Feelings … whoa-whoa-whoa feelings

This is a crosspost of a comment on the relation of feelings to analysis I just made at scatterplot, in a fallout post from the dead ape / racism cartoon discussion previously mentioned. People there seem to be getting sick of the conversation, whereas I think that after all the predictable posturing and bad reading that basically boiled down to the narcissism of small differences, we’re finally starting to get somewhere.

I’m posting here to get this archived for my own reference, to add some orienting links, and because it captures pithily some things I often think I think. I won’t be sure I think them until they’ve passed through conversation with intelligent others. As I said there, this is informed by a mid-longish lifetime of both trampling upon and elaborately cherishing the feelings of various others. Quote:

I heard an old (Black) guy talking about conditions of work once. He was bemused by the younger generation and put it this way: “Used to be, guys just worked. Now guys got feelings.”

I’m with just working. This position is properly called stoicism, a venerable and coherent philosophy of life. On this view, feelings are what they are but generally irrelevant to whatever the task at hand is. We are each responsible for managing our own feelings. Trying to make tasks-at-hand about feelings is inherently counterproductive and, at minimum, RUDE, because now for everyone else in the situation the task becomes whatever it was in the first place PLUS managing the feelings of others. This should be an embarrassment for competent adults.

Anyone who’s been around 2-year-olds knows how important feelings are, how tyrannical they can be, and how welcome it is to emerge from the chaos of feelings into the light of a more systematic and truly dialogic reasonableness. Yes, a whole wave of feminists pointed out in relation to the Enlightenment that “Reason” can also be tyrannical. And Horkheimer and Adorno showed that reason ultimately loops back and collapses itself. And Damasio showed neurologically that reason cannot generate motivation, only emotion can. But in an open, moderated form dispassionate reason is really all we’ve got to work with when there’s disagreement, short of escalation into shouting or generic uncritical empathy, which in principle all humans deserve.

There are two kinds of conversations I have: polite ones where there’s nothing at stake and feelings can be ventilated freely; and serious ones where there’s something at stake so the task at hand requires the full focus of calm mindfulness. I was reading recently about people who function well in crises. They’re not the ones going all frenzied, who tend to get themselves and others killed. They’re the ones who zero right in on the details of the situation and get down to business.

Unquote. On that thread, olderwoman made a really nice point about how often the people (generally men) who say they don’t want feelings in the workplace really mean that they don’t care about anyone’s feelings but their own. I’d say this is the difference between stoicism and privilege, which may otherwise look the same. This leads me to a further reflection on how feelings were, are and might be handled in academic settings. For the purposes of this discussion I’ll define an academic setting as one in which there’s critical analysis to be done where getting it right may conceivably be of some importance.

In the bad old days, elite white men ruled academe. They had all sorts of feelings and occasionally shouted them at each other, or sulked them at each other, or used them to stab each other in the back. But they also had all sorts of conventions of conduct that deflected or bracketed emotions in favor of getting work done; and because they were a nasty little inbred elite, those conventions were largely shared and effective. The work they succeeded in getting done was often appalling by current standards, of course, as our own will be to later judges.

The grip of elite white men on the academy began to weaken in the 50s when working class white men enabled by the G.I. Bill, the rise of consumer society, the expansion of higher education, and so on began to show up. Soon after, women and race/ethnic minorities also began to push / be pulled into the academy in large numbers. Along with all the morally and pragmatically good things about that process, they brought chippy rejection of everything those nasty old farts stood for, including their nasty old conventions of emotional bracketing, which were pretty clearly artifacts of white male privilege — as could be plainly seen from their products.

The thing is, those conventions got the decks cleared and allowed a lot of work to get efficiently done. The content of that work is a separate issue. So how might we get those clear decks back, without reprivileging the particular neuroses of nasty old white guys?

How ideology works

The issue of Newsweek currently in my bathroom concludes with the usual nugget of pungent wisdom from George Will, this one titled Bootleggers’ Delights. The topic is unintended consequences of government regulation, in this case the stimulus bill and the enrichment opportunities it offers to attentive and focused bad actors.

To illustrate his point Will talks about acid rain. Referencing work from economist Russell Roberts that I have not read, he writes that

[i]n the 1970s … sulfur dioxide emitted by Midwestern power plants caused acid rain to fall on the Northeast. Encouraged by environmentalists, the public demanded cleaner air. The most efficient way to get less of something is to make it more expensive, so the obvious solution was to tax smokestack emissions. “But Congress didn’t impose a tax,” Roberts says, “it imposed a technology.”

Cue creepy music for the unintended consequence fade:

It required extremely expensive scrubbers on every utility’s smokestacks, the costs of which were passed on to consumers of electricity. The air became cleaner, and scrubber manufacturers, who joined environmentalists in lobbying for the requirement, became richer.

But wait: it wasn’t just the scrubber peddlers who got rich farming overfertilized government soil.

But the biggest bootleggers were West Virginia coal companies. A tax would have been an efficient incentive to burn the cleanest coal, much of which comes from the West. By pushing the requirement that utilities use scrubbers, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia was able to preserve the market for West Virginia’s dirtier—high sulfur—coal. Hence, says Roberts, improved air quality was purchased at an unnecessarily high price.

So here’s how ideology works. Will argues that the way to get less of something is to make it more expensive. He then complains that the scrubbers were extremely expensive. Why doesn’t this way of making pollution expensive count? Well, maybe because this cost was passed on to consumers. And the cost of a smokestack tax wouldn’t have been?

But apparently only a tax will do. Because you see, unlike the threat of mandated expensive scrubbers, a tax would have been incentive to burn cleaner coal! Which comes from the West, home of notoriously ineffective legislators — easy pickins for feckless environmentalists and that old sharpie Robert Byrd. And was apparently not attractive enough to the electrical industry just on the basis of it not destroying the environment.

Given an ideology of free markets, small government and regulatory parsimony a tax is, for sure, the obvious choice. Assuming, of course, that you can precisely calibrate for all bad actors in all market fractions for all market conditions exactly the price point where paying extra for clean coal makes sense but passing on that extra cost to consumers doesn’t. And assuming that burning clean coal without scrubbers would actually solve the problem, and that this changeover would happen universally and immediately enough to avoid critical tipping points of environmental degradation. And assuming we’ve got something else for all those West Virginia coal miners to do, and that there’s enough of the clean coal to make the dirty coal superfluous (until later, when dirty coal is all there is and we’ll need scrubbers anyway). Not to mention how attractively cheap dirty coal would get when its market fell out.

And what were the nefarious consequences of the bad scrubber regulation? Immediately and certainly cleaner air. Employment and profit for the scrubber industry. Continued livelihood for West Virginia coal miners at no one’s expense. Higher prices for electricity that would have happened with a tax too. Energy sourcing flexibility for the electric industry. Some foregone tax revenue that would likely not have covered the remedy cost of further pollution. A win for environmental groups. And incrementally bigger, more powerful and intrusive government.

A mixed bag, I’d say, but with ideology premises become conclusions without too much disturbance from mixed evidence.

Hunting Dodo with Blunderbuss

Friends, this blog and my blog culture are not yet a year old, and it shows in my newbie fascination with tired old blogtastic shenanigans. The instance in question is an intermittently interesting discussion at scatterplot about the racism, or not, of this cartoon:

As usual I’m simultaneously interested in both the conversation’s topic and its dynamics. And regarding the latter, my no-shit-Sherlock observation is that it’s very difficult to develop an analysis under certain conditions common to the blogosphere, among them systematic confusion of premises and conclusions and, as Jeremy says there, quick devolution of charged discussions into ideological preening. Of course, as a student of the history of marxism I know this can be accomplished without new media as well.

Along these lines the one I like the best is the one where it turns out we’re not having an investigative dialogue among human beings articulating reasoned hypotheses but a dogmatic monologue against avatars of hopelessly stupid counterpositions. Reading what someone actually wrote is so beside the point. The sport is then to load up the blunderbuss with whatever crap you’re carrying around in your pockets and blow away these dodos.

I am such an Enlightenment geek! No matter how often it happens, it’s weird and awesome to see “Carl” turn into whatever dodo the gunners happen to be hunting that day.

UPDATE: The topic here is communication, but if actual analysis of the cartoon interests you please visit Prof. Susurro’s outstanding post detailing the long history of racist imagery that can be read out of and into it. She follows up in a later post on the public debate. I’m not entirely on board with Susurro’s conclusions, but she knows how to construct a case.

Bad teaching

At some point if you’ve taught long enough you realize that you can get away with teaching badly. The kind of bad teaching where you do more harm than good, not just failing to communicate anything positive but actively turning students against learning. And not just once, on a bad day when your car wouldn’t start and you spilled your coffee on your notes and your hormones were in an uproar and your students had been replaced by evil alien replicants from Planet 13. No, you can get away with teaching badly over and over, and still get asked back to do it again.

Sometimes because of local ideologies or accreditation requirements or teacher ed fads or the politics of democratic legitimation, bad teaching is actually required. This has turned out to be the general lament about the (unintended) consequences of No Child Left Behind, for example. And sometimes bad teaching is more or less explicitly a device to sort out and eject students whose habitus does not fit the status profile of educational accomplishment. And sometimes lots of bad teaching happens because in a mass compulsory educational system with no access to infinite pools of great teachers and eager students, the odds of lots of dumbass teachers getting matched up with lots of clueless students are very high. These are instances of what we might call ’structural’ bad teaching.

More contingently, you can get away with bad teaching because it’s a big bother to check up on you substantively (going through the motions of checking up is easy), and an even bigger bother to replace you. And because there are so many other bad teachers that the standards are actually very low, and it’s a crapshoot whether someone else would actually do better. You can get away with it because no one actually knows any better, starting with the students, and because just about any hack teaching will produce good outcomes sometimes to feed the confirmation bias. Like you try something once, it’s bad, but no one ever calls you on it and someone manages to learn something despite you, so you just stick with ‘what works’.

Because what actually needs to get taught in the 15-20 years of a standard educational career could be taught in 4-5, you can get away with bad teaching because there’s plenty of room for lots of waste. And therefore you can get away with it because most of what we teach is either useless or worse than useless, causing society at large to evolve defenses against the plague of formal education, efficient systems to train our graduates from scratch in the relevant skills and knowledge and to help them unlearn the harmful stuff. I’m just scratching the surface of why you can get away with bad teaching.

Any goober can teach well when they think they have to. I’m on a search committee right now and the teaching performances have been terrific. The hard part is guessing what each of these goobers will do once they figure out they can get away with teaching badly.

Retention

Heh.

The community college dean is thinking about what it takes to get students to retain what we teach them. It’s not a trivial or simple question. Clearly covering all the material in the world is a colossal waste of time if no students retain it. Maybe still if only a few do.

Classes in the major at least enjoy a certain minimal buy-in from most students. Gen Ed courses, as the dean reflects, may be the only time those students ever get a whiff of our discipline.

Given that not everybody will become an expert in your subject, what do you want them to take away from it?

I’ll admit that it took a couple years of teaching for me to start thinking in those terms. Early on, I made the rookie mistake of trying to ‘cover’ everything. When I got back bizarrely disjointed versions of the material in papers, I gradually realized the error and started trying to focus more on the big picture. After a while, I decided that what I really wanted the students to develop was a combination of aggressive curiosity and some sense of how to frame questions. If they got that, I figured they were capable of following up on their own. Less ‘covering,’ more ‘uncovering.’

Same here. However, it’s worth noting that actually teaching and learning is only a small fraction of what education is for. There’s reproduction of elites to take care of, legitimating the ‘open’ society, creating habits of resentful deference to one’s educational ‘betters’, sorting people into occupational hierarchies, managing child care and surplus labor, producing disciplined, docile bodies for the workaday grind, and so on, none of which are incompatible with failing to teach the students the least thing they’ll remember later.

When failure is an option

At Now-Times Alexei has opened an interesting discussion by firing a shot across the bow of grading: he’s not sure it serves any good purpose, he sees that it’s prone to ideology, and he’s concerned that pedagogically useful failures will be discouraged by failing grades. In short, he thinks grades aren’t good for much. I mostly agree, but only because I think we tend to do it wrong. I’ve begun to comment there and I’ve also said a lot of relevant stuff here, here, here, here and here. But I’ve also had this conversation in other venues and wanted to use this opportunity to retrieve a point I made a while back at the excellent but now-dormant Paragraph City:

I don’t get complaints about grades, for the most part. Of course this might just be the luck of the draw, but I think it’s because I do explain, in great detail, exactly what I’m looking for in their work, why I’m looking for it, what’s in it for them, how to do it, and what consequences to expect if they don’t do it (including ‘failure’). All of that is explicitly open to negotiation by mindful students who can explain the equivalent value of a different set of tasks or criteria. If they learn nothing else from my classes, they learn how to connect desirable skills and knowledge to standards and standards to performances.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that for many of my colleagues the strategy seems to be to present themselves as authorities pronouncing mysterious olympian judgments, which is not very ‘human’ either; and students with even a smidge of critical thinking do well to question this authority. If we teach standards as reasons, not just rules or arbitrary commands, we get much farther into recruiting the students into the kind of thinking that we know how to do and wish they could too, by enabling them to make their own principled judgments.

It would be great if grading turned out to be the reason our students don’t learn and we could turn them into eager learners by not grading them. I believe actual experiments along these lines have been programmatically conducted with mixed results, e.g. at U.C. Santa Cruz. It’s worth talking about why the results were mixed. But in any event, as part of a mindful pedagogy grades can be useful. Given that they’re the industry standard anyway, I think we should figure out how.

History, theory and pragmatism

I just figured out what’s bothering me about the new philosophy. As an intellectual and cultural historian I’ve run across lots of different ways of thinking about things. My job is to make sense of these ‘objects’ or ‘assemblages’, not just in terms of their internal logic but as coherent expressions of and participants in contexts. You can probably be many good things without taking context seriously; historian is not one of them.

Accordingly, the truth of claims, beliefs, theories, philosophies and so on is not my primary objective. People in context always like the truthiness of their ideas; out of context, not so much. Once I got properly disciplined, (mostly) stopped chasing neat thought-butterflies like a puppy and started seeing ideas as assembled objects operating within and dependent upon larger context assemblages, truth (or value, to shift frame a little) in the larger sense became a nonsensical question. I’ve said these things various times before.

Far be it from me to exclude the possibility of a universal, contextless truth. One may be just around the corner, or just discovered two blogs over, or there already in the Bible, Qu’ran, Gita, Large Hadron Collider. The standards for identifying it as such would also need to be universal and contextless, of course. History would have to end. I’d be ok with that; history is confusing.

Yeah, I’m simpleminded, I may need some reeducation, but in the meantime since I’m not buying the big truth claims what I want to know about any given way of thinking is what it’s for more locally: what work it gets done, in what context. Pragmatic questions.

Among the various things ideas may be for, what they’re nearly always for is constituting discourse communities, conversations and like minds. For ideas in the present, then, that I don’t have a professional obligation to backtrack through all their assembled agendas and contexts, the questions for me are first: whether they’re getting anything done I see a need to get done; and second, whether I find the conversation and/or conversants compelling. In the case of the new philosophy I’m solid on the latter, which is why I’ve been engaging with it. But I’m really shaky on the former, which is why I keep feeling so dissatisfied. What the hell is this stuff for?

UPDATE: Find an enlightening response from Larval Subjects here. As I had hoped, the effort is thoughtfully targeted and it is indeed work that needs doing.

Object: disambiguation

I woke up yesterday morning from a dream in which I was talking for the first time in quite a while with an old favorite student, Jenna Howard. It was an oddly unsatisfactory conversation, in the specific way I always find those reacquaintance conversations unsatisfactory, only in waking from the dream I was able to figure out why: I was interacting with Jenna as an unfamiliar object, a strange intersector of my space, rather than as a person who I know and enjoy.

no, it's a kliban

According to object-relations theory, I (the subject) am ‘driven’ primarily by my desire for relations with others (my objects). In the pragmatic tradition George Herbert Mead agrees; our selves, social objects, are formed through a series of shaping interactions with and symbolic embeddings of other (therefore tool-like) objects, including what we come to recognize as other humans. I have certainly always enjoyed my relations with Jenna, who is smart and interesting and pleasantly confirms my self-image of being so also – including ongoingly in that part of myself she shaped.

Sandra Harding might say that this decidedly marginal mutual confirmation could, if we were reflexive about it, begin to ground what she calls “strong objectivity,” a kind of knowledge fully situated in the real shared experience of embodied humans, contrasted to what she calls “weak objectivity” or “the God trick” in which we imagine we can step outside of our bodies, communities and histories to see everything all at once from every perspective. For Mead too, what we call objectivity, indeed thinking itself, is a contingent product of our interactions: “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 … 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” (“The Genesis of the Self and Social Control,” 1924-25, in Reck, ed., Selected Writings).

Although we may all be objects and contribute our part to generalized objectivity, apparently there are objects and mere objects. For example, feminists worry about women being reduced to mere objects for men. “Man fucks woman. Subject verb object,” Catherine MacKinnon noted, excluding reciprocity and (arguably) describing reality by a grammatical trick. Subjects have popped back up as a special kind of object. On this view subjects can change the object, not the reverse; but can subjects change the subject?

Perhaps not, because similarly in the hegelian/marxist tradition, the subject is the actor, the object is the acted upon or acted toward (you may object that my object here is not clear). Fortunately, in principle subjectivity and objectivity are relational moments of being, not essential characteristics. “Practice is the actual unity of the subject and the object of activity. Moreover, as Marx understood it, the problem of the relationship between the subject and object is not identical to the basic question of philosophy, i.e., the question of the relationship between consciousness and being, because the subject is not simply consciousness, it is a real and acting person, and in its turn the object is not simply objective reality, but that part of it which has become the target of the practical or cognitive activity of the subject,” Lektorsky helpfully glosses. Incidentally, this clearly ‘reduces’ objects to their relations with subjects, actual and potential, and limits subjectivity to human beings, which does look pre-Copernican. But it’s a dialectical theory so there’s nothing essential about either of those prejudices and one may always choose to extend potential relations into an ontologically-useful infinity.

In contrast, object-oriented programming uses modules (objects) to simplify and stabilize complex programming. Objects are self-sufficient ‘virtual machines’ that maintain their own operational relations with their own data while allowing reconfiguration as parts of larger programming wholes. This looks a bit like what a subject was earlier; very confusing. I suppose we could figure it all out, though, as long as time and money are no object.