The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007

(x-posted to The Valve)

What a very long year it’s been. It’s been a year shaped by the evolution of political discourse in this country and around the world. Here, as people grew increasingly sick of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, Democrats regained ground. An appreciation for “intelligent,” sensible approaches to complex problems — the basic Democratic credo since Bill Clinton, but one overshadowed by Bush’s cowboy moralism — put moderates at the forefront.

It was every bit as boring as it sounds.

For intellectual blogs, the year started with bangs and ended with whimpers. Many bloggers embraced the models set forth by the political moderates, and worked to create a more inclusive blogosphere that could speak to disillusioned, uncertain conservatives or, on the other side of the fence, pragmatically-minded liberals. In the spring and early summer, there were intense debates about — among other things — feminist issues (Full Frontal Feminism), the efficacy and significance of the American Christian right, and theoretical problems (Andrew Scull’s take on Michel Foucault). However, as the year wore on, the blogosphere seemed to simply fall to pieces. There was less collaborative work, and less antagonism. The effort involved was simply too great, so opposed blogs began ignoring each other or reconciling on the cheap. A genteel solipsism emerged as the norm among intellectual bloggers: “I know not what others may do, but here is my project, for you to interpret as you will.” In the deepening twilight that has followed the deaths of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, what passed for public intellectual discourse became either irrelevant (Stanley Fish in the New York Times) or strained to the point of hysteria (Slavoj Zizek) whenever it didn’t emulate the new centrism.

I hope, in the year to come, that intellectual bloggers will once more be willing to engage passionately with their commenters, instead of looking on in rueful condescension. I hope that more conversations spanning numerous blogs will arise, even if they take the form of blog wars. In any case, it’s December 24th and time for the best and worst of the intellectual blogosphere 2007.

PART ONE: THE BEST

New blogs. Of course, every year a new crop of bloggers arrives, and they invariably have a lot of energy to devote to the uncertain work of posting entries and writing comments. They’ll take on any subject, inhabit any metaphor, consider any claim on its own merits and immanent grounds. In part because of wonderful conversations taking place via N. Pepperell’s Rough Theory, 2007 was the year of Now-Times, Perverse Egalitarianism, and Wildly Parenthetical. At least one of these blogs began earlier, I seem to recall, but nonetheless this was their debut, as far as we here at the Grammy Awards are concerned.

The power of the image. This was the year when intellectual bloggers (with the exception of me) figured out that HTML is a medium that loves graphics and graphic design. N. Pepperell, having already given Rough Theory a terrific makeover, punctuated a return to considering Hegel with marvelous and evocative stills from The Wizard of Oz. Who can ever forget Antigram’s grainy, witty picture of the dominatrix, which he posted right above an attack on Zizek (and Zizek’s supporters) entitled “We Want Discipline”? (Both sides in the debate over Slavoj Zizek came up with astonishing pictures of the man: in the course of a single day, he can look like an inspired prophet and a debauched vampire.) Over at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman made a group of political blogger malcontents continue to discuss Swift Boat under the imposing aegis of Hello Kitty. Of course, speaking of Full Frontal Feminism, petitpoussin gave one side of the debate its rallying flag by taking a single trenchant and satiric photo.

One world, one blogosphere. The old distinctions between the different blog specializations are breaking down. Bloggers have become incredibly aware of the demands and desires of their audiences — more on this later — and one result was a trend towards posts about culture and even gossip on political and professional blogs. Meanwhile, particularly given the consistently lackluster response to posts about books, most intellectual bloggers turned towards politics and professional matters with increasing frequency. Celebrity gossip and reality television became matters of concern for highbrow writers. Political bloggers showed up on humanities blogs to defend their methods and ideas. Political activism, avant-garde poetics, geeky obsessions, and serious scholarly research — all that and more slowly fused together, thanks partly to mega-sites like Salon, BoingBoing, and Alternet, and partly to local friendships between bloggers of different stripes. This year, Timothy Burke coined the term “Everything Studies,” and the phrase clicked everywhere with bloggers. In short, the old divisions that used to produce segregated readerships no longer applied, and everyone benefited from the change. (Correction: I’m delighted to report that our own John Holbo, at The Valve, was the originator of “Everything Studies.”)

PART TWO : THE WORST

Reputation capital and the rise of the cynical blogger. It is inevitable that blogs will become a well-known, legitimate part of public discourse and self-fashioning; as a result, the romantic model of earnest avowals will go into decline. However, it is my hope that blogging will not become merely another avenue for self-promotion. The reasonable tone of so many bloggers just rang hollow this year: eager to appear intelligent and important, they wrote with the imperturable and phony goodwill of people giving interviews on television. Seminars and posts showed up everywhere on the subject of creating a dignified and impressive online persona: you can get famous by blogging. You can advance your career. You can eventually secure some kind of publication or book deal. The whole thing was more sickening than a conversation with a timeshare salesman.

Too much credit for sarcastic contempt. For example, those funny, funny authors who saw it as their mission to write thoughtless, hypocritical “parodies” of other bloggers, in the hopes of immediately earning vast quantities of readers without having to do the hard work of articulating viewpoints. It is terrific to be funny, and there is always occasion for satire, but it was just sad watching reasonable bloggers try to seem hip by linking to and celebrating their mockers. Just as these blogs got too much credit for a continual recourse to sarcasm, too many commenters got stuck doing the verbal equivalent of very slow, loud clapping. The blogosphere cannot survive on dismissals and exasperated gestures.

Fixed ideas. Yes, we are all in favor of long-form projects, but the number of posts that had five, or eight, or twenty sequels this year exceeded all reasonable limits. It didn’t matter the content of blog — everybody was bitten by the continuity bug, myself included, and the overhead was a disaster. Blame television for producing longer attention spans: when you tuned into a blog you hadn’t read in a while, it was like suddenly finding yourself with Season 6, Disc 3 of The Sopranos. Every time you return to something it should show you a new facet: whether that is something new in you, or new in it, is always hard to say, but each piece must be its own revolution.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2008

So, what’s ahead for 2008? I can’t predict trends, but I can say what I hope for, and that’s a renaissance of words in their essential loneliness. Intellectual blogging is a medium that thrives because it captures the quietude of those moments when we seal ourselves off from our surroundings in order to consider the printed words of another person. The tremulousness of the word, the expectation of an answer, the abjection and shamelessness of writing for self-publication: in order to be honest, a blogger has to be vulnerable, more so even than the author of a book. What she is writing apparently had to be blogged to be written at all. Given the voluntarism of the blogosphere, polish is merely comic; risk is the only thing worth admiring. The risk of saying too much, the risk of being unread, the risk of being misread — intellectual blogging must change from an indifferent exercise of dignified exposition into the willing practice of risk.

The University and the Specter of Horowitz

(x-posted to The Valve)

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J. H. Blair
-Florence Reese (lyrics), “Which Side Are You On?”

In an ongoing series of posts at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman has been linking to and collating instances of the ongoing war against progressive thought in the academy. First, as some of you probably know, Scott took up the subject of Until Proven Innocent, a book co-written by KC Johnson, who teaches at Brooklyn College and CUNY. Until Proven Innocent attempts to pin the scandal surrounding the Duke lacrosse rape case on the politically correct culture of liberal academia. While Scott was napping, Smurov linked to a piece by Mark Bauerlein, who is an English professor at Emory and who titled his essay “Indoctrination in the Classroom.” Finally, Scott and Smurov both linked to this reaction, via the National Review’s blog Phi Beta Cons, against those professors whose reading assignments make students feel “spoiled or privileged.”

I use the phrase “ongoing war” advisedly: this is a war, albeit one being conducted discursively through periodicals, campus organizations, and websites and blogs. At some point, the leader of the anti-intellectual, anti-academic crusade was David Horowitz, founder of Students for Academic Freedom, a “student” organization created with the express goal of sabotaging university teaching by mounting pressure campaigns against left-wing professors. The most affable representative of mainstream academic opposition to Horowitz was Michael Bérubé; with incredible patience and argumentative cunning, Bérubé defended academia and tore hole after hole in Horowitz’s shoddy research. He debated Horowitz live, and wrote a book (What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts?) that was the subject of several vibrant conversations at the Valve (book event archive). Although Bérubé was incredibly successful at mimizing Horowitz’s efficacy, the movement against the liberal arts has taken on a life of its own, falling back on the same rhetorical tactics that the American right-wing employed against welfare and in support of the Iraq war.

It is time that we examined where the logic of these attacks on the academy leads, and how the right-wing doublespeak of “academic freedom” is structured.

The Agenda

Here is what right-wing critics of the academy would like to see implemented:

1. Pay cuts for all scholars in the humanities, including reduced funding for research and travel.
2. Elimination of tenure.
3. Public access to all courses, particularly lecture courses.
4. Public hearings for faculty hires and dismissals.
5. Public or student-led selection of assigned texts.
6. Guidelines for hiring based on candidates’ political beliefs; establishing a quota for conservative academics in all disciplines within the humanities. (Yes, this would be quota-based hiring for registered Republicans.)
7. Replacing content-based courses with skills-based courses; in particular, replacing instruction in English with formalistic instruction in writing.

The underlying assumptions are as follows:

1. There is no difference between a lay person and a tenured professor when it comes to evaluating the quality of a text.
2. In the humanities, there is no difference between knowledge and belief, and all beliefs are equal. There is therefore no justification for challenging students to re-examine inherited beliefs.
3. Skill is independent of belief; in expressive practice, this means that form (ability to write) is independent of content (statement of belief).
4. Public interference in the process of education is justified by democratic and consumerist principles in a way that public interference in the private sector is not. For example, students are justified in suing professors, but consumers are not justified in suing corporations.
5. The market value of writing skills should largely determine the salary of a humanities professor.

The rhetoric goes like this:

1. Professors are out-of-touch with American values.
2. Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.
3. Professors are lazy.

Living in a Rhetorical World

Our thoughts are our own; our language is not. Whatever we say or write enters public discourse in the context of the assumptions and debates of its time, and, in the reader’s mind, it does not necessarily link up with our entire worldview or with our own private struggles and motives. I’m reminded of the moment in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife when Nathan Zuckerman tries to convince his brother to abandon an Israeli settlement in the occupied territories. Zuckerman tries to make his brother admit to Freudian motives, and the brother responds that his motives really aren’t important any longer, because he is now part of a movement, the historical meaning of which is greater than the sum of its parts. It is essential for us to see the rhetorical context of contemporary debates about the academy, and neither to exempt our own speech from its likely misuses, nor to treat disputants as rhetorically naive.

You can already see, in Bérubé’s account of working with a student named John (cf. the book event), that it’s not merely a question of having the right to speak, or earning a sufficiently high grade, which are personal concerns — John feels a political concern for himself and the other students in the face of possible “indoctrination.” His personal concerns are understandable and admit discussion; his political concern does not, since it is necessarily based on a series of judgments about the relationship between politics and pedagogy that John isn’t qualified to make and which exceed his right to fair treatment.

Similarly, in the comment threads that followed Scott’s posts on KC Johnson, there were a series of individuals (particularly an anonymous commenter named “Professor Ethan”) who tried to inundate Acephalous with canned rhetoric about the failings of academia. Trying, as several commenters did, to get a personal account from Ethan of how he suffered in the classroom, and how such mistakes might be avoided in the future, is a mistake: Ethan is trying to create change, not come to terms. When Ethan quoted NPR, in the comment here, the point wasn’t just that he attributed to NPR something actually excerpted from Until Proven Innocent. He was quoting NPR in the first place because it’s “liberal media,” and he figured Scott’s readers would feel bound to respect it. This is all made possible by National Public Radio, which has been under siege from the Bush Administration for years, and so runs a piece on Until Proven Innocent as an easy way to seem balanced and not indefensibly liberal.

That’s how the feedback loop works when an issue gets pushed to the right: progressive intellectuals and media outlets are shamed into re-defining objectivity and balance as more centrist or rightist, and then skimmed for whatever admission can add fuel to the fire, without ever beating the charge of bias. Right now, any English professor who lends the credibility of a position and a doctorate to the conservative anti-academic agenda is guaranteed a lot of attention and readers.

Even the most well-meaning pieces can end up making odd syntheses, not out of impure motives, but simply because the rightist agenda is circulating everywhere. This is what happened, I think, with Tim Burke’s piece on academic freedom in the Minnesota Review. Burke is a great blogger and a thoughtful respondent (including on Acephalous with regard to Johnson’s book), and I think his article (mentioned by John Holbo here) was motivated by sincere concern for continued innovation in the humanities. Burke’s solution to over-cautiousness and paralysis in the humanities is, potentially, eliminating tenure, though he does not make an explicit demand.

From the standpoint of academic freedom, though, the demand doesn’t make any sense: expanding the population of professors without real job security is guaranteed to produce more cautiousness, not less. Whether or not the professors on a hiring committee have tenure, they will still want intellectual diversity, they will still desire to be fair, and they will still walk in to meetings and interviews with a set of firmly grounded attitudes and ideological allegiances. The real questions are whether the candidate can expect to get a tenure-track position or a year-to-year lectureship; whether that position will come as soon as graduate school is over, or after years of tutoring high school students preparing for the SAT; whether or not funding is available for summer research, and for dissertation research in lieu of teaching. That will determine how much capacity for innovation will be manifest in new generations of scholars. There is an analogy here to the situation with elementary and secondary public schools: first you starve them for funding, then you blame the teachers and the curriculum when students do poorly.

The Three Basic Criticisms of Academics

Professors are out-of-touch with American values.

I respect those authors, including Richard Rorty and Walter Benn Michaels, who have tried to define what “achieving our country” or “our America” might mean in progressive terms. That said, I believe that American scholars in the humanities might as well stand up for the truly international community that constitutes their field, as American scientists and businessmen have done. Nationalism has left a lot of scars, here and elsewhere, in the past few decades; the principles that found institutions of learning are universal. Otherwise, one sits in an IKEA chair, working on a computer made in China, trying to achieve our country.

Professors are hypocrites who criticize luxury while living in its lap.

This is really just a customized version of the argument about liberal hypocrisy: if you’re so idealistic, why aren’t you poor? It is pathetically literal to criticize professors for teaching about inequality. One may as well ask how able-bodied Congressmen could vote the ADA into existence. It is not necessary to believe that selfishness is the premise of all action.

Professors are lazy.

This is a groundless claim without a shred of hard evidence besides the existence of summer “vacation.” It is like calling apple growers lazy because the fruit appears in September. At UC Irvine, the summer is divided into Summer Session I and Summer Session II.

***

The fact that scholars like Johnson and Bauerlein are doing what they can to harm the reputation of the humanities does not make us unfree, and neither does the existence of an organized attack on the humanities. We remain free in the only meaningful sense of the word: free to determine our relationship to the humanistic traditions of scholarship and pedagogy, and free to determine our politics accordingly.

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.

***

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.

***
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.

***

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.

The Myth of the Ineffective Teacher

Over at the thoughtful, medievalist blog In The Middle, Eileen Joy has posted a response to Scott Eric Kaufman’s Valve post about teaching (which begins with Seung-Hui Cho, but I’m not going to revisit that). She writes:

But, over the years, I’ve also developed a hunch that we only really help students who are already hard-wired to embrace and open up to what we and literature have to offer….You can never teach morality. You can only model it. And maybe live it, in imperfect fits and starts, and only with the recognition that morality is more related to affect than it is to principles or rules or even final actions.As to the relation of pedagogy to leading students to the better sorts of lives, I stopped agonizing about that a while ago. I don’t mean to say I don’t care about pedagogy [I care a lot], but that I don’t anymore torture myself worrying about whether or not I am leading my students to liberalism or humanism [or, humaness (sic)] or any other political or philosophical mode of being/thought, either through hectoring or a more subtle and laudably non-ideological method. Is there a way we can merely “be ourselves” [?], simply modelling to our students our desire[s] to read and think out loud and wonder and be moved? More and more, I worry less about students’ moral bearings [and lack thereof] and more about their emotional affect. I worry about their ability to be enchanted and to feel–”to feel” in the sense of allowing themselves to be swept away by art and literature into the lives of other persons. There is some kind of predisposition, I think, to being “open” to that possibility, without which ethics, of any sort, cannot be possible.

As this blog grows and develops, I hope to find many ways of investigating an odd dissymmetry: what people advocate for as their own intellectual and ethical projects is often acceptable or even admirable, while what they advocate against or seek to limit casts them in a less flattering light.

For example, I can only applaud Eileen’s efforts to model morality, which she does despite being aware of her own imperfections, and (I would think) admitting the possibility that even her most exemplary actions will be misunderstood. It is intuitive for any teacher of literature to teach the relationship between morality and feeling, since the two are inseparable in works of art. One tries to share with students the feeling of expansive (but still determinate) sympathy that literature can provide. In fact, this ethics of imaginative sympathy is the basis for much of Richard Rorty’s pragmatist writings on literature and ethics.

That said, there is a blatant contradiction between Eileen’s assertion that one can never teach morality, and her concern for her student’s emotional responses. Their emotional responses, in her world, are their ethical judgements and moral attitudes. When she says that morality is “more related” to affect than to principles or rules, she means that the content of effective, adaptive morality is emotional, and has to do with the ability to sympathetically imagine another person’s life. When she is modeling her desire to read, think out loud, wonder, and be moved, she is modeling morality in a classroom setting. In other words, she’s teaching morality (or ethics, by the end of the passage). She’s just not teaching it as a set of abstract rules.

Certainly, the passage remains skeptical about whether this sort of modeling is possible, but it flatly refuses to allow that any other sort might succeed. This is rather similar to Scott’s approach. He first rejects the efficacy of teaching out of hand, then gradually returns to the notion of efficacy, but only through inspiring in students a constructive, critical disillusionment with sentimental and rationalizing discourses (for example, the myths of noble “Injuns”). All of which is just to say that Scott comes across as a teacher who’s good at teaching literature as a tool for critical thinking, and Eileen comes across as a teacher who’s good at teaching the ethics of imaginative sympathy.

Eventually, I want to write a post about difference, examining where the postmodern ethic of difference really comes into play, and tying it back to statements like “You can never teach morality.” I can easily imagine the student, probably male, who likes to discuss moral principles, and who would be very annoyed to hear that morality just doesn’t work that way. The last sentence I quote raises the disturbing possibility that Eileen thinks some people are more ethically predisposed than others, and that this is “hard-wired” into them according to their capacity for openness. But for now, let’s focus on the fact that what Scott and Eileen are teaching are fundamentally skills. These skills are ethical, not “practical,” if we define practicality in a very superficial manner. But they aren’t that different from teaching students to write clearly and effectively. Sympathy and skepticism are habits of thought, just like looking for the formal and symbolic elements of a text, identifying pertinent research data, or organizing an essay in a coherent fashion.

Almost no teacher in the fields of literature or composition would be willing to say that students can’t learn to write; somehow, often over a very short period of time, we bring students a long ways towards being able to express themselves. In the process, we necessarily refer to all sorts of moral principles: for starters, we expect them to be objective, and we forbid them to plagiarize.

I’m not suggesting that a teacher of literature should be blithe about teaching morality and ethics; actually, teachers of literature should doubt their own abilities as writers, too. But to describe such pedagogy as impossible, just because both critical thinking and affective sympathy are radical positions in today’s society, is both an act of surrender and a phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. I call it cognitive dissonance, because we know how hard it is to teach students to write well, to teach them the elements of style, and we do it anyway.