it's hardest lesson friday.

fruit of the mundane unrush

Music: Danny Paul Grody: In Search of Light (2011)

A couple of weeks ago a friend asked me how to make buttermilk biscuits, but we ran out of time. And when biscuits are the thing, taking one's time---and not worrying about getting flour everywhere---is crucial.

Biscuits are to be given away. One should never horde biscuits. It seems strange that whenever I make them, the twin panhandlers with the crooked knees, the doubles who stand like Cesare emerged from Dr. Caligari's cabinet, seem to appear at the median on Airport Boulevard near the Greyhound station. I never give them money, but frequently leftovers and often biscuits. The twins never appear together because they seem to be taking shifts. They share a bike. They seem grateful to get food. I always wonder what has happened to their legs, because they stand crookedly. They move slowly. I have never seen either of them ride that bike.

I've tinkered on my recipe for some years but have never written it down (it's a combination of Cooking Illustrated's "flaky biscuits" and Southern Living's "best buttermilk biscuits" recipes). I think that there are two secrets to good biscuits: (1) freezing the flour after you've cut in the leavening for fifteen to twenty minutes; and (2) not rushing it. Flakey biscuits are the consequence of leisure, the fruit of the mundane unrush.

As a young person I had more in common with the things strewn on the linoleum than the stuff on the tabletop. If I only knew then that one day I would like to cook I would have paid more attention, climbed up on a chair to see, even. I remember many bored, chilly Georgia mornings staring up at my grandmother's apron as she measured the ingredients for biscuits. Handfuls of this and that: flour, powder, shortening; sift it, roll it, lump it. Biscuits smell a certain homey way with shortening. Of course, trans fats are forever and coronary heart disease is ample testament to the fact, so one has to weigh the consequence of olfactory nostalgia: what price, that familiar smell?

Granny didn't cut her biscuits like I do (with a rocks glass, and without twisting); she made "drop biscuits" by creating mounds or lumps that came out, well, that came out with a perfect mix of flake and chew. I cannot replicate them. The recipe died with her. But mine are pretty good---that is, pretty and good---and they smell right.

What You'll Need: 2.5 cups of King Arthur unbleached all-purpose flour, and a few handfuls for dusting and kneading; 1 tablespoon of baking powder; ½ a tablespoon of baking soda; a pinch or two of kosher salt; 2 tablespoons of cold Crisco; 1 stick of cold butter; 1.25 cups of cold buttermilk. And coffee (for sipping while you make biscuits).

"I am in the kitchen in a double-wide facing a stove and oven. The stove/oven is candy-apple red, from the 1950s, and I recognize it is one that my friends Gary and Trish resorted and have in their real, dreamy kitchen, except in the dream it belongs to my parents. My parents don't really use it, but I like to. To my right is breakfast bar and past that is the living room and two reclining chairs where my mother and father lounge watching a morning news program. There is a protective, plastic covering on the recliners, and when my parents move they squeak. I am kneading and folding dough to make biscuits."

"Go on."

"I am worried that the biscuits won't turn out right, you know, turn out like my grandmother used to make them. I don't want to disappoint my parents. I think I'm wearing an apron that someone made for me, maybe my granny, I cannot remember. And as I make the biscuits I start to think about how I am becoming the parent now and the struggle of my generation---the exes---and how we are depending on our parents well into our 30s, but here I am this once cooking for them. I don't know if, in the dream, I am visiting or if I am living with my parents again. Still, there's much more at stake than making breakfast."

"Hmm. Making your parents biscuits. Sounds sexual to me."

"Don't you think that's too easy an interpretation, though, too much of a softball?"

"Funny word, softball. Biscuits. Makes me think of---"

"---I know. And I'm a housewife for my parents, the anima anxiety of an only child. If I can't make 'em babies, I'll make 'em biscuits, dammit!"

Step One: Stir together the dry ingredients in a bowl and set aside. Cut up the shortening into little squares and dump into the bowl with the flour. Put a handful of four on the kneading surface and coat the stick of butter; slice the stick into thin squares and sprinkle over the flour in the bowl. (Note: you do not have to use shortening; you can substitute another half-stick of butter for the two tablespoons of shortening, however, your biscuits will be a little less chewy/spongy.) Now is the time to have some fun playing with your food: squeeze the shortening and butter together in your fingers in the flour, making tiny, thin saucers (about a nickel or penny size). Do this until your flour is full of little leavening saucers and peas. Then, stick the bowl in the freezer for twenty minutes. Seriously: in. the. freezer.

Jack Spicer drank himself to death by the age of forty, which is too bad. Among many things, like media technologies and magic, he wrote of the sporting life, because he started-out as a linguist unsullied by deep structures of Chom(p)sky. From his final collection titled Language: "The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counter-punching radio./And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even/know they are champions." He wrestled with the word, a lot you know, even giving himself the one-over; the booze was really just lube, in the end, but there's a point at which you need the friction to re-member. All that forgetting gets you somewhere, you bet, but it's not the kitchen.

Still, I see myself cutting butter with the women rather than in a recliner next to cousins and uncles watching a match. (Counterpunch.) On Thanksgiving holidays, when I grew old enough to understand the division of social favor, I knew my assigned place was watching football on the floor with the boys while the girls confabbed in the kitchen. Nothing was more boring than watching football on the floor. I would have rather watched my grandmother make meringue, even though that was almost as tedious as the Atlanta Falcons. To this day I don't care to eat either of them. Still, the shortwave radio was in the kitchen, and I liked to play with its knobs. Jesus sermons and Floyd Kramer, and warble inbetween their stations climbing that amplitude.

Do you know Floyd Kramer?

Step Two: remove the flour-leavened freeze and add the buttermilk to the bowl and, with a spatula or fork or your fingers, get the stuff into a sticky ball. Dump the ball on a pile of flour and, with a well dusted French rolling pin (much better than the American flat roller, which gives you little to no real control or feeling---manual or automatic?) flatten the ball into a rectangle. Then, fold the dough like a business letter (twice from each side), turn 90 degrees, flatten. Only do this one or two more times---if you fold and flatten too much the dough won't rise into flakey layers. Using a rocks glass or biscuit cutter, cut your biscuits and put them in rows on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Step Three: Brush those puppies with some melted butter (about a tablespoon and a half) and bake at 450 for about fifteen minutes or so. After browned on top, take them out and brush with any remaining melted butter you have and let them sit for about seven or ten minutes before serving.

Here's a gallery of the most recent biscuit-making session. I didn't make them for anyone, really, just sensed I should make them. Because . . .

I wrote though Thanksgiving, for the most part. Mostly. At the special moment, about one in the afternoon to the ambient blares of referees whistling, I remembered the boys would be summoned and lumber into my grandmother's tiny kitchen and she would "say grace." Always the same, patterned grace, about nourishing bodies and soldiers doing something over there. What is Thanksgiving, really, without young people from the lower classes fighting a war for someone else? (Sucker punch.) Always a war, about who wears the apron and who wears the helmet.

I stumbled across another "found object" blog. Someone discovered a note from his or her father's desk, a list of "to buy" items for the first, new apartment with mom, penned before she was conceived (or, at least, was gestating). A plate. A sink stopper. A jigger, for Manhattans she supposes. She doesn't know what a Pyrex dish is---but isn't this essential, even today, for everyone's first apartment? She also doesn't know that a biscuit pan is (or used to be) round.

The handwriting of the found list resembled that of people from my grandparent's generation. Granny had no use for round biscuit pans because she dropped hers, on a cookie sheet. Times were tight and tough and I can still remember finding books and books of unused S&H green stamps in one of her desk drawers.

At the bottom of the "found object" blog is Spicer's famous "Letter to Lorca" from 1957, where he instructs the other poet's poet on fetching the alive from the "garbage of the real," the garbage of the visible or picture or image, because "that is how we dead men write to each other."

it's squander-and-shit friday!

on gratitude

Music: Steve Hauschildt: Tragedy & Geometry (2011)

The machine, the box with blackface and red led numbers and lights, beeped incessantly, the sort of pressing electronic screech that refuses to let you make a pattern in the sound, that willful sonic moiré that comforts; the peace of a patterned rhythm.

"Do you have someone to call, a significant other or loved one?"

"No, not in this state."

"A friend?"

"Well, yeah. But everyone's at work."

"If you have someone to call, now is the time. We'd like someone to be here when you come out of anesthesia."

"You're going to operate?"

"It's likely. This is the time to have someone here."

Three years ago the nurse's certitude was, in the end, thankfully dismantled with an exception. I didn't have the operation. Hours later, the screech was replaced by a rhythm, not of beeps, but of the shuffling feet of friends in and out of a antiseptic room. Friends who, I hope, never get see my hair that dirty again.

I am thankful for my loved ones who are determined to make rhythms and forge patterns out in the blaring-Nons of the past, and the gaping nothings sure to come. Without you, I'm just a dead turkey.

separation anxiety

Music: Active Child: You Are All I See (2011)

Five days in a city that loves, that doesn't loathe as a matter of habit, thriving on an industry that turns on a suspension of surveillance and ample chers and darlins and babys like gravy, can make you wonder what you've traded in for health and regulated rhythms and a steady job. At least for a few days. New Orleans can get in your blood, and not like Las Vegas or Orlando like some forced, Oliver Stone virus of paranoid hedonism or policed happiness respectively (fantasies of blind enjoyment, foreplayed disordered order), but a dis-ease of tolerance. A temporary disease-cum-ease, at least: "I can't believe it took us an hour for coffee," I found myself saying to friend after a sojourn in search of coffee. "I can't believe I just complained about that," I said to myself quietly, angry at my complaint. "This is Louisiana." I should know better; I should listen to the rhythms I once felt living in the state (-of mind). I came around, eventually. And just when I let it in and was ready to stay forever, it was time to go.

It's easy to find solace in cynicism, and I've got barnacles of the stuff encrusted on any number of cognitions and nerves, some sad ganglia in the groin too. But I do love New Orleans; I love that there is soul somewhere in that tourism, something deeper than slot machines or a desert or . . . blue-dyed water. . I love Chicago and Denver and New Orleans. And parts of Maine. I love the creek bed behind mind grandmother's house that is now squatted by a strip-malled grocery store. I will let myself love some cities and places and not be clever about the beloved. It's permissible to love a place crammed with people, even. And there is something in a people or their vibrancy released of the usual or mundane orders that is genuine, even when a dollar is crammed in a shoe resigned or habituated to dancing.

New Orleans was a comfortable lap (at least for me) for seating a conference, the strangest of things that professions and politics have created and attended, this weird, mondo-klatch designed for the visual spectacle of a particular economy (of knowledge, of power, of money, of unrealized sex).

As I do this gig more and more, I find myself enjoying, increasingly, those who dress well---and I mean that in many senses. If ideas are attractive, why not align the senses "all the way down?" It's a military fashion show, you know? (a very crypted musical nod, I know.) And this in a city that rewards stylistic risk coupled with a relaxing of the defenses. The cultural context made it easier for me, this time, to detach a bit and observe and enjoy the conference for what it seems to be for me at this moment of my career, which is now fully woven into my life, and that's a life that cannot be fulfilled by a career but which is enriched by it nonetheless: a conference is a huge, ever pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the ultraworld.

That much, that last bit, is also musical joke that has an idiosyncratic relation in my mind to Hegel's understanding of the "world spirit." (I really don't know what Paterson means by "the ultraworld," though I'm pretty sure LSD was at one point involved in the coin.) The association is neither here nor there for you nor important except for the weird realization for many of us that conferences are not only economies of exchange but organisms that reckon with change---with mortality. When I started attending them as a graduate student, I viewed the academic conference as a smorgasboard of "free" (though ot really free) food and booze and a kind of star system that circulated celestial bodies. The annual National Communication Association meeting is certainly that---in so many ways---but from the vantage of middle age no longer in the same way I had supposed. Some years ago I started to recognize the heart of the pulsation shifted to something memorial, a kind of life-tracking device functioning centrally for some and peripherally for others, but functioning just the same: multiple cohorts are growing old together and using the conference as a way to re-member and re-center over the auspice of the idea.

The promise of the auspice is often (if not routinely, as a matter of mutation) perverted. This is the function and dynamic of governance, to argue over the character of the mutation; for example, the administration inevitably emerges at variance with the membership. As with the rave or circuit party, so with the professional convention The Burkean barnyard bubbles up, often over the spectacle of policy, this year in the name of "civility" or less publically, crass careerism and stupidity, then (re-membering) last year prestige, next year I predict entitled nihilism or apocalypticism (the jargon of the meta-meta, matta matta . . . or as I overheard a senior scholar intone this morning, the excluded third or "turd"). But this ironically consequential prattle really runs cover for the maturing attendee, for the central conversational labor: we are growing older, wending toward a dying, and we want to matter, at least to each other. Growing old together. Children produced and reared/books seemed to dominate our conversations.

My friends and I talked repeatedly about petered partying. About not going out to drink. About staying in, getting rest. About tiring over the reindeer games.

Conferences are machines of recognition. The observation seems trite, I know, but in the setting of New Orleans this demand really was starker and more interesting to me, even fascinating because of the mood that this particular city inspires, a mood of cutting through the crap, almost like a high school reunion in a decade or two after the graduation year: how complex have ways become to ask for love and to say to others "you are loved?" Conferences are combines---projection zones and screens, and its off-sites and friend-only dinners and no-hosts spaces of relational identification (against).

"But, I phoned ahead and they said there was space for 200."

"Yeah, but you didn't expect 400 to show up," he responded. Overhead.

Underestimated. There is a "soul" to this, after all.

There are many stories to tell, and three, overly-disclosive paragraphs that I have just deleted.

Still, what a strange and beautiful thing this last conference was. I will be thinking-through its experiences for some time to come. I suppose my point here is that I think many of us who went to the conference assume, going to a professional meeting, that these are professional endurances. That is, well, that is the rhetoric we produce about them (as I said, "Ugh. And so the circus begins.") But deep down you and I know---the you who know me through school---we know that these things are major life events, extremely significant, sometimes potentially traumatic and increasingly operatic. As an academic, we have to reckon with the fact that we invest so much in our professional lives that it becomes central to our lives---and this is why location, mood, and the rhythms of the host city are so important.

Perhaps this is why so many of us were talking about, feeling about, how much this particular conference in New Orleans was good and moving and loving and important. The fantasies of the city were implicated---I don't think superficially---in our conference experience, in the traumatic and deeply consequential event of Katrina and the disastrous Nation State's response to it and our feelings about ourselves and this city and its mood and our orientation to recognition. And why so many of us want to avoid the conference next year in Orlando. It's as if our personal lives and self-conceptions are at stake. It's like Disney makes plain the necessary economy of professional fantasy and all the work it actually does to allow us to do the labor of loving we all really want. We don't want to see those we love and respect in a strip mall.

I didn't get to spend time with those whom I admire and love and respect enough in these past days. I left wanting and I felt guilty for not seeing or doing this or that thing with loved ones. But that is a good wanting, I think, and it says something about the import of a city and its soul and its dispositional seat. It says something about my not wanting to go to a conference in Orlando, Florida, as if my time with the admired and loved would be cheapened by the con- and pretext. That the auspice of the idea would be somehow cheapened by completely retreating the necessity of the spectacle and the dollar (a observation I would make similarly about Las Vegas).

Still, these unordered musings begin, for me, the thinking of bodies in place. It's not something I've really dwelled on in the past, since my focus as been on the moorings of professional stability, which do not so much depend (at least initially) on place. I've chosen a line of work for which the choice of rest is not mine. Even so, seated in a city I love (Austin, indeed!), I recognize that place (geographical culture) now has a purchase on me it hasn't had before---at least consciously. Travel has a new meaning. And I'm starting to reckon with that in ways I've never really done before. This is, I think, a dimension of the subjectivity of settling, of emplacement. Of disposition.

I'm realizing, I guess, that where I meet my far-flung friends has an impact on relational contact, on professional stead, and the situation of stranger encounter.

a tale of two perversions

Music: Georgia Fair: All Through Winter (2011)

For the intellectual heir of Jacques Lacan in France, Jacques-Alain Miller, "perversion is when you do not ask for permission." Such and observation is shorthand for a distinction between jouissance, human enjoyment or a kind of pleasurable pain impervious to or beyond representation, and desire, which is founded on a question (what do you want? what do I want?). Perversion is characterized by a relative disinterest in others, only the act---a kind of pure act---that invites charges of obscenity. Perversion calls the law, broadly conceived, into being; where there is perversion, there is discipline . . . there is a spanking, and increasingly perverse spankings are becoming public. Spankings are delivered along the inseam of permission and permissibility: For example, in Mike Nichols' 1967 masterpiece The Graduate, Ben comes to realize his desire at the moment his seducer appears to transgress the rules without asking. "For god's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You got me into your house. You give me a drink. You . . . put on music. Now you start opening your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours."

Mrs. Robinson: "So?"

Benjamin: "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me."

Mrs. Robinson: "[chuckles] Huh?"

Benjamin: "Aren't you?"

Despite George Michael's claim that "everyone wants a lover like that," it's true in the diegesis only for Bancroft's brilliantly played character. The spectator identifies with Ben's desire ("is this what I want? do I like this?") as Mrs. Robinson appears to enjoy his questioning (much more than any sex act; it's not about sex, or rather, it is about sex but not concerned with the sex act). In this way the perverse act is staged for us in cinematic fantasy: it's not that Mrs. Robinson truly wants Ben to make love to her; rather, it's Ben's reaction and attempts to bring the rules to bear on the situation: this is not supposed to happen; this is inappropriate; this is wrong. What Lacan teaches us about perversion is that Mrs. Robinson is not enjoying the promise of seduction, but the staging of the wrong itself. Sexual pleasure, if it occurs, would be incidental, a spin-off like Tang for space exploration. Indeed, from the perspective of the pervert, Mrs. Robinson is only bringing about Ben's enjoyment of her, beyond his desire, and is in some sense envious of the desire (that this, the questioning) he has in the moment. Strangely, desiring is a kind of limitation, it puts guardrails on enjoyment, it helps us to "pull back." Mrs. Robinson cannot "pull back," and despite appearances, is at some level envious of those who can question and forge limitations, like Ben. And at the same time, she sees herself as channeling his enjoyment---that which is presumably associated with the rules, that which is presumably open to her because the guardrails are off.

This week, given the priapic plights staged by Penn State: The Movie, for the thinker interested in psychoanalysis commentary almost seems compulsory. The topic of pedophilia, however, strikes at the heart of psychoanalytic understanding and locates psychoanalysis' rhetorical weak-spot: in providing an explanation for the violation of our most taboo of cultural taboos, those relatively unsympathetic to psychoanalytic insights can easily find such insights morally objectionable themselves. Or, to put it plainly: it's taboo to talk about the taboo. Discussions of pedophilia that say too much---that say something other than blanket condemnation---are somehow odd apologias for perversions, or participate in scope of perversion itself. That, too, is true, hence the title of this post. And the strategy of approaching the issue of perversity obliquely, at a slant, is for good reason ,because talking about the taboo similarly courts misunderstanding if not outright condemnation.

Unless, of course, one is a "journalist."

Indeed, the overdetermined, culturally sanctioned way to discuss perversion is perverse itself: to discourse on pedophilia, I must first and foremost condemn it in the name of human decency. This is not to say I don't agree with the spirit of condemnation. Although I would stop short of pathologizing perversity as such, pedophilia is culturally forbidden form of perversion because it is morally reprehensible, and for reasons easily adduced, principled and consequentialist. Even so, this obligatory opening gesture ("pedophilia is evil!") is itself perverse if one understands perversity is also, first and foremost, wrapped-up in a complicated relationship between jouissance and the law. Two quick examples will suffice, the first from my own recent past experience as a scholar.

Some years ago I was a blind reviewer for a manuscript that purported to be a content analysis of the website of a famous pedophile/pederasty advocacy organization. The conclusions of the analysis were, it seemed to me, obvious: the website's rhetoric made claims about the "rights" and civil interests of boys, who have been systematically disempowered in Western culture, and this organization promoted and protected boy's rights. The arguments made by the website were consistent with the defensive claims of pedophiles with one exception (that children are seducers, a common claim made by pedophiles). I rejected the manuscript on scholarly and moral grounds. As scholarship, the essay seemed rather pointless. But the essay was not pointless in other ways; the moral objection I raised was that the point of the scholarship seemed to be its motive,enjoyment. The authors were "getting off" on slumming around in pedophiliac rhetoric. For the authors, despite a sense of detached scholarly objectivity, the motive deployed to justify such "research' was moral: "we have to understand how perverts think in order to stop perversity!"

The irony of my rejection of the manuscript was that it was particularly righteous (the editor never asked me to review a manuscript again because of this righteousness). We might even say that I took some pleasure in naming and denouncing the enjoyment of others as obscene; in castigating what I saw as a perversion of scholarly mission I was, in my own way, also engaging in a kind of perverse enjoyment---I got to embody "the law" and deliver the judgment of indiscretion and moral violation. And that observation begs the second example easily, NBC's pedophile-busting reality television program, To Catch a Predator.

For about three years (2004-2007), show host Chris Hansen made his a household name by busting would-be sexual predators lured to parentless homes by of-age teens or young adults pretending to be 12-14 year olds. For me, the show was excruciating to watch for a number of reasons, but the most glaring was the obscene enjoyment of Chris Hansen himself, visibly delighting in the painful righteousness of meting the moral law (which, viewers were told, were followed by the police after Hansen got to confront the "suspect" on camera). Despite ratings, the show was eventually cancelled because, NBC claimed, "sexual predators" were now well aware of the show and its methods and were becoming harder to "catch." I think the show was cancelled because of the mounting criticism and, in my view, its fundamental obscene character. The show was inescapably perverse in its staging of a sado-masochistic reality: the sadistic predator is revealed to be a masochist, Hansen becomes the law-giving sadist, and so on. Perhaps the most disturbing detail here is that the decoys were of legal age, entrapping rhetoric to the contrary, and although few will admit it, often times the spectator felt sorry for the would-be criminal! Therein is the complexity of perversion as cultural entertainment (examples abound in horror films that get us to feel something for the evil anti-heroes).

These examples---of film, of scholarly blind review, of To Catch a Predator---represent perverse acts on both sides, behaviors that are classically perverse because they are premised on a kind of unwavering faith in either the jouissance of the Other or the Law (I'm only doing what you want me to do; I'm only following orders). I hope they serve to illustrate how all of us are capable of obscene enjoyments, how we all can do perverse things or participate in the perverse. Such daily perversities, however, are premised on behaviors and nothing fundamentally essential. There are some people in our society whose subjectivity is perverse, however. These folks are very rare. And in psychoanalysis, these are the folks we say harbor a "perverse structure." All people are capable of perverse acts; a very few number of people are themselves perverse. The pedophile is the most stark example of an individual for whom perversity is a core disposition.

Of course, space prevents any thorough or technical discussion of perversity as a structure that is, in rare cases, pathological. Pedophilia is perhaps one of the most vexing "diagnoses," since most people do not have the capacity to understand it in an empathetic way, and this is because we are structurally "neurotic." Here's a quick thumbnail of the Lacanian take on the perverse structure: most people, paradigm persons, undergo two processes or formative transformations in childhood, "alienation" and then "separation." Collectively these fly under the term "castration," which in general just means having one's self "cut off" from the mother-child dyad as one unit, becoming "two" (or really, becoming "three," since the mechanism of the cut off is a third other).

According to Lacan, each process or, better, "event," concerns a symbolic paternal figure (a second parent, irrelevant of sex, can function as the "symbolic father"). The first process, "alienation," is when a child learns that he or she is not the same being as his or her mother and, more importantly, that s/he is not supposed to be or allowed to be. It is the moment of hearing "no" and understanding what it means for the first time---coming to terms with Jagger's observation that you cannot always get or have what you want. To be alienated is to understand prohibition, to understand what "no" means.

Understanding "no," however, doesn't necessarily mean you'll mind the prohibition. Of course, because the "no" is usually scary or accompanied by a threat, most children do. Minding the prohibition, accepting it, is the second step termed "separation." We've all seen this with "separation anxiety" in toddlers, yes? There are certain kids that cannot possibly part with mama. Kindergarten is, in many senses, a pedagogy of separation (and this, of course, requires the life-skill of sharing). It is with the understanding that comes with separation and absence that we learn the basic life-skills of exchange and substitution. So, for example, take the Peanuts character Linus: he cannot part with his safety blanket and sucks his thumb. These are substitutions, or transitional objects, that presumably help him to deal with a separation from mother or the maternal body. Regardless, the end result of successful separation is symbolization, fundamentally an economic relation premised on substitution (exchange, transaction, etc.). And for Lacan, the symbolic is the law as such, broadly construed.

Most of us are neurotics: whether obsessive (most academics) or hysterical, neurotics have undergone both alienation and separation. Together, these events mark the completion of "castration," whereby one is prohibited and separated from the maternal bosom and thrust into the world of social (or symbolic) relations. Prohibition, that initial "NO!" asks us to give up our unbridled enjoyment of mama in exchange from something else---the symbolic world represented by speech. Desire comes into play at this point in terms of questioning: "Ok, I cannot have mamma for myself. What, then, do you want from me? What do I want?" Without language, we cannot reflect on what it is that we desire. Enjoyment represents the satisfaction of our drives---eating, shitting, screwing, touching ourselves---and these things we learn we cannot do whenever we want. We give up our driven impulses with a little self-restraint to be social creatures, and "let go" only in socially sanctioned ways. Desire functions, in a way, as a limit to enjoyment; the guardrails, as it were.

Now, the psychotic person never goes through alienation or separation; this is a person who never understood "no." Psychotics are often very easy to spot (especially if you do any sort of online dating!). The trickier character is the pervert. The pervert is in a kind of developmental purgatory or limbo (although I wince at using that d-word): she has heard and understood the prohibition of alienation, she gets the "no," however, she has no way of symbolizing it or understanding (internalizing) its meaning. This is why structural perverts are very good at leading what appears to be a "normal life," indeed, why some may never commit perverse acts: law is reckoned with, it is felt, it's just not established or firmly emplaced. To use a computing metaphor: it's like knowing how to code HTML, just not being able to do it or not seeing where you've missed the backslash or typed the wrong coding. Or rather, it's being able to follow the rules perfectly but not really caring about the end result; it's following the rules/code itself gets repeated, over and over, almost compulsively.

There's a lot I'm not going into here (for example, the symbolization of the "maternal phallus" in the fetish, the realization of "lack," and so on), but the gist, I hope, is clear: the pervert can enjoy but cannot desire because s/he lacks the symbolic resources to desire. The pervert does not ask questions, or as Miller puts it, "does not ask for permission." And so the pedophile emerges as a person who knows, very well, that what he or she is doing is not socially sanctioned, appropriate, and so forth, but does it anyway---not because it is taboo, but rather, to bring the taboo into being. What's at stake for the pervert is the law itself, the law as such, the invitation for the paternal, a deep call for understanding, at some level, what the "no" means or is because s/he cannot.

Sandusky is not only a textbook case of pedophilia from the behavioral (viz., DSM) standpoint, but from a Lacanian standpoint was well. He went to great, elaborate lengths to create an environment for his victims---troubled boys whom, predictably, are looking for father figures, who themselves are calling out for the alienation/separation of primary and secondary repression. From the pervert's standpoint, he is doing what the child wants, bringing the law into being. This is why, according to Fink, the cultural fantasies of unbridled enjoyment are really a ruse for the pervert and the horrified observer: Sandusky is racked with anxiety, and by repeatedly restaging the trauma of prohibition he is making the Other---the Law---exist. That he may "get off" in the company of the boys is really not the purpose; however strangely, the pedophile sees himself as a liberator, letting boys enjoy themselves. Yes, this is twisted, but it's only this twisted thinking/feeling that begins to explain the compulsory character of perverted acts (I would be remiss not to point out that there is also some empirical brain research that suggests there are serious differences in the brains of pedophiles, but what that means exactly is not yet understood or proven in any satisfying way).

I've gone into the differences between structural perversion and perverse acts because one can beg the other. Often, our response to perverts is also similarly perverse, and I think we would do well to recognize the point of convergence in righteousness and our rush to absolute condemnation and judgment. As Size (damn autocorrect) Zizek notes of "fundamentalists" in his recent How to Read Lacan, the religious zealot's conviction "does not concern facts, but gives expression to an unconditional ethical commitment." That unconditional, blind commitment to some principle or law is perverse because at its core is a sort of painful delight---enjoyment---in proclaiming the law, thou shalt not! It's Chris Hansen busting would-be sexual predators, or my blind-reviewing self condemning scholarship as trash. It's the subtext of the current media orgy reporting on and condemning, in nauseating detail, the crimes committed by Sandusky and, we worry, school administrators in covering it up: in the zeal to win at any cost, the "perverse core" of collegiate athletics is revealed in its complicity with the obscene and heinous.

The two perversions, then, are these: the perverse structure of pedophiliac subjectivity, and the perverse response we have to that subject. One begets the other. One kind we might feel is justified---and frankly, it is. But we should not ignore our own complicity in this strange, warped economy that would keep enjoyment at bay, since the very fantasy of "busting a pedophile" allows us to approach enjoyment just the same, albeit from a different direction, from the higher ground of moral righteousness. This is, of course, not to excuse or condone either type of perversion. It is to say, however, that we need to be more critical of our consumption of this story---and the zeal with which is it being covered. We cannot help ourselves, like watching the scene of a car accident. But, still, I guess I'm saying we should not exempt ourselves from obscenity at the heart of controversy. Again, I come back to Jagger: "I shouted out/ who killed the Kenndys/ when after all/ it was you and me." One is right to be suspicious of those who proclaim most righteously the evils of Sandusky, just as we are the religious zealot who condemns "fags" to hell. Sandusky will be brought to justice, I just want us to be wary of how much we ourselves enjoy seeing that. It too easily can snowball into a moral panic (pedophiles under every shrub) or righteous movements that create even more victims.

At the risk of perversity, here's the moral: Dehumanization is the most terrible perversity of them all. Or, you know: two wrongs don't make a right.

it's synth-pop friday!

on misogyny and "the black man's hour"

Music: Sigur Ros: Inni (2011)

A forth woman will step forward today to report that she was sexually harassed by a presidential candidate at 1:30 p.m. A friend and colleague at another university alerted me that she was expecting a term paper today from a student who would be arguing that this candidate is a "victim." This news got me to thinking about Susan B. Anthony.

As is well known---er, except, perhaps, by public high school students in Texas---black male suffrage was established in the 1870s with the 15th amendment. Support for the amendment split the "first wave" feminists into two camps: those who refused to lend their voices to the reconstruction legislation because it did not extend suffrage to all and those who supported the amendment as a kind of incremental progress toward universal equality before the law. These divided efforts would also split into federally focused and state focused strategies for women's suffrage. It would take over another forty years to establish women's right to vote in the United States with the 19th amendment (and shortly thereafter, establish an age requirement for voting too).

Anthony and Stanton's famous opposition to the fifteenth was met by other voices, many suffragists but also a number of vocal misogynists, that it was "the black man's hour," meaning that women should "wait" until their proper time. In hindsight, of course, it's easy to argue such arguments were shortsighted, however, we have to remember that each historical moment is more complicated and knotty when viewed from the crises of the future. After the Civil War, one can only imagine that in the late 1860s either a state or federal approach seemed viable---we celebrate all the suffragists for their strivings. Ultimately Anthony and Stanton were right (on political, legal, cultural, and theoretical grounds), but that's not to discount those suffragists who agreed with the strategy of incremental progress: they took that inch, and although it took too long, the mile eventually came.

Today the phrase "black man's hour" can be understood as shorthand for the ideology that underwrites it: the superiority of the male sex and gender and the secondary station of woman, whether "natural" or "cultural." Even writing such a statement seems absurd, and yet, we can certainly discern the ideology at work in contemporary politics: taking the admittedly facile representations of the mainstream media as a symptom, on the right, "black man's hour" references a commitment to the natural inferiority of women in arguments for a better world, while on the left the phrase references an investment in the cultural truism, however unfounded, that we gotta work within the system we got. As a rhetorician through-and-through (although I do not throw out notions like "truth" and so forth, my moorings are constructivist to say the least), it's often difficult for me to limit my thinking to the level of MSM jockeying and take this discourse on its own terms. I firmly believe "seeing is believing," and that visual regimes participate in the hegemony of patriarchy at a pretty deep (that is, early-in-childhood) level; this is to say, I think gender is lodged at a structuring, epistemological horizon of understanding. I recognize such a view is provocative, and I'm happy to discuss that, but even so, let me briefly take up the implications of the superficial (the rhetoric of reportage) to make a larger point about presidential candidate Herman Cain's harassing proclivities, a candidate who is slowly being revealed as a straight-talker whose refreshing candor is actually buoyed by a sense of male entitlement/exceptionalism (the direct links between masculinity and an ideology of exceptionalism, of course, need not be elaborated after Bush II).

It hasn't taken long, of course, for self-identified "conservative" pundits to step forward to suggest the allegations of Cain's sexual harassment is racially motivated. Last week Ann Coulter's Cain-raising on the media circuit garnered the most attention; she suggested not only were the charges born of racism, but that Republican "blacks" are far superior to Democratic "blacks" because of the scorn they must endure to be conservatives. As the bile duct of the RepubliChristian unconscious (Marx's observation about Hegel's dialectics being upside down comes to mind), we shouldn't be surprised Coulter would say something so (ironically?) racist. Still, as Ronald Martin's CNN editorial details, pundits have been giving voice to the "race card," saying what politicians already in power cannot say. Even Cain has suggested as much himself, and after this afternoon's press conference with the forth accuser, I expect to hear more of it.

The suggestion here, of course, is that this is the black man's hour. The suggestion is that the charges of sexual harassment are a deliberate, conspiratorial distraction from the power of Cain's conservative ideas. How else do we explain the persistent polling suggesting the harassment scandals are still a non-issue among Republican supporters? Early this morning a CBS pollster noted Cain's numbers are up, and that his "testy" defiance may even help Cain's campaign. One has to wonder: so, four women claim to have been harassed sexually, to have been inappropriately treated by Cain because of their sex/gender. Four accusers is four too many, of course. Sure, there's yet to be "hard" evidence released in the media, but it's just a matter of time. And so, why is it Cain's supporters are unwilling to consider the plight of the possible victims of Cain's unwanted advances?

Although there are more insidious forms of ideological machination, at least superficially, Cain's defiance and his persistent popularity reflects how ideology actually works. Ideology is "overdetermined," as the story goes, and works in ways more akin to a complex machine of moving parts than conspiracy, making critique something like "whack a mole" when one attempts to address ideology as the multi-headed Hydra that it is: one can claim the feel-good mantle of fighting racism while propping sexism. Ideology works this way, sideways, shifting the terrain almost always in the name of The Good. And it's not just in the case of Cain, in which the rhetorical structure of the "high tech lynching" laid by the Supreme Thomas twenty years ago has been redeployed again; it's rather a persistent and deep structure rooted in the nineteenth century that argues for equality in the gestures of inequality. Among those of the Left there is a great temptation to suggest "we" are somehow exempt from the ideological machine, but how soon folks forget the presidential campaign of 2008: remember, folks, Hillary Clinton suffered a similar fate, losing a bid for the presidency because it was, yet again, the "black man's hour." As bell hooks and countless cultural critics have argued both inside and outside of the academy, one cannot fight misogyny or racism or class disparity without recognizing their deep, interlocking and mutual implication. This is why Anthony was, in the end, right to resist supporting the fifteenth amendment back in the 1870s: equality is a total horizon, not merely a sum of discrete parts clamoring for recognition.

its synth-post-punk friday!

carnEVIL 2011!

Music: Pale Saints: In Ribbons (1992)

In 2002 I started throwing an annual costume party, first at my home in Baton Rouge and now continued here in Aus-Vegas. I've always thought it was a good time for friends and colleagues to mingle (and merge); like Mardi Gras, Halloween is a holiday for collapsing hierarchies: kids get to be adults and demand treats from other adults; adults get to regress to childhood again; girls get to dress like hos; and boys, well, boys get to dress like girls. Not that any of these transformations doesn't already happen on a daily basis (just ask my colleagues how childlike I can become at any mention of a 9:00 a.m. meeting). The longer I do it and the older I get, the more I like to turn over the theme to those more younger and creative than me. And this year is proof positive this is good judgment. As a co-host, I'm really only the DJ with party favors (that is, lighting)---the real creative genius behind this year's party is Rob Mack and Ashley Mack (no relation except that, um, they are geniuses).

This year's theme was "carnEVIL," to be interpreted however one wished. The living room/dance floor was transformed (with the aid of crafty tablecloths) into a big, red top tent! It looked amazing, and made for a fantastic dance floor once the fog machine and lights got spinning. Just beyond that was a Fun House/Hall of Mirrors animated by strobe lights (aka, the pukey-room; also see Herr Gravitron). The kitchen became a glow-in-the-dark Midway Graveyard, with lots of strangled stuffed animals hanging on nooses. There was a staging area, and a refreshments area, of course.

Out in the back patio was the biggest surprise: A bouncy castle (a.k.a. the Vomitorium)! The bouncy castle was truly over-the-top and an outstanding hoot (and folks used it, I'm happy to report, without . . . "incident"; wardrobe malfunctions? Yes. Motion sickness? No.).

Perhaps owing to the theme this year, the costumes were both amazing and incredibly creative. I liked almost all of them, but among my favorites: Maegan's super-creepy "Bloody Mary" costume, which won the award for "Scariest." Basically, she appeared as a sink and mirror, but when she turned on the light inside her witchy face greeted you (sucking on a sippy cup of booze, of course). I found Camille's ringleader costume smashing, and we looked great together!

The funniest costume went to the corndog-(non)chomping Bachmann duo, who temped everyone on Saturday with their corndogs---rubbing them on their faces, each others' faces, the faces of strangers. Them corndogs really got around . . . and the pair cinched (or clenched?) the "Funniest Costume" award. There's too many good costumes to mention here, so, I'll invite you to live vicariously through the photo gallery here. Suffice it to say at some point in the evening I stopped taking photographs to protect the guilty. If you were there, you know what you saw. If you weren't, well, you'll just have come next year---the tenth annual costume party bash DJ-ed by yours truly, and sadly, the last to be hosted by our creative party geniuses, Rob and Ashley. Until then . . . .

it's hard times all around (default)

Music: Skinny Puppy: HanDover (2011)

A couple of days ago I decided to resist the magnetism of screens and attend to some repairs and removals, mostly in the garden. Many plants, thoroughly ravaged by the summer heat, had become dead things that just needed to be buried in a dumpster. Coming home after a long day at the university, I noticed on the short walk from the patio gate to the back door green things had returned. And among the green things were dead things, too far gone (long past gone and neglected). I reasoned the sight of brown and crinkled leaves was somehow crafting an unconscious graveyard mood as the days passed, a mood suitable for Halloween, of course, but not everyday. Strong winds had blown down the mirrors I had hung on the western wooden wall to create a sense of space. After I dumped half a dozen exoskeletons formerly known as flora, I set about to rehang the mirrors. Hammer in hand, I steadied myself on an acacia wood bench and lifted my arm when I soon realized---or rather, retroactively realized---that I was falling; I thrust out my harms and hands to save face. My left palm cleft, confronting a concrete jutting and I scraped the skin off of my knuckles on the right hand.

I slumped on the hard, cold patio floor and thought about it. At first there was no pain. That took a few seconds to come. And in that tiny span of time I remembered impaling a wrist on a barbed wire when I was eleven, the curly spire poking out of my palm, and then the nausea that washed over me, and then resisting the urge to throw up. But I didn't feel that same nausea, just remembered it. And then I remembered all the things I had to do before bedtime and reasoned I should simply just get up and wash up and move on.

When I have nightmares they almost always involved disappointing someone. This week: forgetting some birthdays. I dreamed a parent and then a friend were upset with me. Only after the dream did I recall I had missed the birthdays. Still, aside from letting others down, my nightmares involve bodily traumas: drowning or car accidents. Trauma, often a blunt one. Falling reminded me of these premonitions, however briefly. Not so much parting flesh; I will not die by cutting, I don't think. So: get up.

A leg on the bench had rotted and it collapsed under me. I bled---too much for the scrapes, I thought. The bench ended in the dumpster along with former geraniums. The baby blue pajamas I wore took on a brown, polka dot pattern in spots.

The garden looks better without the dead. There's always a slight sense of guilt when dumping the dead; it's as if I should leave the carcass in the garden to remind myself of the failures (gardens often appear like resumes, don't they?). The mirrors are hung, and scabs have formed on fingers and knees. Still, there's nothing quite like a simple fall to remind one of the smell of trauma---those heightened senses, that retroactive doubt about one's sense of security (or immortality, as infantile as it is). You know the feeling: the inchoate sense of dread that says, for a millisecond, "I'd rather be in bed reading a book than falling on the concrete right this moment." No one enjoys falling on concrete, even for the memories the falling might provoke.

The clutch on my car went out this week. Things, you know, fall apart.

My friend's mother, I learned at dinner, is back in the hospital. I'd say such news "comes with age," but really, it does not. I simply think such news is more in mind as we age.

A student's father was in a hit-and-run accident and she missed class. Another student reported her mother had a stroke last week, and she was busy tending to her. A friend of mine in the Midwest reported that one of his students was killed a couple of weeks ago. This is one week.

It's hard to worry about students' assignments when you find yourself saying, "don't worry about class; you need to focus on what's most important, and that's your family." What is this call for "accountability" in higher education when we are caused to consider the personal lives of students? Does accountability make exceptions for making exceptions? Is it ever alright to attend to the green things instead of the screens, and if so, can you measure that attention? The dead and dying are invisible on screens and pages.

A friend of mine teaches fifth grade. She says aside from the challenge of teaching her bilingual students to take the "no-cog-left-behind" exams, one of the most pressing problems of teaching is head lice (and getting it once a year from her students).

"Accountability" is not, it would seem, a word that is synonymous with responsibility. Response-ability: the capacity or faculty of response and recognition, and some would argue that this capacity entails an obligation to attend to the dead. Response-ability is a quality, a character trait, something that is cultivated, like a virtue. Accountability has become, more or less, a term for surveillance measured in number. Accountability has ceased to be response-able. In the world of policy, accountability my be obligatory, but that obligation is compulsory, or at least seems increasingly so.

And if I return to screens and pages, there is a toad in the garden. A poisonous toad. I read with some interest Rick Perry's "interview" in Parade this past Sunday; his smug portrait appears on the front. He believes global warming is a "fiction," among other things you might expect him to believe. He also quipped that making severe changes in the department of education (presumably modeled on the slashes he made to public services in Texas) would reduce the national deficit. He is proposing a "flat tax," that fantasy of equity that appeals, much like Ayn Rand's writing, to the firm exhilaration of negative liberties: it does not matter that your lover has smacked you across the mouth, drawing blood. Of course, it's violence, but what matters is that the blow was good for you---it even turns you on a little. Everything is in its place, like the imagined scenes of domesticity in the Pottery Barn catalog.

As Benjamin once warned, the aestheticization of the political aims at the beautification of death. We should be wary of leaders who hold out infantile fantasies of omnipotence. When death looks pretty the ugly death will come. There are no lice in the Pottery Barn. Or gurneys.

it's synth-pop friday!

what’s a regent? continued . . .

Music: Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV (2008)

Last May I reported that I didn't quite understand the role of the Board of Regents in governing the University of Texas and that I would spend the summer poking around to figure it out. I've come a little closer to getting a handle on their role, which has invited the national spotlight because of Perry's bid for the presidency and a number of high profile, political appointments in various state education agencies. The short answer is that the regents are political appointees and wield tremendous power in the UT system; they are constrained only by popular, political sentiment and legislative will. The Board of Regents has the power to hire and fire the university president, and the chancellor of the UT system also serves at their pleasure. The chancellor is the figurehead, both a policy pusher and a fundraiser---key person for the administration and corporate side of things.

My education concerning the regency mostly comes from a book recommended by Rosa Eberly, The Tower and the Dome: A Free University Versus Political Control (1971) by former UT president Homer P. Rainey, who served the University of Texas from 1939 to 1944. An outspoken defender of the tenure system and academic freedom, Rainey was fired by the Board of Regents for defending the university from politicization. Although the story is long and complicated, the trouble started when Texas governors W. Lee O'Daniel and Coke Stevenson "staked" the regency with appointees opposed to "New Deal" legislation. During Rainey's tenure, a number of the regents called on him to fire four full economics professors for teaching "radical" views. Rainey refused, citing tenure protections and the principles of a "free university," where upon a many-year struggle ensued, eventually going public. The regents began meddling in the UT curriculum and fired three untenured economics professors, leading Rainey to make charge the regents with sixteen violations that he publicized. Despite widespread popular support, Rainey was ousted. Rainey eventually moved on to the University of Colorado and had a productive career, publishing The Tower and the Dome as a principled account of the controversy (the book is full of memos, speeches, and policies).

Rainey explains the power structure of the regency this way:

The University of Texas is a constitutional university; that is, it was provided for by the Constitution of Texas and not by legislative statute. It is controlled by a Board of Regents of nine members. These members are appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate. Appointments are made for six-year terms which are staggered in such a way that the terms of one-third, or three Regents, expire every two years. The Governor is elected for a two-year term [today it is four years]; consequently, each time a governor is inaugurated he has the privilege of appointing three regents. If a governor is elected for a second term, two-thirds of the Board will consist of his appointees, and by this process he can if he desires, secure control of the Board by appointment men committed to his policies.

As Rainey tells the story, high-level meetings were held in the late thirties by politicians to "take control" of the university system, expressly for the purpose of controlling what is taught. This resulted in "staking" the regency to push forward policy reform that comported with what has come to be known as "conservative" values (at that time, "anti-Communist" values and profound disdain for New Deal reforms).

The comparisons of the current regency to the one appointed during Rainey's time are plain; all nine regents and the student representative were appointed by Perry: Alex M. Cranberg, James D. Dannenbaum, Paul L. Foster, Printince L. Gary, Wallace L. Hall, Jr., R. Steven "Steve" Hicks, Brenda Pejovich, Wm. Eugene "Gene" Powell, John Davis Rutkauskas, and Robert L. Stillwell. Of course, Perry has been governor forever, so it makes sense he would have appointed the whole board. Nevertheless, one can easily understand why there is high tension in the current higher education environment in Texas.

That the board is awash in Perry appointees explains why there is so much controversy about higher education reforms in Texas: the governor---an office that is relatively weak compared to other states---can push through pretty drastic changes should he want to do so. This makes, of course, the university president's job an especially tricky one, taking history as our measure. This may also explain why the Chancellor has "given in," so to speak, to the demands of the Texas Public Policy Foundation's "seven breakthrough reforms" stressing higher accountability and "more" productivity. The agenda has been set: increase enrollment, decrease tuition, teach "blended" classes (which is to say, adopt the University of Phoenix model), and stop supporting "frivolous" scholarship. Scholarship like mine, of course, which takes popular culture as a serious academic subject.

it's synth-pop friday!

occupancy

Music: HTRK: Marry Me Tonight (2008)

Witnessing the worldwide ruckus now widely reported as the Occupy Movement, surely I am not the only one who has been thinking of R.E.M.’s song, “Welcome to the Occupation,” from 1987s Document (if you don’t know the song, I recommend a listen). Back in the late 80s, I always thought the song was about the dispiriting discipline of the "office collar" job, beating the "teen spirit" out of ya: "You are mad and educated/primitive and wild/ welcome to the occupation." Back then, I enjoyed my afterschool job working at Little Caesar's Pizza. It didn't pay very well, but the owner was kind (he often worked along side us and just as hard) and there was a fun camaraderie among the folks who worked there. No hierarchy, very little at stake, and minimal politics. We made pizzas. They were cheap. People got happy.

Watching the protests in New York spread across the globe this last week, it seems the movement has finally achieved traction in the mainstream news media. As Kevin DeLuca argued in his book Image Politics over a decade ago, social movements have been drifting toward a kind of postmodern politics of representation, harnessing the power of mediated circulation as a or the means of mobilizing affect. Although I've always had some trouble with DeLuca's argumentative particulars, I think he captured the emergence of a new form of global political organization; his and Peeple's subsequent notion of the "public screen" certainly seems apropos in this moment, especially when we take up the oft-heard question, "but, what do they want?" What is, in other words, the signified that would anchor all this unrest into a series of demands? (Notably, one of the original posters for the Occupy Wall Street protest deliberately leaves the questions unanswered).

Comparisons to the Tea Party movement have been common---or rather, have been often denied, which is the acknowledgement of a comparison. This had led me to think about what, exactly, the basis of any comparison might be. Aside from the obvious role of information technology and the "swarming" mobilizations this has enabled, we might say both lack a clearly identified leader. Protests to the contrary from the Tea Partiers—or rather, just a few fiery ones who are "friends" on a social networking site—both also lack a clear set of demands. I don't consider calls for "smaller government" or an end to corporate greed a demand. Prima facie, it would seem that the bedrock commonality is a brand of political nihilism in which the movement is defined against an established or projected order of one sort or another (for one, the illusion of liberal conspiracy; the other, the reality of global capital).

I'm still thinking. But, like a treasure hidden in plain sight, I do find it surprising that few commentators and critics are talking or writing about the concept that has helped to organize so many: occupancy. The original call to "occupy Wall Street" signified, on a basic level, putting bodies in a certain space as a metaphorical squatting ("bring tent," the original flyer says). The term also has militaristic connotations of property seizure and violation of ownership. Even the term "occupation," now metonymy for one's profession or even class-identification, derives from a person located in a particular space. Unlike the Tea Party movement, which seemed to organize an inchoate swirl of rage, xenophobia, and classic "American" paranoia, the Occupy Movement started as a political gesture of space. This marks it as something more---or perhaps something other than---a politics of spectacle.

Occupancy harkens to street marching politics of old in a way that flies in the face of theories of digital mobilization or virtuality. What the Occupy Movement seems to be harnessing, however paradoxically, is a strange, postmodern politics of invisibility made possible by postmodern regimes of publicity. What I mean by this harkens to Hakim Bey's conception of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, in a sense: insurrection occurs in spaces that have gone "unmapped" by the state. Or to use Henri Lefebvre's notions of representation, the Occupy Movement seems to be pointing up the distinction between "representations of space" (which serve the dominant class) and "spaces of representation," the latter concerning how people actually occupy the world with their bodies, often in ways that do not comport with dominant conceptions of space. The territory of lived lives---the structures of feeling and being in the world---exceeds what is capable of being represented.

For example, consider how long it took the MSM to get around to representing the Occupy Wall Street protest: it took almost two weeks for screen-time to reflect what New York citizens were experiencing in Manhattan. This "lag" time in "mapping" the movement represents in a homologous way the "lag" between representations of the experiences of "everyday folks" and what is perceived as consensus-reality on our many screens. My point is that Tea Party mobilization was conducted largely on the terrain of virtuality (despite some modest rallies and a Fox-News sponsored DC thing), whereas it appears that the Occupy Movement is manifesting quite differently---adding a spatial component to the temporally bound logics of publicity and circulation. In other words, occupancy is the central tactic, and the image politics of the tactic is secondary. Of course, this was the strategy of uprisings in the Middle East, presumably in countries with less sophisticated technologies of mediation and representation; clearly, however, a number of those involved in the Occupy Movement believe the spatial tactic is crucial. Those who study social movements in postmodernity would do well not to lose sight of occupancy as a strategy.

Evidence enough that the Occupy Movement is engaging in a territory map struggle are the attempts of those "on the right" who would force it into a state-sanctioned map. Consider, for example, George Will's conclusion in a recent column:

As Mark Twain said, difference of opinion is what makes a horse race. It is also what makes elections necessary and entertaining. So: OWS vs. the Tea Party. Republicans generally support the latter. Do Democrats generally support the former? Let’s find out. Let’s vote.

Isn't the reduction of social struggle to the ballot precisely the mechanism occupancy seeks to combat? Martin Luther King comes to mind . . . .

it's synth-pop friday!

halloween pr for the aus-vegas mothership

Music: Jesca Hoop: Snowglobe EP (2011)

Because of my “expert profile” on the media relations pages of my employer, about the second week of October I start getting requests for interviews about all thing that go bump in the night. I’ve done a lot of interviews on the topic of Halloween and ghosts (this year some show called Ancient Aliens called, but they seemed to want me to say some things that I would never say). Often journalists ask the same questions, and it’s difficult not to use the same answers, since they’ve almost become memorized scripts. It’s an odd thing.

A slightly higher profile interview will be going out on ProfNet’s Newswire subscription service, which alerts journalists to experts on everything from sniffing underarms to bunny sniffs. Maria Perez of ProfNet interviewed me over the weekend, and I’ve been asking if I could write my answers lately (so I can check the language; memory is choosey when speech is involved). Because this is taking up the last two hours of the week I try to reserve for blogging, I asked her if I could post our interview here. She said agreed, as long as I provide a link to the actual story. That won’t be out for a couple of weeks, and I’ll provide that here as soon as it is official on the Intertubes. Meanwhile, here is a preview:

What led you to teaching about this topic?

The answer to this question depends on how far I go back in my personal history. If I were to stay in recent history, I started teaching a course on the paranormal and occult because I find the topic fascinating, of course, but also for pragmatic reasons. I’ll explain.

For my first job as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, I had to teach the courses of the person I replaced. One of them was titled “Rhetoric and Religion,” a course I would have never taught by choice. Because at the time I was finishing a book on occultism, I decided I could still achieve the goals of the course—cultivating a respect for different viewpoints, understanding the character of faith and how we talk about it, and so on—by going at the topic slantwise. I soon realized that having students read about more unusual beliefs ironically helped them to maintain an open mind. Then, at the end of the course, I ask students to think about how strange their beliefs actually are. Yes, Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction story is very strange, however, so is the narrative of the deity who came to earth for the purpose of being tortured to death. Students really seem to dig this approach--the devoutly religious, especially. I teach courses on celebrity culture, popular music, and rhetorical theory. My course on the supernatural and paranormal has been and remains the most popular. I think that popularity says something about the purchase of the supernatural in our culture, and more specifically, two persistent human obsessions: mortality and the problem of evil.

So, I teach about these topics because I find it is a great way to reach students for the sake of the “bigger picture.” And, of course, owing to our longings for immortality, the supernatural intrigues people because it flirts with some confirmation of life after death. In the end, the supernatural and paranormal are implicated in religious belief. These topics seem tangential, and are often culturally coded that way, but I think they are in fact central to the “big questions” of life.

Now, if we go way back in personal history, my interest in researching and teaching on these topics is rooted in childhood. I grew up in an evangelical church that taught young people that any interest in the supernatural and occult was “of the devil,” even that one could be possessed by seeing a horror film or enjoying heavy metal music. I believed in spiritual warfare until my early or mid-teens (cars and sexual awareness were the route of my growing doubt). So, part of my interest concerns wrestling with my own “demons,” deep-seated fears about what I once thought was a supernatural force, but now believe is essentially human: evil. Popular culture narratives about the paranormal, supernatural, and so on help us as a culture work-through the stark and often disheartening realities of adulthood, as well as help us to craft something or someone else to blame (aliens, the devil, reanimated deceased pets, the in-laws). I think working-through is good, and that’s how I teach material on the supernatural and paranormal. Still, as much as the spooky stuff represents a culture working-through its traumas, it can also be used for harm and displace responsibility (e.g., did the devil really make you do it? Is the person you want to execute really possessed by a supernatural force?). Too much concrete evil is done in the name of fighting an abstract Evil. As a species, humans routinely turn other people into monsters. It makes them easier to kill. This is the ugly side of the supernatural, and that needs to be taught as well.

Was it something you studied before or after you became a professor?

Perhaps because the paranormal, occult, and so on were taboo in my youth, I’ve always found these topics interesting. I did not formally study them until graduate school, however, and mostly as topics for term papers.

What really pushed me to start writing and publishing about these topics was the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999. Many journalists in the mainstream news media were reporting the gunmen were practicing Satanists or occultists; I noticed an explosion of discourse on the Internet (at that time, newsgroups were big) about demonic forces, the apocalypse, and so on connected to the shootings. Most of these sorts of claims turned out to be patently false, and I wanted to understand the larger, cultural processes that set them into circulation. Why was the claim that the gunmen were practicing Satanists credible in the first place? That’s an interesting cultural question to me. As a communication scholar in a college anchored by a journalism school, I know a little bit about how journalists are trained; that a journalist would publish that sort of thing says as much about our culture as it does the journalist.

Since that time, the best answer I’ve come up with to questions like these is simply this: we have a rather large vocabulary for discussing good things. We have a very poor and limited vocabulary for discussing the negative—for discoursing on evil. Television shows, movies, and stories about strange-goings-on are, in some sense, a kind of cultural compensation for this poor vocabulary. Or alternately, these have become our vocabulary for giving expression to that which we fear and have difficulty talking about. In this respect the occult, supernatural, and paranormal are a kind of poetics, a human striving to make sense something ineffable that we all feel but cannot name.

Do you incorporate horror/subculture studies into your classes? For example, do you assign your students horror movies to watch for homework?

Yes, but just for my paranormalism course (“Rhetoric and Religion”). The class covers the topics of spiritualism and psi phenomena; demonic possession; apocalyptic cults; and alien abduction narratives. I don’t require students to watch the films (they are, after all, scary), but I suggest if they can bear it they should see The Legend of Hell House; The Exorcist; and Close Encounters before the appropriate week, because I draw examples from these films (and many others). Films are profoundly important for providing the collective imagination with images that circulate and, in a way, anchor narratives about the supernatural.



For kids today, Halloween is all about dressing up and trick-or-treating. What else should they know about the holiday? What are its origins? 



I am going to assume by “kids” you are not referring to anyone’s age. Halloween is precisely a holiday for kids, especially the middle-aged! I’ll come back to this.

A lot has been written about the date of Halloween, its links to various harvest festivals (Samhain) and so forth. What a lot of folks don’t know is that, like a lot of things imported to the United States, we have made Halloween our “own.” We know the celebration comes to us from the Irish and Scots, which may explain why Halloween was originally a class affair. David Skal in his 2002 book on Halloween (Death Makes a Holiday) argues the holiday has a lot to do with class division. The Great Depression ended the largely upper-crust practice of ladies carving pumpkins and getting glimpses of their future beloveds at midnight when disgruntled, rock-throwing youngsters started “tricking” them. As Skal tells it, in New York City and related areas in the northeast, it became common practice for poor kids to beg for change on Thanksgiving. For some reason, the previously generous upper classes stopped giving handouts, and the “ragamuffins” started pranking and vandalizing rich folks’ homes. The story goes that the more well to do got the idea to open their homes on the night of the pranks, feeding the young people apples and cider and so forth to avoid vandalism. Offer a treat, or you’ll get tricked—and how! The practice drifted toward October over time. Of course, that’s just an explanation for the practice of trick-or-treating, and a lot more feeds into the way the holiday evolved to the way it exists for us today.

Regardless, I think that the class-based tension underlying the holiday is still with us, both in terms of its association with the working class, but also psychologically. On what other day is a young person empowered to demand a gift? It’s the only holiday I can think of when a young person—the most disempowered of almost all cultures—gets the upper hand on the grown-ups. This power play is part of the joy, and perhaps why so many of us “regress” to our childlike selves when celebrating the holiday, or when reliving it through our children’s eyes. It’s the same dynamic that makes Maurice Sendak’s children’s books so enjoyable to children-kids and adult-kids alike: Max, denied dinner, becomes King of the Wild Things and commands all of them to have a “rumpus!”

Have you ever witnessed an exorcism/demonic possession? 



Yes, many times. Bob Larson, the head of the Spiritual Freedom Church in Denver and the most visible exorcist of the Deliverance Movement (an off-shoot of Pentecostalism), routinely holds weekend seminars and forums in cities across the country in which he exorcizes people. Many of the seminars and forums are free and open to the public, and I’ve been to number of the forums in which he exorcized people. For a fee, you can also take a class to learn how to do it yourself. I’ve not taken a class because I’m cheap. Still, it’s quite something to witness—folks behave much like the possessed do in Hollywood films. Notably, the exorcisms are much less profane than the ones often portrayed in films. The possessed rarely drop a curse word.

I was once contacted by a student who believed she was possessed; we had a very unusual series of email exchanges and phone conversations. I gave her the name of a Shaman who performs exorcisms in town, as well as encouraged her to seek medical attention. I also contacted her dean, who got in touch with her parents. It turned out she was schizophrenic and had gone off her meds.

I mention the Larson exorcism and the woman who contacted me together for a reason. Many people have asked me if I believe in demonic possession. Personally, I am an agnostic on the issue of angels or demons. But really, what I believe is beside the point. The fact is that people do believe that they are possessed, and they are seeking help. Someone who reaches out for help is someone who can be helped. I don’t doubt that those who have exorcisms feel better, or that some are moved to happier lives. And that’s why I offered the troubled woman my Shaman contact. I admit, as an educator and as a person my preference is psychotherapy and psychiatrics for possession cases. Even so, most therapists will tell you that you do not help someone who believes she is possessed by denying her reality. For the possessed, the demon is real, and one must start with that assumed reality.

Do you have personal stories of experiences with ghosts, hauntings, etc.? 



Yes, but I’m always the reticent, open-minded-but-skeptic in these stories. Because my interest in the supernatural and occult is as a cultural critic, I tend to “read” stories of hauntings or alien sightings as the manifest narrative for something else. For example, a man contacted me once pleading for help concerning his haunted house. There was a persistent feeling of dread, strange noises, bursting light bulbs and so on. I usually do not get involved with those who contact me for help regarding this sort of thing. Other than listen to these stories, what I usually end up doing is providing contacts to paranormal investigators (there’s more than one ghost-hunting group in town), which I did for this man. After a second conversation, however, I suspected the haunting was about a marriage on the rocks. Still, I put him in contact with a local paranormalist and that was that. I tend to pull out of invitations to “investigate” the paranormal on a first hand basis; it’s just outside of my domain of expertise. Because I think so much of this is psychological in origin—that is, because I tend to believe there is a secular explanation—getting involved would require a scientific or medical training that I do not have.

I will say, however, there are many times in my life I have been “spooked,” especially as a young person. I used to get “night terrors” as a kid, and although in retrospect I know my hallucinations (of seeing demons, ghosts, and so forth) were psychological or biological or what have you, that did not make the experiences any less terrifying. That we all experience terror or feelings of panic is one of the reasons stories of the supernatural have such a common purchase. We can all relate to the feelings these stories inspire, and they can anchor and validate our personal experiences. It is often comforting to have a label and explanation for an intense feeling of fear, dread, or shock.

Has your perspective on all this changed since you started a career in this field? 



Absolutely. Just like any profession, academics can be hardheaded and just as closed-minded as the most dogmatic, religious zealot. When I started researching in this area (focused mostly on popular culture—films, books, and so forth), I was told indirectly and--sometimes directly--that taking the supernatural, occult, and paranormal seriously was a “career destroyer” and a waste of time. In part, that attitude is the legacy of a very long and often bloody history of freethinkers trying to make sense of the world without persecution (Galileo, for example, was accused of practicing witchcraft).

That attitude has changed a lot since I entered the academy over a decade ago, thankfully, but it still remains. Research on the supernatural is sometimes described as a waste of time, or trivial, or of interest to marginal publics. Recently outside forces, mostly political, have been critical of academics studying this kind of thing as opposed to, say, something better suited to the marketplace (vocational and professional topics). But these attitudes are precisely backwards: who isn’t intrigued by things that go bump in the night? And why are we intrigued? Cultural narratives about the supernatural and occult permeate our culture, providing not only enjoyment but also meaning for many, many people. The supernatural does things for people, helps them make sense of the world, it helps them interrogate themselves, and sadly, it helps them demonize others. Isn’t that worth studying?

I think we need to continue examining our superstitions and fears and how we choose to represent them because doing so tells us something about “human nature.” Representations of the supernatural can evoke powerful emotions in us and are more influential than many folks realize. For example, after Nine-eleven President George W. Bush delivered a number of addresses to the nation that utilized the language of spiritual warfare. Spiritual warfare is a growing belief system among many Christian faiths. The core idea is that demons exist among us and possess people. In many of Bush’s Nine-eleven speeches, the “terrorists” are described as demons or possessed with demonic forces, and whether it was accidental or deliberate, the fact remains an analysis of those speeches shows an exorcist-like narrative of purging a foreign body of its evil. I think that supernatural beliefs influenced, or at the very least justified, foreign policy. Why should we study the practice of exorcism? My answer is that it tracks a form of discourse that justified war.

Incidentally, this discourse has not left the political scene. The much discussed “Day of Prayer” headlining Texas governor Rick Perry was sponsored by the Texas Apostolic Prayer Network, a group that is at the forefront of the spiritual warfare movement. Whatever Perry’s political beliefs, the fact remains that the rhetoric of demonology is in our political discourse, often indirectly or at a barely noticeable level. But it’s there. It’s not just “at the movies.”

What impact have media (film, TV, books, etc.) had on public perception of the supernatural? 

Anything else you'd like to add?

Well, I think the assumption of the question is a false one; publics are constituted by “media.” A public does not exist without mediation.

But in the spirit of the question: because I tend to think about the occult, the supernatural, the paranormal, and related “spooky” things are fundamentally based in image and narrative, the media have been central---they are the force of impact! The story here is one of circulation.

Many nineteenth and early twentieth thinkers prophesied the end of superstition (even religion), but that has not come to pass (and I don’t think it will). Rather, we’ve seen an explosion of interest in the supernatural, the emergence of new religious beliefs, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories. This has to be, in part, a consequence of the speed of information flow, the way in which the speaker and screen can distribute a singular image to millions upon millions of ears and eyeballs at once. Stories move quickly and can engender widespread belief before any critical apparatus can come into play (e.g., “fact-checking” what politicians say in a debate, for example). Lived experience is an increasingly collective one. This entails all sorts of things, not the least of which is the erosion of the trust in authorities, a person (or institution) who can say “that is false” or “President Obama is a U.S. citizen.” The democratization of information entails a price; one of them has been a resurgence of belief in the paranormal and supernatural. As images and stories circulate to more and more communities, certain images can become ubiquitous and stay in one’s mind. An image, such as that of the World Trade Towers in smoke, can come to represent and anchor as “real” the belief that Satan’s reign on earth has begun.

I realize this all rather abstract, so let me use a concrete example—a pre-Internet example, the 1973 film The Exorcist. In his book American Exorcism, Michael W. Cuneo shows how, prior to the film, it was very rare for the Catholic Church to authorize an exorcism. After the film, the practice steadily grew. The film’s overriding message of a spiritual battle between good and evil was so powerful that it ended up providing a vocabulary (and diagnosis, really) for making sense of the cultural malaise of the 70s. It was powerful enough to inspire the Deliverance movement--the practice of “amateur” exorcisms and, I would argue, the spiritual warfare movement. Before that film, folks simply didn’t know how the possessed behaved. Before that film, certain folks didn’t have demonic possession as a possible, spiritual explanation for this or that self-destructive behavior (remember, in the film the mother pursues every possible medical explanation before she goes to the church). It’s interesting to note here that when Bob Larson holds his seminars or freedom forums, he often shows a videotape of himself performing an exorcism on someone, a sort of preview what is to come. It makes for good theatre, but it also makes for good priming. After the audience views the video, they know how to act possessed—or at least, an unconscious part of them knows.

That said, mass media, broadly construed, have the biggest impact today on beliefs concerning the supernatural (or anything, really); without the circulation made possible by contemporary media technologies, folks wouldn’t be on the same page—or better, image or sound—about da spook.

it's dream-pop friday!

”and now,” cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!”

Music: The Cure: Disintegration (1989)

Children’s book author Maurice Sendak has just published what I hope is not his last children's book, and it’s been a thirty-year wait. Bumble-Ardy is about a nine-year old pig who throws himself a birthday party because he was tired of waiting for one (after all, his parents were slaughtered). I’ve not got my copy yet and plan to do so this week. If you’re like me---and many of you reading this are---Sendak has a stronghold on the youthful heart, since we all saw ourselves in Max. Adorable, mischief-making Max.

In a promotional blitz, Sendak has been doing rounds of interviews. He was on Terry Gross’ Fresh Air radio program last week, and today the Associated Press released a profile that covered much of the same ground. Bumble-Ardy is perhaps one of Sendak’s darkest books, engaging the topic of child abuse. In his characteristically charming, crusty manner, Sendak dismisses the claim this book---and many others---is inappropriate for children. He was more sharp-tongued when asked about Where the Wild Things Are back when the film version debuted. In an interview with Newsweek, he was asked about how he might respond to parents who believed the book and film were too scary for children:

"I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered."

Sendak’s concern is one I’ve heard echoed by a number of academics, most notably Jack Zipes, a retired professor at the University of Minnesota. I was fortunate of take a course with Jack on Walt Disney and fairy tales, and it was wonderful and has stayed with me for over a decade. At the time I took the course, the first Harry Potter novel came out, and Zipes was highly critical of it because he thought the book represented what the culture industry has done to fairy tales. Rather than introduce children to the horrors that will greet them in the world, after Disney, fairy tales metamorphosed into utopian visions that forestalled convictions in social justice and change. As he puts it in his classic study, Happily Ever After:

Children are exposed to the social design of reality from the moment they are born. Adult versions of “reality” are imposed on children to ensure that they are positioned physically, socially, and culturally to experience their own growth and life around them in specified ways. “Reality” is held up to them as empirically verifiable and as an inexorable force. Fairy tales have always balanced and subverted this process and offered the possibility of seeing reality as an illusion. As children become aware of the artifices and machinations of their lives, they gain the sense of alternatives for making their own lives more meaningful and pleasurable.

In other words, fairy tales are, as Uncle Burke said, “equipment for living” for young persons.

Sendak understands this, and his children’s books reflect it. Parents are not always good. People are not always good. Evil is not necessarily a monster, and abuse is not necessarily avoidable. When his book In the Night Kitchen was banned from school libraries because it featured an image of a naked boy crowing like a rooster, Sendak said it “was so fatuous, so incredible, that people would get so exercised by a phallus, a normal appendage to a man and a boy. . . . We live in a different country altogether. I will not say an improved version. No.” I’m teaching a graduate seminar on psychoanalysis, and we just engaged a similar outcry that Freud faced when he dared to suggest infants and adolescents were sexual creatures. The cultural struggle here is over the romanticization of children as “innocent" beings, and the subtext of the critique, of course, is that Sendak is a child abuser for daring to suggest that children should confront issues that make their parents uncomfortable.

It's the same subtext behind Bachmann's suggestion Perry's HPV vaccine order harms "innocent little girls." My, what ridiculous political claims are made in the name of a childhood innocence that is, well, an illusion---an illusion just as any fairy tale.

One thing that strikes me about Sendak’s recent interviews, however, is his explicit sadness. I admire him for sharing that sadness with his many audiences. Just like we are not supposed to introduce our children to human sexuality and human ugliness, we are also not allowed to be sad in public (remember prozac?). Yet he makes it a point to let people know he is sad, and that there is nothing wrong about it. He is not ashamed of his sadness. On the radio interview he breaks down into sobbing at times reminiscing about his longtime lover Eugene Glynn, and friends who recently died. “Everything is over. Everything that I called living is over. I’m very, very much alone,” he says in the AP piece. “I don’t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They’re nowhere. I know that they’re nowhere and they don’t exist, but if nowhere means that’s where they are, that’s where I want to be.”

We're also not supposed to admit we do not believe in the immortal soul, perhaps the greatest illusion of all. Hats off to you, Mr. Sendak, for having the courage of your convictions.

Still, as much as I admire Sendak's public sadness, his statements are somewhat devastating to me, because his books brought me so much joy in my youth---and now. I just spent some time with my copy of Where the Wild Things Are and found myself laughing aloud when Max, christened King of the Wild Things, declares it’s time for the “wild rumpus to start!” I hope (and suspect) Sendak does not believe he is very much alone. So many of us wild things have been dancing with him for most of our lives!

on cheating

Music: Shearwater: Palo Santo (2006)

This post is about dating, test scores, and some easily confused egos (the ideal-ego, the ego-ideal, and the superego, you know).

And my dog.

(My dog’s hopeful stare at around the time for dinner reminds me of my responsibility to others, and he’s giving me that stare right now---back in a moment).

Channeling Uncle Burke, I’m gunning for some perspective by way of a little incongruity. And incongruity is a nice banner for a dating story, because I have many to illustrate the ingenuous mismatch that yields insight (maybe). She was beautiful with piercing dark eyes. She could draw blood with her sharp wit. She had the uncanny ability to make a well-worn t-shirt appear as elegant as an expensive evening dress just by cracking a smile. One date began with the odd request to “borrow some deodorant,” which strangely charmed my pants off (literally).

A phone conversation, recalled and reconstructed from a summertime Thursday night:

“I don’t have a date on Tuesday.”

“But I thought you had dinner with the other guy.”

“I decided I don’t like him; I would rather you take me out.”

“Excellent! And so I shall. But what changed? Does this mean I’m the only one?”

“I guess I’m just not into him.”

“Well, I hope you let him down easy. You’re quite the catch and losing you can really bum a guy out.”

“Why do you care? You should be talkin’ shit about him. C’mon Josh. Bring your game.”

“Just because I want you to myself doesn’t mean I can’t be considerate of others. I’d hate to have others talkin’ shit about me, you know. My game is being a good person. Trying to be nice guy, at least.”

“You’re so bogus.”

That date happened---the seventh of seven---and it went very poorly. I should say it went “predictably poorly,” but love can render one pretty stupid. Still, what is to be learned?

If we think about courtship as a practice, then we might identify a number of codes, rules, and techniques central to that practice that I either observed or failed to observe in this situation. To borrow from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, a practice is a form of cooperative human activity that strives to produce goods internal to the practice. The good internal to courtship seems to me to be a “healthy relationship” or “love between two people.” For me, that good is characterized by attraction, trust, emotional transparency, and mutual respect, buoyed by a good dose of lust and a bigger lump of caring. My understanding of courtship, and my former dating partner’s understanding, seemed to be at odds. In her world, courtship entailed a battle akin two jousting knights or fighting among rivals to “win” the honor of her person, and this may entail disrespecting a rival or dehumanizing him. “Don’t nice guys finish last?” she once quipped. “Apparently,” I responded. And apparent it was.

But then, I don’t see the practice as a game or race or joust. Why? The answer has to do with what I think is a kind of emotional cheating, or what we might term today as “manipulativeness.” Would I prefer to have a relationship with another that was achieved by characterizing other suitors as inhuman or unworthy of recognition? Does one “win” love, or cultivate it? And if the former, what does that make one’s lover? A prize, or a person? I recognize the competing models of courtship in our culture. One is sport; the other is less spectacular and perhaps best described as an evolving negotiation.

In his book on ethics titled After Virtue, MacIntyre uses the allegory of the game to explain the tension internal to all practices:

Consider the example of a highly intelligent seven-year-old child whom I wish to teach to play chess, although the child has no particular desire to learn the game. The child does however have a very strong desire for candy . . . . I therefore tell the child that if the child will play chess with me once a week I will give the child 50 cents worth of candy; moreover I tell the child that I will always play in such a way that it will be difficult, but not impossible, for the child to win and that, if the child wins, the child will receive an extra 50 cents worth of candy. Thus motivated the child plays and plays to win. Notice however that, so long as it is the candy alone which provides the child with a good reason for playing chess, the child has no reason not to cheat and every reason to cheat, provided he or she can do so successfully. But, so way may hope, there will come a time when the child will find in those goods specific to chess, in the achievement of a certain highly particular kind of analytical skill, strategic imagination and competitive intensity, a new set of reasons, reasons now not just for winning on a particular occasion, but for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands. Not if the child cheats, he or she will be defeating not me, but himself or herself.

That is, there is a good internal to chess playing that can motivate learning the game, and there is a good external to chess that can motivate learning the game. One would “hope” that those who engage in chess playing do so because of the joy of the game and the skills it helps to develop. The good external to chess playing---social or gustatory---is not specific to chess. The analogy to courtship should be, at this point, obvious: does one want a relationship or a trophy? The game in-and-of itself or the candy? If the former, then the reward is for oneself. If the latter, then the reward is for others to see and for “me” to enjoy. Of course, the latter reward is ultimately about oneself too, but it is once-removed, or abstracted, to a measure that is only tangentially related to courtship, which is to say, the reward is about something else.

Since I was introduced to MacIntyre’s theory of “virtue ethics” as an undergraduate, I have always come back to it. I find it compelling as frame for thinking through moral dilemmas and trying to live what Aristotle called “the good life.” Virtue ethics also resonates for me as a good description for how we actually behave in the world.

If one does not believe in moral universals, comporting oneself as an ethical person can tempt relativism. Go with God, or you have to behave in a less certain way. MacIntyre’s “solution” without deity is to trace common threads in Western thought about “virtues,” pulling them together into a coherent framework. Masculine connotations notwithstanding, virtues are qualities of character or behavior that are cultivated in “practices.” From various traditions (including the teachings of the New Testament) MacIntyre develops a description and a prescription for moral behavior based on the cultivation of valued qualities and behaviors. He says that we learn to be good people by embodying the virtues that we see role modeled by others in practices that we also practice (or want to practice). The most obvious examples of practices are crafts or professions, but MacIntyre also means things like sport, or courtship, or raising a family. The benefit of thinking about ethics in terms of virtues is that there are no absolute rules for right and wrong, just guidelines, or rather, behaviors and character traits we see in others we admire. And because ethical comportment is based on role modeling, one is absolved of perfection (for example, even Christ was “tempted”---he was not perfect either), but rather strives toward “being good at what one does.”

With the benefits, of course, come the risks (living well is dynamic and never “achieved” until death). The thing about just about any practice is that they need resources, and consequently, are necessarily tethered to institutions. Institutions provide material (and sometimes affective) support to practices. MacIntyre argues there is a tendency toward contradiction when practices are concerned: practices work toward the cultivation of goods internal to their activity, but require the resources of the institutions that support them. Institutions by definition pursue goods external to the practice. Consequently, the pursuit of goods between practices and institutions can be at odds. Again, the obvious examples here are professions, such as medicine. The goods internal to medicine include healing, and the virtues cultivated toward that end are care and hospitality. The goods external to medicine are prestige and profit. In the current “health care debate,” for example, the story of beleaguered doctors bemoaning the pursuits of the pharmaceutical or health insurance industry are so commonplace they are cliché: medical doctors cannot practice healing and hospitality because of massively complex bureaucracy based on profit-making pursuits. The pursuit of goods external to the practice of medicine are killing the goods internal to medicine and warping the virtues embodied by the Hippocratic oath.

And so with courtship. Although the actual statistics are complicated, 40 to 50% of marriages in the United States end in divorce. Why? The answers are also complicated. I would not generalize my personal experience to this national number, nor any viewing of Bridezillas, but there’s something to MacIntyre’s theory of competing goods: some people are not getting married for the goods internal to the practice (love, a healthy relationship, and so on); some are getting married for the goods external to the practice, the institutional pursuit of social (and legal) recognition. How many of us have had a friend get married for the sake of marriage, when the spouse would seem more or less interchangeable with another?

In fact, those who have studied the history of the institution of marriage often note it started as an economic arrangement; marriage is an odd institution in the sense that practice it supposedly houses came after it. Build it and they will come? (double entendre intended)

The tension between the pursuits internal and external to the practice of committed relationships is also at the heart of the same-sex marriage debate. Those who advocate for same-sex unions argue for external goods---and these are not bad: health care rights, tax-related issues, all sorts of things are wrapped into the need for institutional status recognition. Many of us caution, however, that the pursuit of external recognition is somewhat compulsory and in a way that may in fact threaten the “under the radar,” long-term relationships forged by queer couples for centuries . . . .

Still, if once adopts a virtue ethics approach to being-in-the-world, the mundane “bad thing” of the outlook becomes cheating. In this way of thinking, cheating is the thing to be avoided. “Evil” is a rupture in practices, ultimately the irrational x-factor; psychotic eruptions are, in the last measure, unthinkable in this moral perspective. And so we have a place for rupture, a seat of chance (and the reason for grounding ethical being in something like autonomy in the sense that nothing is sewed-up in advance). Cheating, broadly construed as deliberate dishonesty to secure advantage, is the antithesis of a given practice’s virtues. This is to say, dishonestly is the “sin” of the virtue ethics approach (and “evil” is the rupture of chance). Notably and importantly, in MacIntyre’s example of teaching the child chess, cheating is placed on the side of the pursuit of external goods. Cheating represents a short-circuit, of sorts, a deliberate violation of the virtues of a practice in pursuit of external goods. And it’s not that the pursuit of external goods is bad; rather, cheating represents the pursuit of external goods in a way that violates or negates the goods internal to a practice. Cheating is a mask: cheating says that it is in the name of virtue when it actually erodes or submerges this-or-that virtue.

Dating. Chess. Standardized tests. I started thinking about making this post because of the SAT test-taking scandal that broke this week. Rich kids were hiring smart kids to take the college entrance exam for them. In the mainstream media, the motive for doing so was couched in the pursuit of external goods: rich kids needed to get into this-or-that prestigious school because prestige is . . . well, everything. The story mirrors: numerous teachers in the Atlanta public school system were changing test answers for a decade to secure recognition. External goods. The goods internal to the practice---learning, knowledge---were eclipsed by the need for external recognition (funding). And those of us who are educators are very well aware of common practice of hiring a ghost writer for term papers. External goods. Secure the grade, get a job. To hell with the virtue of understanding, or scholarship, or learning for its own stake. Education has always been a means to an end; I’m not so foolish as to believe it has been anything other than this for the century or two that public education was made a coherent pursuit. But I think only recently has the candy emerged as the motive; this is, I think, the slight of hand so central to neoliberal thought. I want to think that educators are like MacIntyre’s wanting to teach a child chess: candy is promised, but by learning the “game” the child comes to recognize that playing is the thing, and that the candy is only a spin-off benefit---and a necessary one, of course, but a spin-off benefit that makes the playing possible. The playing is the thing.

What I’m struggling with here is the permissibility of of cheating as an emerging cultural virtue, or worse, as an accepted means to an end. Culturally, it would seem that cheating has been accepted or even embraced as a norm. Ask any teacher about cheating, and s/he will tell you that increasingly this is a norm that is embraced, however cynically, by younger generations without discomfort. Cheating is role modeled increasingly as a route to success (Wall Street comes to mind). As a culture, we seem obsessed with evil, the irrational ruptures---often violent---that puncture our screens night after night on the evening news. But evil is in the register of contingency; psychosis is psychosis. Cheating seems the more insidious problem of our time, the calculated and overly rational deceiving of others for advantage or gain; the legitimacy of cheating may well be the grounding structure of evil. Well, I think it is; cheating is the foundation.

And so, here is my dog, Jesús. I’m on my patio, enjoying the cool weather. I’m barefoot, in a t-shirt and lounging shorts, plopped on a couch pillow placed on a bench and smoking a cigar. He’s sitting on the pillow with me, at my back. He growls when the sound of sirens waft in (I live next to the busiest fire station in Austin; sirens blaring is a common sound). I’ve switched from listening to Shearwater on my headphones to listening to the local radio station, KUT, on a portable radio. I’m drinking Topo Chico. The dog isn’t wondering about whether I have “game,” or if I’m making lots of money. Well, I really can’t say what he is or isn’t wondering about. But he’s here passing the time with me. He could care less that I’m writing on my blog.