What a Beautiful World

Posted on October 15, 2008 by Timothy Burke

When I was a teenager, I had a chance to spend some time in France with my family and another family we were friends with. I’ve only been back to France once since as an adult, so this time is still very strongly etched in my memory. One afternoon, we ate a slow, sleepy meal at a very pleasant restaurant that was high on a hillside about the River Lot, not too far from Cahors. As we ate, we became aware of a very large group not too far from us, and found that it was a pre-wedding dinner for the families of a young Irish woman and a young French man who were getting married over the weekend. We ended up talking with a few of the Irish family members, partly because they had a toddler who kept rolling his stroller over towards the extremely long and steep stone stairs near our table, and we kept gently preventing him from sending it (and himself) tumbling down. The old patriarch, peeled away from his new in-laws, managed to get in a few genial, bemused jabs at French culture. But he was clearly pleased not just for his daughter, but for the prospect of an unexpected connection to a place far from his own upbringing. On that sleepy afternoon, surrounded by good wine, food and company, overlooking a rugged and fertile valley, warmed by the happiness of young people, who could not feel that the world was from that moment on, a better place?

I was thinking of that afternoon this weekend while attending another wedding, this time of two Swarthmore alumni. It was a beautiful wedding, held outdoors on one of the best autumn days I can remember, the kind where the sunlight looks like burnished brass, the kind of wedding you feel fortunate to attend. It was multicultural and ecumenical in the best, most heartfelt way, with elements borrowed from the couple’s Jewish, African and African-American heritages. I remember again having this feeling that this is what we’re meant to do as human beings, that the world is being rewoven, deepened, cherished through these kinds of connections.

Most of the last century at least raises complicated questions when we talk of progress. Industrialization and technological change have created new and potentially lethal problems even as they’ve brought comfort, health and happiness to most of humanity. Nation-states and international institutions support novel forms of collective action and social organization, but those can just as easily be genocide and war as they can be positive achievements.

But the ability of individual human beings with very different histories to fall in love, make friends, live in community with one another, and for that to happen in the open, as something simple and sweet and good: that’s progress. Ever since human societies around the world began to connect and mesh together in dramatic new ways from the 13th Century onward, there have been plenty of multiracial, multicultural connections between people, but most of them that involved love or friendship took place in spite of numerous laws, strictures and sanctions, in the shadow of repression or violence. I really do think that in the last century, we’ve at least glimpsed a glimmer of light at the end of that tunnel, despite the extraordinary violence and convulsions of our times.

I understand why individuals and communities who cherish what they understand as heritage or tradition worry about transformative connections in their midst. Worried discussion is fine. What came to me as I sat watching this weekend, however, was a sudden sharp reminder of why I’ve found the nastiest attacks on Obama so gut-wrenchingly repellant. It’s not that they are in some simple, crude fashion “racist”. It’s that the ugliest talk wants to take what should be straightforwardly positive about Obama’s personal history and turn it into something definitionally and generically suspicious, as if anyone with his multiracial background or multicultural experience must be a hidden poison for the national body politic. It’s that they want to take what is in Obama’s story a pretty good advertisement for American society and for meritocratic mobility and make both aspects of his biography into a sign of subversion and danger. It’s not just some gutter element rarely seen on the political stage making these kinds of insinuations: most recently, I’ve seen them festering in the comments section coming from regular commenters at several moderate blogs that I really like, to the evident frustration of the hosts of those blogs.

I’m not saying that there are no legitimate questions about Obama’s background, but the legitimate questions are very ordinary ones. What kind of political leader will he be, given his concrete political record to date? Is he something of a political chameleon with an ear for the rhetoric of compromise, but not a strong policy vision that will let him steer the ship in a determined way? (In this sense, I think you could raise a question of whether he’s too much like Jimmy Carter, someone who could read the zeitgeist but who didn’t have a good sense of how to actually govern.) I’m fine with discussions of Obama along these lines.

I see lots of very good reasons in these concrete ways to prefer Obama very strongly to McCain, whose concrete record of leadership and accomplishment now strikes me as being unappealing even before his weaknesses were paraded forth during this campaign. I say that as someone who liked McCain in 2000, though I’ve begun to feel that what I liked is what his friends in the media helped me to imagine him to be, rather than what he is. Nothing about my negative judgment of McCain affects how I view his considerable accomplishments, his great contributions, before he became a politician. It’s all about here, about now, about what a politician does and becomes in the course of being a politician.

The other kind of talk makes me both sick and furious because it takes one of the few parts of our national and global history where we’ve seen a better kind of world come into being and tries to make that into something dirty and shameful.

Posted in Blogging, Politics | 1 Comment

Puddleglum

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Is anybody else feeling just kind of totally depressed about the political and economic scene of the moment? And not just for the obvious reasons? As the possibility of an Obama victory becomes more and more tangible, I find myself more and more down about it. Not because I don’t want it: I want it desperately. But because even the possibility seems to be producing an infinitely escalating spiral of spew from hardcore opponents of Obama. I feel like I’m drowning in the sheer madness of it. I read a lot of it and say, “Really, what’s the point of even trying to talk about any of this? This is either someone who has just lost their sense of proportion utterly or someone who is so malicious that my only reasonable response is to edge away slowly and hope they don’t notice me.”

All you folks who’ve thrown around “Bush Derangement Syndrome” so casually as a label in the last seven years. All I can say is that in February 2001, I said to a lot of friends, “Come on, this won’t be so bad.” I did not have strong feelings about either candidate in 2000, to be truthful. I said in October 2001, “Maybe this guy will grow into his role–he’s owed the benefit of the doubt, he asked for us to come together”. (Honestly. Read some of what I’ve put out there about my reaction at the time.) If I ever became “deranged”, it was about things which actually happened, a tangible, real record of failure and malfeasance that I think is historically remarkable in the context of the American Presidency. I’m reading plenty of people now who seem to me so much more deranged, more out-of-their-skulls batshit crazy than the most fringe puppet-waving no-blood-for-oil-sign-waver you could possibly conjure up after a night of watching Fox News in a drunken stupor. So. Seriously, don’t mention “Bush Derangement Syndrome” around me any more, because whatever your yardstick is, if you’re not adding another three or four yards to it right now, you’re either not paying attention or you’re one of the lotus-eaters.

Update Judging from some press reports in the last few days, some of this kind of reaction may be worrying John McCain as well. Now were I him, even as a matter of political calculation, I might wonder if giving a strongly worded speech telling some of his supporters to cut out all the nutty conspiratorial or racist crap would be a shrewd as well as honorable move, giving at least some independents some reason to see McCain as a principled person. It certainly would be a genuinely maverick gesture to make.

Posted in Politics | 22 Comments

Gaze Into the Crystal Ball

Posted on October 7, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Everyone is prognosticating right now. I’m not immune. In those moments where genuine uncertainty enters the room in an undeniable way, we all desperately want to know what is happening, and what will happen next.

One of my private pleasures as a historian is reading old newspapers in sequence just to see pundits and prognosticators try to guess what is coming next. They almost invariably fail badly, often because they cannot imagine either just how terrible the near-future will become or how wonderful and strange some of the developments just around the corner are going to be.

This is a basic problem with professional futurism as well. However much flummery and fan-dancing it offers about its methods, it is usually mere extrapolation from the history of the previous twenty, thirty, fifty years.

Why do I like reading the wildly wrong views of past people who stand poised on the edge of some major and unguessed-at transformation? Partly because my favorite four words in the English language are, “I told you so.” But it’s also a warning to myself and anyone like me.

Nassim Nicolas Taleb’s The Black Swan is a smart book that centrally engages this basic problem. Taleb focuses on the events which we do not expect because they are improbable, our tendency to make models and theories that domesticate the empirical noise from which improbable events and sudden transformations can emerge. He tries to describe an alternative practice of prognostication, or of managing exposure to “black swans”, these unforeseen, disjunctive moments. In part, he argues, we should “worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the more vicious hidden ones” and to “worry less about matters people usually worry about because they are obvious worries, and more about matters that lie outside our consciousness and common discourse”. (p. 296)

I don’t think I get to some of his self-described intellectual practice through the same frameworks (in fact, I think Taleb is sometimes just as indebted to bad theory or bloated abstractions as some of the experts he targets) but I like the ambition. It’s less about trying to make the future a conventionally known object and more about exploring the possibility spaces that I can imagine resulting from the accidental or unplanned interactions of systems and agents. But it’s also being willing to believe that things can happen as a result of those interactions which are not part of my experience nor are mere replays of some known past scenario, to resist easy parallels and metaphors.

So from that angle, how do I think through the present financial crisis? It seems to me both possible to imagine that what appears to be a certain disaster could end as a kind of weird farce wherein all the various players so wrapped up in financial instruments that they themselves don’t understand find as they untangle their knots that all their many bets and insurances and fictions cancel each other out. Fictional money could evaporate, but real assets remain, and it will be only a lesson about speculation for future generations to recall like the tulips of past days.

Or we could find that however real some of the assets down deep at the bottom might be–houses and properties, buildings and factories–that these things only will have value again in a decade, two decades, but that the entire financial system and consumer culture is built on them having the value they were believed to have right this very minute. In the worst case of that direction, we might find that there isn’t enough money in all the world to recapitalize the system right here, right now. In which case, I have no idea what could happen as a consequence, only that it might well be bad at scales and intensities that few of us alive have any benchmark for.

The important thing now seems to me to not domesticate these events, to not try to stuff them back into the box of already-understood models and analogies. Instead we have to try to imagine instead the world becoming strange to us, to think the unthinkable. If enough people had been able to imagine the terror and suffering that industrial weaponry and trench warfare might produce, perhaps World War I would have seemed a much worse gamble than it did seem to those in power at the time. If more people besides Vannevar Bush had been able to see the potential shape and impact of information and computing in the decades after 1945, perhaps a whole generation of thinking about mechanization, computers, and cultural transformation would have taken on a softer, more enticing tone from the outset–and fewer people would have lived in fear of an all-powerful mainframe running human affairs. (This would have deprived Captain Kirk of one set of easy victories, however.)

This is an elaborate way of saying that I don’t know what’s going to happen, and neither do you. But you should neither be too quick to be sanguine and comfort yourself by thoughts of your own financial prudence or inoculation from the problems of others nor should you start looking for the most likely place to pitch a tent in your local Hooverville. Whatever happens, both safety and danger may lie in unexpected places. Taleb has a pretty good bit of advice about this, too: seek wide exposure to potentially positive unexpected events, and clamp down hard on any exposure to the worst of potentially negative ones. The problem, of course, is that the very worst (and best) such transformations make it clear that there is nowhere to hide, no way to be private, no island: that we are always already social, institutional and system-bound, and cannot help being so.

Posted in Books, Politics | 16 Comments

Artist Bleg

Posted on October 6, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’m looking for an example of a well-known visual artist who did a lot of black-and-white drawings with charcoal, pastels, or pencil-and-ink whose work was heavily tonal rather than involving a lot of line. This is for the life drawing class I’m auditing: we’re supposed to find someone whose work interests us visually, whose work we feel we can learn from looking at and eventually reproduce.

———

I’m kind of stuck on territory that the German artist Max Klinger thought about in the 19th Century. He argued that painting and color were for observation, drawing and prints for the imagination, for fantasy, for visual work that came from ideas. I don’t agree with that division, but I find myself almost helplessly inclined to reproduce it in a more general way.

On one hand: I’m really attracted to the work of a whole slew of cartoonists, graphic artists, designers. But: most of it has a lot of control, a lot of departure from observational work. A lot of line. I can’t do this kind of work. I’m sure of it. Once again, I’m learning about the way my mind works, and I’m learning that my mind simply doesn’t like precision when it’s doing work, even if I like that kind of precision in the work of others. I was really drawn to a lot of the character design work in a book by Michael Mattesi that I picked up the other day. I feel like I can conceive of the designs, but I couldn’t execute them through life drawing myself. When I try to work with line, it looks bad, it looks wrong, and I get flustered quickly.

I’m happiest with the results of my own work when I stop having ideas, or trying to impose too much control, when the work can be imprecise and sloppy in some ways, and when it’s very tonal, very much about light and shadow, about volume and dimensionality. (Sometime tomorrow I’ll try to scan and post the two drawings from this semester that I’ve thought were ok.)

Intellectually, I’m really against the view that we should strive for the perfection of control, for our intentions to match outcomes. I’m not so much a postmodernist in this sense as an anti-modernist. The idea of mastery over the world, the environment, society is a bad one; I’m always very interested in arguments about how what we mean to do is transformed in many unintended ways when our intentions meet up with the material world, with institutional and social systems, and so on. I think that’s a good thing, a way that we become usefully strange to ourselves. That’s what I like about the idea of observational drawing: it’s not just that I’m looking at something real that I’ll never see again as I saw it at that moment, but that there’s the physicality of paper, charcoal, a room, other people drawing, all sorts of things going on that will make the results a surprise to me as well as anybody else. Maybe a bad surprise in some cases, but that comes with the territory.

How much all of this is just a fake dichotomy, I don’t know. It may be that I’m like a baby taking a few steps and saying, “DAMN, is this what walking is all about? I’m no good at running and strolling and stuff like that, I’m going to stick with wobbling unsteadily and falling on my ass because that’s where I’ve got my natural skills”.

A lot of the German expressionists seem to me to represent an interesting middle zone for me to think through. Not thematically: the politics of a lot of Expressionist work seems to me to have that ambition to control or authority in multiple ways. I don’t really want to do polemical work visually, or to visualize stereotypically social themes. But they did seem to be doing work where on one hand they had a strong idea or concept in mind and yet were also responding to light, value, tonality, volume in what they saw. I don’t want to produce abstraction. The artists that most readily come to mind sometimes had distorted, stretched, exaggerated figures, which is what I like about some of the sketches in Mattesi’s work, or other work by contemporary graphic artists, cartoonists and so on. I really want to find someone with very strong black-and-white work if possible, though.

I really liked Kaethe Kollwitz’s work visually when we looked at it in class earlier this semester. I hate to be the kind of student who doesn’t go any further than what was brought into class, but she may be the closest to what I feel I can do. Oscar Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach and Emil Nolde are also somewhat appealing. The South African artist Gerard Sekoto is interesting to me for the same reasons.

Other, very different people whose work appeals in the same way, as something where I like the technique and the medium on display: Honore Daumier and Albert Pinkham Ryder. Living artists: I like Frank Auerbach’s black-and-whites. I like some of the sketches and illustrations that Mervyn Peake did, though I think most of his pictures have have a lot of line and detail.

Any ideas out there? My knowledge of art history is so episodic and largely about understanding the overall arc of cultural history that it’s not helping me much to think through this challenge.

Update Edwin Dickinson seems really appealing to me along these lines, including the unreality or dreaminess that was part of his work at times. I think that’s what I’ll go with.

Posted in Miscellany | 5 Comments

Always Never Sometimes Generalize

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Timothy Burke

In the discussion of my previous entry about Mark Edmundson’s essay, Alonzo raises a pretty fair challenge to the intensity of my reaction to that essay. I’ve been thinking about this issue a bit this morning.

This is a discussion that I’ve gotten into before at this blog, because I tend to have strong reactions to what strike me as unfair generalizations. The strength of my (over?)reaction produces two immediate problems.

First, I like to make generalizations myself. You can’t avoid doing so, and you shouldn’t want to avoid doing so. Generalizing well is a basic part of critical thought. I’m finding the truth of this proposition in yet another form this semester in doing some observational drawing. If you try to draw a room, a person, an object in every possible detail, you’re on a fool’s errand. It isn’t even how we actually physiologically see the world. There will always be another detail or nuance excluded at the end of your work.

I’m presently trying to finish the introduction to a manuscript I’ve been working on for an unseemly length of time, and in it, I’m aggressively generalizing about some of the atmospheric, pervasive claims I see as habitual features of scholarly writing within African studies in the Anglo-American academy. There’s a problem with that characterization, and I acknowledge it in the introduction: if you look for chapter and verse quotations to document the tendencies I’m describing, if you try to draw that feeling straight out of published work, it’s actually rather difficult. Either you have to magnify the importance of a relatively marginal work that is written in a more polemical or vivid style than ordinary professionalized scholarship in the field, or you have to really dig in hard on the exegesis of much more canonical works to show where the tendencies you’re describing can be found. What I’m trying to describe in the introduction is really the paratextual context that surrounds Africanist scholarship. Not what we say in our carefully groomed publications, but the conversations we have at meetings, the introductions we make to our papers on panels, the verbal characterizations we make of what is good and bad in our field, the mustering of institutional resources to endorse some research and condemn other research. I’m trying to capture gestures, winks, nods, scowls, all of which I think are more powerful in constructing the norms of practice in a disciplinary field than the formal publications that we put forward to be cited and dissected. I can’t help but describe those kinds of underlying forces in terms not far off from the way Edmundson builds his complaint. At some point, you’ll have to trust me.

Second, being overly fastidious about generalization is a quick road to shitty writing. Specifically the kind of shitty writing that academics frequently exhibit, writing full of qualifying statements, cover-your-ass mock concessions, muddled and passive-voice constructions that permit the author a measure of plausible deniability about an argument. This is one of the points that Alonzo quite rightly raises in his comment, that the end result of my complaint is the constriction of Edmundson’s (or any author’s) ability to write a short, descriptive, provocative essay.

To return to the analogy I’m getting from observational drawing, if I’m making a drawing, it is at least as much for others to view as it is for my own satisfaction. If I make a drawing that has so much detail in it that nothing draws the viewer’s eye or says anything about what I saw, what’s the point? All I’m really doing then is grabbing you, sitting you down in the same chair that I sat in and saying, “See?”

On the other hand, it’s all about the details you choose to put in that picture. Generalizations work best when they’re vivid in the few specifics they do offer, when the telling detail or sharply observed narrative draws you in. A good generalizer is willing to be surprised by the world around them, to see something they’ve never seen before, or sees a detail that feels drawn from life as we ourselves know it. A good generalizer is a good storyteller, often working from personal experience. Bad generalizers grab generic reports from the newspapers, snatch course titles out of online catalogues, retell thrice-told tales, tell you about something that happened to a friend of a friend who knows someone.

————

So what does rub me the wrong way sometimes about generalizations?

Part of my reaction is simple. I’m most annoyed when I feel included in a hostile generalization that I don’t find to be a truthful description of my practice or my life. When I read David Lodge, even when it makes me wince a bit at the resemblance to my own life, it feels more or less correct. Reading Edmundson’s essay, on the other hand, I don’t see what he sees in several respects, even given that I share some of his underlying dissatisfaction with the state of the academic humanities. I teach and read cultural studies, I teach and read about popular culture. That’s not all I do, but it’s some of it. I don’t use computers or gadgets in every or even most class sessions, but when it’s appropriate to do so, I do.

As a result, there really isn’t any room in Edmundson’s essay for me to be a good teacher, to care deeply about what I do, to believe I’m calling students to the “alternatives”. He hasn’t left any rhetorical escape hatches for me to crawl out of. I have colleagues here and elsewhere who I think are fantastic teachers and scholars of the kind that Edmundson claims to admire, and they too are left penned in by his characterization. So at that point, I really am left with only two possibilities: I’m wrong or he’s wrong. Option B, please.

Second, I react strongly because I have a countermanding generalization in mind. I’ve known scholars who imagine themselves as Edmundson seems to: lonely sentinels standing on the rampart of a neglected outpost as the barbarians crest over the hill. Sometimes, they’re completely entitled to that self-image. I’ve been taught by professors and worked with professors who absolutely strike me that way, who really do stand alone in some exemplary manner, and whose contrarianism is both prodigiously talented and fiercely charismatic. I love these folks, I admire them, I desperately want to be surrounded by them. I’d often like for them to succeed in transforming academic practice so that more of us teach or think as they do. Judging from what Alonzo says, that’s how Edmundson comes off to his students. I could certainly read him in that spirit, and maybe I should.

However, I’ve also been taught by professors and worked with professors for whom this kind of self-image is armor against the unfortunate fact that they stink as teachers or that their scholarly interests pace restlessly inside a teeny-tiny intellectual prison cell of their own making.

If I had to come up with a rule of thumb about how I sort the former from the latter on first acquaintance, it’s that the charismatic contrarians are more playful, more self-aware, more entertainingly performative and often surprisingly knowledgeable about the objects of their derision. You can drop them into almost any context and they’ll be able to play along, prod and poke, conceal the eventual ferocity of their critique until the emotional and intellectual moment is right. The people who are really just flattering themselves while developing a comprehensive alibi for their own professional weaknesses are humorless, repetitive, dully tendentious, unresponsive to context, one-trick ponies.

Third, I’m domesticated enough to the norms of professional life that I think that fellow professionals are owed a generic kind of courtesy simply by the fact that they are fellow professionals. I’m all for calling a demonstrated scoundrel out (Margaret Soltan is the supreme mistress of this art). But I intuitively recoil from characterizations which either make someone out to be a scoundrel from what strike me as minor foibles or mistakes, or which sweepingly indict vast acres of professional real estate as populated by worthless hacks.

One of the things I ended up deciding I didn’t like about graduate school some years after I’d finished graduate school was a culture of invidious (and self-complimentary) disdain for most other scholars and most other scholarly work. It took me a long time to cleanse that kind of sneering out of my system, and I sometimes lapse back. I didn’t like the meanness of this affect towards others, and I didn’t like the implied egocentrism of it either.

I think most of us publish too much stuff, and that scholarly work taken as a whole is weakly written, overly specialized, and pedantic. Paradoxically, though, my basic opinion of any given individual scholarly work is positive until I’m convinced otherwise by reading it and engaging it. Writing a whole monograph or even an article is hard work, and anyone who gets to the finish line deserves a slap on the back and a hug. Most of the time, even if I disagree with a specific work, I try to respect the work and craft that went into it.

I think a lot of what is taught in the scholarly humanities, especially at R1 universities and selective liberal arts colleges, isn’t really what most 18-22 year olds would most benefit from learning. But my default assumption about any individual course taught by any specific professor is a positive one until I have really specific reason to think otherwise.

That’s what I think I owe people as a fellow professional. It’s also how I want to live my life as a person: to work towards preemptive charity and mutual respect until I’m given a specific reason to feel otherwise. There are exceptions, sure. Sometimes big ones. It’s an ideal, that’s all.

My problem with some hostile characterizations of academia is consistently that they jump these two registers of judgment in appallingly casual and mean-spirited ways. Edmundson’s essay is nowhere near as bad as some of the stupid reports and mindless surveys I’ve criticized here in the past, but it has a similarly uncharitable sense about it.

There are problems with this kind of professionalism, I know. It’s why doctors are sometimes very slow to deal with a fellow doctor that they know is screwing up or incompetent, or why law firms sometimes stick a weak senior partner in an office, lock the door, and hope he’ll just stay out of the way. Seen cynically, this kind of professional courtesy is a reciprocal pact: I won’t attack you, and you won’t attack me.

But one of the oldest and noblest ideas about the scholarly enterprise is that it is about the progressive construction of knowledge, that we not only know differently in each succeeding generation but that we know better, know more, that we build upon previous insight and leave something new for the next generation. If you take that at all seriously, it requires a basic measure of intellectual and professional generosity. It means that you read what you don’t like, observe what you criticize, try what you’re disinclined to do. It means you impose a tough test if you want to argue that a particular argument, a particular kind of work, a particular way of teaching and studying, should be superceded or demolished.

You want to rebuild the canon? Tell me how and why, and don’t just wave off a generation of smart and less-smart attacks on the canon as universally worthless. You’re tired of postcolonial theory? Fine, I have a lot of problems with it too. But it is a body of knowledge made by fellow professionals largely in good faith. If you want to do something else, you have to build the next stage on top of what they did, as a succession.

You don’t like what other academics around you are doing? Try to at least ask, “Why are they doing it?” in a way that does not presume you already know the answer. This is when generalization is most likely to make me restless, and why I complain at what I perceive to be a lack of curiosity.

Posted in Academia, Blogging | 17 Comments

Where There Is No Vision

Posted on September 30, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I have very little understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of the current financial crisis. One thing that the media covering the crisis could talk about more clearly (except maybe I think some of them don’t understand this issue and others do understand it and are very frightened about it) is the credit crunch and its possible consequences. This is the part that I think many Americans are not picking up on very clearly. It almost doesn’t matter why lenders stopped lending: the key thing is that they aren’t.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the bailout plan is the solution, as I read it, because it’s not entirely clear that this bailout or any bailout will affect this part of the problem.

Thinking about this crisis historically, the question I have is whether this situation is really best compared to a classic “bursting bubble”. I don’t think it is, though the collapse of the housing market is one of the things that precipitated this situation. If it were just another conventional popping of a speculative bubble, then I think it might be right to conclude that after some economic pain for those most exposed to that speculation, things would settle down and get back to some version of “normal”. This situation looks to me more like one of those much rarer conjunctures where some of the fundamentals underlying a political economy are in the throes of a significant transformation, where “normal” is about to pass through an alchemical process. Sometimes in cases like that, no institution that can actually restore the old normal, because by the time a wrenchingly transformative crisis is visible, it’s too late.

Sometimes it’s possible in those kinds of convulsions to engineer some new structure to rise out of the ashes. Sometimes it’s not. This is the political vulnerability that the bailout plan suffers from most. The plan wants to save a dying patient, and so the planners have all the impatience of an emergency room surgeon with questions about whether the patient will be able to resume a healthy life afterwards. Sometimes that’s what everyone really needs to know: what will happen after? The bailout planners need to operate on two levels now: medicine for the dying, but also a long-term vision for a better, stronger patient if emergency measures succeed now. Absent that, a lot of the public, not to mention some politicians, seem to prefer a DNR tag.

Somebody–and I take it for granted that it won’t and can’t be George Bush or most of the Republican leadership–needs to talk comprehensively about the regulatory and institutional world down the road a bit, well beyond little fripperies like highly qualified and targeted limits to executive pay. What, for example, is the government willing to do in order to insure that there are safe havens for investment where you are not an unwitting counterparty to some firm’s heedless risks? What limits are we going to put on the right of individual firms or even a whole economic sector to put our nation or the world all in profound danger? How will we impose legal or economic consequences on risk-takers in the future so as to change the way they evaluate their personal and institutional exposure to high risks? We’ve been very free for three decades to dictate strong economic and political medicine to the clients of development economics. Who’s going to step up and talk about what kind of prescriptions we’re going to have swallow ourselves? It’s past bedtime for the political infants now. Grown-ups only.

I want to hear the same things now that I want to hear about the Iraq War: less “when will you withdraw” and more “what will you do to change the way we go to war in the future”? I don’t hear anyone really talking in those terms about the financial crisis, except for vague blather about regulation and making a few heads roll here and there.

Posted in Politics | 2 Comments

Physician Heal Thyself

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Many academic bloggers responded to various essays in the New York Times magazine devoted to colleges and teaching two Sundays back. I’ve been meaning to get around to this myself, specifically to Mark Edmundson’s essay “Geek Lessons”.

Edmundson basically reprises the complaint of “Why Read?” again. The problem I had with “Why Read?”, as I have with a lot of similar axe-grinding from other critics, is Edmundson’s lack of curiosity. I have a problem with a complaint against the conformity of an establishment that ends up wanting to replace one supposed monochrome with yet another. I have a problem with someone who takes their own pedagogy, preferences, interests and style as a standard without much exploration of their own limits and fallibilities.

I have no problem at all with much of Edmundson’s message about the academic humanities. I was talking with a friend earlier today about our common feeling that the humanities need to strip away a lot of the dead, cheerless weight that is the consequence of overspecialized scholarly writing in this domain, that we need to work back towards a more common-sense engagement with literature, art, cultural expression of all kinds. We need to speak to and inform a wider public while also persuading them that there is unguessed-at beauty, possibility, meaning in human culture and practice that they can and should learn to see and appreciate. In this sense, being “old-fashioned” about the humanities is very appealing to me.

It’s just that I don’t think any of Edmundson’s cranky old-man hand-waving about them kids today and their crazy machines, or about all them scholars with their cultural studies crap, is at all necessary for that project.

Edmundson’s essay is concerned first and foremost with the value of teaching, with what he calls the “Bangsian” (for Lester Bangs) professor, the person who isn’t afraid to be uncool, unhip, old-fashioned in his teaching style.

I agree that good teaching at its core comes down to some kind of dialogue with students, some primal ability to connect with them, that the best teachers would be able to teach if you put them on a desert island with students, shorn of all props save a coconut or two. There are as many ways to make that connection as there are individuals in the world, however. Edmundson allows that some teachers do well with an unorthodox style, but the limits of his allowance extend to Wittgenstein terrorizing his undergraduates.

Once you start to build up from an idealized Socratic scene where professor and students all huddle around one another in their togas, what’s an allowable prop? Would Edmundson use chalk and board? Publications that he assigns? Handouts? Maps? What kinds of references to the world around us are ok, and which are wretched signs of conformity to being “cool”? What are the narrowly approved “alternatives” to the mainstream that Edmundson will approve as such, and what makes them so?

Part of the problem here is with a generation of literary critics who are sure about what they like, sure about what “literature” is, sure about what should be taught as literature, and yet who are consistently inarticulate when it comes to defining and prescribing those boundaries in such a way that others might follow along (or take issue). These critics don’t have any kind of fully worked-out answer to the attack on canons or any way to systematically rebuild a high/popular distinction. In a way, they almost concede the argument of the historicists, or of Bourdieu, that the high/popular distinction was first and foremost a social distinction, a product of a time and place, arbitrary. So either they drift off into loosely Neil-Postmanesque reveries about building a bridge back to some favored past era, or they simply assert what they cannot be bothered to argue. They know literature when they see it, and they know junk when they see it.

If you’re Edmundson, you know what pedagogy makes someone a worthless conformist witlessly pursuing the “cool” and what pedagogy makes someone an authentic, fully Bangsian teacher. You know what tools are proper to teaching and which are not. You don’t even have to go and look at anybody else’s practice yourself: you just know that somewhere out there are computers and light-shows and gadgets and 3-D glasses. None of that is “unorthodox”, none of that calls students to the cultural alternatives (or raises critical questions about the mainstream). None of that works as Edmundson thinks teaching should work. He doesn’t have to go see it or experience it. He just knows that you can’t have a computer around.

Edmundson wants to challenge the complacency of students, but I don’t know how much more complacent you can get than some of his own armchair survey of the teachers and scholars around him. The first and worst sin for a humanist as both teacher and scholar should be a lack of curiosity, a unmoveable certainty about people and practices that we ourselves don’t know or don’t use.

If you want a sign that someone isn’t directing much scrutiny at themselves, it’s when they cite Groucho Marx with the certainty that Groucho is making fun of the other guys. Edmundson also admires Lester Bangs’ ability to “mock himself”, put himself in proportion to the exercise of criticism, but he doesn’t exactly strive to reproduce that part of the Bangsian formula.

Posted in Academia | 9 Comments

A Man Among Men

Posted on September 27, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Paul Newman is dead at 83.

The role I think I loved him in most was as Sully Sullivan in Nobody’s Fool. It was a role that almost anyone else would have screwed up by playing it broadly, making the film little more than an ABC Afterschool Special.

The cult of celebrity creates such a noise around the real people who compose its base, but Newman was one of the few men who somehow managed to shine clear through all of that while not projecting some equally phony or grandiose idea of himself as anti-celebrity. When I think about my ideal image of American masculinity, Newman is one of the people I think of: full of wily humility, smart about himself and the world around him, confident but modest, at ease but canny enough not to make too much out of that. Class act.

Posted in Production of History | 4 Comments

Trade Secret of Teachers

Posted on September 25, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I once had a student who was a prolific (and not proficient) bluffer ask me if I knew when he had no idea what he was talking about. I said, yes, it’s almost always obvious, even when a student is trying to bluff you about something that you yourself don’t know a great deal about. A student who asks honestly searching questions, or who is completely straightforward about not understanding something, is often showing off a better quality of mind than the prolific, habitual bluffer. (The proficient bluffer, a much more rare type, does have a valuable skill and often a good mind as well. In fact, you have to be smart and generally knowledgeable to bluff skillfully.)

I don’t usually dislike a bad bluffer unless that person is also intensely pretentious or strongly opinionated when they try to simulate knowing something. It can get kind of annoying when it’s a habitual response as opposed to an occasional improvisation. Certainly the habitual or persistent bluffer is never going to go on your list of the ten most impressive students you’ve ever taught. Even people who don’t know what you know can often sense, vaguely, that this is a person whom one should not fully trust. Bluffing at knowledge is kind of like a bad pick-up line in a bar: it may be amusing, it’s usually off-putting, and most importantly, it’s almost always ineffective.

Watching Palin’s interview with Katie Couric felt like being in a classroom with a bad bluffer. In fact, a bad bluffer at their worst moment, which is about five minutes before a final examination is about to begin. Simulating knowledge is exclusively conversational. It’s a social hack that relies a bit on the fact that most people have a hard time exposing or calling someone out in a face-to-face encounter. When the protection afforded by everyday politeness is stripped away, either by a skeptical interlocutor or by a concrete test or examination of knowledge, the only way a poor bluffer can keep going is by escalating brazenness and self-absorption. What especially compounds this problem for some students is when they’ve recognized suddenly that a test is coming and they try to cram in all the knowledge that they’ve been feinting at the rest of the time.

Like I said, I actually feel for a bluffer when I see them at it. My first reaction to watching the video wasn’t political, it was much more like how I feel seeing this as a teacher: a sympthetic wince. Whomever is sitting down and trying to cram with Palin is making a bad mistake. She’d be a lot better off if she didn’t to try to seriously talk about how Putin is rearing his head and floating into Alaskan air space and so on. I suspect that her personal instincts about how to answer these kinds of questions are better than the staffers who are trying to infuse her with Stature [tm] at the last minute. She’d be better off she just laughed and said, “No, of course I wasn’t serious that proximity to Russia gives me foreign policy experience. What’s important in foreign policy isn’t prior experience, it’s common sense and a solid confidence in who we are as a people.” If someone threw a gotcha at her, rather than bluff at an answer, she’d be better off just saying, “Tell me a bit about what you mean?” or “I’m not familiar with that term, I have to confess”. Socratic reversals and humorous self-deprecation are stock in trade for the talented bluffer. As is knowing when you’re in over your head: the skilled bluffer knows when to leave some important matters in the hands of those ready to handle them.

Posted in Politics | 10 Comments

I Can’t Campaign! I’m Too Busy Running For President!

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Timothy Burke

McCain is declining to debate because he’s too busy solving urgent problems, imagining himself as the already-president. This is like Walter Mitty refusing to go to work because he’s too busy doing emergency-room surgery.

Posted in Politics | 5 Comments