Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Side Jobs and the Internet Economy

Such a muddy line between
The things you want
And the things you have to do
-Sheryl Crow, “Leaving Las Vegas”

Over eighty thousand pounds! I knew, didn’t I know I knew? Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?
-D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking Horse Winner”

Some of you might have wondered why my participation in the blogosphere fell off so quickly and dramatically. The answer is that I was teaching myself to play poker.

You cannot survive, at least in Orange County, California, just on the salary a teaching assistant in the humanities receives for half-time work. This is a shame, because when you’re not doing your teaching, you’re supposed to be researching and writing your seminar papers, and then reading for your exams, and then writing your dissertation.

When I made the decision to enter graduate school in 2003, the situation was a little less bleak. For one thing, the average price of gasoline in the OC was $1.80 per gallon. It is now at $4.60 and climbing. The public transportation system in Orange County and Los Angeles is exceptionally poor. There is a metro, but it takes extraordinary luck to find that both starting point and destination are anywhere near to it. This is partly because it was run mostly through the poorest parts of Los Angeles, I imagine to save on building costs and hassles from neighborhood groups. There is a bus system, but it requires a very time-consuming series of changes and runs infrequently. This part of the country is dominated by highways: over-crowded, slow-moving highways. My fianceé’s job currently has her staying in a hotel in Riverside, some 45 minutes away, and living in Long Beach, 35 minutes away. When we move in together next fall, the likelihood is that I’ll have a commute of my own, along with a host of new fees for parking.

In 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate his deep commitment to higher education — each passing year has seen a new budget impasse and new cuts affecting the University of California. The university has responded as it had to: raising rents and fees, cutting disbursements. When I completed my exams, I was awarded a standard fellowship covering all fees (additional to tuition, which is paid by the teaching assistantship). That summer, the fellowship was canceled, and the quarterly fee almost doubled. The fees are slated to increase again this year.

Finally, the university is no longer in a position to guarantee teaching assistantships for all of normative time to degree. There are certainly ways around this — the faculty has been incredibly good at getting funding for teaching programs that can support graduate students in their seventh year and after — but the bottom line is that for most of the people I know who are writing their dissertations, there is no way to avoid significant financial risk if you are entirely dependent on the university. This has not become a union issue because it’s not malfeasance on the part of the administration; it’s the result of politicians reducing funding for higher education, without the private contributions that help compensate other disciplines.

All of this might still be survivable if your car didn’t break down, requiring expensive repairs, but it does. Or if you never traveled, but you do when your friends are getting married. So what fills the gaps?

The Optimizer Economy

Yes, the optimizer economy. This is the entire economy that has grown up during the Information Age (with its boons for self-promotion: cheap desktop publishing, the Internet, etc), targeted at parents who want to give their children an edge. The test prep companies that have been around forever, such as Kaplan or The Princeton Review, now compete with all kinds of small brick-and-mortar startups, some managed out of a home, usually offering comprehensive tutoring in all subjects in addition to test prep. Beyond this there are any number of private tutoring relationships begun through referrals and emails forwarded to graduate student listservs.

The parents have sympathetic motives, the kids often appreciate the attention, and the tutors get to teach. It can work out wonderfully. During the summers I teach test prep and ESL at a boarding school, and that’s a terrific opportunity, because the kids have a rigorous schedule and learn a great deal over five weeks. Teachers have the support and structure they need to get through a real curriculum, and they have creative control over their curricula.

Unfortunately, the day-to-day reality of these part-time tutoring jobs is very different. If you teach for one of the big test prep companies, you are teaching from a book, which is a minor bummer. The major problem is that most of the companies are incredibly exploitative of their workforce, charging twice (or more) per hour what the tutor or teacher receives. In addition, many of them are oriented towards parents, because the parents pay, rather than considering what would be optimal for students. As an example, quantifiable lessons like vocabulary words are emphasized over the much slower and wayward progress of a standard liberal arts education. Yesterday Johnny learned fifty vocabulary words, today he passed a test on them, boom! Learning! This type of lesson also gets around the problem that students aren’t in these enrichment programs very long on any given week, since they supplement regular school, sports, and the rest of the child’s responsibilities. This can also be a problem with individual tutoring: if a student doesn’t see the tutor very often, then progress is slow (e.g. one novel for a whole summer), the curriculum becomes erratic (affected too much by the academic concerns of that week), and the lessons don’t stick.

To sum up: the intensive institutional programs are good, and some individual tutoring relationships work out very well (at least, they’re no worse than harmless), but still the majority of side jobs mean working as basically a knowledge temp, with all the frustrations and disadvantages of any temping job. I chose something else.

No Limit

On a broad scale, what is interesting about poker is not the $5 million dollar televised games between the same 25 celebrities. Nor is it the World Series of Poker Main Event, where people invest a huge amount of money to play against thousands of other people, getting relatively bad odds unless they manage to sneak in via Internet poker promotions. The only real significance of the televised poker craze, as dozens of writers have pointed out, is that it helped to make the game well-respected and popular.

Playing regular cash poker in a casino is feasible, particularly in Las Vegas, but you need a lot of cash if you want to play for more than entertainment. That is, you need many thousands of dollars, because even though good players generally win money, on a given night it is quite possible to lose big instead. In California, you need even more, because the house’s percentage of every hand is vastly higher. That’s necessary because California casinos can’t use poker as a loss leader to attract gamblers who then try their hand at craps, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, sports betting, or the slots.

Economically, the interesting thing about poker is that it has become Internet wage labor, played for small stakes by vast numbers of people sitting at their computers, a lot of whom are now poker professionals in a meager sense.

The most profitable game is “no limit” Texas Hold ‘Em, for the intuitive reason that since there are no limits on betting, you can bet more when the odds are in your favor, and less when they are not. The game has a canon of about twelve books written by Dan Harrington (5), David Sklansky (3), Phil Gordon (2), Doyle Brunson (the infamous Super/System), and Barry Greenstein (Ace on the River). The canon takes a month of study, maybe two. I should note that as of last September I had never played Texas Hold ‘Em once in my entire life.

If you* sit down at a no-limit game and play only the very best possible hands, folding (refusing to bet) the rest, you will be dealt about five playable hands per hour in a live game. Online at one table, you will get about ten playable hands. However, once you get comfortable, you can usually play at least four tables simultaneously online, because you’re folding 83% of what you get and then waiting for the other players to finish the hand. That means you will get a hand favored to win more than once every two minutes. You will get aces or kings, the two best hands, about once every half hour. If you can just manage to win 60% of these hands, or if you win only half but bet more when you win then when you lose, your principal increases by 9% an hour, compounded every time you double your principal and can rise to higher stakes (so about once every twelve hours). Furthermore, by playing four tables, you do what you can’t do live, which is quarter your liability if an unlucky, unlikely card beats you. You get reduced to only 75% of your principal, rather than zero, and can if necessary immediately drop down to lower stakes.

If you had to cash out all of your winnings minus your principal investment, you’d be making better than minimum wage at $100, better than almost all tutoring wages at $800. If you can manage to invest or reach $1600, you stand to make better money than practically any professional-in-training who isn’t at the top of the capitalist food chain. (At a brick-and-mortar casino, this would almost certainly not be enough to make a living. Plus, rather than winning ten dollars at a time off loan adjusters playing before bed in Hamburg, you’d be playing broke retirees from the neighborhood who are spending more than they have in order to be out somewhere.) The Internet sites run every single day, 24 hours a day. It is a skill game, and of course it’s a skill learning to detect bluffs, learning when to stop betting a hand, and learning how to make your good hands seem weak to your opponents. But you only need to be about as good at poker as your local Little League coach is at baseball.

That is the new story: for some people it will be easier, more comfortable, and more sustainable than the other treading-water jobs, like restaurant jobs. This is perhaps what Hardt and Negri meant by the rise of “immaterial labor.” You’ll know one such person, then two, then five, who are sitting at home in the early afternoons, playing poker for money while listening to their record collection. They’ll take the time they have left for their passions — waiting, still waiting, for the miracle to come.

****

* Note: This “you” is a hypothetical you. Your mileage may vary. It usually does.

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.

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

Teaching Literature

(x-posted to The Valve)

Look, I realize that there is a serious danger inherent in only writing posts about teaching literature. It’s not all I do, it’s not something I want to do exclusively, and above all it doesn’t make for ideal blogging unless it is leavened with humorous posts on occasional topics.

Nonetheless, Dr. Crazy wrote such an odd post that I have to respond in brief. The inspiration for the post was great: why do you teach literature? A White Bear wrote in with some fascinating observations about how her students respond to literature; she has observed them relying on a phony positivity that tries to immediately neutralize texts by applauding them for being conventional, and then applauding them for being different. This leads to several interesting conclusions, such as a) AWB is back and you should read her, and b) it’s a worthwhile question for any teacher to answer. If you happen to be a teacher, perhaps you will answer it in the space provided for comments.

I teach literature because I love reading it, and I want other people to feel comfortable investigating it. My interest in literature stems from my interest in other people’s experiences of life. To me, it matters a great deal how other people perceive the world and their place in it, and how their speech encodes — often with such astonishing density — those amalgamated experiences and interpretations. If you happen to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, then you might agree that it succeeds in making the ordinary experiences of a bourgeois Frenchman matter. Bauby, the protagonist, has an unsatisfying love affair, struggles to converse with his father, suffers a terrible illness, and learns from an acquaintance who spent four years as a hostage in Beirut. Were it not for literature, I suspect we would hunger even more for honest characterizations of life. As Wallace Shawn once observed,

We live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other!

Literature steps into the breach. I confess, at this moment, to total indifference about how we handle the relief from this ignorance that literature provides. For some people, it is an ethical revelation. For others, it is merely interesting. For aspiring writers, works of literature enable acts of literary usurpation. Regardless, we have no other antenna so finely attuned to the aftershocks of experience. For many of my students, serious conversations about bodily, imperfectly comprehended life depend upon some knowledge of literature, and some appreciation for it. The rest of the time, etiquette and convention bar the way. Other forms of popular culture, such as movies and music, do related work. Nonetheless, writing retains its singular value because it is a solitary and largely atechnical enterprise. It does not require collaborators, unlike most films, nor does it require much by way of money, dexterity, or materials.

Dr. Crazy writes that she inspires curiosity; I want to focus on the kind of curiosity specific to literature, namely social or empathetic curiosity. She writes that it disrupts the consumer model of education; that’s true, but not because it’s impractical. It actually disrupts the entrepreneurial model of education, because it privileges solicitousness over selling. She writes that she wants to instruct students in fineness and complexity, chracterizing this as the accomplishment of depth. More accurately, it is the accomplishment of style.

In the end, Dr. Crazy writes that understanding literature makes students capable of conversing with the rich, and inspires them to make space for pleasure. Neither claim holds much water. While it would be nice if every rich family resembled the families in Match Point or Quiz Show, in fact most I’ve known resembled the Wilcoxes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. They awkwardly combined erudite, cultured conversation with patriarchal business sense, and even a certain impatience with culture.

As for the second point, my students are avid and self-aware consumers of pleasure, and it’s not my place to legislate what those pleasures should be. Naturally, literature has its peculiar joys, but so do things I often forego, such as early morning walks.

A White Bear writes, very wittily, that she teaches in order to plead with her students not to be suckers. I do love the salty, healthy skepticism that aesthetic training provides. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most often books make readers look like suckers. They bore their friends with the details of character and plot. They buy tributary, explanatory books with annotations or critical essays. They name various things after books or parts of books, including cats, computers, and their personas on the Internet. Whenever a reader is acting most naturally, minus the solemnizing accessories of a leather chair and a study, she looks like a dreamer, a fool, or both. Yes, that’s what I teach. It’s not always dignified, but it’s irreplaceable.

***

I have learned, via the Constructivist, that scholar of golf and Gojira, that I have the power to tag five people. My votes are for Scott, tomemos, Sisyphus, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects to respond, since I’d welcome posts covering other fields in the humanities.

In Response To Stanley Fish’s “Will The Humanities Save Us?”

(x-posted to The Valve)

Bill Benzon calls our attention to a new blog entry by Stanley Fish, posted by The New York Times here.

It is easy to imagine how, after a lifetime of dedicated scholarship, an emeritus professor like Fish might react in frustration against the platitudes in Education’s End, a new book by professor of law Anthony Kronman. Kronman has little to offer us; his vision of college as a place for the “nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together form the basis for living the best life one can” is a rhetorically tepid, repackaged version of a pedagogical philosophy shared by many earlier authors, including Matthew Arnold and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne figures prominently in Alexander Nehamas’s book The Art of Living, which is entirely devoted to the enormous history of this idea within the Western philosophical tradition alone, to say nothing of history, literary studies, or the other constituent disciplines of the humanities.

That said, the banality of Kronman’s prose is no excuse for what Fish has written. Fish ends his post thus:

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

The crux of Fish’s argument against literature as an agent of moral self-fashioning goes like this:

If [Kronman's position] were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

It my sincere belief that this argument is worthless. I hope, when I am finished, that it will be ashamed to show its face again. It is hardly original with Fish; rather, it is everywhere, since it makes scholars in the humanities feel humble and forthright, and it makes people hostile towards the humanities rejoice.

***

To begin with, there is no universal standard of behavior to which Fish can appeal in order to prove his point. Instead, one of the foundational principles of much study in the humanities is the idea of incomparability: we give up trying to decide whether one individual, or one culture, is essentially superior to another. Look at the description he chooses: “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people.” Such an account of the supposed purpose of literary studies would have sickened Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote:

The oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like, us, the patient, humble, and just.” (Genealogy of Morals, 1.14)

Nietzsche also described honesty as the virtue of those afraid of what secrets others may keep from them. Of course, nobody has to take Nietzsche at his word, but there is value in confronting him with sympathy, or with hatred. Here Kronman hits the mark. He writes about students considering “which alternatives lie closest to their own evolving sense of self,” and, presumably, which others lie furthest away. There is no reason to assume that engagement with texts produces a certain type of person, least of all a person who could equally belong to a Christian ministry.

Fish makes the ministry his standard for a justified moral vocation: “Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry.” In fact, ministers are also engaged in interpreting and teaching texts. Their proper subject is theology, and they are just as prone as other human beings to moral and ethical lapses. This fact has not yet extinguished religion, or forced it to withdraw into a sterile self-regard. Fish attacks the humanities but not other forums for moral education and reflection. He writes as though he had never read Chaucer, or, more to the point, as though he were a stranger to Milton.

Fish’s sample consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments.” That is, his sample of the human population bears absolutely no relation to the actual participation of thinking people in what we might call “the humanities.” Artists, lay readers of all kinds, and students — to name only three of the many constituencies of the arts and human sciences — are excluded here, along with any thought of the purposes the humanities serve outside of the academy. Fish also imposes judgment from the outside; while he vastly overvalues his own anecdotal observations, he leaves no space for personal accounts of a profound experience of an intellectual work. I know, from reading an earlier blog post, that Fish has been an ardent admirer of Frank Sinatra for most of his life, and that he sees Sinatra as a symbol of “single-minded dedication to craft.” Craft is, of course, the most reflexive virtue of a work of art, but it is a virtue nonetheless, and not the only one a reader, interlocutor, or listener may choose to admire. The idea of devoting oneself to a craft is precisely the sort of moral valuation that opens out onto many human enterprises, including scholarship, and endows life with resonance and meaning. Fish will have his Sinatra, but deprive us of ours.

Fish writes that the humanities are their own good, and believes in studying them for their sake. I believe in studying them for our sake. But I do not mean for the sake of the salvation of mankind, understood in some grandiose manner. There truly is a difference between the evangelist and the reader. Humanism is not, as Fish seems to think, a substitute for Sunday school. It is the emergence of a reflective capacity within human culture, and so represents the possibility of a truly self-determined culture for individuals and collectives alike. The humanities are an archive of reflective modes of encounter and expression: close reading, historical reconstruction, artistic making, anthropological study, and so on. The arts and human sciences do not make us better people, according to some a priori moral standard that Fish, despite himself, cannot help bringing to bear upon them. Instead, they make witnesses and authors of us. They make us responsible, and free.

The Return of the SoCal Bloggers: Tomemos, Uncomplicatedly, Girl Detective, Surlacarte

Dear readers,

Happy new year!

Blogging is a reflection of brick-and-mortar communities, and it creates and sustains new communities of its own. Discussions begin through blogging that could never have happened otherwise, and friendships and relationships begun through blogging have the potential to be life-changing. I’ve just returned from New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas, my birthday present from petitpoussin. We met through blogging in the fall of 2006; one year later, she moved out from Hawaii to join me here in Southern California, by far the most significant and wonderful development of 2007 for me personally.

It delights me when the leisure of the holidays permits academic bloggers living here to return to their keyboards. Surlacarte is back with two excellent posts, covering the disappointing end-of-year music lists and his own list of 2006′s underrated albums. Yes, it takes a particular kind of mind to sum up 2007 by writing about 2006, and surlacarte has that mind. My own music post is coming soon.

Meanwhile, tomemos, girldetective, and uncomplicatedly have written a series of posts on feminism and vegetarianism, with tomemos suggesting some points in common between the two conversations. Here’s your roadmap: start with tomemos’s post “Don’t you know that other kids are starving in Japan,” partly a follow-up to the recent debates at tekanji’s Shrub Blog mentioned in my earlier post. Tomemos has a very different take on the proceedings, and on Valenti and Friedman’s forthcoming book. Then check out uncomplicatedly’s response to tomemos, punningly titled “Making Friends With Salad,” and girldetective’s own version of and thoughts on the Night of Drunken Political Rebuke, “False Allies and Sexist Women.” Finally, tomemos responds in brief to both posts in “Omitofo.”

Vegetarianism is, in my view, a good way of life that I do not practice. The arguments in favor of it are immensely compelling: it is healthier, less cruel, and more ecologically sound to avoid eating meat, given the way most meat is produced and the overall environmental burden of sustaining a global human population exceeding 6.75 billion. With rare exceptions, I never buy meat at the grocery store, but I do eat what meat others cook for me, and I order meat dishes at restaurants.

I eat meat for three reasons: first, because of its aesthetic pleasures. Second, because I enjoy sharing that pleasure with other people, particularly when I am a guest. Third, because my schedule is prone to various disruptions — traveling first and foremost — and in those cases it is an inexpensive, convenient source of complete proteins.

Nonetheless, being vegetarian is eminently workable. Most reasonable people will accomodate vegetarian guests, and, as uncomplicatedly notes, so will most restaurants. There are, of course, other sources of good protein. Also, as vegetarianism gains adherents, the aesthetics of it are improving: petitpoussin is vegetarian, and for her birthday we went to a restaurant in Los Angeles that served better fake meat barbecue than I had eating real meat in the Deep South.

All that’s old news, and what is new in what uncomplicatedly and tomemos have written is very joyous: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself…” Yet I demur. Tomemos writes about deciding to eat fish tacos on his recent Mexican honeymoon:

In the end, though, I think this experiment ended up strengthening my vegetarianism. The fish tacos tasted good; they didn’t make me feel like I had been missing out on something amazing for fifteen years. At one point during our trip, I had a vegetarian tostada, and that was as satisfying a meal as anything else I ate in Mexico. Taste is possibly the most transitory aesthetic experience: even if you eat a meal that you remember for the rest of your life—and I’ve had one or two—it can’t make you want to live a different way. My feelings on eating meat are unchanged: for me, it is a moral issue, but not a moral absolute.

In her post, uncomplicatedly responded thus:

[Tomemos's final evaluation of eating fish tacos] was immensely reassuring, because it appeared that amazing things were happening on my family members’ plates [this holiday] and I was a little bit jealous. I’m sure they were great, but the truth was that I managed to eat pretty well.

In the grand scheme of things, the singularity of meat dishes is something one can forego. But that does not mean that it does not exist. The poached lobster and huckleberry venison I had in Mandalay Bay were amazing, and I see no justification for treating aesthetic pleasure so abstractly that I would be able to call a polenta strictly equivalent. It is very likely that what uncomplicatedly saw on those other plates was special indeed, and we can understand her jealousy without concluding that she should have bitten in.

Hindsight can lend a tidiness to excess, and reflection can corral it dialectically, and thank goodness — we might go out of our minds thinking about the possibilities of lives we didn’t lead, or for which we weren’t chosen because of lack of opportunity or talent. (For example, in my case, baseball.) There’s still the dust of Nevada on my shoes; Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is, as much as anything, a book devoted to restoring to fantasy its chaotic and terrifying force by unmasking the advertiser’s illusion that Vegas can fit comfortably into American normalcy via the cognitive dissonance of “vacation.” But an unacknowledged source of so much of our curiosity about other lives is the sorrow of our historical and material finitude, and the double bind of decisions that entail sacrifice. We cannot avoid making sacrifices as part of the devoted act of choice — that is perhaps the very meaning of becoming who one is — but we are, as H.D. once put it, permitted to wonder.

In following this conversation, I am reminded again of Thomas Wolfe’s opening to Look Homeward, Angel, that each of us is the sums we have not counted. Uncomplicatedly writes engagingly about the experience of getting to know a chef by making a special request for a vegetarian dish, and there are plenty of other versions of that pleasure. This Thanksgiving, my family had to make a vegetarian turkey (the “Tofurkey”) for the first time in our history, and doing so was a lot of fun. However, it is also true that plenty of people find vegetarianism alienating, or simply don’t have the ability to provide a very good alternative to what they know. The former are legitimate objects of satire, as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but the fact remains that people enjoy communion. If you don’t drink, you can’t toast; if you don’t eat meat, there are certain dishes you can’t share. In my own nuclear family of three, being vegetarian would mean eating a separate dinner every night I’m home. Meanwhile, for one of my high school friends, being vegan and abstaining from alcohol meant that he was regarded warmly throughout his travels in the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia.

Uncomplicatedly continues,

One summer in college, I lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. One afternoon, I was assigned the job of sweeping out the spider webs from the temple’s windows. “But won’t that kill the spiders?” I asked. The monk responded, “We avoid harming other creatures when we can, but sometimes we have to. It’s not our intention to kill the spiders, but we need to clean our windows. You should bow to the spiders, say ‘Omitofo,’ and pray that they get reborn as humans.”

What is strange about this response from the monk is how it echoes certain Native American rituals performed on the occasion of a hunt. The spiritual practice of apology, as a complement to a postulated need, can be directed towards acts or victims of any kind, up to and including human beings. Uncomplicatedly focuses on the experience of having actually unintentionally caused harm by eating shrimp, and so makes good use of what amounts to a confused iteration of “If you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs,” one that tries to sever intention from admitted consequence.

***

Tomemos is right, I think, to see similarities between the conversation about vegetarianism and those about feminism and other political work: it is again a question of recognizing the importance of what is singular and what must, at least initially, tarry with the negative. Careers are not equivalent to one another; suggesting that volunteering in New Orleans is right for everyone, as the Tipsy Crusader did, is a form of madness. At the same time, tomemos does lose a lot of direct political efficacy by working as a teacher of English, something that Rich Puchalsky pointed out in comments to my Valve post on the year in intellectual blogs. There is some horizon point where these different kinds of service converge, but the requisite disposition and skills are so different, and the experiential quality of the work so variant, that the truth is in the singular differences as much as in one’s general feeling of solidarity.

The problem with Yes Means Yes is not that there aren’t connections between rape and sexuality, but rather that the authors are at such pains to identify the two — even in their initial call for contributors — that they sound like nothing so much as academics who strain to put a political point on every piece of criticism they produce. They over-identify the two things, and do it probably for reasons similar to those that turn academics into pundits: unconsciously, they feel that the standard version of feminist sexual revolution has already been done, just as most literary critics worry that regular ol’ literary criticism is an exhausted genre. That said, tomemos is right that yet another act of generalization, whereby some critics of Yes Means Yes want to use the book as an opportunity to declare their separateness from a mostly imaginary faux-liberal status quo, can create needless dissensions among progressives, as opposed to the necessary divergence of vocation.

Girl Detective points out that the present connotations of the word “liberal” are partly an invention of the Right:

The definition of “liberal” is a matter of semantics, not policy; it depends on who you ask, and people fighting for the same causes may give themselves very different labels. If you support religious tolerance, social welfare, environmental protection, and the eradication of racism, but hate liberals and everything “they” stand for, then you’ve been duped by the Right’s misinformation campaign. Also, I’m sick of people who call themselves allies – male allies to women, white allies to people of color, first world allies to third world nations – but are more concerned with boosting their ego by yelling at fellow leftists than with actually developing any strategies for change.

I assume that, in most of the cases to which she refers, these leftist critics are thinking of Martin Luther King, who wrote in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” these words:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

So, in response, one is obliged to point out that King aims his words against moderates, not against liberals. Throughout his letter, King stands behind the constructive foregrounding of tension over and against the “negative peace which is the absence of tension.” There is no way to banish negativity and tension — the woman who cornered girldetective had to become an object of rebuke in turn. Calls for solidarity always entail strong words against dissensus, and girldetective and tomemos rise to the occasion here.

King writes, “Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.” This, finally, is the spirit of my answer to what tomemos says about the transitory nature of gustatory pleasure, and the urge to live a different way. The aesthetic is a realm of exquisite tensions: between flavors, between lines of melody, between characters, between the different parts of a composed picture. It appears, not in the ethical determination to eat less meat, but in the scene that transpires between an unprepared chef and an inconvenienced patron, or in the moment of reflection occasioned by breaking a rule. It is inevitable that we should relax into the confidence of habit after the crisis has passed, but for me, to seek out the aesthetic is to beckon those pleasures to return, to feel break upon one’s consciousness what was still unguessed about life, and to experience in its bittersweet fullness the uncertainty that decides us, each to each.

Academic Blogging Revisited

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers,

It’s been a little more than a year since I began blogging under my own name, began contributing to The Valve, and generally took my first steps towards noticeably academic blogging. It’s a new school year, and the topic of academic blogging is in the air again. Here at UC Irvine, The School of Humanities convened a panel with Scott Kaufman and five faculty members, which Scott announced here. Simultaneously, at Inside Higher Ed, both Scott and Adam Kotsko have written new articles on academic blogging: “An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogging” and “A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogging,” respectively. Scott’s article is very kind, by which I mean full of tall tales and outright lies written in the best Americanist tradition. It has a number of salient points; so does Adam’s piece. N. Pepperell, who blogs at Rough Theory, has just been asked to join a blog syndicator managed and promoted by her university; her wonderful, ambivalent response is here.

I also recommend a couple of earlier artifacts: the panel presentation on academic blogging at UC Davis (podcast), and Bitch Ph.D’s article on academic blogging. When I wrote my own earlier piece on academic blogging, entitled “The Ivory Webpage,” I argued that intellectual blogging was a more important genre than academic blogging, and that the former could (and should) subsume the latter.

I still hold that view, and yet it seems to me that academic blogging — done by students and faculty at institutions of higher learning, noticeably overlapping with scholarly work carried out by other means — has had a great impact on blogging as a whole, and may become more influential still. The fact is that academics in the humanities have a lot in common with bloggers: the list of the 25 most frequently used tags for WordPress blog posts includes “art,” “culture,” “books,” “writing,” and “poetry.” I might refine my earlier term, “intellectual blogging,” into “humanistic blogging.”

The term “academic blogging” is something of a misnomer; in my experience, most discussions about academic blogs concern blogs within the humanities and the human sciences. Scott and I are graduate students in English, Bitch Ph.D. does her academic work in English, Adam studies theology and philosophy, and N. Pepperell works on philosophy and social systems. There are of course math blogs, physics blogs, and the like, just as there are technology blogs, but these blogs attract a more specialized readership, and do not suffer routine crises of identity.

Part of the reason that math blogs (or, say, blogs about video games) do not undergo the sometimes tempestuous Bildung (development) of humanistic blogs is that they are usually focused on information and evaluation. They are fairly impersonal by nature; they try to build credibility, rather than building a style, though they may be stylishly done. Ultimately, this is a large part of Adam’s vision for blogging within the humanities: “bringing new scholarly research to the attention of an interdisciplinary audience.” Creating a new scholarly news feed is a perfectly legitimate vision for any given blog, but it fails to capture the potential of academic blogging as a whole.

Bitch Ph.D., writing from the standpoint of a blog author, captured that potential very well:

In effect, my blog was doing more or less the same thing that 18th-century periodical essayists were doing: writing more-or-less personal essays on a regular schedule, using a consistent eponymous pseudonym, about topics from politics to the latest news to what the author dreamt last night or where he or she had dinner, and what the company talked about.

When you consider how the work of bloggers echoes the more-or-less personal essays of Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion, you can see how the individual act of reckoning the world through writing poses many of the same challenges as literary creation, and also provides a foundation for substantial political and philosophical debates. A news feed is something else entirely, and perhaps something less urgent. After all, searching the Internet already yields rich returns, and all major commercial sites involved with culture (Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, and so on) have created ways for users to share information and publish evaluative opinions.

Also, I want to challenge Bitch PhD’s 18th Century frame by suggesting, firstly, that her own blog draws on the often highly personal writing of first-wave feminism, and secondly, that most good humanistic blogs are similar conglomerates. Eileen Joy’s contributions to In The Middle, which frequently (but not always) concern medieval studies, seem to me ideologically grounded in the deep tradition of Renaissance humanism. Steve M, who blogs at This Space, writes in a style reminiscent of the great literary reviews of the 20s and 30s. Within this new diversity of recombinant forms, the archive is reborn: to the extent that Aristotelian moderation, or Romantic sentiments of yearning and disillusionment, are still vital elements of our intellectual culture, they are also recognizable voices within blogging communities.

***

Still, there is more than the work of single authors at stake here: both Scott and Adam raise the issue of relationships between bloggers, and even of the relationships between different group blogs. For Scott, academic blogs supplement and maintain friendships founded upon shared intellectual excitement and the exchange of ideas. People who read and comment on each other’s blogs gain an understanding of each other as people — they come to imagine a certain unity of sensibility and scholarship in the other person, and understand that unity sympathetically, as mirroring their own tangled aptitudes, passions, and contingent histories. Scott’s closing note of pathos, “[blogs] ensure you’re not forgotten,” means more than the usual desire for literary fame. Bloggers become part of each other’s lives.

Adam, by contrast, writes that bloggers seek each other out of loneliness. He writes, “I know that my interest in blogs peaked when I was living in the rural town where my undergraduate institution was located. I was fortunate enough to find a vibrant intellectual community in Chicago, so that I frankly don’t need blogs as much as I once did.” I think he is right to an extent. One’s interest in blogging is intensified by periods of isolation, and many blogs go under once their authors become sufficiently comfortable — a partner, enough friends, the right job, more concrete hobbies.

While that may appear to be a natural fate for a blog, it is also true that many would-be artists let go of those ambitions when they reach a certain age. Loneliness, sexual frustration, boredom, and even poverty have been fuel for incredibly successful works of art, and we recognize both that art can be poor compensation, and also that it exceeds its sometimes banal origins. Given the political potential of intellectual debate, the democratic possibilities of online media, and the uncertainty and dispersal that afflicts the humanities, there are professional, political, and disciplinary reasons to go on blogging, as indeed Adam has. Paradoxically, the humanities are universally perceived as “in trouble” at a moment when culture and criticism are thriving: new journals, new novelists, a whole new era for television serials, an explosion of independent music and film, and new homes on the web for criticism (Pitchfork, Slate, Salon) and imaginative work (YouTube and other video hosting, webcomics, hypertext fictions, etc). Humanistic blogs are one way of restoring the connection between scholarly tradition and the new plenitude of culture.

There is no real competition between socializing and blogging. If you think of blogging as an opportunity to find other people who share your particular interests, then the pingbacks will be just as far-flung as they are when scholars do traditional kinds of research. Academics travel all over the world to discuss their work with others. Furthermore, most people maintain friendships and/or romantic relationships across long distances, via phone and email, and now sometimes through blogs. It used to be the case that people would beg off of Facebook or Friendster because they “had plenty of friends in real life,” and didn’t need to participate in cyber-stalking and faked intimacy. Now Facebook and Friendster are simply part of our social existence, with no stigma attached.

***

Scott revels in the way that the celebrity hierarchy of blogging disrupts conventional academic hierarchies, just as he revels in the personal understanding that develops between one blogger and another, and between bloggers and vocal readers. Adam, by contrast, accuses blogs of creating disparities of power, in part because of the way commenting works, and in part because he thinks blogs like The Valve mimic traditional institutional power structures. Scott imagines himself making new friends, and meeting new colleagues, with a lot of overlap between those two groups; Adam looks nostalgically back on a series of blog conversations (about German thinker Walter Benjamin) that happened across blogs, rather than within comment threads.

Again, Adam makes a good point. Commenting is a pain, even just practically speaking. The comment boxes are too small, formatting is difficult, user authentication and anti-spam verification are unreliable, being held in the moderation queue is frustrating, and keeping track of new comments is difficult on most blogs. Furthermore, blogging produces celebrity. As bloggers get more famous, they tend to act like celebrities. They write fewer and fewer replies to commenters, becoming inaccessible and dismissive while often continuing to pay lip service to the people’s democracy of the Internet. If bloggers act like celebrities, they will get snarky comments, even if they have twenty readers. By the same token, many commenters are driven by the medium to become far more condescending and querulous than they would be otherwise. They complain about circled wagons whenever they find themselves in the minority. They take their revenge for showing up in the fine print, but nobody comes away satisfied. For all these reasons, Adam’s preference for inter-blog conversations makes sense.

However, it is possible for comments to resemble the polite, earnest questions that presenters at conferences receive, the responses likewise. A comment thread can also sound like, and equal, a town hall meeting or a witty trail of multiply-authored graffiti. Scott has particularly encouraged comments in those three categories, and has made a point of posting links to specific comments, such that over time the comment threads at Acephalous have become worthwhile and meaningful; the environment has become disposed that way.

Adam’s advocacy for de-centered blog conversations, as opposed to Scott’s more straightforward faith in cooperatives like The Valve, reminds me of the political debates I sometimes have with anarchists about acceptable organizing means. For a blog really to function the way Adam wants, it would have to be maintained by an individual, without any major disciplinary allegiance, and arguably without many readers. Readers create power and attract favorable attention from institutions, particularly if the readers are willing to comment and cheer; group blogs tend to promote intra-blog sympathy (one author coming to the defense of another) and emphasize ideological commonalities; blogging “in the discipline” employs the same strategies that confer power within traditional academic spheres, such as scholarly citation. In reality, there are lots of blogs that remain aloof and obscure, but few of them have committed authors who blog several times per week, since the incentives aren’t there. Since the blogosphere is not limited in its territory, there’s no reason why an author couldn’t maintain one or more conversational, “de-centered” blogs, while simultaneously participating in other forms of collective authorship. Idealizing a sheer lack of organization means wanting the benefits of blogging to be exclusively about an individual’s private intellectual speculation, assuming she can even find that small, centerless circle of like-minded folks without some institutional map. This has its place, but isn’t the only thing blogging can achieve.

Bloggers deal with institutional power every day; the Chronicle of Higher Education is almost exclusively for and about institutions of higher learning. If blogging itself is to become a valuable resource for a broad group of readers, and a force for change within the academy, bloggers must embrace the power that organization and collectivity confers. The alternative is innovation in a vacuum. The fact that, at certain times, collaboration produces turf wars, is evidence of the fact that something emerges therein worth fighting for. Readers do not, as we sometimes imagine, flee in horror from fierce debates across blog lines; instead, that is often precisely what engages their interest, skeptics and enthusiasts alike.

De-centered blog conversations are often stepping-stones to mainstream work: ironing the kinks out of a journal article, gathering sources for a dissertation, drafting a keynote address or the chapter of a book. They are adjunct to academic institutions. But the opportunity exists to turn blogging into something more than an interstitial occupation, for the lonely times, and the idle times. It can be the practice, as vital in scholarship as in friendship among equals, of discovering a voice.

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.

Culture, Fiction, and the Humanities

(x-posted to The Valve)

Timothy Burke, at his blog Easily Distracted, wrote a post some time ago arguing for a Department of Everything Studies. Scott Eric Kaufman at Acephalous responded, and so did Smurov (at the Valve) in turn.

One of the key paragraphs from Burke’s eminently readable post is as follows:

I want to go in the opposite direction: I want to collapse all departments concerned with the interpretation and practice of expressive culture into a single large departmental unit. I’d call it Cultural Studies, but I don’t want it to be Cultural Studies as that term is now understood in the American academy. Call it Department of the Humanities, or of Interpretation, or something more elegant and self-explanatory if you can think of it. I want English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theater, Art History, Music, the hermeneutical portions of philosophy, cultural and media studies, some strands of anthropology, history and sociology, and even a smattering of cognitive science all under one roof. I want what [John Holbo at the Valve] is calling Everything Studies, except that I want its domain limited to expressive culture.

I agree with Burke so much that I disagree with him. That may sound odd, but what I mean is that so far in the blogosphere (which is already a Department of Everything Studies) there has been a regrettable conflation of two distinct viewpoints. One the one hand, the blogosphere has enabled serious discussions about a new academic interdisciplinarity within the humanities, one capable of working with mixed media and synthesizing imaginative (e.g. literary) and analytical (e.g. philosophical) materials. On the other, people working in literary studies have in both surrendered to and indulged in the desire to downsize literary studies in favor of criticism of television shows, blockbuster films, comic books, pop songs, and other media. You can see both strains in what Burke has written.

If the humanities were to re-shape itself in order to accomodate the changing shape of culture, all of the analytical disciplines would combine — Philosophy, Political Science, English, Comparative Literature, History, Sociology, Anthropology, and the rest — while the creative disciplines would remain separate: Creative Writing, Dance, Theater, Musical Composition, and so on. Critics and scholars are not always good artists, and vice versa. The grounds for such a merger would be basically ideological. If we accept the idea that our beliefs about the world are essentially constructions, then it makes sense to give the study of those constructions the widest possible scope, such that they can range across politics, literature, philosophy, and so on. At Stanford, there is a Linguistics/Computer Science major entitled “Symbolic Systems.” Perhaps Symbolic Systems would be a good name for this new confluence of the human sciences.

If you do not accept the idea that the world is constructed by human beings, at least insofar as it is an object of concern for scholars in the humanities, then there is no point to a merger. The merger absolutely depends on the notion that works of fiction, and all other tropological acts of expression, are as “truthful” as a nation’s Constitution or a work of empiricist philosophy, and in the same way, less differences of rhetorical mode that do not parallel the usual fiction/non-fiction binary. Otherwise, Visual Studies professors can turn their attention to graphic novels (many already have), and Film or Media Studies or Communications professors can work on television shows and advertisements.

These discussions, the visible part of them, are the tip of the iceberg. Just below the surface is the fact that writers like Charles Dickens or Alexander Pope are less significant than they once were, and the general social apathy towards these writers also affects the scholars who are paid to study and teach them. Your time is limited: you can either keep up with Battlestar Galactica, or you can remedy some embarrassing gap in your knowledge of your own field, but you can’t (beyond a certain point) do both, since both literary specializations and popular culture now imply enormous territories. We live in a time of highly accessible digital media, and the consequences for text are real; if they weren’t, you wouldn’t see so many earnest Everything Bloggers discontinuing their blogs in order to write dissertations — that is, resuming their relationships with paperbacks and hardcovers at the expense of cultural studies and the blogosphere.

Look at how this anxiety informs the post at Acephalous. Scott writes,

Consider the example of “noir.” In order to present an accurate account of noir as a cultural phenomenon, you might begin with the novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but you’d be remiss if you ignored film noir, as it was not merely a contemporary phenomenon, but a complementary one. (Many of the early films being adaptations of the novels and/or written by the novelists.)

Obviously, film scholars do not feel the same way. A work like Nicholas Christopher’s Somewhere in the Night draws on noir literature, just as it draws on other literary works and academic disciplines, but it is not a series of close readings of Hammett’s or Chandler’s prose. So we end up with English scholars who want to encroach on other disciplines without making the claim (first introduced in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition) that they must make first about the breadth of cultural signification, and the analogy between fiction and culture.

Here is where the specific references that buttress these calls become both issues and problems. In all the time I’ve been reading blogs, I have never, ever seen somebody use When Harry Met Sally or so-called “chick lit” as an example of the need for Everything Studies. Instead, we get a very recognizable set of reference points, among them Harry Potter, comic books/graphic novels, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see Burke’s post). As long as these discussions are saturated by obvious pointers to personal interests, the discussion will have an unpleasant tang of disguised arbitrariness and dilettantism. For bloggers, even for academic bloggers, this isn’t a problem. You and I will find readers who share our interests, and even readers who share our depth of interest in each thing. But in terms of the academic tradition of the humanities, it is simply inadmissable. There may be good reasons for a continuing lack of symmetry between academia and the blogosphere.

Finally, it is important to remember that just because Everything Studies isn’t given official departmental recognition by universities doesn’t mean it isn’t part of our culture right now. Sites like Television Without Pity or Pitchfork Media already do a great deal of cultural “work,” and they do so with a willingness to actually criticize when they write criticism. My own experience writing about auteurs like Joss Whedon is that the academic blogosphere is incapable of taking seriously the flaws in a given work of popular culture. My guess is that this has two causes: academics are used to suspending value judgements when producing readings of canonical texts, and they would consider it ridiculous to hold Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the same standard as they do Little Dorrit. (For example, because of the obligations imposed by writing for network television, as though Dickens wasn’t writing a serial under equally rigorous commercial and formal constraints.) Anything less generous makes us anxious about turning into cultural conservatives a la Harold Bloom. But, in the process, we condescend to what they propose to analyze, and pay the price: our analyses are novelties, interesting but marginal. A site like Television Without Pity has no problem criticizing episodes of Buffy, because it truly, without strain, considers the other episodes among the best that is thought and said.

Home Again, and Back Online

Dear readers,

Thanks for bearing with me in the middle of all this moving around, and all this chaos; I thought I was going to live-blog New York, but actually, on the Global Warming week I arrived, nobody was doing much besides melting or stalling out on subway lines.

I’ve been traveling around, from Boston on to Philadelphia, New York, and (tomorrow) Berkeley. Countless friends and New Yorkers saw me and my airline weight-limit maximum suitcases in and out of trains, taxis, terminals. I’m fatigued; actually, I have the really bone-deep tiredness that comes from a few months in strange, humid beds, getting four or five hours of sleep per night. I was working, and then I had my vacation, but my vacation was just as intense. Blogging was a big part of it, in fact. I was hosted very graciously by the impossibly hip blogger (and real-live social dynamo) miso, who threw a house party in Williamsburg where we kept getting up and getting down all night. I like meeting bloggers in person. Actually, I have yet to ever see someone give a bad report after a face-to-face meeting, perhaps because blogging is frequently a heavy medium, and it’s always refreshing to see that same intelligence under circumstances of greater ease. I’m also pleased to report that I was at a Williamsburg party about the same time that Valve commenter Luther Blissett assigned such parties as a task for all Valve writers. Please note that the scandalous things mentioned by Blissett did not take place on my watch, but I did have intense conversations about James Brown. Attendees included A White Bear, something which just makes it more sad that she’s discontinued her blog in the name of her dissertation.

So much for the carnival on the East Coast; now I’m home, and able to make time for the tiny, persistent repairs of sleep. It’s a busy time ahead. Two of my close friends here are getting married, which is wonderful for them, heartwarming for me, and involves a fair amount of planning and wondering about airport-hotel wireless rates. I’m also moving from teaching composition, to teaching Irvine’s “CORE” course in the Humanities, which is the closest I’ve come to spending a year doing what I’d like to do for the rest of my life. My girlfriend is joining me here in less than two weeks, a prospect that makes me involuntarily glow. We are currently trying to figure out whether Justin Timberlake tickets are a feasible way to celebrate, or whether he will be so small in the L.A. amphitheater that he will look like a glittery Lego.

This summer was, as summers usually are, an impoverished few months in the world of culture, gadgets, and ideas. The iPhone arrived, but somehow everyone who had one seemed like a jerk to the rest of us. Transformers was predictably, incredibly, massively overrated. Various albums were released, but Feist failed to change anybody’s life in any way. When the quieter summer movies come out on DVD, it will be possible to delve back into Paprika and Once and frame the moments of greatest vision.

I was sad to see Antigram’s blog disappear; to the best of my knowledge, he quit blogging after a fight with K-Punk (that eventually produced excellent responses at I Cite, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects). Blogging hurts people; more so, and more obliquely, than most face-to-face conversations. That’s its shame. At the same time, blogging works for me, in the midst of the splintered time of planning a dissertation, when people are cut off in their rooms and cut off by whole cities from each other. The people I know are jostled from place to place; the Web stays where it is.

I’m reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. I wish I could read the original, since the translation is full of the absence of what is unpreservable, the faint buzz of compromises with simpler prose. (Like, in poetry, every English Dante and every English Baudelaire.) Also, the book is written like a series of fiction workshop exercises. Still, I’m being patient with it because it is one of the best non-Russian studies of pettiness. It is not only about petty irritation, petty love, helpless desire; it is also about leaping out of ordinary life and falling back in somewhere else — like the character Black, who is rejected in love and so spends twelve years self-exiled to the army.

Take care, and enjoy the end of your summer. More soon.

-Joe