de-legitimation and purposeless universities

Bill Readings makes what I think is the right argument regarding the de-legitimation of higher education in The University in Ruins. Previous structurally legitimating notions of the university were rational (the Kantian model) and cultural (the Humboldtian model), but these have collapsed under the weight of the university’s core function as a bureaucratic corporation.

His analysis of the bureaucratic university as an administrative institution is spot-on. Universities are measured by scales that have no referents and that are essentially meaningless – among them, rankings like that performed by US News, institutional research data like graduation rates, time-to-graduation, etc. The very concept of excellence is devoid of meaning.

Readings does not lament this. Although the post-modern university (he prefers not to use this term, but it’s what he means) has no legitimation, the nostalgic drive to re-legitimate it would only restore one or another of the not-terribly-noble legitimations of the past. Instead, he argues that the university should be treated as a ruin – a potentially interesting place to be, that still has some remaining resources to do some interesting things. He says that the university without a purpose should instead be organized around the rhetorical and ethical obligation of the relation of pedagogy, which is to say, universities should be places where teaching happens.

Now, if the teaching and other activities of university faculty are only measured via what boil down to reputation surveys, what would make teaching one thing versus another the right thing to do? Readings’ answer is: nothing. So teaching is not about disseminating knowledge, or of producing it, or of reproducing culture, or anything related to some content. Instead, it’s an ethical relation between teacher and students. So far, so good, I think.

We can’t say in advance what ethical obligations that relationship creates, because those obligations arise from and are inherent to that relation itself. What can we say about it in general? As a teacher, Readings says, my conduct should be focused on justice.

Here’s where he loses me. What we have up to this point looks like Socratic education (Socratic, not Platonic). It is not in service to the state, to the economy, to the church, or to any particular, given set of ideals or any particular, given ideology. After all, what else did Socrates do but raise questions about all of that? Instead, Readings writes something not much different from gibberish:

The referent of teaching, that to which it points, is the name of Thought. Let me stress that this is not a quasi-religious dedication. I say "name" and I capitalize "Thought" not in order to indicate a mystical transcendence but in order to avoid the confusion of the referent with any one signification. The name of Thought precisely is a name in that it has no intrinsic meaning. In this sense, it is just like excellence. However, Thought differs from excellence in that it does not bracket the question of value. (159)

Oh, for fuck’s sake! How 90s-tastic can you get?

Anyway, the actual idea he's presenting here, as far as I can tell, is something like what I've outlined above. Since (a) nobody's actually watching what I teach, and (b) the only measure of what I'm doing that anybody cares anything about is an arbitrary notion that boils down to customer satisfaction, and (c) this is the case universally in universities, (d) because their purposes are referent-less - that is, there is no legitimating narrative for university education and it serves structural economic and social purposes not linked meaningfully to any particular activity taking place within them, it follows (e) that teaching has no purpose and no essential content. From this we can conclude (f) that teachers who so choose would be able to teach according to a notion of ethical responsibility that would be, from the standpoint of the administrative apparatus of the institution, immeasurable, unknowable, unacknowledged, and unnoticed.

What disturbs me about this is not the idea that university education is, for most intents and purposes, bullshit (that is to say, everyone involved could - and many do - treat it as bullshit with no discernible effect on the function of the system). What disturbs me is not the idea that teaching is a contentless activity related to an inchoate and non-referential concept of justice. As I said, those together fairly well describe Socrates wandering around Athens making people upset. I'm fine with that.

What disturbs me is that, if universities are ruins, and there is no purpose for ruins, there's no reason to maintain them. Again, I think that's probably true, and is certainly characteristic of the long-term trend of higher education. There are very few places where it's safe to do this crazy thing Readings calls teaching. There are fewer where it's safe and remunerative. And getting fewer by the hour. I admit it: what upsets me is the likelihood that I won't have my job much longer.

Then again, maybe I will. Just because universities are purposeless doesn't mean the capitalist economic system will liquidate them. Capitalism runs on consumption, and universities are spectacular sites of consumption.

album of the day: Nine Objects of Desire

The last year I spent in Pittsburgh I was in the habit of listening to Harry Shearer's weird weekly radio program, Le Show, every Sunday night on the local NPR station (which happened to be a unit of Duquesne). In between Shearer's bits of satire and tongue-in-cheek reading of bits from the LA Times "hot property" column and trade publications, there were delightful musical fills. Among other qualities, Shearer has excellent taste in music.

He started playing stuff that I didn't recognize as Suzanne Vega for some time. The songs were sharp, had an interesting sense of language, and often some good jazzy rhythm guitar. It turned out the songs were all from this album, which the All Music Guide has no patience for.

I dig their criticism, even if I don't agree with their overall judgment. There are some spiffy songs here. The best of them are probably "My Favorite Plum," "Head Shots," "Stockings" and the very nice "Caramel" - all of which Shearer introduced me to. Aside from "Head Shots," these all seem to describe states of desire - which has always suggested to me that the title of the album is hardly an accident, even if we can't quite call it a themed album. "Caramel" compares love to food, something I think we should always do. "My Favorite Plum" might do the same thing, and if so, it's subtly lascivious, and I approve, or else it really is just Suzanne Vega obsessing over a tree fruit, and I approve. "Stockings" would seem to be about very nearly falling into a lesbian crush, and once again, I approve (although almost none of my lesbian crushes have achieved very much).

"Head Shots" is just kinda creepy. I don't know what it's about, except seeing pictures of a boy's head all over the place. Vega does creepy so well, it's creepy. I don't think she's creepy, I just think she has a creepy ability to express being creeped out by creepy stuff. Maybe her ability being creepy, and the prevalence of creepy themes in her work, means she is in fact sorta creepy, but I'm not yet prepared to render that judgment.

Of the rest, I like "Lolita," "No Cheap Thrill" (which Shearer also played) and "Thin Man" a lot. Lauren really likes "Tombstone," which is about why tombstones are so great - namely, that they weather well. There's only one song on here I really could do without, "World Before Columbus," and even that has a nice guitar line.

A guitar line that is, unfortunately, obscured by the over-production and (AMG got this right) muddy engineering that mar the record. For my money, Vega's song-writing here is clever and smart and shines through despite the production, and that makes it worthwhile.

philosophy and the de-legitimation of education

This week I finished reading a 90-year-old book, and wondering why I had read it, and what it had to do with philosophy today. The feeling scraped at a previously acquired irritation regarding philosophy in the academic setting.

During my recent conference travels, I ended up in a conversation about maintaining currency in the field of philosophy. I said something about feeling like I should read people like Badiou or Agamben, even though I can't see what people find so compelling about them (which is a nice way to put it). The person I was talking to said that didn't matter, that as philosophers, we specialize, and we don't need to take account of present day or contemporary philosophers, even within our so-called continental tradition.

I wonder. Perhaps philosophy does not "progress" in the way we seem to think sciences do: contemporary philosophers, even in taking account of previous philosophers in "the tradition" do not necessarily or even usually claim to be improving the state of human knowledge or wisdom. Why would that be? And if that's true, why do we expect our elite academic philosophers to publish "new" or "original" philosophical works? What would "new" contribute to a body of knowledge that does not "advance"?

One possible answer, that academic philosophers shouldn't approve of, is that the professional academic business of publishing is a sham. What that could mean about philosophy itself is a further question: What does academic philosophy have to do with philosophy?

On the other hand, what warrants philosophy as an undertaking at all? The last philosopher I can think of who claimed that philosophy was not only scientifically rigorous, but the model of scientific rigor itself, was Husserl. That is, Husserl claimed that philosophy had to do with truth. Other than a handful of very seriously addicted Husserl scholars, I don't know of anyone who continues to uphold this claim. In any case, if you have the truth, you don't have to read anyone who isn't telling the truth, and so, you can exclude contemporary pretenders. Isn't that convenient and cute?

If philosophy isn't warranted on the basis of a special access to truth (a method, or an insight - a low or royal road), then what does warrant philosophy? I believe that most academic philosophers practice philosophy as, basically, a sub-discipline of literature, with a canon of texts not grouped by nationality, but by a peculiar style and content. What academic philosophers do, in that case, is a form of literary criticism of these texts. Since there is no specific insight or method, it is harder to say why you should read some practitioners of philosophy and not others. You could say that you specialize in a particular major figure, and then your practice should involve staying current on what other specialists write about that figure's works - just like, say, Chaucer studies.

There once was a cultural warrant for this activity, but the legitimacy of that warrant ran out by the 1950s or so (as Bill Readings cogently argues), so now the only warrant for this practice is that it somehow serves capital accumulation. For instance, somehow, the practice of (to take a random name) Heidegger scholarship has the effect of preparing you to be able to train students either in some "critical thinking" or "communication" skill salable in the job market, or else to be able to produce consumers of Heidegger scholarship (i.e., graduate students). This leaves academic philosophy tremendously vulnerable to market demands for either salable skills or scholarship, and moreover, to the discovery that someone other than academic philosophers can provide the necessary products at a cheaper price - someone in another academic discipline, or someone off the street who happens to be a decent, and fairly logical, writer.

A final option is that philosophy is not warranted in any of these ways, and can only be the practice of radical questioning and doubt. No particular methodological commitment is important to this notion of philosophy, because methods are merely techniques of radicalism. There is no objective reason whatsoever to narrow or to broaden the scope of the philosophy you read, no objective reason to remain current in the published record of academic philosophy. There are subjective reasons, namely, that someone's method or book seems to work for what you're trying to do, or turns you on.

In this case, philosophy as practiced in academic institutions is completely at odds with philosophy itself. In fact, the aim of academic philosophy is almost entirely destructive of philosophy itself, for the simple reason that academic philosophy could not afford to be scandalized in this way in the contemporary university. It would be all too clear that the emperor has no clothes - that the system of credentialing and awarding of authority practiced in academia has no connection to philosophy as a practice of radicalism, and in fact works to eliminate radicalism. A "radical philosophy department" is a contradiction in terms, unless somehow a group of people have managed to extort or otherwise commandeer institutional resources in service to its own destruction. That would be very weird.

For myself, I've come to think that the last two answers are mutually compatible and close to the truth of things. It makes my status - a Phd in philosophy, teaching in a university - not very comfortable, yet - given my tenuous-track employment, in a university whose public support has rapidly diminished - more understandable.

I'm speaking of all this in terms that are far too totalizing. Obviously not every class taught in every philosophy department is either so dogmatic, or cynical, or nihilistic, as my discussion suggests. A few philosophers working in academic settings probably do manage to get away with being radical. Until one of them commits a serious felony, though, we're not likely to know their names.

Ideas II

In the end, I’m a little disappointed in Ideas II. Some of the most difficult issues Husserl raises with regard to the lived Body he either resolves to my dissatisfaction or doesn’t resolve at all. From my previous experience of reading the lectures on passive synthesis, I’m pretty sure that’s where I need to go next. Meantime, I should state what I think are the key issues.

Husserl’s discussion in Ideas II is framed by Modern philosophy, ultimately by Descartes and Descartes’ metaphysical (substance and attribute) dualism. This leads Husserl to continue to work on the mind-body relation, despite his constant refrain that there isn’t a mind-body problem to solve: for the lived Body, or the personal Ego, or the living I, consciousness or spirit is always embodied, even though we have phenomenological insight of the separability of consciousness. Consciousness as such is separable from the Body, but to be a living I, that consciousness or spirit or soul (he uses spirit and soul interchangeably) is dependent on the Body.

All well and good. But the way this dependence is experienced, and why it’s significant, are not sufficiently explored by Husserl, in my opinion. This is the main thing that disappoints me. I chalk it up to the Cartesian frame of the mind-body issue in philosophy, and that disappoints me a second time (though not as much), because it doesn’t seem very phenomenological to take up the Cartesian frame of the issue. Why shouldn’t, or couldn’t, Husserl have gone through epoché and reduction of lived Body in order to reach the same ontological region, and thereby totally escaped Cartesianism? (I’m not meaning to say that Husserl is Cartesian, since he clearly isn’t. Again, I refer to the Cartesian framing of the issue.) On the other hand, would philosophers have been thinking about minds and bodies at all, or in anything like this way, unless Descartes had come along? Would it have occurred to Husserl, or anyone else, even to investigate consciousness in relation to lived Body?

There are experiences in everyday life that do suggest separability of consciousness and lived Body, from as mundane an example as daydreaming while walking down the street, to highfalutin things like meditative “out-of-body” experiences. (That might be something to consider!) We also have experiences of making incorrect judgments on the basis of perception, of pain that we can’t completely localize, of pleasure that overtakes us, of altered states of consciousness, etc., etc. There’s a tremendous range of experiences that offer themselves to potentially very rich investigations. But is it a trick of philosophical tradition, or even a trick of language, that leads us to talk about bodies and minds, and even to regard bodies as possessions or objects? What is it in these experiences themselves, apart from our ordinary attitude (objectivating, etc.), that leads to any questioning of the way consciousness is embodied?

In short, I feel as if Husserl was distracted from this potential investigation by the Cartesian “mind-body problem.” (In addition, he was clearly aiming for a clarification of the distinction between natural and human sciences, and arguing for the primacy of the human to the natural, as well as for the primacy of phenomenology as a science of consciousness – which I suppose is a version of the claim philosophy finally gave up some time ago to being the queen of sciences).

One particular way this disappoints me is that whenever Husserl gets to a point where there’s something obscure in the way we encounter the lived Body, he doesn’t spend a lot of time on it. I don’t know how much further we can investigate certain of these obscurities, but I think it has to be further than he has in Ideas II. My friend Randy tipped me on to one of them: the “aesthesiological” body, appresented as a unity in conscious acts of perception, but not intended as an object of consciousness. We “have” a lived Body in every act of sense perception (say), but not only do we not consciously constitute the unity of this Body (that is, it is “passively” “pregiven”), but we find, if we attempt to enact the conscious constitution of the aesthesiological unity of the lived Body, that we can’t do it ourselves. This is just nuts!

And terribly exciting to me. And the source of great inspiration. In Husserl’s terms, the things I’ve been obsessing over for years now are all of these obscure matters of the pregiven, passive unity of the lived Body.

album of the day: Backatown

We heard Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews on some late-night program, and the performance was just terrific. So we bought the disc.

I ain't got much to say about it. It's terrific. My only criticism is that I wish at least a few of the numbers were extended jams instead of the tight 3-minute jobs they are. I'm not sure if that would defeat Trombone Shorty's purpose here: he might well have a sort of point to make about musical economy, or jabs, or the state of recorded pop music in the fatal stages of capitalism. I don't know.

If you're into that kind of thing, you might enjoy playing "what genre is this" with the album. I had initially stuck him in jazz, before we played the CD, because of the TV performance we'd seen. He was dressed kind of jazz then, too. He looks sorta jazz on the cover. But I moved him to the general mishmash section of our CD collection, because I've decided that the more central vibe here is funk.

But really, what this is, is music. That whole genre-definition game is overdetermined by capitalism, class, and culturally snobbery. At bottom, the only thing that holds a genre together is usage. Certain traits of musical performance and composition keep getting called "jazz" until the family resemblance fools us into imagining it has an essence. By then, it has a cultural cachet, the main significance of which, especially these days, is its brand-identity.

Anyway, you should listen to Trombone Shorty and have a good time.

phenomenological ethics

Today I've been reading Ideas II, on the constitution of the world of nature and of the human world. It led to some probably not terribly novel thoughts about ethics, of all things, in relation to what Husserl was doing on the general question of world-constitution.

So, three quotations from Husserl that frame my thoughts.

What is educational in the phenomenological reduction… is also this: it henceforth makes us in general sensitive toward grasping other attitudes, whose rank is equal to that of the natural attitude … and which, therefore, just like that latter, constitute only relative and restricted correlates of being and sense. (§ 49 (d), p. 189)

[For a person who knows nothing of physics, the] sense-content of physics does not belong to his actual surrounding world (p. 195f).

Speaking quite universally, the surrounding world is not a world “in itself” but is rather a world “for me,” precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject in his intentional lived experiences with the sense-content of the moment. (§50, p. 196)

Posit: A fundamental problem in ethics is the incompleteness of our ethical regard and acknowledgment. That is, a basic motivation for acting unethically is our failure to acknowledge someone or something’s ethical claim on us.

The instance I have in mind is the rejection of the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, in particular on the basis of religious dogma. In my opinion, a person who denies that same-sex couples should have the opportunity to marry on the basis of one’s own religious belief is doing something unethical. It’s difficult to think of it as motivated by anything other than blind hatred or fear, and I suppose, in many cases, that is as far as it goes. But perhaps there are people who believe sincerely that it’s perfectly good of them to do this unethical thing – that they have good reasons for it, that it’s the right thing to do, etc. They have as little doubt about their rectitude as I have in their blameworthiness.

The world of such persons is, as Husserl puts it, simply the world for them, the surrounding world of just those Ego-subjects, and is therefore relative to their position, their constitution of the world, etc. The sincere denial of the right of same-sex couples to marry on the basis of religious dogma makes sense in a world in which a certain sense-content of ethics is missing. Dogmatism rules out the limitation of one’s own perspective, it denies that one’s perspective is a perspective. The dogmatist takes his or her own world, the world for his or her own Ego-subject, to be the world in itself.

Now, there’s at least two ways we could go about ethical discourse. One, the most common, is to engage ethical discourse as a contest of arguments. Understood that way, we could deal with our religious zealot by demonstrating the circularity of the argument based on religious dogma, or by pointing to the obvious question-begging. We could also marshal a better argument in favor of the right of same-sex marriage. (At least, that’s how I see things, because in my opinion, if we held this contest, the pro-same-sex-marriage-right argument would be objectively superior, given that we live in a pluralistic, democratic society under a republican form of government and a system of law that holds, as a fundamental principle, the separation of church and state.)

It seems fairly obvious that the religious zealot, even upon losing the argument, will not concede. Very often, the fallback position taken is that permitting same-sex marriage is somehow violating the rights of religious dogmatists to be religious dogmatists – a position that requires, as part of its defense, that it is somehow inherent to the free practice of religious dogmatism that the dogmatic religious faith of this particular individual person become public policy.

This is a slightly exaggerated example by which I intended to show that ethical beliefs, especially false ethical beliefs, are not strictly rational in the sense we take to be at issue in logical arguments. They are more fundamental than logically fixed beliefs – which makes sense to me, given that for the most part our ethical conduct in the world does not follow from logical processes but is, precisely, ethical conduct, habituated ways of addressing the world and others and acting. Ethical conduct arises in our fundamental attitudes, which means, following Husserl somewhat loosely here, that ethics is constituted within the Ego-subject’s own relative world – as though that world had been built to correspond to the Ego-subject’s own ethical perspective. The problem of dogmatism is that, for the dogmatist, the everyday world constantly addresses that dogma, because that dogma is constitutive of that everyday world. The dogmatist on this issue is like the person who has no knowledge of physics, in Husserl’s example. The sense-content of ethical regard and acknowledgement of the full personhood of same-sex couples is just not part of the world of the dogmatist.

My everyday world is no less relative to my own Ego-subject, of course. At that level, everyone is, if not a dogmatist, at least someone who has faith in one’s own world and the attitudes and sense-contents that have constituted that world. No one’s ethical regard and acknowledgement is perfect.

This leads me to a second way to go about ethical discourse, a phenomenological way. Instead of arguments, we would learn how to bracket the general ethical positings we make that are constitutive of our everyday ethical life-worlds. (I know, I’m mixing my Husserl terminology. I don’t care.) I’m not suggesting this will magically convince anyone of anything. But a genuine insight into the constitution of ethical worlds, and a genuine understanding of the relativity of those worlds to each Ego-subject, should convince someone not only that dogmatism can never be right, and that dogmatic intolerance can never be an ethical orientation to take toward others. It should also show that logical arguments about ethics are not the complete story. Perhaps, as Husserl claims, it will teach us to be sensitive to grasping other attitudes, and therefore to understanding ethical perspectives, including our own, as perspectives.

the empty university

I'm reading a book by a guy named Bill Readings, called The University in Ruins, published in 1996. It's the book I've been waiting for, examining the contemporary situation of universities, basically through a Situationist lens, with a good dose of Lyotard. I’m amazed that this book is 15 years old, and yet none of the current discussion of university crisis in the US refers to it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be amazed, since this book makes almost all of the current debate absolutely pointless.

A key term for discussing universities in the late 1990s was excellence. It is, as Readings explains and illustrates, an entirely empty term. Excellence is not a criterion, has no referent, and is not a unit of measure. It does not define an ambition or an achievement. It is not ideological, because it does not name what sorts of things should be said or done (and what should not be said or done). It is distinctly anti-cultural, because it refutes any reference of the activities of universities to culture or nationality.

The term gained its currency because universities, especially in the United States, are now bureaucratic corporations, and are expected to operate entirely as bureaucratic corporations. The best analogy, he says, is to compare contemporary universities to the National Basketball Association. The NBA organizes activities that are entirely self-referential. Although fans of the sport attach themselves to particular teams and players, and provide financial support for the activities the NBA organizes, as he says, the won-loss record of the Philadelphia 76ers has nothing to do with the city of Philadelphia. Universities, like sports teams, are branded enterprises whose sole purpose is to get consumers to give them money because of their brand name and the consumers’ desire to associate with the brand name. There is, otherwise, at present no other purpose of universities.

What the use of excellence to name the activities of universities achieves is provide a bureaucratic rationale for managerial decisions. Since it is precisely not a criterion for judgment, but an empty qualifier, it can be used rhetorically in any situation to provide what looks like a justification for any decision. Since universities have no purpose, every managerial decision is essentially an arbitrary exercise of power – the power of the administrator (as Readings says, in the contemporary university the major figures are the presidents and provosts), or of market capitalism.

We’re hearing less about excellence these days, for which I’m grateful, because it had long ago lost its amusement for me (when Marvalene Hughes was president, she could almost literally not utter a single sentence without saying it. She also never figured out who I was, despite seeing me in Academic Senate meetings for several years). The word that seems to be replacing excellence is the equally empty success, especially in the phrase student success.

All of this is making me want to write something called, approximately, “A Lousy Essay on Student Failure.” It’d be tongue-in-cheek, you see.

my body with your body

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new

And it’s not just sex… (I like e.e. cummings. If you think he's immature or a purveyor of cheap poetical tricks, well, screw you, pal. By which I mean, I think that's probably true, but I like him anyway.)

One way the experience of the size of my Body can begin to become strange and therefore to reveal itself, is to consider our Bodies with other people’s Bodies – or, I suppose, we could consider our Bodies with animal Bodies of any sort, or even with inanimate things. Possibly my pure subjectivity, the subject-I as zero-point of orientation, is unavailable to you – possibly we cannot share experience immediately. And possibly, therefore, how my Body feels for me is unavailable to you. It does not follow that my Body remains unchanged in the presence of your Body – and I don’t mean to refer to physiological or biological changes, but changes precisely as a Body, that is, as a lived-Body, as my-Body-for-me. As cummings shows us, our Bodies become new with one another.

Setting aside all the very stimulating possibilities for exploration of this topic that this introduction offers, since I’m inquiring about how big my Body is, I’ll look just at my Body’s size with another’s. You are shorter than me by several inches. That’s just how it is. Being with your Body, my Body is newly tall, stretching and extending, as though you urge me to reach just by being there with me. As I’ve said before, this is a feeling of my Body that I find pleasant and desirable. It is a particular kind of stretching that my Body undergoes – lacking tension, stretching through unraveling or unwinding, "uncoiling," "unfurling."

With you just now, I am just barely lighter, less dense, my mass more diffuse, again pleasantly, and also like being stretched, stretched upward. I want to be able to say what about this experience is affective or emotional and what is physical or relational. I don't feel that my longer, lighter Body-experience is due just to you "sweeping me off my feet." My experience is of a re-orientation to the world through your presence near me, a lightening and lengthening you and I effect in my Body through our close proximity or contact.

Now sitting in another room, that reaching urge is missing, and my Body settles lower into place. Or, walking away following an embrace, I feel my Body shrink to “normal” size.

(I'm going to adopt the usage of Husserl's translators and refer to the animate, living body with the capitalized Body. This is their translation of Husserl's Leib, which distinguishes a quickened body from a merely physical body, or Körper. Too bad we only have one word in English. I hope the capitalization isn't too annoying. Obviously, cummings should have used the capital B as well, but he was a bastard, and also didn't capitalize much. Poets rarely do, if you think about it. Capitalize, that is. You know, on their poems. Cuz, you know.... poems.... uh....)

how big is my body?

I’ve decided to spend some time this summer considering the question, “how big is my body?” I like this question. It strikes me as sounding peculiar, and I think it’s a good thing for philosophers to consider peculiar questions.

One way it seems peculiar is that, from a certain overly literal and physicalist standpoint, there is a very simple series of answers that puts an immediate end to the question. I am just over six feet tall and weigh something in the neighborhood of 160 pounds. That’s how large my body is. (To these I could add various other data like the length of my reach, my inseam, the circumference of my chest or my head, or the size of my hands. My head and my hands are both notably largish.)

Phenomenologically, answers of this sort miss the point pretty much completely. I may be, in an objective sense, six feet tall, but to leave it at that does not address the experience of my body size. For a start today, I want to name several dimensions of the experience of embodiment that I believe are relevant for fully answering the question of how large my body is.

(1) I experience my body’s size as varying. In different conditions – rest, movement, health or illness, different postures, even different mental moods – my body feels taller, shorter, heavier, lighter, longer, etc.

(2) I experience my body’s size and limit variably. That is to say, my experience of embodiment is sometimes focally about the limit of my extension – when I can’t reach far enough, e.g. – and other times is so diffuse that the limit is indefinite to me. This particular aspect opens a number of phenomenological considerations related to perception and sense experience. In so far as my body is a seeing body, its extension is in fact indefinite, because there’s no definable limit to the distance I can see, just the acuity with which I can see at that distance. The size of my phenomenal body is related to what can affect my senses, and many of them are affected by things far away from the core of my body. I certainly don’t have to be touching the crow squawking outside my window to be bodily aware of it. (Some difficulties here with wording: in a literal physical sense I am contacted by the air which vibrates with the waves produced by the crow’s vocal apparatus…)

(3) Experiences of varying body size have affective dimensions. I prefer almost always to feel tall and very light. I tend to feel heavier when I am physically tired or sick, or under stress. I tend to feel shorter when I’m in poor spirits. When I am at my peak of physical and mental condition, when I look down at the ground it seems further away, my head feels open to the sky, I am nearly unaware of any sense of my body’s weight.

(4) Experiences of varying body size occur relative to others, objects, and the world. I would not have an experience of my body size without these relations – I feel my body’s size always correlatively to something. I take the measure of my body from the street I walk down, even while I take the measure of the street by my stride. As my body moves with yours, both our bodies size one another up.

(5) My experience of my body size can be at odds with another’s experience of my body size. To some people, my body most likely is experienced as tall, even when for me my body may feel short at that moment. This is a fairly common experience, I believe: people comment on how tall or short they feel relative to one another, even people they’re accustomed to being near. Also, depending on what we’re doing together, our experience of relative body size could vary between us. How far I can reach, or how large my hands are, for instance, could not only vary between us but make a significant difference for us. I’m inclined to say, further, that my body’s size has a public dimension, meaning that my body’s size is experienced by whoever happens to be near enough for my body’s presence to matter. My body can also contribute to the mass of a crowd, and in that situation my body and the crowd’s body are intertwined or enjoined such that I take on some of the largeness of the crowd.

(6) My body’s size can also be considered from the standpoint of its impact on others, objects, and the world. I do not carry all of my weight myself. I do not reach only myself. That I take up space in the world and with regard to others means that my body’s size is part of the world itself. I don’t know how far I can phenomenologically clarify this, but part of what this aspect addresses is how my body’s size affects the world. Asking how much of the world I occupy is asking, among other things, how much noise I’m making (and where), how much of the world I’m consuming (and where), etc. So, a phenomenological inquiry into the size of my body has an ethical and political dimension.

when is a sex scandal not a sex scandal?

I turned on my hotel TV this morning, like I always do when I’m alone in a hotel room, and the first thing that confronted me was the Andrew Wiener “sexting” scandal. Not only did he tweet his underpants to a woman somewhere or other, but he also apparently had an ongoing text flirtation with a casino card dealer. On my screen was an outpouring of moral revulsion and condemnation. It was quite festive.

I don’t care about Anthony Wiener. Nonetheless, it’s disturbing that we’ve become so culutrally obsessed with this bizarre romantic/moral expectation that no reasonable person could ever engage in extra-curricular fantasy, flirtation, or even attraction. I heard Wiener’s texting equated to “cheating” on his wife. Really?

To me, this looks more like an attack on imagination than anything, which is no great surprise in a society that demands simplistic black-and-white moral distinctions. A spouse is either faithful or faithless – and to be faithful apparently means having no other attractions or affections of any kind outside of the marital bond. There is no room for ambiguity, and no forgiveness for even the mildest flirtation or shared fantasy.

On one hand, that attitude is frankly and utterly stupid. I can no more refrain from haphazard and random attractions than I can stop seeing. It doesn’t mean I’m faithless. Beyond that, I can’t begin to fathom why it’s become an unimaginable moral monstrosity that anyone could possibly get erotically entangled in fantasy with someone not sanctioned officially for it. Our culture has a driving need to judge, I guess.

Not that I’m sending anyone pictures of my underpants – because I’m not quite that stupid or foolhardy. Besides, sometimes a few words are worth a thousand pictures.

more on faculty ethics - add Foucault, shake, pour into cocktail glass, and add a twist

I've been thinking that my presentation at the AAUP conference on Thursday needed more bite. On the plane from Newark to Portland, and then again on the flight back from Newark to San Francisco, I took some notes. Here's a bit of the 2000+ words I've added to the behemoth paper I'm presenting. (By the way, I'm doing this without including what will now have to be a massive scholarly apparatus. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.)

The destructive argument

Like most professional codes of ethics, the AAUP Statement on Professional Ethics addresses relatively powerful people, and does so in total abstraction from their actual working conditions. It functions as an expression of professional ideology – what the official ruling establishment of the profession says about itself in order to create a normalized reality effect. Like most professions, the ideology emphasizes the profession’s alleged authority and self-regulatory autonomy, standards of conduct, as well as its commitment to the public good. While its application to the majority of those serving as faculty is clearly doubtful – since the majority simply are not professors in the sense denominated in the Statement – it is also not clear how well it applies even to those who otherwise appear to be professors.

What I think this means is that, at present, there is no operative faculty professional ethics whose legitimacy anyone regards, or should regard, as binding. There are documents, there are utterances – mostly high-minded or hypocritical, whether stated by faculty, administrators, politicians, or culture-warriors. All of those utterances that I’ve heard or read strike me as, at best, ethically bankrupt. No one can say knowledgeably either what faculty do or what they should do.

One obvious thing to say is to make the political claim others have already made – that faculty – all faculty, but especially the faculty majority – need to organize, and need to organize all the faculty. This is the political solution. It does not address in a direct way the ethical question, and here I think the catastrophic nature of the crisis needs a radical proposal to meet it.

What is required in this situation is the free choice, taken up by each person working as faculty, of what sort of being he or she will choose. That is, the kind of faculty member one will become, how one will resist or reproduce the dominant structures of power in institutions of higher education, will have to be the leading choice, the determining choice, of what sort of “code” one may adhere to.

Faculty subjectivities, faculty power: the constructive argument

A basic question regarding faculty ethical responsibilities is, who are the faculty? The majority status of part-time faculty, and the huge majority of tenuous-track faculty, demand that we cannot take tenure-track professors as the presumed model for faculty in general.

Rather than a natural species, faculty are socially constructed, and, obviously, differentially socially constructed. Analyzed through Michel Foucault’s later work on power relations, institutions, and subjection, what would we find as the basic shapes of subjection adapted and adopted by those who become “professors,” “lecturers,” or “adjuncts,” respectively? (Not an exhaustive list.) Indeed, I have already been describing some of the key differences between these subjectivities. “Lecturers,” for instance, are subjected to teach heavier loads, accepting or even being grateful for these opportunities, and so forth.

From a period during graduate school, most PhD students in the humanities learn that taking “adjunct” work – a course here, a course there, for very low wages and no benefits – is a necessary starting point for most aspiring professors. Despite the fact that this “starting point” is for most of these PhD students an ending point (that is, that the majority will never have tenure-track “jobs”) , we take on this subject-position, continue to work the conference circuit as much as our dire financial conditions allow, revise and submit papers to journals, hustle for book contracts and continued “adjunct” employment (in order to continue to have the basic legitimacy that a college affiliation offers) – all under the normalizing framework that this is how academia works, and that if I am going to get a “job,” I have to keep at it. (And wow, they're pathetic. I know because I was one.)

The longevity of this “adjunct” subjectivity depends on a number of factors, including an individual’s personal exhaustion point, competing interests like starting a family or paying ever-looming debts, and of course, getting hired tenure-track. My observation is that, for most of us who occupy either the subjectivity of aspiring to tenure-track employment, or the subjectivity of tenure-track professors, there appear to be no alternatives. Thus the imputation that those who never make the leap from this kind of “adjunct” work to tenure-track work have “failed” in some respect, or the alternative analysis that blames either “the job market” or “the over-production of PhDs." For those thus normalized, ethical responsibility means adhering as much as possible to the values and behaviors of the tenured elite.
Any analysis of the state of the academic “profession” which accepts this simplistic binary, and implicitly accepts the notion that faculty employment is accurately characterized as dividing the small minority of academic “winners” from the undeserving “losers,” fundamentally misinterprets, or ignores, the daily working lives of faculty, and the subjectivities, interests, perceptions, and intentions of those working as faculty. In short, it denies ethical responsibility to the majority of faculty, by denying their subjection.

I’ll use myself as an example. I am completely pessimistic about my prospects for a tenure-track “job” at this stage of my career. My PhD has passed its freshness date. I earn too much to be an attractive entry-level employee. I carry baggage as an activist/troublemaker. I continue to research and write, I continue to present my work at national and international conferences, and I continue to stay as much as possible up-to-date in my field. If I do all this without hope of a tenure-track “job,” and if my work looks very much like the work of a tenure-track faculty member, then what sort of faculty member am I, exactly?

I’m a “lecturer,” but that means so many things that it means nothing. I’m an academic outsider in many respects, because my status, and my aspirations, do not adhere to the dominant ideology of the academic profession – the ideology of the professoriate so eloquently stated in the AAUP Statement on Ethics. What shall we say are my ethical responsibilities, if I have reasons that I find compelling to be suspicious of my field of expertise (academic philosophy), to withdraw my compliance with my institution’s rules; if I am unable to seek or state the truth as I see it, or to encourage or model intellectual honesty for my students; if the public at large sees little value, or simply does not see what I do to contribute to the public good?

By and large, every day, I have no problem understanding what I should do, because I have already settled, for myself, the issue of my ethical responsibilities as a faculty member. That is, I have a relatively stable subjectivity which directs my actions according to a relatively stable, though tacit, code. In relationship to the dominant ideology, my own code is one that variably adopts, adapts, and resists – and so does yours, and so does the “adjunct” whom you have never met, who teaches one class each semester at your university’s remote campus.

If I accept that I have some responsibility to my discipline, to my students, to my colleagues, to my institution or to the public, this takes place for me every day in my classroom. If I am honest about my or my discipline’s limitations of wisdom, if I question the dominant power structure of my institution or classroom or society, if I make my primary concern the state of my students’ souls, or the state of their judgments, or their development of critical thinking skills, or their satisfaction of institutional requirements to advance to the degree — and in turn, if I don’t make one or another of these my concern — in any and all of those free and deliberative actions, I commit myself, though not irrevocably, to an ethic, and express that ethic.

This is an ineluctable faculty ethics, I think — one that cannot be codified (that precedes all codifications), and one that does not dissolve, no matter how much my power is diminished by my status, because I walk into the classroom, or go online, and I am a certain “faculty member” then.

legitimation crisis in higher education, part 2

So, what happened to the legitimation of higher education? How did we reach the point of incredulity?

The series of events I believe is as follows. (1) The Holocaust. (2) The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (3) The GI bill. (4) The civil rights movement.

Incongruous list, eh? Lyotard gives me the first two. The Holocaust and the rise of the nuclear age shattered forever the dream of human control of nature or our fate, and bankrupted any notion of moral authority or moral purpose (if you don’t dig that last bit, read yer Adorno). Poof go those grand narratives, never to be recovered. No, not even with bioengineering.

The reason the GI bill and the civil rights movement are crucial events is that they produced a democratizing legitimation for education that ultimately led to class warfare, and political attacks on the authority of experts. For the GI bill and the civil rights movement both made a demand on education, and on higher education, to be a mechanism for social justice in the form of upward social and economic mobility. As one of the speakers at the CFHE presser noted, last Tuesday was the 54th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and he quoted from that decision: “There is no justice without educational justice.” Ironically, legitimation by social justice sped the crisis along, in part because of the way it was conceived.

In California, the social justice legitimation of higher education has been linked to the 1960 Master Plan, a bill that clarified the purposes and borderlines of the three systems of public higher education in the state. The University of California was to accept the top 1/8 of high school graduates, and continue to advance scientific and technical research - i.e., serve as a public R1. The California State Colleges (later the CSU) was to accept the top 1/3 of high school graduates, and train them to be teachers and other lower-level professionals - second tier. The California Community Colleges were to accept everyone interested in attending - third tier.

That division of labor led to the identification of the CSU as “the people’s university,” a concept that clearly intends to link the purpose of the CSU to social justice concerns for class and origin. CSU faculty activists often use this rhetoric to argue for increased state funding to the CSU, and to criticize funding cuts as politically retrograde. That’s true, of course, but it shouldn’t be surprising, and it shouldn’t be surprising when the arguments are ignored. (I refer interested readers to Christopher Newfield’s Unmaking the Public University for analysis of the class and cultural warfare attacks on public education. Although limited in scope, his work can at least be applied to the more general situation.)

What I think is important about the rhetoric supporting state funding of education under legislation like the Master Plan is a shift in the legitimating narrative, from education as serving public, national, or universal human interests, to education as serving class, and ultimately, individual interests. That is to say, under this regime, higher education’s success can be measured strictly performatively, by assessing whether graduates make more money. What education ultimately is for, according even to this concept of social justice, is generating a measurable quantity of money.

And that’s what we often argue: every dollar the state invests in the CSU returns more than five dollars in revenue. If this is true, it is true in a way that is strictly functionalist, instrumentalist, and bureaucratic.

On the other hand, once we accept that frame of reference for legitimating higher education, there is no way out of efficiency standards. The best education would be that which maximizes the benefit, in terms of dollars earned by graduates, and minimizes cost. Disciplines and degrees, faculty-to-student ratios, number of tenure-track faculty, library budgets, and everything else, in the best possible case, would be subject to efficiency rationalization.

Some things are, as administrators tell us almost every day, and as the public readily accepts, just too expensive: majoring in individual instrumental performance or philosophy, post-baccalaureate programs, classes with fewer than 15 students. When the state's revenues dry up, education becomes one among all the other expenses, comparable to roadwork, prisons, medicare, parks, and police. The only defense of education that has any weight in such a discussion is the performative one: universities generate more economic growth than parks, e.g.

What's defended, and what's attacked, when education is at stake, is a certain input/output system defined by its constituencies and typical bureaucratic structures. Any "purpose" is now unintelligible.

Next: Habermas vs. Lyotard, or, optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of the crisis of higher education. Plus: why these are false dichotomies. (I know, I know: once a Hegelian, always a Hegelian.)

legitimation crisis in higher education, part 1

Tuesday morning, we attended the “watch party” for the press conference to launch the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. CFHE’s goal is to bring the voice of the faculty into public debate, to provide an alternative vision to the narrow, exclusive, and ultimately exploitative plans of public policy elites. I’m certainly supportive of their goals, and will be a loyal footsoldier for them.

The very existence of CFHE makes me more convinced that higher education is in the throes of a crisis of legitimation – and has been since probably the 1970s. Throughout the morning I was reminded of Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis in The Postmodern Condition. I sketched out, à la Lyotard, a periodization of legitimating narratives for higher education, which I think is probably going to be the backbone of whatever my essay turns out to be.

Early modern universities had distinctly moral legitimations. Not only were they primarily religious institutions in their origins, but their purposes were understood in moral terms. The scions of old and new wealth attended in order to become proper, educated, humanized men. They read the classics en route to entry into moral realms of social life: the clergy, the law, medicine, or some lordship or other.

In the 19th century, in the United States as elsewhere, a new legitimating narrative rose to prominence: higher education was to serve the social and economic interests of the nation. To this end, the US created land-grant agricultural and technical universities. There still were the traditional liberal arts colleges, pursuing their moral mission, but the land-grants were a new sort of college pursuing useful arts and sciences. This distinction corresponds roughly with Lyotard’s conception of the moral or liberating and nationalistic legitimations of knowledge.

By the late 19th century, the US had sprouted normal schools for the training of school teachers. Again, in my view at least, this was legitimated primarily morally. One particular case in point: the California state normal school, originally opened in San Francisco, was moved to San Jose (which was more wholesome, less wild), and eventually became the first California State College.

By around the time California State Normal School became California State College, we began in the US to divide colleges and universities into the now-familiar tier system. The moral narrative had basically broken down, and a narrative of scientific and technological advancement became predominant – knowledge, and hence higher education, was to serve humanity’s control and domination of nature and our own fate. Under this narrative, the leading tier of higher education would, of course, be that which produced new knowledge and technology, what we now call Research-1 universities. Second-tier higher education functioned within that same narrative, by producing the professionals and para-professionals who acted upon that knowledge and technology. The third tier, mainly technical and community colleges, also could be legitimated by this narrative, recognizing the demands that an advanced technological society would place on all members to adopt and adapt.

As I said, this narrative of knowledge in service to humanity had been the dominant legitimating discourse of higher education, from right around the turn of the 20th century until just after mid-century. From that point, a series of events have thoroughly undermined the legitimating narratives of higher education. By the 1970s, as Lyotard explains, we had entered the postmodern condition of incredulity toward metanarratives, which I interpret to mean a loss of faith in a grand purpose.

Next: What the hell happened?

this stupid program

It's the last day of classes for Spring semester, and for the academic year. That means it's time to start fighting with Excel to make it calculate grades for my classes.

I'm not computer illiterate, and I'm not math illiterate. But something about the Excel interface is so counter-intuitive to me that I feel like I am. This morning, considering the prospect of my semi-annual battle, part of my brain decided to call Excel "This Stupid Program."

"This Stupid Program" was the name of a program my friend Bob and I recorded, over and over again, using a series of cassette tape recorders from ages 9 or 10 until 19 or 20. As a kid, I was either instinctually or preternaturally drawn to parody, I don't know which. As a result, Bob and I made up and recorded multiple hours of utter silliness that made fun of TV and radio programs and, especially, ads. We called our efforts "WDUM," as though it were a radio station.

I used to draw up program schedules before we would record ourselves. As I recall the events, I had just put "This Stupid Program" on a schedule without any idea what it would be. I don't remember how it was that Bob became the host of the program, but I do know the entirety of the transcript of the show:

Time again for "This Stupid Program." "This Stupid Program" is designed to last approximately thirty-seven and one-half seconds, so it is almost time to go. There, it is time to go. See you next time on "This Stupid Program."

Now, that's fairly stupid. Having a program like that on a radio or TV broadcast would be rather stupid. Who would advertise on "This Stupid Program"? Who would listen to it? That was the conceit that drove WDUM - that these idiots were actually on the air. (And of course they had one chief sponsor, called Krazy Kooks Inkorporated, which was a conglomerate selling absolutely everything.)

Bob uttered the text in a weird muppety voice, which made it sillier. We used to repeat the show multiple times running, and by the third or so, it was immensely silly.

So, while I'm struggling to make Excel behave, I'll be hearing Bob in my head, and then the ad following, for KKI's Tree Tree, or some other similarly useless invention. Sadly, I've lost all of the tapes we made. I don't remember the circumstances of that, but it may have been in the flood in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1998 - the same one that took a dozen or more notebooks and plays, and hundreds of poems that I wrote from ages 13 on.

basic contradiction

On my walk home, contemplating Manuel Castells' brilliant analysis of al-Qaeda in The Power of Identity, I started thinking about basic contradictions in cultures, and the way they instigate crises. Al-Qaeda's main ideological origin is the contradictions in Middle East political and cultural life - the accumulation of wealth and power by those who own the means to access petroleum reserves, versus the essential piety and humility of Islam.

We have a very similar contradiction in the US, and it's odd that hardly anyone seems to notice. The majority of Americans regard themselves as Christian, and yet do not see that our society's official reverence for market capitalism is totally at odds with the values of the teachings of Jesus. It's pretty plain, though, it seems to me: "love your neighbor" is really contrary to "screw your neighbor," the official competitive motto of capitalist economies. Jesus taught that the poor are blessed and shall inherit the earth; the capitalist faith claims the poor deserve to be poor because they're lazy or talentless.

And yes, I know there are evangelical contortionists who twist the beatitudes into knots in order to rationalize the view that the poor have earned their poverty as punishment for their sins. I just don't see how that could be truly compelling in the face of the Gospels. (Then again, I'm neither a student of the Bible nor a Christian, so this is all external critique, natch.)

I mean, you could at least prettify the situation by saying that capitalism is a kind of unfortunate state of nature - original sin as economic reality. That would at least save some of the fundamental tenets of Medieval Christianity. Then Christian faith could take the role of how one cleanses oneself from the wages of sin (pun intended).

Another interpretation would be that either the faith in capital or the faith in Christ are hypocritical or cynical. In that case, the faithful would use their expressions of faith to assuage their consciences (assuming), their god (assuming), or their bankers (well, those, at least, do exist). I'm less inclined to this view, mainly because it's less kinky, and I do like kink in my theology.

Anyway, one might wonder whether, or when, this basic contradiction in American social and cultural life might express itself in violence. If so, one would obviously have missed the past 20 years or so of domestic terrorism, the rise of the militia/patriot/tea party movement, and, not to put to fine a point on it, the Bushes.

You know that old saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes"? I always want to know if there are any Christians in potholes.

higher education in crisisJean-François Lyotard is in my pants!(as we used to say in college)

Every day I read news of reductions in classes, students, faculty, and funding of some institution of public higher education. I mean every single goddamn day. This has to mean something.

The easy answer, which I propose is dead wrong, is that states have run dry, and higher education is a place where cuts can be made. One reason I think that's dead wrong is that budgets for those institutions have been cut even when the economy wasn't in recession.

I've got something else cooking, too, and it's more complex. There is an obvious crude economic argument for funding public higher education: it repays. Every dollar spent on the CSU comes back to the state five-fold. What does it mean when the state chooses not to fund public higher ed, even though the investment provides a 500% dividend?

It could mean that those who choose not to fund public higher education have simply decided to steal that return from the labor of people, by privatizing public universities and colleges and demanding increased tuition payments by students. The more students pay, and the less state revenues have to be invested, the more profitable to the state public higher education is.

(Note that this rationale is not only cynical and condoning kleptocracy, but also non sequitir, since it uses profitability as a criterion for decision-making about a non-profit, public good. I digress.)

There may be something to that interpretation, but during the last couple of years, I've become convinced that something weirder is happening, which I'm going to try to pursue. I think what's happening is a crisis in the legitimating narratives of higher education in general. That is, what's happening in public higher education is not only a reaction to recession (and, in fact, fundamentally isn't), and not only a form of class welfare (in fact, it is a form of class warfare, of the kleptocratic class against the working poor), but reflects a crisis in the legitimating protocols of education in general, and higher education in particular.

In short, my preferred hypothesis (I sound more like Baudrillard than Lyotard at this point, but either way, pants) is that our society has reached a stage in the postmodern condition in which we* no longer can or do sincerely believe in the metanarratives that legitimate education. We have an apparatus, an economic-political-cultural institution of higher education, but nobody* seriously believes it serves any grand purpose.

If I were to follow Lyotard, I would say that the legitimation of higher education is no longer on the basis of some notion of human progress or liberation, or of the good of the nation or state. Instead, the only legitimating narratives are the petit narratives of performativity and paralogy - "What have you done for me lately?" and "Are you following your own rules?"

But I think it may have gone further, because the crude economic justification for higher education would seem performative, and the self-legitimation of peer review would seem paralogical. (I'll probably talk this through at some point, so not to worry if they're unfamiliar terms.) I believe it goes further than public higher ed, too - it's education in general that has lost legitimacy.

Please keep reading! I promise I'll stop name-dropping and get to brass tacks!
--

* By "we" and "nobody" above, I mean to refer to a convenient, fictional social actor who represents a generalized ideological subjectivity. I think it's interesting that, while Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition is certainly brilliant, he puts the "incredulity toward metanarratives" in the passive voice, such that the notion that there have to be people whose consciousness involves this incredulity is totally elided. Lyotard was a clever dick.

new homeland security alert system

The Department of Homeland Security (Abteilung der Heimatsicherheit in the original German) has adopted a new advisory system to replace the color codes. I'm not entirely thrilled, because the infantilization of US citizens implicit in the old system was its main appeal to me. That, and you could describe your day's outfit as "Elevated," which was fun.

I have a good idea for a replacement advisory system, but they haven't been returning my calls for some reason. (Though they did say my name would be added to a list they keep of special people!)

Here's the system I proposed:

Threat Level:



Oprah. Routine precautions. No travel restrictions.



Cher. Elevated precautions. Restricted travel for listed individuals; all air travelers subject to random searches. Ongoing patrols of major transportation infrastructure: bridges, tunnels, airports and railway stations.

Gaga. Severe. Known threat of imminent attack. Most air travel grounded. Restrictions on rail travel.

Busey. Attack currently in progress. Take extreme measures for security and safety: marshal law, total grounding of all foreign and domestic flights, transportation lockdown on all federal highways.



Sheen. No safe place anywhere. Kiss your kids goodbye.

album of the day: Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5

It's always precarious to write about music as expressing ideas. Especially in the case of a symphony, which is really just a series of notes, and especially in the case of Shostakovich's Fifth, which is not only just a series of notes, but a series of notes he wrote in an attempt to continue his composing career and not, you know, get executed by Stalin.

I forget exactly how I got hooked on Shostakovich. I suspect my friend Bob is to blame. The Fifth Symphony is the first piece I knew, and it was so compelling, I immediately went after all the Shostakovich I could.

I won't go into the details of the history of his composing it here. There's a good piece on it on Wikipedia.

This afternoon, I listened to the first two movements the symphony on the way home from campus, and could barely contain myself. I've continued it since then. I can't provide a perfectly rational basis for this claim, but I'm happy with it: this symphony is about the horror of power. The first movement, for instance, expresses the terrifying potential of power - political power, most of all - to make things happen, to cause things to occur. If I have to explain to you why this is a horrible power, you may already not be a good audience for the symphony. But if you have an inkling, give Shostakovich a listen, so he can explain to you just how horrible power can be.

After being terrified nearly to tears by the first movement (walking down Andre in Turlock, and passing a few fellow pedestrians who gave me very concerned looks), I hit the tragedy of the second movement. Officially, the second movement was a bit of fun, a comic interlude in an otherwise extraordinarily bleak symphony. Bullshit. The second movement takes a Russian folk theme, played in quiet, meek tones on woodwinds and pizzicato violins, and then refracts that theme as an appropriated melody blasted back at the folk by a militaristic march. Their theme expressing life and its sanctity and fragility is twisted into a monstrous anthem, presented back to them as though the people were expected to accept this as the authentic representation of their culture and lives. There's nothing silly or relieving about the comedy of it: it's the harshest satire. My boy Shostie could write some friggin satire.

There follows the third movement, quoting a suppressed - no, an overtly banned - traditional funeral dirge, and which apparently made the premiere audience weep. Nuff said. The fourth movement, in my opinion, expresses the triumph of power, the final obliteration of the life of the folk, as all the themes ultimately contribute to what I am sure in my soul is a mock-heroic climax. The tension Shostakovich achieves in the last phrases of the fourth movement, the clashing cymbals and blaring horns over the straining strings - that's the sound it might make when hope dies.

I mean, imagine you're a creative artist with a quirky sense of humor and a spirit of adventure, and that the work you are compelled to create is making people want to kill you and your friends. Imagine that after your last premiere, people started publishing reviews that said, basically, "yep, time to kill this motherfucker," and that at the same moment, your friends started disappearing. Then they come to you and say, "when's your next piece coming out? We're really interested!"

The awful genius of Shostakovich, in this symphony, was to give those people something they had to accept, even laud, and at the same time, express himself genuinely, and say something about, to, and for the people under this tyranny. Jesus, no wonder they wept!

In Mstislav Rostropovich's direction, this London Symphony recording does some amazing things, I should say. I am most familiar with an old Allegro classical cassette I bought in 1984, for fuck's sake, and that's my basic frame of reference for any other performance - as these things always go. Rostropovich's first movement is way goddamn scarier, and in fact one of scariest performances of classical music I've heard. (You may need to be in the mood, and may need to be familiar with the Fifth, to get this.) But it was the second movement that nailed me. Rostropovich leads the London gang to such a tender expression of the initial themes, and through such a miserable plundering of the same themes, that the connection between them is devastating.

I bought this on iTunes, and because of that, hadn't really regarded the cover art. Nice summation.

still temporary after all these years

I was informed on Friday that I am not a finalist for the tenure-track position in my department. I have heard that I "deserve" a tenure-track position, as well. Just, you know, apparently not here.

This is very strange, given my 13 years of contributions to the department, the university, and my active records of scholarly achievement in academic philosophy. I am not a great scholar of the era by any means, and would never claim I was, nor that I aspire to be, but I also think that I'm impeccably qualified for tenure at Cow State Santa Claus.

Anyway, this is not a disappointment to me, because I had no expectation of being a finalist for the position, and certainly no expectation that I would get it. That's why my application's soundtrack included Cee Lo Green. (There's a history, a history which apparently became more common knowledge during the review of my application.)

Many folks know I'm a big Marxist. One of my favorite Groucho quips is that he would never join an organization that would have someone like him as a member. Being a member of the non-tenured majority is very much like that, and on the whole, it's the untenured majority I'd rather join.

family budget the California way!

Since 90% of folks in the US live on a median income of $31,000, we all try to economize and live on a budget, but especially in these difficult economic times, it's critical. Perhaps, then, you'd like to follow these handy tips to family budgeting, based on the best practices in California.

1. Reduce household income

If two people in the household both work full-time, your wages may be so high as to create certain pressures to spend them. A simple solution we've used for years in California is to reduce revenues. One of the two of you should go part-time, or, better yet, quit, and don't look for work. If there is only one wage-earner in your household, an alternative would be to ask for a reduction in salary. Many bosses are happy to accommodate such requests.

2. Have lots of loud arguments in public about your finances

A lot of families already do this, and it's good that they do, because, like in the California legislature, those shouting matches demonstrate your commitment to principle. Nah, I'm kidding. They're really just spectacles of public humiliation used as part of a strategy to undermine your opponents. But the appalling display of illegitimacy and unfitness for decision-making create terrible uncertainty and anxiety, and that's sure to make people frightened about what decisions you will, eventually, make. In other words, it can be useful to make your kids shut up.

3. Max out your credit cards

Buying on credit is a great state tradition. In fact, California routinely takes out emergency loans when our annual budget squabble threatens to shut down the entire state government and a large portion of the state's economy in general. Using every bit of your line of credit is a great way to show your credit card company that you're serious about consuming, and need and want even more debt.

4. Base your budget on as much financial information as you can find

Budgetary decisions that are pragmatic and realistic depend on the quality of the information used in making them. California bases its state agencies' budgets on assumptions about what state revenues will be, and what the agencies need to perform their services. Then we tear that up and write random numbers down on sticky notes, then sticking them on an organizational chart of state agencies.

You could do the same! Here are some numbers you can use: $13, $490, $3.98, $12,872, $i. Now, here are some budget categories you can use: turkey feed, boxes of rocks, cable tv, alimony, booze.

To demonstrate how this works, I've just gone through the California budgeting process using the above information - the best available to us as of this writing. For next year, my plan is as follows:

Expense category	Amount
turkey feed	$12,872
boxes of rocks	$3.98
cable tv	$i
alimony	$13
booze	$490

Now that my spending plan is in place, all I have to do is go have a screaming match with my mate, use my Visa to buy $6000 worth of plastic forks, and quit my job, and I'll be ready for the next fiscal year.

happy happy

Now that the official deadline has passed for the state to hold a special election to keep some taxes in place, and the state senate has started holding hearings on a cuts-only deficit reduction that would lead to massive layoffs of faculty and staff and huge increases in tuition for students, I'm headed to the CFA Assembly this weekend. Good timing.

I decided last night that I would practice Strategic Happy-Making™. This is a series of actions one takes in order to attempt to impose a cheerier mood. Counter-insurgency against doom, you might say. Attitude regime change. Whistling in the dark.

In any event, since the Assembly is in San Francisco, John Phillips' "San Francisco" was going through my mind. And although I may not wear some flowers in my hair (though I've been known to), I will definitely be wearing flowers on my shirt. I'm going to be decked out in bright yellow, green, and blue for the Assembly, the Faculty Rights workshop, and the Lecturer Council meeting. Perhaps someone will ask.

I should consider wearing flowers in my hair very seriously for the election, because I'm running again to be on the Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies Committee, and I figure the flowers would encourage people to vote for me.

Sometimes this kind of dopey effort works for me. Some fair percentage of being happy is convincing yourself to be happy.

on meaning

Over the last couple of weeks, a series of questions have been on my mind. In fact, I keep waking up thinking about them, as though I had been wondering about them in my sleep. I think these are really fundamental philosophical questions, and the way I'm thinking about them strikes me as odd.

Let me say what I think is obvious about meaning. Our brains have evolved in a way that makes our conscious lives lives of meaning rather than non-meaning. I don't know if only human brains have evolved this way; I speculate that we're not alone in having meaningful worlds. Meaning is at least correlative to an evolved trait that has not caused us to die out yet. Perhaps meaning does something for us that is advantageous - this seems overwhelmingly likely, in fact.

There are neurological, psychological, biological, and anthropological ways to ask about meaning. The philosophical way to ask is to consider the meaning of meaning, which is what I think Merleau-Ponty was doing in The Visible and the Invisible, to name one.

So, here goes a first attempt to get at it.

Why and how is there meaning? By meaning, I mean (provisionally) a phenomenon of consciousness whereby experiences and the world are intended as such. Meaning takes place when a consciousness intends something. There's a wide range of different ways that happens - I'd guess an indefinitely large range of ways. I don't want to get into that right now, but I'll give a couple examples to try to clarify what I mean by meaning. (There'll be a certain degree of re-hashing of Husserlian phenomenology here.)

Meaning:

(1) I'm looking at a used-up AA battery lying on my work table. In looking at it, its presence there and what it is are evident and actual contents, we might say, of my conscious awareness. My looking at it, and my describing it, or considering it actively, are the forms of meaning taking place. That is to say, if my eyes were to glance over and past it with only the barest recognition - "black and copper short tubular object" - then that would be the meaning of the experience, or what my consciousness intended at the moment. As it happens, I did not merely glance over it, but noticed it was a AA, remembered it to be a dead battery, and so forth - and so those attributes were part of the meaning of my looking and intending.

(2) Having looked at and described the battery, I'm now thinking about what the battery does. That is, what I mean in intending the battery has shifted from a more perceptual to a more pragmatic dimension. A battery provides electric power to some device, most often electronic. This may have been used in a guitar pickup or a remote control. The potential of a still-good battery, and the lack of potential of a dead one, to provide power, is partly what I intend when I intend battery.

(3) Now I'm shifting my attention to a symbolic dimension. Dead batteries make me feel slightly sad and guilty, because I see electric generation and use, especially in the form of the typical chemical disposable battery, as a bad business, environmentally speaking. The dead battery represents our unsustainable lives of excess, so even though I probably enjoyed using the device the battery had been powering, now I wonder if it was worth it.

I take examples to show that meaning really does take place, and if you understand what I meant - what battery meant in each of the three ways I described it - then meaning is something that is shared. Other people experience meaning, and we can communicate meaning to one another. (Not perfectly, which would after all be very boring, but nonetheless with tremendous acuity.)

Now, why and how does any of that happen? (A corollary question I want to get to is: does it only happen for human beings?) Why is there meaning, as distinct from just behaving? "Just behaving" would mean perceiving and responding to things without intending them as such. We do that too: yanking my hand away from scalding water happens faster than meaning, and even if I go back, as it were, and intend hot water, my initial movement is more like behaving than meaning.

A few related questions have been popping up for me recently. How are meaning, perception, expression, ideation, and imagination related? What does meaning do for us? What's the relationship between meaning and truth, or between meaning and belief? Do cats have meaningful worlds? Do cats have truths or beliefs?

album of the day: Pictures at an Exhibition

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room

- Ani Difranco, "Fuel"

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time riding my bike out to a shopping center in Greensboro that had a really good book store and a decent record store where I spent a lot of the money I made on my paper route. Among the great finds was a cassette tape of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I didn't know anything about classical music then, and still know next to nothing, but I could tell from the start that this 1958 concert recording by Sviatoslav Richter was a monumental piece of work.

I played that tape to death, always only playing the side containing Richter's performance and ignoring the orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel on the other. I bought a CD of somebody else playing the solo piano original by Mussorgsky, but it had none of the appeal of Richter's. When my old tape-deck crapped out several years ago, I tried to find a CD of the Sofia concert, and for years, it just wasn't available. Thanks be to iTunes. And thanks be to whoever decided not to tamper with the original engineering, despite its many faults.

In comparison with present-day recording technique and production values, this is a disaster. Seemingly every cough of every audience member is faithfully preserved on the scratchy, flattish monaural recording. My guess would be that, aware of Richter's attacking style, the recording engineer placed the microphone (I expect just one) several feet away from the piano, to avoid red-lining too much.

But Richter is impossible to describe adequately. In his hands, Mussorgsky's sorta tone-poem, sorta programmatic suite is a weird tragicomic passion play. No other performance I've heard has 1/10 the humor, gravity, energy, or meaning. Maybe Richter was just making it all up, and those staid, smoothed-over renderings (I'm looking at you, Ravel) are more genuine. I don't care.

Richter came into the concert hall, sat at the piano, twinkled around with the introduction of the recurrent theme, thence through the Gnomus, the Tuileries, the Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells - all the silly stuff, played with terrific dynamic variation (the Chickens seem to dance in stop-motion animation, very cartoon-like), and then beat the living hell out of the rest of the piece, stomping out a terrifying Catacombs in particular.

I don't know anything about Sviatoslav Richter, really, but in my opinion he was a pretty scary dude. The Wikipedia article about him quotes him as saying he believed performers should simply express the composer's intentions, but if that's so, I can't understand why his performance of Mussorgsky is so different from others I've heard.

I also can't seem to find any information on the circumstances of the 1958 Sofia recital, other than that it was recorded and well-regarded - which is incredibly feint praise for it.

a delicate matter about a crappy book

I'm working on a book review for an academic journal. I won't say what journal or what the book is, because, to be blunt, the book is really bad (so far - I'm about halfway through it). In fact, it's so bad, it's making me angry.

Back in grad school, I wrote a satire called The 12-Step Program For Academic Success, spoofing the career-building behavior of some of the academics I knew. One of the steps was putting together an academic book or "volume" (because in the 90s, nobody called them books - they were all "volumes" or "works"). Part of the gag was that academic books are, generally, horribly written, and patched together from articles that the author previously published.

I didn't know then to call this behavior "duplicate publication" or "self-plagiarism," but it didn't set well, and still doesn't. Maybe a series of articles is worth binding together, and maybe that series presents a coherent line of thought, but in my opinion, the vast majority of academic books put together thus is neither.

The present instance is not only incoherent chapter-to-chapter, but within each chapter there are gaps or clashing themes that the author has made no real pretense of making coherent. Readers are apparently supposed to assume that it flows and makes sense.

Part of me is angry because this has been published, and I don't have a book published. (That's pretty stupid, since I haven't written a book. But envy isn't always rational.) A larger part of me is angry because I have to read it to write the review - allegedly - and I promised, and have already written nasty notes in the margin, so I can't really back out of it or follow my whim to throw the book as far away as I can. A still larger part of me is righteously angry because it's so crappy, so clear an example of crappy academic behavior, and because I can see a much better way to approach the topic and to form the arguments than this hack did.

Sheesh!

Now, the delicate matter. If I write the review I feel the book richly deserves - a right thrashing - what happens then? What if I meet this guy sometime? What if his friend shows up at a conference where I'm presenting a paper?

I've written a couple very negative reviews of books before, but they were for the journal of the American Hegel Society, The Owl of Minerva, back in the anarchic days of the Hegel Society, when scathing, terribly nasty disputes via email discussion thread typified the prevailing ethos. (Hot damn, it was fun!) Most academic discussion, in print at least, is much more polite, and a lot of academics are thin-skinned, and some are vicious.

The topic, too, is one that attracts a lot of academics who believe themselves to be good-intentioned, but who are easily provoked. Could be some nastiness coming my way in return.

random hockey post

I rarely write anything about hockey. There are 28,309,146 hockey blogs out there, and around 98.3% of what anybody writes about hockey is blather - like all other sports.

Anyway, in addition to being a lifelong hockey fan, I'm a Pittsburgh Penguins fan. Lately, that's been great, because of players like Sidney Crosby, Kris Letang, Marc-André Fleury, and so on. Crosby has been the best player in hockey since he started in the NHL in 2005, and this season was looking to be his most productive as a scorer. In January, Crosby was hit in the head in two successive games, and has been unable to play since because of concussion. The first hit was not called a penalty, but was in my opinion a deliberate action in attempt to injure. The second was called a penalty, and did result in Sid's head striking the edge of the wall around the ice, but I don't think it was an attempt to injure, just a dumb play.

Controversy over head shots has heated up ever since. Two games ago, Penguins forward Matt Cooke, who has a long history of doing stupid and deliberately injurious things during games, elbowed a New York Rangers player in the head, and received a game penalty and a suspension through the end of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs.

Hockey fandom and media are basically unanimous in praise of the suspension, because, they repeat, the NHL finally got the discipline right.

Wrong.

Unfortunately for all hockey fans, what the NHL did was on the basis of this player's reputation and history, and the current controversy. I am not saying that Matt Cooke should be allowed to deliberately target opponents' heads with his elbows. I am saying that the punishment befit the criminal, not the crime. It wasn't justice; it wasn't even discipline. They made an example of him. Cooke's suspension is a spectacle, or a PR campaign (especially after Penguins owner Mario Lemieux made such a big deal about head hits), to show the NHL is Really Taking Player Safety Very Seriously Indeed.

I believe all the blather about head shots and attempt-to-injure penalties lately really misses a main factor: the salary cap. (If any hockey fans happen by, I do mean that seriously, but you may have noticed this really isn't a hockey-related blog, so I'm not going to pursue it.)

Anyway, enough about this.

academic freedom, freedom of speech

In two of my classes this semester, we've been spending an inordinate amount of time on an article about academic freedom, its distinction from freedom of speech, and the way economic pressures threaten academic freedom. The article defines academic freedom as the right to teach and to research as an academic sees fit, without undue pressure to conform to some extrinsic production measure.

I woke up this morning wondering about the meaning of academic freedom in my life and in the economic and political environment of contemporary academia. Some basic truths, of a sort, came to mind.

No one actually cares what I say or do in my classes, as long as it doesn't subject the university to liability or otherwise damage the university's public image. Almost nothing I might say about my actual field makes any difference to the university from this standpoint. Nobody much cares if I teach a bunch of crazy radical stuff in my classes, unless and until a student complains about it. In my own experience, what students are likely to complain about is personal conflict, not course content. Students complain about course content tactically, in order to attack faculty.

No one actually cares what I say or argue for in anything I publish, as long as it doesn't similarly endanger the university's currency interests. Administrators aren't going to read what I present at conferences or publish in journals or books. Most of what most faculty publish is in technical jargon that administrators wouldn't grasp, of course, but the main reason they don't read it is that they have absolutely no concern about what's in it - only how much of it there is, and whether it's peer-reviewed.

Which means that the university isn't particularly interested in curtailing the content of my exercise of academic freedom. The content of my speech concerns them much more when I speak as a private citizen, because as a private citizen I might freely criticize the university in a way that could endanger the university's currency interests. That is, the university has a fairly strong interest in curtailing my freedom of speech.

This is how it looks from my perspective, as a non-tenure-eligible faculty member who has a contractually guaranteed position until I either grossly violate university rules or a layoff is declared. It would likely look very different, ironically enough, if I had tenure at risk.

After all, there are tenure-track but not-yet-tenured faculty who are scared shitless to write anything as benign as this blog and post it somewhere. (I guess I mean this particular post.)

Academics argue for tenure on the basis of the claim that it and it alone can protect academic freedom. I wonder if what they mean to protect is freedom of speech, instead.

need a break

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Doc Nagel is in a bad way. I blame a large part of this on the confluence of recent events - the department tenure-track search, looming budget cuts to the CSU (yet again), daily news of the unconscionable exercise of power. I blame another large part on the unrelenting propaganda demonizing organized labor, in particular in public higher education. It feels lately as if everything I care about is threatened or under attack. No exaggeration: the ideal of education, my own job, my loveliest, the cat, my favorite hockey team...

On the other hand, obviously the largest part of my terrible, doomed mood is sui generis. Everything I care about seems to be under attack because I feel truly terrible about myself these days. A few people who regularly read this have known me long enough to know that that had been a constant until Lauren came into my life. And although it is very hard to feel terrible about myself with her around, somehow I'm managing it.

For me, this often takes the form of a sort of voice constantly telling me the same thing, no matter what happens: "You're a terrible person." I've checked a book out of the university library, but it's been sitting on my shelf unread. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went poorly. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went well. "That doesn't change the fact that you're a terrible person." I committed a typo in an email I sent. "That's because you're a terrible person."

It gets old after a while.

But hey, do you wanna know why I get depressed, and why I feel this way despite how wonderful Lauren is, and how basically good life is right now? I'll give you a hint: It's because I'm a terrible person. That's what I've heard, anyway.

Taking a break from this is kind of a weird task, because this delightful partner in dialogue is, of course, me. (Hey, wanna know why I'm so cruel to myself? I'll give you a hint...)