Friday, January 16, 2004
(10:18 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
Threat to democracy and God's Kingdom
I have now one-upped Adam for being the object of derision to a conservatives ideology. He may be an American-hating-leftist-historian but I am a threat to democracy and God's Kingdom (and of course God's Kingdom is also the kingdom of white, heterosexuals who voted for George W. Bush). How cool is that? Aren't you scared of me? And yes, that is the only way to read Voegelin and not want to kill yourself.
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Thursday, January 15, 2004
(8:19 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Value of Pointlessness
A while back, I wrote a post quoting a dialog participant who said to me, "As far as I understand your views, I cannot refer to them as Christian." I'm starting to wonder if I should take that as a compliment, or, further, if I shouldn't claim to be a Christian. When the person in question wrote that, I recall being offended not so much that he didn't think I was a Christian, but that he was so egregiously ignorant about Christianity. My feelings about being feebly insulted by a braying jackass are admittedly not going to be the best source of information about what's going on "deep down inside of me," but it still seems relevant.
It's not really a big concern to me to advertise the fact that I am a Christian. In fact, I'm willing to side with the fundamentalists on this and say that I'm not a Christian, I'm a Catholic. If "being a Christian" means a bunch of obscurantist things like having Jesus in your heart and believing in God (seriously, what does it mean to say you "believe in God"? I honestly don't know) and holding strong opinions about abstract things, then I really have no interest in it. Being a practicing Catholic is another matter. I basically follow the teachings of the church, within reason. I don't particularly care if anyone out there in Reader Land wants to join me in those practices. In fact, if you're going to try to convert Catholicism into a new fundamentalism (such that all of a sudden we have "nominal Catholics," then the real "devoted Catholics" who worry about really obscurantist things like their "relationship with God" [WTF?!] or how strongly they believe in what the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith churns out each year), I'd rather that you just stay in evangelical circles.
I don't know if I'm quite to the point where I don't care whether God "exists" or not or whether there was ever a real person named Jesus who grew up in Nazareth, etc., but I'm close. A lot of people arrange their lives in ways that refer to stuff that never happened, and I don't fault them for it as long as they aren't assholes about it. For instance, I don't think that it's very likely that YHWH appeared to Moses on Mt. Sinai and gave him all these laws, but I also don't think Judaism is stupid. In fact, I think Judaism is great. Honestly, I think that Islam and maybe even Mormonism are fairly good religions, too. (I'd continue along these lines, but I reached my "startling ignorance threshold" with that last sentence.)
I wish that the Catholic Church hadn't gotten rid of so much of the ridiculously arbitrary stuff -- mainly just the Latin. I think there's some value in preserving the Latin language "just because." Plus, maybe having the liturgy in a foreign language would help people not think that it's all about their "relationship with God" and hearing a bunch of stuff that will "strengthen" that "relationship" -- it's also about keeping a connection with the communio sanctorum. Virtually every day for several centuries, people have been gathering together to hear some readings out of an old book, recite a few old prayers, assume a variety of bizarre postures, and eat some highly stylized bread (and often wine, too). A lot of other stuff has gone on alongside that, a lot of dedicated service to the poor, a lot of intellectual dispute, a lot of heroic asceticism, a lot of really stupid and cruel and petty acts, but what makes it all into one continuous history is this repetition of a few antiquated ceremonies that are, in themselves, pretty pointless.
I wrote on dialog tonight that Christianity is a culture. Clearly other cultures have liturgies of their own, pointless rituals that are carried on largely for the sake of continuity. Maybe that's what worship is, in general, the community presenting itself in thanks that it has endured thus far and in hope that it will endure still further. I wonder if the secular world can produce worship, in that sense, whether a secular liturgy is possible -- and I also wonder if, in a secular world, the older liturgies of subcultures can long endure. Certainly in previous world empires, it was assumed that the subjects would have their own liturgies, and they would either be tolerated or would be compelled to conform to the imperial liturgy. But to continue the liturgy when the world believes, in its heart of hearts, that having a liturgy is stupid and pointless? That it's a sign of weakness? That participation in it is virtually a signed confession of ignorance and stupidity, of not being able to get over the past?
We've had proposals for replacement liturgies over the course of the modern period -- the two with which I'm most familiar are the turn to "nature" and the turn to literature. The turn to nature is still given token honor in the many nature-themed "motivational" posters that litter our classrooms and our offices, but it's difficult to sustain a devotion to nature when it turns out that everything we value depends on destroying nature. Matthew Arnold thought that literature could and should fill most of the functions that religion did in the past; it is not by accident that we post-Victorians were bequeathed a "canon" of literature. That dream was undone, however, by the solitary nature of reading in the modern world and by the aggressive incomprehensibility of high modernism.
Worship, in order to function properly, must be a communal event. Through the 20th century, we have had the movie theater for our place of worship (I owe this insight to Kurt Vonnegut), but the home entertainment center is destroying even that. It would appear that the only alternative that has had even localized success has been the nationalistic political rally, as practiced by Hitler -- or else, perhaps, the revolution as practiced by Lenin.
Sometimes I honestly don't know how I get from the beginning to the end of these things. If a post is sufficiently long, the ending is almost always a surprise.
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(1:44 AM) | Robb Schuneman:
Say Yes! To Michigan
A few months ago, I was bold, unforgivingly stupid, in saying this:
"It's time. I'm going to name my top 3 albums of 2003. I know there is still 1 1/2 months to go, but I'm not impressed enough by what is yet to come out to stave off any longer."
Well, I missed at least one amazing album. It is by a fellow named Sufjan Stevens. I was originally drawn to it by the title of the thing, which is "Greetings From Michigan!: The Great Lakes State".
This is my home state. I'm really rather fond of it. I hold it up as one of the greatest in this union of ours, in spite of all it's failures in recent years. Those add a certain level of humility and stuff to the people. I'm also making all this up in an attempt to justify a level of fillial warm fuzzies that I can't otherwise reckon with.
Next, after the title, I examined the songs. This is where I knew I'd have to buy rather than "obtain" this album. Such hits as :
"Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpayed)"
and
"For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti"
or
"Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)
and of course,
"Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)
The guy know how to pull on the heartstrings of a Michigander. (Wow..I just used that term. I am going to cut off my lower extremities and throw them in the ocean.)
Musically, I'd place it somewhere in between a less cocky Badly Drawn Boy, or a more focused Iron & Wine. Also..the lyrics are far beyond usual fare..which is always cool.
Trust me, I wouldn't bump the great post by Adam below unless I fully believed this album to be the most incredible thing since Led Zeppelin's IV, which I know nothing about, but hate.
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Wednesday, January 14, 2004
(6:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Higher Education, cont.
In a previous post I wrote of my desire to find a way to participate in the "essence" of academic pursuits without also participating in the racketeering (scroll down to "PhD Program Attrition Rates") aspects of the current regime. Our conservative brethren may well have a point about a certain lack of vitality in academia, and I am beginning to wonder if we can trace some (if not most) of the problem to the increasingly apparent economic interests that converge around academia -- that is, professors have an interest in having their universities subsidize the highly specialized courses that best suit the professor's interests and also in having their universities get someone else to teach the boring classes (freshman comp is the supreme example of this). Thus, graduate students and adjuncts are brought in, and the number who get to the end and achieve a result that feels "worth it" (i.e., tenure-track positions) is relatively small compared to the number of people who wind up basically being used.
Part of the problem may well be a failure of the American education system -- that is, many of the boring, introductory level college courses seem like obvious candidates for "shit you should have gotten in high school." Composition in particular seems like an incredible waste of college time, as it seems reasonable to expect that high school graduates would be at least competent in grammar, style, argument structuring, and following a documentation style. Maybe our system is set up incorrectly if we have PhDs teaching glorified high school classes. Also, maybe, in addition to providing students with inadequate high school education, our system is putting too many people through college. Our grade-inflating society may well be cheapening every level of education by failing to provide more rigorous instruction at earlier levels. Thus, maybe all of us super-motivated people who lust after learning should go teach high school (since those are the kinds of classes we'd be teaching as adjuncts anyway and since at least that way we'd have a good salary and some benefits, albeit without the "prestige" of a PhD).
I think all of us with concerns about the "grad school issue" would do well to note that grad school does not exist in a vacuum.
Anyway, onto the important stuff: reading cool shit. Personally, I still think that my original proposal in the first "Higher Education" post is thoroughly workable, and talking to my new roommate Justin about it this evening only increased my confidence. For those who don't like "clicking links," here's the gist: a small group of people agrees to read something as a group and meet regularly (once a week, I would hope) to discuss it. This basic model could evolve to accomadate having various people agree to moderate the discussion or present papers they had written on their own.
I believe that, over time, a group of this nature could potentially produce significant literary, critical, or theoretical work -- all while basically working boring, 40-hour-a-week jobs. I would imagine that only the very upper eschalons of academics spend less than 40 hours a week on activities unrelated to their scholarly pursuits (teaching undergraduates, grading papers, various administrative issues, etc.). In addition, I'm sure that the "publish-or-perish" mentality contributes to the amount of shoddy scholarship that is published each year (whether from a "Theory" viewpoint or not). The people involved in a group such as the one I propose would be motivated primarily by a sense of community and solidarity and by a simple love of learning that is not complicated or compromised by being directly tied to one's tenuous livelihood.
There are some obstacles to forming such a group. First, many people who would be interested in such a pursuit are strongly wedded to the idea of being a part of academia. (For example, I, the proposer of this idea, am currently enrolled in a masters program, and I'm still pretty sure I intend to try to get a PhD if someone will pony up the cash for it.) More fundamentally, I think that people have difficulty participating in things that are not registered by the Big Other -- in other words, in our society, intellectual pursuits are increasingly cordoned off into "official" university settings (even things such as visual arts or music, which were formerly pursued mainly by freelancers), and overcoming that desire for official recognition is very difficult.
Reinforcing this tendency is the strongly utilitarian character of American society, which tends to push people toward identifying "hard work" almost exclusively with a career. Thus most people seem to be content to focus on their jobs and devote the rest of their time to mindless entertainment. Viewing work as a necessary evil to help finance one's true passion is regarded as naive at best, subversive at worst -- but I think that in the end, our society would be healthier and more truly participatory if more people thought that way. That is, I think that most people's tendency to put in their time at work and leave thinking to the professionals is, well, a bad thing, and I think that starting groups like the one I propose -- groups that seek after some real intellectual rigor, not just Barnes and Noble reading groups -- would be a valuable step in the right direction. Plus, it might make room for some different perspectives on literature that would help Winston not feel so lonely and afraid.
I say we try to start this some time in late June, or whenever Anthony is done with his insane schedule at school.
(On another note: Might the blogosphere provide a forum for something like this? At first glance, I think it can, but I also think that it might be more difficult to maintain rigor and genuine interchange in a time-delayed, highly abstract medium such as blogging. That is to say (in technical terms), a group of people who meet together face-to-face and are physically present to each other might give this kind of project more oomph. Blogs are certainly good for ephemeral thoughts and for spreading information quickly, and they do foster a certain kind of community, but still -- I have my doubts.)
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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
(11:21 PM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
The Will to Power and Kant
I hate to break up the very interesting theory discussion but I have made promises and promises must be kept. I miss having the opportunity to write on here as much but this quarter has been harder in the first week than any of my previous school years and, unfortunately, school, for some reason, must come first. Regardless, the nature of the academic life is that you fill up and fill up and never quite have the time to excrete those thoughts that have compacted in the brain and the time must come for one to do so or risk blowing up; though I must point out that I have no real scientific knowledge, which is of course the only True knowledge, to make such a statement.
Those of us interested in philosophy and even those of us interested in science all know about Kant's project. The basic idea is that, because of Hume, the certainty we once gave to our sense perception was flawed. Human experience and reason was not going to find the First Cause and as such everything we do is in question. Hume recognized that we can't live this way and very obviously we do sit down in chairs without much thought but what he had effectively done was disengender all meaning in human action. Kant was awoken from his dogmatic slumber by this revelation and began his project to see if there was anyway that we could engender meaning again, reunite the human condition. Kant went on to assert that all knowledge must be based on a priori cognition, such as what we often times find in mathematics. Of course the kind of outlook that Kant creates is one that gives primacy to science, the scientific method and enlightenment values of moderation in all things except knowledge ("Think what you will, but obey!"). In reality, the kind of meaning Kant was looking for would not change anything or have any real materialist effect on the human condition; an effect of his assumption concerning mind/body. This looks much like our current brand of neo-Conservatism that has become the common ideology of American youth, though I'm not trying to blame Kant for that but I think it is evident that it leads to nothing but self-propagation (We will bring democracy to the world so they won't kill us anymore!).
Nietzsche's project started out with a similar problem, how can meaning be given back to a life that was and is still becoming nihilistic? The way he goes about it is entirely different; instead of looking to science Nietzsche, for better or worse, looks to the ancient Greeks and their tragedies. Of course the Greeks had a great respect for science and most of what we do in our own sciences is somehow indebted to the Greeks but this did not give them meaning, it did not establish a love of life! When earthquakes and wars destroy your cities and science, for all its greatness, is unable to save you then there is no relying on it for the good life. So they taught themselves that this was the way of the world, a move of infinite resignation (I know Kierkegaard again, sue me!) and then they lived on. Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, of woe and blessing, was the chaos of the world and Apollo ordered it through art. Eventually Nietzsche comes to see both these aspects brought together in the god Dionysus but the path is still the same. Have wisdom to see that the world is not kind, that the order of the world is not here for humanity, that ultimately it is chaotic and the amor fati (love of fate) to accept that while never forgetting that the will to power can engender that suffering with more beauty than science could ever hope to give.
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(8:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown!
Our dear friend Winston has responded to my critique of his entire worldview and his quality as a person -- and rightly so. I have "unfairly characterized [him] and [his] position." The primary evidence of this is this paragraph:
Just because you and your friend Steve evince contempt for the thinker as well as the thought, please do not assume the same of me. I have a number of leftist friends, including several who know exactly what I think about politics, the academy, etc. While I may think some of their ideas are ridiculous, I am able to get along with the person behind the ideas. In fact, there are even a few I enjoy arguing with, and they with me. Were I hired by a theory-ridden department, I'd like to think I could develop some of the same relationships--agree to disagree, but always hoping of course that I could make a difference.
As an aside, I don't even know for sure who Steve is, and even if it is who I think it is, we're not close friends. I will take Winston's word for it on his characterization of his personal interactions with colleagues of differing opinions -- clearly, if he could not get along with Theory-oriented people on a personal level, he likely wouldn't have made it as far in the academic game as he apparently has. This paragraph, however, contains an example of something that is prevelant throughout his post: assumptions about me. For instance, he seems to assume that I think Stalinism is a good thing, even though I characterized Stalinist purges as a horrible waste. I was not saying that the Soviet system is good; I was saying that problems other than pure principles brought it down. In addition, he seems to ignore basic points of fact when taking down my argument. For instance, when I mention the fact that the U. S. was much richer than the Soviet Union to start with at the beginning of the Cold War, he says,
Yeah, the U.S. was in terrific economic condition during the Great Depression. You might want to talk to my dad, sometime. He could tell you some great stories about how well off the U.S. was.
Well, he might want to talk to my dad or, you know, anyone else in the world, to learn that the Cold War didn't start until after World War II, by which time the United States economy had recovered from the Great Depression. The deck was stacked against socialism in the beginning, simply because capitalist societies, which were already firmly entrenched, had a significant stake in keeping socialism from growing -- for instance, Europe as a whole may well have gone communist if not for the United States' (right, positive, generous) decision to give Western Europe a vast amount of money under the Marshall Plan. My pointing out facts like this does not amount to a longing for a Stalinist society -- it's an academic question.
Also, he seems to assume that I think I'm right about everything -- this is only true on a meta-level (in that I'm right about myself when I step into a self-critiquing mode and point out the ways I'm wrong). So, when he says,
Yes, Adam. Hopefully you will outgrow your current phase, a phase of leftism apparently brought on by the anger of the right, if I'm reading you correctly. But I thought that one political extreme couldn't drive a person to move towards the other extreme? Oh, I forgot. I guess you've invoked the double-standard again.
he's kind of missing the point. I'm not invoking a double-standard. I spend more time on him than on myself in the post at hand, but I have a multitude of self-critical articles, both on the blog and from my site's previous incarnation as The Homepage. I'll admit that my leftism is not entirely motivated by a dispassionate assessment of empirical evidence -- and no one's position is. At the same time, I am responsible for the positions I take and the decisions I make, and I took Conservative English Major's blame-game to be a way of passing the buck. Emotions are tied up in political positions to a huge degree, but Winston consistently acts as though the broad outlines are drawn out of science. I find that highly implausible. I mean, sure, he can say his political beliefs are based on science, but what special expertise does he have in science? Lacan thinks some of his ideas are based on science, too, and he gets nothing but ridicule for it. Ah, but here's this jewel from Winston: "And yes, the difference IS that I’m correct. I have a set of biological facts on my side, proven through the use of scientific method, and you have ideology."
In any case, this discussion is not likely to get any prettier. I believe that Winston has mischaracterized my position on a variety of issues, but that's largely my own fault. I wasn't clear enough in my opinions. I don't have a lot of use for Foucault or Derrida, and I think that "postmodernism" in general has probably outlived its usefulness. When I do literary analysis, I generally do New Critical-type stuff. I admire T. S. Eliot and Cleanth Brooks to no end. If people want to do literary analysis without a particular theoretical stance, I say more power to them -- in fact, I think there's probably a nice niche for people like that at conservative Christian universities such as my alma mater.
I think that science produces real knowledge about the world, but I am highly skeptical about attempts to "apply" those insights in social situations -- I think that in general, the gap between social science/theory and the hard sciences is a valid thing and that we shouldn't attempt to close it. I don't think that either psychoanalysis or Marxism has been "disproven" by advances in science. Marx is widely regarded as having a piercing (perhaps even unparalleled) insight into the workings of the capitalist system, and Freud's ideas have so thoroughly penetrated the modern mind that nearly all psychologists are Freudians to some extent.
I personally have a great interest in theory, based in a reading of theoretical texts, especially Marxism and psychoanalysis, as should be clear by now. I don't see many places where those theories are studied outside of literature departments, and so I'm glad that people who have those interests have some sway in literature departments. I'm not simply defending the status quo, with which I don't have a lot of direct experience aside from reading some books the status quo has produced, but I don't know how the current status quo is any worse or better than any previous or future status quo in terms of being open to new ideas. A "Winstonian" hegemony in English departments would probably be less hospitable to those who don't share the Winstonian viewpoint, but -- just like in the current situation -- some people with differing views would get through, and those people might end up producing scholarship that's exciting and insightful and that demands everyone's attention to such a degree that it starts a new trend and results in a new hegemony. I doubt the current regime is any more or less open to such a shift than any other possible state of affairs. In fact, the very stasis that Winston evokes makes me think that a shift is inevitable -- if the Theory people really can't come up with anything new, someone else will.
Winston, I wish you the best of luck in finding a job, and I hope you continue to stand up for what you believe (even though I clearly don't agree with you). Given the very high regard for hard science in American culture, I would even predict that within a generation, people like you stand a fair chance of taking over literature departments -- the whole culture seems to be shifting rightward, and so the last remaining bastion of leftism will almost certainly decline in power, leaving room for more conservative individuals such as yourself. To some degree, that probably won't make much difference, because it's not like Fred Jameson or Judith Butler has had much influence on public policy or on anyone's daily life. I hope, though, that if you do achieve a position of power in academia, you will remember your frustration and give a fair shake to that young beleaguered upstart who thinks the establishment is stacked against her. I have no particular reason to believe you won't.
And in conclusion, I recommend Stanley Fish's book Surprised by Sin as a work of sensible criticism. I know you aren't necessarily looking for works on individual authors or texts, but I found it to be a very exciting and productive piece of criticism back in my Miltonophile days, and it certainly dates to before Fish went off the deep end.
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(4:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
(Miscellaneous)
Via the very active comment thread on this post of Jared's, I have discovered that DePaul University is calling for papers for its upcoming graduate conference. I project that I will be finished with the Phenomenology by the end of this week, at which point I will begin to develop an abstract (or maybe an entire paper) about Hegel and Lacan. I can't get enough of pseudo-intellectual posturing (i.e., continental philosophy; link via Chun the Unavoidable). I would give you more details, but I do not want any of you jackasses to plagiarize me and get all the glory of participating in a graduate student conference using my idea.
In other news, Salon (I recommend going there, getting the Day Pass, then returning here to follow the upcoming link) has a very good story about the way the mainstream media allows itself to be manipulated by the conservative press. Those "liberal media" accusations have been reaping the conservatives ever-increasing dividends.
Invisible Adjunct has an interesting discussion going about the meaning behind the surprisingly high attrition rates among PhD candidates. Most disturbing is this comment from Chris (#15):
Actually, I'm far enough removed from grad. school that I can't really even imagine what sorts of people are in grad. programs these days. I mean, given the job situation, or rather, the lack thereof, who is going to grad. school in the humanities?
Does theology count as one of the "humanities"? I mean, given the Incarnation, it technically should, but does it? As a sidenote, if I decided that I would rather not devote my life to (the study of) Christ, one of my main options would be comparative literature, which is well known for having probably The Worst job-placement rate in the industry. (Continental philosophy is probably not much better, although Catholic universities do represent a nice niche for people with that specialty--I'd probably be a sure bet for one of those positions, since I'm Catholic and there are so few Catholics in the world [kind of like how every time one of my Nazarene friends meets a Catholic girl, they think I should date her, since we'd have so much in common since we're both Catholics, just like one out of every six people in the entire world].) I wonder if comparative literature would do better as a discipline if it changed its name to Intertextual Studies, or even better, if the individual departments restructured in such a way that they could call themselves, for example, The Edward Said Institute for Advanced Intertextual Studies.
I just realized that that hypothetical name was unconsciously modelled on "The Rush Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies." I hang my head in shame.
Finally, I found this Crooked Timber post's comment thread to be very interesting -- it brought out aspects of the conquest of the Americas that I had never even thought to ask about, including the experience of Native Americans in Canada and the Tierra del Fuego. If you're looking for an interesting, informed discussion, you could do worse than to go to Crooked Timber and look for a post with a lot of comments.
UPDATE: How could I forget? No link round-up would be complete without today's modern classic from Adam Robinson.
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Monday, January 12, 2004
(10:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Tired of the Anger
To begin, I'd like to apologize for the technical difficulties surrounding Anthony's post immediately below mine. Unable to use Blogger to repair the error, I turned to more primitive methods involving a text editor and an ftp client. I am filled with fear and trembling as I anticipate posting this. [Update: Obviously the post went okay. I have also decided to switch comment providers, since BlogSpeak is apparently dead at the moment. All old comments are now lost -- alas, alack.]
Now, on to the matter at hand: anger. I'm tired of it. I don't mean justified anger; I think that can be productive and energizing. I am mainly tired of petty, overly localized anger, especially when that anger draws on universal principles.
I am thinking primarily of the conservative graduate students with whom I have made electronic connections in recent days. Here, Winston (who commented below, if comments were working) expresses genuine worry about the difficulties his conservative politics will cause him in getting an academic job due to "the dreaded Theory question" at an MLA interview:
According to “the rules,” potential employers aren’t supposed to be able to ask you about your politics. But, given the highly politicized nature of theory, how can the theory question not constitute a question about politics? If I start talking about I. A. Richards’s influence on my work, I reveal myself as a literary conservative. And if I talk about A. C. Bradley’s influence on my reading of Shakespeare, I think that makes me a literary paleo-conservative. Whereas if I mention Foucault, or Said, or Derrida, I’m a fellow traveler. In many ways, the answer to the theory question reveals the candidate’s politics, or at least the candidate’s politics in terms of literary scholarship (though the two generally go hand-in-hand, in my experience).
Does the theory question constitute a political litmus test? I know it will in my case. I can either lie, and pretend to espouse a highly politicized way of looking at texts that, in many cases, runs counter to everything we know about reality and the human mind (yes, I prefer the answers of science, not the empty hypothesizing of postmodernism), or I can tell the truth, and probably blow my chances of getting most of the jobs I’ve been called to interview for.
This is surely a shame. The academic job market is tight, and a political litmus test might prove to be a crippling disadvantage. However, if the members of Winston's interview panel could read this, they might be more justified in moving on to the next candidate:
When I say "sensible," I am talking primarily about criticism that can be used as a tool--that presents a methology for reading literature (or any text) that can be used by the reader without the necessity of adopting a particular ideology or adopting wholesale the subjective viewpoint of the critic (as so many Foucauldians do). Yes, yes, everything is ideology. Go ahead and blog on that. I'll still be here. What it should be grounded in is knowledge. Real knowledge. Not politically motivated fabrications, like radical social constructionism, but real knowledge. Hence my interest in cognitive psychology. Leftist nonsense notwithstanding, cognitive psychology has gained real knowledge about the human mind--the way it thinks, the way it produces language, and so forth--that demolishes a great deal of postmodern philosophy.
He appears to have nothing but contempt for the vast majority of literary scholars, so it's unclear why he would want to work for them. If I went to a job interview virtually anywhere and let it slip that I think the way my potential employers do things is absolutely corrupt and stupid and that I would spend my career fighting to radically reshape the entire enterprise, then I wouldn't expect to get any bonus points. Winston would also do well to note that many of the currently hegemonic discourses in literary theory started out as embattled minorities who thought the entire scholarly enterprise was fundamentally flawed and, given his tone, he would do well to admit that if people like him were in ascendancy, they would treat leftists the exact same way. Except, of course, that the conservatives would be justified in excluding those who disagree with them, because conservative ideals are justified by knowledge, real knowledge:
Human beings have not evolved to live in Marxist regimes. We are competitive creatures, and we work for rewards. Take a hard look at why the Soviet Union was not able to compete with the United States during the Cold War.
It certainly couldn't have been anything like the fact that the United States was much, much richer to begin with and that the Soviet Union lost millions more soldiers in World War II than did the United States -- and it also couldn't be the tremendous waste of human life represented the Stalinist purges. It also couldn't be the Soviet Union's stupidly disproportionate military spending. Nope, it had to be the economic systems. Evolution, you know. It's somewhat similar to the fact that Cuba can never be prosperous, because it's a socialist state -- the U. S. sanctions against it have nothing to do with it. Meanwhile, capitalist nations that are open to global trade, such as Haiti, prosper.
Strange how his "real" scientific theories turn out to be the ones that best support his politics in his mind, and vice versa -- I'd be interested to learn which came first, the conservatism or the scientism. In any case, the fact that he gets to hide his beliefs behind "science" (we fucking evolved to be capitalists?! Did I miss something and we suddenly went back to the Victorian era?) sounds suspiciously like the "politically motivated fabrications" that he so derides, in form if not in content. The difference, of course, is that he's correct.
Meanwhile, not everyone has arrived at their conclusions through the scientific method: the Conservative English Major, a blog-friend of Winston's, has up a number of posts (his/her permalinks seem to be broken at the moment) about "how the strident left-wingism [sic] of the academy can force moderate students to the right." To give some more detail:
The fact that my fellow grad students and my instructors constantly make comparisons between Bush as Hitler, loudly wish he would die, and refuse to see anything he can do in a positive light - this attitude pushes me even further in my support of Bush. Instead of being a slightly disaffected supporter who would critique some of his policies, I find myself reacting to my fellows [sic] extremism and becoming a fairly staunch supporter.
Amazing! Now the liberals are to blame ... for the fact that this person's a conservative! It appears that if the liberals keep it up, there will be no more liberals left, because Lord knows that no one hates anger more than a conservative. The Fox News-viewing American people, accustomed as they are to cool-headed, moderate commentary, will be instinctively turned off by anger -- I mean, I guess that could be true, if we set aside the fact that the contemporary conservative movement is built entirely on anger.
And I am its child. I can relate to these guys more than I'd like to admit -- I know the suffocation of hearing the same thing over and over and over from absolutely everyone, and I have often succumbed to the temptation of embracing a new position simply because it's different. More to the point, I have often succumbed to the temptation of placing myself in a situation in which I know it will be very easy to sustain this feeling of novelty, of being the only one standing up for truth, of being the noble gadfly. Some of us, apparently, enjoy this feeling of being perpetually out of place -- some of us enjoy anger.
Hopefully, at least some of us will outgrow that.
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(12:24 AM) | Anthony Paul Smith:
Dionysus is Jesus sans the Crucified
I am presenting Jean-Pierre Vernant's commentary on Euripides' "The Bacchae" for my Tragedy class tomorrow. The article I read, "The Masked Dionysus" was one of the most faith-shaking things I have ever read which is rather strange considering it never once brings up Christianity in any serious way. It was just that Dionysus, as he is presented in "The Bacchae" and in Vernant's article, is so much like the Jesus I claim to follow.
I don't have the time to write a good extrapolation of the essay at this moment but just to outline briefly how Dionysus sounds like the Jesus of that brand of Christianity I find myself associated with: We see in Dionysus the subversion of all categories (Greek and barbarian, old and young, madness and reason, man and woman, free and slave), the rulers are thrown down for not recognizing the godhood of Dionysus and for shunning his followers, by eating the man whom is possessed by Dionysus the followers can share in his godhood, his wine is his gift to affirm the world regardless of woe, his presence is marked by a distinct absence (they even called his parousia), and so on and so on.
How this comes to bear on my understanding of Nietzsche will be fleshed out in the coming week, so I leave you in anticipation of that coming event.
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Sunday, January 11, 2004
(2:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
New Blog Watch
m2 has a blog. Apparently a lot of people already know that, since people have visited my site from his about forty times in the last twenty-four hours, but I thought I'd make it official.
I have also found two new (to me) blogs to which I give a cautious recommendation: Virtual Stoa, a socialist blog with a decidedly classical bent, and Socialism in an Age of Waiting, a more activist-oriented blog. Virtual Stoa is especially interesting in that it actually deals with philosophical issues once in a while. For example, today when I checked it, there was a lengthy post about Gramsci, with some remarks in the comment section about Hegel and some other social theorists.
Finally, "The Economics of Pound's Canto 45", by D-Squared (with whom I once grappled in my never ending quest to defend the obscurantism of tenured radicals), is my personal pick to win the Koufax Award for Best Post by a Left-Wing Blogger in 2003. (Awards linked via everyone's favorite good-natured lefty Christian blogger.)
UPDATE: I just looked at my web page stats, and apparently I get several referrals from people looking for "names for cats" on Google -- my article "Good Names for Cats" is actually in the top ten results for that query. If any readers get to this page today from my cat page, please leave comments to that effect and let me know if you end up using any of my names.
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