Back In The Saddle Again, Plus Meta-Blogging and Rorty
Dear readers,
Thanks so much for bearing with me during my hiatus, brought about my exams and last-minute wrap-up for the school year. I’m delighted to report that I passed my comprehensive exams, with emphases in modernist literature and the literature and philosophy of self-fashioning. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting some of my writing from my exams, including thoughts on Augustine, Butler, Derrida, and Kenner.
I’m writing from the town of Hilo, on the big island of Hawaii, where I am halfway through a much needed ten-day vacation. Long-term, I’m going to be planning out a dissertation (on self-fashioning) that will probably include chapters on Shakespeare & Greenblatt, Joyce (esp. Finnegans Wake), and queer self-fashioning: Judith Butler, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust. I’ll also be polishing up an existing essay on Brave New World, musical counterpoint, and Huxley’s critique of catharsis in Aristotle and Freud.
Blogging has been great for my writing; after almost a year blogging under my own name, it was much easier to write focused, declarative essays under time pressure (albeit ones riddled with typos: I called Irving Howe “Irvine Howe”). I’m excited to begin writing again, including here, after a period of concentrating to the point of exhaustion on pure reading and retention.
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I’ve taken up the blogosphere again also, now that I have the leisure for it. Some nice news: petitpoussin had the extraordinary kindness to nominate me in the “best blog commenter” category, over at the Koufax Awards, and I was honored to be linked by the Second Carnival of Radical Feminists.
It’s been a strange week around the blogs, hasn’t it? Blog wars and more blog wars; it does seem as though the rate of entropy and autoimmunity is increasing. There was that blogger Brittney, who was forced to resign from a paid MSM blogging position after her decision to link (without comment) a disgustingly racist “obituary” came under fire from Jesus General.
Scott Eric Kaufman, at Acephalous, covered the whole chain of events (go there for the long history of relevant links) and made the argument that Brittney had been misunderstood by readers (most significantly the General) who weren’t regular readers and didn’t grasp the context of her post, including the ironically-meant title, “Teaching Libs a Lesson.” He was rewarded with an online assault from some lurker/commenter who is now trying to get him fired, apparently on the theory that if you can hurt somebody with whom you disagree, you should. All of this helped persuade Pandagon blogger Ilyka Damen that the Internet was poisonous, and she has decided to shut down her personal blog.
On other blogs, philosopher Richard Rorty’s death inspired some warm and thoughtful tributes, written by John Holbo and N. Pepperell among others.
So how do I feel about all of this? Well, at the risk of not only sounding like a bad person, but actually feeling like one, I am deeply ambivalent. I’ll start with the blog gossip, and then return to Rorty.
First of all, if what you’re looking for is care and concern, you can’t do better than the academic blogosphere. I’m not being sarcastic; I’m being utterly serious. Blogs that are noticeably academic work overtime to promote new bloggers, to provoke each other to new and loftier heights, and to sustain fellow bloggers during hard times. Hardly a day passes when Rough Theory doesn’t link some new and interesting writer, such as Grundlegung or the resurrected massthink. When I was about ready to give up blogging, kind words from Larval Subjects and The Constructivist encouraged me to keep going. Larval Subjects and Rough Theory are now at the center of thriving blog circles thanks to their constructive efforts at community-building.
The same is true of Scott Kaufman, who has even begun appearing to speak publicly about the value of academic blogging. He’s committed to building blogging communities, and he’s unafraid to write like an academic. Now he’s the pressure point for another merger of the academic and political blogospheres.
And for my part, I hope that the model of “political blogging” as we now know it disappears from the earth. There is only one thing to be gained from the political blogging model: the emphasis on the stranger, the first-time reader. Political bloggers know that they’re likely to be linked and read on an issue-by-issue basis, rather than over the long run of common interests. That is even true of sites like I Blame The Patriarchy that pretend to be in-clubs; over the past year, many friends of mine have become first-time IBTP readers, and none of them have had much trouble decoding it.
Scott defended Brittney on the grounds that she was being read out-of-context, which is why he and I disagree. But really, the hope of being understood in context is covering for a multitude of sins here: the queasy partnership with mainstream media, the pointless link post that adds no original commentary whatsoever (other than an invisible patina of irony), the unworkable ideal of “round table” free speech, and the clannish habits of some established bloggers, who came to Brittney’s defense for no particular reason.
I’m sick of hearing about academic jargon from people who consider themselves brilliant every time they trot out “asshat,” “Nice Guy™,” or “wingnut.” I’m sick of being told that the academy is an ivory tower by bloggers who think the most important political discourse concerns the upcoming race for the Democratic nomination. Sadly No! wrote a decent post on the Brittney/SEK situation (in response to some horrible conservative blogger), but had to throw in, “Man, that kind of [post-structuralist] patter plus a corduroy coat with elbow patches would get you laid at any one of the Seven Sister schools circa 1973.” You know what? 1973 was a great time to be an academic. Let’s not confuse bad appropriations of academic theory with all academia, in a post where the point is that we should not confuse one loose cannon with all liberals. (Also, bonus points for misogyny!)
I’d just added Ilyka to my blogroll and RSS feed, and now that she’s disappearing I guess I’ll have to take her off. That’s sad. But this world — this nasty, frequently uninformed or link-addicted, small potatoes world of the political blogosphere — is not a world I made. I owe it nothing, and I have trouble mourning the casualties of its civil wars. I’m too busy adding Wildly Parenthetical, a terrific new blog on the body politic, Grundlegung, and massthink to my blogrolls. All of them are writing about politics right now: the politics of nationalistic “blood” myths, Rorty’s ungrounded liberalism, and the Marxist theory of the exploitation of labor, respectively.
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I was a student of Rorty’s at Stanford, and he introduced me to Kierkegaard, The Birth of Tragedy, Heidegger, the Euthypro and Meno, and, incredibly, to Wallace Stevens. The two courses I took with him were basically my introduction to the breadth of the philosophical canon; he was a matchless teacher. At the same time, my interaction with him shipwrecked during an independent study on Being and Time, where I wanted to read Heidegger “against the grain.” Specifically, I wanted to call into question Heidegger’s “ontic/ontological” distinction, while Rorty insisted that Heidegger be read according to his own instructions, a demand that continues to make innovative readings of Being and Time impossible.
As for Rorty’s published work and persona as a public intellectual, to my mind there is one work of consequence: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In that volume, Rorty makes a great many assumptions about what “we” tend to believe and value, but he also makes some excellent arguments for socially productive ways of ironizing selfhood and democratic participation. It’s a sort of negative dialectics of solidarity, up to and including a terrific reading of Derrida’s impatience with Searle.
On the other hand, the two books that his NY Times obit emphasizes, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Achieving Our Country, are both dead ends. Rorty was much too fond of generalizing about American society; he tried to kill empiricism by announcing that it was already dead in our hearts. That is the essence of unreliability, and not co-ordinate with Nietzsche’s proclamation about God, since empiricism is not structured as a matter of faith. Predictably, he kept writing about the “end of philosophy,” and yet his obituary read, “Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75.” This was inevitable; his struggle with the philosophical tradition, even more than Derrida’s related struggle, landed him squarely within it, and I think we are obliged to resist the sentimentality of reviving (but only for a moment) the image of the kind old thinker, which has proved so ineffective at countering hatred of the academy since it is reserved for the dead. He claimed to be an inheritor of pragmatism, but there is an enormous difference between William James, with his interest in radicals and small religious communities, and Rorty, with his interest in the common sense of “us” or “most of us” or “the masses” as he understood them. Common sense has never needed one more defender.
Rorty touted his socialist upbringing, but his ideas were standard-issue liberal, and his nationalism wasn’t dialectical in the least — if everyone, not just Americans, started “achieving” their countries, that would be the foundation for transnational cooperation and the eventual withering-away of national identity. Figures like Roosevelt and Lincoln are easily picked up and dropped by American conservatives, as it suits them (cf. Ann Althouse‘s intellectual dishonesty), and the Rortian criterion (will their peers let them get away with it) is perfectly satisfied by these acts of cheap and manipulative co-optation.
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Rorty left behind at least one indelible book, a book that any of us might aspire all our lives to equal without succeeding, a book that is fundamentally open to readings and an evolving series of uses. I’m not going to mourn him, at least not yet. I’m going to go back and re-read Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, and “Anecdote of the Jar,” and throw him a wake.
Congratulations on getting through your exams!
Joseph,
Word of advice. Think carefully about the way that the diss. chapters fit together under a “specialization” rubric. I know, I know. It’s annoying. But I’m one of those guys who wrote a dissertation that was sort of all over the place (wrong countries, cutely wrong time periods). And I’ve come to largely regret doing it this way. More than that: I’m very glad that I hemmed things in and narrowed the later chapters into a distinct time and place.
It’s annoying, but seriously: the business runs, especially at the junior level, on strict categories. Modernists don’t get Victorian jobs, and vice versa. You can’t be a Britishist if you write mostly on the French. If you’re both a Britishist and an Americanist, you’ll need to explain why – make the slide between the two the focus of the work, rather than relying on (as I have) “but these are the books that matter to me!”
My advisors sort of let me sail on this. I wish someone had stopped me at some point to explain the rules of the game, and how intractable they are.
Take a look at the MLA job list when it comes out, and figure out how many jobs your diss would qualify you to take. Be pessimistic about it: saying “I wrote on Stein” does not make you an Americanist etc…
(I tried to play a little game with po-co, because that was what you did a few years ago. I taught a course on it, had a paper “under review” etc… People laughed and shredded the app when they received it. There are no “games” to play at that level.)
(I hope you take this in the spirit that it is intended: I think you and I share some interests / stances / relationship to the field, and this is just meant to be a report from someone who is maybe five years down the road, but on a similar path…)
I’ll put it one other way: say you end up with 8 ideas for chapters (or 8 figures you’d like to write on). Pick the four that combine into a coherent specialization and plan to return to the others later, after you’ve defended and have a job and are writing the book. The real purposes of the diss are:
1) to pass muster with the advisors and get you the degree
2) provide you with a writing sample (maybe two) and a job talk and maybe a single paper to publish as you’re leaving
3) provide a map of your interests via chapter topics, so that search committees can see that you’re a serious Xist.
There is no #4. That is all dissertations are for. In a couple years, I’ll be leaving messages here on your blog reminding you “this is not a book that you are writing, just a dissertation! Do you have a writing sample? Good! Then finish the fucking thing!” That was my mantra, and the mantra of almost everyone I knew who actually finished, hit the job market, without burning out in year 11…
Don’t trust CR! He’s got it in for you! And Rich, his congratulations are insincere! He thinks you’re a conservative provocateur! Wait, sorry, the whole political blogosphere has gone to my head. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Why doesn’t Seth love me!?!
Joseph, it is great to see you back. Congratulations on finishing your exams! I expect great things from you. I’m deeply touched by the kind things you say about Rough Theory and Larval Subjects. I cannot speak for the other side of my brain or Nicole, but “community forming” is an extremely powerful and affirmative word for the space of this fragmented community. Thank you.
Congratulations on passing your exams! That reminds me, some of my friends passed their quals and I need to go buy them drinks. Have a virtual drink on me!
I would never, ever contradict SEK on anything, but CR has some good points about the difficulty of looking like the right “fit” for jobs (and I note that Scott’s diss appears, from his blog, to fit nicely into a historical/national job category type-thing. Pot? Kettle? Clearly he’s a provocateur. This is part of his fiendish plot to take over the world by boring from within. Oh wait; that’s my plot. My bad.)
But back to the subject: our dept. really tries to walk the “interdisciplinary” walk and we’ve had people do cool things with music theory, economic theorems (whatever you call them), film, the internet, or other discipline stuff, and they have all had troubles landing jobs. Even our people who do “transatlantic” whatever have had rough times —- there’ll be 2 jobs that actually list “transatlantic” in the job title and then everyone else was suspicious of them, wondering if they’d “go over to the other side” rather than teach as a good Americanist/Britishist/whatever. I’m saying that the profession says it wants to see all this flexibility and cross-times and interdisciplinary, but I don’t believe it.
PS what was on your lists?
And, if I may be even more of an annoying wet blanket than before, what would you say to my advisor’s contention that “self-fashioning” only can be used in a renaissance context as Greenblatt has defined it?
Oh, thanks for reminding me, Scott — that my supposed J’accuse was supposed to have been the cause of the new gap in Joseph’s blogroll. (I think that you might just wait a week or so, Joseph, and find that you don’t have to change anything.)
“I’m sick of hearing about academic jargon from people who consider themselves brilliant every time they trot out “asshat,” “Nice Guy™,” or “wingnut.””
Yes, this exchange did do a good deal to clarify for myself why, although I think of myself as a “political”, I hang out mostly in the academic blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with nastiness. Or native intelligence. But if you’re going to communicate through writing, the academic mode has certain advantages, like not automatically dumbing down everything.
And the various political blog threads, while well intentioned and all, are stuck in a mode of individual choice politics. I mean, assuming an American political context, have these people ever worked on a real political issue, with real people, who being American are necessarily somewhat racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic? The person with the hair-trigger sensitivity to affronts isn’t drummed out because they are either 1) not able to be bossed around by the whitemaleprogressive activists or 2) hurt the feelings of the white, male, progressive activists. They’re out because they sabotage whatever organization they’re in. The problem with the political blogosphere is that people aren’t actually *working* together on anything, most of the time, and thus have no motivation to favor “you made a mistake, don’t do it again, get back to work” over a long denunciation, and no idea how destructive a denunciation of your coworker, with whom you are supposed to have solidarity, really is. And I don’t even want to get into the political effects of making the ability to not offend an upper-middle-class skill.
Eh, sorry for the rant. Hopefully this is far enough away so they won’t notice.
Sadly No! wrote a decent post on the Brittney/SEK situation (in response to some horrible conservative blogger), but had to throw in, “Man, that kind of [post-structuralist] patter plus a corduroy coat with elbow patches would get you laid at any one of the Seven Sister schools circa 1973.”
Aww, but that joke took me a good 15 seconds to think up (5 to switch out ‘tweed’ for ‘corduroy’ because the latter is funnier).
But thank you for finding the post ‘decent’.
Sinthome, Rich, Sisyphus, & all — thank you! Sisyphus, you can download my three exam lists and my “headnote” essays here.
I trust my advisors, and my own instincts, when it comes to the dissertation. I’d be lost otherwise. That said, I do appreciate the advice. Actually, my biggest problem right now is figuring out how I want to define “modernism.”
Sisyphus, your question about Greenblatt actually showed up as one of my timed essay questions! In my opinion, Greenblatt was protecting himself against the various criticisms of self-fashioning in the present. It is perceived as corny, juvenile, and politically irresponsible. Nonetheless, I can hardly think of a time when self-fashioning was a more relevant concern, given the proliferation of self-fashioning on the Internet: blogs, MySpace, etc. It’s true that the court has disappeared, and with it the curious mobility of authors in a mixed feudal/mercantile society. But acts of identification (Greenblatt’s authoritative Other to whom the self is addressed) and the performance of identity (including split identities a la More) are with us more than ever. The democratization of celebrity has given almost everyone an audience of some size, in many cases a much larger audience than Greenblatt’s subjects ever contended with.
Greenblatt’s afterword is a confession of an ethical failure: his commitment to self-fashioning prevents him from helping a man in need. The fact that he indicts himself in this way does not make his self-fashioning impossible; it just makes this instance of it potentially wrong.
D. Aristophanes, our differences about the critique of tweed aside, it was a good post, particularly because it skewered Goldstein for trying to buddy up to Scott with academic language.
Rich, I said almost the exact same thing to a friend the other day: “Political organizers hate the person who feels compelled to create offense and division at every opportunity, out of peevishness and a desire to be heard. In any truly radical, successful political organization, some of these people will actually be paid provocateurs.”
I like the phrase “individual choice politics.” I would add to your incisive analysis the problem of politics-as-entertainment on the blogs, meaning bombastic rhetoric produced and enjoyed for its own sake but claiming political efficacy.
Heh, don’t credit me, credit La Fascist Advisor! The other point she made was that Greenblatt defines it almost solely in terms of writing, not more embodied types of performance.
The lists don’t appear to be there. I’m not sure I want to be assigned so much work at the start of the summer, either. Don’t you have a Cliffs Notes version? :)
And good luck on defining modernism! Haven’t people written whole books on that? Especially if you mention the word *whispers* postmodernism *looks around cautiously* and screw everything up.
The other point she made was that Greenblatt defines it almost solely in terms of writing, not more embodied types of performance.
Which is very much how Alexander Nehamas describes Nietzsche in Life as Literature: creating himself through text, through writing, rather than through his personal demeanor or public appearances (embodied forms, as you say).
You clicked on the three documents and didn’t get the .doc files as downloads? That makes me hate WordPress. The lists should be there, following the essays.
And good luck on defining modernism! Haven’t people written whole books on that?
You see, this is the problem.
Thanks for the mention, Joseph. And congratulations on your exams!
I’m glad that you understand, Joseph.
On the question of bombastic rhetoric as entertainment, in general the farther you get from the brilliance of The Poor Man, the worse it is. But I recently saw a sort of interesting piece at alicublog. The final paragraph:
“Though Noonan has many distinguishing neuroses as a propagandist, I think this one reflects a common tendency among her whole tribe: the ever-increasing certainty that one’s straw men are in fact real people. It’s sort of like what happens to some artists and the characters they invent, except, you know, totally evil.”
There’s an element of creativity in the hostile self-fashioning of the other, if I can use such a phrase. Think of, say, the Poor Man fashioning Sully the Pooh, Broderella, and Doughbob Loadpants — these cartoon figures are, in my opinion, usually more interesting than their models. Isn’t the Winnie the Pooh figure (sometimes with a Nazi armband, oh no Godwin!), puzzledly looking on as somehow the words coming out of his keyboard support genocide yet again — isn’t that really a more interesting character than Andrew Sullivan himself is?
It’s the political blogger as frustrated writer. Of course the Poor Man is doing it as satire, which avoids Noonanesque treatment of the cartoon as if it’s the real person. Too much of the rest of the political blogosphere is somehow confused about what it’s doing.
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