Learn or else

I wanted to call attention to this insightful post on coercive technology at a very good blog, SpeEdChange. The author, Ira Socol, is an expert on instructional technology and accessibility.

Real democracy

What would real democracy be like?

To me this is an odd question. In the United States we have a real democracy – let’s go see what it’s like. There’s another one in Brazil, Athens had one, the Swiss are an interesting case, Zimbabwe’s is particularly conflictual, and so on. What an ideal democracy ’should’ be like is a different question and maybe, once we see how the real ones work, not a very involving one — in the same way working out the aerodynamics of flying horses is not very involving.

Democracy alive and well at the Justice Department?

In an earlier post I remarked that one of the ordinary ways democracy works is to enable winners to arrange things to their liking. This is, um, the point of winning.

There are, however, debatable limits to how far parties in power can be allowed to politicize the ordinary functions of government. It’s pretty obvious that you shouldn’t get or not get a driver’s license based on whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Naderite, Fascist or Communist. The question is whether you can drive straight, not whether you can think straight, pace my earlier thoughts on getting clear. It’s slightly less obvious, but analogous, that you shouldn’t get the job distributing drivers’ licenses on such a basis either.

(By the way, this is obvious only in the context of ‘modern’ formally-organized states based on some kind of abstract popular consent. In ‘traditional’ client-patron systems like feudalism or the Mafia you do, in fact, only get things because of your affiliation with groups and networks. These systems work very well and are by no means completely displaced by formal organization, as the current case illustrates.)

The Department of Motor Vehicles is just one of many agencies of government that perform technical functions according to rules and procedures, regardless of what party is in political power. Politicizing those agencies would – and does, where it happens – entail massive discontinuities and disruptions of ordinary service every election, as the new rulers throw out the old cronies and the new cronies learn on the job. Think of Kenya, Louisiana and Zimbabwe here. Meanwhile, you’d have to offer political (or other) favors in order to get your sewer hooked up or your taxes refunded. (Yes, yes, I know.) As galling as it may be, the very best thing about the horrible bureaucratic impersonality of the modern democratic government is that it’s not ‘who you know’ that should get things done, and eventually does.

This is a principle that the Bush administration has been notoriously unclear on, most visibly in appointments to positions and policy enforcement in the Justice Department (DoJ). I won’t rehearse previous instances, but a new one popped up in the paper today (AP reporting, I will not be quoting) and it’s kinda interesting. It concerns the hiring of new law-school grads for summer internships and ‘Honors Program’ jobs. As the former spouse of a top law graduate, I know how desirable and competitive these things can be as career steps. There’s a lot of incentive to parse the criteria, which are formally supposed to be politically-neutral accomplishments like grades, quality of law school, clerkships, and other experience.

One way to get at this would be to wonder how neutral those neutral criteria are. The privileges of group affiliation get packed down into life chances and institutional access in some pretty complicated and shady ways. Bracketing those questions for now and just looking at the numbers in terms of political affiliation, two examples are given in the article I read. In 2002, 911 (wow) applied for Honors jobs. 100 were identified by the screening committee as liberal, and 80 of those were denied. Out of 46 applicants identified as conservative, only four were denied. In 2006 the numbers were: 602 applicants, 150 liberal, 83 of whom denied; 28 conservative, five of whom denied.

You can eyeball the percentages and come up with the obvious conclusion that makes the story: a far greater proportion of liberal applicants were denied than conservative applicants. It’s possible that this is because liberals tend to be knuckleheads and this is reflected in their resumes, but the story assures us that highly qualified liberal applicants were denied while lesser qualified conservative applicants were accepted. OK, let’s accept that the report’s sources do a better job of assessing credentials than the screening committee. So apparently the effective variable is not the quality of the candidates but their political affiliations. Given that this is a formally depoliticized area of government, it looks really bad.

I’m stuck on the raw numbers, however. I’m not at all confused by the large remainder of applicants who had no discernable political affiliation; this matches nicely with the general apolitical drift of the people I partied with when my ex-wife was in law school. My impression was that a lot of those were essentially conservos in their vague unreflective commitment to laissez-faire individualism and the pursuit of personal wealth, as were the majority of the lawyers I partied with once my ex-wife began her career. Then you had the fringe ideologues on both sides, who made the parties more fun and who are presumably those who screened as liberal or conservative at the DoJ.

My impressions cover only one top-twenty law school and two metropolitan corporate law crowds, demographics that are both skewed conservative for reasons I presume are obvious, but those are the kind of people who are also live candidates for fancy post-grad internships. So why were there from two to six times as many liberals as conservatives among the applicants?

I don’t know. One possibility is interpretation bias in the political screening: it might have taken less ideological purity to be branded a liberal than to be anointed a conservative. Another possibility is in the nature of the ideology: laissez-faire individualists are not much devoted to collective political struggle, while bleeding heart do-gooders are, so the traces of their politics show up differently. Along the same lines, activist liberals may be more attracted to the good they imagine they can do in a government job, while conservatives may disproportionately zero right in on the law firm track to get their careers and earnings moving. Then again, conservatives are more associated with law and order, so I’m a bit surprised they aren’t swarming to the DoJ. Figuring this stuff out would take far more nuanced categories of analysis than ‘liberal’ vs. ‘conservative’.

All of this is background to the point that leapt out at me, which again is just the raw disparity of numbers. Yikes! If I’m a conservative running the screening for entry to the justice pipeline I’ve got to be horrified that the candidate pool is so politically skewed, just as a liberal would be if the positions were reversed. In fact, in these circumstances turning a blind eye to politics in the selection process would produce a dramatic overabundance – 2X to 6X – of liberals in the agency, in effect politicizing it. I would expect any good democratic citizen to be appalled by such a blatant violation of the spirit of the laws, and to take affirmative action to correct it. Fortunately, between the screeners’ frontier justice and the current backlash, this seems to be the process that’s underway here.

Public relations

“We must socially stimulate ourselves to place at our own disposal the material out of which our own selves as well as those of others must be made” (G.H. Mead, “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness,” Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck).

In a series of posts Larval Subjects has just discussed disgust with the blog medium, the frustration produced by rude and arrogant blog commenters, democracy and perverse internet egalitarianism, and upsetting mismatches between rhetorical effectiveness and the truth. As usual the reflections over there are first-rate, but in a very different theoretical idiom and emotional register than mine. LS will get where he gets without my kibbitzing. So instead of being impertinent there I’m going to address these questions here and attempt to show what a different way of looking at them might yield.

To my mind these posts are all related, and what relates them is relationships. Specifically, LS like many other people I know is disappointed by the distance of real relationships from ideal ones. Blogger to commenter, internet user to user, all of us to democracy, humans to the truth. In each case there’s a hope for something special to happen, a desirable better way to do things, and a letdown with what we actually get. Underwear and socks for Christmas again. Although we’re outside my way of thinking about things, I do see the point. In each of those spheres of relationship things are not as they ’should’ be.

After the usual philosophical training in high idealisms of various kinds and only Marx to fall back on, what a treat it was for me to find George Herbert Mead. Mead does not torture himself and others with shoulds. There is no ideal against which the real is being compared and always, always found wanting — although he does explain why people tend to think that way. Mead starts with actual relationships and stays there. His abstractions come from the pragmatics of pattern and repetition. They are symbols or they are habits. People create and share abstractions — including a sense of self — as tools to keep track of and assign significance to the interactive networks and assemblages that they encounter in their lives. This process is his focus.

LS begins to entertain an idea along these lines when he considers Feuerbach’s view that, as LS puts it, “we project our highest aspirations and desires onto another being, but then experience these qualities not as existing in and from us, but in something else. God is thus an alienated and distorted image of our own essence or nature.” Right, and not just God. Notice, however, how LS has subverted the social-relational drift of Feuerbach (as Feuerbach himself does with the static concept of ’species-being’) by smuggling in the language of ‘desire’ and ‘essence’. Later in the train of thought this re-idealizing reading would be better foreclosed by Marx and Durkheim, both of whom had similar ideas of how abstractions happen in the course of real social relationships, the former in his discussions of religion and fetishization, the latter in his analysis of the stability of collective representations compared to individual perceptions and explanation of religion as societies representing themselves to themselves. “Therefore the collective ideal that religion expresses is far from being due to some vague capacity innate to the individual; rather, it is in the school of collective life that the individual has learned to form ideals” (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912, trans. Karen E. Fields).

Marx was coping with Young Hegelians, utopian socialists and liberal political economists; Durkheim was trying to sociologize Kant while detheologizing the positivistic sociology of Saint-Simon and Comte; and both were thoroughly steeped in the western philosophical tradition, so the social relationality of thought is both demonstrated and discursively obscured in their work — as N Pepperell is showing brilliantly in Marx’s case. As much as I loves me the Marx and Durkheim, and can get what I need from them, there’s a lot of digging through the cluttered attic involved with finding any particular useful thing. Sure, I’ll do it if I have to. But what I like about Mead is that although he knows his philosophy, he started out as a railroad surveyor and has a nice direct way of laying his track right to the point in short, pithy essays. In fact, his writings are a little like blog posts.

The reason Mead didn’t write more, and more at length, is interesting. He was a very good teacher. He devoted his thought and energy to getting his points across to his students and colleagues, who were his first and realest audiences. To his fans’ benefit and dismay he did not apparently have any strong vocation to talk at more abstract audiences through a book. This conversation right now with these people right here was the one he cared about. There’s no platonism at all in Mead, no inclination to think of the world we live in as less than fully real, ‘phenomenal’ in relation to some more perfectly and enduringly real noumenon behind the curtain of our lamentable animal perceptions. My grad advisor David Luft taught me to take pride in being simpleminded, which was a wicked subtle joke he told on himself and the philosophers upstairs. Mead tells the same sort of joke in his essay conversations with his imagined audience.

For Mead “Our thinking is an inner conversation in which we may be taking the roles of specific acquaintances over against ourselves, but usually it is with what I have termed the ‘generalized other’ that we converse, and so attain to the levels of abstract thinking, and that impersonality, that so-called objectivity that we cherish” (G. H. Mead, “The Genesis of the Self and Social Control,” Selected Writings, ed. Andrew J. Reck). This is the ‘truth’ of real interactions in real communities, that gets its objectivity from being shared and effective. Roots of standpoint theory are here (going back to Hume, of course, or forward to, for example, Sandra Harding’s “strong objectivity”), without the metanarrative of heroism and villainy that’s usual in more contemporary versions. On this view rhetoric is not something opposed to truth, but a process communities use to work truth out.

Selves are the product of an ongoing series of feedback loops, to which at first we bring only basic biological dispositions to mood and attention, with localities gradually defined as ‘environments’ in a process of experimental differentiation, and specific others in relation to whom roles are worked out and abstracted into worldviews and ‘generalized others’. (Most of Freud’s developmental theory is in that last sentence, without the reification of accidents of Freud’s own culture.) It is by ‘taking the role of the other’, getting a feel for the game (as Mead, Wittgenstein and Bourdieu would all put it), that the self is differentiated in particular and then abstracted symbolic space. As an explanation of Mead this gesture may be enough. Because I don’t have a specific interlocutor for this post other than the existentially thin ‘Larval Subjects’ persona, I don’t know how much detail to go into here. Wouldn’t want to be a schooler. Comments would help, if you’ve made it this far.

So why do we blog? Lots of reasons, of course, or perhaps lots of rationalizations for the same reasons. But in terms of the contrast I’ve set up there are two contradictory possibilities. The first is the search for an ideal audience as against the disappointing real audiences who inhabit our real lives. Students, colleagues, friends, etc. who in their human, all too human ways come to their conversations with us with differing standpoints produced by differing self-formation processes in differing interactive histories. It’s hard work continuously reorienting ourselves in real time to others whose roles we have not yet taken and who may not give us much to go on to do that. Much easier to close off this real interaction and search for a more perfect one with ideal others who will echo, confirm and amplify the generalized other our thoughts already embody. I think this is what LS means by ‘democracy’ and as he says, as such it doesn’t exist. In this sense he is right that the academy is where eggheads go to protect themselves from democracy. The internet then turns out to be a place where that many more disappointingly imperfect others lurk.

The other reason to blog is to have (more of) these difficult conversations in which our selves are literally destroyed and recreated in dynamic interactions with really other others. Here self is not stabilized by being closed off from further (exhausting, painful) interaction but metastabilized by embedding in networks and assemblages of relationships. I realize this is a bit of a salto mortale, especially for selves whose interactive history is confusing or oppressive. But I agree with Mead that this is what it means to really think. So this is why I and perhaps some others blog, as Mead suggested in the opening quote.

Freud and the Freudtones

This is an underbrush clearing post.

I’m not sold on Freud.

This agnosticism is not entirely the product of ignorance. I’ve read the Introductory Lectures, Three Essays, and Origin & Development; Future of an Illusion; and Totem and Taboo. Civilization and Its Discontents was a formative moment in my development as a critical thinker, and I found some nice things to say about Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in my dissertation. My field is modern European intellectual history, so, you know, Freud’s in there.

In grad school my advisor was David Luft, who was great to me and influential. Freud is important to David, whose work is on Musil, Weininger, Doderer, and eros in the Central European fin-de-siècle (in which he works to decenter Freud). David was a student of H. Stuart Hughes at Harvard before Hughes moved to UC San Diego so that he could teach with his wife Judith. Other notable Harvard Hughesites include Martin Jay, Dominick LaCapra and John Toews. By the time I got to UCSD Hughes was emeritus and sporadic, but I did TA for him, he took a generous interest in my work, and as far as I know mine was the last committee he sat on.

Along with Peter Gay, who wrote heaps and bunches about Freud, H. Stuart Hughes was perhaps the preeminent postwar American historian of modern European intellectual history. And maybe even more than Gay it seemed obvious to him that Freud was right about everything. Here’s how Hughes put it in Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930, probably his most famous and influential book: “Obviously the towering figure of the era was Sigmund Freud.” Really? Just like that? This baffled me until I realized that for that generation of northeastern American brahmin intellectuals, Freud was indeed right about everything. Distant, judgmental fathers, castrating and/or vaporous mothers, anxious hypersexualization, the works. Last I checked, that history remains to be written. Anyway, this doesn’t describe my childhood (thanks Mom and Dad); but one way or another I’ve gotten a pretty fair exposure to Freud.

My familiarity with various strands of freudianism is more patchy. I’ve read almost no Jung, more Reich than most people (Mass Psychology of Fascism, not the orgone stuff), the usual Erikson, some Horney. Beauvoir, if she counts. Fanon. Nancy Chodorow’s Reproduction of Mothering was illuminating at a certain point in my feminist education and is still useful to trouble some of the more simplistic just-so stories about big bad patriarchy.

By the way, in North Oakland I lived for several years in an apartment across the street from Dr. Chodorow’s practice, which did not seem especially active.

If I’d seen Nancy Chodorow out my window, here’s what she might have looked like.

In an odd juxtaposition Green Day’s offices were a couple doors down, again with little actual sign of them. Yet I’m sure I was somehow enriched by these spectral proximities.

If I’d seen Green Day out my window, here’s what they might have said.

My encounter with Lacan, some of it favorable, is entirely vicarious; Irigaray ditto. I’ve only read snatches of Zizek, who I did see speak at a conference of desperate and adoring leftist academics a few years ago. (He was charming, droll and took a long, entertaining time to say very little. I was hooking up with Rachel at that conference and we laughed about him together, so there’ll always be a warm place in my heart.)

It’s not at all that I find nothing of value in Freud and the Freudtones. Quite the contrary, there’s all sorts of good stuff in there — the same way there’s all sorts of good stuff at a flea market, buried underneath heaping piles of junk. Sometimes when I’m in the right mood it gives me a lot of pleasure to pick through junk to find special treasures. In just this way I have over a thousand lps — great old rock, blues, jazz, folk, and some treasured junk like Stuffy and his Frozen Parachute Band and Jake and the Family Jewels — most of them culled from moldy stacked boxes full of Mantovani, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Don Ho, South Pacific soundtracks. (It’s thanks to a happy accident of that really awful vulgar orientalist popular taste that copies of Getz/Gilberto were so readily available.)

Although I actually enjoy the album I could happily go the rest of my life without ever seeing another copy of “Whipped Cream and Other Delights,” but here it is in all its gorgeous sexist glory:

Anyway, all of the stuff I find good in Freud and the Freudtones, especially the stuff about the formation of self in relation to others/the Other, I am able to find in other places (notably pragmatism/symbolic interactionism), unburdened with mold and Mantovani, fanciful speculative drives and cheesy circular defenses (‘denial’). It may well be that’s the very stuff that gives the Freuds their special rich, musty atmosphere for some people and I won’t try to deny that appeal! A sincere Jungian can atmosphere me under the table any day.

Price to pay

I need some help. I woke up this morning with a song by Abra Moore (formerly of Poi Dog Pondering) stuck in my head – “Four Leaf Clover,” perhaps you know it. (Sorry for the mere link, the embed function is apparently turned off at youtube.) It’s a good song if I’m in a pop mood, so that’s not the problem.

There’s a recurring line in which she sings “It’s got the best of me. It’s such a price to pay.” The problem is that sometime this morning before I woke up my brain turned this into “It’s got the best of me. It’s such a prize toupee’ –” and that’s what’s stuck in my head. Mainly I need to DO something with this notion of a prize toupee’ that gets the best of one.

Since Praxis has me all imprinted on Kliban at the moment I’m imagining a cartoon of a guy sweating under the weight of a big pouffy Elvis wig with a blue ribbon on it, and the caption “A Heavy Prize Toupee’.”

Any thoughts?

Executive summaries

At this terrific thread over on Praxis about the emergence of modernity a’ la N Pepperell we are, in effect, torturing poor NP, who’s out of the country on a grand European tour and indisposed to comment up to the customary high NP standard. Lucky Praxis gets to talk with NP personally (I hope pints are involved) but this does the rest of us little good so the torture is moochle.

In defense and as usual NP would like to say everything all at once and nothing less will really do. Right, that’s true. NP is one of those people who rewards further reading, so something is always being lost in the shorter versions. I may or may not reward further reading, but I imagine I do, so I’m very sympathetic to this argument.

There’s this famous Borges fragment, “On Exactitude in Science,” in which an empire decides that no map of lesser exactitude than complete 1:1 correspondence will adequately represent it. So their map is the same size as the country, which might well be described as, ahem, cumbersome. In the inevitable scaling down of maps to make them actually useful, exactitude is indeed lost. The map is not the territory (this is a particularly good wikipedia entry).

I’m pretty happy with my current job, for many reasons not least of which that it took me three years on the market to get it. (For historians of modern Europe in the U.S. in any given year there are about 20 tenure-track openings and upwards of 200 well-qualified candidates for them. As an intellectual/cultural historian without a country specialization I was automatically out of play for at least half of those.) One of the absolutely essential and decisive skills I picked up during that time was the trick of self-vulgarization.

At the height of my powers (I’m rusty now) I could explain what I was up to in one sentence, one paragraph, one page and three pages, in addition to the twenty and two hundred page versions that got me the doctorate; in writing and orally; in versions tailored to experts, non-experts, Rotary clubs, alumni picnics, numbskulls, and administrators. I could do each with a straight face, without apology, as if what I’d said was fully adequate — which it was, for the purpose at hand.

At first, this all made me die a little inside. So much essential detail lost. I was enough of a brat about it to not even be a serious candidate until my second year out. By then, refashioning myself to look qualified to teach pickup courses in philosophy and sociology at local schools in the Bay area had worn me down and wised me up. Having to find a way to slip some tiny fraction of what I knew into the brains of students who had no foundation and all sorts of other fish to fry was the last straw.

People with very interesting things to say always have more to say. But whether they do it themselves or someone else does it for them, it’s going to get boiled down into the one sentence, one paragraph, one page, and three page versions. And those are the versions that will get out there into the world. Because life is short, we’ve all got places to go, and the map is not the territory.

Hot off the easel

Two new paintings by Rachel. These are for a show at the Fayetteville NC Museum of Art.

Rachel is interested in old buildings that have built up layers of use over the years and are nearing the end of their run. They’re about the sedimentation and erosion of ways of life. These pieces are on panel, with a substrate of old guano tobacco fertilizer sacks. The skeleton of the image itself is transferred, stripped digital photography (involving a whole bunch of steps Rachel has adapted or invented); she paints with various degrees of transparency on top of that so that there are all these spectral layers in the finished work. It’s really neat stuff.

Commenting on Praxis

I just left a comment like this:

on Praxis’ blog (in an otherwise very very interesting discussion of N Pepperell’s ideas about the emergence of modernity), and not only was he gracious about it, but he kindly prompted Kliban.

Rescue

Rachel recently got an inquiry about buying this painting from a couple who were married in the gallery in which it and its siblings were showing. Their wedding photos and video are full of her images, so here’s a sweet memento hookup that might happen. Music swells, eyeballs moisten.

In another dimension the connection is a little more odd, yet apt. This series of work is called “Rescue.” Rachel found a very old lifesaving manual and appropriated/repurposed some of its images and text as part of the layering in these canvases (there’s also antique player-piano paper and a whole bunch of other stuff going on, some of which you can see above). Her theme is good intentions, miscommunication, and hurting the ones we love, which is just about right for a lot of marriages but maybe not what most newlyweds have in mind.

The central point of the lifesaving manual is that when you go to rescue someone who’s distressed, you probably need to beat them up and disable them first or they’ll drag you down with them. So there are all these images of struggling and grappling and submission holds and whatnot. Both people want the same thing, but at least one is working at cross purposes and the way through is pretty unappealing. At this point the metaphor is eerily capturing some significant fraction of my interpersonal relations, with me on both sides at one point or another.

There’s a real danger that the peril of one will become the demise of two. My dad was reflecting on the “pacification techniques” he learned in his Red Cross lifesaving school in relation to his own indifferent swimming skills. It’s a nice image that when we’re floundering we would be rescued by some super-competent, patient and gentle hero. More likely it’s whoever’s handy, and they’re just barely making it themselves.