update and unbearably adorable kitten pic

This morning, Alexander lay on my lap, seeming comfortable, for about an hour while we watched the Tour de France on the tube (sucks to be Janez Brajkovic the last couple days). Then he crawled up into the kitchen chair he's basically lived in for a week.

But then, when Lauren made pasta salad, and started making apricot jam, Alex was roaming the kitchen with her, perched for a bit on the step-stool, scored a piece of pepperoni, and then he and Valentine took off after a fly. A few minutes later, once Valentine had successfully bounced himself head-first off the front window trying to nab the fly, Alexander chirped at it excitedly.

That's more like it.

This is Alex and Arthur as kittens.

cat anxiety

We've brought Alexander to the vet twice now since Sunday. He's lost hair on his abdomen and backs of his hind legs. On Sunday the first vet (one I don't particularly care for) told us it was just stress or anxiety related. We had already been giving Arthur an herbal anxiety remedy, because for several weeks the cats have gotten more hostile to one another, and have spent less time playing. The herbs seemed to be working. The vet suggested we give it to everyone, to calm them all down.

Yesterday morning Alexander didn't look right to me. I called and got him a late afternoon appointment, with a vet we do like. I fretted all day about Alex.

Finally the appointment came, and the vet concurred with the prior diagnosis, but I asked for blood tests anyway. That came back negative only a few minutes after we got home. The urinalysis may take another day, given the holiday today.

Last night I lost it. I was terrified. Alexander seemed wrong - lethargic, less affectionate, and not talkative and drooling on me, as usual. By the time we got to bed, I was overwhelmed. I thought Alex was going to die last night.

This is what Alexander is supposed to look like (he's the one on the right).

You have to add the drool to the picture for yourself.

We still don't know what's wrong. Maybe he is just depressed and anxious. 

publication provision: revision

Last time I heard back from a journal about a submitted paper, it was the Journal of Academic Ethics asking me to revise and resubmit my paper on the decline of the professional status of college faculty and the lack of opportunity or authority to follow our professional ethics. The blind reviewer earned this name in a way he or she probably didn't mean to, by clearly not reading the paper for its actual argument. Instead, the revise and resubmit letter said I should basically write an entirely different paper on a topic that this reviewer would find more agreeable: how university administrations constantly seek meaningless public image advancements.

(I emailed the JAE editor back and said I would not be resubmitting to a journal so obviously lacking ethical commitment to the principle of peer review.)

Just last week, while we were down in LA, I finally received word back from the journal of the Romanian Society for Phenomenology, Studia Phaenomenologica, saying that my paper had been accepted pending revisions. The revisions listed by their reviewer seem to miss the basic ironic stance in my paper, and the reviewer seems unfamiliar with the pursuit of phenomenology of the body in French existential phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty, Henry, and Marion (and more recently Barbaras), despite my having quoted Ricoeur freaking explaining it in precisely the same terms.

So I've added voluminous footnotes citing dozens of sources to show that, indeed, there is a pretty constant and still ongoing phenomenology of the body. My criticism of this is, briefly, that this fetishizes the body in a way that does two things phenomenology shouldn't do: (1) presupposing that there is a theoretical level of analysis that we must go to in order to explain experience, and (2) relating phenomenological description to a specific metaphysical problem - the mind/body problem Descartes gave us - despite the avowed intent of phenomenologists from Husserl onward to dispense with that metaphysics.

There are some quite valid and difficult criticisms. I write very elliptically at times, and this does not help. I blame Merleau-Ponty. (Obviously, I can't get away with it, because he's Merleau-Ponty, and I'm not.) Plus, the version of the paper I sent to them was edited down to 5000 words from a 8000 word screed I wrote last summer, which I ended up calling "the goofy paper," to express my total disgust with Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. Minus some of the screedy elements, the argument is not very explicit (whereas, with the screedy elements, the language would have been all too explicit for a family journal like Studia Phaenomenologica).

(I curse at my food when I cook, and I curse at my books when I read. Mostly in good fun. I am far more forgiving of disobedient foodstuffs than disappointing philosophers, so some of the cursing at books is a little less joyous and collegial.)

I'm having a very hard time keeping the gumption up for this task - hence this post. I have until 15 July.

pleasure, motion, rightness

I’ve been on two bike rides today. The first was on an errand: we went to the pet store to buy some anti-anxiety drops for Arthur. The second was a junket, up to and through the campus, into the environs thereof, and back down home, much of it at high speed. It feels good to fly. Why? Glad you asked!

Another example of the phenomenon of pleasure in moving comes from dance. Much of dance involves moving in a way that “feels right,” that gives one a sense of bodily pleasure. What type of pleasure is this? One aspect of a dancer’s pleasure in movement seems to be shared with the athlete, for dancers enjoy that simple ineffable pleasure of movement as well. But professional dancers also seem to enjoy a more cognitively enriched pleasure, a pleasure that arguably could be classified as aesthetic. Perhaps athletes have a similar experience… (Cole and Montero, “Affective Proprioception,” Janus Head, 9:2, p. 303)

Undoubtedly there is a “right” feeling to hauling ass on my bike. (A student once commented on seeing me cycling to school: “You ride so fast!” I said, yes, I do everything with maximum possible intensity — which is more or less true.) Their connection of dancing to athletic movement makes a great deal of sense to me — playing guitar fluidly and harmoniously feels good physically and proprioceptively in the same ways as riding very fast or cooking when I have the moves. I see no reason to interpret this experience as necessarily aesthetic. I don’t dance, but I can relate: when I’m playing well, I feel as if my hands move beautifully. And yes, those movements have an additional cognitive dimension when it’s a series of movements I know produce something beautiful. But for me, the affective core of this experience is erotic, rather than aesthetic. My food, and sometimes my guitar playing, is gorgeous, I won’t be falsely modest. The pleasure of the movement is more visceral — which is not the right word. They awaken and open my erotically, fulfill and perpetuate a desire, to do it all again (I know we should).

One significant aspect of this experience is the feeling of effortlessness, of the body moving almost on its own without any need of conscious direction. When absorbed in movement there may even be what might be described as a loss of self, a feeling that, at least as a locus of thought, one hardly exists at all. And of course the best performances are those where one is not thinking about the steps at all but is rather fully immersed in the experience of moving itself. (Cole and Montero, 304)

There’s a phenomenological technique called “free imaginative variation,” the purpose of which is to help identify the essential core of some experienced object. One way to do this is to consider how adding to or subtracting from the object would alter its being perceived and meant as the object it is. If Cole and Montero had been better phenomenologists, they would have noticed that the feeling of effortlessness is not an essential characteristic. On the contrary, it is sometimes the very feeling of effort that gives us pleasure. Now, as to the movement overtaking us and needing no conscious directing, they could be on to something.

When I’m on my game, cooking, I bound around the kitchen, merrily swearing at my food, stirring four pots without a thought of the spoon, the room, the place, the time — and my mind is in a creative space, in the spice rack, in the garden, in the spinach, even. Beyond even immersion in the experience of moving, the moving carries itself out through me. It is no longer my own moving, that is, I am no longer moving myself, but the movement is moving me. Sometimes the movement demands more effort than I think I can give, and somehow do. And meanwhile, I’m cussing out the basil.

So, does the body “disappear” in these experiences, as Gallagher and Leder have suggested? Here, Cole and Montero miss Gallagher’s point. It’s not that the body fails to be present, it’s that it fails to be present in an objective way. It is no longer “the body,” but has become the movements themselves. 

bunnies (and phenomenological ontology)

 Lauren knit this object. What is this object? Why and how does it appear as this object? Phenomenologically, two things are going on here. First of all, my perceptual experience intends this object: it is the focus and the correlate of my conscious activity of perceiving. Secondly, my perceptual experience means this object: it is a specific, typical thing of a particular sort.

(1) As intended, this object is the synthetic unity of series of adumbrations, whose unity is achieved, mainly passively, by the contiguity, concatenation, internal referentiality (self-sameness) of the presentation of these adumbrations. It can appear as the one, single, object of several acts of conscious perception through its constitution as that same thing, through the harmonious, unbroken interconnection of perspectives.

(2) As meant, this object is far more complex. It is not merely a synthetic unity of perspectival perceptions, but also a specific thing — in this case, a thing called Walter Bernhard Bunny. That is to say, I do not perceive this thing as “plushy white soft fibrous blob” but as a stuffed knit representation of a bunny. (Possibly more remarkably, given the stylistic representation here, is that I can also recognize this as “Walter Bernhard Bunny.”)

The problem of normal and abnormal is raised significantly here. For, it is normal that I or anyone would (1) intend a selfsame thing through the harmonious unity of ongoing perception. It would be abnormal to fail to experience this synthetic unity; that failure would suggest that my consciousness or my senses are inhibited by something. But then, the big question in phenomenological ontology is, how much does (2) the meant object foretell that perceptual unity? That is, does to what extent does the unity of the intended object, as the correlate of a harmonious, ongoing series of perceptions, depend upon the meant object, as the typical thing recognized as something-or-other?

Imagine someone who has not seen a stuffed, knitted representation of a bunny. Even better, imagine someone who has not seen a bunny, either. What does this object appear to be, to that person? Clearly, not “a stuffed bunny,” and decidedly not “Walter Bernhard Bunny.” But is that somehow necessary for this object to appear as anything at all?

In my opinion, the phenomenology of constitution lets us down at this point. That kind of analysis is concerned with how meaning and objectivity are built up from subjective, indeterminate, individual percepts. It helps us account for how this bunch of stuff can come to mean “Walter Bernhard Bunny.” But it doesn’t let us know how much of the unity of the stuff depends on the meaning, and how much of it depends on the synthetic, passive synthesis of perception. That’s why Husserl said we needed genetic/generative phenomenology. Agreed. But that only tells me there’s another level of analysis to go: it does not tell me that the passive synthesis accounts for the appearance of “something” without there already being “Walter Bernhard Bunny,” or at least “stuffed, knitted bunny” to hold the object’s unity together.

This was Hume’s problem, wasn’t it? He asked his readers to suppose someone had seen every shade of blue but one. That one missing shade of blue could be analytically and imaginatively filled out, but the authentic and vivid idea of that shade could only come from experience. My question is whether, for this object to appear as a unity, I don’t need the experience (the cultural experience) of some things being stuffed knitted representations of bunnies.

If you think all that’s complicated, imagine what it would be like to try to unpack the cultural concept of “cute”!

zany madcap food post

My loveliest made kick-ass Russian food on Friday: mushroom, potato, and ground beef peroshki (the ground beef is local, grass fed - HAH!), Russian cole slaw, a cucumber salad. Yummers.

I had to double-down. So yesterday, while Lauren was knitting in public, I put together a little repast of my own.

A couple years ago, as part of my bi-annual innumerable-course, birthday blowout, I made a savory mock-tiramisu - turning construction of the dessert into a truffle and gruyère bizarro-world entrée. Over tiramisu at the best Italian restaurant in Turlock, Villa Napoli, I remembered that, and started thinking about reversing the field.

Hence, last  night's dessert: blueberry and cream cheese "ravioli" in lemon cream sauce.

In place of the ravioli pasta, I made pie crust, but deliberately mistreated it, so it built at least some gluten - and thus behaved a little more like pasta dough. The filling is blueberries, cream cheese, an egg, powdered sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cardamom, lemon juice, flour, and love. The sauce is lightly whipped cream, lemon zest, lemon juice, triple sec, sugar, vanilla, and more love. In place of grated parmigiano reggiano, the tops are sprinkled with grated white chocolate. In place of fresh ground pepper, that's more nutmeg and cinnamon. In place of chopped parsley, that's mint. And love.

If you leave me alone in a kitchen for long enough, something like this is going to happen. (That's not fair: I just about kicked Lauren out of the kitchen in order to do all this in secret.)

normal, abnormal, queer theory, and phenomenology

I figured out what I want to write this summer. Last year I did a ton of stuff on the phenomenological concept of normal, in part responding to Sara Ahmed. I'm going to try to turn that into some kind of reasonable essay, but more excitingly, I'm going to work on contrasting it with other ways of looking at normal.

So, here's a start. I hope some of this is intelligible. It's just notes on the fly.

--

I’m going to use the term “queer theory” to name a broad category of perspectives on numerous academic and scientific disciplines that are generally linked by a common interest in critiquing and undermining the cultural and political status quo, in which LGBTQ folks are, in the main, excluded. That’s pretty rough, but I don’t care.

Queer theorists often deploy the term heteronormativity to call out and problematize what they regard as the exclusionary and oppressive status quo with regard to sexual orientations, identities, practices, social and political expectations, etc. Implicit in the use of the term is a concept of normal, which is a central target of queer theory critique. To me, this requires a careful determination not only of a definition of normal, but also of to what ontological domain we assign a particular definition of normal. That is, what is normal in a cultural sense could be defined in terms of limits of social acceptability of traits, behaviors, etc. On this level, heteronormativity is losing a lot of ground in many areas of US culture and society: even to raise the question of same-sex marriage and have it seriously considered and debated shows this. This sense of normal is grounded in institutions that are at least somewhat dynamic.

What Sara Ahmed seems to do in Queer Phenomenology, in part, is to let this concept of normal into the domain of phenomenology of experience. Does it belong there? What is the phenomenological concept of normal? I believe it will turn out that there are several layers to it, and that there will be no causal relation, and at times only a resemblance, between the phenomenological and cultural concepts. Drawing from Husserl, I would say that the most basic phenomenological encounter with normality is perceptual, and that further investigation of perceptual experience will discover a pre-perceptual level of normality that, at least Husserl says, cannot really be investigated further.

One chief difference: heteronormativity has to be defended as a political and cultural practice, and is being defended today with vehemence and violence, because it is increasingly clear that it’s only based on an accrual of practices. Normal cultural interpretation of the practices in question has shifted rapidly, such that it is harder and harder to define what normal sexual orientation or identity is. Phenomenologically, I believe, we would have to say that it is normal that in our perception of the world we become attuned more toward some objects than others. In short, I don’t believe the so-called normal experience of sexual attraction could ever mean “heterosexual attraction” from the phenomenological standpoint. It would simply suggest that the normal experience of sexual attraction is to perceive certain others and objects as appealing to a person as a sexual subject.

The cultural concept of normal relates to a social and political determination of something or other as within bounds, of being included or accepted. The phenomenological concept of normal relates to an attempt to understand how it is that we experience anything at all as being something of a certain “kind” or having a certain meaning or value.

The two have something to do with one another. Merleau-Ponty discusses the history of human visual perception obliquely as he discusses art history, for instance: cultural norms make a difference in how we perceive. But that’s consistent with the phenomenological idea of perception as being a transcendence into the world. Our perception is of the world in two senses: it is a perception that takes in the world, and is a perception that is founded upon and needs the world to support its transcendence.

gender, orientation, normality

I'm jut getting into my summer philosophy reading list, on the broad themes of orientation and the "normal." In November, a couple friends and I are presenting a panel on orientation, disorientation, and being in and out of place. My own approach to it has come from reading the very good, and often delightfully exasperating book Queer Phenomenology, by Sara Ahmed.

So I'm paging through articles about experiences of orientation, disorientation, gender, sexuality, sex, and other stuff. I've just read a provocative piece from a while back by Kate Bronstein that includes some lists of questions having to do with the experience of gender (and she means gender, as differentiated from sex and sexuality and transexuality). They were appealing questions for me.

In part, what they made me consider, and remember, is the ways I - how shall I put this - the ways I don't do masculinity "right," in the culturally normative sense round these parts. There are some obvious things I don't do right, including insisting on wearing very bright colors, having long hair, sometimes in braids, and, as my loveliest says several times a week, being "an eight-year-old girl" (viz. the tiara and princess wand).

It's not that I consider myself particularly "liberated" from the constraints of compulsory masculinity and heteronormativity. It may seem odd, but I don't think I'm in the right position to judge that. All my life, I've been white and male, and the presuppositions about me that accrue to those characteristics have made my own gender, sexuality, and identity unproblematic. That is, I can always pass,* and I almost never have been subjected to assault because of someone else's perception of my gender, sexuality, or identity -- not since high school, at least.

It's obviously not only an academic philosophical interest driving me. A recent acronym groups people as LGBTQQ, where the first Q stands for queer, and the second for questioning. The lesson I've learned from reading queer theory, feminist philosophy, and related stuff, is that anyone who's self-aware really ought to be questioning, on one level or another. I forget who wrote it: Why don't we ask for an explanation of someone being "straight"? (This assumes, falsely, that everyone is either "straight" or non-"straight," and I'm not sure I can tell what that distinction means in the first place.)

This all means I'm a good philosopher. No one who is a good philosopher should take presumed definitions of sex, sexuality, gender, or identity for granted. They are some of the most violently defended pieties of our day - and there's nothing better for a philosopher to question than pieties.


--
* This is why I say "partner" or "mate" to refer to my loveliest, and also why it confuses my students. It's also why, despite having been "shotgunned" by the State of California, I avoid using the m word, the h word, or the w word.

no deal

For as long as I know, the California Faculty Association has bought time from the CSU administration, and used that time to allow faculty to do work for the union. Not any more.

After weeks of delays, we finally got word at Cow State Santa Claus that the chancellor is hereby forbidding campus administrations from allowing this arrangement any more. This is due to one of three possible motives: (1) the administration does not know how much stress and undue pressure CFA activists endure as faculty and union reps, or (2) the administration does not care, or (3) it is the express intent of the administration to stop CFA from being able to defend the contract, or (4) they hope to cause faculty activists grievous harm. I am inclined to believe 3 and 4.

I plan to change my class assignments to reflect the undue pressure that five courses, let alone additional unpaid work on campus for the university, let alone union work. I'm going to give my students less of my time, energy, and effort.

I'm also going to have to give less of my time and energy to faculty rights work, but I'm going to try not to reduce my effort. I haven't even begun to work out details of that.

on not going to Canada

Each of the last several years, my Loveliest and I have gone to a conference at the end of May in Canada. It's part of the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences, held each year, as thousands LC Canadian academics descend upon the same college town.

This year, I am scheduled to give commentaries on two papers, and to co-coordinate a workshop on phenomenology. I shall do none of these, at least, not in person.

We are instead holed up in Holland Ohio, visiting my folks. The reason for this is that my passport expired in February, which fact I did not know until packing my passport the day before our trip.

There followed several hours of searching for information on whether I could enter and exit Canada with an expired passport, what would happen if I couldn't, what options there might be for renewing a passport in 24 hours, and thinking up other options. The official rule seems to be the following: you may enter Canada with an expired passport and a valid driver license, but you cannot re-enter the US.

My pal Dave "Dave" Koukal called the border patrol and talked to an actual human border patrol officer, who said I could re-enter with an expired passport, driver license, and birth certificate. The state department begs to differ.

I considered this briefly. If I was not permitted to re-enter the States, I would likely languish in Canada waiting forthe US consulate to expedite a passport renewal. Expited renewal means two to three weeks. It wasn't worth the risk, not after I spent a night in the hospital following a panic attack.

Thus Plan B: fly to Detroit as planned, spend the evening and night with Dave and Sharon as planned, but then catch a lift to Holland and spend the week here, hanging out.

So far, so good. It was 97 here yesterday, rained this morning, is now 86, and tomorrow it will be 70. Lauren has an infected bug bite or sting. We're going to visit my brother , whose birthday is tomorrow. We're going to walk through the park I frequented as a lad, along an old Erie Canal split called Side Cut, to allow boat traffic into Maumee (my home town).

diagnosis: chest pain

Here's how I ended up spending 24 hours in Emanuel hospital.

Tuesday morning, after Lauren drove off to work the day in Modesto, I started my bike ride to campus, right around 10:15. Going up Del's Lane, I started to notice it was taking more effort than usual, riding into a gusty headwind. By the time I reached the philosophy department, I was sweating heavily and a bit more out of breath than normal (I usually ride at high intensity and velocity, as many on campus can attest).

After maneuvering my bike into my office, I mopped the sweat from my forehead and drank some water, cooling down as usual. I didn't feel right. My heart was still beating fast, and the tightness in my chest seemed worse. I sat, made final minor preparations for my 11 o'clock class, added a couple short paragraphs to something I've been writing, and then headed to class. I had to mop my brow again.

I walked over to my classroom, a hundred yards, if that, from my office, upstairs in the Bizzini building. The stairs were very hard to climb, and I was overheated when I got to my class.

Class was short. I had a spell of lightheadedness about halfway through, but while discussing the whodunnit portion of Aristotle's Ethics and students' term papers due on Thursday, I felt okay.

By the time I returned to my office, I was having trouble catching my breath, and the chest pain was still worse than before. I sat, trying to calm down, trying to let myself cool down, but it seemed like my heart was racing. I decided I needed help. I told our department assistant I was going to the health center, and set off for it.

I was unaware that, for liability reasons, the health center will only see students. I tried to say it was an emergency, and the receptionist referred me to same-day care across from the hospital. I said I couldn't get there, because I rode my bike. Eventually, the doctor on call saw me in an exam room, "as a courtesy," he said, and took vital signs. He did a lot of frowning, and said he thought I should go to ER.

While he called for an ambulance, a nurse took my blood pressure a second time, did some more frowning. The doctor came back in and told the nurse to give me an aspirin and a sublingual nitro tab.

It seemed like this was taking forever. Finally two campus police came in, and asked me, like the doctor had, what was going on, and my basic stats - name, age, etc. Then two firemen came in and did the same thing. They took my bp and asked more questions. Then the ambulance came, and the EMTs asked me the same questions all the others had, hooked me up to a portable EKG and an electronic bp monitor. They didn't frown, but they looked very concerned. I couldn't see the EKG, but when I glanced at the bp monitor, it said 155 over 110 or something like that, with a pulse of 105. I overheard them radio in that the EKG was irregular - I think.

Off to the ER. The EMT placed an IV line, gave me another aspirin, asked me about the nitro tab, declared that the health center's nitro was no longer potent, and so he gave me another.

We reached the ER, where a series of nurses, technicians, and doctors all came and went, asking exactly the same questions, frowning, and so on. At 1, I felt like I could try to call Lauren at work (at her former boss' house, actually), and proceeded to find that I didn't have the number. Eventually I reached Lauren, and she came down.

While she was on her way, a cardiologist arrived, looked at my EKG, and told me I was not going to die of a heart attack, because he was pretty sure it wasn't a heart attack. He wanted me to stay overnight, because, it turns out, to rule out heart attack definitively, you have to have three clean EKGs six hours apart, and three blood draws that test negative for a particular enzyme, also six hours apart. The cardiologist ordered a stress test and echo-sonogram thingy for this morning.

The pain in my chest had waned considerably, especially after Lauren arrived. By the time I was in a room, the pain only felt bad when someone asked me how the pain was.

This morning, after a good 3 hours of sleep, I reported for the stress test. The nurse got me all hooked up, and said she didn't like the bp reading at all: it was 137 over 95 or so. I told her I was anxious, have anxiety and depressive disorder, and that being around anything medical was my major phobia. Yet another doctor arrived. I did ten minutes on the treadmill, reaching 4.2 miles per hour (around my typical walking pace on the jaunt to school), at 14% incline, before I reported I was getting a little tired.

I got off, and within five minutes my bp was 130 over 79. I did not say, "told ya!"

The echo was just an echo.

We waited back in my room for another doctor to free me. I got to eat something. We watched an episode of "30 Rock" on my iPad (it was our "unchallenging, unlikely-to-mention-medical-stuff" choice for entertainment, plus neither of us had seen more than 2 minutes of any episode).

Whatever happened, it was not a heart attack. My official diagnosis is, in fact, "chest pain." I am 99% certain it was the worst panic attack I've ever had, and about 91% certain it was the worst physical experience I've ever had. The echo turned up a slightly dilated aorta they think I should check on yearly. Otherwise, aside from being a basket-case after this academic year, I'm fine.

And now all I have to do is grade 120 term papers, approximately 60 additional short papers, and write two conference paper commentaries, before we head off to Canada on 27 May.

blog post topix - where to start?

This morning the LA Times site offered me this: "State's swelling deficit will bring painful cuts. Where to start?"

This is a story I've had keen interest in, for obvious reasons. I thought, good, analysis, maybe an op-ed. Instead, the post repeats the basics of Jerry Brown's preview of the May revised budget doom, then asks readers to offer their no doubt marvelous ideas for cutting the state budget.

This is the genius of contemporary capitalism in capsule form: paying subscribers are now providing the content they read from the LA Times site. (It's also another brilliant tool for undermining information exchange and giving social approval to the uninformed opinion of what Schütz called "the man in the street.") Eventually, the LA Times won't need to hire reporters, editorial writers, editors, or anybody else but technical support staff!

Interesting concept. So, readers, let me know what topics should be covered in this space in future posts! Increase the chances your post idea will be selected by writing it yourself!

summer reading

The last three years, I've had a great time reading and writing during the summer. I think I've learned a lot, and developed some intuitions into real insights. The way it has worked is that I gather a reading list during the academic year, of anything that comes up related to some glimmer of an idea I have. This year, it hasn't worked out so well, because it has been so exhausting and crappy. But I do have a couple things on the agenda.

Assuming a Body, by Gayle Solomon, a transsexual. The book is about her experiences as understood from the standpoint of philosophical thought about embodiment.

The Transgender Studies Reader.


Transgender Migrations, edited by a colleague on campus, Tristan Cotten, who is cool.

White Coat, Black Hat, a muck-raking book about the business of medicine, which will make me feel sick.

The Body, by Donn Welton. Last summer, I came to the conclusion that the word "the body" is already a fetish, and that even "embodiment" is troublesome. So I have an agenda about this one.

Wanna read some Gramsci, maybe some Fanon.

The last few summers my reading has had a very clear direction. Other than sex and gender, I don't seem to have a direction. And it's a little disturbing to me how little phenomenology is on the agenda.

Maybe that's good. I'm moving outside my intellectual comfort zone, and although that means I will likely have less chance of generating some kind of publishable or conferenceable paper, I could learn more as a result. As I wrote a while back, since I'm among the tenuous-track faculty, projects are less important than ways of life.

the end of semester blues, sorta

It's finally getting close to the end of this wretched semester and academic year. Some nice things happen at the end of a semester, and I've needed nice things lately for reasons I won't go into, to avoid ranting.

One nice thing is last teaching days, and the relief that provides. Another are the rituals of closing shop - clearing out the inbox, filling the recycling bin with obsolete memos and old papers, the final faculty meetings.

Far better are the lovely exchanges of appreciation. It's amazing how much it means to me to hear that my course was significant, helpful, interesting, or inspiring. I'm collecting a few of those already. I have two students this semester in a GE class who have previously taken another GE class with me. I've seen them as first year students and now seniors. They deliberately chose my class to complete their upper division GE requirement, because of their good experience in the lower division course. They've recently let me know that.

I've also received unsolicited, unexpected, and much needed expressions of appreciation from faculty I represent in the California Faculty Association. I do a lot of work for faculty, and I nonetheless get a lot of flak, much of it illogical, about my representation and advocacy.

It's bittersweet. I have regrets, I made mistakes, I have frustrations, but I also have successes, victories, and joys.

(Yep, I had joys this semester. It just hasn't seemed that many in the face of all the negativity.)

Academic Year 2011-2012: A Year That Will Soon Be Flushed Down The Toilet.

several unconnected observations

Last year, CFA bought 6 units of my workload, 3 for being lecturer rep, and 3 for being a faculty rights rep. At the end of the year, I told the others I didn't think I'd earned the units for faulty rights. I've earned them this year. Shit, I've earned them in the last two weeks.

 The Filthadelphia Flyers lost to the New Jersey Devils today, and are out of the NHL playoffs. I'm ecstatic. Schadenfreude is a terrible emotion, but what the hell. BLLLLPBPBHH!!!!

 I upgraded my iMac to Lion, had to update MS Word to the 2011 version, and suddenly my fonts went missing. They just came back. I did nothing to cause this. All I've done with fonts lately is copy my font book to a flash drive to move them into the new MacBook Pro California bought me to perform sedition with. I have concluded that MS products are built on a software platform that would have been subject to capital punishment in 1600's Salem.

 The semester will not die. I have not yet decided whether it is a zombie, a vampire, the devil, a rock, Bermuda grass, or fascism.

random items

I'm reading an article by Lewis Lapham in the May Harper's. Lapham used to be the magazine's formidable editor in chief. Under Lapham, Harper's was icily brilliant almost every issue, in my opinion. I miss his voice and I think the mag has slipped rather a lot since his retirement. His article is on the peculiar American trait of historylessness, which provides the basis for our political discourse's constant doomsaying and constant nostalgia. Hep stuff.

I'm also listening, as I have done a lot lately, to Chopin solo piano works. I have come at last to the conclusion that Frederic Chopin is not allowed in the house. I mean: "Funeral March"? Are you kidding me? (Lauren didn't even bother to point out that he's long dead, this morning. She sort of chuckled.)

Today I am going to attempt to read a "work of philosophy" by a French "collective" active in the 1990s. There's a guest lecture on campus on Wednesday about them. I am deeply suspicious.

I am also going to try to read one of the papers I have to comment on in Canada in June. This one is on the McGurk effect. No, I'm not making that up.

But what I really think I ought to do is get back to writing something about porn.

monsters

I'm reading Merleau-Ponty's essay "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence." He suggests that a history of painting that seeks to reveal a Reason underlying its history would be a kind of "Hegelian monstrosity." Merleau-Ponty criticizes Hegel's apparent accumulation of the totality of philosophy or of history, and his presumption to say affirmatively what that totality means to say. Hegel, he says, is a museum, in that the works collected there are converted, are perverted, by their juxtaposition and placement within walls, into an inevitable history dictated by a monstrous Reason or Spirit.

Yet later, he seems to suggest that language is such a monster. For instance:

The transparency of spoken language, that fine clarity of word which is only sound and that meaning which is only meaning,... and its would-be power of recapitulating and enclosing a whole process of expression in a single act -- are these not simply the highest point of a tacit and implicit accumulation of the same sort as painting? (Signs, 76)

Later, he tells us that the ambiguity of all literature, of all language really, is the price we pay, "that is, a conquering language which introduces us to unfamiliar perspectives instead of confirming our own" (77). This "conquering language" is also "the presumption to a total accumulation" (81) -- that is, an accumulation of meaning and of words.

It's as though, when we speak, while we simply engage in the act of speaking, at the same time (and indeed, for it to be possible for us to say anything), we are conquered by the tacit language, the presumption of a total accumulation.

The key difference is that, unlike the Hegelian monstrosity, language only pretends to total accumulation, and what makes it obvious that it is only a pretense, is ambiguity. Nonetheless, the tacit language is monstrous, conquers us in our attempts to speak, and aims to accumulate all words and all meaning. We forget this every time we speak, Merleau-Ponty claims, because every time we speak we intend to say exactly what we mean to say.

The tacit language is a silent monster, or else a monstrous silence, lurking beneath "our" language, every time we speak.

performativity, tenure, and administrative power

Reading excerpts of The Postmodern Condition with my class, I was reminded of Lyotard's claim that the drive toward system efficiency has gaps - spots where the efficiency criterion creates inefficiencies. I tend to think of the lack of content in education as one of those efficiency gaps. From the system's standpoint, my job is to generate enrollment. Beyond that, what I actually do in my classes is irrelevant.

So, I might teach a fairly standard curriculum on Professional Ethics or Logic or whatever, or I might spend almost all of class time on radical political thought, leading several of my students to become loud activists against exploitation. Oops! The performativity criterion created the potential for counter-performative discourse.

There's another area where this is happening. Tenure has long been identified as a source of inefficiency. Tenure is a check on the maximization of arbitrary administrative power. Faculty with tenure are supposed to have a right to due process with regard to decisions to terminate them. If this is true, then administrators would have to invest resources in the effort to fire tenured faculty they want fired. An obvious solution to this problem is not to hire tenure-track faculty, and indeed, this is exactly what university administrations have done for 35 or 40 years.

Tenuous-track faculty have no due process rights worth speaking of. Perma-temped faculty are fully commensurable units of managerial power, and hiring them in lieu of tenure-track faculty has the added effect of minimizing the number of tenured faculty who offer any institutionally-protected resistance to that power. From one standpoint, this could also look like an erosion of protection of academic freedom, on the hypothesis that tenure protects academic freedom.

The problem with that interpretation is that, under performativity, tenure does not protect academic freedom at all, since in order for a faculty member to earn tenure, that faculty member must produce according to the standard of performativity. The research areas must be sanctioned by performativity, the teaching and other work the faculty member does must meet efficiency standards, etc. No faculty member has academic freedom.

The perma-temping of university faculty continues apace. But while this is going on, the real performativity standard applied to university "teaching" - generating enrollment - creates the very spaces needed for the subterranean discourses of dissent. This is because, from the system efficiency standpoint, education has no content - or, rather, the content is irrelevant. The faculty in the best position to produce these discourses are the faculty the system considers most efficient as "teachers."

Of course, we're doomed anyway, but the tenuous-track faculty are in a much better position with regard to that, too, since we have never imagined we were anything but doomed, while our unfortunate tenure-track colleagues dangerously misrecognize their own positions and roles, and waste so much of their energies insisting upon academic standards for managerial decisions that can no longer be relevant.

do I work hard?

I frequently use my own career and experience to illustrate issues in my Professional Ethics class. Today, after a discussion of ethical problems in academic publication and conflict of interest, a student approached me and asked about my own record of academic publication. (I have had a handful of run-ins with questionable publication practices, not surprisingly.)

What he asked, in fact, was how he could find the things I've published, so he could read them. I replied that he might not find them all that accessible, since they are, after all, academic publications (which is an ethical issue in its own right), but if he was really interested he could search for them. He mentioned Google. Hmm.*

Anyway, it led me to think about my CV and how up-to-date it might be. I checked it out this evening. There are things missing, and I'm editing it, but what this brief exercise has really made me think about is my record of academic and scholarly achievement, and what it means.

I've presented around 40 papers at academic conferences. Almost all of them have been international conferences of philosophical scholarship or phenomenological investigation. Is that a lot?

I've had several peer-reviewed publications. Only three or four have been peer-reviewed articles in academic philosophy journals. The rest have been in little off-beat publications I thought were cool, like the late, lamented Journal of Mundane Behavior. I guess that's pretty good, considering where I work and what the mission of my university is.

I've served on a dozen university and college committees, served on the academic senate for 10 years, and have been a peer reviewer for several conferences, and editor of conference proceedings, a board member of a couple scholarly societies, etc. etc. etc.

It looks like a lot of work, all listed up like that.

--

* The "Hmm" is due in some small part to the fact that, if he actually does look me up, he might find not only this blog, but a reference to my Journal of Mundane Behavior article on the phenomenology of pornography, or some of the other weird things I've published. He might also find some of the terrible things that people have, no doubt, said about me on teh Interwebs.

titles

In a random fit of public service, I present, for the edification of whoever stumbles by, the basic formats for titles of academic publications in the humanities. If you are looking to start, or advance, a career in academia, you would be well advised to adopt one of the following for each and every paper, article, chapter, or book title.

As is well established by this late date, the humanities is our culture's last, best bastion of the defense - nay, the celebration - of diversity. The diversity of your opinion is sure to be well-received and given a fair and honest hearing, provided you adhere strictly to the exceptionless, unavowed, unwritten rules. To help you along, here are the officially accepted title types.

Word, Word, Word
This looks especially good in Times New Roman centered on the 10th line of a cover page. Do not get cute and put this title in a larger font. 12pt TNR has passed the test of time. Besides, no use calling undue attention to yourself. You'll only make yourself look uppity.

Word and Word
Also good, and also translates well to Palatino Linotype.

Adjective Noun
(See also: Adjectival Phrase Noun)

Most commonly used as for books, this title format juxtaposes two different parts of speech for added interest. Handy for incongruous or non-sequitir titles that drive sales up. (Who wouldn't buy a copy of Lithe Feminism? Or Reconstituted Community?)

These title types have spread through academia, predominantly in the US, by way of the insidious influence of so-called Continental philosophy on lit crit and other quasi-disciplines.

Pithy Non-self-explanatory Phrase:
Lengthy, Verbose Explanatory Phrase that Entirely Defeats the Aesthetic Elegance Effects of the Pithy Non-self-explanatory Phrase, or that Even Conflicts with the Basic Thrust of the Preceding Phrase, Such that the Pithiness of the First Phrase is Revealed as a Failed Attempt at Hipness
This tremendously successful title type is particularly prized in cultural studies. A remarkable feature of this title format is that the catchy first phrase need not relate intelligibly to the content of the text. It could probably be chosen entirely at random, so long as it makes it seem like you're going to say something provocative or amusing. You don't actually have to be able to do either! And the long subtitle gives you the opportunity to say what the content really is, or to make an assertion that you will not defend in the text.