Representations of the Academic

In the spirit of posting to the blog, I would like to hitchhike upon Andy’s concluding point about the “representations of the academic” in the modern university. I will break down this phrase into function and perception. The cultural perception—how academics are viewed in contemporary society—typically overrides the function—what academics actually do? This growing disparity among social opinion affects not only the funding universities receive, especially in the humanities, but also the effect academics have when implementing or resisting policy change. Part of the problem, I argue, is that the perception has become much stronger than the function, as academics are unsure of their role in the fabric of society and within the university.

Disagreements among departments are indicative of the identity crises academics experience in the university. If academics possess anxieties and ambivalence about their role in the university, then this *unknowing* spreads throughout culture. In addition, popular media—funded, promoted, and controlled by corporate interests—capitalize upon this unknowing in order to dismantle the university network, which is one of only a few places left for critical inquiry and, perhaps, one of the last defenses against the corporatization of our whole social sphere. Bill Readings gets at this point somewhat in “University Without Culture?” when he recognizes two common tensions in the university’s future: 1) return to a conservative past and bolster the traditional roots or 2) recreate a new “cultural identity” in order to adopt a contemporary and relevant situation that reflects contemporary society. He calls the latter a “multicultural position” (465). This very binary indicates the anxieties and tensions that arose in the department meeting mentioned in Andy’s post: do we return to our roots and cultural identification of years past by reinforcing “literature” in course names or do we recognize the plurality of the discipline and use expansive, multicultural monikers such as “texts.” The third option, which Readings advocates, seems too extreme and unrecognizable to any previous academic identity and threatens to undermine the whole institution as we know it. As we have been discussing all term in this colloquium, perhaps Readings advocates the third option because it ushers in a whole new and uncomfortable discussion about how we perceive ourselves and our function as academics, as opposed to being defined by popular media or culture.

One could certainly argue that the outcomes are the same regardless of the semantic nuances, but the point highlights the role and identity of a department, and ultimately an academic. Throughout this colloquium we have visited many opinions about what a university “was,” “is,” and “will be.” Throughout this debate, there is a growing sense of detachment and powerlessness from the academic, who, I would argue, should be at the centre and ultimately leading the debate. As a PhD student, it’s difficult to avoid feeling reactionary when entering the profession: how can I adapt, assimilate, acquiesce, and so forth, in order to possibly obtain a position somewhere? While this reality certainly exists, it extends from the larger issue that academics have not only become reactionary, but they also cannot decide where they stand within these issues.

Again, playing off of Andy’s post directly, do we study texts or literature? Does it matter? And are the representations of academics as irrelevant correct? And, nodding again toward Readings, what does excellence mean? These are all questions each of us are asking ourselves in our training, so it’s particularly disconcerting to see this position as one of the fulcrums of the university crisis. Linking “excellence” and “professor” synonymously provides some indication of the breakdown and a general antagonism for an academic’s identity that has been couched in anti-elitist rhetoric by the conservative right. Obviously this stems from political and capital gain, but there can be a lesson here that without any sense of identity and unification, the academy is essentially creating the possibility for its dismantling. Or, as Readings suggests, “the decline in the power of the university as an institution over the public sphere, with the concomitant elimination of the intellectual as a public figure” (465). This brings us back to how we perceive ourselves and our function within the university. We might consider thinking about how we want to move forward before approaching the system as a whole.

To this end, here’s my question(s): what is our role as an academic? That is to say, why are we here and what motivates our work? Is it some form of social responsibility and are we deluding ourselves in thinking that it’s anything more than a “job”? Is it “fun” work and therefore something enjoyable? Or, is it simply something we “know” after completing years of coursework in a specific area? I guess what I’m getting at, and what I ask myself, is what motivates our continued interest in this profession and how do we see ourselves placed within it: as active or reactionary members? And, what is our function? Or, worse, do we even know what we do, why we do it, and how to achieve it within the present system in a potentially catastrophic flux? If departments cannot find some cohesiveness regarding the direction of academic study, then how can we find stability and hope in the future of this system?

Reading(s) Macleans

Since Bill Readings so helpfully brings up Macleans' annual university rankings issue, I am going to use this as a point of departure to bring up what I am most curious about this month: The on-going debate over Macleans' recent "Too Asian?" article. (For those of you who have not yet had the distinct (dis)pleasure of reading it, you can find it here: http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2010/11/10/too-asian/

The timing of the Readings reading is quite apropos because the Macleans' piece presents another way of looking at how excellence is constructed in universities.

I will start off by saying that the article is undeniably racist. I don't really have anything to add to Jeet Heer's excellent critique found here http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2010/11/24/too-brazen/ (thanks to Shama for pointing it out)

What I would like to particularly emphasize from Heet's piece is how the discourse of whiteness circulates throughout the framing of the article: a campus can be called an "Asian campus" when white students begin to feel threatened. Terms like "white campus" are reserved for apartheid-era South African schools.

I was going to talk about how ideas of excellence circulate through the Macleans article, but instead, I think there is a need for a more urgent discussion. The one point made that I will concede to the authors is their observation that race is not a topic that is openly discussed in Canada. But let us be clear -- it is a topic not discussed by white people in Canada. Why is this? Do white Canadians suffer from white guilt to the extent that any discussions about race paralyze us intellectually? Or are we so blinded by the (failure of) multiculturalism that we ignore the power dynamics that constitute the very fabric of "Canadian" identity?

More importantly, how do we, as academics and ostensibly student role models, not only respond to articles such as this one, but proactively engage with the underlying xenophobia that enabled it in the first place?

The risks of this article are not just about universities. We have seen this historical moment before: an economy in the midst of seismic restructuring, massive job less, and a rise in immigrants stealing "white men's jobs" and with "loose morals" that would hurt society. The so-called "Yellow Peril" of the early 20th century with with us again but this time, an "Asian" (and what work is being done when that term is deployed in contexts such as these?) influx is hurting over-privileged white people with a"hard work ethic" rather than loose morals. So what are we going to do about it?

good god

I really have no idea what to write in response to this weeks readings. The articles were pretty self-explanatory and everyone else has taken up the various points that the articles make.

For the most part, I don't think the articles provide us with any new information, so to speak: we all know we're fucked in this new corporate university.

What I think is important, and perhaps something the articles allude to, is the representation of academics. I don't just mean in films like Tenure, or novels like Lucky Jim.

How does Macleans represent academia? How do university websites/general propaganda represent academics? How do we represent ourselves, or allow ourselves to be represented? We study representations and yet we fail to pay attention to how we are represented.

Most people think academics, especially in the Humanities, spend a lot of their time arguing about nothing of particular importance. And i actually think most people do a whole lot of nothing in the jobs/careers. Like how many times do you have to go to a doctor before they actually know what is wrong with you? But I digress!

At the last department council meeting there was a very big debate between the faculty over whether or not to change the first half of course titles; instead of writing "Studies in American Literature" it will now read "Studies in American Texts." Some professors lamented the loss of literature, while others argued for the "capaciousness" of texts. Now, this title does not limit the actual course content, despite what some professors seemed to think, it is merely for organizational purposes and for the graduate calendar. The graduate calendar is one way that what academics do is represented to prospective students and outsiders.

Do you study texts or literature? Does it matter? And are the representations of academics as irrelevant correct?

I think it is time that humanities departments hired some seriously amazing PR firms to revitalize the image of the humanities professor so that we can still do what we do, but people see the representation as something that represents something relevant.

The Ruins of Difference

We’re being asked by Bill Readings to both rethink thought—not “economic” but instead as belonging instead “to an economy of waste” (488)—and space—the ruin and debris of an institution now long dead—in the university today. The payoff, on Readings’ account, has something to do with “liberat[ing] new spaces and break[ing] down existing structures of defense against thought even as it [the "system"] seeks to submit thought to the exclusive rule of exchange value (like all bourgeois revolutions)” (489). He earlier names the technologies through which such a liberation might be thinkable: dereferentializaiton; community of dissensus; and a movement through (university) space characterized as détournement. So far so good. The resistance to a “result, a different end” (489)—that is, what he claims “is not a move of ‘big politics’” (489)—tempers the real force of the project, however. His would be a university that takes difference and ruins it—that is, undoes disciplinary borders and commitments in exchange for and “arphipelago of minor activities” (490); but it seems to me like we can go a step further in historicizing and sublating what was announced to be the death of difference (alondside the death of distance) in and around 1989. Difference in the ruined academy is not, or should not be an object among objects, as has been and is with little question the case today, but rather the thing that enables the kinds of conversations and questions excised with what MacIntyre calls the professionalization of the academy.

It makes little sense, in other words, to respect difference and disagreement as an object among objects in the academy today, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests in “Political Science Fictions”, “for if identity politics is nothing more than the politics of the subject position and if, every time we disagree, we make the subject position irrelevant”—i.e, we refuse to recognize it as the end of the conversation—“then, in every moment that we disagree…we produce the blueprint for a world without identity” (662). An “indifference to difference” (662)— or a disavowal that differences in opinion are reducible to an essentialized subject position, that is, the understanding that what you think has less to do with who you are and more to do with where you are in posthistorical geo-cultural space—means not valuing disagreement as the horizon of interaction but as rather the thing to overcome. Disagreement, here, does not ratify difference but instead seeks to eliminate it (which is not the same thing as saying a universalizing process towards sameness). If we take seriously that the end of the Cold War was the end of a certain version of ideology (the version where there are two and they are incompatible, and thus essentially different)—and folks on the left and the right for different reasons, to be sure, take this very seriously—then what we’re left with, Michaels and Readings seem to agree, is not “identity politics” but politics as such, where politics’ object is not the identify of difference but the discordance of dissensus.

So if we run with this claim for a bit longer, taking into account Readings’ call for and commitment to a “reimagine[d] notion of community” (478) alongside a radical movement—“détournement” (480)—through the ruins of the university, we’re forced to rethink not just misguided commitments to difference in our research but to also amass a hostile, or at least antagonistic, posture towards differences in discipline and what Ian Angus called different “forms of knowledge.” On the level of the institution, in other words, we are still very much committed to differences—say, the difference between data collection for the sake of data collection in cognitive science versus a hermeneutics tailored for narratives irreducible to individuals or individual bits of information in an English department—not because these differences are more or less right but because they are accepted as self-evidently necessary under the rubric of disciplinarity. Readings, to be sure, is not insisting we respect these difference; rather, his is a call to walk spontaneously and disrespectfully through “the spaces willed to us by a history whose temporality we no longer inhabit” (480)—that is, the dead and dying ruins of an institution designed for one thing but functioning as another, today. “Détournement” is the opposite of a respect for difference, and a disavowal of difference is the opposite of agreeing to disagree (which we do, in my experience of the academy, every single day). But at this point I would add an addendum: what we do here has never been restricted to the institutional “here”—though it more often than not feels like that—which is another way of saying that we are, or should be beholden if not to publics than to interests (political, archival, cultural, economic?) and that even producing ‘disinterested’ work with critical distance is wrapped up in systems (funding, an epistemology) that never were and never can be contained in the university. It is not merely the university that has been ruined. We should act accordingly.

Allegories of Readings

When Homer Simpson won the “First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence,” he revealed that excellence had been formalized into a field in which one could achieve and do so outstandingly. As Readings says, this field is self-referential and contained; it is also a field upon which signification works, to use Readings’ term (although I’m not sure that it’s actually the most proper term to use, I’m going to use it throughout this response), “metaleptically”. Here, “outstanding” can be both juxtaposed to and exemplary of “excellence”, when presumably they are synonymous.

The bizarre fixation on excellence is an allegory of (mis)reading: an allegorical operation, a metonymic slide whereby the figure of “Quality” becomes literalized into “a quality”, a property, and then on to “property” capable of being exchanged. While Readings’ readings of the university’s misreadings are, indeed, excellent, I think that the question isn’t about how standardization fits the heterogeneous into an index of equivalent value, nor is it about the metalepsis whereby “reputation” can count as a part and a whole (471). Rather it’s about the metaleptic aesthetic ideology of excellence itself. The existence of “excellence” as a field of value shows that in the absence of a normative culture, excellence is the only social/political measure of intelligibility. And surveys—Maclean’s, student-customer satisfaction evaluations, alumni association surveys, etc.—are not examples of a problematic index of value, but rather they form and express the broader cultural index of value, that is, what our culture at its most operative and most formal metaleptically produces and deems as valuable. But metalepsis by itself is not necessarily bad or wrong; it’s merely a version of the hermeneutic circle. And it’s a canonized position running from Spenser’s Preface to The Faerie Queene, where “Magnificence” is the virtue that perfects and contains all the rest, on to Jameson’s Introduction to The Political Unconscious, where in the current intellectual marketplace, Marxist criticism is “the untranscendable horizon” that subsumes all the other “antagonistic and incommensurable” critical approaches, preserving them within itself. (For an interesting discussion of this subsumption, see Geoffrey Bennington’s “Aberrations: de Man (and) the Machine”.) The real problem here then isn’t that excellence acts as both particular and general; example and Idea; perception and cognition; exception and law; observation and criterion—all clichés and slogans act this way. Our real object of critical concern must be the epistemic environment which allows for a category error to become an organizing principle.

This undoubtedly occurs when excellence is normalized, surreptitiously becomes synonymous with “normal”, and the uniqueness of a phenomenon Bill and Ted would judge to be “Most Excellent” is reified into a cliché. It’s particularly and unforgivably ironic that this structural model of the cliché takes such hold in the university. Readings’ example of the dean from UCI illuminates this intra-institutional ironic blindness well, but perhaps not as well as the episode from The Simpsons where the writer says to the suits who want to develop the Itchy & Scratchy Show according to a new “proactive paradigm”: “Excuse me, but aren’t ‘proactive’ and ‘paradigm’ just buzzwords that stupid people use to sound important? I’m fired, aren’t I?” What’s unfortunate is that the dean was fired and then made his remarks, when he deserved to be fired for making such stupid remarks. Readings’ most important point is that purely formal concepts lacking any content continue to appear as legible, and so misreading has become the norm, or the excellent way to read. He locates such a misreading in the evaluation form: “In order to permit standardization and integration under a common index of value, administrations push for the introduction of standardized multiple response questions across the board, which will allow the calculation of a quotient of consumer satisfaction, preferably modeled on the consumer survey” (481). Again, description is taken for prescription, fact for value, perception for cognition. This is all reducible to an institutionalized illiteracy, efficiently-administered misreadings, summed up in the slippage from the figure of accountability into too-literal accounting. Despite Readings’ insistence that he is not calling for a return to progress or the Culture that came out of the Enlightenment, the philosophical problem he’s describing is the classic mistaking of perception for cognition that inaugurated the Socratic method, was the dominant aesthetic ideology in Plato’s Cave, and has lasted through the Enlightenment to be criticized by Wittgenstein and de Man to Agamben.

So obviously the solution to this reading problem is, first, teach students and administrators how to read. Then, through the weakened but not yet impotent nation state, institute Informal Logic classes in elementary schools under the alibi that critical thinking skills produce both better corporate citizens in the form of excellent consumers and makes for better civic discourse because politicians and policy makers would then have to be more competitive, to more excellently sophisticate their rhetoric, fallacies, and clichés at least up to a grade 12 or so level. Let’s use the nation state to create a new, non-essential, non-nationalistic volkism that interpellates us as readers—subjects able to know a fallacy when we see one.

Readings draws attention to the fact that savings accrue through sacrifices of all in the University, not just the administration, and, therefore, savings should be channelled back into pedagogy; this is great, but it doesn’t go far enough. And this might be due to his desire to move past Graff’s model of conflict cum consensus into one of dissensus (478), which in turn goes too far. Consensus should not be abandoned but instead reimagined into a new solidarity. Here the nation state can again come in useful. Why do the liberal arts university and the nation have so much trouble resisting the sell out? Both crave the money that corporations give them, but why are they so blind to what they give in return? We have something they want. We’re capital; we’re turned into values all the time, so why can’t we exploit our value? Let’s revitalize the student/university union structure to impose demands on the money we receive. The university can say, “We’ll take your money and pump out more patents for you, but you’re going to fund our arts programs too.” Nations should unionize too and present demands to TNCs saying, “You need a physical place to operate: you can set up here, but you’re going to fund a bunch of social programs in exchange.” The Nation might be a laughably outdated figure or a chillingly creepy one, but it’s in ours and its own interests to resist the privatization of national culture, and so we should figure out how to use it against being trained for the excellence industry.

Of course, this all may be happening already in the form of the PhDs being pumped out into a jobless market (479). Could post-Fordism, via its weirdly Fordist and Taylorized universities—speeding up and overproducing so many smart, hypercritical, useless and thus potentially unexploitable “workers”—be training and professionalizing its own gravediggers? And if we’re not the eventual gravediggers, then why the hell aren’t we, and how do we train to be excellent in that field?

The BBC production of Ibsen’s A Doll's House reminds me of an essay of Lu Hsün (one of the greatest writers in 20th-century Chinese literature) entitled “What Happens after Nora Leaves Home?” At the beginning of the essay, Lu Hsün recalls another play of Ibsen The Lady from the Sea. In this play, the heroine, a woman who has a lover before marriage, is given the freedom by her husband to decide for herself whether to stay or to go with her lover. She finally chooses to stay put. For Nora, she chooses to leave. Rightly so, but what then? Lu Hsün points out that Nora, having neither psychological support nor means of financial support, would have only three choices: to starve, to go to the bad, and to return home. Then the question becomes: what has Nora taken away with her apart from her awakened heart?

Maybe we can pose a similar question to educators who are trying to figure out a way out for today’s universities: what happens after the university breaks away from all the restraints imposed upon it by the logic and imperatives of the capitalist mode of production and claims its independence? Ian Angus makes clear his stance in his book’s preface: “I have tried to balance a realistic assessment of the state of the contemporary university and the forces that would undermine it with a sense of what can be saved, reinvented, or discovered of its potential” (Love the Questions 10). Likewise, Bill Readings contends: “The question posed to the university is thus not how to turn the institution into a haven for thought, but how to think in an institution whose development tends to make thought more and more difficult, less and less necessary.” Yet however down-to-earth Angus tries to be, he, as far as I can remember, does not seem to have come up with any practical solution to the crisis the university is now faced with. Instead, he places his hope on the general public, who will someday, he hopes, “comes [come] to recognize the role that a real university culture can play in society and demands [demand] the political will and financial resources necessary for it to do so” (125). By contrast, Billing does put forward some more specific suggestions – for example, asking students to write essays in course evaluation (though it remains a question whether these essays can be rightly and perceptively interpreted) and persuading administrators to channel the resources liberated by the opening up of a general interdisciplinary space into supporting short-term collaborative projects. I am personally more in favor of the type of criticism of the current state of the university which can ground philosophical discussions in concrete suggestions for action rather than merely remain on the theoretical level.

As to MacIntyre, he envisions a twentieth-century version of the thirteenth-century university, a nostalgic stance which Readings is against. Readings advises that we view the university as a ruined institution, which means “to dwell in those ruins without recourse to romantic nostalgia.” For me, while I agree with MacIntyre’s idea that the central responsibility for the university is to initiate students into conflict, I hope to get a clearer picture of how this idealist thirteenth-century form can adapt to the vastly different social situation of our time. Surely, it is not just a matter of adding more texts to the repertoire. I think any discussion of the contemporary university should have some kind of what Readings calls institutional pragmatism. Only in this way, the problems peculiar to our own age can be more effectively addressed. Perhaps we could discuss a little bit what particular situation our own university, the U of A, is in and what measures it has taken or can take to deal with its specific problems.

Collaboration and Confrontation?

I’m interested in Bill Readings’s suggestion that “the dualist split between humanities and natural sciences that has been the most apparent structural reality of the university in the twentieth century is no longer the practical certainty it once was.” The link that I posted earlier is a letter from a biochemist arguing for the importance of language and humanities programs in response to SUNY Buffalo closing their French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts programs. The letter points out the relevance of these programs to a variety of questions and contemporary issues. It may be a cliché, but we need to learn from past learnings; we’re not reinventing calculus with every generation so why not read Machiavelli to learn the basics of leadership (or something like that). In one of my classes last week, we talked about how cognitive neuroscience is moving into literary studies. People are doing empirical research on affect (which is fine, but could we say it's more suited to psychology or sociology?) and English professors are getting their students to write about their feelings (who cares?) instead of looking at the texts in a more rigorous (traditional?) fashion. I wanted to talk about the relative merits or usefulness of the methodologies themselves, but the conversation turned to whether or not this interest in cognitive neuroscience comes from institutional pressure to make the humanities more scientific. I feel like we should support research in all areas as long as it’s advancing understanding of the objects of study and not merely because of some superficial institutional imperative; otherwise we should just be a bunch of separate institutes instead of a university. Most of our projects are to a lesser or greater degree interdisciplinary—how can they not be? Readings writes, “philosophy departments are spinning off into applied fields in which experts provide answers rather than refining questions—medical ethics being the most obvious example.” I was listening to a debate on euthanasia on CBC Radio a few days ago and both sides kept using the word “dignity.” They had a question from a philosophy student asking how they can use such an ambiguous term without defining it, since each side seemed to be appropriating different meanings to suit their position. Someone on the panel responded that they don’t need to define their terms because the point is that it’s a placeholder (empty signifier?) for a host of meanings and doesn’t need to be defined, then turned the question around to the student and asked how he would define it. This guy didn’t have an answer, so the moderator and everyone had a good laugh about how philosophers don’t need to know answers. Isn’t precisely “what’s at stake” the definition of dignity when talking about euthanasia? And of course it's important for people who don't really think about language in that way to have someone ask that question.

Readings writes, “the idea of culture in Cultural Studies is not really an ‘idea’ in the strong sense proposed by the modern university. Cultural Studies, that is, does not propose culture as a regulatory ideal for research and teaching so much as recognize the inability of culture to function as such an ‘idea’ any longer.” Maybe I’ve been reading too much Derrida, but this seems to me a good thing. Why do we need a regulatory idea for culture? It seems like it’s best if the field is de-regulated—we can think of MacIntyre’s call for conflict as différance! I like Readings’s proposal for interdisciplinary research in short-term collaborative projects that don’t devolve into mini-departments—is this happening now? U of A is much more into interdisciplinary studies than my previous university; aren’t most of us doing Cultural Studies?

MacIntyre identifies the increasing fragmentation and specialization of academic inquiry as a problem for the future of the university; it is also a concern, I would argue, within individual departments. It has been my experience that people working or studying in the same department sometimes have difficulty discussing their work with each other because they have few common texts or theoretical frameworks upon which to build a common understanding. MacIntyre argues that “proponents of th[e] Great Books curriculum often defend it as a way of restoring to us and to our students what they speak of as our cultural tradition; but we are in fact the inheritors . . . of a number of rival and incompatible traditions and there is no way of either selecting a list of books to be read or advancing a determinate account of how they are to be read, interpreted, and elucidated which does not involve taking a partisan stand in the conflict of traditions” (228). While I agree that it would be challenging to get an entire department to agree on a curriculum of the most influential texts in any particular cultural tradition, and while I realize that the identification of certain texts can easily lend itself to the promotion of the “dead white guy” tradition, I nevertheless believe that such a course would be beneficial to undergraduate (and perhaps graduate) students. The very identification of “rival” traditions suggests the identification of a primary (for lack of a better word) tradition against which other traditions are compared. A critique of the concept of the Great Books course could be incorporated into the syllabus, forcing students to ask who decides which books are Great and why. Perhaps instead of, or in addition to, a Great Books course, we should consider a Great Theorists course (I would call it Major Approaches to Literature to avoid the artificial distinction between literature and theory that we have discussed previously), which would consist of a chronological survey of how (and why) we have studied literature, including the “close reading” technique which purports not to use theory. I feel I would be a much better scholar if I had had the opportunity to take a Great Books course and a Great Theorists course. I would even consider making them prerequisites for all other literature courses.

On a largely unrelated note...

Why does culture have to be considered only as inseparable from national identity, as Bill Readings indicates? Admittedly, I have not read Humboldt, and perhaps this explains my problem with Readings’ reading of culture. According to the OED, culture has also been defined as the “cultivation or development of the mind, faculties, manners” or the “improvement by education and training”—and, by extension, the “refinement of mind, taste, and manners” and “artistic and intellectual development”—since at least the 17^th century. Surly this notion of culture is still relevant to the university’s place in society? (A return to Matthew Arnold would be useful here). I would be interested to discuss what we think “culture” means and how it relates to the contemporary concept of the university, and what we see as its role or function in society.

Don’t Worry, It’s Educational

I thought about watching A Doll’s House. Mostly what I thought was that I didn’t want to watch it. I did try to download it as a torrent but the file only made it to 0.3% (turns out it’s not such a common text). What did finish downloading was loudQUIETloud, a documentary about the Pixies. I watched that instead (don’t worry, as an emancipated spectator I’m allowed). Happily, the Pixies have a song about university; it’s from their 1991 album Trompe le Monde (which I think is Portuguese or something) and is called “U-Mass.” If you don’t know it, here are the lyrics:

In the sleepy west of the woody east
is a valley full, full o' pioneers
we're not just kids, to say the least
we got ideas, to us that's dear
like capitalist, like communist
like lots of things you've heard about
and redneckers they get us pissed
and stupid stuff, it makes us shout
oh dance with me, oh don't be shy
oh kiss me cunt, oh kiss me cock
oh kiss the world, oh kiss the sky
oh kiss my ass, oh let it rock
of the April birds and the May-bee
oh baby
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
University
of Massachusetts, please
and here's the last five
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational
it's educational.

Which brings me to my final point: I don’t understand this colloquium thing. Did we move on from the “big” (how big? BIG) questions that we were supposed to ask earlier? Did we get those covered and sorted and answered? Are we on to bigger questions? Are we supposed to be serious now or not serious? Are we writing responses or questions or blog posts? Are we voting about which responses/questions/blog posts we like best and breaking into groups to talk about them? Are we having class in Salter or outside again? Did we figure out if we’re elitist or common? Do we need common texts? Do we want not to be elitist but still want to get paid a lot to do whatever it is that we do? Do we love the questions enough? Are we poorly treated or just jealous of The Sciences? Should we get guns and move to the mountains or learn to row (“row” as in paddle backwards, not fight)? Do we like theory or not? For last month’s response I watched the film twice and did all the readings carefully. I know we’re supposed to pretend that we spew out brilliance (or mediocrity) with little effort, but I spent a lot of time on my response. I rewrote it several times and tried really hard. I read everyone else’s responses too and am sure other people also put a lot of work in. But we didn’t talk about any of them, really. Do we get graded on this thing? Can we fail it (i.e. for not being emancipated enough or for not increasing the font-size of our questions enough or for being too (non)serious)? Are we supposed to just bask in the comfort that we’re now, finally, engaged with the conditions of our existence? Whereas all along we’ve just been….

I’ve come to suspect that the colloquium is an experiment conducted by the department and that the students are the test-subjects—the rats, if you will.

Pre-Experiment conditioning: tell the rats nothing about the colloquium; tell them to sign up for it only in one semester but neglect to mention that they will be taking it not only all this year but also all next year.

First Colloquium: get the rats comfortable within their environment.

Second Colloquium: see how the rats respond to a common enemy; establish common enemy by ranting at them and expressing general “disappointment”; what is their collective affective response?

Third Colloquium: establish a MacIntyresque conflict by pitting YesTheory rats against NoTheory rats (by the way, I think this is fantastic—I love the conflict idea. Let’s get shirts made: if you’re on the YesTheory team you get a shirt with YT on it; if you’re on the NoTheory team you get a shirt with NT on it; if you’re more like, “I dunno, Maybe…,” you get a shirt with MT on it. The hallway-fights will be epic.

YT: “You and your texts are just discursive constructs blinded by the forces of your unrelfexive ideologies.”

NT: “You’ve just lost your essence.”

MT, sobbing in the corner: “I feel so hollow….”

I especially like that MacIntyre thinks we can macroscope these internal conflicts into institutional ones. Let’s pick someone relatively obscure and all write about herm (that’s my word for him/her—it’s better than him/her; you can use it too). People could talk about The Edmonton School and its focus on whateveritiswechoose. We could attack other universities in the country for not being as awesome as we are—for asking questions that are much too small. The conflict would rage and there would be no settling down. It would be blood and by the gallons; the old days; the bad old days; the all-or-nothing days.

I digress.)

Fourth Colloquium: Not sure. I think we’ll probably extend the couple minutes of quiet contemplation into three hours, with a break in the middle; how do the rats respond to prolonged periods of silence?

Post-ironic, I'm not sure if I'm being serious or not.

Dude1: "Aw, here comes that cannon-ball guy: he's cool."

Dude2: "Are you bein' sarcastic, dude?"

Dude1: "I don't even know anymore."

But don’t worry, it’s educational.

Random Thoughts

Since I have yet to watch the BBC version of “A Doll’s House” that’s been assigned, I thought I’d just post a collection of random thoughts in response to the Macintyre and Readings articles.

Reading mentions that, in universities, “the drive to push out Ph.D.s within four years continues unabated, despite the fact that there are no jobs for them to occupy, either in the university or elsewhere” (479). We’ve touched on this fact several times in our own discussions, and the tone suggests a tension between an acknowledgment that we don’t expect graduate school to supply us with jobs and indignation that we won’t be employable. In my view this points to a broader tension in the University around money, beginning with the awareness that jobs = money = livelihood and yet discomfort with the idea that we earn money at all, since money is in the service of capitalism and therefore enforces certain kinds of value. Then there is the belief, held within the university institution, that society as a whole should monetarily support universities (because ultimately everyone benefits when some members of society are critically aware) combined with an unwillingness to accept that other people’s ideas of money – exchanging value for value – will be attached to the money which supports the institution. Clearly there are two different discourses operating around the same referent. What this means for the university as a whole I don’t know; I see the problem but I don’t have an alternative to offer. But I do think it’s worth investigating the different levels on which these assumptions operate, because how else can we see another side to the contradiction?

I’m also very curious about the role computers / information technologies play in entrenching the idea of accounting as accountability. Computers run on numbers; they run on quantitative renditions of ideas. While complex systems can be built that allow human interpretation of bigger ideas, information must always be massaged in certain ways in order to integrate it with computer systems. While computer systems of ‘thought’ are getting more and more sophisticated, aren’t they also responsible for promoting ‘interoperability’ and ‘accounting’ so we’re all always on the same page? While this is usually taken for granted as a being good thing, doesn’t it also mask many essential subtleties? As the university becomes more and more engaged with and dependent upon technology, are there ways we can stay critically aware of the flattening effects of technology?

Macintyre, in discussing the position of ethics discussion in the medical sciences etc., writes that “in this realm what is in fact inconclusive intellectual debate nonetheless issues in the practical resolution of problems, a resolution the arbitrariness of which it is the function of both philosophical and professional rhetoric to conceal” (227). For myself, I wonder: what is the point of the philosophizing in the first place if we can’t offer some practical application? Also, isn’t the discussion of ethics an ongoing one? What stands today may not stand tomorrow, even if the decision is arbitrary rather than the best practical decision available at the time given all the factors at play. Isn’t this similar to the process of philosophical debate itself. I wonder whether Readings isn’t more approachable on this topic (even though his argument of ‘dwelling in the tension of the question rather than searching for a single answer’ is similar) in that he seems not to resent the constant forming and re-forming that takes place through the philosophical process. Is philosophy, or critical inquiry, really about a process we value because it can produce new ways of thinking, or ‘results’? Is this too simple an explanation? If it isn’t, why is this such a hard sell?

I too was struck by the proposal of a more antagonistic discourse within the university, which I think MacIntyre is implying will link to more possibilities for relevance outside the institution – that by excluding that which has not fit into the “agreed” status quo (219), the thinking within Universities is necessarily divorced from real significance within larger social contexts.

And I will confess that seeing the department counsel debate for an hour on whether to name graduate courses as “texts” or “literature” confirmed some of this for me: here was a space of dissonance that would likely be irrelevant, even a source for mockery, if taken into larger contexts. Some faculty argued for the aesthetics, history, and importance of the term ‘literature,’ while others suggested that the inclusivity of the term ‘text’ renders it the most descriptive of what the department actually offers – and yet the I wondered about the significance behind the debate. What’s actually at stake in the top-level naming of courses? Is there a territorial violence done in the changing of the terms? Was this a debate of MacIntyre’s “moral significance” or was it, as Readings might see it, a pragmatic shift being resisted by scholars operating in an older (possibly nostalgic?) tradition?

As debates go, this wasn’t really a very good one. Proponents of the literature side seemed to largely simply suggest that in some cases the term ‘literature’ would be more concise a term, or a more aesthetically agreeable one, without really taking up the proposing of an alternative to the proposed term “text.” On the other side (and I’m generalizing here), the proponents of the term “text” spoke of the term’s greater applicability in context of oral traditions, and non-canonical texts, and only in one instance were the political ramifications of the term shift addressed. The two sides were certainly at odds, and some voices were more antagonistic than others, but I really didn’t sense that this dissonance was a productive exploration (MacIntyre 232), nor that even given some strenuous objections that there would be any kind of opportunity for evaluation (a quiet voice next to me suggested we use “literature and texts” but no new proposal of this kind was really taken up).

Additionally, the politics of the term ‘text’ speak in some ways to Readings’ observation of a new “cultural studies” paradigm that perhaps serves a more pragmatic purpose than some existing models – the conscious move to a term that shifts away from existing, canonical hierarchies makes sense to me, but I can also see that there is inherent within this move a further codifying of the term ‘literature’ as something that fails to signify properly, in effect concretizing a connection between the term and its hierarchical deficiencies. This was of course a pragmatic decision that needed to be made, but it still struck me that if it was worth talking about for more than an hour, then the debate might have produced more than the sense of either an indulgence on the side of the movers to let the dissenters ‘have their say’ without really needing to respond to it, or the non-productive dissent being raised without proposing a new paradigm. Perhaps I’m locked into a consensus building model, but I certainly didn’t see any kind of real space for dissent here – the decision made beforehand, and the dissent being voiced mostly in a resigned, sometimes nostalgic way.

My response to this debate echoes Angela's in that perhaps a productive (generous?) reading of MacIntyre’s model is a life-long engagement with difficult conflict -- but one invested with a commitment to respect. Lindsay’s connection between A Doll’s House and the Readings and MacIntyre readings about a call for change is something I see as well, all though I will confess in a slightly more defeated manner (today). I have always felt suspicious of the championing of Nora’s exit from the Helmer house: not because I think she should stay, but because it seems to me from her complete lack of knowledge about the world outside of her domestic sphere, of the extreme potentiality of consequences for her actions, that Nora is screwed. She doesn’t have Kristina’s office experience, or any other resources (unless she will have some support from Dr Rank). Perhaps what makes this play so disturbing to me is the sense that really, Nora was out of luck either way. Perhaps what I’m feeling today is that while it may be important to challenge our notions of the university's social engagement and to embrace a more dissonance-phillic approach to lectures and the collation and circulation of knowledges, this is a) not likely to become a productive space – perhaps through the lack of respect mentioned in other posts, b) not likely to result in the reversal of a corporate university model and student-consumerism that devalues much of what we do, and c) not going to change the fact that we, like Nora, are likely SOL anyway.

PS sorry andy for being so serious! I really am more fun than this. sometimes.

For Every Action there is a Story

J. Edward Chamberlin states that “Pluralism is a danger not because it creates conflicts, as [Arnold] thought, but because it masks them” (If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories 25). I think that this danger is in part what MacIntyre is getting at when he claims that “the liberal university aspires to be a university of unconstrained agreements and hence its abolition of religious and moral tests and exclusions, and hence also, so I have argued, its present endangered state” (230). I find MacIntyre’s call for dialogue and conflict challenging, but I also think that his criticism of the university is in part correct.

Why do we read literature? Why do we study and/or teach it? Why is it valuable? As an undergraduate student at The King’s University College one of the answers I inherited was that we read literature to know that we are not alone, and we read literature in order to understand ourselves and each other more clearly and more deeply. But inevitably, through literature, we will also come across worldviews that conflict with our own. How do we read texts that challenge us in this way? By adopting an easy pluralism, sometimes it feels like today’s secular universities do not acknowledge incommensurability of worldviews.

These questions are important for me and my work with Aboriginal literature. In his Massey Lectures Thomas King claims “If we see the world through Adam’s eyes, we are necessarily blind to the world that Charm and the Twins and the animals help to create. If we believe one story to be sacred, we must see the other as secular” (The Truth About Stories 25). Similarly, Tomson Highway continually draws his readers’ and audience’s attention to the conflict that exists between Christian and Cree worldviews. This conflict deserves attention, energy, and work. It is not enough to simply say that both stories are equally valid without investing yourself in a real struggle for understanding. It is also too easy to simply say that “I don’t believe either story is sacred.” I have been studying Cree for the past two and half years. The more I learn of the language and culture the more I learn how discordant my language and my culture is. As I learn Cree I am continually reminded how “white” I am, and how “white” my thoughts and philosophy are. I believe we are all deeply affected by Western society’s traditions of thought.

In response to Camille’s criticism of MacIntyre putting too much emphasis on conflict I would like to suggest that perhaps MacIntyre is calling for a life-long struggle with conflicting worldviews. The conflicts he points to are not ones that will be solved in any 3-credit university course classroom. I see his call for conflict as a call for all of us to look carefully at our own worldviews, and to bring them honestly to bear in our approaches to literature and teaching.

This honesty is for me, at times, terrifying. Especially as (as Camille aptly points out) some aspects of identity are more acceptable for discussion than others, and some identity groups have been privileged above others. Religion, for example, seems to be one aspect of identity that is currently not an acceptable point of reference in a secular university.

Perhaps my dread at the thought of displaying and exploring such honesty in our colloquium, or Camille’s discomfort with MacIntyre’s call for conflict points to the need for these discussions to take place within a mutually honest and respectful atmosphere (an atmosphere that has yet to be established).

I want to focus on something that somewhat relates to Camille's comment that McIntyre might be ultimately conservative in his reconception of the university as a territory of conflict. What disturbed me in the text was his constant insistence on morality and theology as the fundamental topics of university life: with the liberal university, "moral and theological truth ceased to be recognized as objects of substantive inquiry and instead were relegated to the realm of privatized belief" (217).

If he's going to advertise a model based on Thomist thought, then I suppose it makes sense that morality and theology should be at the heart of it. But who goes to the university for specifically moral or theological training? I feel like his analysis implies the belief that the current university model is amoral and atheistic, and that it is a bad thing. When he talks about "adapting the university to a modern context", he never says what that might entail, especially concerning theology. In our field, we are taken to task to deconstruct the structure of religion, "conventional" morality and everything they represent: racism, homophobia, etc. How do you reconcile a mission such as McIntyre envisions it with the reality that it is the university's (or at least the humanities') role to break apart the oppressive systems around us? I feel like a Thomist university would simply take us back instead of bringing us forward. And, there's plenty of confrontation in the humanities! He decries the fact that there is no consensus in reading the Great Books curriculum, and yet he says consensus is a bad thing.

I agree with Camille that his model just reinscribes the patriarchal system that the last decades have done so much to take down (not that it's all gone, but at least we're trying). Which is where I find some hope in Readings: while he doesn't propose anything specific, I think he is also trying to deconstruct the system around the perception of the university and its profoundly patriarchal (and capitalist) basis in "excellence". Of course as professors we'll always have to ascribe grades to papers and evaluate the status of a student's learning, but I'm sure we could reflect on ways to mitigate the competitive approach to grades, especially in the humanities.

Which brings me to Nora and A Doll's House, I suppose; one of my favourite lines is when she exclaims at the end that she doesn't know what religion is. Does she need to go to a Thomist-style university where she'll be forcefully fed, through a masculine confrontational system, different doctrines (and hence the "right" doctrine depending on who wins the argument) or should she instead go in a space where relative freedom from oppressive systems (or at least a space where she can discover and deconstruct them) will let her make up her own mind through the experience of a variety of texts and methods? If I am to reach "excellence" in one of the two systems, I'd rather it was the second.