Bugs and Puppy Faces

Posted on August 14, 2007 by Timothy Burke

We took off for a late summer trip to a New Jersey amusement park today, which was fun.

At one point, my daughter wanted to get her face painted. I was kind of struck at the catalogue of choices. They were mostly for girls, with a few boy faces. The boys were: Loch Ness monster, spider, leopard, a few other gross and monstrous things, and puppy. The girls were all sorts of things: princess, butterfly, flower, cat, fairy, on and on.

The catalog reminded me again of how gender (and other identities) get produced, but maybe also of how weirdly we approach trying to attack or critique that production, about what went wrong (and is still sometimes going wrong) in how we go about that critique.

So much of the time, that critique is made in negative terms, and in a discourse that’s about virtue. “Watch this, do this, dress like this, because that’s what good (political) girls and boys and women and men do”. Conversely: “That film is bad. That image is bad. That text is doing bad work in the world.”

Bring those two discourses down on the head of a six-year old and it’s the equivalent of bombing civilians in Iraq. For that matter, do it to the desires, subjectivities, consciousness of adults, and it’s that also, but even worse with kids.

I watched for a while while my daughter was getting her face painted. The little girls stopped and pointed to the princesses and the butterflies. The little boys mostly didn’t stop, but occasionally they stopped to demand crocodiles and monsters. A few got in line to get their wish, most of them were shooed along to the next ride or game.

Why are those faces cued (explicitly) in the catalog to gender? Why do they stop where they stop? It’s not a conspiracy, or a calculated act on the part of the face-painters. They could mislabel the faces (butterflies for boys, monsters for girls) and I don’t think it would stop the girls and boys from pointing where they point.

When you’ve got kids, you remember all again how weird and atypical it was to have a grown-up try to directly enforce gender or class identity on you as a dictate. At least it was for me, and it seems so for my daughter. Rarely does any adult say directly and unambiguously to her: girls don’t do that. Or “you’re acting like a boy”. When they do, she remembers it, asks me about it, is disturbed by it. The teacher who said that “a father’s kiss isn’t important, only a mother’s kiss is special” was a total freak as far as she was concerned: she asked about it immediately that night.

Kids, on the other hand, aggressively and unselfconsciously enforce gender on other kids. My daughter hears all the time from other girls about what she’s not supposed to like. Yes, kids are getting it from somewhere: these ideas are not spontaneously generated by them. They’re getting it from their observations of the total cultural space, and in some cases, from direct and indirect commentary in their own domestic world. But when there’s identity work going on, a lot of it is coming from peers, sometimes made more malevolently and directly powerful and coercive by the unveiled and direct uses of interpersonal power that young children are capable of.

I don’t like any of that work that other kids are doing to her, obviously. I hate hearing her say, pensively, that she wonders whether she’s supposed to like video games while we’re playing a game that she asked for us to play. “Because”, she says, “some of the girls I know say girls don’t like video games”.

But when I think about what I should do about it, the last thing that enters my mind is to tell her she can’t get her face painted because I don’t like the choices that system offers her. That’s what a lot of our cultural politics still amount to, unfortunately: a commandment, a declaration of virtue. Like a Victorian primer for good children. Do this, disavow that. Do not watch this, that thing is forbidden. You should not feel that, you should not want that. That movie is bad: it has a scene in it which is bad. That character is bad: she looks the wrong way. I do it too, still. I used to do it a lot more.

When I think about what I do that I’m a lot happier about? It’s not to forbid, to scold, to command virtue. I just do the things I love and ask my daughter if she wants to do them with me. So I am gardening and I see a lot of really interesting insects as I till up the ground. I call her, and we hold worms, beetles, grubs, slugs, cicadas, ants, crickets. We look at them, talk about what they do, why they’re interesting or cool. This is what I did all afternoon long when I was six and seven: lift the bricks and rocks in our backyard, fill pickle jars with insects, read about and look at them. I don’t tell her it’s a duty for her to do it because she’s a girl and she’s fighting hegemonic narratives about gender. I do it because I still like to do it, and so it’s my culture and my life and I share it. She’ll like it or she won’t, like she likes or not the dinners I cook and the movies I put on the DVD and the comics I show her and the science-fiction and fantasy stories I like and the things I talk about and care for. If I was a hunter, I’d take her hunting. If I liked musicals, I’d show her my favorite. I’m not doing work when I bring her in my cultural world: I’m giving gifts.

I wonder a bit at whether some of the women I know who are also concerned about their kids’ ideas about gender could manage to stifle or repress being grossed out by a beetle or a snake long enough to keep their daughters’ from picking up on that feeling. Probably not. I don’t blame them. What you feel about a slug is a hard thing to change. You could say, “A slug, how interesting”, but if your face says, “I’m going to vomit”, almost any kid is going to read the face rather than hear the words. Why doesn’t that inability to change feelings about bugs or monsters or boy-things worry us as much about whether men can suppress or transform some of the things they like, the things they feel, the things they look at in the world? I don’t know. Maybe that’s the problem: repression. Maybe it’s easier and better to say, “Here’s an interesting insect, let me tell you what it is and why I like it. Let’s look at it under the stereo microscope and read about it in the Audubon guide. Let me tell you why I looked under bricks as a child, and why I still do it.”

The problem with the commandment: no. “That scene is bad: do not watch it.” “That image is bad: feel bad about it.” “That character is bad: do not like him or her”. It puts a kid in an impossible position: but I like fairies! I like pink! I like war toys! I like video games! I like television! even though Mom and Dad say I must not. Desire doesn’t just become mysterious suddenly at 18, it always is. Being the censor puts us in an impossible position, because we have to playact at virtues we don’t feel in any deep way ourselves. “Why, yes, that image was quite bad, my darling! Let’s, uh, watch the movie again so that we can reacquaint ourselves with its offensiveness.” I’ve never forgotten when I showed The Man Who Would Be King, a movie I really like, to a class where we were trying to study it in relation to colonialism and masculinity. I still think that was an appropriate use of the film, there are a lot of interesting discussions to be had out of the narrative. But one student sighed afterwards and said, “Do we have to talk about that film now? Because I really liked it and now we’re going to spoil it”.

So today I went and put two quarters in a foot massage machine while my daughter and my wife supervised the face painting. My daughter chose puppy, partly because she and her mom are on an extended campaign of psychological warfare against me on behalf of acquiring a second dog, to which I have tonight surrendered. But, I have to note, puppy was a “boy” face. Maybe we change culture best by viewing and doing and being what we desire and love best, and less by trying to perform the role of an ideal and virtuous self.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Politics, Popular Culture | 24 Comments

Habilus and Erectus

Posted on August 9, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Help me out, evolutionary theorists. I’m a bit puzzled at the conclusion that homo habilus cannot be ancestral to homo erectus because the two species apparently lived alongside each other for 500,000 years or so.

Isn’t it possible for one population of a species to be isolated from other populations because of relatively short-lived changes in geography or environment and to diverge just enough in that time period that speciation takes place? And after that the two populations co-habit again, but rarely or never interbreed?

With hominids, it even seems possible for me to imagine that something we could broadly define as “culture” playing a role in this kind of isolation. Reading the work of some primatologists, it seems to me that even chimps have culture in some sense, that particular social groups of chimps may have distinctive habits and practices whose roots are at least somewhat arbitrary rather than specifically adaptive. (E.g., one day an influential member of one group starts doing a common task a different but basically equivalent way, and the others eventually follow.) Exaggerate that aspect even a little bit and maybe you could get two groups of habilis living near to each other who rarely if ever interbreed simply because their day-to-day routines were culturally different, because the temporal organization of their lives amounted to the isolation of their populations from each other.

There are so many just-so stories that strike me as reasonable about the evidence that we have. As an outsider, I’m always a bit surprised at final and direct claims from the big players in the study of hominid evolution after significant fossil or genetic evidence comes to light.

Posted in Academia | 13 Comments

Ignatieff

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Michael Ignatieff’s piece in the NY Times magazine this weekend made for an interesting read. I really agree with a lot of the points made by Henry at Crooked Timber.

It’s an interesting piece in its own right, with some valid observations about the particular ways that certain kinds of intellectuals and scholars (a much narrower group than Ignatieff describes, however) tend to get mugged by reality. This is one reason that I strongly prefer the kind of historical and ethnographic scholarship that is descriptive rather than work that is trying to come up with comprehensive explanations or models. Model-makers and theorists are easily deceived about the messiness of real life. That’s fine when they’re confined to making models, and not so fine when they escape out of their theoretical clean-rooms and try to influence how policies get made.

A lot of Ignatieff’s critics accuse him of inflating the importance of people like himself, or of conflating his own errors with far more serious kinds of malevolence coming from other political and intellectual directions.

When I run down the list of prominent pro-war constituencies both inside and outside the government in the last six years. I would say that Ignatieff’s group of liberal hawks were more important in framing discussions among liberals and leftists than they were in affecting policymakers planning the war. This is where I particularly see it the way Henry does. From the perspective of Dick Cheney, or even of neoconservative intellectuals and policy wonks close to the Administration, people like Berman, Ignatieff and Packer were tools, not peers. This has a lot to do with the phenomenon of the liberal hawk who suddenly discovers that he is also anti-abortion, indifferent to torture and wiretaps if they’re carried out by the United States, strangely convinced by creationism, opposed to strong enforcement of occupational health standards, and so on. A lot of these guys took a position on the Iraq war that seemed to them to be a reasonable extension of a reasonable criticism of left defenses of sovereignty (a criticism that I’ve supported myself) but as long as they were taking that position, they expected their knockings on the door of American executive power to be answered with a friendly howdy-do neighbor and a welcome inside for tea. When the door to power didn’t open that way, some of these folks started adding all the other trappings and bangles of conservatism to try and get inside–maybe in a few cases (like Packer) hoping for that welcome to be extended while there was still time in their view to professionalize or smarten up the occupation.

I think Henry’s run-down of the relation of liberal hawk proponents of the Iraq war to other war proponents is pretty much correct.

There was one opportunist group for whom this was merely an opportunity to further their goals for long-term conservative hegemony over most policy-making feeder-streams and over as much of the public sphere as they could claim for their own. The war was an occasion, not a goal in and of itself. I wonder a bit if history is going to show that the war was actually their fatal overreach, that they’d been cautiously pushing forward through middle-American moral theatrics and small-beer post-Cold War foreign policy questions. I keep thinking that Karl Rove must have had some sleepless nights when true believers in invading Iraq commandeered executive power for their objectives.

There was another group of intellectuals and policy wonks who shared the liberal hawks’ fervent distaste for realpolitik and their belief in the forcible spread of liberalism but who came to that view from a very different intellectual trajectory–Wolfowitz, etcetera. Where the liberal hawks were outside of power looking in, these guys were much more like the New Frontier guys who planned Vietnam, full of themselves, feeling that this was at last their moment to carry out a grand geopolitical experiment and demonstrate that they had been right all along about how the world worked.

Cheney and the people closest to him seem to me to be yet another constituency with a different theory of power. I keep thinking of them as realpolitik types of a different flavor than Kissinger: brutalists whose theory of the Iraq war (and domestic politics) was more or less the same theory that a mobster applies when he sends an enforcer out to theatrically break a few debtor kneecaps. I don’t think many of them really cared much about whether Iraq ended up a liberal democracy. The war was about sending a message to future clients and potential enemies.

There was yet another group of writers, intellectuals and so on out there, many of them younger men for whom the war was a chance to participate vicariously in a particular kind of masculine spectacle, to demonstrate their affection for the professionalized military culture of post-Vietnam War America. I kind of understand what’s going on with this bunch. The post-Vietnam War military is an institution that a lot of American liberal-left elites are very distant from, but there are some genuinely attractive things about its culture. Before the Iraq war, I was really struck in my occasional conversations with military people at their attractive fusion of blunt honesty, egalitarian meritocracy, and aspirations to efficient managerialism. A lot of that turns out to be a kind of bluff when you take even a modestly harder look: how honorable have our generals and officers been in their political behavior within and outside their services in the last six years? How consistently meritocratic have these institutions really been? Efficiency? Uh, no. But there’s some real there, too–as higher education, for example, has drifted from some of its egalitarian commitments, the volunteer military has tried pretty hard to preserve a system where talent and commitment have a consistent payoff. It isn’t just this culture that explains this particular kind of fronting for the war, though: it’s also a kind of boys-own masculine theater, the keyboard commandoes and journalistic tough-guys sniffing around for an invitation into the Sekrit Clubhouse, a vicarious desire to prove their own manhood by prose genuflections to the guys on the battlefield. Some of the people who’ve fallen into this trap don’t seem to me to have the ideological and intellectual histories that led other people to put common sense into their safety deposit box. Any war anywhere would have been good enough, as long as it wasn’t a five-second scrub conflict like Grenada.

Another group who I think is fairly amorphous, distributed across a variety of ideological and intellectual commitments and backgrounds, are Huntington-style clash-of-civilization folks, genuine New Crusaders who aren’t out to prove that liberalism can flourish globally, but are largely instead spoiling for a sustained war with racial or cultural Others out of a neo-Spenglerian fear that the West is weak, hedonistic, self-indulgent, and has to be called to the frontiers to fend off the barbarians.

So what Ignatieff says is of interest, but it’s a narrow kind of interest. Matt Yglesias, quoted by Henry at Crooked Timber, is right that the liberal intellectuals who got caught up in supporting the Iraq war weren’t area specialists (with a smattering of exceptions) but instead generalist theorists. Area specialists have their own kinds of blind spots that are quite different. They tend to have a very hard time imagining or predicting major changes to the status quo in their region or countries of specialization, for example, and also have a tendency to protect access to their investment in area specialization by foregoing certain kinds of critique. Some of the commenters at Crooked Timber are also right that Ignatieff doesn’t exactly make a clean breast of it: he’s quick to blame others for tricking him or to imply that somehow everyone who resembles him intellectually is equally culpable of the same overall errors. Ok, so Kanan Makiya was a good guy and they all liked him, fine. But come on, the intellectual failures here are not his fault: they’re squarely on Ignatieff and Packer and so on. Those are the guys who didn’t trouble to read a bit more about Iraq or to think a bit harder about whether liberalism-by-occupation had any historical plausibility to it at all or to worry a bit about whether the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight in the White House had even the least chance of pulling this all off.

Ignatieff also doesn’t seem to grasp that there’s a (large) group of liberal intellectuals who shared some of the same frustrations with past political experiences, had some of the same theoretical and empirical toolkit, had a generalist sensibility, and yet came to a completely opposite (and totally valid) skeptical conclusion about this war in specific and voluntary wars intended to spread liberalism in general. There were a lot of people with an idealistic commitment to liberalism but a realistic understanding of its historical underpinnings. Ignatieff tries to expand the circle of his specific failures to a larger group than he’s entitled to.

I don’t really think Ignatieff comes clean on the rhetorical and institutional shamelessness of a lot of war supporters in the run-up to the war, something that I still see in a lot of the so-called “decents”, even those who have recanted their specific advocacy of the war (some with the “competency” dodge, believing the war winnable in the abstract but lost on the specific policy failures of the Bush Administration). Ignatieff recognizes that principle matters, but he doesn’t seem to grasp that process matters too, that the process of public debate over going to war, the gravest decision a democratic society can make, was badly malformed by propaganda, chest-thumping, and manipulation. Every single proponent of the war should have forced themselves repeatedly to intellectually rehearse and evaluate the arguments against the war, and every single process of deliberation about war should have been at pains to respectfully include arguments against as well as arguments for. Ignatieff says he was carried away by his emotional desire to believe that things could turn out well in Iraq, but it’s more than that. His specific intellectual peer group was also carried away by their sense of exultant victory over long-time institutional and political adversaries within their own narrow worlds and so misperceived every critical or dissenting voice around them as the equivalent of George Galloway.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 34 Comments

Learning Peer Review

Posted on August 8, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been doing a decent amount of peer review work this summer. I was struck at how my own practices had changed over time.

First, I’m curious. How many people received some instruction about how to do peer review, any kind of advice at all, from advisors or teachers while you were in graduate school? It’s one of the first things we’re called upon to do as professionals when we have our first posts, but I get a sense that almost no one has any training in it. If you get trained, it’s almost by reading other people’s peer reviews of your own work.

As I think back, I don’t second-guess any of the peer reviews I’ve done of manuscripts. Mostly I’ve recommended for publication, in a few cases, I called for extensive revision. Usually I’ve tried to do fairly detailed commentaries on manuscripts, broken into two sections: a general overview of the book with an assessment of its contributions to scholarship, its appeal to potential audiences and so on and then specific comments on individual chapters where necessary. In some cases I haven’t bothered with the second part if the manuscript seems basically well-written, tightly structured, and so on.

But I have changed a good deal the way I approach journal-length pieces. When I started out, I wrote fairly extensive reviews that sometimes also verged on being (constructively) critical replies or incipient dialogues with the author(s) of the article. This now seems to me to be completely the wrong way to go about it. My only job in reviewing a journal-length article should be: does it add to the scholarly literature? Are its claims reasonable and well-based in evidence? Is it adequately written, and are its arguments clearly laid out? That’s it. If there are things I would do differently, or if it’s not really my cup of tea if I had my druthers, that’s not my business to say as a peer reviewer. That’s up to the journal editors. I finished a review of an essay in a game studies context that I thought was based on good research, had a clear argument, and contributed to the literature. I wasn’t sure it entirely matched my understanding of the journal’s specific interests, but that’s for them to decide. It isn’t the way I would approach the particular subject that the article authors were studying, but that’s not relevant.

I know that editors (both of journals and book presses) often include a document explaining what they’d like a peer reviewer to do, but I don’t really have a sense of whether that’s what most peer reviewers end up doing. Judging from some peer reviews I’ve received over the years, I’d say that in some cases, not very much. I’m sure most practicing academics have gotten at least one of those peer reviews that consists largely of a demand that the author cite way more secondary literature in order to prove his/her scholarly credentials, and as long as the author is at it, please cite the peer reviewer’s work far more extensively thanks very much.

When I’m not thinking that maybe we ought to just abolish peer review altogether in the humanities, I’m wondering about whether we can change it–or at least have a more transparent collective discussion about how it should be done.

Posted in Academia | 15 Comments

Anti-Canute

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Timothy Burke

King Canute took on the waves to demonstrate the limits of his power to his subjects, who asked him to do the impossible.

Robert Mugabe is the kind of authoritarian who thinks that the waves ought to obey him, and if they don’t, he’ll send his thugs to beat them until they will.

A lot of people are predicting that it’s the endgame for Mugabe’s rule. I’m not sure I see things as being that inevitable. There are still possessions and resources for government forces to steal and still room for violent coercion of people, and until they completely run out and the cupboards are truly bare, I think events can still spiral further downward. Arguably they can spiral downward until most of the country’s population has fled to neighboring nations or dies of starvation and abuse.

The one thing I think people interested in the situation need to understand is that the inner circle of power is now relentlessly and exclusively focused on their own immediate survival.

A lot of the reporting on Zimbabwe has had a tone of amazement in its recounting of the recent round of anti-inflationary measures, which consisted of capping the price on goods sold in stores, which then led to the stores being ransacked for everything useful (in many cases by police, military or ZANU-PF officials) which then led to the stores having no inventory and having no means to acquire more inventory. The government has now threatened manufacturers, telling them to keep producing goods even though they’re no longer able to pay for the materials to produce those goods, and now that many of the sites of primary production of those materials are no longer making anything near the amounts necessary for the economy.

Observers are asking, “Are they serious? Don’t they understand you can’t beat inflation by issuing a decree that there shall no longer be inflation? Don’t they understand that where they’re heading with factories is having to use forced labor?” Yes, they’re serious and no, they don’t understand. Except maybe about the forced labor part. The people now inside the circle of power who have ostensible responsibility for economic policy honestly don’t know the first thing about how 21st Century economies actually work. Or if they do, they dare not admit that they know. I think Mugabe may seriously believe that he can just order inflation to stop, and he’s now surrounded by yes-men who would probably tell him he could stop the sun from rising if that’s what he said he wanted. In the short term, they’re even correct. You can stop inflation from being a visible public reality if you banish all commodities from public sight and force all exchange to happen within an informal or underground economy. There is no more inflation in Zimbabwe because there’s nothing left to buy out of a store with the official currency except for dog food.

Posted in Africa | 5 Comments

There Must Be a Word

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Timothy Burke

Is there a term for misperceiving a historical relationship between two works, images or tropes so that the earlier of the two is falsely thought to have derived from the later one?

I was thinking about this in terms of the inevitability of some movie critics thinking that the film version of The Dark is Rising is a rip-off of Harry Potter when in fact its source fiction predates Potter by a considerable margin.

I remember a similar instance when I was working on my Saturday morning cartoons book: I came across a TV critic who denounced one version of Super Friends because he thought the character of Darkseid was an outrageous ripoff of Darth Vader, when in fact Darkseid predates Darth Vader by seven years.

I also recall thinking when I was a kid, the first time I saw the TV show The Honeymooners, that it was a rip-off of the Warner Brothers mice cartoons.

Is there actually a term for this? If not, let’s invent one.

Posted in Popular Culture | 12 Comments

Cooper v. Rowling

Posted on August 6, 2007 by Timothy Burke

One of the reasons I’m keen to promote an “Everything Studies” approach to expressive culture is my dissatisfaction with the way that established models in cultural and media studies often (not invariably) marginalize aesthetic judgements as well as evaluations of technical craft in cultural works while still making those judgements sotto voce, on the sly. Saying that a particular film or song or book is good or bad, well-made or slapdash, becomes the crazy old aunt in the attic of cultural analysis: you can’t get rid of her, but you don’t want to admit she’s living under your roof. On the other hand, I don’t want to just invert that picture so that we primarily judge the aesthetic worth, skill or import of a cultural work at the expense of questions about audience, circulation, reproduction, production, ideological use and so on.

Let me try a road test of an Everything Studies approach by talking a bit about Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising books in comparison to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. I was reminded of Cooper’s books this weekend by a thread at Unfogged which mentioned an upcoming film version of The Dark Is Rising. (Also from that thread: an interesting list of the film’s changes to the narrative of the book.)

Let me start with a bit of potential apostasy: I think the Harry Potter books are on the whole better works of fantasy than Cooper’s Dark series. I re-read the Cooper books a few years ago and I found them wanting in many respects, some of which bothered me even when I read them as a child.

Where Cooper’s books suffer by comparison with Potter is in the dynamic relationship between the narrative of the series and the characterizations of the main protagonists. Both series have a similar narrative engine driving their action, something that I suspect will lead many inexperienced critics to accuse the upcoming film of being a derivative creation based on Rowling’s work. Of course, this similarity is also what led some readers to accuse Rowling herself of being derivative. Without the accusation, there’s something to that reading. In terms of the history of juvenile and young adult fiction since the 1950s, I would rate Cooper’s books as one of the most important thematic precursors to Rowling.

Both series center around a young hero named by prophecy as the key to defeating a growing menace of supernatural evil. In both series, the hero discovers that he is the heir to great power, which he must learn to use quickly in order to be equal to the challenges ahead. Both heroes are advised by a wise older mentor. Yes, I know, this is hardly a parallel limited to these books: paging Joseph Campbell. But the specific parallels between the Potter and Dark books are much tighter than that. Harry Potter and Will Stanton have to decipher mysterious signs and master powerful talismans in alliance with some of their peers while also dealing with adults who either help or oppose them in their tasks. The Dark books have a wider variety of protagonists, however, in that Will isn’t central to the action in all five of the books.

So why do I think the Potter books are better? The Potter books center the action in a character and his growth and maturation. There’s a naturalism in the way Harry Potter navigates the situation of the books. He’s painfully aware that he’s been chosen to play his destined role and increasingly resentful of the way that adults around him abdicate their responsibilities and leave him groping in the dark. When he at last accepts with grace the inevitable climax that others have scripted for him and (seemingly) sacrifices himself willingly, that’s a fairly hard-won moment that’s been building for seven books with some degree of consistency. Rowling at least wants us to read this as a story of choice rather than a story of destiny fulfilled: Harry had other paths he could have trod. There’s another important part of the Harry Potter books: they’re social. The Wizarding world is a complete social world, a community. In discovering his powers, Harry is not set aside from the social world, but inducted into a new one. His eventual triumph in the climax of the story is a consequence of his own efforts to build community within that social world: without the voluntary, hard-won loyalty of friends and peers, he could not have won.

Will, on the other hand, often reads as if he’s taking a very strong sedative. There’s some fairly pro forma attempts on the character’s part to reconcile his sense of self before and after his part in prophecy is revealed, but he very quickly adjusts to his new circumstances. In fact, the plot argues for a kind of anti-naturalism, that because Will is one of the Old Ones, he really isn’t an eleven-year old boy at all in many respects. The narrative structure of the books is largely not situated in the interior of the characters at all: it’s a puzzle narrative where the pleasure of the story lies in seeing how and when all the pieces will come together, in finding out which Sign does what and when it does it. About the only character-driven moment I recall clearly is in Greenwitch, where Jane’s personal empathy is the key to the plot. Moreover, the books are really not about a fully realized social world for all that it talks about the Light and the Dark and the Old Ones: neither side is really about personalized desires or ambitions. The Light and the Dark are more like weather systems or tectonic plates, impersonalized forces that happen to manifest in human or humanoid shapes. The Rider is very menacing, but none of his menace comes from within.

This is not to say that the Dark books are bad: they’re very appealing in many respects. If I were just going to focus on the prose of the two series, I’d probably say Cooper has the edge. There’s a parsimony and precision in her use of language where Rowling is often sloppy or prolix. The Dark series is tightly plotted where the Potter series is lax. But this also reinforces the comparison between them. It behooves a puzzle narrative to be tight where a narrative centered on character and community can afford to take detours or spend time setting the scene.

The question is, why do I think Rowling’s narrative is preferable? This is where I think an Everything Studies approach can show its strength. If I were just to declare by fiat that situating drama in character as opposed to situation is always better, that isn’t much better than a pitched argument about whether Metallica sux or rools. First, I think we can talk about a very large-scale comparative critical history of dramatic conflict in expressive culture, with such obvious touchstones as Hamlet. In preferring the way the Potter stories explore a basically similar narrative structure, I’m aligning myself with a huge infrastructural argument about personhood, subjectivity, modernity, individuality.

In preferring the fully realized social world of Potter over the impersonal mechanistic world of Dark, I’m also aligning myself with a tradition of world-creation in modern fantasy writing. That in turn brings into focus the very particular audiences who have read this kind of fantasy most avidly, and the desires they bring to those readings. To me, the puzzle structure of Dark is a kind of Asperger’s fantasy: it requires no messing around with the mystery of people or their feelings.

As a result, it’s not a narrative that allows for any kind of projection: fans cannot be slans in Cooper’s stories, really. I suppose you can imagine yourself in a role rather like the Drews, as spear-carriers for the Old Ones. But the books close as tightly as they begin: when it is over, it is over, with only Will left as the Ishmael who remembers any of it. (The other children dream a bit of their experiences, but that’s all.) The Cooper books aren’t an open platform for further subcreation, whereas the Potter books are like a printing-press of the imagination, a wide-open creative engine.

Putting the comparison in those terms not only locates me within one of the great cultural arguments of our historical moment, it locates me sociohistorically as a reader of fantasy, in relation to a particular group of literate young middle to upper-middle-class readers who read fantasy at a time when it was culturally marginal and largely invisible to the wider society, whose accumulated tastes and experiences have become a major driver of cultural industry in the last decade. There are all sorts of questions to be asked about that history, some of them fairly pointed or critical.

There’s also a historical argument to be made about Rowling’s craftwork in relation to Cooper’s. You could argue that Rowling’s individual skill has something to do with taking some of the narrative motifs of juvenile fantasy from the 1960s and 1970s and refocusing them dramatically. Here I think you could compare her much more to L’Engle and Alexander, whose works had some of the same orientation as Rowling’s. I think there is a really technical aspect to this comparison. It’s not that a puzzle narrative is inevitably and by definition always inferior to a fantasy story that situates drama in character and in a fully realized world, but if I were giving advice to a writer, I’d generally say to put your money on the latter rather than the former.

Posted in Books, Popular Culture | 16 Comments

The University President as Leading Intellectual

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Timothy Burke

From time to time we hear of the glories of a past age when university presidents strode like giants across the land, leading our genteel national discourse on the great issues of our day.

First, I think there’s plenty of recent university and college presidents like Derek Bok who’ve contributed a great deal as intellectual leaders to various discussions and debates in public life.

Second, do we really want university and college presidents to be far more exaggerated and intense in their pursuit of any bully pulpits that come their way? One Leon Botstein is quite enough, thanks very much.

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

Department of Everything Studies (Expressive Culture Division)

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I meant to comment earlier in July on this excellent discussion at the Valve on Mark Bauerlein’s suggestions for specific “conservative voices” to be included in courses of literary theory. Pretty much all the criticisms I had planned to make were made in the course of that Valve conversation, though, particularly by Luther Blisset, who usually hits the bullseye in these kinds of discussions.

The most important point Luther and Adam Kotsko and others made in that thread was that it’s way past time to be whining about inclusion. Bauerlein (or anyone who finds his basic point of departure to be congenial) needs to get out there and do interpretative and hermeneutical work that is inspired by a conservative thinker that he finds valuable. That’s why Foucault got into the theory canon in the first place, in both history and literature departments: because people did literary interpretation and historical research that had Foucault as a point of departure, that used something that Foucault wrote to generate an inquiry. Even when a lot of that research tended to call into question some of Foucault’s actual arguments (as often happened in cultural and social history that drew on his work), the upshot was that Foucault ended up within the canon because people were writing with or against him, or bouncing off some premise of his thinking. It wasn’t because professors in the English Department pulled his name off the Master List of “really really left-wing people” in order to plump their citations enough to meet their allotted quota of leftists.

So don’t tell people they ought to make their students read Hayek or Horowitz. Explain what a hermeneutics that riffs off of Hayek actually looks like. Illustrate it. Do it. I have an easier time seeing a conservative literary criticism that comes from Arnold or even Edmund Burke. I could maybe imagine a Hayekian criticism, but it’s not in Hayek, not at all: there isn’t even the opening to a hermeutical or interpretative set of questions that Marx provided in the commodity fetishism part of Capital.

—————–

Ok, so I’ve got that thought off my chest. Amazing how a discussion that’s only two weeks old can feel like a lifetime ago in the blogosphere. I want to use another comment from that Valve discussion as a jumping off point for something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. John Holbo remarks that the problem that English Departments have is that they’ve tried to keep their options open on being “Everything Studies” and as a consequence don’t have an easy way to explain why they wouldn’t want to read Hayek and Horowitz and any other text someone might choose to throw at them. John wants those departments to specify some sort of domain rules that would justify saying, “But Hayek doesn’t do hermeneutics” in such a manner that one might also then have to agree, “And so neither do a lot of other people who maybe have fetched up on some syllabi in English departments”.

I want to go in the opposite direction: I want to collapse all departments concerned with the interpretation and practice of expressive culture into a single large departmental unit. I’d call it Cultural Studies, but I don’t want it to be Cultural Studies as that term is now understood in the American academy. Call it Department of the Humanities, or of Interpretation, or something more elegant and self-explanatory if you can think of it. I want English, Modern Languages, Dance, Theater, Art History, Music, the hermeneutical portions of philosophy, cultural and media studies, some strands of anthropology, history and sociology, and even a smattering of cognitive science all under one roof. I want what John is calling Everything Studies, except that I want its domain limited to expressive culture.

I thought about these questions a lot during this last year when I was involved in interviewing candidates for our Film and Media Studies program. I didn’t want to write too much about this argument then for fear of prompting people to just parrot it back to me.

In a nutshell, I have diminishing patience for people who categorically tell me that studying a work of expressive culture requires nothing but the text or nothing but context, hermeneutics or historicism, appreciation or critique, canonical traditions or perpetual transgression.

Yes, there are pragmatic limits on the kinds of questions a scholar can ask in a given work of research. You have to give a syllabus that needs to be taught in a finite body of time some firm and justified limits. We can specialize in particular media for reasons of personal preference and intellectual competence. I couldn’t begin to write about music, but I can do fine with television and interactive media. Each of us has methodological limits that result from our training and our talents. I’m very bad with languages and linguistics: I couldn’t do criticism that required philology on any deep level. I’m not likely to ever be mathematically competent enough to do even simple statistical comparisons well.

But the limits on our research and interpretation of expressive media are provisional and personal. There’s no reason to turn them into prescriptive claims about the nature of interpretative work for everybody else.

When we study expressive culture (art, film, new media, novels, poetry, dance, theater, and so on), we should be asking how a given text or performance works in every possible sense of that term. None of the meanings of works are intrinsically incompatible with each other.

If I’m writing as a critic and scholar about a novel, I should be potentially interested in all of the following questions (which are not necessarily exclusive of one another):

1) How does this novel work in terms of its craft, how does it work as written language, how does it work in relation to other works of its type? What kinds of devices and techniques does it employ?

2) How does it work psychologically and experientially with any given reader? What kinds of cognitive effects does it have, how does its language and form affect the phenomenological experience of a reader?

3) How does it work with historically specific audiences? What effects did this work have upon its time and place and why? In relation to what?

4) What kinds of messages, arguments, values, ideas are communicated within this novel, by this novel? What do they or ought they mean to us? What did they mean in the past to others?

5) What kinds of historically specific intertextualities affect the way the novel is or was bought, consumed, reproduced in a given time and place? What effects did it have on intertextual systems? How did its tropes, ideas, language, reproduce over time in different works or media?

6) How did this novel come to be produced? What were the individual, collective, institutional and material conditions of its creation and circulation?

7) How does this novel instruct us as potential craftworkers ourselves? If we looked at it as producers of culture, or from the perspective of people who produce culture, what’s interesting about it? What can we learn from it about novel-writing, but also about the business of selling a novel? Do we have any useful or productive advice for someone in the business of selling novels like this one?

Notice all of these questions are, at least as I see them, politically and prescriptively open. You could pick up Triumph of the Will, have all these questions in mind as valid ones, and end up arguing that it’s a repulsive piece of work. You could pick up the entire cultural system of television and have gloomy, dismissive views of that entire media system that are filtered through these questions.

What I’m sick of is people who want a “conservative tradition” picking only the neo-Arnoldian parts of this list and then thumbing their nose at the rest as if it is self-evident that no self-respecting critic would want to talk about the cognitive, historical, economic, ideological questions that surround expressive culture, that all that crap is some social scientist’s dreary business and get it the fuck out of my English Department. Just as I’m sick of a historicist refusing to take hermeneutics seriously, or some Franksteinian Frankfurter regarding the practical questions involved in actually doing cultural production as some sort of low-class consorting with the hegemonic beast.

Yes, that’s a lot of questions. No, you don’t have to answer them all yourself categorically about any given work of expressive culture that interests you. But you do have to stay curious about all of them, and welcome the presence of research and criticism that is pursuing any and all of those questions within the disciplinary body where the interpretation of culture is being pursued.

If I’m reading academic work about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I want to hear from people interested in the craftwork involved in how it tells stories, including assessments of its quality as a visual and cultural work. I want to hear from people who talk about its use of symbols. I want to hear from people who study how fan communities read and write the text of the show, and from scholars who examine how mass audiences that don’t categorize themselves as “fans” reacted to the show. I want to know how much money it made, and how it made it. How Joss Whedon and other people involved in making it understood what they were doing. How the history of the trope of the “vampire” affected the show, and how the show affected that trope. About how it related to other shows on television and other cultural works in the time it first aired, and how it has affected them since. I want to know what it means, what it has to say, and whether I should value its communications either as entertainment or art. I want to know someone who wanted to make Buffy the Vampire Slayer would go about it, and whether our criticism can generate insights that are useful in practical terms to the people who made Buffy or would like to make something like it.

The exact same openness goes if I’m reading academic work about Hamlet. All of that is fair game, all of it is interesting, all of it potentially germane. I have enough room in my heart and my critical practice for Harold Bloom, Terry Eagleton, A.D. Nuttall, Stephen Greenblatt and Marjorie Garber.

The problem of course is to have world enough and time. We cannot write everything, read everything, teach everything. Scholars and publishers have to make decisions about what they value: which graduate student should advance or be rewarded, which work should be published, who makes the cut in a syllabus, which courses do we offer and not offer? Canons and disciplines are a pragmatic shorthand that keep us from having to rehearse our wanderings through Everything every time we set out to teach and research Everything. But that’s all they are. They’re not complete ontologies, not totalizing politics, not comprehensive philosophies.

If I had to boil it down to what the normative selective principles of my new megadepartment ought to be, I’d say that the only things I really care about are: 1) be smart; 2) be interesting; 3) be communicative and 4) try to keep the ecosystem of cultural criticism as varied as possible. Don’t load up on neo-Arnoldians or exclusive historicists or cognitivists or anything else besides. Stay invested in as many media and as many historical settings and contexts as possible. Don’t let anyone categorically say that the Department of Everything Studies (Expressive Culture Division) doesn’t deal with popular culture or doesn’t concern itself with aesthetics or regards actually trying to produce culture as some kind of riffraff vocational thing suitable for the lower orders and capitalist hegemons.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 12 Comments

All That Glitters

Posted on August 1, 2007 by Timothy Burke

I have a question.

Why does Ron Paul, or by extension any libertarian who finds his political platform congenial, have such a fixation on the gold standard? This is an arena of political and economic thought that I’ve never really read about in detail, save for a bit of literature on the gold standard’s impact on industrialization in South Africa. I read this speech and it’s kind of like reading about someone earnestly praising the properties of phlogiston. Gold doesn’t have any “real value” that stands apart from a historically derived and basically customary view of it as valuable, any more than cowrie shells do.

When did this become a fixation? Is Paul fairly representative of party libertarians in the U.S. on this point?

Posted in Politics | 15 Comments