New President

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Swarthmore has a new President, Rebecca Chopp, currently the President of Colgate University.

You can read a few comments by her on Swarthmore at the Daily Gazette. Also her initial remarks at a reception can be found on the college’s web site.

She seems like a fantastic choice. Kudos to my colleagues who were involved in the selection process.

(One thing I’d like her to bring along with her is the design of Colgate’s News and Information website, with integrated comments. I know it would be a chore to moderate that kind of comments section, but I think it’s a nice feature.)

Posted in Swarthmore | Comments Off on New President

Engine and Caboose, On the Same Track

Posted on February 24, 2009 by Timothy Burke

David Brooks’ column today in the New York Times is a great example of his hackery. I suppose he irritates me even more than your average op-ed shill because he feints at having an interest in ideas and views that I’m sympathetic to, only to brutally toss all that intellectual infrastructure overboard in the second half of most of his pieces so that he can serve up some callow partisan spin. He revs up the train engine and heads down the track, but the back of the train just sits there in the station where it always is and always will be.

So today he starts off by talking about how reading Edmund Burke and assorted other authors (Hayek, Oakeshott, Berlin, Niebuhr, Orwell, etc.) taught him “epistemological modesty” and checked his youthful left-wing hubris, that he was persuaded by their skepticism of planning and technocracy, that he became wary of desires to “reorganize society from the top down”.

Fine. I’m with him on much of that, and feel as if I’ve undergone some version of that journey myself in many ways. The second half of his piece, however, warns that Obama’s Administration is looking to solve every problem from the top down, do everything at once, be exactly the liberals that Brooks once was and now fears. He hopes that Obama’s people will prove him wrong, but it’s clear that he still expects to be right.

This in a nutshell is not only what’s wrong with David Brooks but what’s wrong with the entire form of op-ed writing. All this column does in the end is serve as an intellectual fig leaf for a Lakoffian frame. All it amounts to is planting a meme, providing a soft and chattering-class-friendly translation of Michael Savage’s ranting on talk radio about Obama’s Marxist plans to destroy America. There’s no interesting question convened here, no open conversation begun.

There’s nothing concrete that he’s pointing to, either. I share his anxieties about the hubris of officials and experts (in any Administration or government), but so far I’m not really seeing concretized programs or projects that strike me as alarming examples of that kind of hubris. Certainly the stimulus package isn’t anything of the sort. In fact, the stimulus package depresses me because it’s nothing more than a band-aid and doesn’t pretend to be anything but. I want to see more ideas about what might happen next, about what kinds of redirection might happen further down the road.

If Brooks was being an honest broker of his own declared views, he’d know that the most powerful “perverse consequences” tend to come not from some single, unified umbrella political drive, but through the small initiatives of powerful official actors who are given tremendous autonomy to act independently, to enact some body of social theory or some aesthetic principle held by a visionary. The craziest neconservative bullshit in the occupation of Iraq came from Wolfowitz and the cluster of hacks associated with him: that’s how you got to soldiers and occupying bureaucrats sitting around waiting for flowers to be thrown at them while arms depots were raided by insurgents, how you got freakshow bullshit like freshly minted graduates making statutes and procedures for the whole of Iraqi life from deep inside the Green Zone.

If Brooks really wants to grapple with the problem of how governmental action might lead to dangerous unforeseen consequences, he needs to get down and dirty, to really dig into something specific. What actual policy makes him anxious? Which official? Which particular idea? What perverse consequences does he potentially foresee as following from which specific initiative? Is it too much to ask that an op-ed column in a newspaper actually be based on some reportage?

If Brooks really wanted to explore outward from his intellectual name-dropping, to open up discussion rather than provide some Cliff Notes for conservatives, he’s got to apply those ideas honestly, in an exploratory manner, and without treating them as theological writ.

Three ideas about how to do that:

1) If you want to argue that governmental or institutional action has unforeseen and perverse consequences, you have to apply that insight retroactively, with rigor. Meaning, among other things, that the economic crisis of the moment from this perspective is just as much an unexpected consequence of earlier governmental actions, in this case, changes in regulatory regimes, in monetary policy, and so on, under the Bush and Clinton Administrations.

Moreover, if you want to add intellectually to that composite body of thought rather than apply it in a dull fashion, one of the possibilities to consider is that some of those thinkers on Brooks’ list were too fixated on the state as the only large institutional force in modern life whose actions can lead to unforeseen or perverse consequences. Civil institutions and large corporations ought to be looked at in the same manner, with the same skeptical eye, with the same understanding of social causality. What have companies been doing to the fabric of everyday life in America over the last two decades? What kinds of top-down changes have they imposed on people, with perverse consequences?

This is why so much conservative fretting of this kind seems so phony. It only applies to something that Democrats are doing. It’s not applied to a large-scale analysis of social outcomes as a whole. It’s not applied with any kind of historical awareness. Conservatives forget a massive domain of governmental action and treat many social outcomes as immaculately arising from the wisdom of crowds. The suburbanization of U.S. life is the consequence of official policy in large measure. The products we buy and don’t buy are structured by an intricate web of policies and decisions, taxes and duties. Marriage as it is (not just as it might be, if gay marriage were permitted) is governmental policy. (I didn’t decide in my organic traditional self that a license and a blood test would be a nice thing to do when I fell in love with someone, or that a tax incentive would be a beautiful way to celebrate our love.) We have the energy infrastructure and economy that we do not because of an absence of top-down initiatives, but because the U.S. government has programmatically supported a heavy dependence on petroleum for the last six decades. And so on.

Following on this: being honest about your intellectual commitments requires applying them to yourself and your own political and intellectual history first and last. So before Brooks frets too much about what Obama and his aides are doing, I think he’s still got a lot of archaeological digging to do in his own record of argument, a lot of water that he carried for partisans whose ambitions to use state power for top-down transformations were more breath-taking by far than even the most far-reaching muttering about possible plans that have come out of the current White House.

2) Following from this: so what kind of planning or action is allowable under the banner which Brooks hoists in the first part of his column? That’s where some kind of interesting forward-looking argument could begin. Not this kind of “well, maybe limited conservative views of government will turn out to be right, rather than this OMFG CRAZY LIBERAL stuff”. There is no such thing as a limited conservative philosophy of government or official action in the United States at the moment if by that you are looking to party politics. No movement, no party, nothing that Brooks can point to and say, “There, that’s it, that’s what I mean, that’s how someone who believes in Oakeshott-Burke-Orwell-Hayek makes policy”. Unless what Brooks means is party libertarianism in the U.S., which is not really what anybody on Brooks’ list of thinkers believed in except arguably for Hayek.

One person that I’ve always read as being a part of the intellectual circle that Brooks describes, for example, is Jane Jacobs. But Jacobs’ critique of high-modernist planning was not a rejection of all planning, any more than Burke’s critique of French Revolutionary utopianism was a rejection of all deliberate attempts to produce change. Burke was an Enlightenment progressive inasmuch as he believed that human life could be changed for the better, and that there were things that people could deliberately do that would produce that change. Jacobs believed that government and private institutions could plan, and that their plans would produce better cities. The point being in either case that they believed that plans and changes should be modest in scope and scale, derived out of the organic substrate of daily life, in alignment with the everyday consciousness and common sense of most people.

So what does economic or social or political policy look like right here, right now, from that perspective? It doesn’t look anything remotely like the last eight years of Republican government. Brooks pretends that there is something out there that he’s pointing to other than Obama, some other political project which nicely exemplifies his viewpoint. But there is nothing. If Brooks is serious, he’s got to start thinking through that vision, start taking the risk of concretizing his own ideas, and stop being the nerdy kid who brings towels and Gatorade to the big players of the Republican Party.

Among the open questions that he might look at in an honest exploration would be, “Do those ideas apply well to crisis? Could you wage a war ‘modestly’? Deal with a disastrous fiscal crisis ‘modestly’?” I don’t say that cynically, knowing what the answers are in advance. I’d like to know what a military conflict undertaken with epistemological modesty looks like. Does that just amount to realpolitik, to brutalist realism? I hope not. I’d like to know what intervention in economic crisis looks like if it’s constrained by a modest sense of the limits and outcomes of power. I suspect it kind of looks like what’s being done so far: a bunch of bandaids and holding actions, full of timidity.

Brooks doesn’t have to invent out of whole-cloth ideas about how change and modesty, policy and limitations, might align. William Easterly’s most recent work on development policy is one compelling example of how you can argue for an active commitment to transformation while also maintaining a structural commitment to epistemological and practical modesty. There’s a lot out there that provides the same kind of platform, in fact. But it’s not to be found in the contemporary Republican Party. I wouldn’t say that it’s the mainstream of Democratic governance, either, but I see more of this perspective in Obama and his nascent Adminstration than anywhere else in the federal government at the moment. The point is, if you’re serious about this vision, and not just trying to be an opportunistic schmibertarian hack, start looking for the people who are genuinely trying to put it into action. You won’t find them if all you’re looking to is the endless circle-jerk of Beltway think-tanks and Sunday morning talk shows.

3) Brooks is also limited by the same problem that afflicts a lot of shallow-end libertarian rhetoric in the United States, namely, he takes the lesson about the unexpected and perverse outcomes that follow from the application of state power to social and economic life and applies it with myopic pessimism.

When you start looking at causality through this lens, with an eye to how the circuit of intention and outcome is often broken when a plan or a project moves from the drawing board into guiding the action of large-scale institutions like the state or big corporations, you realize that unexpected outcomes are sometimes positive as well as negative, and sometimes they’re not clearly either, just that we end up somewhere different than where we started. And weird as it may seem, on occasion, what happens is pretty much exactly what the experts said would happen and what everyone wanted to have happen.

Nobody meant for the Internet to come from planning for post-nuclear holocaust communications. Nobody meant for cellphones to make social and economic coordination in rural parts of the developing world easier. Nobody planned for the confluence of middle-class consumerism, contraceptive availability and more legal and social guarantees of rights for women to result in the slowing of global population growth. Nobody argued for massive federal funding of the lunar landing as a generalized strategy for the R&D of many technologies and objects of everyday practical usefulness. Nobody argued for funding spy satellites as a way to get to having GPS systems widely distributed.

But all of that came from some major project that had a lot of money and expertise directed to it by a large institution, a project with some kind of top-down or transformative intent. Brooks jumps, like a lot of schmibertarians, from the insight that institutional action often has unexpected outcomes to a notion that this means that all big initiatives, all visionary rhetoric, all coordinated action, is henceforth doomed, mistaken, inevitably trodding the path to the gulag. It’s more complicated than that.

I agree that recognizing how systemic action frequently is shaped by a break or interruption between intent and outcome inevitably rebukes high-modernist hubris. I agree that this insight should lead us to a persistent skepticism about what experts think and about what planners do. I agree that we need firebreaks in any program of action that check its consequences, that we should always keep modesty in the picture.

But all that should lead us not just to tedious complaints against other social and political actors but to a sense of wonder and surprise at the byways of change, at a bemused view of transformation, a wisdom about the mighty oaks that grow all around us from acorns we never noticed as we trod over them. That’s what it means to view change as something that happens inside the “black box” of organic life, to look for transformation to come from the unexpected alignments and coincidences of heterogenous actors responding to signals and visions present within everyday life. The first humility that flows from this understanding is not something we demand from others, but impose on ourselves.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments

Grades

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I find both of the poles in the current cross-blog discussion of grading policies a bit weird. There’s the people who say that a C is the average, and thus that should be reflected in the distribution of grades, with an A being one end of the bell curve. And then there’s people (most especially including students) who say that if they do everything asked of them, they should get an A.

The default state of grading at most institutions accords individual faculty a lot of philosophical latitude in the grades they give out, so this kind of fundamental disagreement about how to grade is not that surprising. I think most students are well-aware that different faculty have different approaches to grading: it’s a necessary part of the student’s art, to know what you’re getting into when you sign up for a particular course. You’ll sometimes hear faculty known as tough graders complain that their approach has a negative impact on their evaluations, or that students refuse to take courses with them. (Often this goes along with a somewhat cattier suggestion that faculty with many students are popular entirely because of their grading policies.)

I’m sure that some students do avoid a notoriously difficult professor. But quite a few such faculty end up with some very devoted cadres of their own. I think this is a case of a problem that solves itself in a curricular marketplace: the students craving a challenge, or knowing they need a strong taskmaster, find their way to a faculty who approaches evaluation in that spirit. I don’t think there’s any need to have that be the default, or to enforce this style of evaluation, however.

My personal sensibility shifts a bit from year to year. I’m not terribly consistent in my internal understanding of what I’m doing when I grade. In general, I tend to imagine the B as the default grade, and an A as a grade that says, “You did something considerably better than ordinary”. The C means, “This is really not as good as ordinary work”. Failures are either, “This is dramatically worse than the norm” or “You blew this off, and I can see that you did”.

I freely confess that I tend to have a slightly different understanding of how this scaling works out based on my understanding of what a student is capable of. The more I’ve graded a student, the more I form an expectation about what they can do. A student who has done consistently excellent, original work for me is likely to draw a much more negative reaction from me for doing ordinary work than a student who has done fine, decent but undistinguished work consistently. If I graded blind, I suspect I’d still have some pretty good guesses over time about the identity of writers, but maybe that would help shake up some of my assumptions. I’m weighing trying to do that next year for the first time.

Every assignment is different, too. Sometimes I get back papers and see such a common repetition of a problem or issue that I realize that there was something screwy about the assignment or that I didn’t explain something very well in class. So that tends to mitigate my grades. Sometimes I get back papers and everybody nails the essays so very well that I hand out A’s very liberally. I don’t believe that I have to produce the same distribution of grades every single time: I’ve had classes with a lot of B’s and classes with almost all A minuses. I really do think that sometimes you get a stellar mix of people or that there’s some kind of convergence in the class or that you’ve succeeded in getting the material across in some special way. Why not recognize that when it happens?

I also find that when you compare notes with other faculty about a particular student, even if their grades vary somewhat, you tend to find that they have a very similar appraisal of that student’s capabilities and commitment, the kind of information that isn’t expressed well by grades themselves. That’s an argument for some kind of written evaluations to go along with grades, of the kind we write for first-semester students at Swarthmore. Though what faculty say to each other is often much blunter or matter-of-fact than what we’d put into writing to a student. Which is again perfectly fine, it seems to me, because grading isn’t just an absolute mark of excellence against some objective benchmark: it’s also a communication to a student, one that encourages them to improve or compliments them for achievement or reprimands them for inattentiveness–in short, part of the art of teaching, which necessarily varies from person to person.

Posted in Academia | 12 Comments

Textbook Costs

Posted on February 12, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Lots of cross-blog talk on this subject at the moment: why are textbooks so expensive?

The answer is mostly that it’s a racket with some resemblance to some of the weird pricing that happens inside the health care system. The general cost of health care to individuals, for example, may basically correspond to a one-by-one breakdown of what the overall costs of health care across a whole society. But look over any given bill you receive for medical care and the itemized breakdowns tend to become more surreal the more granular they are, where items that you could purchase outside of medical care are billed to you at many times their normal purchase price.

What’s happening in part is that the price of other things not on your bill is being off-loaded onto those items: the labor costs of doctors, nurses, administrators, pharmacists, custodial staff, and so on. The costs of uninsured care in that same facility is being added into your prices. The costs of insured care which is absurdly expensive to run or prescribe for you or for others are being broken down a bit and blended into other items. The total pharmaceutical costs of a hospital or facility are being averaged over all the drugs prescribed. And so on. In the end this works in part because it’s usually not about a payment made directly by the user of health care but a payment from an insurer to a health care provider. The breakdowns are a kind of surreal peek inside a black-box process. You don’t have much choice about any of it, including usually whether or not to seek health care in the first place.

Textbooks are way less defensible in these terms because they’re a much more direct relationship between teaching faculty, their colleagues who publish textbooks in a given field, and the publishers. But much as in the case of health care, a student generally doesn’t have any choice, and that’s more or less the root reason why a single textbook can cost over $150.00: because the publisher can charge that and expect that a captive market will have to pay.

It’s only when you ask why faculty in many fields don’t just do without textbooks that you realize a bit of what that price is standing in for. (I’ve never used a conventional textbook, and I’d say that’s generally true in a lot of humanities courses.) Compiling a series of reliable and clear readings on the full range of topics covered in a survey course is hard. If you had to write them all yourself, that would be an enormous undertaking. If you’re also putting together problem sets which you intend to use for grading purposes, that’s harder still, because not only do you have to compose those problem sets, you have to change them, or have a very large group of them from which to draw every year. Making up your own textbook, if your pedagogy needs to be based around one, would be a tremendous amount of labor well above and beyond your ordinary responsibilities as a teacher or researcher.

So most faculty who use textbooks, if they even dream of writing one themselves, understandably want to be compensated if they do. If you have no ambition to write one yourself, you’re probably willing to see colleagues compensated for doing that work for you. When you hear what the price tag for a textbook is, then what? The only way to opt out of that market is to make your own textbook, seemingly. And so we’re back to wanting to be compensated. Who will publish your much-cheaper textbook that you’ve written in order to save students money, and still have the money to advertise and market that textbook?

The answer I think lies in something like Wikibooks open-content textbook projects. The history ones are mostly really bad so far, the science ones seem very slim and weak as well. There isn’t much yet at Flat World Knowledge, either. I’m totally willing to correct a Wikipedia entry from time to time, but writing a whole history textbook (especially considering that I don’t use history textbooks or think they’re very useful) is way beyond anything I’m interested in doing for free on behalf of other people. A whole textbook written by one hundred or two hundred experts in small bits and pieces is usually going to be a total dog’s breakfast, hard to read and hard to teach from.

Doubtless a lot of professors feel the same way. I think if cheap, relatively open textbooks are going to take off, it’s going to take somebody somewhere putting at least some money into the project. One possibility? A big consortium of universities and colleges, where they could compensate authors through stipends or modest salary increases while doing a lot of make the cost of instruction to students considerably less.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 11 Comments

Different Cliffs, Different Bottoms, Different Parachutes

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Timothy Burke

There is a kind of confusion that happens anytime there is a major historical conjuncture where histories of failure and crisis which have independent roots happen to coincide. Because they coincide, they become part of the same “event”, and by becoming part of it, they genuinely aggravate each other and create an accelerating feedback loop of disaster and collapse. Once that happens, you don’t have the luxury to pick apart those separate histories and imagine how they might be resolved in their own terms any longer. But somehow it seems important to me to remember when there is a massive collision of three or four trains that they came from different places and were originally heading towards different destinations.

Looking at the current economic global economic crisis with this in mind, while the drop in consumer confidence and its impact on consumer spending is now firmly fused to the massive failure of the financial system, I think it’s important to keep in mind that some of the foundations of mass consumption in the U.S. were already showing serious strains well before the public heard about subprime mortgages.

Here I’m not merely referring to levels of credit card debt or the use of home equity to fuel consumption. I think the entire dominant architecture of retail consumption that took shape in the 1990s would have been in some degree of crisis by the end of the 2000s no matter what. Looking back, it’s going to be hard for future economic or cultural historians not to lump in the failure of stores like Circuit City or KB Toys with the Millennial Depression or whatever it is that we’re going to end up calling this whole event, but I actually think many of the retail failures reported in the last six months might have been coming no matter what.

Some of the issues that I think were already visible by 2000 among North American retailers:

1) Saturation of retail outlets. It isn’t just Starbucks: I think we had hit a point in the early 2000s where most communities simply didn’t need any new retail. But much as in the residential market, there were a lot of developers and construction firms that were built around the constant addition of new units, often without taking older retail out of the picture.

2) Saturation of product. Here I’ll agree with my colleague Barry Schwartz and many other critics of contemporary consumer culture: too much choice on store shelves, too much informational noise in the system, too many options and too much duplication, from cheap non-durables all the way up to big-ticket durables.

3) Failure to adapt to the affordances of online shopping. Not just too much choice, too much of it a false choice. Too many shell-games going on where manufacturers bought up shelf space in large brick-and-mortar stores and filled it with variant forms of the same product while those same stores failed to keep deep back catalogs of goods or to stock “long tail” items that might make shopping at that store a real destination experience. Back when a store like Borders first appeared, before Amazon, it was a place you’d drive to just for the depth and variety of their catalog. I remember taking a special trip to the one that opened near DC precisely because it had so many books across so many categories. I freely concede that brick-and-mortar stores now, whatever their size, can’t compete with Amazon’s catalog. But most of them have completely given up entirely on having a selection that goes beyond the last six months of product. This leaves those stores with an increasingly small customer base if they’re selling in communities with substantial online access: they’re selling to the people who can’t shop online, who won’t shop online, or they’re selling to people for impulse purchases of the latest merchandise where there is some value to physical presence or some special attraction to immediacy. (The latest Harry Potter, the newest DVD). Add to this that a great many big retailers still do not seem to recognize that many consumers now use the Internet to do price comparisons. I’ve heard informally from people that some of the chains liquidating in the last six months have taken product off the shelf, marked it *up* by 50% or 100% and then marked it down again to the price it was selling at before the announcement of closure. Yes, this is an old trick, but honestly, it works much more poorly in an environment where price comparisons are easier to come by.

4) Blind acceptance of the Wal-Mart model: squeeze the suppliers, reduce the quality, reduce the price, and hire a poorly-motivated minimum wage labor force to man the cash registers. Maybe this works for Wal-Mart, at least when it is going into retail spaces where the main competition are sleepy small-town Main Street retailers with small inventories at high prices. It doesn’t work in areas saturated with suburban retail clusters and malls. It clearly didn’t work as a model for a store like Circuit City and I don’t think it’s working for other retailers like Home Depot, Best Buy, and so on. Most of these bigger outlets and chains are now vigorously unpleasant places to shop in, pretty much the opposite of the spectactorial grandeur of mass consumption at the end of the 19th Century. Workers in these stores often know almost nothing about the merchandise they sell and have almost no desire to actively sell it to anyone. Many large retail outlets are laid out indifferently or confusingly, and have all the problems with the diversity and selectivity of their stock that I’ve described above. In a lot of cases, short-sighted middle management has added to the problem by requiring sales staff to aggressively push unnecessary warranties or robotically attempt to encourage customers to acquire consumer loyalty cards, to make the experience of shopping intrusive or unpleasant.

5) Saturation of personal ownership, particularly leisure and cultural goods. For example, the music industry, with its obsession about piracy, doesn’t seem able to bend its head around the possibility that another problem they have is that older music consumers may simply have hit a point where they don’t need or want any more music–that they’ve assembled the back catalogs of work they really like and are now vastly more selective about what they might want to add, limiting to new work that they enjoy or the occasional addition of older work. Or maybe they do understand it, hence the constant drive towards new formats with the insistence on sabotaging their compatibility with old formats. This is the only thing a lot of culture-industry and leisure-goods manufacturers get now: steal back the old stuff of durable quality that we foolishly sold to people and require them to buy new stuff where we stick in some expiration date or limitation on its use–rather than attending to the production of new material that might motivate many consumers to a purchase.

If one of the goals of stimulus is to get American consumers shopping again, then I think it’s going to take some substantial changes to the entire retail landscape for that to be more than a momentary upward blip in a relentlessly downward spiral. And at least some of those changes will involve rethinking the size, scale and ubiquity of retailing. Brick-and-mortar shopping needs to move back towards smaller but more knowledgeable and invested sales staff who are better compensated and respected for their work. It needs to offer better choices from a genuine diversity of goods, to build back catalogs and long-tail selections on the shelves, to look for local or variant producers. Retailers have to stop trying to manipulate information asymmetries about price, availability and quality to their benefit, and have to start investing in standards and regulations that improve the conditions of manufacture.

This ultimately means lower aggregate sales and fewer retail jobs, in all likelihood. But it’s the only stable long-term foundation for mass consumption that I can see. I’m absolutely not one of those critics of consumerism who basically loathes it from start to finish: there is a great deal to like about late 20th Century material culture in the U.S. and Europe, quite aside from the fact that consumerism is now the heart of the only global economy we can plausibly imagine. Retailers need to think about what’s gone wrong in the part of the economy that they control, and fix it independently of the fixes being aimed at the financial sector. If they fool themselves into thinking that Circuit City is the fault of Citigroup, then don’t look for the consumer economy to have a healthy revival regardless of what happens to toxic bank debt.

Posted in Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities | 16 Comments

Fish Food

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Let me add to the “Stanley Fish is just kind of pathetic” dogpile a bit here. In many ways, Fish’s latest column kind of reveals just how naked the emperor has become when it comes to hack complaints about the leftist intolerant academic-freedom abusing groupthink academy.

Fish writes about a physicist at the University of Ottawa who is clearly a goofball spewing out Bazooka-Joe bubblegum comic level radicalisms about how grades are the tool of the capitalist satan, blah blah blah. Fine, the guy sounds like an asshole to me. I guess he sounds like an asshole to the University of Ottawa, too, since they’re working to get him fired. How about that, act like an ass and refuse to do your job and you get fired. But Fish spends most of the column bemoaning the fact that you’d get fired if you had a normal job but not in academia. But here comes the real kicker: Fish says in academia, “You’d be celebrated as a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies, a pedagogical visionary and an exemplar of academic freedom.”

Who is celebrating this case or this behavior? Where are the protest marches demanding that this professor be reinstated? Nobody and nowhere. So you have a column in which, if you read it carefully, the columnist is confessing that his assumptions are completely off-base.

I’d have said that the job you really can’t get fired from is being a columnist for the NY Times, only they finally did run Bill Kristol off the premises.

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 4 Comments

Book Notes: Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Before I launch into my more complicated reactions to some of the material in the book, I should be clear: this is a really good book (and Vanderbilt has a nice blog to go along with it). If you get twitchy about Malcolm Gladwell’s almost complete stripping out of references to his source material, you’ll like this a lot better, as it is much easier to follow the trail of breadcrumbs from Vanderbilt back to his sources and research. The book is written as an exploration of the state-of-the-art in traffic studies, rather than driving inexorably towards a single strong thesis or synthesis view of driving and transportation.

I’d say that it made me think in some new ways about my own experiences as a driver, particularly in terms of the way I read the behavior of other drivers as having moral or social significance.

However, I also did find myself feeling some familiar frustrations as the book went on, not so much towards Vanderbilt as towards some of the expert views or perspectives he features. (Though he does have the occasional annoying habit, common in this kind of non-fiction, of temporarily adopting the perspective or filter of the dominant expert perspective that he’s exploring in a given chapter, even if in a later chapter, he’s looking at a different, conflicting perspective or approach.)

Here’s the two things which sometimes got under my skin.

The inability of experts to see the history of their expertise as part of the problems that they’re trying to solve today. There’s a certain amount of talk by traffic and transportation experts in the book about the degree to which the awareness of drivers about the intent of traffic engineers alters the behavior of drivers. E.g., that if drivers know that a particular design for a road network or signage, etc., is meant to elicit a particular behavior from drivers, they sometimes seem to perversely foil or resist that intent.

So at least some of the people Vanderbilt is talking to actually try to veil or hide what they’re doing on the logic that this is a better way to herd human cattle towards desired ends. They also seem to have no way to understand why people react to expert solutions in unexpected or unplanned ways except to see those reactions as perverse products of some kind of root-level psychological quirk.

I know this is an old theme at this blog, but the fact is that Americans (and other national citizenries) have perfectly good reasons to view expert-driven management of everyday life with some degree of suspicion. Vanderbilt’s book offers plenty of examples of how the certainties of yesterday’s traffic engineers or planners created serious problems precisely because those certainties were based on fundamentally flawed understandings of the consequences or were justified in terms of some mainstream social ideology about how people should live. Knowing this history doesn’t seem to check the hubris of contemporary expertise in many case: instead, they relentlessly double-down their bets. This time they’ve got it right! This time, we should live in a signless utopia where all the roads have roundabouts and there are naked women and children on tricycles crossing in front of us so that we pay attention to our surroundings.

If the perception that an expert solution is redirecting our behavior in our physical or social landscape often goads people to do the opposite (or to simply elide or evade some of what they are being encouraged to do), that is on some level a perfectly rational processing of the actual history of expert policy formation and intervention over the last century. Sometimes this is also because (then or now) what experts are trying to get people to do is very actively not in the interests of most people, but sometimes people are simply trying to keep their options open, to make sure that they don’t get overly committed to one way of behaving in advance of some proof that it’s a good solution or system.

Until this leads to some greater measure of humility about the value of expertise itself, expect this kind of wary evasion of expert solutions to continue, for completely rational reasons.

Secondly, at least some of the experts that Vanderbilt relies upon have a typical problem that afflicts a lot of applied social science, namely, that local culture (habits of thoughts, ways of seeing the world, routinized practices, belief systems, etc.) is treated either as an incomprehensible externality which has to be compensated for but not investigated or is taken to be a hidden universal that is disguising itself as a local particularity.

In the first case, when planners become aware that people in a particular society or community or place have very particular habits or understandings of driving or transportation, they just bracket that off as another technical challenge like “it’s very hilly hereabouts” or “it snows a lot in this place”. Cultural practice isn’t something they investigate or try to understand in its own terms, and because planners take it to be a fixed property of the locality that has to be accomodated rather than engaged and understood, they’re often flummoxed when the culture of driving or moving through the environment changes, sometimes in dynamic response to the changes made by planners themselves.

In the second case, planners look at some practice or behavior that’s manifestly cultural and decide that it’s actually some universal facet of human neurobiology or social psychology or economics that only appears to be local, particular and mutable. So as soon as they can get everything they’re seeing safely packaged back inside that universal, they can get back to building the better mousetrap. I don’t doubt that a lot of the research Vanderbilt describes is perfectly correct that many universal aspects of human biology, psychology, perception and economics are at play in how we drive or move through the world. For example, the material on how we perceive the speed of an oncoming object, and how road design affects that perception, is totally convincing, and I’m sure influences what happens on the road in Kenya as much as it does in Wyoming. On the other hand, when we’re talking about how (or whether) people view queuing for lane changes in moral terms, I expect that to vary a lot based on cultural expectations and practices of everyday life, and to have a bit less tossing about of generic homo economicus formulations.

Posted in Books | 4 Comments

The Star Wars of 3D?

Posted on February 9, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Ok, that’s a bit strong as a description of the film Coraline. But there were moments seeing it this weekend where I flashed back to that first viewing of Star Wars in 1977, to that moment where the Imperial Star Destroyer came in from the top of the screen, and you realized that all the films you’d ever seen with “special effects” were basically nothing like this film, even though you recognized some aspect of the technology or the style or the genre as preceding that moment of amazement.

Even without the 3D, Coraline is a great film both visually and in terms of its storytelling. Think twice about taking younger kids: my 8-year old was freaking out in parts, and she’s a fairly sophisticated consumer of fantastic imagery and fairy-tale narratives. There were a lot of people in the audience with younger kids still, and you could hear a wave of whimpering fearfulness at some points in the last half of the film. Still, I’d agree with A.O. Scott in the New York Times: this is a good kind of unsettling, scary story for kids, that opens up some potent issues in really good and imaginative ways. As I said to my daughter afterwards, the film is partly about the disturbing moment in childhood where you begin to recognize that your parents have weaknesses and that not everything in the world exists for your own benefit, a moment that comes at different times in different kinds of childhoods. I think I’m going to write a bit about the film over at Terra Nova, because I also think it has some smart things to say about virtual worlds and imaginary play.

However, back to the 3D for a minute: this is the first film I’ve ever seen where the 3D really seems not at all a gimmick, but a sustained part of the aesthetic, something that adds not just literal layers to the visuals but layers to the storytelling, to the experience of seeing and thinking about the film. If you can see it in a 3D theater, do so.

Posted in Popular Culture | 5 Comments

The Embarassment of Paratext, the Insufficiency of Culture

Posted on February 8, 2009 by Timothy Burke

It’s a little thing, but let me make it into something slightly bigger. In the Sunday Week in Review section of the New York Times today, there’s a brief item about road signs warning of zombies ahead.

The item mentions a few of the recent reports of zombie road signs. And then it says, “Authorities were puzzled over how pranksters could have reprogrammed the road signs”, and then “the choice of imaginary danger may reflect the hard economic times…last fall, data posted by the science fiction blog io9.com suggested that the number of zombie-themed movies released tends to spike in period of national trauma.”

Authorities are puzzled? Really? I hope not, given that you can find the instructions for reprogramming road signs on a popular website. A website mentioned in at least one of the news stories the Times was evidently drawing from. And, oh, a website mentioned by some of the authorities that other reporters have interviewed about this story.

As far as zombie-themed movies being a cultural indicator of economic stress, on one level, that’s just the usual silliness of lifestyle journalism at work, in which it is impossible to write about anything without proclaiming it to be: a) a trend and b) a trend which is part of some metatrend, some big change in the way we are. It’s as wrong an explanation as the claim “authorities are puzzled” is. The history of zombies in popular culture doesn’t offer that kind of neat correspondence, but moreover, on some level, it needs no explanation other than itself. The tropes of zombie films and games refer first and last to themselves and their shared history. Any individual zombie-themed work may have other referents, other messages, other commentaries. But if you want to know why this “choice of imaginary danger”, it’s probably sufficient just to know first the subcultural worlds that the pranksters themselves travel through and second to know that the tropes of zombie apocalypse have achieved a kind of cultural critical mass through iteration. When a theme or genre of entertainment becomes stable enough to be parodied (Shaun of the Dead), it is also sufficiently distributed in the culture at large to be a referent in everyday life. If you wanted to know why kids in the 1950s played cowboy-and-indian, at one level you didn’t any explanation other than Western films and television programs.

—–

Of course, there is always more to say about the content of expressive culture. Cowboy-and-indian or zombie, any theme or story or genre, has deeper roots, deeper meanings. But lifestyle journalism is often at best the Cliff Notes version of that kind of culture-reading. It reads the trends so you don’t have to, it serves up the zeitgeist on a platter so that people in Hollywood have some new patter to throw into their next pitch, so that the national narrative gets a few additional pieces of flair. It’s culture as the entrails of a cow, to be read by augurers who already know what to tell the emperor.

Part of what’s going on in the Times article, though, is also a performance of respectability, an attempt to construct what it is that serious people know and think. Serious people aren’t supposed to have paratextual knowledge of zombie tropes or of the practice of pranksters. So a practice which is in some sense quite easy to explain (both the how and the why) gets an alchemical makeover and becomes baffling in its how and something other than itself in its why, becomes a safely familiar reference to respectable news.

I’m not saying that most readers of the Times know that there’s a website that tells you how to prank roadsigns, or that they’re aficionadoes of zombie movies, or even that they have an implicit paratextual knowledge of zombie tropes. I am saying that you can’t write a little news item in the New York Times that recounts the zombie sign story in those terms, that accepts technological prankstering as a cultural form, that nods to the history of the zombie genre and treats Night of the Living Dead and Dead Rising and Shaun of the Dead as sources of cultural practice in their own right.

There are a lot of reasons why print journalism is tottering on the edge of the abyss, but this is one small piece of the problem. Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis of print capitalism in Imagined Communities argues that the mass distribution of newspapers in the 19th Century was an important instrument in creating national identities, that national readerships felt connected by a sense of simultaneity, that a fellow national was reading the same paper and being addressed by it similarly despite the physical or situational distance between the two readers. But now serious journalism in the United States often has a far more cramped view of its imagined audience, and that’s not merely a matter of targeting a market segment or mapping yourself to a social class. It’s about trying to be the kind of adult who could always be heard speaking in the background of Peanuts cartoons, to be in all things so very grown-up and serious. It’s not just that this is a limiting ambition in its own right, but also that the default version of seriousness that informs a lot of print journalism and television punditry is at best a cobwebbed artifact, a different kind of zombie.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture, Production of History | 10 Comments

Book Notes: Alexandra Fuller, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

Posted on February 6, 2009 by Timothy Burke

My students know that I really like the work of Alexandra Fuller about her childhood and later experiences in southern Africa. I appreciate her aggressively unsentimental vision. She doesn’t tell the usual story of rising to self-awareness, rejecting her society, and becoming a moral crusader. But neither is her work a defense of Rhodesia or her own family: she crafts a curious blend of soft misanthropy with an eye for the telling detail that allows you to feel for and with the people she describes. And I do mean craft: she’s an exceptionally talented writer.

Her book about a young man’s life and death in Wyoming shows that her craft as a writer carries over into a new setting. A lot of the discussion about the book to date has centered on the novelistic feel of the book: it’s another of those works that raises some questions about what the constraints on a work of non-fiction are or ought to be. It’s hard to believe that Colton Bryant’s life was described to her by those who knew him with some of the details and stylistic notes that Fuller puts in to the book, and her author’s note at the end says as much, speaking of “liberties” she has taken, and aspects of his life emphasized or disregarded.

I’m occasionally unsettled by some of the boundaries blurred, but I’ve seen Fuller do the same in all her work, and I’m ok with the end product as long as it’s understood that what she (and some other boundary-blurring authors) are doing is basically myth-making in the best sense of the concept. Or in the case of her work on Rhodesia and Zimbabwe, making counter-myths.

Maybe the problem isn’t with work that blurs boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, but with the authority that we’re inclined to grant work that is labelled non-fiction or research or statistics or findings. This morning in the New York Times there is a story about a study that suggests that blue rooms encourage creativity and red rooms encourage accuracy. It takes getting to the bottom of the story before the details of the effect sizes emerge (small) and questions about the assumptions built into the study are raised (considerable). And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if in six months time, there are interior decorators doing their most to sell people on repainting homes and schools and work spaces clutching this study in hand, claiming that experts and scientists say it’s vitally important that this work be done.

What would a book that was more rigorously non-fictional about Colton Bryant and his death in a Wyoming oil rig look like? It could have more of Alexandra Fuller in it, and explain more of what she knows and how she knows it. That can work if it’s done the right way, but much of the time, that approach turns into self-indulgence, where other people’s lives are primarily seen as interesting for what they catalyze in the life of the writer. It could have more of the economic and social facts surrounding working-class life in Wyoming, or more of a portrait of the oil industry in Wyoming, but in that kind of account, the vividly personal diminishes, becomes typified and sanitized, something to use in political campaigns or policy debates.

My main response to Fuller’s work in this book is not about whether she should engage in myth-making, but about what side of the mythic street she is working. Starting with a story like Bryant’s that ends with him dying as a young man working in a dangerous industry that cares little for the fate of its employees, an outsider like Fuller can go a couple of ways. She can look at Bryant’s world as pathological, as a series of traps, as a landscape in need of emancipation or transformation. Or she can sympathize, even sanctify, his world and his dogged determination to make his manhood through a kind of labor that he and everyone else in his world understands is likely to claim its due in blood.

Fuller very much works with the latter approach and a lot of the tropes of that view seep in along the way. This is a good book to read if you want a sense of how a basically Jacksonian sense of popular authenticity arising out of working manhood, as residing in the common sense of the everyday as opposed to the educated consciousness of elites, is so continuously renewed in American life but never more so than in the last decade. All of Fuller’s work sees people who risk and commit and don’t pause overly much to reflect as the authentic wellspring of life, as truly being in the land and the world, as defining what places and communities really are. Even though Fuller clearly views the oil company itself as exploitative and insensitive, the way she imagines Colton H. Bryant’s life is to imagine it as the life he (and perhaps us) should have lived, as opposed to a condition from which she imaginatively wishes to rescue him.

I think that’s a powerful myth, and I don’t care for the pathologization that is its frequent opposite. But I wonder if you can have your cake and eat it too to the extent that Fuller would like to: describe lives not only without apology but as sufficient, as what they are and ought to be, to seal them off from yearning and reflection and second thoughts, not to mention any sense of living in a world where there are other lives, other situations, rubbing up against them uncomfortably. Fuller does to Bryant what she did to her childhood, in a way: enclose him in a manorial world of his friends and family, a culture without boundaries or limits, where even the kids who mocked him as a “retard” are part and parcel of the architecture of that cultural world.

Posted in Africa, Books, Politics | 1 Comment