thanksgiving with adorno
Music: Autumn's Grey Solace: Winterrim (2012)
I noticed, across the alley where empty carports with rusted roofs were almost emptied of their escape pods, a dog had his way with a squeaking toy somewhere out of sight. The newspaper next to the tire, slightly deflated, was fat. As the parade rolled down seventh avenue I dumped the paper onto the ottoman and there was no mention---from the screen or the paper---of the scandal surrounding the red puppet, from which came a joyful song, "nothing's going to bring us down" (except, of course, a lawsuit that appears to be motivated less by impropriety than money). The paper itself was thin on content or story, however, there must have been a hundred circulars advertising "door busters" beginning tonight, at 9:00 p.m. The paper, like the parade, is a paean to profit and part of the logic of the gift.
The cooking will commence in an hour, for inwardness.
Long before Halloween, big box doors were selling Christmas trees to prime the confusion of sociality with consumption. The lead story on the front of the paper today announced that "Black Thursday" has now arrived, meaning that many stores are opening today, on Thanksgiving. "Retailers' hours have sparked controversy," Gary Dinges reports, for encroaching on "family time" (Texas retailer H.E.B. gets an implied pat on the back for closing today at 2:00 pm.). Reading this, I was caused to remember my favorite critical curmudgeon Theodor Adorno had said somewhere that we have forgotten how to give gifts. An InterTube search re-membered, it was Minima Moralia, drafted in the 40s but published in 1952:
We are forgetting how to give presents. Violation of the exchange principle has something non¬sensical and implausible about it; here and there even children eye the giver suspiciously, as if the gift were merely a trick to sell them brushes or soap. Instead we have charity, administered beneficence, the planned plastering-over of society's visible sores. In its organ¬ized operations there is no longer room for human impulses, indeed, the gift is necessarily accompanied by humiliation through its distribution, its just allocation, in short through treatment of the recipient as an object. Even private giving of presents has degener¬ated to a social function exercised with rational bad grace, careful adherence to the prescribed budget, skeptical appraisal of the other and the least possible effort. Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one's way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At the best they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse. The decay of giving is mirrored in the distressing invention of gift-articles, based on the assumption that one does not know what to give because one really does not want to. This merchandise is unrelated like its buyers. It was a drug in the market, from the first day.
I'm not so sure I agree, at least to the letter. Marcel Mass taught us in 1923 that the gift is never "free," but entails a kind of reciprocity "magic," a compulsory exchange that is the social tie. The gift exchange is fundamentally an expression of love through an economy of obligation, and this is not a bad thing, but rather a necessity: "I thought of you, here is an object of our relation, a piece of me." The gift is at some remove a request for recognition, something we all need to be social, but it is also a two-way street; one does not give selflessly, however, one also recognizes there is more than self and the other deserves recognition too.
Still, Adorno's point is that we are forgetting the point: if the gift concerns the relation, then gifting others what one would wish to gift the self reflects "the isolated cell of pure inwardness" that treats others as "objects." A good example of the deterioration of the social ties of gift giving is reflected in Target's recent commercial campaign (later edit: Target removed their full-length commercial from YouTube; here is a 15 second copy):
The spot is as cynical as it is disgusting, and it is no mistake that the ad browsing "mom" draws hearts on the gifts she wants for herself. Perhaps even worse is the second spot that celebrates the social bonding of shopping while making fun of TeenAge argot: "what if you could shop forever?" In each case, the other for whom the gift is imagined is not, as Adorno would have it, someone for whom one imagines the joy of receipt. Here the joy is in the procuring of booty, in the "bad grace" of buying gifts because they are "deals," of imagining oneself in a kind of consumptive play or television show in which purchasing skill reaps recognition in a unidirectional manner. The gift giving here is no longer a dialogue, but a monologue. It is as if the other is an object or actor in my own reality show in which I am the star: "me me me me me me me me me."
We might think about the logic of consumptive drift---the overtaking of Thanksgiving, fundamentally a celebration of food, friends, and family, by commercial imperatives---as another example of what I have been calling "cultural psychosis," the same logic to which mass shooters succumb. Again, from the Lacanian vantage, psychosis refers to a state in which one has not reckoned with the law as "no," a realization of one's limitations and the necessary dependency on others we share as social creatures. In a psychotic state (by which I do not mean pathology, but the adjectival form), other people are objects, not subjects in themselves deserving of recognition. Hence, giving the perfect gift is couched in metaphors of war:
"Who's your mommy now?" goes the interior monologue of the mom doing battle with the affections of her children. The advertisement reflects Adorno's observation that children eye gift givers with suspicion, even their own mothers. And I do not think it is a mistake that there is no father or second parent in the scene: the absence of the paternal metaphor is a hallmark of psychosis (as so ably demonstrated by, for example, the film Fight Club); the phrase "who's your mommy now?" is, of course, changed from a sports quip, "who's your daddy now?" The joy of the children is secondary to the smug satisfaction of mother. There is no daddy, only the unbridled enjoyment of mother. Hitchcock concocted a feature-length film of this commercial; he titled it Psycho.
The real controversy here is not that stores are opening on Thanksgiving; it's the logic that gift receivers are to be overcome, not with joy, but with gratitude---that love slays, reducing others to their proper roles in my world.
take meh stuff
I just put a bunch of ads on the local Craigslist. Here is an edited summary.
For your consideration are some electronic goods and electronic goods' accessories just in time for boring family gatherings. Modeled by the lovely Vinnie and Vahalla, my Gnomic Security Force, these goods are in working order and only need a slight dusting.
First up is a first generation Xbox, a bunch of necessary cords for hooking it up, a couple of controllers and games, and a dandy carrying case. Asking $35 cash. Gnomes not included.
Second, the party never ends! Yearning for your living quarters is a 5-disk CD/DVD player made by Sony, with original box, instruction book (in five languages!) and remote. This player longs for you to stick your disks into it. Asking $25 cash. Gnomes not included.
Next: who wants a skinny TV? I have a Big Ol' television of the amazing cathode ray era, manufactured in the glorious 1990s. Amazing! It's a Samsung that boasts an immodest 25 inches. And lo! It comes with a remote. Asking $15 cash. Gnomes not included.
Now, what about a second generation playstation? It comes with a bunch of necessary cords for hooking it up, a couple of controllers, a heap of games, and a dandy carrying case. Asking $50 cash for the whole lot. Gnomes not included.
Finally, are you jonesin' for that Samsung Cathode Magic? Why not also consider this Atlas, which carried the mondo cathode-ray for almost fifteen years. This stand needs a periodic tightening with a hexagonal tool. Asking $20 cash (it's worth more than the television it carried!). Gnomes not included.
I ain't gonna ship none of this mess. You come get it. You can go here for a closer inspection.
alma matters: publicity and moochy moocs
Music: War on Drugs: Slave Ambient (2011)
Those of us who teach harbor an understanding: what happens inside the space of the classroom is usually different from the perceptions of those on the outside. Sometimes the difference of perception is annoying, like when non-educators claim teachers are indoctrinating their students in left-leaning political beliefs (thereby forcing an entire state to "comply" with a mandate that allows for the general public to vet course syllabae and curriculum vitae---a mandate that a course I taught apparently inspired). Sometimes the difference is to "our" benefit, especially when positive publicity is concerned: popular perceptions are that we're doing exciting, ground-breaking things in the classroom when, really, we're just doing the hard work of making students understand why the difference between a colon and a dash is important, or why cutting-and-pasting material from wikipedia is not a good thing, however much it reflects "how I really think."
For example, every other year I teach a course titled "Celebrity Culture." Presumably the class is about Britney Spears or Lady Gaga and reality television---and it is. But these figures or genres are superficial examples of the deeper teaching of the class, which begins in public sphere theory (yes, they read Habermas) and ends in political communication theory. One of the big concepts of the class is "circulation," which takes off from Michael Warner's argument that "publics" and "counterpublics" are a consequence of the circulation of an object of value that brings them into being. We start with P.T. Barnum and the railroad and end with discussions of the InterTubes---circulatory infrastructures. Students who enroll in the course, by and large, do not "get" what they are expecting, but so far it seems they enjoy and appreciate the course in the end.
Part of the grade for this class is the result of a group project that investigates contemporary forms of publicity. The historical arc of the course begins with the nineteenth century and ends in the present, and over that span we trace how marketing logics give way almost completely to circulation logics (cue Baudrillard). Insofar as quality or content has given way to the buzz of momentary affect, publicity requires circulation on a massive scale. So, groups of five students are told to create a YouTube video or blog. Now, what they create is important, however, how they publicize this thing is the point of the project and the basis of their grade (to get an "A" on the project, the group must not only write a good report, but their object must get over 1,000 views, hits, likes, or so on).
Each time I teach the course one or two groups has a massive success (measured usually in hundreds of thousands of hits or views or what have you). This year, however, one group really hit it out of the park: over a half million views and counting.
Within days the video garnered thousands of hits and, within little over a week, invitations to appear on national news outlets (such as Anderson Cooper Live). Wanting to get ahead of the publicity, I spoke with the college's PR Czar and suggested a flash story (clickable banners that appear at the top of the college webpage); working with her I sent a rather detailed series of answers to basic questions she had (what is the project for? what is the course about? what do you hope students get from the experience? and so on). She penned and published the story on the college website ("Lucky Dog"). Although the story isn't as thorough on the academic point as I would have liked, it's probably the best one can hope for in a publicity push.
Weeks later the video has broken the million mark and keeps climbing. Morning talk shows have featured it and the dog's student owner; the project has been mentioned on NPR; local papers and newscast have featured the video. Google the video title, "Ruff Dog Day," and you get dozens of features and stories. What's instructive (to me and hopefully the students) is that the story reported is about how popular the video is, that is, the story is about publicity. Every story mentions Dudley, how the project came together, and the student dog owner, but they all underscore, repeatedly, how popular the video is on YouTube. Postmodern publicity is publicity for publicity's sake, the motor the buzz of affect---the "aw he's so cute."
So far so good . . . except that in virtually every story about the video, from the local newscast last night to the bit in London's Telegraph, the point of the project is rarely mentioned. Most of the stories don't even feature the class title for which the project is completed (or erroneously describes the project as part of a "communications class"). For example, watch the local newscast from last night on the project. There is no mention of the educational point of the project.
While disappointing, the lack of discussing why the students made the video (and by extension and more importantly, what they're learning from it) is not surprising. And, in some sense, this "publicity of publicity" is a perfect example to use in the classroom. Yes, it's exciting that some students are getting mega-buzz about their project, however, when the flavor fades---like a piece of Wrigley's gum---what are we left with? A perfect illustration of media logics: the object doesn't matter as much---it's circulation, circulation, circulation. While it may deflate the group's excitement about the publicity of their video, at the same time, their experience is an excellent example of how celebrity works in our culture.
So I come to an end where I began: public perceptions of what goes on in a classroom and what is actually going on there are different. Many folks will regard these students' successful project as an excellent and exciting example of what a "good education" can accomplish. That is sad, of course, because the actual lesson of the project concerns how misguided (and irrelevant, in the end) those perceptions are. And I stress the difference of inside and outside is crucial for the lesson of the project---that the students learn anything requires outside perceptions of the classroom experience be wrong (as I predict they will).
Which brings me, of course, to the horse I've been beating over the past year---the horse that refuses to die: Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs (see this post and this post for more details about what I term the "online imperative"). Originally pioneered for good reasons but quickly shunted into Massive Public Relations Campaigns (MPRCs), MOOCs are large (think thousands, or in some cases, hundreds of thousands) university courses that are taught online, expressly for the purpose of making education affordable or free. To the degree MOOCs take off, however, the not-secret plan is to figure out fee structures to charge for them. At present no one knows how these courses can be figured into university curricula, but the powers who be (folks like regents), of course, want this to happen.
This week my college has been pushing faculty to develop proposals for grants to develop a MOOC. My chair has been asking the college, repeatedly, what the compensation structure is for such a thing, but the answers are unclear. As it stands, one cannot get a course release for teaching a MOOC, but the college apparently will allow for "overload" compensation. One can sniff the coming disaster with that plan---that is, the coming exploitation. But my point with mentioning this detail is that moving toward MOOCs has the whiff of technological Stuartism: "Look what we can do!"
Still, the point is that the push for MOOCs is fundamentally publicity with the expectation of financial returns somehow, down the road. The problem with this push is aptly condensed with my students' "Ruff Dog Day" video: that MOOCs are desired and popular are more important than actually developing curricula for them. The content is secondary. Which is to say MOOCs represent a collapse of perceptions about what happens in a classroom from the outside and what actually happens inside, a difference that I'm suggesting is actually part of the logic of education. Education opens doors---but it requires them too. My conclusion is that ultimately the vision for MOOCs is not one of education. We can only hope that the educators who are demanded to teach these things figure out how to educate in the massive, online medium despite the technological Stuartism MOOCs ultimately represent.
it's four-more-years-without-winter friday!
yes, it's synth-pop friday!
it's Halloween Costume Party friday!
understanding bomb threats
Music: Marconi Union: Different Colours (2012)
Last week bomb threat at Texas A&M led officials to evacuate campus and cancel classes and activities for the rest of the day; just a week prior Texas State University in San Marcos evacuated three buildings in response to a bomb threat; and, of course, here at the University of Texas at Austin we were asked to evacuate campus for the same last month. Colleagues across the country, from folks at Pennsylvania State University to the Louisiana State University have reported similar stories, and I suspect there are dozens of "threats" at schools across the country that we don't hear about. What is going on? Are we witnessing an "epidemic of bomb threats," as some have worried aloud?
I think one possible answer is located in the idea of the empty threat. What seems significant, at least in our time, in respect to bomb threats on college campuses is twofold. First, these threats are on college campuses, which indexes the ripe cultural symbolism. Places of higher learning, like many religious places, are considered "safe spaces," if not sacred, and so a violation of their sanctity is meant to portend a feeling of serious gravity. That spaces of higher learning---virtual and otherwise---continue to be the most visible front of the latest battle in the culture war is not coincidental (college campuses are breeding grounds, you realize, of "radicalism"). What is "threatened" is a perceived radicalism or "liberalism" that is brainwashing students to _____________ [fill in the blank].
Second, the threats turn out to be largely empty, meaning that there is no actual weapon or bomb. There is, at the end, no anchor to warrant concern in a grounded treat to human life. Of course, the mistake is the underlying conclusion that "everything is alright, after all" insofar as the disruption of business as usual---not to mention a sense of security---is violence enough. If the damage of a "real" bomb threat is an actual violent explosion, then the damage of the "empty threat" is the disruption caused by emptiness. One is worse than the other, to be sure, but both are forms of violence.
What ties both forms of violence together is psychosis, which I do not define as a behavioral "loss of contact with reality," as does the U.S. medical community (in respect to the DSM). By psychosis, I refer more or less to the Lacanian notion that a psychotic is someone who realizes, consciously or semi-consciously, the contingency and fiction of reality in the first place---that what holds our meaningful, symbolic world together is the consensus that the emperor has not clothes, and that at some level we know he is naked, but continue our lives in meaningful ways on the assumption he is not naked. Whether or not someone making a bomb threat is psychotic is beside the point here, insofar as the threat itself is an acknowledgement of the fragility or contingency of our symbolically meaningful world. So there is no bomb? No matter: you behave as if there were.
The missing bomb is homologous to a psychotic world view.
What this increase in bomb threats demonstrates, I worry, is that our national culture---by which I mean the symbolic resources you and I share in common---as a national culture the United States is moving from a neurotic society to a psychotic one.
Let me use a dissimilar example, but one that gets at the same form of realization. Here, the idea is that no one will see a picture of my junk who can punish me; there is only admiration of my prowess:
The Weiner is gone, although reports are that he will be back to political office in a year or two. "Sexting" is now a technological mainstay that the news media are all-too-ready to hype, replete with the suggestive, blurred images in local news reports, usually of "young teens" who do not realize (it is suggested) that they know what it is they are doing. (Most of them know, I insist, what they are doing; what's different today is the attitudes toward what they are doing.)
Bomb threats and sexting both concern authority or more specifically, the perception of an absence of authority in the sense that one "might get caught" or, worse, that there are any true consequences to either. In each case, the texter or anonymous tipper operates under the assumption---conscious or unconscious---that there is no oversight for him or her.
What is common to both examples is the disappearance, erasure, or erosion of a "third thing." In each case we can imagine a paradigm person set in relationship to a meaningful object, which we could designate as "discourse": a student is set into a relation to a university; a policy maker is set in relation to a presumed "public." In a world in which sending nude photos of yourself or making bomb threats is "wrong," that third thing might be something like morality or ethics, and by extension, a government official or even Deity. Yet in these examples, this third thing---at least initially, is perceived to be absent or inconsequential. State authorities are merely kids with experience and power; deity is a fiction; and educators and school administrators are merely pundits in disguise.
As many of you know, this disappearance or erosion of the "third thing" is termed the "decline of symbolic efficiency" by Lacanian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is a proponent of post-Freudian, Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, he takes the term "symbolic efficiency" from anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.
For Levi-Strauss, "symbolic efficiency" refers to the way communities can communicate quickly and effectively with reference to something all folks hold in common as true, certain, or likely. As political scientist Jodi Dean puts it, symbolic efficiency is a consequence of "what everybody knows." For example, most of you can follow what I'm writing here because we all share the English language and, to some extent, we share a similar affective Rosetta Stone for tone that is particular to our culture. In writing, I make references between us to a kind of third thing that mediates us and makes meaning possible.
Now, for Zizek the term "symbolic efficiency" means much more than this. He takes the term into the domain of psychoanalysis by suggesting the third thing is also an authority, and in some sense, a kind of deference to something larger---a sort of humility toward something more powerful than ourselves. From a psychoanalytic vantage, this larger, outside something is first experienced in childhood as the parent who disciplines.
Now, abstracted to a formal level, in some discourses this third thing of authority has gone under the name of "Master"---such as in Philosophy with Hegel or in certain Asian modes of thought, where the Master doubles as a teacher and a kind of internalized yet disembodied authority. For the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, this Third Thing is described as the "Big Other." In fact, for Lacan the Big Other references the symbolic domain of our experience in general, which we often experience as an external authority or limit on our desires. The Big Other is the Third Thing that, Lacan says, we often mistake as a person with the power to punish, or more to the point, with the power to say "No."
As I have followed her work, Jodi Dean has been arguing for some years that the "decline of symbolic efficiency," alternately cast as an erosion of the Big Other," is the problem of our time, and there may be no solution---political, educational, or otherwise. The problem is exacerbated by "democratainment," or proliferation of communication technologies and the subsequent sense of empowerment---symbolic omnipotence---these technologies seem to inspire in successive generations. Our mediated regimes now enlist "audiences" to co-crate our shared entertainments in such a way as to collapse producer/consumer (for example, how the "news" reports the tweets and opinions of "ordinary citizens" if it is, in fact, "news"). Moreover, this decline is not semantic, but formal and affective in character, a decline of the feeling of possible punishment and, at some level, a limit on narcissism (a tempering, baseline sense of inferiority or insecurity). We might describe this larger transformation as a sort of ascent of feelings of infantile omnipotence---that asserting something repeatedly makes it true, that one's truth (cast as an entitled "opinion") is the whole, or that the end always justifies the means.
Making a false bomb threat, either because one perceives the politics of one's university (or another university) to be distasteful, or simply because one doesn't want to take his or her midterm exam, is buoyed by the attitude that there is no "truth" or "real" or that my god and our god is not your god. Such attitudes are possibly only when we no longer share a similar sense of the symbolic, that we hold no common cultural moorings together despite our differences (the Symbolic proper). I used to say that being an academic, most especially a successful graduate student, is to labor under the suspicion that one will be "found out"---that we are all faking it. That much is neurotic. The psychotic turn is when one no longer worries about being found out, or worse, that one deserves to be found out because of her inner-greatness and righteous purchase on The Answer.
it's synth-pop friday!
blank blog
Music: Arcade Fire: The Suburbs (2010)
I was reaching around to post a synth-pop video to celebrate the arrival of Friday when I realized the gesture was born of guilt: I've let my blog go, something like a digital waistline expanding into the flab of wordless blackness. I thought (upon the thought) that, like my waistline, this is as much the product of age and a patterned progress or the march of the inevitable as it is a loss (a mourning over) discipline. That patterned progress---the inevitable---is social networking and the sacrifice of meat for speed (saying something of substance versus saying something that circulates)---Facebook is the new blog. Or something called tumblr, where borrowed imagery takes the place of wordy self-expression. And the second, the loss, this loss is a shift of norms regarding the parceling of time. The decline of the blog is the transformation of Rosechron, a loss of the contemplative for the mark, "contemplation is happening elsewhere."
I started the work-week on Monday with the decision to track, for the week, where I was spending my time and contemplative efforts. Since this blog debuted a decade or so ago, the intellectual tasks associated with my vocation have shifted, not dramatically but gradually, toward what is called "service." A decade ago I had class and committees, but much more time dedicated to thinking thoughts for their own sake. It seems now thinking always has an end other than itself, and often it is about the welfare of others. While I moan about the instrumentality of that shift, I have to admit it's not a terrible trade off: I spent almost two days writing recommendation letters for students---well, I would say colleagues or friends (as I wouldn't write a letter for just anyone). I spent a morning prepping for class, then began writing (well, retrofitting a previous thing, but still creating a new thing nonetheless) a presentation for a civic group on a topic I know a little about (occultism in U.S. popular culture). On Tuesday I woke early to brush up on the talk, went to school and delivered it to the group, visited with them a bit, then rushed off to teach my undergraduate class, after which . . . . Wait a minute. You don't want to read about that. Nor do I want to write about the laundry list of the week . . . sorry. The point of running through the list of "what I did this week" is that I'm engaging people intellectually in "real space" more than I have in my career. This much is different, different from five years ago in a dramatic way.
The increasing temporal demand of "face time" is not a new realization, but it is something important to underscore about the academic life: the more you do it, the more "face time" you get and perhaps want, the more "face time" asked of you or that you volunteer. Or perhaps this is simply the way professorship goes: the more you do it, the less and less you are allowed to, or want to, sit in front of screen?
Well, there's a familiar refrain: "I don't know." I don't know exactly how to think about the decline of blog writing, even taking the take-off of short, social-networking "tweets" or "status updates" into account. There are smart, academic accounts of the decline of the blog in general (Jodi Dean's marvelous Blog Theory comes to mind), many of which concern the eclipse of what Katherine Hayles termed "deep learning" (or contemplation) versus "hyper learning," or what we might call the thought of circulatory affect: blip here, sentiment there, the landing of an opinion-and-quip bomb. It---whatever "it" is at the moment---gets your attention, raises the jib (but where are we sailing, Josh?), at least for a moment. There's the "truthy" resonance of the hyper after a long week of teaching and meetings and face-to-face exchange: It's 1:30 a.m. here and I'm tired and digging deep to say something of substance, but still, it's a lot less taxing to express myself like a DJ: see the next post, because it is synth-pop Friday, after all. That's the substance. I'm not sure being honest about it is a good thing, but to put the sentiment appropriately (if you're into that sort of thing), "it is what it is." Ugh. I think.
it's synth-pop friday!
it's synth-pop friday!
higher ed: the texas skew
Music: Japandroids: celebration rock (2012)
Tis the season for academic service, which means writing letters of recommendation for the associate and full professoriate: letters of recommendation for grad school, law school, visiting and tenure track positions, Fulbrights . . . but mostly letters to help graduates and colleagues secure a "tenure track" position (for those of you reading who are not keyed to what that means, it basically means a position for which there is the possibility of becoming a "partner" in a university or college---in law firm analogy---which means the employer has decided to "invest" in you after a six year trial run).
Letter writing is a kind of labor that is surprisingly time-consuming, but also one I'm coming to realize may be a luxury only ten years hence---maybe sooner, deity forbid. I don't say letter writing is a luxury because writing them is a total pleasure. Ah, but were that so. It is a pleasure to praise a student or colleague whom one adores, to be sure; there's a joy in writing that first draft of a letter for someone pursing a job. But gone is the day in which someone applies for a handful of jobs for which she is suited; today (and even when I was on the market), one applies for dozens of jobs and hopes to get one or two bites. So letter writers are often writing dozens of versions of same letter.
Or at least, in my field; in other fields, like English, a single, generic letter is written and sent to a service or clearing house that then doles them out as the applicant requests. We can reflect on what the development of this kind of service represents, but we won't. And I evoke "we" not in the royal sense, but rather, in the sense that Sister Sledge made famous, with bubbles.
In any event, writing a letter today and thinking about the person I wrote it for, whom I adore, I recalled a conversation I had recently with some very smart, friendly, and engaging graduate students in a cognate program in my home state of Georgia. I was visiting with a seminar a friend and mentor was conducting on a topic that is close to my heart/mind (psychoanalysis). We were talking about the "publish or perish" mandate that has been circulating in the academy for decades, at least at research-oriented colleges and universities. I cannot remember the context, but a student quipped in response to a comment, "but will there be tenure track positions when we're on the market?"
It was a good question, couched in a cynical tone---and that in the key of the rhetorical---but a question that still opened to possibility. I responded in kind: I said that I thought his, and perhaps the cohort after him, may be the last cohort for whom tenure as we know it today is a possible achievement. As higher education finally admits to itself that the for-profit model has taken over management, as higher education realizes that the "reforms" that have taken over and over-made secondary and primary education as a "race to the top," the coming concession is all but imminent. We're already there; we've just not fully owned up to the sell-out.
Tenure as it was is no more. I'm not sure what it was, frankly, because my generation came up through promotion and tenure as the achievement of a kind of "due process," that tenure means one cannot be fired without a hearing, and this after or over many years.
I gather that tenure used to mean one could not be "fired" except by gross negligence or crimes of moral turpitude. Once one achieved tenure, she could stay on indefinitely as a faculty member, and in many cases, whether or not one continued to publish or teach well. Tenure was granted with the expectation that one would continue to teach well and publish as one had before the honor was granted (a tacit agreement). As I understand it, tenure reform came as a consequence of folks taking advantage of this kind of job security: they didn't publish and teaching worsened. "Post-tenure" review was established as a way to keep tabs on, admonish, and possibly get "rid" of the proverbial "bad professor," dubbed "dead wood" during my graduate school days. On the face of it, this is not a bad turn of events, especially when I hear about stories concerning the academy of old (naughty professors, the sort featured in, say, The Man Who Fell To Earth by Rip Torn).
When I took my first job as a professor, however, "post-tenure review" was a different mechanism---a way to measure "productivity," but with a metric external to the discipline in which one toiled. The measure of one's productivity was determined by the institution and less so one's peers. Post-tenure review seems to rest now at this stage across the country as a default---not a guarantee of continued employment, but rather the promise of due process in the event of one's firing. In Texas, however, post-tenure review is something different: it is now the province of the political---politicians demanding "outcome based education" and so forth. "Accountability." A couple of years ago our state was featured in the national media: a partisan policy "think tank" pushed through an initiative to evaluate a professor's performance in respect to student teaching evaluations (basically, customer surveys) and the amount of tuition and grant dollars the professor brought into the university as compared to her salary. The measure of tenure---here code for job security---became an economic metric.
This "new" metric shifts value from a measure of quality to quantity. "We" are hardly surprised; Robert M. Pirsig made this Marxian thematic famous with his 1974 oddity Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: to economize the soul is something like shock treatment (or as I would prefer, the lobotomy: WHAM! quick adjustment). Nothing I say here is news, as the story is rehearsed in so many ways over so many decades, really; it's the academic's "inherency," the trending status quo that higher education is supposed to (perhaps always?) resist. To put it efficiently: neoliberalism is the death of the academic romance that goads so many of us to follow the life of the mind in the first place, and we must resist the forces that seek to turn teaching into a profit-making venture.
I so often want to check what I identify as a "chicken little" tendency implanted in me by the apocalyptic "structure of feeling" of my Baptist upbringing; surely I exaggerate the demise of tenure? But then, I have had so many conversations with older, more experienced academics who say things like, "in my forty years of teaching I have never seen higher education under assault like this." Or worse: "Josh, it's over. There's no going back. The university has changed."
My viewpoint is admittedly colored by my experiences in Texas public education. The university I work at is a political football; indeed, I've never been at an academic institution that is not that, but it seems to me in Texas the politics of education is much more blatant. Our self-identified "conservative" vice governor ("lieutenant governor") just ousted the democratic senator in charge of the higher education committee in favor of someone who would bring "conservative" solutions to the issues faced by the public university system. I do not think my job is in jeopardy, nor that what I do in the classroom is necessarily in danger. What I worry about is that those who come after me, who have to teach and research in the brave new world of post-tenure review---this benefit-less world, this adjunct land of "accountability" in which the number of degrees granted is more important than what they are supposed to represent. What I worry about is this evaporation of what Pirsig dubs "quality" in exchange for the number.
What I worry about, in the thick of the Texas skew, is the death of a certain kind of idealism. Not the idealism that I am quick to critique as a "materialist" (mind over matter, dreams trumping structural change, Oprah Winfrey), but the idealism that is invested in the conviction in scholarship as a form of battling the demons of darkness, of teaching as a way of inspiring curiosity, free thinking, and critical acumen. The kind of idealism at work in a graduate seminar, the freedom to "work-through" difficult ethical problems concerning how to be in the world with others. The kind of idealism that prods a budding academic to ask the question, "but will there be tenure when I'm looking for a job?" Such a question is not only about dutiful employment and job security. Such a question is also just as much about the freedom of thought, the enterprise of thinking, and the value of thinking for its own sake.
Rest assured a total cynicism about the academic enterprise will kill it. I do not ever want to come around to the position of saying, "hey, don't do grad school. It will lead to a job of unrewarding drudgery." I've been reading that sort of sentiment a lot in academic trade publications, and it makes me angry because it seems to buy into the a larger, cultural transmutation of critical thought into an economic measure of worth. Still, as an educator of educators, I think we need to be clear about the stakes now: pursuit of the life of the mind is no guarantee of job security. You don't pursue this for that. If you pursue a vocation in higher education, realize that justifying your existence is now part of the job . . . and the calling. And without the help of the coffer. Academic endeavor has become, effectively, a religious practice.
it's synth-pop friday!
it's synth-pop friday!
like, duh.
Music: Black Swan Lane: A Long Way From Home (2007)
When I started writing this blog entry yesterday, the news of Romney's "true feelings" about "47% of Americans" had just broke, and one could almost hear audible gasps as journalists scrambled to announce Mother Jones' scoop: Romney was taped at a private meeting with wealthy donors declaring there's no way to win a large segment of U.S. voters because they believe they are entitled to government hand-outs: "who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement."
Well: yes. Frankly, I'd be surprised if only half of U.S. citizens believed they had a right to shelter, food, and health care. It's called "life," and human life is dependent upon these basic necessities. To argue against the "right to life," in the only sense of the phrase that makes sense, is to argue that some lives aren't worth living. Of course, folks of Romney's ilk believe this---which is what he is, in effect, saying to his wealthy donors. Romney seems to lament the fact that he could never convince one of these blood-sucking dependents not to demand food, shelter, and health care. But, um, that would be like trying to convince someone to kill him or herself---to negate their own drives.
Perhaps I am equivocating and amplifying just a tad, however, everyone who claims the anything left of Obama's left (which would be right, so left of Obama is closer to the center) knows what Romney is saying: the wealthy class should be left alone to make more wealth and it's not their responsibility to care for the lower classes---except, perhaps, the ones who work for them (and even then, only the minimum to sustain employment and, by extension, their living bodies).
What's way more astonishing than Romney's "candid" beliefs is that someone is actually astonished. In part, this "scandal" is an enflamed media event designed to garner ratings, stimulate excitement, get bodies all-atwitter over something that is not news. One wonders, given Romney's past political views, which were apparently much more "moderate," if his more or less "extreme" viewpoints on class and those lives not worth living reflect more the mass mediated environment of shock, outrage, amplification, astonishment, and so on. Hence the humor regarding Newsweek's "Muslim Rage" cover, to which folks are responding with delightfully fun comments that humanize Muslims as human beings first and foremost. Perhaps we should regard the media reportage of Romney's candid comments with similar mockery and scorn, if only because such comments are at least partially a consequence of SHOCKING journalism.
it's bomb-threat friday!
it's ph.d-pop friday!
polyamory
Music: Swans: The Seer (2012)
Last night I was at a Swedish synth-pop concert with dear friends at the local gothic club. Goth clubs are dwindling, owing in part to a subcultural moment that has come and gone as its devotees grew up and started families. I like Austin's Elysium because it's exactly like the clubs I started attending at 14: the dress code is black and everyone gets the memo (however, I'm sorry, if you're 40 years old you really should not be wearing anything that is ass-less). I also like going because almost everyone that goes is in my generation; it's refreshing to hear music I like with people my age in a big, stompy, smoke-filled room of "dark" nostalgia.
There are, of course, younger generations who groove on the goth of old and come and have a good time with a range of fans. Last night, between our gawking group and the musical artists on the stage, was a dance floor packed with folks ranging from 18 to 50 years of age. Three young folks in front of us stood out, I guessed 18-20 years or so because of their exaggerated dancing style and cherubic faces. They were marked somewhat generationally because they had a steampunk getup, and because they were making out with one another: one young woman and two young men. The woman was in a rather elegant, velvet gown; one young man had on a top hat and goggles (and a top coat that had to be unbearably hot); and the third young man was tall with rather long hair, spectacles, and he was pierced with numerous rings that rimmed the outer left ear.
This threesome would dance wildly, then make out, then dance wildly again. The make-out sessions were especially dramatic, and before long a throng of us were unsure whether we should be watching the stage or the threesome in front of us. "Look at all this drama," I said with a smirk to my friend Macy, who returned with a laugh. "I think that's just all for show."
I'm not sure, however. Over the course of the evening a tension over the goggled boy between the long-haired man and the fair woman became obvious. Mr. Goggles was clearly into the woman, tongue kissing her in deep, Hollywood worthy smacks. The long haired fellow was clearly into Mr. Goggles, at times hugging him to himself and in impassioned, lanky gestures licking his neck. Mr. Goggles, however, didn't seem to be into the longhaired man. Toward the end of the evening, Mr. Goggles and the lady were lying together and making out on a raised platform near the back of the dance floor. The long haired boy spied this, and stared intently---seeming heartbroken. The last time I noticed them, the long haired man was trying to insert himself into the make out session and seemed, more or less, rebuffed.
I report this Teen Steam not simply out of jealousy (gee, why didn't I get to have two partners as a teen?), but also because I think it represents a newer "trend" among younger generations that I do not quite "get," but which I should: Polyamory. According to those who claim the label, polyamory is a commitment to a lifestyle that subscribes to view that one can love many people at once. Not to be confused with "swinging" (multiple sex partners), polyamory is touted as a responsible, committed multi-person relationship. Having done some online dating here and there over the past couple of years, I'm noticing an increasing number of folks on dating sites claiming a polyamorous lifestyle.
Intellectually I am intrigued, perhaps even approving, of those who argue for a polyamorous approach to relationships. I'm persuaded by Lauren Berlant's work on intimacy and public/private being, where she argues the forced plot of "the couple" is a harmful ideology for those individuals who are not down with the mandate of social reproduction or the proper conclusion to one's love life. It is for this reason I remain troubled by the push for same-sex marriage, even though politically I am all for it: the institution of marriage domesticates the alternative relationships forged by queer people cognizant, for over a century, of their exclusions.
On the other hand, there is the hurt experienced by the long haired man I observed last night, and the ambivalent feelings of Mr. Goggles (the young woman was less expressive and it was difficult to tell what she thought about the triangle). There's no way to understand what these folks were feeling, of course (who knows, they could have been coked up?), but the drama that unfolded only underscored my feelings about the polyamory movement: at what point is a commitment to multiple lovers (not sex partners, I mean emotional investment here)---at what point is a commitment to multiple lovers a form of irresponsibility? A failure to attend to the needs and desires of a single other? Or, is it possible that the "plot of the couple," as Berlant calls it, is so deeply rooted in the ideology of the Western Subject that any attempt to refashion the roots is bound to fail, precisely because it is not possible to think----as subjects---outside of the couple? That is, is polyamory some organic spring of emotional attachment or is it, rather, a reactionary response to the oppression of "couple skate" only?
These questions are perhaps simple-minded; even so, I don't know the answers. I do know that polyamory is becoming more pronounced as a philosophy and lifestyle among younger generations, and we have long needed to rethink the basis of most theories of communication (which always presume the dyad, even in so called "small group" communication, which inevitably posits an emergent leader, recreating the couple). Perhaps the paradigm of the "social network" has made it increasingly possible to refashion the plot of the couple into something more inclusive and group-oriented. My worry, however, aside from that fact that my psychoanalytic moorings lead me to be suspicious about the long-term viability of multiple lovers is that an unreflective embrace of two or three people to love at once may lead to heart-break.
Jealousy is normal. However, I have also seen how destructive and hurtful jealousy can be.