She started a fire in a bedroom fireplace and closed the flue. When death did not come quickly enough, she went downstairs to the kitchen and turned on the gas. For extra measure, she slit her wrists.
Stereo speaker wire was her final weapon of choice. She took a length of it back upstairs, lowered an attic ladder and hanged herself from it.
most people kind of kill themselves with a whimper of sadness; she assaulted herself repeatedly in a total rage.
11:08 the contrast betwen the extremely stirring rhetoric and the big idea of all of us together and the sketchiness and modesty of any actual policies is just built to disappoint people, you know? if that was obvious the first time round, it is almost painful now. bit i'll tell you this, he is just so so much better a politician than romney; seems liable to win.
make no mistake. america faces a choice. which america will we live in? who are we reallly deep inside? and then here's how that cashes out: here's the same tax adjustments we've been advocating for four years.
11:04 nothing wrong with that; it had a good crescendo. i'd say it almost caught fire a few times, but not quite. he should have maybe structured the whole thing around the concept of citizenship; he seemed to focus the argument on that bit.
10:57 you did that: again a version of that perot move; a little humility is well.
10:55 he's giving today's statist argument: we have to pull together! it's all of us! but then, what should we do with the fact that it rests on coercion?
10:50 has he done much on foreclosures?
10:49 when he talks about romney cutting the taxes of the rich, is he talking about not permitting the bush cuts to lapse?
10:48 has obama put forward a detailed plan for tax reform?
10:47 yeah rolling over romney right now on military and international. he can kill on that.
10:43 boilerplate so far. but his voice is rising in epiphanic ecstasy.
10:38 the united states of how? the united states of what? the united states of who, who?
10:35 he's not in his loose black-guy campaign mode, at least not yet. that's when he rocks.
10:30 all i want is to play by the rules. that's the bargain!!!
10:25 our guy has aged remarkably. only dude who's had a harder four years than me.
10:22 this video is bloated, interminable, and redundant with everything else. simplify.
10:17 obama must owe some sort of debt to durbin. put up a young gun in that position. john boehner killed barack's mom. orioles hitting mad home runs.
10:03 joe biden has no idea what could be meant by 'culture of dependency.'
9:50 honestly, he's kind of bombing. but that will be ok from obama's point of view. 'the finest warriors in the history of the world!' then just continue: 'better, better than the roman centurions! the golden horde! edo-era samurai! better than the wehrmacht, mel gibson in braveheart, crazy horse! they'd have kicked che's ass! fuck the fucking knights of the fucking round table! anyone who denies that or qualifies it in any way, i'll slap em silly i tell you!'
9:46 folks, my dad respected barack obama...would have respected barack obama if he'd been around. that's perfect biden: with all the courage and passion of a noble soul, he make shit up right there and then! it's like listening to ornette coleman, but without the art. omelette coleman.
9:40 a job is about respect. it's about dignity. ok then what are food stamps about? like i say, the right isn't the only side which deploys the stigma.
9:32 uh-oh the rattletrap is in the house. the flibbertigibbet. julia louis-dreyfus was priceless as biden.
9:30 you could do worse than the straight jackie wilson your love (keeps lifting me).
9:27 actually, being introduced by your own tribute video as the music swells etc is quite a bit like dying by auto-erotic asphyxiation.
9:26 they certainly decided to go all in on the political use of bin laden. well hard to begrudge them that, actually.
9:24 joe biden's mom taught him that no one is better than he is. she was wrong about that. this video hs the goofiest narrator ever.
9:23 what i love most about america is the convenience stores.
9:13 i revile success. and i definitely don't think succesful people should turn around and help others. that will just drag you down.
9:09 i don't think the republicans really tried on international stuff, with the exception of condi. mitt really has no credibility. even santorum wold have had a better case. like i say, obama is fortunate in his opponent. the militarism of this convention is remarkable, but that started with kerry.
8:53 but obama should relentlessly emphasize foreign affairs and security, in the key kerry is hitting here. it is remarkable that the democrats have neutralized the republican advantage on this. too bad kerry couldn't even make himself oppose iraq in 2004.
8:45 at least they spray-tanned john kerry. he was looking horror-film dire.
8:35 funny how putting the turncoat onstage has become a ritual; crist in this case. artur davis last week.
8:30 cnn has actually been touting this schweitzer dude for president one day. i do not think so. such a rugged frontiersman or else a borscht-belt comic.
8:22 obviously the actresses and stuff are possessed on the stage. i'm not sure this is the best approach in your attempt to reach the undecided voter etc. eva longoria started with nothing. so did adam jones.
8:18 grantholm is driving them to utter madness with her wild, smurf-like gesticulations. it's like a blood orgy of unanimous destruction!
8:09 americans, or at any rate american politicians, appear to know exactly one narrative: the american dream. work hard and make a better future for your kids. ok but it begins to seem insincere in version xxx. maybe we have more than one story if we really dig? if not we best get a writer on it.
7:48 really? scarlett johansson? damn, girl. don't swim into bill's ambit. try to steer away from kennedys, edwardses, etc.
7:36 orioles 4, yankess yet to bat.
6:52 like each individual american, america itself grows from the middle out.
5:27 now they're going to pretend to believe in god and stuff.
5:04 james taylor is ok, but he's not like that former lead singer of night ranger who tore the republicans to shreds. the whole convention should be sheer hardcore: all killing joke all the time. actually, james taylor is not ok.
4:35 the middle class is so mediocre. maybe we can repatriate them to their homeland, middle earth, so we don't have to resort to ethnic cleansing. no, really. ever see death of a salesman? the middle class doesn't have the guts to be extremely rich or extremely poor, and the extremely rich and the extremely poor should unite against them. screw them with their little nuclear families. they live like leeches or vampires on the ingenuity of the rich and labor of the poor. i cast sheer ordure upon them and all their ilk. i revile and abominate the middle class. i annihilate them in my imagination retroactively so they never existed at all.
4:24 one unbelievable mis-step by the obama admin was giving far too optimitstic a set of initial predictions of where the economy would go, what the effect of the stimulus package would be, etc. he ought at least to acknowledge that, work it into the 'we found a disaster' narrative.
4:15 i think people, in particular many of obama's former enthusiasts, now underestimate him. maybe it's because i am myself a prof, but i actually do think he has a common touch on a good day. clinton is a true master, but obama is an extraordinary politician. people have oscillated way too much: too over-the-top enraptured; too disillusioned. i predict he'll show y'all again tonight. right i'll be blogging along this evenin.
54 is a good age for a person in my line of jive to transform his hopes for sudden recognition of his transcendent genius to hopes for transcendent posthumous success. really when i was but a wee philosopher i thought i could be a transformative figure. insofar as i am in contact with reality, i'd have to be convinced by now that such a thing is not likely, possibly due to insufficient talent. princeton and stanford aren't calling; indeed, it's more like i'm lucky to have a job. i fantasize about a macarthur or something, but i didn't even get the grants i applied for for my sabbatical. i keep writing books and they get published, but putting it mildly they don't launch a discussion, much less whole new lines of actual inquiry, ecsatic worldwide acclaim etc.
now i might tell myself things like this: oh they just don't see how incredible i am because they're too...narrow-minded, conventional etc. however, one would have to notice that radical or unconventional figures often do extremely well. so then it oscillates to: well you must just suck, you pathetic fuckhead. it's hard to tell about yourself how smart you are, or how good you actually are at your job , isn't it? at least, it's hard for me.
so i tell myself that all i can really do is to try to keep plugging away, or doing the best work i can. i berate myself: are you doing this because you believe what you're saying and because you love what you are saying it about - are you doing it for it - or are you doing it to be loved and admired? i want to be intrinsically committed to the material, not the career: that's how i feel i could do meaningful work. but then: i am writing a 'system of philosophy.' it might be tending to become massive. and i have to ask myself: who would read something like that from you? ok if some famous dude at harvard or the sorbonne was doing something like that, someone might publish it and people might read it. but the world surely is not begging for that from crispin sartwell. i do think about audience/success enough to ask myself, stongly enough to make me take the day off, whether anyone will actually read this stuff i spend years typing. and then i find myself in a fantasy: oh you know in 2075 somebody will casually find my book in the stacks of an academic library and go: wow that's amazing! revolutionary! let's write some dissertations about this. i portray myself in my own head - in what i cannot but regard on reflection as really a pathetic attempt to bolster a repulsively saggy ego - as a van gogh, etc: someone laboring away in obscurity in his own time only to sell for $100 million a hundred years afterwards. i waver between crazed grandiosity and useless defeatedness.
just possibly these reflections are somewhat heightened by the news that my ex-wife - with whom, pathetically, i am still in love - is dating an academic who just got a 200k advance on his next book, and whose divorce decree states specifically that should he win the nobel, she gets a third. i am so far from worrying about your pathetic nobels! he sobbed.
i have been entertained or even delighted by many novels. in my teens i read *lord of the rings* a dozen times or more. in my twenties it was wodehouse: i read all hundred novels, more or less. thirties: well, for one thing noir: hammett and especially chandler. etc., and i've read a lot of the classics, some of which i liked a lot, and many of which i thought were absurdly overrated. now i don't doubt that a decade in middle earth or blandings castle had some effect on my personality. but no more than watching a lot of sports on tv, or driving a honda and many other activities. the novel is an excellent form of entertainment. you just need to stop bloating your little pleasures into a profound, world-transforming and person-transforming Truth. people (mostly lit professors) have tried to understand all human life and personality in terms of the novel: as 'narrative constructions.'
you'd better keep this pretty amorphous. there have been novels that actually had some real effect. supposedly goethe's *sorrows of werther* gave rise to a suicide fad, for example. other than that it's stuff like 'the invention of the human,' or a kind of deep insight into the zeitgeist or something: you'd better keep it at that mega-wooly level where the assertion just kind of sounds profound but has no actual content, because actually novels are just little rectangular objects with ink stains, which basically don't do a damn thing. yo that's ok!
if it's any comfort to you, i regard philosophy the same way, more or less. it's not implausible to argue that locke, or marx, or confucius, had dramatic social effects. but that's three out of thousands. (however, no novel has ever had those sorts of effects.) i fully expect my books to have no effect on anything, and i'm good with that. it's like my hobby or whatever; i find it intrinsically absorbing, and that's why i do it, and that's good enough to keep me going.
you should get worried if i start saying that 'life itself is a philosophical treatise,' or 'we are the polemical essays we compose,' or that the structure of the universe itself is a syllogism. or when the dude at the honda dealership likens world history to a sales pitch. the novel has no more claim to reflect the very structure of consciousness and the nature of reality than does carpentry, or free jazz, or gastronomy, or gardening, or driving, or playing board games, or bird-watching, now if you're thinking that all of these are significant because they fall into a narrative structure, i say, first: that's not true. and second: it would work just as well the other way round: a novel is like a house, or like a meal, or like a commute.
rather a remarkable experience. i'm handing back mid-terms in philosophy of art and i give the usual disclaimer: if you think i added it up wrong or you want to talk about the essay, i'm happy to. so tom comes up and says that i had indeed added wrong: he got two points he shouldn't have. not only that, but these two points took him from 91 to 89, A to B. never seen anything quite like it. i guess you'd say i was ethically impressed.
March 11, 2011
here's how i think about it. heinrich wolfflin, in principles of art history, describes different ways or representing reality. one pair is "linear and painterly": think raphael vs rembrandt. in raphael, all the emphasis is on clarity of outline in a well-ordered, plane-oriented composition. rembrandt breaks the symmetries and planes and builds figures from within rather than tracing definite outlines. raphael effaces the brushstroke: you don't see the traces of the manual work. rembrandt is just the opposite. rembrandt disperses the light, yet makes clear that it emanates from a definite source; raphael bathes the scene in a relatively uniform, unsourced light, etc. wofflin writes: "They are two conceptions of the world, differently orientated in taste and in their interest in the world, and yet each capable of giving a perfect picture of visible things" (p. 18 of the dover edition). there is not a way to adjudicate between them wherein one would be 'objective': there is not one objective system of representation.
now science is not the world: it's a series of systems for representing the world. at any given moment, like art even where it is concerned with accurate depiction, it also responds to all sorts of factors: cultural moods, funding mechanisms, academic hierarchies, mood. and it responds constantly to aesthetic factors: simplicity vs complexity, clarity vs richness, etc. but this is not to say that science is 'nothing but' these factors.
there can be more than one accurate representation of the same thing. but there could be inaccurate representations. giotto really is truer to the world and our experience of it than a medieval altarpiece (not surprising because the medieval painter wasn't trying for accuracy!) and masaccio really is more accurate than giotto. perspective really was an advance in truth, even though it was also a set of representational conventions and had its limits.
on this parallel, there could be different paradigms neither of which was more accurate, or which highlighted different aspects or had different contexts, purposes, and so on. however it certainly does not follow that any paradigm is fine, and it would take a lot to make me think that two paradigms were in any sense 'incommensurable'; certainly not if they're consecutive in the very same culture or science. (i don't offhand entirely preclude the possibility of 'incommensurable' scientific paradigms which are equally accurate or inaccurate, but i wouldn't expect to see that and of course it depends, as it so did in the interpretation of kuhn, what you mean by 'incommensurable.') but certainly linear and painterly are very different. but but you got painterly in response to linear: the paradigms are historically connected, in fact they more or less have to have the sequence they do, and they are certainly not globally or entirely different in the way they represent the world.
now what wolfflin misses (though not entirely), and maybe what kuhn misses, is the massive overlap of alternative systems and paradigms. rembrandt understood raphael; he could recognize the objects depicted even as he he worked through it into a different but equally comprehensible representational schema. raphael and rembrandt are very different, but not alien to one another, and there is a story to tell about how you get from one to the other. and they are both, among other things, trying to 'imitate' or accurately represent the very same world.
how we see and how a dog sees are very different, but you can tell in our interactions that we experience the same world in somewhat different ways. (when the dog wants out, she barks at the door; she doesn't pass through the wall.) you can tell that aristotle's experience overlaps massively with our own - that the world he's trying to account for is our world (albeit different in the ordinary ways; he didn't have cable) - though he produces such a different representational scheme. it is really interesting and important to try to enter into that scheme, and you can't evaluate its capacities for truth unless you enter into it as far as you can in its own context or in its own terms. then it reveals its truths, or its role in a history that does in some ways to some extent make progress. then if you were trying to narrate physics aristotle to einstein as a series of paradigms, you'd have to do all sorts of things: smooth shifts between closely-related paradigms, relatively sudden relatively radical displacements (like maybe ancient to medieval), revolutionary developments re-explaining experimental results developed within the previous paradigm, and so on.
our actual sensory experience, on my account, is not representational; that's why we share a world; and that's why modern philosophy at least since descartes has been a dead end: we are not looking at our own ideas or mental images, we are looking at, which is to say, ingesting, actual things. but there are representations: things like paintings and theories. the analogy of our experience to such things is compelling. but it's wrong. the current fad for the idea that the universe consists of information is a version of this mistake, which seems intractable. the notion that in interacting with my dog i am immediately acquainted only with a series of percepts, images, feels, etc is a terrible betrayal of our actual experience and world. it is non-explanatory and it raises a thousand unanswerable skeptical doubts. and it seals each of us in our own percepts, behind a screen, or a bunch of us together in our language.
i'm not denying that einstein is truer than aristotle. orbits are elliptical and the earth isn't flat and people do believe all kinds of crap. but you do want to treat einstein's physics as a system of representation responding to all sorts of factors too: no scientific theory is 'objective' in the sense that it does not deploy representational schemata which are alterable, and to which there are alternatives. but representational schemata are not all equal truthwise, even though there could be equally true representations in some two systems of the same thing. and some representational systems are sensitive to different kinds of truths or different features of real things than others; no human schema is entirely adequate to an infinitely profuse reality; or, reality is always in radical excess to its representations.
and it is worthwhile really to immerse yourself in different historical moments, different cultures, different groups' experiences, insofar as that is possible, among other things so that you don't just think your moment or group must have the truth or the only true schema, and so that you don't stop being critical of all sorts of factors in your own representational schema. it's hard to be aware of your own era's/culture's representational schema and you can't become completely aware of it. but you need always to be seeing the compelling qualities of other schemata, know the present structure is optional, not the last word. because it will certainly be replaced. under aesthetic demands and sociological shifts, but also in a quest for representational accuracy.
and what the history of science shows among other things is that the world will keep blasting through every representational schema, that each is impoverished; none is exhaustive. that's one reason why you keep observing and experimenting instead of just repeating the commonplaces of your present science or the present syntax of your community's language.
the end of the errol morris series just shows perfectly clearly that (a) the thing is a personal grudge (and too late! the guy is dead dead dead), and (b) morris does not have the equipment actually to grapple with kuhn's position. if only it was that easy! morris's grudge might have been richly motivated fifty years ago. but alien abductions? flat earth? these objections were answered and exhausted before kuhn even finished his book. ridiculing kuhn as a total irrationalist etc is just not engaged in his writings, and ridiculing the way he sucked on a cig of course doesn't help at all. no one would have read kuhn if the position was that mind-numbingly implausible. (and again, i speak as a realist.) the sensation kuhn had when he read aristotle was the sensation of entering into a globally different way of thinking. he saw how it hung together, saw what happens when, for example, you take seriously the concept of final cause. well you need to have that sensation, even if you also need to narrate a somewhat more continuous set of developments than kuhn's structure suggests. but then you just take the stupidest thing that aristotle ever said (women have fewer teeth than men), and discredit the whole worldview on that basis, and then accuse kuhn of agreeing? dude please. and it does make you re-think the grudge a little. it makes you wonder how carefully morris ever read anything, makes you see why kuhn might throw an ashtray.
March 10, 2011
this thing about professors welcoming disagreement from their students is actually pretty difficult, more difficult than i've made it appear, perhaps. i don't teach grad students, though i have here or there, and i'd say i rarely run into an undergrad who i would think presents a serious challenge to my point of view. like i say, philosophical prodigies are exceedingly rare, because you have to know a lot - it takes years of study - to really be in the debate. also undergrads tend to be kind of passive overall, and you're not usually reading very extended treatments etc. but i've been a grad student and had problems in this regard and i'm in the culture where this is often a question. i've seen all the possible responses.
at any rate, one thing is that you have the opinions you do and that means that you regard those opinions as the right opinions. and if you're in my line of work, you've spent years or decades developing lines of argument for these views, which you obviously regard as superior to those of your rivals for their contrasting views (though if you're a reasonable person you also wonder whether your arguments are as good as you think, etc). so it can be hard to see the quality of another argument, especially from someone who's not quite as thoroughly in the question as you obviously are. now also people like, let's say, kuhn, were constantly embattled. they were attacked all the time and they had to fight for their ideas (rorty too, come to that). so they're already in a defensive crouch and they are probably sick of most of the obvious moves. (on the other hand, though, you are in a serious power-differential with your own students, and the actual current threats are people at your own level of eminence, and you just need to be aware of the power you actually have. it's never right simply to crush people whose careers depend on you.)
also people like that have a stake in regarding their ideas as the beginning or the avant-garde of a movement, as progress, as things people will come to eventually (thus also of course recognizing your importance). so if grad students come at you with an attempt at refutation, you take them to be reactionaries. you might not know it exactly, but you are trying to gather followers; you think you're right and you want the right to prevail. this was absolutely explicit in rorty: he had a whole history of human thought, and he thought he'd discerned its direction, and he was pushing it along. he lined up a history of progressive figures who'd had partial insights and of course in a certain sense this culminated in his work. the very worst example is hegel, who i think believed that the world-spirit had reached in culmination of self-consciousness right there in his own work. but most people in philosophy who are not primarily historians - or would like to regard themselves as major figures - have something like this sense. (i have always written as though i was a major figure, even though i am one of the few people who thinks i might be.)
so it is a sticky difficult matter to see two students of equal knowledge and intellectual ability as equal where one agrees and one doesn't. one is progressive and sees and one is reactionary and doesn't. obviously the one who does is right and also easier to talk to and more ego-gratifying. it's not that you want to judge people wrongly; it's that the lens can't help but distort. i too am subject to this. edge toward my point of view, or add to it, and my heart goes: yes!
but it is really really important to have some tendency or ability to step back from that, though this will always be limited. you have to affirm consciously a commitment to pluralism, and you have to worry constantly that your ego is engaged one way or the other. some people are extremely bad at doing that (such as kuhn as portrayed by morris). no one can do it perfectly. but i did have a fairly good experience with rorty as i attacked and attacked. and i wasn't completely right, and my arguments were half-formed or were the same old realist arguments that he'd been dealing with for decades. but he read carefully, helped me improve, sometimes took pleasure in the challenge. that speaks incredibly well for him. i know i wasn't his favorite student ever; how could i be? (he always mentioned robert brandom, who i'd say has more than paid off on that assessment.) but he let me write a dissertation, get a degree, and he wrote me a letter of rec. that is a pretty good model of how to behave.
(there are completely different models of education, of course, that reverse-value pluralism or a critical test of ideas. the, um, german model. you have to serve an apprenticeship; get so far inside the ideas of your professor that you know them as well as, and in the way that, he does; then you're ready. i've seen the cult of the herr professor in action. i'll name names: charles scott and john sallis (whose persons and followerships i knew at vanderbilt when i was on a post-doc there), but also maybe cora diamond at virginia when i was in grad school, who wanted to make you a grand-acolyte of wittgenstein. let's just leave this approach entirely out of consideration, though i never had any luck in actually ripping it to shreds at first hand, and among grad students the follower is always more common than the critic.)
March 09, 2011
i would recommend to npr that they don't just keep buckling. you start decimating your staff in response to every little sting etc and i'll tell you this: the hornets will be swarming. you're making o'keefe almost unbelievably effective. now on the other hand there is a problem, and there is a whole culture of elite incredible arrogance that serves no one well, even itself. i was sitting with some profs the other night, and we were discussing something or other and the loudest among us said, "but republicans are just so stupid." of course everyone nodded along (well except me, but i also didn't merely blast away; it seems wrong to destroy a friendly dinner conversation with an honored outoftown guest (in this case the curator of french painting from the national gallery in dc), plus i ain't no republican). well if the topic had been tea partiers, it'd have been worse. no argument, just extreme group self-esteem-enhancement: these are the wrong sort of people. they didn't go to the right colleges. that's exactly what the npr fund-raiser said, and it's doubtful he's ever had lunch with someone who would have had any response but enthusiastic nodding and mutual backslapping. that there would be a problem. it's almost impossible to generate any actual opinions in an environment like that; it's just bobbleheads nodding in synchrony.
i actually think npr bends over backwards to be fair. but they do have to bend over backwards; it would surprise me if the basic politics wasn't close to unanimous.
it's pretty amazing what errol morris is doing in the new york times. (but memo to nyt: it is stupidly difficult to get access to all the parts of the piece smoothly: make sure each post links smoothly to all the others right at the top.) and kuhn's ashtray is a pretty good little concomitant to wittgenstein's poker etc. i do remember a long and laborious apprenticeship before i could get anything out of kripke's naming and necessity - which is, for one thing, a beautiful model of philosophical prose - or even understand the questions from which it emerged or the taxonomy of positions in which it took up a place.
kripke was that rarest of things - a philosophical prodigy - and there was just no denying the lightning-strike brilliance. but he also kind of flamed out, and i don't think anyone would take his later work (wittgenstein on rules and private language, for example, which i remember everyone waiting eagerly for at hopkins in 1982) to be comparable. and kuhn wasn't the only jerk; a couple of female students i knew had insanely difficult experiences with kripke at princeton. anyway, i have to say i'm with kripke on reference in a big way, and that would have gotten me an ashtray from rorty. only rorty was not the kind of fuckhead who threw ashtrays! this will tell you a lot about the intellectual culture of the era and place morris describes. it really really mattered! which is good, but not good.
one reason it was not good was that if you disagreed with your prof - which one would think offhand should be welcome - you could get smacked to the tune of ending your career, which is what morris is describing. rorty, who came right out of that princeton environment, was sort of weary of being disagreed with, but he also just wanted to make sure you gave the best argument you could for your disagreement; that is a very very better approach.
there is not a direct contradiction between kuhn and kripke, though there is a tension. and kuhn was always trying to hedge his thing about incommensurability. (i did see him give a series of lectures at uva, rorty in attendance.) people were always like: but according to you there's no real world and no truth! and then he'd say: no not at all, and then it got really complicated. but rorty, who taught kuhn all the time, would be all 'exactly. no real world, son. aren't you tired of that crap anyway? it's so oppressive.' and his eyes would twinkle.
March 03, 2011
so there have been some pretty dramatic protests at the college where i work (dickinson in carlisle, pa) concerning sexual assault of students (mostly, of course, by other students, and mostly acquaintance assaults by male on female students, again of course). hundreds of students have occupied the administration building for the last couple of days, and coverage has been kind of amazing: it led all the local newscasts and the local newspapers, and you've seen slices even on huffpost and other national outlets.
now first of all, it's actually great to see students active in this way; dickinson hasn't really in my time there been a hotbed of activism, and more students seem interested in binge-drinking (which of course you'd have to say plays a large role in this problem, which is serious) than anything that has anything to do with anything. and the demands of the protesters seem by and large reasonable: more transparency in the disciplinary process, expulsions for serious sexual offenders, and so on. but we're also back to the following, which is the kind of thing i've spoken out against at a number of the institutions where i've worked (this is from the list of demands as presented by the protesters this morning):
The college must recognize sexual violence as existing on a spectrum: cat-calling, lewd comments, and homophobic or misogynistic slurs contribute to a culture conducive to sexual assault. This is one sideof the broad spectrum of offenses that we consider sexual violence, with the most extreme end of said spectrum being rape and sexual assault. These behaviors must be dictated in the same policies thatgovern sexual violence and formally punished, though certainly not with the same severity as sexual assault and rape.
the definition of speech as violence, and the banning of certain phonemes, is just completely wrong and counter-productive and counter-educational. i and others have put forward these arguments for so long that it seems almost silly to repeat them, but i will just a bit. it matters who uses the 'slur' and when and why. a gay person throwing around 'faggot' and 'queer' (like a black rapper with 'nigger' or a feminist with 'bitch') is routine and part of the ways that words mutate and get constantly inflected and turned around. i just mentioned or quoted those words, and that is completely different for my money than hurling them at someone as a form of verbal abuse. you actually get the feeling that people are scared of certain sounds, and 'the n word' etc is just pathetic: gutless. they want to ban even talking about what words they want to ban. please.
banning certain words just leads to the spiral of useless euphemisms, and if you think people can't replace 'retarded' with 'special' or whatever you may authorize next, i will demonstrate that you are mistaken. and even if you could get teenage boys actually to stop using 'gay' as an all-around term for anything they don't like, that wouldn't keep them from feeling like they have to continually establish their heterosexuality to each other using whatever terms you might leave at their disposal.
you increase the power of any word that you brand as an act of violence or propose to delete from the language. in fact you attribute to words a literally magical power: like i can literally assault you, damage your body, by sitting here in my little house typing. and i can make you love me by writing your name on a piece of paper and folding it up just so. if it were true, i might be tempted actually to make use of this supernatural ability.
and if you can't hold out some sort of distinction between words and violence, you can't stop censorship anywhere, of anything. etc!
February 09, 2011
this restores my faith very slightly. at least someone has actually noticed! it absolutely could not be more obvious, from the sheer fact of unanimity, that this group of psychologists polled by haidt, believes only because of social cohesion among their demographic, that is for no reasons related to the truth of what they believe. any academic conference would yield the same result. what's really annoying in the case of profs is that they will then also continuously assert that anyone who disagrees is irrational or impervious to evidence. har har. you have to experience the unanimity, the pressure, the extreme arrogance all at once - that is, you have to be a member of the group who doesn't hop on the consensus - actually to see what this means and how it is enforced. as i say, these folks are supposed to be educators and experts. you'd be better off with the rankest group of rednecks, where there is a lot more diversity of opinion, much more capacity for independent thought, much more tolerance for diversity.
May 11, 2010
i have to say brooks is very right about students, especially the best, these days: "If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and
strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers.
They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than
authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the
time, they were prudential rather than poetic." and one might point to the culture of standardized testing - again bushobama's only idea in education, or for the eradication of education - as a symptom and a cause of this slavishness.
but in addition to finding that disturbing ("What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the
incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes
creativity and rewards caginess"), i find it surprising that someone is a law professor at chicago or a dean of the harvard law school, without an elaborate record of scholarship. maybe i don't understand the standards operating in that zone of the academy. can you be those things as mere academic entrepreneur?
June 07, 2009
one thing that happened to academic identity politics is that it just kept fragmenting, in reflection to some extent of the movements it was associated with. so you were a friedan-type feminist, but then black feminism arose to some extent as a critique of that. like are you worried about the problems of the bourgeois housewife when you're working as a maid for that very woman? ok so then also you are alienated from the radical civil rights movement, because malcolm x or stokely carmichael are raving sexists. you need your own movement. well, say you are a black lesbian woman. then you're in tension with hetero black feminists and also the gay rights movement, dominated by men. but then say your mom's white and your dad's black, or your mom's brazilian and your dad's japanese? it's an infinitely divisible space.
then, when identity politics segued into social constructionism or postmodernism, each of the categories was analyzed as a social production, not nothing, but contingent, malleable, something that could even...disappear, like judith butler on gender. that happened with race and gender and sexual orientation: continua not dichotomies. people started speaking for the border-crosser or the creole; trying to organize various groups across lines because they all lived near lines.
i feel like this kind of discourse started dying by the mid-nineties, and has had difficulty in recent years really getting any traction or any resistance. there is a younger generation of scholars with somewhat different categories. my own contribution was act like you know, but it was hard to know that it was already obsolete in say 1995 when the book was written. or else on the other hand, identity politics was merely ramified and realized more fully.
identity politics really is necessary, but it is also self-consuming. it tries to reproduce that amazing feeling that you get when you hear someone speak your experience, as in the consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism. the best analogy i can draw in my own experience is listening to alchies and addicts at 12-step meetings, where you go: you are me. it is mobilizing, absolutely essential to stake any sort of claim against the dominant class or motivate resistance. but this experience can be over-rated, and an ecstasy of identification can be delusory: there are more differences and division than one initially recognizes. also, though, it's real: you do inherit chunks of your white or black or regional membership-class.
i do think it really fetches you up in individualism, where each person is an incomparable, incongruous congeries. but it remains imposrtant as a way for people to describe at least some of the ingredients in their personal soup. it made contributions to understanding the content of those elements, while people also keep re-asserting the dichotomies; we're still not at the point where we don't try to figure out whether you're black or white, straight or gay, etc., and adjust our responses accordingly.
but that's obama's approach to identity politics: he's interested in it but not invested in it. he tried to "explore his black identity," but almost as a matter of choice or a game. sotomayor, on the other hand is a wise latina woman. as i say, the division is generational, and arises right at the gap between them, as well as from the details of their biographies.
May 26, 2009
one thing we'd have to say about ruth padel: her work is radical not only in the realm of poetry, but in the genre of email, where she pursues a sort of automatic surrealism.
"ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily)
Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well
turnup...
"THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6
pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide
interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth."
as well, she is one of many innovators in the genre of postpostmodernist apology, where you're terribly sorry for being willfully misunderstood:
"I apologise for anything I have done that can be misconstrued as having
been against him."
May 25, 2009
nothing quite matches the savage politics of poetry professors. she lasted, like, a week. but now they've had a woman, and can go back to another three centuries of men. it was a bad sign early on when padel hired karl rove as a consultant. i also dig her statement:
I acted in complete good faith and would have been happy to lose to Derek.
words of the scandal-decimated politician.
May 29, 2008
my pro-conservative-studies piece is in the latimes this morning. ungratefully, i'm going to express my dissatisfaction with the edit. to start with, i am aware that you don't endow a professor, but a professorship or a chair. incomprehensibly, they lost the strongest paragraph:
Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people.
anyway, if anyone cares, they can compare it with the submitted text.
For Conservative Studies By Crispin Sartwell
That the University of Colorado would establish a Chair of Conservative Studies is rather delicious in its ironies. It certainly smacks of affirmative action, and casts conservativism in the syntax of whole departments decried by conservatives for decades: women's studies, African-American studies, and so on. Furthermore, the idea of affirmative action for conservatives seems gratuitous. Women may be oppressed, sort of, but conservatives run whole wars, black site prisons, sprawling multi-national corporations. In fact, if women are oppressed, they're oppressed by conservatives, which may render faculty meetings a bit tense. But as an academic who is neither a liberal nor a conservative (anarchism has its privileges), let me tell you why I think it's not such a bad idea. Within the academy, conservatives really are an oppressed minority. On a faculty of 825, the University of Colorado apparently has 23 registered Republicans. This strikes me as high, and I assume they all teach business or phys ed. The professoriate is unanimous for Obama. I say that's a problem. It's a problem in a variety of ways, but it's certainly a problem pedagogically: ideological uniformity does a disservice to students, and makes a mockery of the pious commitment of these professors simply to convey knowledge. I teach political philosophy. And like most professors I know, I bend over backwards to teach texts I hate sympathetically; I try to show my students why people have found Plato and Marx - both of whom I regard as totalitarians - compelling. But I don't deceive myself into thinking that I teach these texts as well as or in the same way as would a professor who found them plausible. On the other hand, with Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," I've immersed myself in the text for years. I've struggled to parse every sentence. I've put it into the context of all Thoreau's work, and that of his friends and contemporaries. When I get to the end of the "Communist Manifesto" I'm usually asking things like this: "Marx says that all means of communication should be centralized in the hands of the state. Anyone see any problems with that?" I don't - I can't - teach Marx the same way a Marxist would. I think that's fine, but what I'm saying is that even as I try to be neutral (well, even if did try to be neutral) my real opinions affect every aspect of what I do, and I think that is generally true. It's horrendously true in a situation in which academia produces a consensus. Here everything is affected by the real opinions of real professors, from the configuration of departments to the courses on offer within those departments to the texts taught within those courses to the ways those texts are taught. And because there's a consensus, there is precious little self-examination; a slant that we all share becomes invisible. Indeed, the academic consensus is of a particularly irritating variety. First of all, the fact that everyone agrees and everyone has a Ph.D. leads to the occasionally explicit idea that all intelligent people think the same thing: that no one could disagree with Obamanism without being an idiot. This has been expressed by the continual attack not on the positions of Reagan and Bush, for example, but on their grades and IQs. That is, the self-image of the professoriate results in a non-stop ad hominem attack. Furthermore, the claims of the professoriate to independence of mind, actual academic freedom, supposedly nurtured by tenure, are thrown into question by the unanimity. Professors are as herd-like in their opinions as other groups that demographers like to identify - "working-class white men," for example - or indeed far more so. That's partially just a result of the charming human tendency to nod along with whoever's sitting next to you. But it's also partially a result of the fact that a professor has been processed, often for a decade or more, by the institutions that harbor this unanimity. The predictable result of "educating" professors for many years in unanimous institutions is that each cohort is a bit more unanimous than the one before. Every new generation of professors has been steeped in an atmosphere in which the authorities all agree, and in which they associate agreement with intelligence and with . . . degrees, jobs, tenure, and so on. If you think conservatives are evil idiots, then conservatism itself richly justifies a decision not to hire or tenure a Ph.D. Every new leftist minted by graduate programs is an act of self-praise, a confirmation of the intelligence of the professors. Professors yap more than most people; they are more opinionated than most people; but they are less intellectually independent than most people. That this smog of consensus is incompatible with the supposedly high-minded educational mission of these institutions is obvious. Higher education is at least as dedicated to the reproduction of Obamanism as it is to conveying information. But it is massively self-deceived about this, which makes it all the more disgusting and effective. So as my liberal old professor Richard Rorty said, referring to Allan Bloom, conservative Platonist: "Let a thousand Blooms flower." And if they flower in endowed chairs of conservative studies, that's at least pretty funny.
Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College In Carlisle, PA. His book Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory has just been published.
May 26, 2008
here's stanley fish's argument against the u of colorado's notion of establishing a "chair of conservative studies." 23 of the 825 faculty members describe themselves as republicans. that's actually pretty high. but anyway, fish argues, as he has many times before, that one's ideology is irrelevant to one's teaching, that even a liberal philosophy prof, for example, is obliged to give a fair assessment of conservative texts (plato or burke or adam smith, let's say) to his students. all i can say is that this argument is bizarrely naive. i do myself bend over backwards to give a clear and even sympathetic reading of "the communist manifesto," which i think is interesting but terrifying. but i do not deceive myself into thinking that i've expended as much effort in understanding it as i have on a comparable text i actually sympathize with (maybe "civil disobedience"). i tell my students: 'well, you know, when marx says that the state must control all the media of communications, that sure seems totalitarian to me; but i don't think if you had a marxist in here, he'd think it was so clear.' but i also can't adequately represent the argument, regarding it as i do as ludicrous. at any rate: if you despise a text or a thinker, you read him differently, emphasize different things, etc, despite all your attempts to be fair. this is a typical and unavoidable human derangement, most clearly seen in the fact that nearly everybody sympathizes with themselves, that their account of their own lives and arguments is partly designed to beef up their self-image. the idea that people can simply drop off their deepest beliefs at the door is silly, even if we want to. and when you've got let's say 802 liberals on the faculty, you've got a pall of interpretation slanted in every possible respect: which texts we teach, and how. and it's even more dangerous if we maintain a fishy claim of impartiality; that doesn't get rid of the prejudices, merely conceals them, which buries the whole process further in self-delusion.
ask yourself: how is it that all these professors are liberals, are more or less perfectly unanimous for obama? i'm not going to accept the professors' own account: that smart people are liberals and only ignorant idiots are conservatives (say "george bush" and roll your eyes here). even just the sheer self-praise involved in that assertion should give you pause. it has to do with the fact that they're trained in institutions by people for whom liberalism is an unquestionable orthodoxy. it has to do with the texts and classes and curricula and how they're taught. it has to do with the charming enthusiasm of people for believing whatever the person next to them believes, especially if the latter has the appearance of authority or expertise. the longer people inhabit the academic institution, the more unanimous they become, a strange coincidence if fish's characterization of education is true. if you ask me, these things have nothing to do with what education is, and i do think that some effort to achieve ideological diversity is warranted.
i don't know if inventing the discipline of conservative studies is much of an answer, but it's at least delicious in its ironies: conservatives always hated the idea of "women's studies," "african-american studies," lgbt (or whatever it is) studies. etc. and the implicit portrayal of conservatives as an oppressed minority for whom affirmative action is appropriate is pretty odd considering how powerful conservatism is. on the other hand, in academia, conservatism really does constitute an oppressed minority.
Recent Comments