The Ancients Whisper

So, to set the scene ... and with no reference to the title of this post which, evidently like all my titles, breaks evolving rules of social media ... I took the day off to make a four-day weekend, cleaned two aquaria, ran around town and faced down the mad weekday traffic of downtown San Francisco in order to do my duty by recycling a bunch of old computer stuff. Now I am chilling with a beer that descibes itself as a "Handcrafted Ancient Ale". This would be a Midas Touch by Dogfish Head Craft Brewery who write this about the brew: "This recipe is the actual oldest-known fermented beverage in the world! It is an ancient Turkish recipe using the original ingredients from the 2700 year old drinking vessels discovered in the tomb of King Midas. Somewhere between wine & mead; this smooth, sweet, yet dry ale will please the Chardonnay of beer drinker alike."

I picked the beer because I am re-reading ancient history. The regular reader of this scratch will note that my reading habits are a never ending peregrination through history, period by period as the mood strikes me. What I want to focus on, in reading ancient history for the first time in 25 years, is the mind of the ancient world ... how did people construct reality, what were the signposts of the mind, what assumptions of system and configuration informed perception and action?

One has to beware of this sort of thing because the tendency is to look for commonalities. That is what I like to call the tyranny of relevance ... what can I find in the mind of Sargon that is like me. No doubt that sort of thought is comforting, but making the assumption that relevance and an unrequited empathy is the purpose of the study of history predisposes us to project our own being backward. That would be at best idealism and at worst an underhanded teleology. In other words, the approach that starts and ends with commonalities across the millennia either postulates some prior universal humanity, which would be a religious concept, or it assumes that history is the process whereby the present drags the past behind it.

I am human, of course, and I want to know what it would be like to be in Uruk in the third millennium before the myth of the cross ... I want to know how those people are just like me. But that is a projection; it has to be balanced with an understanding of how they differ.

So, from reading the magnificent Landmark Herodotus ... there are two themes that I found constantly in Herodotus.


Firstly, at least in the written word, there is a familiarity with the immediacy of death that we have lost in the modern Western world. That is a subset of the immediacy of culture and habit and action. Herodotus explains things very plainly and forwardly, even when he speculates about underlying causation. He is plain with his audience as if they are at his side. This is partly explained by his writing for a world which was still radically aural ... aural is in the hearing side of a radically oral society. This was a world where, notwithstanding writing, people knew things by reason of their having heard them ... and speaking and hearing were formalized in a way that we have lost. Now, we lost that way only recently, and there are still many places where that way has not been lost, or at least not fully lost. But in a radically oral society, and especially in a radically oral society before the invention of a radically literate society, people thought differently than we do.

That difference ... and I reference my dissertation on this ... is the difference between the primacy of authority over authenticity. In the ancient world, authority spoke, and authority guaranteed authenticity; we, by contrast, are obsessed by the authentic, and afraid lest we have been conned into accepting something inauthentic. In that sense, for us, authority exists primarily to guarantee authenticity. Herodotus never thinks of the authentic ... notwithstanding that he often does not believe things he has been told. He wonders about the veracity of who told him about things, and he posits veracity based on that. There is a religious dimension to this. You never read him saying that some passage is the inerrant, uncreated, permanent word of god ... in other words authentic by reason of the text being authoritative. Rather, you read him speaking about the authority of various interpretations of oracles. It is curious in this world where science and religion were genuinely inseparable that the divine was revealed not through inerrancy but through interpretation.

So the immediacy about which I started this section is an immediacy of speech and person and authority. And that dovetails with a world view that is immediate. I noticed how flatly Herodotus explains culture ... this or that is the habit of such a people. He does not layer his explanation with any ideology of acceptance or non-acceptance. Difference inheres in peoples and locations, and that is the way the world is. We do not see universals in Herodotus. We see a wide-eyed explanation ... albeit with plenty of sly self-credentialing ... where he postulates an audience that will accept his revelation as true because he is an authority. Immediacy, authority, interpretation.

Note how that differs from the Christian world with its distant god ... a world of mediation, authenticity, and, paradoxically, inerrancy. So ... and I slide into the tyranny of relevance here ... there is an argument that in some ways liberals and our love of ambivalence share at least the notion of interpretation with Herodotus where modern christians share virtually nothing.

So, on to the second theme ... reciprocity, or balance. Not balance in the sense of equality, but reciprocity in the sense of the action assuming or predicating or predicting the unavoidable countervailing counteraction that will balance the scales. For example, pride always calls out a comeuppance. The gods are the agents of this phenomenon, but they as much as we are bound to it. Reciprocity, in that sense, is a characteristic of reality, an ether in which we live. It is inescapable in Herodotus. It can be complex, and sometimes the reciprocity is paid by subsequent generations ... that, of course, is another part of the ancient mind, the corporate nature of the individual's being. And again, that is something that has not disappeared in much of the world. But I would aver that these notions were unquestioned in the ancient world where even in a place like Diyala province in present-day Iraq, people are aware of the antithesis to their corporate notion of personality ... that's why they hate us.

Reciprocity in Herodotus exists on the grand scale ... the Athenians helped the Ionians to revolt against the Persians, and the Persians burned Athens to the ground. But the Persians profaned various temples, so they lost at Salamis and Plataea. Herodotus explains all of this, as above, flatly and plainly, if artfully. He explains it as my grandfather explained the birds and animals, and the way that you do things. He explains it as if it is plainly real, true because it is, not because it is authentic.

So immediacy and reciprocity. Not that those are exclusive to the ancients. I have to find a way to express what was different about the ancients, and those are starting points. That's why I read history. I have finished Herodotus ... I thought him an excellent way to start thinking about the ancient mind. Now I am reading the history of the ancient Near East. Let me say only this about that ... the time from the first writing that we have from Uruk until Alexander defeated the Persians is longer than the time that separates us right now from Homer. Pause, my friend, for a moment, and think about that.

In the meanwhile, I have finished the second of my ancient Turkish beers. It is full and honeyed and grained. I know it is ancient because the label assures me of its authenticity ... and that is a relief since I paid $13 for four of them. Authentic ancient beer in a modern bottle. The authority is a web site put up by the makers ... and that I distrust. Hmmm.

Photos by Arod of statues at Sans Souci, Great Frederick's palace in Potsdam, Germany.

Stanley Goes to the Fish Market

I read Stanley Fish's blog in the New York Times pretty regularly, and he recently published a piece called The Last Professor. The post questions the survivability of the humanities in the academe, and refers to a recent book by one of Fish's students, Frank Donoghue, who has a new book entitled “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities.”

Fish argues for "higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility" ... I refer to a similar concept in the phrase "the tyranny of relevance." Fish writes (and I have conflated two paragraphs for clarity's sake):

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the [ideal of Michael Oakeshott that "there is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining"] (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic – in the pejorative sense of the word – if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

Both Fish and Donoghue say "no" ... regardless of the merits, scholarship as an end in itself untethered to an explicit and argued social utility cannot and will not survive.

There is plenty of evidence to back up their skepticism, not the least of which is that students increasingly look to post-secondary education with career in primary mind. The last flush of inutilitarian idealism might have been the 70s when people like me took classes in Chinese language whose principle was that the memorization of Tang dynasty poetry could lead to fluency. The result of that is that I can recite imperfectly two lines of a famous poem and I can scratch out around 25 characters.

I believe, and I am in agreement with Fish here, that scholarship is justified about anything that is knowable or anything about which we still do not know everything. That covers pretty much any subject. To require an explicit tie between knowability and utility predisposes the scholar's work with reference not to the object studied but to a present paradigm that may have nothing to do with the object. This was precisely the tyranny-of-relevance error of the whole theory digression that bedeviled literary studies for a couple of decades ... I am happy to aver that the grip of airless theory seems to be loosening.

Having said that ... that study itself is sufficient argument for scholarship ... methinks Professor Fish got lost in the marketplace. Because as with everything, the pure argument, the single source of truth, is always wrong at least because it is incomplete but more so because it closes the door to the fuller explication of the underlying dialectic. You see, scholarship has never been free of the tyranny of relevance in any meaningful overarching sense. Certainly one has professor x who spent three decades deciphering runes while his colleagues snickered at his tawdry clothes and poor hygiene. But even professor x lived in an institution situated within a society, an institution subject to rulership, economics, pressures, and social changes.

Complexity is what interests me, and reductive-to-the-single-point arguments run out of steam. I can stamp my foot all I want about pure scholarship ... I could rage on about the undeniable fact that most professors produce precious little of memorable quality ... and I could feel good about it. But it would not get me closer to understanding the dynamics that are rendering scholarship in the current era.

I think you need to start with the counterposing pure scholarship and social context. They are never separate, though social context pays vastly less attention to pure scholarship than the other way around, certainly. The fascination is in the complexity of that relationship. I wrote a few days ago about a forum on the term "Islamism" and I hope that I prefigured a couple of these points there. Emmerson, the scholar talking about Islamism took the term out of its robust and fractious social context and laid it before us as something to be studied. I think that Emmerson lost a chance to change scholarship by insisting on writing a book about this term instead of creating a living monument on the web. But that demonstrates precisely the struggle between the pure scholarship of wresting the term from its context and looking it as a captured wave (not a fixed or reified object) and the social context that wants some feedback from the pointy-heads who do this kind of stuff.

Emmerson lives in a rarified world, the world of the endowed scholar who just thinks and writes. Great work if you can get it. I think that world has a responsibility to knowability, even when the objects it might choose to study are not relevant, or what is more significant posed-as-relevant, to come current issue or problem. In other words, we can demand of endowed scholars that they do something, and then we can tell them that we are free to make of what of what they do what we want. They can't own it or keep it back. Again, that is a dialectic.

The key to saving the humanities is to inhabit both terms of that dialectic.


At MRU, the major research university where I pile seashells on the beach in exchange for loaves and fishes, I have argued on numerous occasions ... and you must realize that I have no formal standing to make this argument ... that the humanities departments need to seize the idea of the double major. I like this one: French and Civil Engineering. Or, Classics and Urban Studies. Or, Art History and Mechanical Engineering. Or, History and Earth Systems.

Yes, there is a grave danger here that the humanities find themselves tied to a stated and required relevance. But, so long as one keeps this slippery slope in mind, such formally combined majors enable the humanities to inject into the real world the perspective of pure scholarship. More significantly from the social context point of view, they can round up some students and increase their own footprint.

So, the French and Civil Engineering works in Africa for the United Nations, the Classics and Urban Studies student intertwines classical ideas of open space and citizenship with modern transportation systems, the Art History and Mechanical Engineering student retains the notion of beauty as he proposes a bridge on a freeway, and the History and Earth Systems student comes to this most complex of human issues with an understanding that we have ripped our environments to shreds since we first walked the earth.

The humanities can surrender the social context parts of the double major to the science and engineering departments, and thereby liberate itself to its own genius, to whit the inutilitarian search for the knowable.

I propose this example by way of outlining a path for the humanities to engage with the world that threatens it even as it operates to save its most previous perquisite ... the ability of scholars to define for themselves what is worth studying. Moaning that the world has no room for us, well, that is an ancient complaint that has an odor not of striving and research but of coffee and upholstery.


A few further notes on complexity and military history

Last night at a dinner of five pointy-heads, my excellent friend Ian and I sparred about the Dresden bombing and that spun into Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender. Dresden is in the news these days because February 13 was the 64th anniversary, and the day often presages neo-Nazi marches about war crimes committed against Germany. There is a nice piece in the English Der Spiegel here in which Frederick Taylor, a British historian who has written extensively on Dresden, is interviewed. (I suspect he is the son of the noted left-wing British historian, AJP Taylor but I could not find any proof of that).

Taylor rejects the view that Dresden was chosen only because it was an architectural jewel and as part of a singular effort to destroy Germany by destroying civilian morale; he argues that these were certainly factors, but that it was also a significant military target. One can quibble, and we certainly now know that the carpet bombing strategy was not a significant factor in the defeat of Germany. But I find a reduction of the bombing of Dresden to war crime to be a kind of moral cubbyhole that exempts the viewer from the full range of dialectics at play in the moment. In other words, once we assign the single factor and require that all argument start there, we lose the ability to understand how things actually happen, how strategies in the high sense devolve into tactics on the ground, if I can make a macabre pun. But complexity of argument can readily come back to its starting point, and Taylor, the champion of a complex argument about Dresden does precisely that. The aforementioned interviews ends thus:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think it was justifiable?

Taylor: Personally, though I can trace the logic of it, I have serious doubts. It is a ghastly example of how war depletes the moral reserves even of democratic nations. Goetz Bergander, who survived the bombing of his native city as an 18-year-old and has written widely about its destruction, has described the bombing in his characteristically forgiving way as "outsize." It was certainly all of that.

I think a similar moral cubbyhole has long obscured clarity in argument, especially among liberals, about the events that ended the Pacific War in 1945. It has been argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but either we needed to give them time or we needed to figure some way not to force unconditional surrender. There is no evidence that I know that supports this other than assertion. Significantly ... and this is a grave error in anyone seeking to understand military history ... no credit in this view is given to the implications of the fog of war. What the Americans knew was that resistance had not stopped and that large numbers of troops were being amassed in the South in preparation to resist the assumed invasion. That the Russians had entered the war likely had more impact on the Americans than the Japanese military leadership much of which was committed to a fight to the death of the last Japanese; why would they care whether that final plucked life was given up to a Russian or an American?

But once we credit a notion that the Japanese were ready to surrender before Hiroshima, or that they really surrendered after Hiroshima because they were afraid of the Russians and not the bomb, we avoid a grindingly difficult moral argument: did the A-bombs result in a net of fewer deaths; and, if so, were they thereby justifiable?

That is the moral crux of the end of Japanese war, and it should not be avoided.


A last note:

I have meant to write about this for a few days, so I append it here. There was a touching article in the New York Times entitled "My Sister's Keeper". It concerns aging colonies of lesbian separatists who have kept the faith, as it were, with that peculiar 70s ideology. I want to note that the lesbian separatists did damage to the gay movement, and they are not heroes of mine even if they have lived their lives courageously as they saw fit and so desired. The gay movement of the 70s was overwhelmingly male not because we rejected women but because women rejected us. They had lots of excuses ... all men are rapists, the gay boys have too much sex, we expected the women to make the coffee while we did the movement ... but only one argument is real. Feminism of the 70s was homophobic in a dominant sense, that is in its majority and in its actions. Lesbians active in the women's movement felt they had to hide or at least downplay their homosexuality. The separatists, while hardly hiding from feminism, hid from the world and proclaimed that isolation as liberation. They contributed nothing to our present freedom, and their absence weakened us both in the short term and in the long term. I wish them well in their retirement, but the record tells the tale.

Photos by Arod. The owl is from a window on Divisadero Street; the lion is from a Board of Education building on Van Ness; the window reflection shot is just off Market near Gough; the statue is from Golden Gate Park; the finger is from Hayes Street (I think) near Masonic; all are from San Francisco.

Islamism: What's in a Word?

I went to a lecture and exchange today featuring the Southeast Asianist scholar Donald Emmerson. He is writing a book with a colleague that amounts to a debate concerning the use of the word "Islamism" and the validity or lack thereof of self-censorship when confronting such a charged term. This colloquium was a presentation of his thought process with reference to his colleague's counter process. It raised some issues that are dear to my heart.

So, pursuant to a challenge issued at the event by the scholar Olivier Roy, I will start by providing a definition. Islamism, in my view, is the ideological use of Islam to influence state and society to adopt Islamic policies and practices. The term may be new, but the practice is old. I find it risible to suggest that Islam is just a religion, and political action should not reflect upon it. Islamists, like fundamentalists of all stripes, draw on their religious heritage to justify their campaigns, whatever they may be. All religious textual traditions contain irresolvable antinomies precisely so that they can be used variously to argue for peace and war, love and hate, acceptance and rejection. So no matter how violent or moderate the Islamist, they are from the religion and they argue their own legitimacy from the religion.

Enough of me.

Emmerson proposed a little diagram to explain his argument about the validity or lack thereof in self-censorship in addressing a term like "Islam ... I am not going to reproduce the graphic because I am not sure if it is proprietary or if he wants it bandied about. But he counterposes accuracy and considerateness, so that something that is accurate and considerate is contextualization; something that is considerate but inaccurate is denial; something that is accurate but inconsiderate is candor; and something that is inaccurate and inconsiderate is stigmatization. Nice, and I htink you can see where this is going.

I thought Emmerson produced a lengthy and erudite rationale for sometimes using the word so long as it well-grounded. His colleague ... I cannot for the life of me remember the name ... refuses to use the term ever. And the aforementioned Olivier Roy thinks it is a perfectly fine term ... he claims to have invented the phrase moderate Islamist in 1984 ... and uses it whenever he bloody well pleases, just so long as it is well-defined.

The subsequent comments and Emmerson's responses represented an erudite debate about language, usage, the role of scholarship in the world, and methodology. A knee-jerk response might be to find it all pointy-headed and airless, but that was just not what was actually happening. Emmerson pointed out that scholars actually have an increased role in public debate these days; I hasten to point that the notion that involvement in public debate justifies a given scholarship is a kind of tyranny of relevance. But it happens to be true in this case. There are many scholar talking heads on the news shows and especially on PBS. They too get rounded up into the sound-bite hell of modern broadcast TV, but they do have the opportunity to introduce terms and perspectives that would have been lost in earlier eras.


So the first issue is this ... since language matters and since language is fluid ... sometimes like water, sometimes like glass, mostly like something in between ... public rumination on the particulars of language has a high function. This is hardly confined to the present. I am presently reading Peter Brown's excellent The Rise of Western Christendom and he relates how the seizure of Latin by the church during Carolingian times liberated the vernaculars to develop much more freely ... and all of that arose as part of the debate about precise terminology and usage. In the case of "Islamism", the media use the term increasingly as equivalent to terrorist, and this certainly serves purposes. But simply to surrender a term, especially in these days of aggressive and ephemeral appropriation, is to surrender a discourse. No matter that one might lose eventually in a debate, one always needs to make one's points. So at the least, that function was served today.

At one point Emmerson argued that he had tried to change his usage of Islamism from representing a political Islam to representing a public Islam. I thought this was a dangerous slide because public does not need to represent an attempt to enforce a politico-religious ideology. But another participant had a sharper notion as a counterpoise to Emmerson's idea that public was broader (and, by my way of seeing his point, more forgiving) than political. This young man with an Arabic accent said that in repressive societies you can include secret activity in the political and that might be broader than the restricted realm of the public. So the public protestation of devout Islam in a repressive circumstance might be seen by authority as a challenge, and hence Islamist, but it is more readily tolerated and subsumed that secret political activity which is decidedly thereby Islamist. Because, as always with religion, it comes back to the state. There is no Islamism without looking at the state.

But more interesting to me than this ramble is this curiosity. Why did Emmerson choose to write a book that amounted to a dialogue, and to include in this book the responses of 12 selected contributors? Why not mount this on some kind of web site, and make it a dynamic experiment in public scholarship? The reason is two-fold ... first of all, the academe at its highest levels has been incapable of finding a route into the new modes of publication, and no one has risen to take the bull by its horns, as it were, to force the issue. So, secondly, Emmerson seeks to freeze something in time, to make a monument. But the time for monuments is passed, and the Emmersons of the world lose the immediacy of their arguments by fixing them in a book. This sort of argument is Internet-worthy, but not book-worthy because by the time it appears its urgency will have passed.

In my work, there are no excuses. The new technologies press in on us every day, and the urgency is constantly present. It's time for that to be true of the scholars who inhabit the sandstone building a stone's throw from the modular unit where I toil for wages.

This post developed vastly differently from what I imagined as I walked to the train tonight ... but here it is nonetheless.


Photos by Arod . Gawd noze why I chose these, though gawd noze everthang so it must be rite.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Roy and I attended the American Conservatory Theater production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore on Saturday. So a couple of quick notes ...

'Tis Pity She's a Whore is a 1630-something revenge play, a sort of combination of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with an incest theme. I enjoyed the fast interweaving of scenes and subplots, the comic relief, the skulduggery and dark corners. Not to put to fine a point on it, but classic drama incorporates techniques of oral performance because its audiences were schooled in the oral text. The audience wants to be told when someone is hiding, when someone is thinking something other than what he says; they expect it.

The performance at ACT was sublime, notwithstanding the rather pissy review in the Chron. Two points, external to the action. "Walt Spangler's industrial-baroque cathedral set" served both to invoke the period by reason of how its barren complexity motivates the complexity of action and interplay of choreography. They made plays with fewer gee-gaws back then, and audiences were better trained in suspension of disbelief. The set invoked that history. But the most striking aspect of the set was composer, cellist and vocalist Bonfire Madigan Shive situated like an angel amidst a riot of seeming organ pipes. Her haunting, electrifying music, both instrumental and vocal, punctuated the fear and the dread and ultimately the horror. The audience rewarded her with the most heartfelt of the ovations. Hers is a striking talent that must have greater play as life winds on.

This is a gruesome play, too gruesome, frankly, to have been written in our more squeamish century. Perloff, the director, led at least me to believe in the climactic moment that it was the fetus that was slaughtered, but all the references are to the murdered sister and lover having her heart ripped out bodily. The notion of the slaughter of the unborn seems a nod to modern sensibilities ... the Aztec-ish heart extraction seems blunt to us.

The audience laughed at a few things out of key ... several references to the inferior position of women, and pointedly to a line where Vazquez trumpets that a Spaniard out-revenged his dead Italian master. As an audience, I prefer to pretend that I am somewhere else ... more's the pity that the yappy old bags behind couldn't shut up long enough to pretend anything that their tiny, perfume-addled minds might imagine. Ooops, too cranky.

I guess what I want to say is this ... I do not think that there is any specific that is eternal in this play. We shouldn't force this kind of thing into a tyranny of relevance. Incest may be more prevalent than we prefer to imagine, and it is probably less fraught with slaughter than this play imagines. But the joy in a performance like this is to cast oneself back and imagine sitting in a crowded odoriferous and noisy throng in 1630 watching all the action ... to imagine being in a world where any entertainment is always available, but rather a world in which entertainment is rare and scarce and treasured. To imagine the vicarious thrill of bloody revenge performed, and the thrill of clerics represented as cheats and scum.

In that sense, this performance was sublime. It proffered the antique in the performance, and the modern in the set and the music. Two and half hours plussed passed as a mere moment, and I wanted more notwithstanding the littering of bodies as curtain dropped.

One note to Carey Perloff, ACT's superlative Artistic Director ... your web site should not be so stingy with photos. All these magnificent sets should be memorialized. And many would be the happy to see DVDs of production made available for purchase after the show has closed. I am for the transparency that the Internet era promises, and places like ACT should be in the lead making their fabulous entertainments available broadly.

A few photos from the web tomorrow if I get a moment. Tonight's cocktail, by the way, a Sazerac ... sublime.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Thinking a lot these days about the relationship between the Enlightenment and religion, and between the Enlightenment and romanticism, and between what Tim Blanning, in his fabulous book The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815, calls the interplay between the culture of reason and the culture of feeling. These issues are at the heart of human history over the last two centuries, and they still define much of where we are at. So I'll try to get back to a more intellectual approach to those questions shortly ... at least before I finish the Blanning book and dive into a re-read of my favorite absolute monarch, Frederick the Great.

Said Diderot: "Everything must be examined, everything must be shaken up, without exception and without circumspection." Notwithstanding the obviousness of this and its unrelenting rationalism, it is a cruel prescription. It is also the prescription of an ideologue, for it presupposes the extinction of its opposite. History does not work that way, and in the event, notwithstanding the enormous gift that the Enlightenment gave to humanity, it did not work that way for our heroes, that is Diderot and his pals. Blanning calls the Enlightenment the culture of reason. And then there was the revanche of the culture of feeling.

Goethe said in his "Concerning German Architecture": "The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, harmonious, independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant, of anything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment."

Look at the difference between the key terms of those two statements: examined versus feeling. Look at the difference between the positive statement of Diderot against the essentially negative statement of Goethe. For Goethe, that which lives is that which is not foreign, that which is native, natural, peculiar, and, yes, ignorant.

In our era of the economic triumph of the rational (not to say that economics is rational, by the way), we have become witless victims of feeling. The truth is in the middle, of course, and perhaps I can demonstrate this by the following.

So there I was in Winchester, relaxing in the newly remodeled and fabulous living room of my brother and sister-in-law. It turns out that they are fanatics of American Idol also, and we had resolved to spend the Tuesday evening of my pilgrimage to the Cheese Capital of the Ottawa Valley passing opinion on the efforts of the remaining eight contestants. The boys again outsang the girls, although that did not prevent the fickle public ... and remember the claim that the "public" was invented in the period roughly comprising the Enlightenment and its lead-up ... from voting off the smoothly talented Michael Johns.

But what hit me, again, was the Jason Castro version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Have a listen (I have substituted a later studio version because YouTube killed the earlier version I had here):



My sister-in-law did not know that this song is an anthem for gay men ... I wonder how many gay men younger than I am know what this song meant to gay men before gay liberation. It is, of course, Judy Garland's song, and Judy died on June 22, 1969. When the cops raided the Stonewall bar in the early morning of June 28, 1969, the nelly queens were still mourning their fallen heroine, and their grief and rage and pent-up yearning to be free created the riot that launched the movement to which I owe my freedom. She is our Joan of Arc, and her terrible death spurred us to seek our freedom.

Now listen to Judy sing it:



"Why oh why can't I?" You see, the essence of the appeal of Judy's version is that it is an appeal to reason. Beset by her troubles, most particularly the horrid Miss Gulch who wanted to take away "that little dog", she wonders why things are so irrational, why she can't fly as birds do. There is no rational reason why she cannot live rationally. The essence of the movements for freedom of the 70s, the gay movement, the black movement, and the women's movement, had that precise negative appeal to reason: there is no rationale that adds up to denying us our ability to be fully human, to do with our lives as we wish to do.

No doubt Judy's song is filled with feeling. It moved me when I was a child, and it still sends chills down my spine as I listen to it on YouTube. But, no matter, it is still an appeal to reason. And thereby, we can see concretely how reason and feeling are not inimical.

Where, then, is the reason in Jason Castro, hot and appealing, his neck bedecked with a cross?

Simon Cowell mentioned a version on the Internet by one Israel which, like Castro's version, features a ukulele. Again, have a listen ... this one is a little longer, so feel free to cut out:


Israel Kamakawiwo'ole died at the age of 38 in 1997 of respiratory failure due to obesity that, at one point, topped 750 pounds. He is held in high regard by Hawaiian musicians. But his version is a song stripped of any appeal to reason, and left with only feeling. It is pure sentimentality ... the fact that a song that Judy Garland made iconic in about two minutes rambles on for over four minutes ... well, the maudlin always takes more time than the iconic.

I like this version. It filled me. But there is nothing here but feeling.

Poor Jason Castro, a sweet boy with alluring tight pants, just has no clue about any of this ... certainly nothing in his performance alluded to the historic resonances of this song. If Israel's version was pure feeling, Castro's version stripped away the feeling and left us with affect alone ... skillful affect, certainly. I admit that I enjoyed the performance. I hope the boy hangs in there and makes a record. But that spare individual style of his has no depth ... he would be ideal for Christian music ... it has no savoir faire, it has no reason. It has no approach to the realities that grip us and control us and toss us to and fro. He is not a new Bob Dylan, he is the person whom Tiny Tim lampooned.

So when we think of of the enduring dialectic between the culture of reason and the culture of feeling, we have to remember that reason has feeling and that feeling is never bereft of reason. It is not good enough to draw up the dialectic ... we have to define the terms. Feeling stripped of reason is a zero divider, as I like to say ... any equation in which here is a zero divider can admit of any answer. When people say that they just feel that there must be some higher purpose, they open themselves to anything ... and history has shown us that "anything" can be bloody awful.

But on the other side, reason without feeling is the motor of the ideologue ... the potential for a relentless "truth" that extinguishes the very reason that bred it.

In either case, without the dialectic, we are left with Miss Gulch.

Metablog: Failing Your Way to Success

Not sure if yesterday's post was sharp or a pile of wet refuse. But, notwithstanding a bunch of micro-edits today, I'm going with it. I have not written a significant amount of criticism or rhetoric since I finished my dissertation in 1997. The ideas ... juxtaposition and reversal, the tyranny of relevance, reversal of authority and authenticity, as-if consciousness ... keep swimming around up there, and they influence how I observe and think. But applying them to subject matter and then publishing what I think is not an instantaneous route to success, as it were. Still, one must fail in order to succeed.

Part of the problem is in switching from a near-decade ago mode of dissertation writing in which no limit on length imposed itself to the decidedly aphoristic medium of a blog. Yesterday's post was around 1100 words, and I think that is the longest I have posted.

Clearly, I need to tease out what I think about relevance before I can rest with it. I distrust relevance as a concept because its validity escapes its statement. By that I mean, that the proof of relevance is not in itself, or in absorbing it, but in the relationship to which it points which is the relationship between a topos and some social being, whether that is an individual or a group. From my vantage, that means that there inheres in the idea of relevance a false consciousness in the present day precisely because of the expanding yet debased ideas of identity that we have adopted. If the proof of relevance is in a relation between an idea and a person, and a person is defined by an identity, then the speciousness of the idea of identity inheres in relevance.

This is the basis of the notion of the tyranny of relevance. I like to say that anything human is relevant to me, but that relies upon a smug conceit that I can be somehow more ineluctably human that others, particularly those who would not adhere to my distrust of identity. So even my own embrace of relevance as non-specific is founded upon a character flaw.

Ah, to err is human. And to be airy is human. I think I have managed both at once.

Redundancy and Relevance

Fudging on what to write about tonight. I have a post in my head about Horses and Peoples in relation to the erudite arguments of Robert Bartlett in his The Making of Europe, but after a long day of finagling with text at my job at MRU, I do not know that my perorations would be sufficiently directional. So I am going to take a shot at a little non-directional juxtaposition and reversal ... tugging at two ideas until they are side by side and then seeing if they will run away from each other.

I edit the course catalog at MRU. Since I started this ... I am on my seventh course catalog ... I have looked at a lot of course catalogs, and I unashamedly believe that ours is the best. It is a tight work, heavy in content, and as light in redundancy as I can possibly make it. What I have learned more than anything else in this job is how to detect even the tiniest and most hidden case of redundancy.

Academia is filled, not entirely unjustifiably, with redundancy. Let me posit two sources of that propsensity to "say it again, Sam, and again." On the one hand, the enthusiasm for one's subject, the monomaniacal focus that is the necessary concomittant of committed study, means that most redundancy seems more like emphasis than repetition. On the other hand, it is a form of occupational psychosis, to use the terminology of my favorite literary critic Kenneth Burke, in the sense that repetition is the most ready-to-hand technique by which one might draw attention to one's subject in an open marketplace where the meek risk ending up as afterthoughts ... tenured perhaps but living an "as-if" glory in the company of those whose glory is warm and real and remunerative. So repetition arrives for enthusiasm and remains for marketing.

Every time I edit a course description ... and edit them we do ... I come face to face with this occupational enthusiasm. Now, I argue that a course catalog must speak in a flat, measured, and authoritative voice, and to emphasize anything, to repeat anything that can as readily be said once, is to favor one thing over another, not to mention squander our charge for density of content. So redundancy ... so fertile in argument and enthusiasm, so essential to speech and drama and persuasion ... is our enemy.

Today, I confronted a particularly woolly description. I say "woolly" because it arrived as a tightly woven argument, and my job is to extract a list of topics. I have no idea what this prof will think when he sees the results of my jackhammering, but I offer that it was a delicate and humane jackhammer, the sort of thing a sculptor who works in concrete and steel would wield when confronted with a giant roll of coiled steel cable. Does that make sense? Maybe the editor should edit himself!

That said, I loved the course. An editor is like a dentist ... it doesn't matter whose teeth you are drilling, the job is to make them choppers, not to prefer one set over another. So like this course or not, I did my duty and this is one line from it: "How antithetical responses provoked by crisis demonstrate literature's capacity to produce and sustain apparently untenable contradictions; how this paradoxically may make literature a conciliatory force." Wow ... wish I'd said that myself; it is precisely the kind of contradiction and reversal that fascinates me in everything.

But the original was unashamedly more formidable, more armored, more predatory. It was one of those tightly bound up literary arguments that have made literary studies the object of ribaldry among the other disciplines not just because they are impenetrable but more so because they are gamefully repulsive ... that is, designed to repel the uninitiated with a cackle rather than embrace the novice with blandishments, let alone involve other academics in the particular arguments that criticism can generate and propel.

For the literary academic, the repellent or predatory argument has often become more attractive when it functions as collapsed interplay of public sadism and masochism. Yes, there is a sort of masochism here ... which is to say the masochism of the sadist who would hurt himself for the sheer joy of both ouching aloud and at the same time being the one who caused the ouch. Ouch! For in this little gem of an argument which I flattened into the phrase above, the author simultaneously shows his ability to hurt himself and to draw those who recognize this auto da fe to him, even as the bulk of the actual readers slide on by, neither repulsed nor attracted but distinguishing themselves by their disinterest.

Any redundancy here functions to intensify this public display. In academic literary critical circles, redundancy has assumed an arrogance of isolation. (At some point, I will argue that literary criticism needs to abandon this conceit not only for survival but for its own art.)

Okay ... relevance. Repetition, with which we started, is a cry for relevance, whether as enthusiasm or as something that should be consumed/marketed. Redundancy as enthusiasm repeats its theme so as, by juxtaposing itself to itself, to make itself bigger and thereby to attract and not to repel, and thereby to imply that it is relevant to the reader/listerner/observer/consumer. Redundancy as marketing, as occupational psychosis, is more like a peacock wherein the splendor is assumed to be the proof of the relevance. Relevance, in this sense, is a little abstract ... not relevance to something else, but a general, intransitive relevance which assumes a referrent without naming or specifying or delimiting it. But the problem with boundlessness in describing a phenomenon is that the lack of boundaries allows one to substitute anything ... I like to call this a "zero divider" because any result is possible when you divide by zero. So the intransitive notion of relevance can thereby come to mean that something is relevant only if in the narrowest sense it is relevant to "me" and who I define myself as. This is what relevance has come to mean in education (deferring a discussion of the degree to which this phenomenon matches a broader social issue) ... a topic is "relevant" if it can be demonstrated to touch the observer's self-identification.

By repeating and repeating, and by saying again and again that this is you, this is you, the topic becomes relevant, instransitively, for any observer who is thus simultaneously singled out and reduced to identity.

And so the oddity of our course description is that any redundancy in its tightly bound argument worked to isolate itself enthusiastically to that tiny set of students who could posit their intellectual identity in it. But at the same point, it had eschewed any larger marketing that might integrate it or insinuate it into a broader intellectual market. It turned both redundancy and relevance on their heads, but as with most of the present highly isolated literary critical impulses, it takes no advantage of that.

In editing that line, I sought, professionally and not ideologically, to open it to a less restricted audience and this flatness has the inadvertent effect of stripping off its isolation and suggesting that literary contemplation of paradox and antithesis is an essential tool that literary work can provide to other disciplines. I think that Bartlett, with whom I began this peroration, succeeded in that in one part of his book, and perhaps I can try to explain that tomorrow.

Hmmmm ... not sure that I have made my case, but I will leave it at this, and try to come back to the juxtaposition of redundancy and relevance on some other occasion from a different angle. (I want to add as a note to myself that the course description above in its unedited state started with a straw man argument; I saw this as a move to credential the course both as ironic and dialectical. Not the subject of this post, but this double credentialing is not uncommon in our discipline, both to good and ill effect.)

Photo by Arod.