Long Pauses

Tag: Academia

  • No Reservations

    I read a book last weekend. A 302-page book. I was standing in Borders on Friday night, waiting for Joanna to get a drink, and I picked up a book, read the first few pages, and decided to buy it. Then I went home and finished it in three or four sittings.

    In a minute I’ll have some words about the book itself, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, but first I have to try to explain how strange it felt to stand in a bookstore and to feel absolutely no obligation to browse the fiction, drama, history, and literary criticism aisles. For the past seven or eight years, every trip to a book store has meant looking first for the titles I should read because my career and, perhaps, my identity (my sense of who I am/was) depended on it. In the final months leading up to my escape from academia I bought, began (with the very best intentions), and then discarded a whole stack of books, including Hardt and Negri’s Empire, Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, and Mark Kurlansky’s social history of 1968. I hope to finish them all eventually. I’ll certainly be a better-informed and more thoughtful critic and person for doing so. But it’s a relief to know I don’t have to read them or other books of their ilk, that I’ll never be tripped up in an interview or at a conference for revealing my ignorance of, I don’t know, late Foucault or something.

    My dissertation work was in an area that I do genuinely find fascinating. Even just yesterday I got together with some friends for a lunchtime chat about Good Night, and Good Luck, and I was stung for a moment by the slightest twinge of regret as I launched into a breathless rant about the socio-political climate of post-WWII America and the making of people like Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy. I was enjoying myself, enjoying the unique pleasure of confident knowledge that comes from research and writing. I miss that.

    But abandoning the dissertation has also made possible new and forgotten pleasures. Like the simple pleasure of being able to indulge, without guilt, the full scope of my curiosity. Maybe it’s just the passing of another birthday last week — 34, the first one so far that has felt in any way old — or maybe it’s the lingering effects of another recent read, Philip Roth’s ode to Death, Everyman, but recently I’ve become more conscious of how I regiment the hours of my life. I’ll get home tonight between 5:30 and 6:00, which gives me five good hours to get the living done. I’ll want to eat dinner and spend as much time as possible with Joanna. I’ll probably go for a run or mow the lawn. Then, around 9:00, I’ll get to do something that allows me to be more fully and completely myself. I’ll play the piano for a bit or listen to some music or watch one of the William Wyler DVDs sitting on my coffee table. Or I’ll read.

    I think I’d like that to be my epitaph: “He indulged his curiosity, completely and without guilt.” I’ve been thinking about taking piano lessons again, for the first time in nearly 15 years, and I might sign up for a summer session French class. I’ve also been looking at this (I still have some birthday money to blow), and I’m checking around for introductory cooking classes.

    Which brings me, finally, to Kitchen Confidential . . .

    One of the few TV shows I try to watch each week is No Reservations, which is kind of like the old Jacques Cousteau series, except that, rather than voyages to the bottom of the sea, we instead join our host on a gastronomical tour of the world’s kitchens. Anthony Bourdain is the spitting image of John Cassavetes, right down to the NYC-born and -bred accent and attitude. That attitude, more than anything else, is the source of Bourdain’s charisma. He’s a fairly adventurous traveler and a reckless eater — the delight he takes in eating anything put before him wins him the instant camaraderie of every cook he meets, whether in a Paris bakery or a Moroccan hut — but he’s also sarcastic, foul-mouthed, unapologetic, and self-deprecating. He loves great food (and cigarettes and stiff drinks), and he hates bad food, and his enthusiasm is infectious.

    Bourdain got his Travel Channel gig on the strength and sales of Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 expose of the restaurant business. It’s actually as much a memoir as a behind-the-scenes tell-all. The back-jacket allusions to Hunter S. Thompson seem fair: Bourdain is more than a bit gonzo himself, and his writing is surprising enough and illuminating enough and funny enough to stand up to the comparison. He writes things like this (a snippet from a three-page tour of a cook’s anatomy):

    At the base of my right forefinger is an inch-and-a-half diagonal callus, yellowish-brown in color, where the heels of all the knives I’ve ever owned have rested, the skin softened by constant immersions in water. I’m proud of this one. It distinguishes me immediately as a cook, as someone who’s been on the job for a long time. You can feel it when you shake my hand, just as I feel it on others of my profession. It’s a secret sign, sort of a Masonic handshake without the silliness, a way that we in the life recognize one another, the thickness and roughness of that piece of flesh, a resume of sorts, telling others how long and how hard it’s been.

    That’s really nice writing. Even “in color,” a redundancy I’ve edited out of more than one technical paper over the years, works here, adding a short beat to the line before moving from the simple image of his callus to the clause that explains its significance. Bourdain, we learn in Kitchen Confidential, spent years as a struggling young cook, schlepping from kitchen to kitchen, earning and blowing more money than he deserved, indulging and, eventually, kicking a heroin addiction. He also went to private schools, including a year or two at Vassar, and spent childhood summers in France. That dichotomy is what makes his writing and his on-screen persona so engaging. He knows and loves “the life” and has the scars to prove it, but, without ever becoming detached or in any way condescending, he’s able to pull back just far enough to observe and describe a life that is so atypical — atypical, at least, to those of us who don’t work six or seven days a week, from the early morning hours straight through to, well, the even earlier morning hours.

    Two nights ago, Joanna and I went back to Borders. (A new one just opened two miles from our home — cause for great celebration in the Hughes household.) I picked up a couple more books from the cooking aisle: Bourdain’s followup, A Cook’s Tour, and The Tummy Trilogy, a collection of Calvin Trillin’s food writing.

    Anyone have a favorite food writer? Just curious.

  • How ‘Bout That

    “Darren Hughes’s contribution on Roth’s non-fiction writing, while far too short, is nonetheless a valuable addition to the mostly untrodden field of investigation of Roth as a critic.”
    — from David Gooblar’s review of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, ed. by Derek Parker Royal

    How’s that for the perfect end to my academic career? I got a good note in The Times Literary Supplement!

  • An Important Announcement

    [Note: If you make it through this entire post, you’re a champ. It’s here, more or less, as one more document in the archive of my life.]

    Long-time readers of Long Pauses will know that, after nearly five years and countless redesigns, two elements of this site have remained relatively unchanged: the Mirror-inspired Flash animation and the About page. Nearly three hundred visitors read “about” me last month. They read that I’m a “doctoral candidate in 20th century American literature” and that I’m at work on a dissertation about the American Left and literature of the Cold War. I’ve always taken a certain pride in that description, assuming — or hoping, at least — that my credentials would lend a measure of credibility to my opinions, whether on art or politics or whatever.

    Today I’m pleased to announce, finally, a change to my About page, though, honestly, it’s not exactly the one I’d daydreamed about for so long. Earlier this week I officially notified my committee of my decision to abandon my dissertation. On May 1st, just a few days after Joanna and I return from our trip to London, I will begin a full-time job as a web designer at the university, and I’m damn eager to get started. I’m especially excited about my new title: Artist.

    To tell the full story of this decision takes several hours and as many stiff drinks. At some point, it requires that I reveal the details of the deaths of my mother- and father-in-law and the capital murder trial that followed a year later. And then I have to talk about the shockwaves an experience like that sends through one’s life and the effects of grief on one’s attention span. But, for now, I mention all of that in passing only to suggest that my main reason for making this decision is because what I most crave right now is what a young academic career (at least in the humanities) is least able to provide: stability.

    There are other reasons, of course. For starters, English has never been the perfect fit for me. The two chapters of my dissertation that I completed are, I think, well-researched and well-written, but my analysis floats too casually between literary criticism, political philosophy, cultural studies, and historiography, never slowing to apply the requisite rigor to any one particular area. As a result, I’m proud to say, it’s quite readable. But it’s too superficial for academia. It’s not a dissertation. I suspect that, had I to do it all over again, I might have gone into a Media Studies or New Media program instead, but I would have likely run into similar problems. I’m not an academic writer, it turns out. (One benefit of abandoning my dissertation, by the way, is that I can now focus my efforts on other, non-academic writing projects I’ve wanted to start for years.)

    But stability is the big one. Of the seven people in my doctoral class, only three finished. One seems to have found a dream job, one is (last I heard) teaching at a community college, and one is working as the managing editor of our department’s literary journal while she pursues the job market. If I finished my degree and went searching for a tenure-track job, I would, as a 20th century Americanist, be entering a market in which my application would be thrown into stacks of hundreds for each of the fifteen or twenty available openings. Typically, job offers come to my colleagues only after a year or three of adjunct lecturing, years characterized by heavy teaching loads dominated by sections of freshman composition and too few benefits (salary, health care, marketable experience). Even if I were offered a job, it would mean moving to whatever town the college happened to be located in, followed by years of padding the c.v. while looking for a better job. And then there’s the battle for tenure to look forward to.

    That last paragraph, I know, is not news to many of you. I’ve exchanged quite a few emails over the past few months with friends and mentors, including many Long Pauses readers. Some are former academics, some are happily tenured or soon-to-be, and some are in just the position I’ve described: overworked and anxious but eager to find that perfect position. I’ve written that paragraph mostly for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the state of the academy in the humanities — for people like my friend (a researcher and Ph.D. in physics) who, when I told him Saturday that I’d decided to shelve my dissertation, stood awkwardly silent for several seconds before finally cocking his head to one side and exclaiming, “I don’t understand. What do you mean you’ve quit?”

    Joanna and I made this decision together three or four weeks ago — the evening I was offered my new job, actually — and we’ve both been breathing easier since. What gets too often overlooked in discussions of young academic careers is the burden of spending one’s twenties (and now often one’s thirties as well) with little assurance about the practical matters of one’s future. Few young academics get to choose when their “real life” will begin, or where it will take place, or in what kind of institution it will be spent — all factors (really, really important factors) that highly educated workers in other professions take for granted. Joanna and I have discovered, much to our surprise, that we like living in Knoxville, and also that the instability of my career ambitions has prevented us from planting our roots here as deeply as we would have liked. If we’re breathing easier it’s because, for the first time in our ten years of marriage, we know where we’ll be a year from now, maybe even five or ten years from now.

    I have never, even for a second, regretted pursuing my Ph.D. Doing so allowed me the opportunity to spend six years (four years of graduate coursework, two years of studying for and passing comprehensive exams) reading, researching, writing about, and teaching the great literature of the English language, along with philosophy, history, and critical theory. I got to spend three years — intermittently, I’ll admit — chasing a line of inquiry through four decades of political, cultural, and aesthetic development. I even got to see something I’d written make its way onto my bookshelf. My ways of thinking have been changed radically by the experience, and I’m genuinely grateful for it.

    Any disappointments and frustrations I might have with the current state of the academic profession will always be tempered by my great love for academia, generally. I could make more money, and would likely work on more interesting projects, if I pursued a web design job in the private sector. But much of my present excitement and anticipation stems from the fact that I now know I will likely spend the rest of my career driving each morning to a university I’ve grown to love. (Plus, as a staff member I get to check out books for a full year! It’s the small perks that matter the most, right?)

    Thanks to everyone who has offered guidance and support over the last weeks, months, and years. I do appreciate it.

  • Catching Up

    It’s been way too long since I’ve rambled about the banal details of my day-to-day life.

    Last Friday, five minutes or so after finishing my paper, I hopped in the car and drove to Atlanta for the SAMLA conference. There’s nothing like an opening-night reception to remind me of just how little I’ve evolved socially since the 7th grade, when I would spend both hours of every Friday-afternoon, middle-school dance with my back pressed against a wall, drinking punch and watching Motley Crue and Cyndi Lauper videos on the front-projection TV. Fortunately, conference receptions come with free drink tickets, so that’s something. Also, the reception was held in the same room as the bookdealer displays, which was nice. If I happen to make my way to a party at your house some night, and if you happen to lose sight of me, chances are I’ll be found standing alone in front of your bookshelf and/or CD/DVD collection. Browsing. Given a choice between thumbing through your books or making small talk in a room full of strangers, I’ll take the books. Every. Time.

    While sipping my second glass of wine, I did my best to affect the look of someone waiting for that old friend I had arranged to meet — you know, staring intently across the room, even rocking forward onto my toes from time to time for a better vantage — but apparently I failed miserably. Midway through my glass, a young woman made a beeline for me, introduced herself, and told me she was alone and had decided to talk to me because I was so obviously also alone. And thank god she did. I’m not socially inept. I pride myself, in fact, on being a decent conversationalist. Not shy, but introverted. A one-on-one conversation, instigated by the other person — that’s where I shine. We chatted for about twenty minutes, then I left to grab some dinner at the Thai place connected to the hotel. My pad thai, by the way, smelled like a horse stall. This is the second time I’ve ordered pad thai while attending a conference (the other was in Boulder) and received a meal that reeked of hay and horse. Am I missing something?

    The conference panel was a lot of fun. Chuck paired my paper on In the Bathtub of the World with a presentation by two faculty members at a small liberal arts college, where a group of in-coming freshmen had recently made a documentary about their transition to college life. The presenters were especially interested in the “real” lives of people coming of age in an era of total media saturation, and they seemed to equate the power of autobiographical storytelling with “agency.” Their presentation complimented mine well, I think, and led to a thoughtful and friendly discussion afterwards.

    By the time I got home Saturday afternoon, Joanna had already left on a short trip to Nashville, leaving me bored and alone with the house to myself. Remember what I was just saying about my propensity for browsing through shelves? Yeah, I spent almost the entire evening at the local new/used indie music store, quite literally browsing through their entire inventory. I picked up three CDs:

    Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon — Okay, it wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that this is a collection of Modest Mouse covers. Not that it would have mattered much. At this point, Mark Kozelek could put out an album of improvised readings from the phone book and I’d buy it. If I could sing like that, I’d never talk.

    Goo by Sonic Youth — I first bought Goo a week or two after it was released in 1990. I bought it then for two reasons: 1. David Fricke gave it a 4-star review in Rolling Stone, and from roughly 1987-1992 I shaped my taste by reading every issue of Rolling Stone from cover to cover. 2. Late one night I caught the video for “Kool Thing” on MTV (can you imagine?). I just sat there for four minutes and six seconds trying to make sense of what I was seeing and hearing. I’m not sure when I sold my copy of Goo, though I suspect it was probably some day in 1993 or 1994, when I, like, really needed that new Widespread Panic album. Yep. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to rebuy Goo ever since I watched Irma Vep and had my mind blown again, this time by “Tunic (Song for Karen).” Sunday night, as soon as Joanna got home, I took her out to dinner just so we could drive around town listening to “Tunic” really loud.

    (Edit: I just found a nice collection of photos of Sonic Youth and Cat Power. Kim Gordon and Chan Marshall. Be still my beating heart. Oh, and also new videos from Chan and Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy — both from Truckstop Media.)

    Blow Up (Original Soundtrack) by Herbie Hancock (also featuring The Yardbirds and Tomorrow) — What a find! And for only $7.99! This album is top-to-bottom great, but “The Naked Camera” is two or three steps beyond great. After Joanna’s parents passed away last year, we bought this absurd house in a community where we’ve lowered the average age by a good decade or two. In January we’ll be hosting a “gourmet club” party, and I’m already working on the 5-CD mix of music that will be shuffling randomly throughout the evening. Most of Blow Up will make it. “The Naked Camera” might be side 1, track 1.

    Let’s see. What else?

    Yesterday my car got booted by the fascists from a local wrecker service. They extorted $75 from me despite the fact that I had, as a matter of principle, paid my $3 for all-day parking. The thieving bastards. I don’t know how they sleep at night.

    Oh, and we’ve officially launched the website for the up-coming NEXUS conference, hosted by UT’s Graduate Students in English. I have to say I’m rather proud of the site design. If you shuffle through all of the title images, you might notice I’ve dropped in an allusion to my dissertation: the Angel Bethesda statue that features prominently in Angels in America. The topic this year is “Religion and Nation,” and the committee has scored a keynote address from John D. Caputo. Academics out there, be sure to check out the call for papers. (Hey, The Weblog gang, I’m talking to you.)

  • Still Thinking Randomly

    Right now, I’m supposed to be at the Coeur D’Alene resort in Idaho, chairing a panel on Literature and Religion at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association conference. But I’m not. I’m in Knoxville, where, by the way, it’s in the mid-80s, which is way too hot for mid-October, for real. I had to cancel the panel because all four of my panelists were forced to withdraw due to cuts in departmental travel budgets. All four! If you’re not in academia, I’m sure you don’t care. But this is a fairly serious trend, I think.

    Instead, I’m working on another conference paper — this one to be delivered next month in Atlanta, which is an easy drive, and thank God for that. I’m not sure yet exactly what I’m going to say in my paper, but the good news is that it’s forcing me to read Sculpting in Time for the first time in years, and it’s also given me an excuse to play more with this idea of theorizing boredom. On several readers’ recommendations, I just checked out Leo Charney’s Empty Moments, along with some Bazin stuff I’ve been meaning to read. The paper is about Caveh Zahedi, more or less. I think.

  • New Perspectives

    So, this is kind of exciting. My copy of Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author just arrived, hot off the proverbial press. My article, “The ‘Written World’ of Philip Roth’s Nonfiction,” is the 17th and final chapter in what I believe is the first book-length study of Roth’s entire body of work, up to and including The Plot Against America. Pretty cool. My first book chapter.

  • Usable Questions

    I spent two hours in the stacks yesterday, unearthing Norman Mailer criticism. (My love of library research comes in at #17 on the “Reasons I’m Still Not Finished That Damn Dissertation” list.) While flipping through the pages of College English in search of an early Frederic Jameson article, I found and photocopied a two-page piece by Ira Shor, which I’ve transcribed below. The first set of questions were gleaned from Shor’s readings of Georg Lukacs; the second were borrowed from a “former classmate’s paper.” Lest you think he has completely forgotten about, well, art, Shor does add the following:

    A marxist formalism becomes possible when a materialist intelligence reads texture and structure as closely as do New Critics. The deepest level of literary experience occurs through diction, imagery, patterns of language and character, structures of incidents, motifs, figures, and gestures. A method which absorbs that level of aesthetic form demonstrates most profoundly the unity of knowledge action, and feeling which is art’s mimesis of life.

    I’ll comment on the questions themselves later, in a post that has been percolating for a week or two now.

    “Questions Marxists Ask About Literature” by Ira Shor
    College English 34.2 (1972): 178-79.

    I.

    1. Is there an outright rejection of socialism in the work?
    2. Does the novel raise the fundamental criticisms about the emptiness of life in bourgeois society?
    3. Does the author try to overcome Angst and chaos?
    4. In portraying a society, what approximation of totality does the author achieve? What is emphasized, what ignored?
    5. How is meaning restored to life?
    6. How well is the fate of the individual linked organically to the nature of societal forces?

    II.

    1. What are the work’s conflicting forces?
      • What secondary conflicts exist?
      • Does the plot tension imply a widespread social anxiety? Does its resolution imply the hopes of a period?
      • What threatens order?
      • Who wins in the end? In terms of the unexpected, as well as the predictable victors, can any ideological statement be made?
    2. At what points are actions or solutions to problems forced or unreal?
    3. In terms of characterization:
      • Are there any common analogies used in describing categories of people or actions, like women or working or lovemaking?
      • Are characters from all social levels equally well-sketched?
      • Are any constituencies caricatures vis-a-vis sex, race, or class, or defined only from an outsider’s point of view?
      • How often, for what reasons, and in which instances does authorial distance change, does the author alter her or his detachment, irony, or seriousness?
    4. What are the values of each class in the work?
      • What are the values of one class to another and how are they expressed?
      • Is there a class of virtuous people (children, women, servants, beggars, priests, police, etc.)?
      • What do characters (or classes of characters) worry about?
    5. Are the main problems or solutions in the novel individual or collective? Same for secondary concerns?
    6. Is there any indication that social change might improve anything?
    7. What are the dialectics of morality? Is anyone caught in a moral dilemma in which social or economic necessity clashes with moral precept?
    8. What considerations override basic impulses toward love, justice, solidarity, generosity, etc.
    9. Which values allow effective action?
      • What values are proposed for the reader’s adoption? Which characters are models?
      • What is valued most? Sacrifice? Assent? Resistance? How clearly do narratives of disillusionment and defeat indicate that bourgeois values (competition, acquisitiveness, chauvinism) are incompatible with human happiness?
      • What specific complex of forces motivates behavior? Family? Village? Passion? Civil authority?
      • Does the protagonist defend or defect from the dominant values of society? Are those values in ascendancy or decay?
      • How do characters get information?
      • How are forms of life validated to the characters?
      • Which kinds of characters mediate a change in values?
      • What controls (sanctions or procedures or protocol) exist within each group of characters to control behavior?
  • Talkin’ About Movies

    Talkin’ About Movies

    Note: Last night I delivered the following talk at the 2004 NEXUS Interdisciplinary Symposium: Reconstructing Theory and Value. I was part of a panel called “Film in the New Millennium,” where I was joined by Paul Harrill, who discussed his short film Brief Encounter with Tibetan Monks; Mark Bernard, who gave a paper on postmodern families in Boogie Nights; and Jeremy Fischer, an actor who introduced us to “The Vertical Process,” a new approach to method acting. As I told the audience last night, I got a bit distracted by the panel title, which is just so fascinating to me and so massive. That’s a subtle way of saying that what my paper lacks in focus, it makes up for in, well, I’m not sure really.

    So. To begin. Three brief anecdotes:

    Anecdote 1. In 1985, while discussing his latest novel with a French interviewer, Philip Roth lamented the sad state of literary discourse in America. “Talking about movies,” Roth said, “in the relaxed, impressionistic way that movies invite being talked about is not only the unliterate man’s literary life but the literary life of the literate as well.”

    Anecdote 2. In September 2002, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was denied entry into the United States. He had planned to accompany his latest film, Ten, to the New York Film Festival and was scheduled afterwards to lecture at Harvard and Ohio State Universities. Ines Aslan, a spokeswoman for the festival’s organizers, recounted their frustrating efforts to reach a compromise with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. “It wasn’t that they could not make an exception,” she said. “It was that they did not choose to.” Kiarostami was understandably bitter. In a letter to the festival’s director, he wrote, “I certainly do not deserve an entry visa any more than the aging mother hoping to visit her children in the U.S. perhaps for the last time in her life…. For my part, I feel this decision is somehow what I deserve.”

    Anecdote 3. In November 2003, I walked into my manager’s office, where I discovered her and two other colleagues discussing the ham-handed Christian allegory that, in their unanimous opinion, had ruined both Matrix sequels. I must have sighed or something because one of them turned to me and asked, “What? I thought you were a serious film buff. Don’t you enjoy talking about movies and religion?” The answer, of course, is “yes.” But, as I tried to explain to them that day, The Matrix seems to me to be of limited value for such purposes—a text that seldom elevates discussion above banal, uninformed observations about the “postmodern condition” or something, all of it wrapped in the trappings of anaesthetized ultraviolence. I think I may have even quoted from Baudrillard’s own critique of the film—the one in which he compared watching The Matrix: Revolutions to (and this is a loose translation) “taking a monumental special effect in the rear.”

    Two-and-a-half hours later, though, I was still in my manager’s office, and we were all still talking about movies. By that point, I had probably worked through most of my favorite subjects: the problems of “transcendence” in Carl Dreyer’s Ordet, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Orthodox aesthetic of Sculpting in Time, Ingmar Bergman’s agnostic struggle in Winter Light and The Silence, and—since we were on the subject of cinematic Christian allegories—the long-suffering mule in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. My colleagues, to their credit, were all patient with me. At times, even interested. None fell asleep, at least.

    “Film in the New Millennium” must contend, I think, with the issues raised here. Roth may have overstated his case somewhat, but there’s little denying that “talking about movies” is the most significant cultural activity in which the average American participates. New technologies are constantly making that discussion better-informed, while, at the same time, making it also even more superficial and less “literate.” Digital cable and satellite television are pumping hundreds of channels into most homes now, exposing audiences to a wider variety of films and generating new avenues for film distribution; and DVDs, with their commentary tracks and behind-the-scenes and making-of featurettes, are demystifying the filmmaking process.

    But when Americans gather to talk about movies, what are they really saying? The terms of this “cultural” discussion are, now more than ever, being defined by those with the greatest economic stake in the health of that discussion. More channels, as we all know, does not necessarily mean that more people are watching more great films; it means that cable bills and advertising revenues are soaring. Those DVD features, more often than not, are crafted by studio marketing departments. Weekend box office returns, for godsake, have become the stuff of CNN’s Headline News. Baudrillard’s interviewer was quick to point out that The Matrix, like Madonna’s latest album, purports to critique a system that, in fact, promoted it aggressively and that benefited directly from its commercial success. “That is indeed what makes our times quite difficult to stand,” Baudrillard replied. “This system produces a trompe-l’œil negation, which in turn is becoming a part of the entertainment industry, . . . Moreover, it is the most efficient way to forbid any true alternative.”

    Chalk it up as one more symptom of late capitalism. To bastardize Yeats, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the dancer from the dance—the film from the massive machine that has generated it. Lord of the Rings is produced at New Line; Elijah Wood is on the cover of Entertainment Weekly; CNN, each half hour, runs the same footage of hobbits and elves lined up for the first midnight viewing; America Online offers exclusive Middle Earth prize packages; DVDs are released twice, in theatrical and then deluxe, extended editions; the film itself might then be broadcast on HBO and, later, TNT; and the whole process takes place under the massive banner of TimeWarner. It’s like that scene in Adaptation, you know, the one where Charlie Kaufman—not the real Charlie Kaufman but the Nicholas Cage Charlie Kaufman—describes himself as a snake eating its own tail. “He’s called Ouroboros, and that’s me,” he says, a nice preemptive and typically ironic stab at our postmodern sensibilities.

    And then we have the case of Abbas Kiarostami, long recognized as one of the world’s finest living filmmakers but disallowed from entering America because of his nationality. That his films, in general, but Ten, in particular, espouse the same liberal and humanitarian ideals upon which the Bush administration justified its war with Iraq—if we are to believe the official rhetoric, at least—was apparently inconsequential to those with the authority to grant his visa. At my most cynical, I’m reminded of President Nixon’s response to his old law partner Leonard Garment, who visited the White House to finalize plans for the construction of the Hirshhorn museum of modern art. “I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. . . . I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don’t have to see it when I look out this window.”

    In a strange way, it’s the same logic that led Laura Bush, in early-2003, to cancel a White House poetry celebration after learning that one of the invited speakers had encouraged his colleagues to use the event as an opportunity to publicly denounce war on Iraq. “It came to the attention of the First Lady’s Office that some invited guests want to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum,” a White House statement said. “While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry.” The beautiful irony in all this—as many of you, I’m sure, recall—is that the First Lady’s event was to be a celebration of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. I’m still trying to imagine an apolitical reading of, say, Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again”—and not only that, an apolitical reading delivered in the White House.

    And so those of us who are particularly motivated—either personally or professionally—to “talk about movies” in this new millennium find ourselves positioned somewhere within what I’ll for now call an “attitudinal triangle.” At one point of the triangle sit those who see movies as just “mindless entertainment.” The majority of Americans live there, I would imagine, and an entire industry has grown up to satisfy their cravings. I would include even the majority of popular film reviewers in that camp. Witness the staff reviewer for our own Knox News-Sentinel, who in any given week rates approximately 80% of all current releases with at least 3 ½ stars on her 5-star scale. The public critic as arbiter of taste and thoughtful, informed educator has been replaced by a voice that too often simply reinforces existing attitudes—much to TimeWarner’s delight, I might add. (Remember Ouroboros?)

    At another point of the triangle sit a dwindling number who would still seek art for art’s sake alone. They are, at times, a reactionary lot, arguing like Mrs. Bush for a “celebration” of beauty or form or individual genius or patriotism or dignity divorced completely from the messy details of democracy or commerce or justice. As an aside: That those last three terms—democracy, commerce, and justice—have become inextricably bound to one another in our post-Cold War world is perhaps the messiest detail of all.

    And finally, at the third point of the triangle sit those, like many of us here today, who have systematically honed their skills as critics and readers and lovers of art during the late-20th century. With political motivations of our own—let’s admit it—and armed with continental philosophy—or, in my case at least, with water-down, superficial understandings of continental philosophy—we champion the “text as politics,” flaying its lifeless flesh for the symptoms of exploitation. Like the popular “thumbs up, thumbs down” film reviewer, many in this camp are reluctant to draw firm conclusions based on purely aesthetic criteria, arguing instead for a kind of implicit relativism. Ideology, they would argue, flattens the curve, giving equal legitimacy to a Pynchon novel, a Budweiser advertisement, and an episode of Seventh Heaven. I like Ishmael Reed’s line from his novel, The Terrible Threes: “There were still galleries in which art hung that was less interesting than the jargon that was peddled in its behalf” (Threes, 152).

    These are all gross reductions and oversimplifications, of course, but that is partly my point. None of us exists wholly at any of these extremes; we move, instead, with some fluidity between them. Which brings me back, finally, to that third anecdote—the marathon film and religion discussion that took place over in Dunford Hall. What happened there that day has come to represent something of a model for me of what it means to really talk about movies. It forced each of us to swing, uncomfortably at times, between the points of that attitudinal triangle. It was spoken in a personal, patient voice, valuing relationships and opinions, shared and unpopular ones alike. It was heated and enthusiastic and highly-charged but still humble, self-deprecating even. It was historically-informed—I did my best to proselytize for the European masters and to speak to issues of film form—and it was culturally- and politically-engaged. Perhaps most refreshing of all, though—especially given the larger context of this NEXUS symposium—is that it forced even the most skeptical of us to recognize the legitimacy, the necessity even, of acknowledging religious experience (for lack of a better word) as a shaper of our encounters with culture.

    And, so now, the good news. One last anecdote. In preparation for this panel I searched through my issues of Film Comment that were published over the past four years, jotting down the titles of films that had worked their way onto critics’ year-end “best” lists but that I had been unable to see. I then forwarded a portion of that list on to a few members of a film discussion email listserv in which I have participated for a number of years. By the end of the week, packages were arriving at my door, each containing perfect digital copies of DVDs that have yet to be released in America: films by Bela Tarr, Bruno Dumont, Shohei Imamura, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Olivier Assayas, Hou Hsiao-Hsien. And on and on. This is how I was finally able to see Kiarostami’s Ten, in fact. My friends had ripped DVD-Rs on their computers in Toronto or London or wherever, and I watched them all on my Malata region-free DVD player—an inexpensive machine that circumvents the region-coding that prevents most players from properly displaying discs manufactured in other countries. So there I sat, in the cultural wilds of East Tennessee, watching these remarkable films, and all it cost me was the kind generosity of a few friends (whom I’ve never met face to face) and the price of a couple blank DVDs. Take that, TimeWarner.

    Film in the New Millennium—like communication in the new millennium and politics in the new millennium and education and community and democracy in the new millennium—will be experienced increasingly via purely digital, anational forms. There’s nothing new to that idea—nothing that hasn’t been said already a hundred times in each new issue of Wired. The less obvious lesson to be learned from this anecdote, though, is that the historically-informed, socially- and politically-engaged, and passionate, fan-boy film discussions that I called for earlier are already taking place, but they too seldom occur in the pages of, say, Literature Film Quarterly. Or in the pages of anything, for that matter.

    Acquarello, a NASA aerospace engineer, posts weekly capsule reviews of foreign and art films on his Website, Strictly Film School. Its traffic numbers in the tens of thousands, and Wellspring Home Video now often includes a link to his site as an “extra” on their foreign film DVD releases. When producers from the Criterion Collection began compiling sources for their recent releases of The Killers and Diary of a Country Priest, two of their first contacts were Trond Trondson, a geophysicist in Calgary, and Doug Cummings, a graphic artist in Los Angeles, who operate sites dedicated to Tarkovsky and Bresson. (I know this because I regularly exchange emails with Pascal, Trond, and Doug.) Culture bloggers, many of them former and current academics, are forsaking traditional modes of academic publication for the more immediate and, dare I say it, rewarding experience of online publishing. And, in an example that hits a bit closer to home, Paul and I are both contributors to Senses of Cinema, a quarterly, partially-refereed online journal associated with the Australian Film Commission. As an ABD soon to be hitting the job market, I’m painfully aware of how utterly irrelevant those lines on my C.V. will be to most hiring committees. But that also will change in this new millennium. And I can’t wait to watch it happen.

  • Liberalism and Literature

    A comment left here on Wednesday by Daniel Green led me to his blog, which in turn led me to his wonderful article, “Liberalism and Literature.” A critique of the “academic left” and of ideological criticism, in general, Green’s piece is refreshingly articulate, well-informed, and even-handed. It echoes what I see as a growing dissatisfaction with contemporary, theory-centric literary studies — both within academia and outside of it — a dissatisfaction (political, professional, and aesthetic) that I hope to address in my dissertation (assuming, of course, that I ever get around to finishing the damn thing).

    I’m most sympathetic to Green’s argument when he points to the vast divide that separates traditional liberal ideals and the messy details of practical politics from the radical and Utopian ideologies that dominate certain sectors of literary criticism.

    This reductive approach, whereby all subjects are political, either inherently so or made to be so, is detrimental to real politics, which can be safely disregarded in favor of the more tidy rhetorical kind.

    Green supports his case with a spot-on analysis of America’s current political condition, which, as he points out, is itself a chorus of competing fictions. The “radical worldview” he likens to escapist genre fiction:

    an opportunity to leave behind the muddle of ordinary life in exchange for the narrative clarity and enhanced drama stories make available.

    Modern conservatism — steeped in its legends of “gun-toting colonials,” “bread-earning” husbands, and “a group of white founding fathers whose supreme wisdom literally cannot be challenged” — is founded, first and foremost, Green argues convincingly, on a belief in free market capitalism, itself a dominant force of liberal progress.

    It is impossible any longer to think of the “conservative” — at least in the United States — as one who simply resists impulsive change; instead, the postwar American conservative comes fully possessed of a complete collection of well-made fictions, chief among them the unequivocal faith in the “free market” (taken over, to be sure, from 19th century liberals), a fiction so powerful in its influence that conservatives have almost managed to conflate it with democracy itself.

    So what does any of this have to do with “Liberalism and Literature”? Green’s immediate concern here is reminding us that great literature — with its delight in ambiguity, the “universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations” — is itself a primer for liberal ideals, including, in Tony Kushner’s words, the inevitability of “painful progress.” “I would again maintain,” Green writes:

    that my primary interest in literature — my belief in its capacity to sharpen the mind’s apprehension of the shaping patterns at work both in the imaginative creations of poets and novelists and in the imaginary creations many of us attempt to make of the social, political, and cultural arrangements we must unfortunately settle for in lieu of the more vivid if less tangible worlds evoked by the poets — has made me more alert to the many different forms the aestheticizing of mundane reality can take.

    That’s a tricky leap he has made there, but one with which I am growing increasingly sympathetic. His critics on the left would likely denounce Green’s argument as fundamentally conservative, claiming that by reducing the value of Art to its “universal” nature, he is ignoring the particular economic and “real” political forces that have shaped the making of the Art and our reception of it, and that he is therefore, by default, supporting those very forces. (I’ve made the same claim against Philip Roth’s recent fiction, actually.) But that critique is too easy, and, as a personal aside, it contradicts my own experience of literature. The years I’ve spent studying literature and film have had one great effect on me: They turned what was once a black and white world into a vast mosaic. And that process does, in fact, make a tremendous impact on “real” politics.

    One more note on this article:

    Much has been made — especially in recent years and in conservative regions like the American South — of the dominance of leftist or liberal thought in academia. Green offers, I think, the most obvious explanation for that dominance. I’ve thought the same thing for years, but never took the time to write it down:

    Considering a whole constellation of facts about contemporary America — among them its now unchallenged position as supreme economic, cultural, and military power, its exaltation of business and commerce as indicators of status and accomplishment, its thoroughgoing utilitarian approach to education and manifest impatience with the cultivation of intellect and sensibility for their own sakes — it is not at all surprising that those who choose what was once called the “life of the mind” at its universities would feel estranged from the official values that seem to animate the political and commercial life of American society. Whether such people would identify themselves as “liberals,” “radicals,” “progressives,” or just as independent thinkers, surely it is at the least unlikely that as a whole they would incline much toward the established conservative view of the way things ought to be.

    Good stuff.

  • Democracy in America

    I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest. Mankind, for him, consists in his children and his personal friends. . . . He exists in and for himself. . . .

    Over this kind of men stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. . . . It gladly works for their happiness but wants to be sole agent and judge of it. . . . It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much being born; it is not all tyrannical, but it hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.

    — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

    And nearly a century before television, no less. De Tocqueville is near the top of my “Darren, seriously, isn’t it about time that you read this?” list. I stumbled upon this passage while reading Wendy Brown’s Politics Out of History, a provocative defense of critical theory as a potentially invigorating voice in the discourse of liberal democracy. In the best chapters, she turns for guidance to Nietzsche and Foucault, who could, at best, be described as problematic political figures (what with Nietzsche’s hatred of egalitarianism and all). I plan to finish Brown’s book tonight and post a reading diary entry tomorrow.

    I’m just stunned, though, by de Tocqueville’s prescient description of contemporary America. A few days ago, I walked a hundred or so yards down the street to deliver a piece of mail that had been accidentally put in my box. My neighbor, who I’ve never met, looked at me closely through her window before opening the door an inch or two, deeply suspicious — this in a neighborhood that hasn’t experienced even a bout of vandalism in the six years I’ve lived there. When I run at night, I see the glow of my neighbors’ televisions emanating from behind their closed blinds. And then when I finish my run, I go home, close the blinds, and turn on my television. How sad.

  • Feelin’ Crispy

    I’m sympathizing right now with Clancy, who, a year-and-a-half into her doctoral work, asks, “Is this what burnout feels like? I have so much to do and no desire to engage any of it.” Another friend, a graduate student in psychology and counseling, wrote to tell me that four of the five students who entered her program married have since gotten divorced (which couldn’t bode well for their future as counselors, I would think). Invisible Adjunct is hosting a discussion along similar lines, inspired by Scott Smallwood’s article, “Doctor Dropout.” Smallwood writes:

    On the first day of graduate school, everyone is still a success. All of the students gunning for Ph.D.’s have lived an academic life of achievement: honor roll, summa cum laude, certificates, scholarships, and parents who praise their intellectual prowess. Yet as many as half of those bright students — many of whom have never tasted failure — will drop out before they can claim their prize.

    In some humanities programs, only one of every three entering students goes on to earn a doctorate. No comprehensive national statistics are available, but studies suggest that the attrition rate for Ph.D. programs is 40 percent to 50 percent.

    Of the eight candidates who entered my program in August ’98, only two have completed their degrees, two of us are still dissertating, and the remaining four have moved on to other jobs, families, and places unknown. Four out of eight — that makes us statistically average, I guess.

    I’m feeling a bit burned out myself at the moment. After finishing my second big writing project Saturday evening, I retreated to the couch, where I spent a day-and-a-half napping and watching the first season of The Office on DVD. The writing itself isn’t what’s so exhausting. Hell, the writing is fun most of the time. It’s the other stuff — the messiness of life stuff — that gets in the way and wears a body down. Things like broken washers and dryers, and day jobs, and accidents at the vet that almost kill the tiny orange cat that you bottle-fed for a month because its mother abandoned it when it was a week old. It’s all a high-wire juggling act.

    I’m so tired right now that I can’t even enjoy Kenneth Pollack’s change of heart, or the latest news out of the War College, or the Paul O’Neill and Colin Powell brouhahas. (Okay, so maybe I’m enjoying those a little.) I’m too tired to write up responses to Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (a fascinating train wreck of a film) or Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering Kofman’s wonderful documentary, Derrida (which is, of all things, quite charming and funny). I can’t even find the energy to finish up my “2003 Year in Film” post, which I’d hoped to send to Senses of Cinema and which now, two weeks into January, already feels irrelevant.

    But I do hope to get back to this blog every once and while. If anyone’s still reading.

  • The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology

    By Jeffrey C. Alexander

    As noted in its sub-title, Alexander’s study argues for a “cultural sociology” — a discipline distinct from existing sociologies of culture. “To speak of the sociology of culture,” Alexander writes, “is to suggest that culture is something to be explained, by something else entirely separated from the domain of meaning itself” (12-13). Cultural sociology, on the other hand, demands that culture and social structures be “uncoupled,” allowing a kind of cultural autonomy. Only within such a “strong” program does it become possible to “discover in what ways culture intersects with other social forces, such as power and instrumental reason in the concrete social world” (14).

    Alexander contrasts his strong program with the “weak” ones that have come to dominate sociology over the last four decades. The best work of the Birmingham school, he argues, offers insightful criticism but ultimately invokes “abstracted influences and processes as adequate explanation for empirical social actions” (18). Pierre Bourdieu’s likewise reduces culture to a dependent of social structure — “It is a gearbox, not an engine” (18). Foucault’s deftly reconstructs historical data but “leaves no room for understanding how an autonomous cultural realm hinders or assists actors in judgment” (19). And, finally, contemporary work on the production of culture reduces it all to the workings of corporate sponsors and the elite, allowing little room for the examination of “internal cultural inputs and restraints” (20).

    As an example of a weak program, Alexander cites Wendy Griswold’s fine study of the transformed trickster figure in Restoration drama. Despite her admirable work, what Griswold lacks, he argues, is an acknowledgment of dramatic narrative itself — its inner workings of plot and character and the effect they inevitably have on the coding of meaning. This example points to Alexander’s final proposal: a strong program of cultural sociology that fuses Geertzian ideological criticism with contemporary pragmatism and literary studies:

    This impulse toward reading culture as a text is complemented, in such narrative work, by an interest in developing formal models that can be applied across different comparative and historical cases. In other words, narrative forms such as the morality play or melodrama, tragedy, and comedy can be understood as “types” that carry with them peculiar implications for social life. (25)

    Alexander first applies his program in a chapter-long reading of the Holocaust, explaining its postwar meaning in terms of two distinct narratives. In the first, the “progressive narrative,” the West viewed Nazi atrocities as the birthing stage of a new era, one in which an event like the Holocaust will “never happen again.” This narrative played directly into “modernization” (as Alexander calls it here and in earlier work) — an ideology that posited postwar America as a kind of Utopia. Alexander supports his progressive argument by examining the anti-anti-Semitism movements of the late-1940s and early-1950s and the establishment of Israel in 1948. “Postwar redemption depended on putting mass murder ‘behind us,’ moving on, and getting on with the construction of the new world,” he writes (41).

    With time, however, “The Holocaust,” as a concept, became divorced from its specific historical conditions and was universalized and metaphorized into a “sacred evil” unlike any act before or since. As it became universalized, the Holocaust took on the shape of a tragic narrative, thus allowing all of mankind to identify with the murders and to experience a form of catharsis in the process. Building from Aristotle and from literary critics such as Northrop Frye, Alexander illustrates how the Holocaust’s tragic narrative has been performed, both literally — in plays like The Diary of Anne Frank and in movies such as The Holocaust and Schindler’s List — and figuratively — in the formation of America’s interventionist policy in the Balkans and in the fights against A.I.D.S., environmental deregulation, nuclear build-up, and other potential human “holocausts.”

    Alexander follows his reading of the Holocaust with three short chapters, none of which I found particularly useful. Each takes on a sizable task — defining the relationship between cultural trauma and collective identity, arguing for a cultural sociology of evil, and mapping the discourse of American civil society — tasks much too large to be adequately addressed in the twenty or so pages he devotes to each. Alexander (and co-author Philip Smith) acknowledge this weakness in chapter five, in which they argue that America’s political discourse can be best understood as a debate between “democratic and counterdemocratic codes.” Before diving into short analyses of six significant political crises — from Congressional attacks on President Grant to the Iran-Contra Scandal — they write:

    Once again, we stress that we do not intend to explain any particular historical outcome; in order to accomplish this, extremely detailed case studies are necessary. We offer, rather, the groundwork for such studies by demonstrating the continuity, autonomy, and internal organization of a particular cultural structure across time. (126-27)

    After tracing that structure through a century-and-a-half of American political history, they conclude that it is, in fact, a “necessary cause in all political events that are subject to the scrutiny of American civil society” (154). But their statement is undercut by a series of qualifiers; they write that it “seems plausible to suggest” such a conclusion. Those qualifiers are telling, I think, for Alexander’s argument demands definitive evidence but doesn’t muster the energy to provide it.

    Chapter 6, “Watergate as Ritual,” goes some way in addressing this problem. In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    Chapter 7, “The Sacred and Profane Information Machine,” offers a quick overview of the computer as a maker of cultural meaning. The 13-page essay, first published in Smelser’s and Munch’s Theory of Culture (1993), feels out of date or, at best, like an introduction to a much longer and potentially interesting book. I’m not sure why it’s included here. The final chapter, “Modern, Anti, Post, and Neo: How Intellectuals Explain ‘Our Time,’” was the biggest disappointment, as it is a barely-modified version of the essay that opens Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory (1995). In my dissertation I plan to build from the model that Alexander proposes here by expanding it to incorporate the new post-9/11 reality, and I was hoping that this new book would do some of my work for me. Apparently, I’ll need to wait for the next one. He writes:

    Religiosity was not associated with totalitarianism. But is it fundamentalism per se or only Islamic versions that are employed to mark the correct alternative to civil society? Is terrorism such a broad negative that militant movements against antidemocratic, even murderous regimes will be polluted in turn? Will opposing “terrorism” and “fundamentalism” make the neomodern vulnerable to the conservatism and chauvinism of modernization theory in its earlier form? (Alexander, forthcoming)

    As is probably apparent already, I am of two minds about The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. The argument that Alexander and Philip Smith lay out in Chapter 1 is intriguing, and Alexander’s application of it in his readings of the Holocaust and Watergate are refreshingly useful. The rest, to be perfectly frank, feels a bit like filler.

  • Moral Empathy

    My dissertation is built around a model of postwar American society that was first proposed by Jeffrey Alexander in Fin-de-Siecle Social Theory (1995) and that he has since expanded upon in The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003). I picked up a copy of the latter a few weeks ago but haven’t yet had a chance to read it. (That I’m looking forward — with great expectation — to doing so over Christmas break probably says more about my personality than I should freely admit.) Alexander has a welcomed knack for translating the often obtuse language of social theory into workable frameworks. Theory and action — a nice change of pace.

    Alexander and Ron Eyerman, co-directors of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, published a great piece yesterday in Newsday (also available at Common Dreams), in which they argue that the massive economic and social changes necessary to alleviate suffering on a global scale are dependent, finally, upon change of a more fundamental and personal nature:

    Only when the privileged can put themselves in the place of others who are less fortunate, when they achieve moral empathy, can reforms be made.

    “How do we achieve this?” they then ask. Citing as examples the Civil Rights movement, Ghandi’s performed anti-colonialism, anti-Apartheid efforts, and feminism (among others), Alexander and Eyerman argue that the first step is breaking down the binaries that we’ve constructed to simplify our understanding of the world:

    rational/irrational, autonomous/dependent, honest/dishonest, open/secretive, cooperative/aggressive. We cannot have moral empathy for others we perceive as morally incompetent, irrational, dishonest, secretive, aggressive and dependent on authority. In such cases, their fate appears natural and morally justified. But we know that, by representing themselves in terms of the positive attributes, excluded groups can gain empathy among better off people who might come to their aid. Over time the excluded can achieve enough legitimacy in the public sphere to stage social protests that will be taken seriously and lead eventually to reforms. Subordination and inclusion are not static structural conditions; they can be negotiated.

    There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking here, of course, but something about that connection between constructed binaries and “moral empathy” really struck me. As I’m prone to do, it got me thinking about the American church and, more specifically, about the ways in which it has been complicit in many of our country’s more regrettable foreign and domestic policy decisions of late. In its efforts to stem the tide of “postmodern relativism” (or something like that), large segments of the church have worked aggressively to reinforce those simple constructions. It pains me, especially, when I hear Christians parrot Bush’s good/evil rhetoric, as if the Bible’s message of grace were somehow applicable only to us but never to them.

    Today, on AIDS Day, I’m reminded that three million people have already succumbed this year and that another forty million (three-eighths of them under the age of fifteen) are living with HIV. And I wonder why our churches can’t “stand united” to help, why they can’t muster the “moral empathy” to even care.

  • Speaking of Gobbledygook

    I have this habit of browsing through the “New Arrivals” shelves on my way out of the university library. I go straight to the PNs (film) and the PSs (American Lit) and grab whatever titles catch my eye. It’s a bad habit, actually, because these are the books that inevitably get filed away on some bookshelf at home, never to be opened.

    Today, after tracking down the last of those elusive Philip Roth essays, I gave into my craving and checked out Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, a new collection of essays edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. According to the jacket copy:

    The essays are less about proving the innocence of those accused of bad writing than about critically interrogating the terms and assumptions of the allegations. The contributors attempt to inform and deepen the debate by asking what values, history, politics, and stylistics are implicated, on both sides, in the controversy.

    The book seems to have been inspired, in part, by the journal Philosophy and Literature‘s year-end awards for “bad” academic writing and by the debate (and hard feelings) they have provoked. I found one brief review that summarizes the collection’s argument as such: “by calling attention to their own unconventional writing style, theorists emphasize theory’s calling to investigate language.” I certainly hope that they offer a more convincing justification than that. Should be a fun read.

  • Friday Colloquy

    On Friday afternoon I subjected myself to ninety minutes of critical scrutiny by a group of professional historians. And it ended up being a damn good time.

    My article, “The American Left and the Problems of History in Philip Roth’s ‘American Trilogy,’” was the subject of this month’s Friday Colloquy, sponsored by UT’s Center for the Study of War and Society. Unlike most academic conferences — wherein, in my experience at least, you read a paper to a small and largely disinterested audience who then ask one or two questions while staring at their watches — the colloquy provides participants with copies of the article weeks in advance. The monthly meetings, then, become sites of informed discussion and constructive criticism. Who knew such a thing could still be found in academia?

    After spending the last three weeks writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again the opening twelve pages of my first chapter, my confidence was shaky at best. Sitting face-to-face with a group of critical readers was, surprisingly, exactly what I needed. The best compliment I received was that my writing was “refreshingly free of jargon,” and more than one member of UT’s history faculty told me that when my dissertation is published it will be a welcomed addition to the required readings of many undergraduate American history courses.

    Someone might actually read this thing after all. Go figure.

  • Writing a Dissertation

    A diary of my week.

    • 10/22 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/23 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.
    • 10/24 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/25 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.
    • 10/27 – 6:30-8:30 am. Wrote about 300 words. I think I’ve finally figured out the structure of my first chapter.
    • 10/28 – 6:30-8:30 am. Deleted about 200 words. Restructured first chapter. Still not happy.

  • More on Teaching and Technology

    Russ, a reader from Pennsylvania (and all-around good guy), sent me this email in response to yesterday’s post. Messages this good make me wish I had a comments feature.

    I’m glad to hear Oppenheimer has written a new book. I think his ideas are really essential to trying to get a handle on why our current education fixes aren’t getting to the root of the problems, and well-meaning advocates from both teaching ranks and administrators, liberals and conservatives, have screwed this up.

    I had some doubts concerning the actual usefulness of computers in K-12 education in relation to their perceived usefulness back when the Internet went wide, and Oppenheimer’s earlier piece in The Atlantic gave those doubts some substantive evidence. My take on the larger education crisis is that we cannot effectively educate our populace today because we lack a suitable and convincing “narrative” or “purpose” to justify the necessary expenditures of time and work needed to become an educated people. The narrative of “become educated to get a well-paying job” is insufficient. That has been modified to something approaching “become educated to stay abreast of the high-tech information economy.” That’s also insufficient, in my view. Neil Postman’s book The End of Education put forth a few proposals for replacement narratives, but I didn’t find any of those compelling.

    Yeah, this whole computer thing is suckering a lot of school districts into spending a lot of money on technology and, subsequent staving off of obsolescence — and that’s not to mention the misspending of precious instructional time. The kids of rich or successful families can afford this misallocation of resources; they’ll still receive the time and attention in and out of school to make up for the time not spent wisely in front of a computer screen. It’s the poorer kids who will likely suffer the most, despite their families being told that this technology would level the field.

    I think there’s some hope for a wider discussion of the education narrative question. In his column which ran locally Monday, William Raspberry reviewed a book about the achievement gap and noted that a huge obstacle in overcoming the gap is the lack of a convincing rationale being presented to many African-American youth to justify the toil of education. They’re not falling for the “good job” hook. This raises the larger question that leaves me awestruck: assuming we could find a replacement narrative satisfying to a plurality of the interested parties, how do you go about inculcating that narrative into the schools and the culture at large

    As I told Russ, when I was teaching freshman comp, I would always do a unit on “cultural literacy,” which was my way of forcing students to confront (if not accept) the rationale behind the traditional liberal arts education (“liberal” in the classic, non-partisan sense). Freshman comp was an interesting avenue for such a discussion, as it is the only course required of all UT graduates — the first of the many “Basic Studies” requirements undergrads typically encounter, often begrudgingly. I don’t know if my unit “worked” or not, but I always valued the discussion it would generate. 90% of my students thought of college as grade 13 — as the next, burdensome step toward a high-paying job. So many are so firmly written into that cultural narrative Russ has described.

    I find myself stuck in an odd position: I want to be a classroom teacher, but the tight job market and the “business” of graduate teaching assistantships has left me working instead in Instructional Technology, a field about which I feel ambivalent, at best. I see occasional flashes of value in what I do, but at times I wonder if my salary (and my overhead) could be put to better use elsewhere. It’s a sticky issue, to say the least.

  • A Few Good Reads

    A few interesting education-related links passed through my desk today. The first is to “Rethinking Thinking” from the Christian Science Monitor, which attempts to look beyond the lip-service academics typically pay to the importance of “critical thinking.” Well, to be fair, it usually isn’t just lip-service. Most of us really do want our students to learn how to learn (the goal of any good liberal education). The problem is figuring our how to do it, especially given that brutal combination of increased teaching loads and research expectations.

    Margaret Miller, a University of Virginia professor and director of the National Forum on College Level Learning, is leading the charge to measure what students at state-funded colleges know and can do, including an assessment of intellectual skills. She worries that critical-thinking skills are not truly valued by many state schools and their students. “Students and institutions are more and more focused on the vocational – at a high level, but vocational nonetheless,” she says. “But producing a group of non- reflective highly competent technicians is something we want to avoid if we want a functioning society.”

    Because the curriculum is so fragmented across many narrow disciplines, students have a greater challenge in making sense of it. That means colleges can’t just ghettoize critical thinking in a few courses, but need to spread the focus on thinking across the curriculum. “All disciplines need to become more liberal-arts-like in their focus on the intellectual skills that underlie what they do,” she says. “Some of that is critical thinking, some of it is broader and encompasses that.”

    Along somewhat similar lines, also check out “Are Computers Wrecking Schools?” a review of Todd Oppenheimer’s new book, The Flickering Mind. Oppenheimer’s argument in a nutshell is that the monies and efforts directed toward technology initiatives in our schools have been wasted to the extent that they’ve been removed from sound teaching practices. The only big winners amid the mad dash toward “computer literacy” have been the hardware manufacturers, he claims.

    Oppenheimer is particularly strong in examining the Federal e-rate program, in which technology firms seem to have systematically overbilled many school districts in setting up their Internet services. Oppenheimer describes how, in 2000, the San Francisco school district turned down $50 million in e-rate funds when they found that they could actually build their network themselves, for less than even the small cost they would have had to pay in order to receive the e-rate funding. The hardware manufacturer was marking up the equipment for the federal program far over the prices that the district could get on the open market.

    Oppenheimer appears to have launched a blog on his home page. So far, the only post is a fantastic Frequently Asked Questions — must-reading, I think, for anyone interested in the topic. I especially like this bit:

    6. How necessary is computer training in preparing children for tomorrow’s increasingly high-tech jobs?

    There is no greater hoax in this story than the rush to put young children on computers, in the belief that it will prepare them for tomorrow’s jobs. It won’t-in fact, doing so may well put them at a professional disadvantage. One expert, who used to make educational software, suspects that employers of the future will actually steer away from applicants who were “computer trained.”

    I think I need to read this book.

  • Academic Blogs

    I chased a link and ended up discovering a fascinating community of academic bloggers, most of whom are like me — insiders with an outsider’s (slightly disgruntled) perspective. If you’re considering graduate school, read the links on the right side of Invisible Adjunct before making any rash decision. A few other blogs of interest:

     

  • Edward Said

    Edward Said, who seemed to devote his life to the greying of a world that many would like to keep black and white, has passed away at the age of 67 from pancreatic cancer. From one of his last published editorials:

    Since Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, there has been an uninterrupted imperial presence based on these premises throughout the Arab world, producing untold misery — and some benefits, it is true. But so accustomed have Americans become to their own ignorance and the blandishments of U.S. advisors like Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, who have directed their venom against the Arabs in every possible way, that we somehow think that what we do is correct because “that’s the way the Arabs are.” That this happens also to be an Israeli dogma shared uncritically by the neo-conservatives who are at the heart of the Bush administration simply adds fuel to the fire.

    We are in for many more years of turmoil and misery in the Middle East, where one of the main problems is, to put it as plainly as possible, U.S. power. What the U.S. refuses to see clearly it can hardly hope to remedy.

    I haven’t studied Said seriously enough to draw any but the most superficial of conclusions about his lasting value to literary or political criticism, but I do know that his fundamental ideas — those found in Orientalism — opened up minority, colonial, and post-colonial literature for me in practical and profound ways — a rare feat amid the pomp and pedantry of contemporary “theory.” As an aside, the first and, as far as I know, only book-length study of Said was written by Abdirahman A. Hussein, a fairly recent product of UT’s doctoral program.

  • God and the Machine

    Today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education features an interview with Alan Lightman, a professor of physics and the humanities at M.I.T. Lightman recently edited a collection of essays, Living With the Genie, in which various authors examine the effects of technology (both good and bad) on our lives. Because it’s only available by subscription, I’ve excerpted a sizeable chunk of the interview.

    Q. You remark early in the essay that technology is making life faster and pushing out opportunities for quiet contemplation. What’s the effect of this on our culture?

    A. We have our spiritual lives compromised. We have become a nation without values and without a centeredness, without a belief system. If we have a belief system, it’s money and power. I think the lack of that centeredness is one of the consequences. It is part of our poor relationship with other nations in the world. Other countries sense our lack of values. Before you can understand other countries, you need to understand yourself. We don’t have such a foundation. We just have a blind pursuit of money.

    Q. And technology pushes that?

    A. The blame is on human beings, but technology has pushed that.

    Q. Some of the things you talk about in this essay have been felt in the arts for some time — everything from Brave New World to The Matrix. Do you think that your involvement with literature has given you a sensitivity to these things?

    A. Yes. It’s good that you mention those other media, because certainly there are other people who are saying the same thing. The more of us who say this, the better chance we have of being heard.

    I think a lot of these ideas are old. In my essay, I refer to Henry David Thoreau’s comments in Walden. In those days, the high technology was the railroad, and that was changing American thinking. Thoreau made this witty comment: “We don’t ride on the railroad; the railroad rides upon us.” Of course, I like that, but I would amend that by saying that technology is just a tool, and we created the railroad, after all.

    These ideas have been around for a while, but the pace of the world has accelerated. All of the problems that Thoreau saw 150 years ago are much more acute and have much more devastating consequences.

    I would love to push Dr. Lightman on some of these comments, particularly the first one. That relationship between technology and our spiritual lives is tricky and under-theorized, I think. Tools like blogging can actually encourage the sort of contemplation that he is lamenting, but they too seldom do. He’s right. The blame is on human beings, who seem to be sacrificing something of their humanity to these machines. Interesting stuff.

  • Speaking of Blogs

    I spent Thursday afternoon with UT law professor, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), and thirty or so other faculty and staff in a discussion of blogging and its potential impact on academic life. Reynolds’s talk was informal but familiar, leading me to assume that, during his two-year climb to the top of the blogging heap, he has participated in countless such presentations. The biggest surprises to me were learning that his daily audience outnumbers that of Phil Donahue’s failed return to television (and for less than $40/month in overhead) and that UT’s administration is downright supportive of his efforts. I figured that someone would be troubled by his partisan editorializing on university time. Apparently not.

    We reached little consensus during our post-presentation discussions. There was much interest in the potential of blogging — particularly as a tool to foster critical thinking and cognitive development in our students — but finding a real-world application is tricky. In practical terms, there is little that can be done on a blog that can’t be done using, say, a class discussion forum or an email list. The big perk, it seemed to most of us there, was the very public nature of the blog. Glenn recounted the thrill of receiving his first emails from readers in Thailand, for instance, a thrill to which I can testify from personal experience. Feedback validates the blogger’s efforts, while also raising the bar. Or, in a nutshell: This thing has made me a better writer and a better thinker; I’m sure that some students would undergo a similar process.

    If I were teaching right now, I think I would set up free Blogger accounts for all of my students, host them (again, for free) on Blogspot, then require each student to “journal” on the Web. For some in the class, it would, of course, be busy work. (But, for those particular students, everything is busy work, so who cares?) I bet a certain percentage of the class would really get into it, though, and would continue blogging even after getting a final grade. Imagine that: students coming out of a class with a desire to continue that critical thought process.

    Anyway, here are some notes from the colloquy and our student paper’s write-up.

  • Dreaming of a 28 Hour Day

    I hadn’t planned to take a four day break from blogging, but life — as it’s wont to do — keeps getting in the way. And by “life” I mostly mean Sobig viruses, network flubs, and frustrated faculty, all of which have conspired this week to make my day job unusually exhausting. Well, there’s that and the freelance writing projects, reading assignments, and Jack, the four-week old kitten we’re fostering, whose cuteness doesn’t quite make up for his refusal to be weaned or his tendency to pee on walls, clothes, carpets, towels, blankets, couches, and people.

    Universities Left Behind

    The Times published two interesting pieces yesterday. In the first, “Bush ‘Compassion’ Agenda: A Liability in ’04?” Elisabeth Bumiller argues that Bush’s broken promises might just catch up with him. The pattern should be familiar by now: Bush stands before a supportive crowd, drapes himself in the simple symbols of patriotism and Christian charity, then stumps for legislation that, if enacted, would demonstrate his “compassion.” But, of course, he never gets around to the actual politicking necessary to see that legislation through Congress. Instead, we’re left with frustrated people like Rev. Jim Wallis, leader of Call to Renewal and a former Bush supporter.

    Mr. Wallis said Mr. Bush had told him as president-elect that “I don’t understand how poor people think,” and appealed to him for help by calling himself “a white Republican guy who doesn’t get it, but I’d like to.” Now, Mr. Wallis said, “his policy has not come even close to matching his words.”

    Add to that such highly-touted planks as AIDS funding, faith-based initiatives, child tax credits, and his No Child Left Behind act, and you get a whole mess of sound and fury but nothing much of significance. Well, that’s not entirely true. You also get great sound bites and photo-ops.

    Only tangentially related is “Universities in Decline” from the Times editors. It’s a simple, four-paragraph statement of a disturbing fact: “Public colleges and universities, which grant more than three-quarters of this country’s degrees, have been steadily undermined by state budget cuts and a mood of legislative indifference.” No kidding. Last summer, thousands of my colleagues and I were deemed “non-essential” employees and given a week off when the Tennessee legislature was unable to balance its budget. (Unable, even, after reallocating its tobacco settlement money.) During my five years in Knoxville, three tuition hikes have placed a greater and greater burden on students, who are receiving fewer and fewer services in return. It’s sad.

    And only tangentially related to that is this bit from the latest issue of Harper’s. A co-worker transcribed and forwarded this to me, and I’m now very curious to read the whole piece, “What’s Wrong with Public Education”:

    Public education is not intended to help the individual but to create a populace that is easy to control, says John Taylor Gatto, the author of four books on education and a former New York State and New York City teacher of the year. The real purpose of mandatory public education, he says, is to train young people to be reflexively obedient to authority and to fill social roles that benefit government and commerce. “It is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don’t conform,” he writes.

    The problem is not that public education is failing to reach its goals, but that it is succeeding in producing a culture of childishness and consumption, he says. “If we wanted to, we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids ‘take’ an education rather than merely ‘receive’ a schooling,” he writes.

    Perhaps if President Bush had, at some point, learned to “take” his education he would better understand the consequences of his actions (including his frustrating refusals to act).

    And Some Final Thoughts

    From June Chittister’s The Rule of St. Benedict: Insight for the Ages:

    A Zen story tells of two monks walking down a muddy, rain-logged road on the way back to their monastery after a morning of begging who saw a beautiful young girl standing beside a large deep puddle unable to get across without ruining her clothes. The first monk, seeing the situation, offered to carry the girl to the other side, though monks had nothing whatsoever to do with women. The second monk was astonished by the act but said nothing about it for hours. Finally, at the end of the day, he said to his companion, “I want to talk to you about that girl.” And the first monk said, “Dear brother, are you still carrying that girl. I put her down hours ago.”

    The things we ruminate on, the things we insist on carrying in our minds and heart, the things we refuse to put down, the Rule warns us, are really the things that poison us and erode our souls. We dull our senses with television and wonder why we cannot see the beauty that is around us. We hold on to things outside of us instead of concentrating on what is within that keeps us noisy and agitated. We run from experience to experience like children in a candy store and wonder how serenity has eluded us. It is walking through life with a relaxed grasp and a focused eye that gets us to where we’re going. Dwelling on unessentials and, worse, filling the minds of others with them distracts from the great theme of our lives. We must learn to distinguish between what is real and what is not.

  • And In University News . . .

    It’s a small blogoshpere after all. Thanks to this week’s cover story in the Metro Pulse, I’ve discovered that Instapundit (a.k.a. Glenn Reynolds), one of the world’s pioneer and most heavily-trafficed bloggers, spends his days in an office just a few yards from my own. How odd. And after I’ve spent so much energy lamenting Knoxville’s isolation. Reynolds recently took on a more high profile blogspot at MSNBC.com, where he offers a counterpoint to Eric Alterman’s Altercation.

    And some good news: My dissertation proposal was accepted this morning without revisions by my committee, who were all remarkably complimentary of my work. I’ve spent the last five years waiting anxiously to be discovered — waiting for everyone in the department to realize that I have absolutely no idea what in the hell I’m talking about. Apparently, I’ve fooled them all.

  • A Working Outline

    Working from the assumption that someone out there might actually care, here is my first shot at a rough dissertation outline:

    I. Introduction

    Building from Jeffrey Alexander’s vocabulary (modernization, anti-modernization, post-modernization, neo-modernization), I’ll provide a general overview of Cold War American socio-political trends.

    II. Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer

    I’ll use Miller (All My Sons through A View from the Bridge) to exemplify modernization — the building of a Cold War liberal consensus — and Mailer (particularly Armies of the Night) for anti-modernization — the rise of the New Left. I had first thought to just treat them quickly in the introduction, but giving them a full chapter will, I hope, more adequately set the stage for the other chapters, which will discuss responses to these two periods.

    III. E.L. Doctorow and Robert Coover

    These two (The Book of Daniel and The Public Burning) are a natural pairing, which is obvious from much of the critical literature. Both works, in a sense, view modernization and anti-modernization through a postmodern lens. Also helpful to my project is that both The Crucible and Armies of the Night appear as intertexts in Doctorow and Coover.

    IV. Ishmael Reed and Tony Kushner

    Reed’s The Terrible Twos and The Terrible Threes, I will argue, are traditionally postmodern texts that clutter up Cold War history in order to offer a left critique of neo-modernization — the triumph of capitalism and neoconservatism. Kushner’s Angels in America is similar in that respect. This chapter will deal mostly with the Reagan/Bush years. I think that Reed’s concern with race/class and Kushner’s concern with sexuality, along with their shared frustration with the hypocrisy of America’s “moral majority,” makes them an interesting pairing and a good avenue into neo-modernization.

    V. Don DeLillo and Philip Roth

    I’m thinking of subtitling this chapter, “Epic History.” It’s interesting that, as the millennium approached, two of America’s premiere novelists set out to wrap their hands around the whole of the second half of the twentieth century. I’ll be dealing mostly with Underworld, American Pastoral, and I Married a Communist. At this point, this chapter remains the biggest mystery to me. I’m not sure what, if anything, they’ve accomplished, other than aestheticizing an impossible task: the writing of a coherent and comprehensive American Cold War narrative. The political implications are interesting and troubling and confusing to me.

    VI. Conclusion

    As I’ve yet to discover the main point of my project, I don’t know what my conclusion will be. But, like many intellectuals right now, I guess I’m interested in trying to figure out what’s next. I’m thinking of using Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul as a jumping off point. Obviously, it would deviate from my Cold War history emphasis, but it seems to be a logical next step after I have spent so many pages discussing the rhetorical formation of American liberalism. Social theorists have been saying for years that “totalitarianism,” “nationalism,” and “fundamentalism” would replace “communism” as the Other against which America defines itself. I can’t think of a better study than Afghanistan.

  • Hauerwas, Bush, and Alexander

    After listening to me ramble incessantly, a professor recently pointed me toward Stanley Hauerwas. I now see why. Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, where he has earned a reputation as an outspoken critic of the complacency that has come to characterize much of the American Christian church. I’m on my way to the library to grab a book or two, and at the top of my list is A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity, which sounds like it may have been written explicitly for me. Should be interesting.

    Hauerwas is a ridiculously prolific writer, but here’s an interesting and timely introduction. When asked what advice he would give to President Bush, he responds:

    It’s a tricky question because, if he had asked me, he wouldn’t have been President! (Laugh) So, I’d say, “You need to tell the American people the truth.” This is still about oil. We intervened in Kuwait to protect Saudi oil. You can say, “Well, gee, don’t you think you ought to oppose a tyrant?” Look, the United States is very selective about which tyrant it’s going to pursue. When Indonesia invaded East Timor twenty-five years ago, we didn’t do anything. Why? East Timor didn’t have any strategic interest to us. Bin Laden is clearly motivated by the fact that the United States is in Saudi Arabia. We’re in Saudi Arabia to protect the oil. We need to say that the reason America has such a problem is because we’re such a rich country, and we depend on the resources of the rest of the world. Therefore, maybe the best thing we could do… I mean, rather than saying, “Well, what can you do to support a reaction against bin Laden” — rather than saying “Go out and shop” — maybe he should have said we should put a three dollar tax on gas. (Laugh) That way we won’t use so much of it. That would have been a sacrifice. Yeah, I’d say, “Tell the American people the truth about these matters.” I’m not sure that people around the Bush Administration even know the truth because they need to tell themselves lies about what they’re doing — and they believe the lies — in order to carry forward.

    And later:

    I distrust words that try to explain. I think that we’re desperate to find some explanation when there just isn’t an explanation. I mean, George Bush saying, “Why did they do this? Because they hate us because we are free.” That’s not what they’re saying. They say that they’re enacting jihad against the infidel who they think are deeply corrupt. I think even to accept that — I mean, it doesn’t explain what was there. Of course it’s helpful to get certain kinds of background to put it into perspective, but the idea that somehow or other we’re going to understand this is a little bit like people wanting to have a conspiracy theory around Kennedy’s assassination. We so hunger for some reason that this might embody and make it intelligible to us. But genuine evil is not intelligible. Bin Laden understands some of this. He wants the action to be senseless. And it is senseless because he wants it to call into question America’s sense of non-vulnerability. And he certainly did.

    And along those same lines . . . In January, Laura Bush stood with Hamid Karzai and said:

    We will not forget that 70 percent of Afghans are malnourished.

    We will not forget that one of every four children dies by the age of five because of lack of health care.

    We will not forget that women were denied access to medical care — denied the right to work, and denied the right to leave their homes alone.

    Her speech echoed the sentiments voiced by her husband repeatedly since the days immediately following the start of the U.S. bombing campaign:

    In our anger, we must never forget that we are a compassionate people. While we firmly and strongly oppose the Taleban regime, we are friends with the Afghan people.

    But, of course, the rhetoric of compassion is quite different from the practical problems of “nation building.” Like many opposed to war in Iraq, one of my main concerns has always been “the day after.” What do we do after we have destabilized a dictatorship? What do we do after, in Hauerwas’s words, “we bomb a Stone Age country back into the Stone Age”? If Afghanistan is any indication, then not much:

    “Rather than getting out there in a leadership role and saying, ‘We need a Marshall Plan,’ and fighting for it, they’ve taken a minimalist approach,” complained Joel Charny, a vice president of Refugees International.

    He’s right. The reconstruction funds the Bush White House requested for Afghanistan have been flowing slowly to the country. Moreover, several months ago the White House opposed an effort in Congress to add $200 million to the total. And the total number of US troops committed to rebuilding — after the doubling — will be 340. That’s not a lot.

    Word of the day: nomothetic adj.

    • Of or relating to lawmaking; legislative.
    • Based on a system of law.
    • Of or relating to the philosophy of law.
    • Of or relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.

    Maybe some context would help. From Jeffrey Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason:

    In the postwar period, general sociological theory has been associated with the search for nomothetic knowledge. It has been viewed, by its proponents and critics alike, as the crowning glory of the positive science of society. (90)

  • Film Trip

    Film Trip

    I spent the weekend in Annapolis with my folks. By coincidence, I was there while the Annapolis Chorale was staging Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light, accompanied by a stunning 35 mm print of The Passion of Joan of Arc. Passion live was quite an experience. I would guess that there were about 400 in attendance, which was a pleasant surprise. Nice to see the arts supported so strongly in my old home town.

    I think that Einhorn’s score, while beautiful in its own right, is occasionally a bit too much for Dreyer’s film. There are several scenes, particularly near the end, that work better in silence. But, all in all, it was really well done. The four soloists were exceptional — all were visitors, I think, from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore — and the Annapolis Chorale was more than up to the challenge. My only gripe was with the first cellist, who muffed a few of his solos.

    The 35mm print was better than I had expected. I felt like I was watching the Criterion disc. Seeing it with an audience was really interesting, though. I could feel some resistance at first — particularly from the moron sitting beside me, who tried to entertain his girlfriend by mocking Dreyer’s more stylized images — but for the last twenty minutes, many in the crowd were literally pitched forward in their seats. The best measure of its power, though, was the relative silence of the audience as they filed out of the auditorium. My parents and I were in the car, pulling out of the parking lot, before we said anything.

    An hour before the program, the chorale director gave a short lecture on the film and score. Not much new to share, but he did add something to the story of the mysterious print that was discovered in an asylum. Apparently the print was found with a short printed program that included a brief plot synopsis and cast list. They think that one of the doctors in residence may have been a film buff who requested prints for occasional public viewings, a la Bazin’s cine-clubs. If so, I can certainly understand why he would have stored away a copy of Passion for himself.

    On Saturday, I delivered my Dumont paper to a small but enthusiastic group at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference. The other papers were really interesting. The first used Varda as a test case for the possibility of contemporary auteur studies. It included clips from her first film, La Pointe Courte (1956), which looks fascinating — a transition piece from Neo-Realism to New Wave. The presenter, Richard Neupert from U of Georgia, said that he met Varda recently and reported that she is presently involved in restoring her own films and is very enthusiastic about DVD. Hopefully more of her catalog is on the way.

    The other paper was delivered by a Master’s student in the film studies program at Emory, who spoke about American marketing of European filmmakers during the last decade and a half. I wasn’t too interested in her test case, Amelie, but I was surprised to learn that my enthusiasm for foreign films can be attributed, at least in part, to the Weinsteins. She analyzed Miramax’s marketing campaigns for films like Delicatessen and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, which were the very films that piqued my interest in the late-80s, early-90s. Her conclusion was that, right now, the only foreign films that stand a chance in American markets are those that already conform to American conventions — films that can be pitched as “feel good” instead of “risky” or “provocative,” which remained the model even only ten years ago. We all sat around and chatted afterwards and wondered if DVD has completely changed the distribution channels. Folks like Dumont and the Dardennes find their audiences in homes instead of at the theater.

  • Could You Define Post-Secularism?

    Mmmmm . . . probably not, or at least not well. Warning: this could get really boring.

    In the same way that postmodernism has always been a really problematic and contentious term, post-secular is just another attempt to fix a label on the questions that plague a particular era. For the last thirty years, most academics (at least in the humanities) have operated from the assumption that truth is a construct of cultural narratives or ideologies like religion or capitalism, and so a great deal of postmodern art has set out to expose very deliberately and self-consciously these “fictions” that control us.

    This belief has not been without its critics, though. Chief among them is Frederick Jameson, a Marxist who sees the postmodern era as one marked predominately by late-capitalism, which is, in more practical terms, globalization: all of culture and life and history, the world over, has been commodified — stripped of its particular meaning, affixed with a price, and reduced to its most superficial value. All we’re left with is what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacrum” — a copy of something for which there is no original. Think The Matrix.

    For folks like Jameson, this tendency of postmodernism has serious political, social, and ethical consequences. If truth is just a construct of dominant ideologies, if history is an unknowable intertext, then what recourse do we have to making an ethical claim or critique? Postmodern thought, when taken to its logical extremes, is extremely nihilistic. We’re left with few options for improving our condition. We are, in effect, surrendering ourselves to the role of “cogs in the machine” (to borrow loosely from Marx).

    Until very recently, though, academics have lacked a critical framework for offering Sacred (for lack of a better word) critiques of postmodernism. But that’s starting to change, and the move has only been accelerated by 9/11. Many in the West have found the last year to be an occasion for re-examining spiritual beliefs and, just as importantly, for exploring the social and political currency in them. Once we’ve made a blanket statement like, “America’s system of representational democracy is better than the Taliban,” we’ve been forced to make an ideological commitment founded on something like objective truth.

    “Post-secular,” I think, is one way of trying to find the vocabulary for this type of stand. It’s a way of reconciling the good that was born from postmodernism, while acknowledging the value of the Sacred. As usual, the artists are a few steps ahead of the theorists on this one. In my blog entry of 11/5, I mentioned two recent plays by Patrick Marber that, like Angels in America in the 90s, dramatize this struggle in the personal journey of a representative character. I’m sure that we could come up with a list of other examples.

    Hope that does at least as much good as harm.

    And speaking of Marxism. . . . Have I mentioned lately that The Onion is really funny?

    Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work

    AMHERST, MA—The filthy, disorganized apartment shared by three members of the Amherst College Marxist Society is a microcosm of why the social and economic utopia described in the writings of Karl Marx will never come to fruition, sources reported Monday.

    “The history of society is the inexorable history of class struggle,” said sixth-year undergraduate Kirk Dorff, 23, resting his feet on a coffee table cluttered with unpaid bills, crusted cereal bowls, and bongwater-stained socialist pamphlets. “The stage is set for the final struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the true productive class. We’re well aware of that here at 514 W. Elm Street, unlike other apartments on this supposedly intellectual campus. . . .”

  • Post-Secularism

    An e-mail that I received today sent me off on a rabbit trail, searching for more information about Parker Palmer. Palmer is an educator, activist, public speaker, and Quaker whose work examines the oft-ignored relationships between spirituality, teaching, and political change. In my wanderings, I stumbled upon this interview that was originally published in 2000 by Yes!, a great little ‘zine. It seemed like a natural follow-up to yesterday’s spotlight on Granny D.

    Sarah: One of the things that I found very striking about your work is the idea that the simple choice to live with integrity can have far-reaching effects. What experiences brought you to believe that this was such a central issue?

    Parker: What I know about living a divided life starts with my training as an academic. I was taught to keep things in airtight compartments: to keep my ideas apart from my feelings, because ideas were reliable but feelings were not; to keep my theories apart from my actions, because the theory can be pure, but the action is always sullied. . . .

    But the divided life is not just an academic dilemma, it’s a human dilemma. We work within institutions like schools, businesses, and civic society, because they provide us with opportunities that we value. But the claims those institutions make on us are sometimes at odds with our hearts – for example, the demand for loyalty to the corporation, right or wrong, can conflict with the inward imperative to speak truth. That tension can be creative, up to a point. But it becomes pathological when the heart becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the organization, when we internalize organizational logic and allow it to overwhelm the logic of our own lives.

    At a certain juncture, some people find they must choose between allowing selfhood to die or claiming their identity and integrity. What I mean by divided-no-more is living on the outside the truth you know on the inside.

    I’m glad to say that I’ve begun noticing some progress along these lines, at least in my particular wing of academia. Last week I spent more than an hour pitching my dissertation project to a new faculty member. It was an interesting experience. She was the first person to ask the big question: What’s the point? I waffled for a moment, then fell back on an old trick: I told her the truth. “I’m not sure, but I hope to find a personal, practical politics in the process,” I shrugged. She was interested.

    We spent the next 45 minutes discussing the growing interest (academic interest no less) in post-secularism, one of the many -isms vying for a prominent position in our post-postmodern age (if such jargon is even worth using). I love imagining the political implications of these questions:

    • What is the relation between literature and theology, secular or sacred? How does a focus on theology, religious studies, and/or ethics open new territories for literary study, particularly in the contemporary period? What do we gain by returning to the sacred or secular sacred in literary study? What do we lose?
    • Is there a post-secular literature as well as a post-secular theory, and what would this literature look like? What do the writers say? Was postmodernism theological without our realizing it?
    • How is current theory about the post-secular being imported into literary studies?
    • How are assertions of value in current discussions about literature and ethics/spirituality similar to and different from pre-formalist critical notions of value (and the political implications of such) embedded in concepts such as artistic vision, the visionary sublime, the truth of beauty, or the artist as shaman/oracle/priest?
    • Why is theology surfacing in literary studies now, after more than fifty years of formalist, marxist, poststructuralist, and postmodern theory? What cultural moment is precipitating the theoretical turn?
    • Has the sacred already been caught in the secular theory machine? Will 9/11 poison the post-secular well, particularly in terms of literary studies?
    • How can a post-secular literary criticism accommodate a world literature radically diverse in terms of politics, cultural and social values, and understandings of the sacred? Will a post-secular theoretical view necessarily war with a historical study of literature? What are the problemmatics raised in the relation between multicultural/pluralist/ethnic/race criticism and post-secular perspectives? How might the post-secular be redefined in a global context?
    • How might gender theory intersect with post-secular philosophy in relation to literary studies?
    • What are the possibilities of relation in literary criticism between humanism and the post-secular? Marxist theory and the post-secular? ethics and the post-secular?
    • How theological is the literature classroom? How post-secular should it be?

    I never thought I would be so excited to begin writing a dissertation. Bizarre.

  • Miscellaneous Debris

    Four random but interesting links for today:

    “On Being Postacademic” — After earning tenure at a research university, the dream of all young academics like myself, Kenny Mostern resigned and entered into the world of non-profits and political analysis. I find this article in which he justifies his decision absolutely fascinating, both because he happened to resign from my department (though I never really knew him) and because he says so much that I have been thinking lately. I’ll go ahead and give away the end:

    Even in postmodern times, do-it-yourself art, the art of people who survive through other means, retains a political potential, an intellectual energy, a form of commitment to community building that I believe has fundamentally dissolved in the professional world of the academy.

    And, yes, I know the critique of that position. So what?

    “The Painter of LightTM” — I can’t even remember how I stumbled up this site — Images: A Journal of the Arts and Religion — but I like it. Gregory Wolfe’s editorial takes on many of the same questions that I’ve been writing about lately: What is the proper response to Christian kitsch? Can ten million people be wrong? How do we step away from the commodification of culture in order to have a genuine experience? And what is wrong with sentimentality? (I have other questions about Thomas Kinkade, but since Wolfe doesn’t go into them, neither will I.) Thanks to Wolfe for my new quote of the week:

    The great theologian, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, once wrote: “There is nothing more demanding than the taste for mediocrity. Beneath its ever moderate appearance there is nothing more intemperate; nothing surer in its instinct; nothing more pitiless in its refusals. It suffers no greatness, shows beauty no mercy.”

    “OJ Stupid: Bush’s Iraq Gambit” — Christopher J. Preist’s 4,500 word analysis of current events should be required reading for every American of voting age. Priest is a modern Renaissance man — comic book writer, minister, political commentator, and fellow blog-ist. His site is a great way to lose a day of work, and this article is a powerhouse.

    Doing The Pepsi Challenge between Bush’s proposed resolution and the Tonkin Resolution conjures up possibilities that’ll have me sleeping with the light on for quite awhile. Or, am I just being unreasonably cynical? Maybe. But, in the final analysis, the Bush Administration’s Iraq policy boils down to this: these men are either evil or stupid. There’s really not much middle ground. Rallying America for a just cause would seem to invite if not require bipartisanship, and eschewing even the appearance of politics. No component of Bush’s mealy, meandering attempts to convince us of the rightness of his cause presents any compelling reason why the whole matter couldn’t be tabled until the new congress is seated in January. The merits of his case are not my issue here so much as the timing, the urgency being so seemingly transparent. For all I know, the president has a valid case for this policy, but he squanders it on brazen political opportunism, which makes me question his ethics and, therefore, his judgment.

    “Make Your Own Bush Speech” — It ain’t mature, or even in good taste, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.