More thoughts on the lumpenbourgeoisie

*I’m staying away from faculty unions for a second in this one. Yay, unions. For further discussion in that area see Dean Dad’s post linking several more from across a spectrum of circumstance and opinion. Here I’m sketching some more general ways to think about the liberal academy and disagreements/conflicts therein.

*One way a perfectly good discussion can run aground is if the participants are cognitively or morally or aesthetically mismatched between the view that things are/should be either one thing or the other, and the view that things may/should be complex assemblages of disparate elements. There is a lot of leverage in simplification, a clear enemy and a clear agenda, as we know from the histories of racism and sexism; but as those examples show, if it’s programmatic rather than true to life the thoughts, feelings and actions that result are distorted and distorting.

*What is the liberal academy good for? It’s certainly not to prepare people immediately for employment, although when we’re desperate we trot out marketing slogans about how our degrees prepare folks to be effective in any career. We do have functions in the production of a value-added educated labor force, but honestly there are way more efficient ways to do that than degrees in medieval literature or classical philosophy. Our legitimating, hegemonic functions are probably more a matter of lingering (convenient) habits than careful planning and effective resource-allocation by the class overlords at this point. Nor are we and our graduates at least generally happier or more fulfilled than the average bear.

*We’re not structurally that important. A little legitimation, a little status, a warehouse for surplus labor, a containment system for irritating radicals (this is the mistake the Russians made in the 19th century – they trained a critical intelligentsia to show how progressive they were, but gave them nowhere to roost). In a sense we’re pets. We are paid accordingly. When academic administrators try to tap into a more corporate model they are trying to tap into a higher and better-compensated level of structure. They’re following the money, of course they are. To do that they need to look right (pdf, Chaudhuri and Majumdar, “Of Diamonds and Desires: Understanding Conspicuous Consumption from a Contemporary Marketing Perspective”) to the target audience, which is why they need better salary, amenities and perqs than the workforce. This is no mere venality, but a bootstrapping investment; it’s a smart one, although it’s not at all clear that it can succeed. But if it fails, the alternative is to not be tied into corporate funding, which puts the whole institution at the mercy of the market and of the indirect scraps of corporate success the government in a capitalist society is able to skim off. And it is all ultimately tied to the U.S.’s ability to extract far more than our ‘fair’ share from the global economy.

*If we’re good for anything apart from the little services mentioned above, it’s to practice, model and teach the arts of complexity and dispassionate analysis (Weber’s “science as a vocation,” Bourdieu’s reflexive “interest in disinterest” [I apply this kind of analysis at length here - pdf]) — to produce more thorough, balanced and reliable understandings of the world. This is a way cool thing we know how to do! We can start with us. Competence in the humanities = ability to construct persuasive accounts of multiple perspectives. Joining a gang is not critical thinking. Partisanship is instantly delegitimating. Can we do better, or at least differently than that? Bracket our biases, even overcome them, as we teach our students to do? Speak truth to power, not shout our corporate interests and conveniences at power? Well, here’s a test. Is the academy a simple place with heroes on one side and villains on the other? Here’s another one. Can we see the ‘problem’ of academic proletarianization as a direct and elementary unintended consequence of the expansion and liberalization of higher education to include proletarians? Just as the inclusion of women feminizes institutions by downgrading them, and the extension of voting rights inevitably dilutes the value of each vote. Yay; oops. A sense of humor helps so much here.

*At this point we’ve got mass institutions trying to do elite work. That’s a recipe for disappointment on all sides. We’d all like a pony. You can have wealth, status and distinction or you can have openness and inclusion; you can tweak a compromise mix, which is the game we’re really playing now; but you can’t have all you want of everything at once.

*I’m just sayin’.

Readability: Hitler

The Dec/Jan 2009 issue of Bookforum has an interesting interview with Timothy Ryback about his book on Hitler’s Private Library. (In Pierre Bayard’s readability system as discussed in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, to which I will be introducing my students in the sophomore seminar in the Spring, Ryback’s is an HB+: a book I’ve heard of and have a good impression of.) Ryback was able to identify a number of Hitler’s most personally significant books from more than a thousand housed at the Library of Congress; and prompted by Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” he was able to use them to figure out some things about Hitler as a reader and a thinker.

Most notably, Ryback found that “Hitler was animated not by the excitement of the autodidact discovering a vast world of knowledge but by the intellectual insecurity of a high school dropout who needed to overpower everyone else in the room.” (I know plenty of Ph.D.s with the same insecurity, but the point is we know this type.) Hitler’s genius was for collecting very broad, very shallow knowledge. He liked encyclopedias. He was not a critical reader or thinker; he took what he read at face value and lumped everything together without distinction. In conversation he was a dazzling reciter of facts, constructing detailed but superficial comparisons by juxtaposition.

So far so good – a nice triangulation of something we already knew or at least assumed about the guy. Perhaps the surprise is that Hitler was a compulsive reader; we might have thought him even more shallowly absorbed in his own wacky thoughts and the echo-chamber of his cronies than that. But here’s where Ryback seems to get into some trouble. Ryback is an old-school liberal artist and bookworm – one imagines corduroy, tweed and elbow patches – who struggles to imagine how reading could not be positively transformative. “‘We believe literary reading is an ennobling enterprise,’ he says. ‘The underlying assumption is that we are better people for reading. What’s shocking about this is that we had a man who read to fuel exactly the opposite, everything that was destructive to intellectual processes. Out of this imbibing emerged such evil that it flies in the face of what we believe reading actually does.’”

Not so fast with that “we,” Tim. We’re not all congregants in your religion; books do not light up all rooms with their halos. If books are sacred things you might be right, but if they’re human things, not so much. And sure enough, books are read, and first written, by human beings, who are what they are before they write or read any particular book. Good humans usually write good books, and bad humans generally write bad books, although the reverse can sometimes be true. Good humans tend to prefer to read good books, and bad humans gravitate toward bad ones (Hitler was a big fan of Henry Ford’s and Madison Grant’s racist tracts); but also good humans may read bad books well, and bad humans may read good books badly. Nor is it a simple thing to sort out ‘good’ and ‘bad’ with respect to humans or books. One needs a moral system for that, and moral systems are contested.

We are riddled with confirmation bias, hard-wired for jamming new data into old schemata. Of the three basic kinds of analytical thinking, habit, belief and theory, only theory is readily subject to disconfirmation by new information. I sometimes tell students that the way to tell if your theory is a good one is to track your surprise. A good theory will prepare you for reality, a bad one will leave your head spinning every time something that doesn’t fit happens. By this standard, the theory about the ennobling powers of literary reading is a bad one; but of course, if it’s really a “belief,” as Ryback says, and not a theory, his surprise will motivate no substantive transformation of his thinking. And sure enough, his own reading will not have ennobled (or better, enlightened) him, either.

Omnivorosity

Courtesy of Alexandre Enkerli at Disparate, whose commentary is typically aromatic, here’s a meme.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

So here goes. I will remove some suspense by establishing from the outset that I have a thang about slimy textures. It took me the first five years of my adult life just to teach myself to like raw tomatoes. I’ll also choose savory over sweet most every time. And some of these are pretty transparently reaching for snob appeal. I’m not a collector of experiences just for the sake of checking off an item on a list.

1. Venison (Courtesy of hunter friends. Very tasty; a bit dry, which I like in meat.)
2. Nettle tea (No, but I’ve drunk plenty of flower/leaf/stem/root teas and I’m not clear on why this particular one is the issue.)
3. Huevos rancheros (Yum. Just this weekend.)
4. Steak tartare (Near enough to the edge of slimy to discourage my interest.)
5. Crocodile (No opportunity and not clear why I would seek it out.)
6. Black pudding (Hasn’t come up.)
7. Cheese fondue (Make it myself sometimes, with a touch of port or sherry.)
8. Carp (Not a big fish fan, but if it’s put in front of me I’ll bite.)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush Eggplant is high on slime but I love the Mediterranean flavors.

Big stigma, little stigma

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have me thinking about stigma. Here’s Erving Goffman in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963):

And even where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of disqualifying many persons. For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective, this constituting one sense in which one can speak of a common value system in America. Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable. The general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living.

Goffman’s project was to ‘decenter’ stigma by noting that in some dimension almost everyone is one-down and painfully aware of it. Just about everyone has a touch of double consciousness, and the management of that eerie social disconfirmation of identity is a game known and played by all; his text is a handbook of familiar rules and strategies. Since the culture wars of the sixties even the white boys have started blushing, or at least bristling, under the onslaught of the stigmatized stigmatizing back.

It may look like Goffman is talking about what I’ll call ‘little stigma’, contingent embarrassments, and one of the standard criticisms of the book is that ‘big stigma’, structuring identities like race, class and gender, operates at a different scale with different dynamics. I think the genius of the book is how he is able to show big structural effects emerging from little interactive causes, but that’s a long technical discussion. Read the book. More immediately, the question this election and some of its key players raise is whether big stigma is eroding into the mass of overcomeable little stigmas like height, weight, age, education, accent, cultural style and so on that irritate, hinder and even incapacitate us without ever rising to the level of structural disqualification. I am not therefore suggesting that racism, sexism and classism have been overcome and are now stigma-free, but that the scale of that stigma may be changing in the U.S.. (I am also not suggesting that weightism, ageism, etc., are trivial burdens.)

That race has become little stigma is certainly the argument of Obama’s candidacy. Faced with the presumption that big structural racism would disqualify him categorically from the presidency, his response is ‘I don’t think so, let’s see’. He hasn’t made race an issue because he doesn’t think race is an issue [or rather, a special issue that needs to be his issue]. Although Clinton’s candidacy had to have the same premise regarding gender, her and her supporters’ demographics pushed toward a more old-school rhetoric of embattled exclusion.

Big stigma entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright have tried to push Obama the same way, with no success. The barbarism of schematized identities (a terrific concept from Jennifer Cascadia found here) and their associated stigmas is that life without them cannot be imagined. Obama is imagining this life, and attempting to live it. So far something like half of this country, millions and millions of people, would like to help and join in with that.

Perhaps Tocqueville will turn out to have been right yet again when he wrote that “When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. When everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.” — Democracy in America (1835/1840). Perhaps our tolerances have grown very fine. We’ll need to get to work next on sexualities, the last of the ‘acceptable’ big stigmas which remains structurally excluding, at least in national politics.

Reading again

The new academic year starts in a little more than a week and once again I will inflict reading on a batch of students. Some of them will do it, some of them won’t, and some of them will devise various strategies of PITA and strategic incompetence to cope with it. Eventually through a long, recursive process we may all actually get something out of the process, although I know from experience that it will rarely be the same something. That doesn’t bother me except when I’m trying to explain the value of what I do to people whose goal-process-outcome model is more linear than mine.

I should say that I’m in many ways sympathetic with students in their disgruntlement with the reading-mediated process of education, but their first strategy of resistance to reading, that it’s just ‘book learning’, is not persuasive to me. Try figuring something good out and then just letting it die with you. Books are one of the good ways to record experience, and thus to learn from other people’s experiences, not just our own. They are broadening and potentially transformative. To cut ourselves off from the accumulated experience and reflection of others is, in Mead’s sense, self-defeating.

OK, but reading is an odd thing, as Mikhail has been pondering. Maybe we don’t read as carefully as we think, understand as thoroughly as we should, retain as much as we’d hope. Then there’s this old question of the ‘difficult text‘ and strategies for engaging with it. In some cases you might not want to start where the author did. I often open a book at random and see what happens, but there may be substantive reasons to skip and retrace. Not to mention that behind writings there are authors and behind authors there are more writings, so good reading never ends.

In the margins of more substantive posts Rough Theory and What in the hell… have reflected on reading, reading in order, and reading again. In the margins I’ll note that the theory of reading I subscribe to suggests that we must always read twice: the first time for familiarization, the second time for understanding. When we ‘understand’ something in the ‘first’ reading it’s because it is, or seems, already familiar to us. And that, of course, is a trap: familiarity is easy to ‘read in’, and we may never get beyond the horizons of our preconceptions, or learn anything new, if we always stop at that first reading.

I explain this to students and they are often comforted by it. Many of them have been trained to read (or not read) in bulk, driven by content and coverage. They are assaulted by all manner of new and unfamiliar stuff and, not surprisingly, they don’t understand it. Their folk reaction is either “I’m stupid” or “this book is stupid,” either of which will settle into “reading is stupid” over time. I’ve taken to looping through readings over and over in class, settling them into increasing familiarity and leveraging that to get at richer understandings, then expanding coverage with similar recursivity. It’s perplexing at first but works really well, and knocks out a lot of resentment. I get much better papers. And the best assessment I get is the one where the student says “the class made me feel smart.”