial mental illness.

Kramer has got to get over the idea that his credentials as a sensitive and concerned individual are guaranteed for perpetuity because he once wrote Listening to Prozac. His penchant for leaving questions open is misleading, since he has no patience at all with Barber and his ilk. Instead, Kramer’s guarded language is designed to camouflage the fact that he uses Listening to Prozac, a book about vigilance and the value of concern, to justify incredibly complacent statements like “we may be doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” For someone who takes such an active interest in the culture, he has no inkling of how much his own comments echo similar rhetorical moves by ex-radicals, and before them, ex-Communists like Sidney Hook. Warner’s solution is to list all the panicky volumes that reside on the shelf at her office, as though the mere fact of having purchased these books at Borders implies her full and serious consideration of them.

In addition, Kramer has for a long time tried to set inadequate mental health services against criticisms of therapeutic practice, as though Charles Barber’s book had the power to keep impoverished Americans with mental illness from receiving needed prescriptions. How Americans with access to health care are treated is almost entirely separate from the American health care gap. You might just as well argue that attempts to reform nursing homes hurt elderly citizens who haven’t been able to find or afford assisted living. In fact, the health care industry quite cynically advances versions of this argument all the time, for example around the issue of malpractice suits.

These logical fallacies aside, there is a problem with the way Kramer and Warner put such absolute faith in diagnoses of mental illness, at the expense of every historicist anxiety. For example, Warner writes,

We don’t know how many adults suffered from things like depression in the distant past because no one ever asked. The words and concepts through which we understand common mental health disorders today didn’t exist until the last few decades.

In other words, finally, after untold millenia of darkness, we have attained a clear and objective understanding of the human mind. Yet consider what Henry James wrote in 1902, when he published The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are [...] It is needless to say that medical materialism draws in point of fact no such sweeping skeptical conclusion. It is sure, just as every man is sure, that some states of mind are inwardly superior to others, and reveal to us more truth, and in this it simply makes use of an ordinary spiritual judgement. It has no physiological theory of the production of these favorite states, by which it may accredit them; and its attempt to discredit the states which it dislikes, by vaguely associating them with nerves and liver, and connecting them with names connoting bodily affliction, is altogether illogical and inconsistent [...] for aught we know to the contrary, 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit might be a much more favorable temperature for truths to germinate and sprout in, than the more ordinary blood-heat of 97 or 98 degrees.

James is already fully aware of schizophrenic symptoms, which he terms “hereditary degeneracy” and attributes to George Fox and Saint Francis among others. He is aware of manic states, which he calls “auto-intoxication” and attributes to Carlyle, as well as “melancholy,” various anxiety disorders, and epilepsy. The key difference between James’s pragmatism and Warner’s scientism is James’s willingness to uphold those epiphanies that exert a consistent fascination for a human being and her sympathizers, because they seem to possess “immediate luminousness,” which James parses as “philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness.”

Warner has no feeling whatsoever for the tensions that exist between “ordinary spiritual judgement” and “immediate luminousness” within the discourse of psychiatry. She assumes that if we could establish a historical baseline for psychological problems like depression, we could then evaluate whether current levels of treatment are scaled appropriately. This misses the fact that even if you could explain to someone from the 17th Century that “melancholy” was actually the illness “depression,” there is no guarantee that you could convince them to accept modern causal explanations or forms of treatment. Differences of psychological and medical vocabularies do not merely divide truth from error; they express competing and potentially unresolvable value judgements. Warner makes no allowance for the contemporary paradigm that would condition such historical research, despite the fact that even while she imagines a complete history of depression, relying completely on the fixity of modern diagnostic words and concepts, Kramer is trying to stretch the definition of treatable illness to cover any person who has “suffered mental illness in the past” or has “one of three other indicators of need.”

In Kramer’s review, inattention to these implicit value judgements plays out when he describes his research on Valium. In response to complaints that Valium was substituting for other kinds of therapy, Kramer observes that women received more talk therapy than men, then announces cheerfully that “Prescribing did not replace ‘quality time’; it supplemented it.” Looking at that data, either the women were being condescended to, therapeutically speaking, or the men were getting inadequate treatment, but this does not worry Kramer. All such concerns must be sacrificed to the grand narrative of “doing pretty well with the imperfect medicines we have.” He continues:

A quarter century later, the evidence about mother’s little helpers is no clearer, but the case can be made that what was at stake had less to do with medication than with society at large. Yes, Valium had its beneficiaries and its victims. But the broad trends now look to have had their own momentum—more conflicting responsibilities for women, less time with patients for doctors, and a loss of cohesion and gravitas throughout the culture.

That’s right — women were taking Valium because all that social turmoil was giving them a pain! There was a serious loss of gravitas (a vitamin found in deep manly voices) causing distress everywhere! Nowhere does Kramer note that women faced “conflicting responsibilites” due to a combination of frozen wages, which forced many women to go to work, and patriarchal domestic life, which forced them to continue doing most of the work of the household. Nor does he talk about the women’s movement, which encouraged many women to take up careers, and the psychological toll involved in thus challenging the expectations of husbands, families, and friends. Any of these explanations would raise questions about the relationship of American psychiatry to ongoing conditions of oppression and injustice — questions, not accusations, designed to maintain our awareness of the historically contingent nature of mental illness and legitimate mental health treatment. Instead, he gives a suspect and reactionary account that detaches psychiatry from “broad trends” that “look to have had their own momentum,” and so turns psychiatry into something it must not be: a discipline that takes no responsibility for its role in American society, existing unconscious of its own ideological foundations.

***

Most troubling of all, though, is Kramer’s (and then Warner’s) trump card: the fact that other industrialized countries prescribe Valium and antidepressants as well, sometimes at a higher rate per capita. As a result, Kramer concludes that “little in the scientific literature suggested a crisis or even a uniquely American response to anxiety.” Warner ties this to her amazingly out-of-character (for a psychologist) statement about the irrelevance of our sentiments in light of Human History Since The Beginning Of Time:

Just because it feels like, just because it sounds like, just because soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad doesn’t mean that they are doing so. Nor does it mean that we’re in the grip of some new, previously unheard-of, and uniquely epoch-defining social phenomenon.

People have been unofficially drugging themselves for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so. They smoked cigarettes to boost their concentration. They drank cocktails with lunch and dinner — and more — to deal with anxiety and despair. Prior to the modern era of F.D.A.-regulated prescribing practices, they slugged down untold quantities of tonics and bromides.All of which suggests that what social critics now identify as the signature event of our time (the urge to manage psychic pain through substance use) may, in fact, almost always have been a facet of the human condition. It may just be that we’re better at it than ever before – with cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating tools at our disposal.

This is the cognitive version of James’s “medical materialism.” Since neurotransmitters and drug interactions have always been the same, there is nothing unique to a time or place about “drugging.” Imagine Kramer following this train of thought even further:

I was able to help compile research that proved that vodka was being exported out of Russia in enormous quantities; vodka is consumed in almost every country in the world, and even plays a prominent role in the “cosmopolitan” cocktail that is so central to the American experience of “Sex and the City.” Little of this evidence suggests a uniquely Russian relationship to vodka.

Based on the evidence I have compiled at Starbuck’s and countless independent coffeeshops in the West, little suggests a uniquely Japanese response to green tea; human beings have been consuming caffeine for as long as they’ve had the capability to do so.

People love wine; they love its smooth and complex flavor, and they often have it as the delicious complement to their dinner, just as their ancestors did. It seems hardly likely that Catholics attending religious ceremonies have a different experience of fermented grape juice than anybody else.

The point should be clear enough; but in addition to these examples of “drugging” in their real social contexts, there are all the cases where human beings have reacted with fear and moral concern against self-medication. Examples range from religious abstainers, including Mormons and Muslims, to atheistic teetotalers like Percy Shelley and Friedrich Nietzsche. Presumably, none of these individuals are interested in “cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating” forms of intoxication.

Warner deploys the tools of cultural studies; she calls fears about psychiatric medication “one of the defining tropes of our era,” and later refers to the “storyline” or “narrative” of “mentally vulnerable children and adults” as a fable without an upside. Kramer is similarly eager to engage with culture through its own products: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” he writes, sounding a bit like Wordsworth. But neither writer can see what we’re prescribing along with the somewhat plastic drugs themselves when we prescribe psychiatric medication in the United States. Naturally, these implicit cultural narratives affect not only patients under treatment, but everyone else as well, for whom the drugs create dividing lines between what is pathological and what is not. Kramer and Warner make their forays into cultural analysis in order to protect against it, a bad methodology that leads to wildly untenable statements about history and culture. Quoting Wordsworth begins to seem tactical, rather than earnest. Their approach will only entrench both sides, particularly when they try to use facts like prescription rates in Sweden to devalue felt responses to the current situation. If Kramer and Warner are serious about protecting the mental health of Americans who need psychiatric medication, they have to accept the challenge of discovering what it is about the ideology of treatment that is making lots of people so uncomfortable: not just drugs that help people resume their lives, but tropes and narratives they can live with.

Why Americans Did Not Watch The Oscars

(x-posted to The Valve)

The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through a series of painfully short and choppy montages) at films that reflected national fears, intoxications, and bouts of moral seriousness. Second, it’s a celebrity parade and fashion event. This year we didn’t need it. Why?

No Country For Women

At this particular moment, the filmmakers able to hold the aestheticist high ground are making Westerns and gangster movies (blatantly indebted to Westerns) without women. Petitpoussin already faced down this trend here, though she was content just to fire one shot, touch the brim of her hat, and move on in her quiet, laconic way. There Will Be Blood was so pathetically lopsided in this respect that it became farcical. In the final scene of the film, Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to achieve the iconicity of the word “rosebud” by having Daniel Day-Lewis give a speech about “drinking another man’s milkshake,” which means siphoning the oil from an adjoining piece of land.

If it was still 1988, then maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be a ridiculous speech. However, it’s 2008, and “your milkshake” and “my milkshake” irresistibly recalls the Kelis song “Milkshake”:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

All his life, virile Daniel Day-Lewis sits apart from women, and Paul Thomas Anderson exiles them from the frames, until the whole sexual life of the film is channeled into the gushing spurts of black oil and the oil merges with Kelis’s bizarrely euphemistic dirty talk. It’s sort of homoerotic, since it comes during an intimate moment between Day-Lewis and his enemy (a boy preacher), but the film has no idea what to make of that; mostly, it’s the inevitable return of the repressed.

It’s worth observing that one of most emotionally turbulent moments in the film comes through Kelis’s metaphor, since men without emotion were so central to 2007’s heralded films. Even Joel and Ethan Coen were guilty of finding this problem more interesting than it really is: grim lands demand grim heroes, money and death have a chill touch, and the masculine cult should be celebrated and condemned. Romance becomes the sterile, pre-pubescent romances of technology and treasure: Javier Bardem blows up a car and performs surgery on himself, Denzel Washington finds a good way to transport heroin, the fields are so rich with oil that Day-Lewis gets some on his shoe.

In fact, what emerges from the supposed aesthetic purism of this year’s nominated films is really the cowardice of the Academy. Superficially, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) is a pawn: the sum of his life’s ambitions amounts to choosing to work with one oil monopoly rather than another. Nonetheless, the film tries to minimize that truth, and compares unfavorably with Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis played a very similar character but the politics (and the little thug’s illusion of power) were the central point of the final act, not one rich man’s boring decline into decadence. The academy was too stodgy to award Gangs of New York an Oscar for Best Picture, preferring to wait until The Departed, which had about as much political meaning as a hair-dye infomercial. By the same token, when a film appeared that embraced the homoeroticism of the Western mythos, Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar went to Crash.

Julianne Moore, where have you gone? When Paul Thomas Anderson completed his real flawed masterpiece, Magnolia, Moore was there, giving an unforgettable performance as a gold-digger gradually discovering her feelings for her husband. When the Coen Bros. made the modern comedy classic The Big Lebowski, Moore was there as the painter and radical feminist Maud Lebowski, and it’s through her collision with the Dude that “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself.” In Children of Men, clearly the best picture of 2007, Moore was the leader of the insurgents who convinces Clive Owen to return to the cause. These films weren’t preachy or self-consciously politically correct about gender; they were simply realistic.

Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death — the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life. They are victims of the men around them, including Llewelyn, who puts their lives in danger while dreaming that he’s saving Carla Jean from continuing to work at Wal-Mart. The film almost manages to suggest that all the men — the “good” guys like Llewelyn, the bounty hunters, the suits, the police — are caught up perpetuating the machinery of death. But Carla Jean is still little more than Andromeda in chains, little more than Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, compared to Maud Lebowski or Marge Gunderson from Fargo. Confronted by this artificial wasteland of maleness, audiences were supposed to applaud; most of them just turned away. It was The Godfather without Kay, Casablanca without Ilsa.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that vitiated political commentary and lopsided representations of gender went hand-in-hand this year, but I don’t think so. The great political film of the year was Michael Clayton, and it owed much of its power to Tilda Swinton’s astonishingly believable villain. Female characters do not merely create possibilities for heterosexual romance and desire, or for (potentially sexist) outpourings of emotion. Without them, you cannot portray what Martin Heidegger termed “average everydayness,” the interwoven fabric of consummation and disappointment, luxury and poverty, birth and death, family and social life that gives rise to the political. Look at the examples from television — try to imagine The Sopranos without Carmela and Meadow. Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) is a better version of Daniel Plainview, in part because we see him interact with Trixie, Alma Garret, and the cripple Jewel. The hermetic world of men is also the American cult of the exceptional individual, taken to the point of feverish delusion and inimical to the common ground that political thought and work requires.

The unfortunate complement to these tough-guy films are the insular domestic dramas. They have incredibly weak male characters, mostly of the man-child variety, and take similarly improbable turns in order to be nothing more than twee celebrations of family. They’re love poems to America’s white suburbs with facades of anti-suburban hip. Last year, it was Little Miss Sunshine. This year, it was Little Miss Pregnant Sunshine. The Academy turned a blind eye to Quentin Tarantino yet again, but I’ll take The Bride or Zoë Bell over Juno anyday.

Fashion at the Oscars; or, Goodbye Red Velvet Carpet

One of the most interesting effects of the increasingly horizontal possibility of celebrity — reality television, celebrity bloggers, and so forth — has been the way it has redounded on traditional arenas and duties of celebrity. To the best of our ability, we now try to put ourselves in the position of celebrities, which means reacting to the phenomenon with the same ambivalence that they seem to feel. It’s no longer that we want celebrities to be flawed, human, and approachable — “grounded,” as the old compliment used to go — but rather that the process by which ordinary people with talent become famous is now our primary concern.

Think of how central Britney Spears’s story has been to the entire year in tabloid reporting. Her adventures this year were sold to us as a series of nightmares about custody and control. Britney’s out of control! Britney’s lost custody of her children! Various antagonists, including Britney’s mother, manager, and boyfriend, all took turns in the role of the morally dubious handler who seizes control of Britney’s life, particularly when she was forcibly committed to a mental health institution. They, in turn, would accuse each other of trying to control Britney, either directly, or through drugs, or by exploiting Britney’s insecurities and/or mental health problems. The reception of Britney’s artistic work was likewise transformed. For example, when Britney gave a terrible performance of the single “Gimme More” on the MTV Music Awards, viewers responded with comments like “Why can’t they find her a decent wig?” The anonymous “they” of this comment stands in for all of the people, of whom we are now fully aware, who find ways to manipulate Britney into being a marketable commodity.

The allure of the red carpet pre-show at the Oscars always had to do with our relationship to the stars: at their most distant and un-approachable, they were symbols of style. We still believe icons like Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn to have been stylish; even as television announcers gave us the names of the designers for each piece, we gave the stars credit for picking it out, and for exemplifying the glamour to which it alludes.

Three reality shows in particular — American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway — have de-mystified glamour to an extraordinary degree. (To some extent, the makeover shows have also contributed to this, but they are as much concerned with normalcy as with celebrity.) The dynamic of each show works to objectify glamour as something existing outside of any particular human being, to which any human being can aspire. The brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, Tyra Banks, and Tim Gunn is delicious for viewers in its cruelty, but is also meant impersonally. Glamour is not subjective; if it were, you could never teach it.

Therefore, it’s no longer possible to be much interested in what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet, because it’s no longer possible to attribute to them their own choices. If a celebrity is wearing something terrific, we understand that they have been guided to this choice by a series of handlers working with them. If they wear something terrible, we just wonder why they can’t get better advisors. It’s the same with the rest of the celebrity’s functions: while a dinosaur like Hugh Hefner might still have a reputation for throwing wild parties, a show like Super Sweet Sixteen makes it clear that party planners throw parties. The hosts merely afford them.

The dynamic has become the same sadomasochistic dynamic running through Britney’s story. For example, it was leaked to the press that the women on America’s Next Top Model were forced to go without food or sleep, denied ways of amusing themselves (like books), and generally put under unbearable strain. The show itself flaunted trials like having the models do photo shoots in icy water. Far from diminishing the show’s popularity, these revelations served to confirm what we already knew, which was that the process of becoming famous is a painful and violent re-education, with all the dramatic tension centered on what the wannabe accepts, and what she resists, and how, and for how long, all the while risking returning defeated to an ordinary life. Meanwhile, we are increasingly willing to watch specialists perform: dance coaches, karate coaches, personal trainers, stunt men and women, party planners, makeup artists, fashion designers. (My pick for movie of the year, Death Proof, is about stunt drivers battling an evil stunt driver.) It used to be that the red carpet was the stage for the individual accomplishment of taste. The depth of the image was the star’s own subjectivity. Now that we are conscious of the objective and cooperative process of producing style, depth is provided by interactions between people, insofar as each will or will not sacrifice themselves to the demands of the ideal. Anything less, for the contemporary viewer, is too shallow to do justice to the illusion.

LarvalSubjects on Pedagogy

Dear readers,

I highly recommend that you check out Sinthome’s response to my tag about teaching. He teaches philosophy, and this remarkable post synthesizes the Socratic value of provocation, alienating others from their habitus, with the healthy alienation and skepticism many of us felt during our own student years — something to which it is hard to remain loyal as teachers.

-Kugelmass

Obama vs. Clinton: Long-Term Thoughts About Change in America

As part of my ongoing attempt to make my list of posts resemble a pay-per-view boxing channel, I am pleased to present “Obama vs. Clinton,” with apologies for not posting sooner in anticipation of Super Tuesday. (Tomemos did so; you can read his excellent post on informed indecision here, and the afterword on voting Obama here. Also, look for my upcoming post “Oilmen vs. Hitmen,” on P. T. Anderson and the Brothers Coen.) Of course, Hillary Clinton won my state, California, largely because California law gives certain people, including Jack Nicholson and Aaron Sorkin, one thousand votes each. Still, neither contender is as yet a clear favorite for the Democratic nomination.

Clinton’s my choice. In a run-off determined mostly by negatives — reasons not to vote for Clinton offset by reasons not to vote for Obama, in the hopes of not electing another Republican president — Obama is making overtures to centrist “undecided” voters with a series of rhetorical tactics and policy positions that will cripple his Administration, hurt Democrats running for Congressional office, and make it hard for a Democrat to succeed him in office. By comparison, Clinton’s biggest flaws are her pro-Bush, pro-Iraq War senatorial votes.

Clinton voted the way she did because she didn’t feel any other response was politically feasible. It was a shortsighted vote, albeit an understandable one. If she’s elected, she’ll going to end the war and withdraw American troops for precisely the same reasons. It’s what she thinks her constituents want. From the way she’s running her campaign, it’s clear that she believes she can make the greatest political gains by challenging Republicans and capitalizing on widespread disillusionment with the Bush Administration.

Obama, on the other hand, believes that the key to success lies in presenting himself as a bipartisan leader. His television ads and campaign material focus on jointly-sponsored legislation he worked on in the Senate, and his proposed fiscal reforms are thematized around “restoring fiscal discipline” to government.

Here are my concerns about Obama’s candidacy, concerns that are not parallel for Clinton:

1. Blurred differences between candidates.

The Democratic nominee will be running against John McCain. McCain’s people have pushed hard to give him a reputation for bipartisanship and independence, and he will use that against Obama. Whenever Obama talks generally about bipartisan change, McCain will use a similar rhetoric to distance himself from Bush. Whenever Obama gets into the specifics of change, McCain will cast him as too liberal for America, and he will mock Obama’s biggest projects (e.g. the health care plan) as the opposite of “fiscal discipline.” I have the audacity to hope that Clinton will go on the offensive, drawing unflattering attention to McCain’s canny masquerade of independence.

2. Incoherence at the level of the grassroots.

It’s true that Obama has a lot of grassroots support, but unfortunately that hasn’t helped define him or us. Some people are enthusiastic about him because they think he’s more liberal than Clinton, while others support his critical rhetoric about big government. Whereas evangelical grassroots movements forced American Christianity into everyone’s consciousness, no equally powerful self-definition of America can emerge from Obama’s motley of advocates. Obama has to take part of the blame. His rhetoric lacks substance. His calls for change and hope aren’t backed up by an original approach to policy.

3. Conflating military spending with domestic spending.

The debt the United States has accrued by fighting in Iraq sucks money out of our economy; conversely, expanding social programs puts money into circulation, particularly when those social programs are designed to help the poorest Americans. Instead of criticizing Bush’s imperialism, Obama is criticizing his lack of financial planning, and in response has proposed “pay as you go” legislation that would make it impossible to authorize new government spending without compensatory budget cuts or new funding sources.

He will try to cut the military budget, only to find that Republicans will use fears about our national security to block new social programs to which they are opposed. He will try to raise taxes in order to fund his new programs, and the Republicans will foreground the taxes rather than debating the programs on their merits. By making every fight a fiscal battle as well as a battle over domestic policy, he will enable his opponents to choose the most favorable tactics each time.

***

Clinton was weak during the height of the Republican era. Obama is weak now, and will lead a vulnerable Administration if elected. We need to lay the foundations for Democratic dominance, instead of setting traps for ourselves by using the Republican rhetoric of smaller, bipartisan government. It is the only way, long-term, to regain lost ground in the battle for an American government equipped to care for the American people.

The Talented Mr. Student: Books, Class, and “Passing”

(x-posted to The Valve)

It is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Did I know you at Princeton, Tom? I didn’t, did I? -Anthony Minghella, The Talented Mr. Ripley

This post is a sequel to what I wrote here about teaching literature, and the relationship between literature courses and social class. Readers concerned about the fallout from the conversation may want to read the post here.

***

Over the past months, I’ve written a series of posts that refer obliquely or directly to the theorist Slavoj Zizek — in particular, to the short editorial pieces he has published that, taken together, call for the formation of a radical vanguard capable of forcing political change in the West. My first such piece was probably “Why I’m Not A Radical.” Now, here I am, in response to Dr. Crazy, writing from what commenter metaleptic termed a radical position. That, in a nutshell, is the political situation of scholarship and instruction in literature. We are bound to present radical possibilities to our students — radicalism of all kinds, not only the re-distribution of wealth — and yet every tradition has a celebratory literature. Literary works are often skeptical of political dogma, mass action, sudden change, and the alibi of righteousness. In many cases literature will represent grievances it cannot resolve, or will represent change ambivalently. Luther Blissett said as much in his excellent reflection on Chekhov:

I just finished reading Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for the first time, and upon completing it, I found myself stunned. I couldn’t articulate Chekhov’s message. He seemed to be saying something about the passing of the landed gentry, the rise of the middle class and serf, the end of one period, the beginning of another. But I couldn’t say whether Chekhov liked this or not.

It’s not clear to me, looking over the discussion that has followed my first post, whether “passing” for middle class is a topic Dr. Crazy would want to explicitly raise in the classroom. She did name it as one of her reasons for teaching literature, and other readers found her explanations persuasive. My critique of it summoned a number of defenders, including Sisyphus and Scott.

Put simply, passing is problematic. I am not dismissing it. I am not disputing the fact that the experience of higher education, as a whole, gives students incredibly valuable kinds of social and professional mobility. Literature courses help students become articulate and erudite, and, depending on their personal and professional choices, they might well be able to “cash in” on the possession of those qualities. Still, the discussion has to arrive at two questions:

1. What are the consequences, for the discipline of literary studies, of valorizing “passing” in a way specific to a certain demographic? Might the problems with passing require an ambivalent attitude towards it?

2. What do artworks themselves say about passing?

I believe, responding to the first question, that an unproblematic valorization of passing turns back the clock, leaving us once again on the cusp of the so-called “culture wars.” As for the second question, the best art on passing presents it as a decidedly mixed blessing. Literature courses have the capacity to present it as such. They need not resort to truisms about the privileges of privilege.

Here’s what Dr. Crazy wrote in the original post:

[I teach literature in order to] give students a vocabulary for discussing things that are complex, which is ultimately about socializing them to talk, think, and feel in ways that allow them to be upwardly mobile. Most of my students do not come from families that discuss books over dinner - or art, or advances in science, etc. If they don’t learn how to have conversations about these things, they face a disadvantage when they leave college and enter the broader world. (I should say, I think this may be one of the most compelling arguments for the humanities in the context of higher education at my kind of institution, as it doesn’t matter what degree one has if one can’t hobnob with people from higher class backgrounds when one is done.)

Here’s my response: Working class people and the poor already have numerous vocabularies for discussing complex things. An uneducated person may not be informed about important current events, or they may feel uncomfortable dealing with certain kinds of useful and complex objects, such as older works of literature. An education is a valuable thing in those respects — does this even need to be said? At the same time, to use a well-established example, hip-hop has a complex vocabulary and a complex meta-vocabulary, and it did not arise as something imitative of white culture or middle class culture.

It’s not that certain ways of representing and describing the world became powerful because they were more competent to represent complexity; they became powerful because they were forcibly imposed. If you don’t make this crucial separation between, on the one hand, the historically contingent vocabularies that signify power, and, on the other, the formal capacity for complexity, then you lose sight of the reason to (for example) teach novels written in the vernacular. In her afterword to The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison writes:

My choice of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture. Thinking back now on the problems expressive language presented to me, I am amazed by their currency, their tenacity. Hearing “civilized” languages debase humans, watching cultural exorcisms debase literature, seeing oneself preserved in the amber of disqualifying metaphors—I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was thirty years ago.

Now, of course, I can understand all this immediately, without explanation; what I can’t immediately understand is the phrase from the novel, “Quiet as it’s kept,” which, accordingly, Morrison devotes much of the afterword to explaining. And why should I try to grasp it? Understanding that phrase won’t help me hobnob. It wouldn’t help any privileged person get along in the world, or rise to still-higher plateaus of comfort, except perhaps as fodder for hypocritical conversations of concern. Furthermore, it can only tell a person familiar with the world Morrison conjures something they already know. If upward mobility is the goal, this novel wastes everyone’s time.

Sisyphus writes,

Middle-class culture values doing things without an immediate payoff.

My response: not really, if the latest figures on credit card debt are to be believed. But more to the point, if a student is attending college at all, then he or she has some inclination towards long-term planning. Poor students do not need whatever Keats we throw at them in order to recognize the value of planning. If they didn’t know how to plan, they couldn’t begin to manage the schedules that Crazy and Sisyphus rightly attribute to them.

In response to my reference to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Dr. Crazy wrote:

When I talk about my students (themselves, for I have had students who’ve missed class because they were in jail on assault charges as well as domestic violence charges, or their family members or friends) and jail, or my own experience with family members who go to jail, I’m not talking about people who end up becoming activists and fighting the power, who will go on to write “indelible accounts of time spent in jail.” I’m talking about people who expect the person who has “succeeded” to bail them out, lend them money, help them move at least once every two years, and give them rides when it’s inconvenient.

This goes along with what she says about what her students lack:

The reality is that the majority of students who succeed in high school come from families where there is emotional if not material support for succeeding in school.

In other words, if you go on to become an activist, or if your family provides emotional-if-not-material support for your education, you aren’t working class. Whether or not you are poor is a function of whether your family values education; your class background depends on whether you become an activist. Sure, the behaviors and attitudes that Dr. Crazy describes are common enough, and they correlate to class, but to disqualify the alternatives is to distort the very meaning of class. It comes to mean apathy and vulgarity, rather than simply the fact of occupying a certain place in the American hierarchy.

The problematic definition of class continues here:

I’m not trying to make my students “more likably bourgeois” or, in fact, *more* bourgeois at all, as they are NOT BOURGEOIS.

There is a slippage here between the class “bourgeois,” and the attitudes and common culture of that class. The slippage didn’t originate with me — it’s inherent to the argument that by acting like a bourgeois, a person can eventually become bourgeois. Yes, Dr. Crazy’s students are not bourgeois, but she is trying to help them be “likably bourgeois” in their deportment.

Silencing and independence

Sisyphus writes,

There are so many ways to handle said problems, just as there are many different ways to interact with literature — and going off and figuring out some of those meanings for yourself, and working on your writing/argument/project until it seems good quality, those are the important things for students to practice.

Naturally, I’m in full sympathy with this, but it’s quite a different paradigm from that of social mobility. Social ease is about accomodating people — understanding their definitions of quality and figuring out the kinds of meanings they endorse, putting those ahead of your own. It is not a condition of independence.

I am accused of advocating silencing; Crazy writes, “If I try to give them a fighting chance for when someone responds to their perspective with a bunch of allusions to NPR and radical literature, it’s because without that, the only result would be in their silencing.” This is a strange accusation, given that the whole drift of Crazy’s concern with socialization is judicious silencing:

For me, my students should leave my courses able to have new kinds of conversations - not just conversations about their families or their jobs or money or the next project on the house or that the car needs to be repaired or even about which relative is in jail, which are the kinds of conversations that dominated my upbringing and which (it seems) dominate many of my students lives with their families and friends. (from a comment here)

It’s not that those things are superficial, but in a professional context, yes, those [other] conversations are to be avoided if one hopes to get ahead. (from the continuation at the Valve, here)

Authenticity and the limits of mobility

Is it on “delle Croce, just off the Corso”? You’re a quick study, aren’t you? Last time you didn’t know your ass from your elbow, now you’re giving me directions.
–Freddy Miles to Tom Ripley, from The Talented Mr. Ripley

I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.
–The Great Gatsby

[Morel] answered me in a curt, haughty tone. He had become a real ‘poseur’ and the sight of me, reminding him as it did of his father’s profession, was obviously disagreeable to him.
–Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah

Scott writes,

I’m talking about providing students with the tools required to reach the fringes of financial independence—not by aping the pretensions of imaginary middle class ideals, but (as Dr. Crazy wrote) to allow them to pass among its citizens and fool its gatekeepers. It is in this sense that I find teaching literature most subversive: all the supposedly indelible markers of class can be wiped from our souls with a little learning.

Actually, a little learning won’t do it. Differences of background are readily perceptible. Ripley can provide himself with jazz records, but he can’t give himself a whole childhood of skiing vacations. Moving a team of polo horses across the country marks the Buchanans out as aristocrats; spending the same amount of money puts Gatsby under suspicion of bootlegging. Morel can learn to play music, but he can’t get over his love of little phrases that seem impossibly gauche to Marcel. Dr. Crazy seems to think that if she can only provide sufficiently dramatic illustrations of poverty and hardship, the complexities of passing will disappear: the utilities were shut off when the family couldn’t pay! The parents are addicts! The relatives are in jail! In fact, these anecdotes only bring us face-to-face with the actual tragedy of inequality, and do nothing to prove that literature classes can solve the problem.

American literature might be describing as an entire national literature of passing: passing wealthy, passing white, passing straight, passing male, passing Gentile, and so on. The truth is that there are terrible limits imposed on our powers of disguise. Some of these limits are imposed by other people. Whether or not they see through us, they consciously and unconsciously impose tests upon us. The worst of it is that you can’t pass such tests by trying harder; Ripley knows more about jazz than Dickie Greenleaf ever will. Zeal is a result of tensions the natives don’t experience, and so is total disinterest. Allusions are just that — allusions, vague references. I don’t teach my students to make allusions; I have them analyze one play in depth at the expense of all the rest of Shakespeare. What’s more, you can pass with Dickie Greenleaf but not with Freddy Miles. Freddy Miles knows exactly who you are, and he will always hate your guts.

But far more important, really, than external constraints, and perhaps more interesting, are internal ones. You might be willing to move up on the social hierarchy, but are you willing to turn around and condemn the lazy poor? Are you willing, as a person of Jewish descent, to listen to apathetic and dismissive conversations about “letting the Arabs have Israel”? If somebody responds to your perspective with allusions to radical literature, is that engagement or a way of labeling and neutralizing you? In novels like Quicksand, Portnoy’s Complaint, and Invisible Man, the protagonists find that pangs of regret and rebellion seize them unexpectedly, and carry them kicking and screaming out of otherwise marvelous social circles. I say that this is “interesting” because, unlike intolerance and unlike creating gauntlets, it’s valuable. Nobody’s required to have a particular crisis of conscience, but out of these crises of passing have come some of the most important social critiques of our time. These critiques walk the line between different cultures, drawing on both (or all) but rejecting the unequal way the relationship between cultures is constructed.

Etiquette has two faces: it is a form of courtesy, and also a form of policing. Passing is both empowerment and entrapment. If passing was of vital importance to a particular student population, so much so that it became a primary lens for their whole educational experience, I could imagine building a wonderful literature course around it. It would, like any course, perform its share of socialization, and it would comprehend the desire to pass as other, but it would not settle the matter comfortably. That cannot happen until the injustice itself has passed.

My Post (”Teaching Literature”) & Reassigned Time

Dear readers,

In a little while, I’ll put up a link to a new Valve post on literature and class, in response to a heated ongoing discussion with Dr. Crazy and some of her readers. However, since, if you go to her blog, you will find two follow-up posts (one and two) expressing her extreme frustration with me, I thought it important to put in a word here about our disagreement.

I wrote that I found her post “odd,” and not particularly “sensible.” That doesn’t mean that Dr. Crazy, as a person, is odd or clueless, and it frustrates me that she would characterize my reaction that way. She’s a hugely respected blogger, and from what I can tell, she deserves it.

I have been involved in several blog wars, as opposed to what could perhaps be called “online debates,” and I hate them. But it’s hard for me to see how I could have handled this matter differently. I felt as driven to respond to her initial post, given my disagreements with her, as she did when she read mine.

Of course, I could have written a post just about why I teach literature, without responding at all to what she wrote. But I see that as a lack of engagement. Furthermore, I think there’s something at stake here, about which people actually can be right or wrong. The fact that Dr. Crazy is angry — hell, the fact that I was angry after reading her post — I consider partial proof of those stakes.

If Diablo Cody read Dr. Crazy’s post on Juno, it’s hard to imagine that she would be very pleased. What Crazy finds emblematic in the film, Cody could call specific to that story — in this case, Jennifer Garner happens to be a better person than Jason Bateman, but your mileage may vary, I admit it, stop criticizing my movie. In fact, Cody put the film out there, and Crazy responded critically in a way I found utterly sympathetic. Similarly, Crazy published her post, and I saw it because it got re-posted admiringly in lots of places. It made some good points and started a wonderful meme, but that’s nothing I haven’t already said over at the Valve.

Although the nature of my blogging has changed somewhat since I began blogging under my own name, I assert (with apologies to The Weblog) the moral right to be identified as the author of my posts. I believe in what I’m writing, which is why I’m willing to enter into debates even though I don’t find them all that pleasurable. Dr. Crazy writes that she and I might belong to “different galaxies,” but that’s far from being true — we are American academics at a moment when the humanities seem to be experiencing both an identity crisis and a dearth of galvanizing new ideas.

-JK