faith

My psychologist gives me homework. Most recently, my homework was to approach the world with faith. Faith is equivocal here.

On one hand, faith refers to believing that the world will support my weight rather than swallow it or shrug it off. It also means having confidence that not everything is on the absolute verge of chaos, violence, and madness--for instance, that the broad walkway through the campus will not suddenly become a gauntlet of brutal punishment just for me.

For the most part, this is all true. I think I can be forgiven maintaining doubt while riding my bicycle through intersections of truck routes in Turlock. And while one goal of this exercise of faith is to release me from anxiety and behaving like prey, once again I believe it's prudent to regard myself as potential quarry while cycling. I admit, also, that on campus I have never been physically attacked, and only four or five times verbally abused, and only a dozen or so times even sneered at. (Of course, I am omitting interactions with administrators from this enumeration.)

Another sense of the word faith that I particularly draw from is Sartre's usage in Being and Nothingness to name actions with regard to freedom and responsibility. It's important, I suppose, to act as much as possible in good faith--self-consciously acknowledging that every action creates values and an image of how human life should be lived. To a great degree, I see my prey behavior as bad faith, because it is obviously an attempt to avoid what makes me anxious.

I'm reading an excerpt from Sartre's "Existentialism is a Humanism" with my Intro class, so this is coming back to mind afresh. One problem critics see in Sartre's approach is his overemphasis on a Cartesian concept of consciousness. Sartre's stuff often reads as if he imagines that we can have entirely transparent self-understanding and complete conscious control over ourselves.* But, since anxiety is a lizard-brain response (hence its emergence out of no known or visible causes when walking on campus, e.g.), the way to fight back against your amygdala is by being more aware of anxiety, not trying to diminish it by acting on it. In fact, acting on it increases it, because your stupid amygdala watches you skulking around looking for somewhere to hide, and responds by jumping up and down and shouting "See! Danger! If there weren't, you wouldn't be hiding!"

It's tough acting in good faith, as Sartre himself would tell you. Plus, it makes me want to make my anxieties public, as a way to face them. There are certain things I really shouldn't say to people I come across on campus, and my psychologist also told me to do something to make myself noticed, as a counter-strategem. Yet I'm sure it's not the best coping strategy if I want to be regarded as (1) sane, (2) reliably discreet, and (3) reasonably appropriately professional. Maybe I'll keep a little notebook.

*

It's a misreading, I believe. I think freedom and responsibility come at the point of decision and action. That means that I become responsible for, say, a feeling, when I choose how to value that feeling and how to act on it. For instance, like everyone, I feel very attracted to some people and very repulsed by others. That's not super significant until I do something about it. That doesn't just mean making passes at the attractive people and punching the repulsive ones. I'm still choosing and taking responsibility when I just enjoy being around the attractive people and punching the repulsive ones.

nano nano nano nano nano nano nano

Hey kids! It's National Novel Writing Month!

Is Doc Nagel engaging in this madness? You betcha! In fact, I'm writing a contemporary, quasi-autobiographical Don Quixote, crossed with Samuel Beckett and Charles Bukowski. For folks that know me very very well, this will make real and terrible sense. I think it's a little alarming to my Loveliest. Working titles have come and gone: Peripatetic, Peripatetics, Picaresque, Walk, and now, for what seems to be the settled version, The Solipsists. (Two solipsists walk into a bar...)

But to hell with it. I'm just jumping in, and whatever happens, happens. I'm having a good time writing about cats and walking.

I'm writing it in fragments, all in first person, that include letters, entries in a diary, and direct narration. There are two main characters, who have the same name, both have cats with the same name, are both in relationships with a woman with the same name, and who both have a best friend/cousin of the same name. At first, I had a hard time distinguishing the two main characters, their narrative voices, or their life stories. Then they became very clearly distinct, and now, they're losing distinction again. So, everything's going along swimmingly.

I am not sure their paths will cross. I kinda doubt it. So far, none of the identically-named cats, friends, or lovers are identical persons.

And this'll creep y'all out: so far, the lover has appeared on one single page. I know whose lover it is, and approximately when in his life she appeared, and disappeared, and when this event took place, but otherwise, of her(s), I've been entirely silent. This disturbs me, but it's how it is.

There's more madness. I wrote and recorded a song last night, when I meant to be writing, that I am calling "Quixotic." It's a whole lotta John Fahey goof.

There's yet more madness, but you don't get to see it.

preachin'

I'm exhausted. My exhaustion has nothing to do with the content of what follows, but does for the form.

Today there was a preacher on campus. This has happened before, and about it I have posted before. I think that, on some level, campus proselytizers are precious, and I mean that in the most insulting way you could imagine.

Perhaps because of my exhaustion, political disgust, or angst, what came to mind today while this guy lambasted approximately eight students about their terrible, sinful lives, was how much I would love to see some extremely alternative preachers on campus.

For instance, I think it would be wonderful and instructive to have someone speak with absolutely no coherence whatsoever, about moral issues no one considers, for four hours without break. Imagine a preacher explaining why it's the devil's work when you install your toilet paper roll such that the new paper comes out the bottom instead of over the top of the roll. Imagine a preacher instructing the audience in the holy way to make coffee. Imagine the unfurled banner that would say: "God hates things God hates, and even though we're not certain what those are,if you have any problem with that, we suggest you take it up with God."*

Or this: "Stop making shit up about me. -- God"

Or this: "You people really like floods, don't you? -- God"

Or this: "Get offa my lawn! -- God"

Another option would be to have a preacher and anti-preacher duke it out in a barbed-wire cage. Then again, that's been done already.

--

* Back at UNC-Charlotte, we had the best campus Bible-bangers. One day, a terrific shouter was condemning coeds to death for wearing skirts. I jumped in, and we ended up doing a terrific Vaudeville buddy act. He called all the female coeds Jezabels, and I jumped onto the bell tower base to join him, proffered a nearby alt/goth chick's legs, and delivered Lenny Bruce's classic line: if there's a defect, the blame belongs to the manufacturer. He said God didn't create legs to be ogled (or words to that effect), and I said that settled it, and, in Nietzsche's terms, he had proved that God is dead. Great day.

politics

It is rather amazing that there have been only two viable political parties in the US for lo these many years, especially since they offer virtually no choice regarding policy (look it the hell up: Obamacare is practically a carbon copy of the bill Romney signed in Massachusetts, and both of them will make their friends donors in the insurance industry very happy).

So, I'd like to ask my readers for their help, guidance, and support, as I kick off a brand new venture, a new political party that I think will be a viable third option. I've been giving this a lot of thought, and I believe I have a strategy that will get our candidates elected, help us raise all-important campaign dollars, and draw even-more-all-important media attention.

It's too late to really make an impact on this year's general election, but we can get a start, and this is where you come in. What I want you to do is, on your ballot, write in a candidate of your choice, but, more importantly, state that candidate's party: Full Of Shit.

Here's what I have so far as the party platform of the Full Of Shit Party:

We will lower taxes on wealthy people. This will make them happy. It will not create jobs, but say, over and over, that it will. Call these wealthy people something like "job creators," but don't use those words, because the Republicans have a copyright on them, and that'd just get messy. How about "slave wage providers"? Or "tricklers"? (Remember "trickle-down"? Remember how that worked?)

Lower the deficit. We won't say how.

The Full of Shit Party will continue to make America a place where small businesses can thrive. The entrepreneurial spirit is, after all, what makes America great, and as we all know, America is the greatest nation on earth. It's also what has made Chevron, Walmart, and Comcast such lucrative firms. Their contributions to our economy and society need to be encouraged, through effective tax rates of zero or below.

Maintain the $7.25 minimum wage, since, obviously, any increase in the minimum wage will hurt small businesses and force manufacturing jobs, like putting together a Big Mac, overseas. If you don't want to see fast food manufacturing jobs end up in China or Bangladesh, you have to support maintaining a minimum wage that would provide a full-time income of $14,500 a year (though none of those jobs would be full-time, of course).

Cut government services wherever possible. DId I say "services"? I meant "waste," of course. As everyone knows, any time the government spends a dollar, God kills a kitten it is entirely wasted and no economic activity is created as a result. (Of course, this is not true at all regarding the defense department. Every time the government spends a dollar on the defense department, God kills three kittens God kills terror the world becomes safer for capitalist accumulation democracy.

The Full of Shit Party believes in equality and freedom. We believe it is every American's right to pursue happiness. We support the rights of same-sex couples the unborn undocumented workers donors all true Americans whose behavior we tolerate who have donated to the Party. However, we won't do jack shit to advance their cause.


Remember, on election day, write in "Full Of Shit."

ugh

I woke up at around four AM. I'm not really sure why. Between my Loveliest and I, lately, there's someone up at nearly every hour of the day at our place.

I spent the first twenty minutes of my morning lying in bed with random thoughts swirling around in my head. One recurring thought was about the likelihood of trouble in transit this week. So I got up and checked the east coast weather.

The problem isn't the weather per se, but the backlog of flights now that 9000 flights have been canceled, today through tomorrow. The Philadelphia airport is closed today. All flights are canceled by every US airline in and out of Newark, New York, DC, Baltimore...

And again, we're not going any of those places. We're going to Rochester, up on the Lake Ontario coast, where Hurricane Sandy will provide about 48 hours of constant rain. Given what's happened to Atlantic City already today, I'm hoping there's still enough Rochester above water to fly to.

But the main problem isn't in Rochester, it's in the airports. I'm not a good air traveler, I loathe and feel dehumanized by the non-place of an airport, the non-people of crew members, and the non-service they work so diligently to provide.* Perhaps we'll get lucky, and the airline employees and travelers will have gotten the mean spirit of Sandy's aftermath out of their systems. Perhaps flight schedules will have returned to normal by Wednesday afternoon when we're supposed to transfer at O'Hare.

I might be on east coast time before then. We do have to leave here a little after four AM Wednesday.

--

* I take these terms from George Ritzer's The Globalization of Nothing. "Nothing" is Ritzer's term for the placeless, featureless, ubiquitous crapola that global capitalism produces and sells so much of. RItzer's other concept, of "McDonaldization," helps explain how, where, and by whom "nothing" is produced and consumed. "Non-people" is a modification of Goffman's idea of a non-person, and the rest should be pretty simple to tease out.

My favorite bit is his account of the scripted interactions of non-persons during commercial exchange (i.e., overwhelmingly most of our daily, commodified interactions). It's one of the things about air travel that most offends me. Maybe I'm wrong, but when flight attendants start to run through the safety card information, their dead eyes unfocused on anything in particular, never making eye contact, I experience a sense of their icy hatred of every person in the plane. I believe we all know that the safety information is not for our safety, but that of the airline, specifically, from liability. (Remember when Southwest used to have "joke" safety information? That was just as offensive, because it was that gutless mild kind of writing that isn't actually humorous -- I'm sure they hired a writer from a sitcom on ABC Family Channel.)

Then there's the "in-flight service," a non-service in every way Ritzer talks about. It seems as though the typical non-service amounts to one 8-ounce plastic cup filled with off-tasting ice and a soft drink filled to the rim, per two hours of flight time. On flights over four hours, they sometimes provide a plastic bag containing 2 ounces of mini pretzels (approximately eight), and the smart airlines are now providing free stupefaction pacifiers television. As the plane lands and taxis, when they say "welcome to __" and "your final destination," and tell us to have a good day, I can tell they really mean "get the hell out of the plane so I can wash the dreck of your repulsive presence off of me," or, you know, words to that effect.

current events

I've been away awhile. How are you? You look well. Really? Sorry to hear that.

It's not all cycling here at Doc Nagel, Inc. No indeed: there's classes to teach, papers to grade, and proposition 30 to vote for and proposition 32 to vote against.

Times are tough for prop 30, which could mean times will become very much tougher at the CSU, at the UC, at the community colleges, and at K-12 schools. Honestly, the only way I can conceive of someone who doesn't make $250,000 a year choosing to vote against prop 30 is stupidity. To me it looks like this: either you can have a bowl of yummy ice cream, or a shiv to the neck, and about half of Californians say they want the shiv.

"Really?" I say to them in my fantasy, "'cuz, ya know, the shiv'll hurt, like, bad."

"I know. Want the shiv," says half of California.

"Look at this ice cream, though," says I. "It's way more delicious than being stabbed in the neck, don't you think?"

"I do," says half of California. "Want the shiv."

"It's a stab wound, you realize that, right?"

"Shiv."

Etc.

This is like a brief conversation I had the other day about prop 34, which would ban the death penalty in California. The pro-34 arguments are as follows: (1) the death penalty costs far more than life imprisonment would, (2) sometimes innocent people are convicted of murder, and so, when we execute those innocent people, our society effectively commits a murder of its own, (3) in states with the death penalty, it's likely that the murder rate is higher, so it does not serve as a deterrent. The student understood all these, but was still against 34. In fact, the student said that a person who has committed murder loses all rights to live -- a position I hear again and again, and which is entirely baseless in our political heritage of natural rights. I suggested that this assumes we only convict the actually and legally guilty, when things like the Innocence Project have determined that many death-row inmates are wrongfully convicted. The student repeated that a murderer has no rights -- completely ignoring my argument.

I offered that the only logical argument I could see in favor of the death penalty is if you assumed the only way to restore justice is with a reciprocal act (Kant argued this). This did not impress, apparently, because the student did not need or want a rational position. The student wanted vengeance. And a shiv.

freedom and precariousness

Today in Professional Ethics we're discussing an article about ethical failures in accounting. The author criticizes "academic accountants" for failing either to develop a theory of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or to take an active role in critiquing the accounting practices exemplified by the scandals involving Enron, Worldcom, and the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. The research they do, according to this author, is mainly methodological, and mainly read only by other academic researchers. In other words, the research does not serve the public interest.

The question follows: whose interest does it serve? I can only conclude that it serves the interest of the academics themselves.

Publishing, in academic fields with which I'm most familiar, primarily serves the purposes of advancing a claim to deserve tenure or promotion. It is always carefully--not to say obsessively--recorded in a c.v. and in tenure/promotion "files" (which tend to be muliple enormous three-ring binders containing every piece of anything that academic has touched). At major research universities, the benefits of tenure and promotion are often significant financially and in terms of prestige and job security. At most levels of higher education, the financial and prestige rewards are more modest, but job security is highly prized.

This has the result that the article suggested was endemic to academic accounting research. In class, I used academic philosophy as an example. In this field, there is a tacit but near-universally recognized division between publication that "counts" and that doesn't count. The publication that counts includes publication in peer reviewed professional journals, monographs published by academic presses, and, to a lesser extent, book chapters published by invitation of the editor of an anthology.

In my view, academic publications in philosophy are, for the most part, dead letters--better yet, still born. At the moment of publication, the thoughts and ideas expire. Unless you are a highly prestigious academic, if the publication is read at all, the only response it is at all likely to elicit is to be cited somewhere. I have received no response whatsoever to the most significant article I've published (academically speaking).

Yet it is vital for candidates for tenure or promotion to generate these publications, in order to advance their careers. The situation for tenure candidates is the most dire, since career survival is at stake for many: publish or perish.

Thus it comes as no surprise that I have heard so many newly-tenured faculty say, "now I can research things I'm interested in!"

This is the price of job security. For six years of probation, and likely for several years prior to that, academics in many fields sacrifice their freedom of expression, thought, inquiry, and behavior. By the time they have tenure, how many of them have atrophied capacities for free inquiry or free expression? How many of them have been emotionally, socially, or physically crippled by the bloody-minded pursuit of security?

I am in my 16th year since completing my Phd. I am, for that and a variety of other reasons, a very poor candidate for a tenure-track position anywhere, and getting poorer by the day. The only job security I have had is a three-year appointment, from which I can be laid off with 45 days' notice.

I will never say, "now I can research things I'm interested in." I have no incentive to research anything but what I'm interested in, because the only reward for my research is the research itself. I have never had to hold my tongue, never had to attend a dinner at the campus president's house. As I've stated before in this space, I probably do not have academic freedom, but neither do those on the tenure-track; however, I have the advantage of academic license.

I am more free. I am also in a more precarious situation. So I wonder, now, whether precariousness is the price of freedom, just as freedom is the price of security.

poverty

A line in Foucault's lecture course Abnormal led me to consider the contemporary conditions of poverty. His line was about the outmoded concept of power as repressive and always wielded in the same direction, from the same source. He called that model of power "feudal." The model of power since the late 18th century, he says, is productive, and makes arrangements for production and circulation, not repression and deduction. This model of power cannot be confined to certain institutions, nor to a certain narrow range of relations.

I started to wonder if Foucault's view of power is starting to lose its explanatory power. The increasing wealth gap in the affluent parts of the world, the de-legitimation of social and political institutions, and the increase in poverty, suggested to me that the feudal model of power might be heading for a comeback.

On one level, it makes some sense to consider the emerging form of power to be feudal. The trope of the 1% versus the 99% expresses something like this: the 1% wield power over their societies, over the world, and over all resources. Democratic elections are basically meaningless exercises, because the power of concentrated wealth simply undermines any authority any elected representative might be willing to use to the benefit of citizens. Look at Greece and Spain. Look at the US.

Yeah, I thought, the superwealthy are reducing the rest of us to serfdom.

But there's a significant difference between feudalism and contemporary poverty. Serfs more or less belonged to the feudal lord, were basically required to do his bidding, and owned nothing. Serfs worked the land, the feudal lord accumulated wealth, and granted some portion of the product of their labor to the serfs -- sufficient to keep them working.

Contemporary poverty doesn't have that benefit. The very poor do not work. In a way, they are required not to work, for the profit of the superwealthy. Underemployment, part-time work, permatemped work is degraded. The work is degraded. This generates profit because the fantastic accumulation of wealth takes place these days by way of controlling how much gets produced, when, and where, and assuring that production only takes place under those circumstances. In contemporary poverty, you do not get to work the land.

Of course, there are many of our contemporary poor who do work the land, I'm aware of that. (Duh, I live in California.) Unlike serfs, they do not belong to the land they work, nor to the landowner. They do not belong anywhere except where their (note: temporary, and also illegal) work is required at a given moment. Otherwise, they are not allowed to be on the land.

Where do they very poor belong? I'm tempted to say nowhere. For the comfort and convenience of the wealthy, it is necessary that the very poor be dispatched, sent away, remain hidden. If you walk or ride your bike through enough of Turlock's streets, and pay attention to what you see, you'll find lots full of campers, in which people live. There is one in a parking lot behind a small hotel down our block. There might be 20 or 30 campers in there -- I'm talking about the kind of camper one might tow, not a 30-foot RV. The people living there are not serfs, because they have no land to work, even if they would have been granted permission to grow anything.

And this is to say nothing at all of those who do not even have a camper to their names, and who have no place at all that they have a right to be.

ethics, education, empathy

In my Professional Ethics course, I have my students read an essay by a community college English instructor who is unsure how to deal with the confessional personal essays his students write in composition classes. His students go through all sorts of hell, tell him in their essays all sorts of private information, including details of their lives they’ve never told anyone else. His dilemma is that he can’t tell where to draw the line between responding to the essays as a composition teacher, and responding to them as a person.

I use this essay to get at a dilemma that I believe professionals in many fields face (though likely more often in education and caring professions) – negotiating the boundary between the professional-client relationship and a person-to-person relationship. I started using the essay because I was getting so many liberal studies majors (i.e., students preparing to be primary school teachers), but now that I’m getting practically none of them any more, I try to relate it to the nursing and other health-related professions students. It’s easy to imagine a physical therapist working with a patient, who suddenly blurts out information about some kind of harm or danger the patient is exposed to. What are the therapist’s responsibilities? Suppose the situation is ambiguous legally, ethically, or factually?

As I’m reading it this afternoon to prep for class tomorrow, I’m finding myself wondering why I’m so drawn to this essay. It’s good, and I think the issues it raises are real and important, but I don’t know why I think it’s all that important. I have affection for the essay and empathy for the author that go beyond my pedagogical purpose in using it in class. This is partly because I don’t think education is reducible to training, but I’m sure it’s also because of my own experience of caring teachers I had, in high school especially, who crossed that boundary, and likely (in one case at least) violated their own ethics rules, out of that empathy and care.

So here’s my confession: I love it when this happens to me. It’s impossible for me not to feel empathy and affection for my students, and impossible for me not to care about them as human beings, beyond being students. I want them to do well, to be well, and I want to help when that’s not happening. I feel like I have a responsibility not only for their learning, but also, when it comes up, for their being – in fact, their being is more important to me than their learning.

Of course, my Loveliest had been a student in a class I taught. But it would be a cheap dismissal to say I’m concerned about my students’ being because I have some sort of fascination with illicitly crossing that boundary. I’ve crossed that boundary numerous times, in mostly very minor interactions. I have listened many times to students talk about their history of mental illness. I had a student confide in me about her crisis of religious faith, brought about by a conflict over a relationship she had. I had a student come to ask for advice about what she and her girlfriend could do to form a legal marriage, in case Proposition 8 passed.

I had a colleague a few years ago who used to refer to her students as her “babies” or her “children” very often, and I think that’s going overboard. On the other hand, I do not see any reason the state of their souls shouldn’t matter to me.

(Warning: cheap punchline to come.)

This is why I am ineligible to serve in administrative positions at the CSU.

what I really need - a new philosophical task!

Right now, I've got the following balls in the air:

• stuff about the phenomenological concepts of normal and abnormal, and the critique of these concepts by Foucault and Canguilhem
• something about the construction of faculty subjectivity, via Foucault, in order to get at some kind of non-professional or para-professional or renewed professional ethics of faculty, given the ongoing degradation of our work and employment status
• more phenomenology, of orientation
• still more phenomenology, working out further the ontology of subjection

It's fun, or it would be, if I weren't teaching five classes, staring at the first of five sets of papers I'll receive between yesterday and Tuesday, and doing faculty rights work. I have also been taking all of my blog posts and turning them into Word documents, in preparation for putting them all together as a book, sort of as a gift to my mom. 

To avoid reading student papers, I was just re-reading a post about language, from a series of entries about Merleau-Ponty. In this post I said that we describe our experience using the concepts of truth and reality. It took me aback.

So now I have another thing to think about, and to try to track down, doing what could be a weird kind of Foucauldian phenomenology of the way we describe our experience using such terms, and I suppose some others. It wouldn't be a genealogy of truth like Foucault's, but it would borrow from his scholarly methods and certainly owe a lot to his philosophical spirit. It would be phenomenological: how does something like truth or reality become constituted on the basis of lived experience -- and why? And are there alternatives?

But now I have to go to class.

crash course

Students in my Professional Ethics and Bioethics classes confront issues of social justice very early in the semester. Professional Ethics begins with outlining what professionalism consists of, and how the claims to professional status of many occupational groups are undermined by Friedmanism, bureaucracy, and technocracy. Bioethics begins with the issue of allocation of healthcare, and I frame the issue alternate as a matter of deciding how much they are willing to contribute for certain kinds of healthcare, what principle(s) of distribution are to be followed, and who deserves healthcare. 

It has to be pretty heady stuff for my students who are paying attention and being reflective. (By the way, at least this semester, that's looking to be around 33% so far - a very promising start.) The very idea of cooperative social arrangements or a common good is, I would argue, ruled out by the dominant neoliberal individualistic ideology in US politics. It's an implausible ideology, to say the least. The hardline libertarian view of social justice essentially ignores that practically everything we need for survival is produced through social cooperation that no single individual has a strong incentive to contribute to. 

In any case, I think I'm becoming more direct about this, more willing to challenge any knee-jerk view. For instance, today in Bioethics I asked "who deserves healthcare?" One student responded with what is basically the hard libertarian line on this: nobody deserves healthcare; those who can afford it through their own resources can acquire it. I asked why this was an appealing position for this student, and the student replied that people should be self-supporting and that no one has any obligation to provide for anyone else. I responded that this was a peculiar position for someone in a publicly supported institution to take, and noted that the public is contributing (around) 49% of the cost of a CSU education. I also noted that when I started teaching here 14 years ago, the public provided closer to 70% of the cost of a student's education. 

(On the flip side, there is a libertarian faculty member on campus who asserts that all taxation is theft and that the state should not be in any way in the business of "redistributing wealth" from the haves to the have-nots.* I always want to ask whether this person has, therefore, renounced the portion of salary provided by taxation, since, obviously, it's theft. I'm sure, not. "So," I would want to reply, are you a liar, or a hypocrite? Take your time.")

I am an equal-opportunity gadfly, I hasten to point out. Today another student took a stance as opposed to the libertarian as one might be, suggesting that a broad program of social and cultural change could lead us to make compassion a core value. If scarcity of resources (in this case, healthcare) is the result of decisions to distribute on the basis of what is profitable, then scarcity could be undone to some extent by taking away the profit motive and seeing people as in need of care. Great, I responded, only, this doesn't mean we'll have significantly more resources to distribute -- so we'll still have to make decisions about rationing, about "cutting off" access to healthcare (as we say, charmingly).

I suppose from my tone and arguments today it was clear I regard the hard-core libertarian position as unspeakably inhumane, socially implausible, inconsistent, and ultimately immoral. I hope that it was also clear that I regard compassion and empathy to be useless as bases for social policy. 

I will say, though, that the libertarian view is more pernicious, more prevalent, and more lacking in humanity. I don't think there's anything wrong with my saying so in class. I say so because, unless and until a student complains enough to get me investigated, nobody really cares what I do in my classes except me, some of my students, my Loveliest, and a few of my friends.

--

* Never mind the myriad ways that the state has actively redistributed wealth from the have-nots to the haves, e.g., Mitt Romney's effective tax rate, the amount Wal-Mart's employment practices cost in welfare and other forms of assistance without which their employees could not live even on Wal-Mart's famed low prices, subsidies to industries, etc.

desiderata

When I was 17, my list of things I wanted in life would have included pretty much the following:

• a hot chick
• an electric guitar
• a car
• a computer of my own
• rock stardom
• lots of tea

I think I've done pretty well. 

Obviously I've scored bigtime in the hot chick department. Hub-ba! I can't even begin to tell you, not without making most people who might read this extremely uncomfortable, in one way or another, and so, I will let discretion be the better part of hubba.

Not only do I have an electric guitar, but also an electric bass guitar, and three 12-strings, two classicals, two 6-strings, and a guitar in another state. In my house, I'm never more than 30 feet from a guitar.

Eddie Jetta just had his first major surgery, after 85,500 miles: the cooling fans and thermostatic sensor crapped out, for a total of about a grand. We drive him much less these days, of course, and I hope that extends his life.

I'm using my big-screen iMac. Next to me is my iPad and the mini notebook I bought myself because the university wouldn't buy me a computer (except they did - a MacBook Pro, which has a bum touchpad). Also on my table is the iPhone. There is approximately 2 billion times as much computer processing power and 2.5 trillion times as much storage memory on my table top as was in the computer I owned when I was 17. 

Didn't quite make it in rock stardom. My alter ego Biff Nerfurpleberger has his fans, though. Of course, so do Paper Cats.

I'm drinking tea right now. 

I suppose, in truth, when I was 17 I also wanted to fight the good fight, and I'm doing that. Once I started college, I never wanted to do anything but be in college, and that's going well also. 

it begins

I have only 67 more class sessions this semester.

It's taking a little while to gear up for this term. My usual level of enthusiasm for teaching at the beginning of a year is around a 12 on a scale of 2.7 to 14. This year, on a scale of π to 136, I'm only around 72.1-ish.

But, let me look back on the summer, and see how many of my goals I accomplished. I had some plans for reading and writing philosophy. A panel I submitted on the experience of orientation and disorientation was accepted by a conference coming up this fall, and I wanted to pursue those, and the concept of normal, as regular readers of this feature will perhaps recall. To that end, I intended to read Experience and Judgment, From Affectivity to Subjectivity, Refiguring the Ordinary, Assuming a Body.  Check.

I did not intend to read The Normal and the Pathological, but I did. I certainly did not intend to go back yet again into Phenomenology of Perception, but I did a lot of that, too. Four chapters worth, actually. I did not intend to read The Problem of Embodiment, but I did that, too.

I intended to read Getting Back into Place, and I read a lot of it, but got to a point that I felt like it was doing what Hegel called presenting clever remarks. Sorry, Ed. Maybe I just don't get it.

I wanted to look up stuff on the affective experience and worldhood of those who lose their memories, or a particular sense, or who otherwise undergo fairly radical alterations of "normal" orientation to the world.

I didn't think I'd be spending quite so much time revising an article. That's okay. The suckers printed it!

Unrelated to any of that, I wanted to read some of The Transgender Studies Reader, and some of The Prison Notebooks. Not as much as I'd hoped. Gramsci's kinda bitchy.

One of my worst emotional habits is comparing myself to other people, using an external criterion of my progress, and worse, my worth. Looking back at what I've done academically this summer, I think, "Um, is that good?" I don't know. I am fairly chuffed that article got published. I hope I scandalize people.

Possibly my greatest accomplishment this summer was reading all of Don Quixote. This is the kind of book, especially at this late date, that you could make a tidy academic career out of -- there are so many allusions to Cervantes' contemporary world to track down and decipher, so much to do to relate it to our own world, and it's so long that there can't be more than a few dozen people who've read the whole thing. It's perfect fodder for literature folks.

I wanted us to play a gig. We did that. I think we should have played more, but we didn't, mainly because of mental health. It went pretty good, though, and I hope we can do more in the future.

I wanted to write several songs. I ended up writing several tunes, and several very, very bad attempts at songs, that I have wisely destroyed. So much for my goal of recording a new CD. It's been two years now since Do Paper Cats Dream of Origami Birds?

Again, I dunno, is that good?

what we've learned

Time's about to run out on summer's reading activities. Do I now understand more about orientation and the normal? Or about embodiment and subjection?

I began with wondering about orientation, again, continuing from last year. That led me to the way the concept of normal keeps circulating around in phenomenology, and the relationship between the equivocal phenomenological concept and certain other, critical concepts of normal, in particular Foucault's and Canguilhem's. (Canguilhem's critical history of the scientific and knowledge claims of medicine, The Normal and the Pathological is brilliant, tremendously insightful as a way of thinking about the development of medicine as a consumer product, and astonishingly under-read and under-appreciated, given that he wrote in in 1963!)

I haven't gone back through and done the scholarly folderol to unpack this whole business, and probably should while I have the chance. Who knows, it could result in another bizarre polemic that is unaccountably published.

I have just learned today that what I've been doing the last three summers was presaged by Gabriel Marcel in the 1910s. It's a fundamental paradox of individual human existence and our knowledge and understanding of it, and what Marcel concluded was the impossible quest to give ourselves assurance that we exist as well as knowledge and understanding of the meaning of existence. We're each assured we exist by our own subjectivity -- basically, by the self declaring itself. But we can't cash out the meaning of that existence as a kind of knowledge -- an objective knowledge -- precisely because we can't take an outside perspective on it. In a nutshell, to have both assurance and understanding of our existence, we would need a perspective that was somehow both subjective and objective.

Marcel was certainly partly wrong, and not because we have psychologists and such -- since they can only take an objective view, since no one can declare for me that I exist, and no one else can enter the world through my subjectivity and perspective. He's wrong because this metaphysical way of looking at the problem harbors a dualism. Where I've been going has been to blur the subjective/objective "line" by looking at the ways we (subjectively) undergo our own subjection: we undergo that which establishes our subjectivity. So, rather than begin with the assumption that assurance is a subjective declaration, and knowledge and understanding have to be systematic and objective, I'm performing a classic destructive dilemma. My conclusion is: neither is it the case that subjectivity begins or is assured by the "I exist!" declaration, nor is it the case that knowledge and understanding have to be, or even can be (entirely) systematic and objective.

It looks like a Kierkegaard move, but I'm not as pessimistic about human understanding or as optimistic about god and the leap of faith (to say the least).

the value of human life -- some offhand phenomenological musing

It's odd I ended up writing about this. I went on a bit of a walk to try to solve a problem about whether I could meaningfully say I am or have a body, and just what that sense of a unifying whole, apparently delimited notion of lived experience would mean. Instead.....

**

We think rather highly of consciousness. We presume that it is the most significant — not to say the most valuable — trait of ours.

There is a massive ongoing problem in ethics related to this, concering the moral value of human and non-human life. Every attempt I have seen to distinguish these two on the morality scale has involved a commitment either to a humanist or theological position. In other words, it is under the presumption of the specialness of human being, and of human beings, that all this ethical discussion takes place. For now, I’m going to let ethics off easy, for instance on the point that, for most world religions, the sacredness of individual human lives has proved “negotiable” (as George Carlin put it): a human life is valuable pending certain qualifications.

In phenomenological philosophy, the certitude of the centrality of consciousness is also taken for granted. This appears to be so even when phenomenologists are trying to account for something more basic, like affectivity, or desire, or being vulnerable. In From Affectivity to Subjectivity*, Christian Lotz argues that the basic ethical value is connected to this kind of affect and vulnerability. [Think a minute how this plays out in terms of Carlin's jab: if chickens can be vulnerable (to pain, e.g.), then what exactly is our negotiation? Do they somehow deserve it? Are chickens secretly commies? Or do they deserve it just because of their irritating clucking and flapping-wings behavior, and because they happen to be tasty and nutritious? Talk about negotiation!]

Where does that affect come from? How is it that we can be affected? Lots argues that for anything to affect our senses and draw us to attend to it, there must be, prior to that attention, some valuing of what draws us. He says that attention is directed by a structure of “being-able-to,” meaning, I would say, a core valuing-activity: attention is directed by some subjective determination of what is valuable — ultimately calling on Levinas’ notion that every experience is held together by the equation of life and happiness. “Being-able-to,” as a source of valuing, implies intentionality, hence consciousness in the way we’re accustomed to considering it, to wit: human consciousness. (The reference to Levinas — a deeply theological thinker — is a giveaway.)


It’s a terrible argument, but leaving that aside, there’s nothing obviously related to consciousness, intentionality, or our being human, that we can demonstrate is the final source of moral value. Without the presupposition that affectivity is connected to intentionality we also cannot finally deny that vulnerability as an attribute of non-human life, especially non-human animals. If it matters that we are vulnerable, then how can consciousness be our definitive characteristic, at least, as it comes to moral value?

*The original title was not From Here to Eternity. I looked it up.

   

what is normal?

Lately, I feel like I've been led ineluctably to this question, all of my life. Most recently, I've been led there by the confluence of what I've been reading about what is normal, abnormal, or otherwise than either, in our perception, our desires, and our ways of being -- in queer theory, transgender studies, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. But I've been thinking about it today, and I realize that the normal/abnormal/pathological issue has been fundamental to my life, just about all my life.

Given who tends to read these posts, I'm probably preaching to the choir on this point. That's as may be.

I have never felt myself to be normal -- socially, physically, psychologically, or in almost any other way. (Including syntactically! The first version of that sentence read: "I have never felt myself -- socially, physically, psychologically, or in almost any other way -- to be normal


In the astoundingly brilliant -- and, I would argue, thoroughly readable for non-experts (see, I've done it again!) -- The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem critiques several medical concepts of normal and pathological as defined by physiologists, medical doctors, biologists, and so forth, over time. Canguilhem divides the kinds of definitions into two basic, fairly rough categories, that I consider to be "statistical normal" and "normal as equilibrium."


I won't go into depth. I want to give you the provocations, and let you fume.

Statistically, if you're outside the range of data points of 68.26%* of the population for some characteristic, it's time to ask questions, because you could be abnormal. Fun upshot of this: It's possible that you have a normal non-fevery temperature of 100 degrees, but there's only a 14% likelihood that you do, absent fighting an infection.

Think of the implications of this for such phenomena as: (1) your likelihood of weeping during a performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, (2) how much you might potentially enjoy having sex in public, (3) whether you're left-handed, (4) your likelihood of having seen The Sound of Music more than four times. I know! This is a main reason I love philosophy.

Equilibrium-wise, consider someone who grew up in the east, especially the northeast, where there are frigid winters, a lot of rain, humidity up the [omitted -- Ed.], and you move to a hot dry place (in, I dunno, central California). A normal body will come to feel that this is in some way normal for the climate, and, upon returning to that northeastern clime, have much less tolerance for it.

So, is the body attuned to dry hot central California normal? Is the person with a daily temperature of 97.6 degrees normal? Is the person who used to prefer extremely vanilla sex who is now building a dungeon normal?

--

* 68.26% is the number Canguilhem takes from Gauss to describe the average of a population, in contrast to the more familiar mathematical average.

sex, sweat, taste, flesh

This summer, I've been tracking down ideas of normal and abnormal, as ways of describing bodily experience. This is inspired, as I've said repeatedly, by a very good book called Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed, who has still not paid me a nickel for this. Anyway.

Theory sometimes gets in the way. This happens, for instance, when an apparently earnest trans-gender/sexual writer (name omitted politely) spends tons of ink on theorizing about bodies, sexuality, gender, and the politics and academic understanding of all that, in an attempt to get at the experience of gender and sexuality.

Let me be blunt: sexuality and gender are not the same thing as the interpretation of sexuality and gender.

Because I present/pass as a straight man, I don't have street cred to say a lot of this. It is clearly suspicious for me to claim to have direct access to sexual embodiment in its most carnal and un-gendered, un-disciplined, un-enforced manifestation. I'm going to claim it anyway.

The problem with all the theorizing about sex/gender/identity/orientation/etc. is the way it departs from the carnal experience of, for lack of a better word, flesh. By flesh, I don't mean some theoretical concept. I mean that stuff I can touch and smell and taste. I mean the stuff whose sweat I can see, feel, smell, taste, and that makes me sweat in return. I mean the stuff I desire without will or thought.

There's too little sweat, too little smell and taste, in the discourses of feminism and queer theory. As far as I'm concerned, if you want to know about sexuality and gender, that's what you need to know about: whose flesh, whose sweat, do you long to taste?

Thus my <300 word rejoinder to this 200 page book I'm slogging through.

orientation, habituation, passivity

My favorite stuff Husserl wrote was about what he called "passivity," which is not as passive as it sounds -- it's about the basic receptivity we have through our sense perception. Our sense perceptions, Husserl contends, are not just a collection of data, but are already "given" in a unity -- a unity that we do not actively constitute, hence given by "passive synthesis." In other words, our sense perceptions give us a sort of whole world already, and our conscious, attentive, thinking egos root around in this given world and make judgments about it.

One big-time implication of this is that our perceptual orientations to the world -- what we tend to pay attention to, what we put together as "objects" of perception, what we return to again and again as objects we ought to pay attention to -- are also built up "passively." That is to suggest that we are, as it were, primally orientated to the world in certain ways.

To take this beyond Husserl, and to give a concrete example, I'll recall my first experience of eating Swiss chard. It was in a very strange social setting, and a friend was whipping up a (vegan) stir-fry that included Swiss chard as an ingredient. Never had it before. It was deep green, cooked up quickly, tossed with the rest of the stuff, tossed onto brown rice, and set in front of me.

From the first taste, I liked it. How? The taste attracted me. As we say, it tasted good. How? How did I undergo the experience of it tasting good? At first, I couldn't say what about it I liked, or even identify the Swiss chard itself very clearly out of the mishmash of stuff.

The second time I had it, I was able to start to taste it. There was a dark greeniness, an earthy taste, a rooty bitterness balanced with a clean sweetness. I was developing a taste for it, as we say. I was learning how Swiss chard tastes, learning how to taste Swiss chard, and -- most intriguingly for me -- learning how to enjoy it.

From Husserl's perspective, what's happening here is, I am forming predicative judgments ("I like Swiss chard"; "Swiss chard tastes earthy, and a little bitter if it's undercooked"; etc.), but at the same time, those predicative judgments are forming and shaping my perception of Swiss chard. It's way more complicated than saying that if I tell myself I like it, I'll start to like it. I already was predisposed to it, before I'd ever had it, without knowing it. My first taste revealed that I had a "tendency" toward it. The more I experienced it, the more I followed out this tendency, the more I developed my affinity, and my acknowledgment of my affinity, for chard.

This has by now led me to have a chard-orientation toward the world. If there's chard around, my eyes are drawn toward it instantly. I look at it, and I almost taste it. I want it. I don't even think about it. I have a Swiss chard habit.

In stages:

1. My passive receptivity toward Swiss chard (my being able to taste it) and passive tendency toward enjoying it.
2. My conscious attention to Swiss chard, and my repetition of experiences and alert, deliberate attention to the taste of it... leading to judgments about it (like, "Swiss chard is really good wilted, then steamed, then buttered and seasoned").
3. My orientation toward Swiss chard, my habit of desiring it.

The first and third stages are two stages of passivity, it turns out. This is the cool thing: habituation is a "secondary passivity," where conscious attention fades away. I don't think about it, I just do it.

imaginary and actual worlds

It makes no sense, e.g., to ask whether the Gretel of one fairy tale and the Gretel of another are the same Gretel, whether what is imagined for the one and predicated of her agrees with or does not agree with what is imagined for the other, etc... Within the same tale I can certainly ask such questions, since, from the beginning, we have a single imaginary world...

In the actual world, nothing remains open; it is what it is. The world of imagination "is," and is such and such, by grace of the imagination which has imagined it; a complex of imaginings never comes to an end that does not open the possibility of a free development in the sense of a new determination.        -- Husserl, Experience and Judgment, p. 173

Most of the chapter I read today was about the temporal unity of objects and worlds that is necessary for relation and comparison to take place -- which I won't get into here. But this page, and especially the reference to imagined worlds, caught my eye, for a couple reasons.

The first connection was to something I'm cooking up as another writing experiment for NaNoWriMo this year. We can ask questions within the same tale, Husserl says, of whether Gretel is the same Gretel. Sure: and in fiction, you can strain realism to the breaking point, or past it, by making these questions the center of the story. I was working on that, in a way. (I promise I haven't written a word of the novel; I have some notes on how I want it to go.)

Now I'm wondering how that kind of problem in fiction could be turned around by having two different stories taking place, with two characters with the same name. Especially if the stories each raised questions about whether the character was the same character within the story, what would happen if both stories, with a character of the same name, each raised those questions? (Comedy of Errors does this to some extent, if you take the two plots as two stories in this way. And obviously, The Bald Soprano knocks this mutha out of the park.)

The other connection I drew is to the notion, in fanfic, of writing within a particular "universe."

There's an important difference. For fanfic writers, as I understand it, "universe" refers to the basic characters, the presupposition of that universe being founded upon what has been written by the originator(s), and the basic furniture of that universe (i.e., if they have space ships, they have space ships; if soap is unheard of, then, to quote Husserl, "it is what it is," and there's no soap).

These ideas aren't so far apart, though. What Husserl means by nothing remaining open in the actual world is that, for there to be any relation and comparison of objects in the actual world, there has to be an objective, unified time to that world -- it simply must be in the same actual world. It's ambiguous: does that mean this world is like a story? Or is this world more like the fanfic concept of a "universe"?

stars, constellations, experience and judgment

I tried to come up with a good analogy to help explain to my non-phenomenological-philosopher friends why reading Husserl's account of meaningful perceptual experience is so exciting to me. I started to write it out, drawing out all the little teeny micro-analogies that make the overall analogy so excellent. That meant I was writing in and explaining technical Husserlian phenomenological jargon.

So I'm not going to share the whole analogy, just the broad outline. We can talk about the rest.

Husserl's goal is kind of like this: Why do we see constellations, and not just stars? (To get even closer, what he's asking is more like: why do we see stars, and not little weird imperfections in the black velvet night sky? -- but constellations will work better.)

Constellations, physically speaking, aren't out there. For one thing, we perceive them from a viewpoint that places stars in close relationships or groupings that have no astronomical basis at all. Besides which, from the stars' standpoint, there aren't constellations, because they're just big balls of fiery gas (but enough about Newt Gingrich).

And yet, from our terrestrial spot, and from our various cultural spots, there are constellations. Why do we see them? Or, to put it a little closer to Husserl without getting too technical, why are we led from our seeing stars to make the judgment that they're grouped into constellations? What goes on, from mere awareness on up through active perception, to imbuing with cultural significance, such that we end up with constellations?

(At this point in Experience and Judgment, Husserl is dealing with some not very heavenly examples, like a red ball, or a pen in a penholder next to a pencil. In terms of the phenomenological investigation of meaning, those are still very interesting examples, but I realize constellations are a lot groovier.)

Where this is going in this book is pretty cool, too. Not only do we see constellations, but our seeing them becomes the basis for our saying things about them that can be true or false:

"Hey, look," (I could say to you), "it's the Big Dipper!"

"You doofus," (you could reply), "that's the Little Dipper."

Or:

"Ah, there's lovely Cassiopeia," (I could say). "I forget, was she one of Zeus' illegitimate kids he had pretending to be a goat or something?"

"No, no, no," (you could say), "she's Cepheus' wife, the one who pissed off Poseidon because she was hotter than the sea-nymphs."