Examined Life

I understand we’re all a bit sceptical that a film that gives 10 minutes to 8 representatives will have anything profound to say about the public face of philosophy. I don’t think that being profundity is the goal, though, because the film itself is a glossy, stylized walk through various settings—we feel like we’re just passing these people on the street or having a conversation with them at a party. It seems somehow fitting since it’s interspersed with shots of random people living their lives, about whom I couldn’t help but make assumptions (based on dress, demeanour, what-have-you). We have very little information about other people, but we feel we can somehow imagine they are or aren’t examining their lives. I’m not quite sure what it means to examine one’s life, if it’s an activity or a mode, but I think it is something along the line of living deliberately, making sure that you are aware of your own motivations and, as much as you can, the consequences of your actions.

The movie is about philosophy, but my work is literature and film. Yes, they’re all part of a greater humanities and I’m a fan of intersdisciplinary studies, but I want to think specifically about what it means to read texts. It’s fun to look at meter and rhyme in poetry and stylistic devices and description in prose, but what are we really getting at when we make claims about texts? We can recall the internet video I’m sure we’ve all watched about the naive student who has “important things to say about death in literature.” What about death in the world? How do we separate the incredible specificity of our work in textual analysis with philosophical claims? I like writing about semicolons in Elizabeth Bowen; how do I make that relevant not only to the public but to an examination of my own life? I was having a conversation with someone working on a presentation who said he didn’t want to overinterpret the text. I didn’t really get what “overinterpret” means so we thought about it together for a while and preliminarily concluded that we didn’t want to impose too much of ourselves onto it, or what we wish the text was saying, or what fits our own worldview. I’ve been thinking about this problem more, thanks to the Colloquium and the general emphasis on “big stakes” at U of A that I didn’t have at my previous university. In good Socratic fashion: What does it mean to interpret literature? What does it mean to tell stories? What does it mean to live in a community? What are the responsibilities of professional thinkers to the public? And, of course, why so serious?

Back to the film: like many, I enjoyed Cornell West’s fragmented appearances. Zizek was fun, always, but he’s becoming a grouch who seems to want to be contrarian just for the shock value (“You call this pornography? Oh no, my god.”). West spoke to something that I experience: alternating intensity and boredom. We share the same love for Beethoven’s final piano sonata; the first time I heard it I needed everyone to listen to it. How could people live without it? But I could never write about my favourite music—why? And what about boredom? When the things that really make you feel alive are too intense so you need a break and just shut down completely? Ennui might be a better term. I think we need to embrace that feeling sometimes instead of feeling anxious about not engaging with our wonderful texts all the time.

I think of these responses as a starting point, with the real work going on collectively when we meet. So, here’s to a productive conversation!

comments

For whatever reason, I cannot post comments on the blog posts, so I will have to put them all here

Re: Why so serious?!

Andy -- I am right behind you with your thoughts on seriousness and the attendant dangers of shutting down intellectual growth. I've been giving some thought to the construction of a hegemonic academic and in particular, I am wondering who upholds that image. Certainly, to the increasingly corporatist administration, I am sure the only part of that "tweed-wearing, pipe smoking, old, white man sitting at Oxford or Harvard" you mention that they would like to see is the old part -- and by "old" I mean "dead." But perhaps, like all hegemonic forces, this is how the rest of the university (indeed, perhaps the rest of society) views us. If that is the case, would not taking ourselves seriously (beyond allowing ourselves the opportunity to be wrong and leave our tender little egos at the door for a moment) be one of the most efficacious modes of political struggle (in terms of fighting for humanities learning) in which we would engage?

Re: Why Bother?

Why shouldn't researchers in medical/scientific fields justify their existence? I suspect many of them do, they just happen to have a smaller burden of proof than do we. My first reaction upon seeing the competition you mention was "stop relying on graduate students YET AGAIN and hire a gawd-damned PR firm already." If we have to justify our work to a certain audience, we are already engaged in a specific kind of discourse. Let's launch an advertising campaign already so that we can all get back to working instead of reacting.

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In defense of theory (and a response to the film)

I am curious about the reactions to theory. In my mind, theory is not the exclusive realm of philosophers and we enter into all kinds of trouble when we collapse the two. Theory shares the same project as poetry: it struggles to express ways of knowing and being in the world that cannot be contained by language. Take Judith Butler, for example. A number of people registered surprise at how lucid she was in the film, noting (rightfully so) that her language is often dense and impenetrable. But isn't that the point? Her project is, in part, about the impossibility of language as a communication tool. One sees much the same thing in Elliot, Donne, or Atwood. This is certainly not to suggest that theory is the only path of acquiring knowledge in the world, nor that there is only one kind of theory. Yes there are trends, but a paper that does not engage with Marx is not a lesser paper. Fuck Marx, or Butler, or Derrida, or whoever else. Being able to consider the implications of the Hegelian project on neo-liberal constructions of time is not a measure of intelligence. Sticking to your guns and knowing your own field is such a measure. There will always be people who try to make you feel bad about yourself because you don't use their theory. Rest assured that most of them are desperately insecure. But even if one works in the most obscure branch of literature, one is still engaging on some level with theoretical frameworks.

I should say that I think of theory and practice as two very different things, although they exist in a co-dependent relationship. Whenever I hear someone decry theory in the Humanities, I want to ask: why are you here? Humanistic academic learning (and feel free to disagree) is always based in theory, for the purpose of producing theory. Certainly that can look like a number of different things, but humanistic learning is not about practice. The push to make it so is a contributing factor behind the decade-long attack against the humanities and all the silly reasons why we need to justify our existence.

I do think theory gives me a guideline on how to live my life. Is it the only guideline? Certainly not. In the three years I spent working between my MA and PhD I bumped up against the theory/practice divide every single day. I had studied, thought about, and written on feminist pedagogical praxis for years, but when the time came to actually apply those theories, the messiness of life interrupted and I was left faking it. But at the same time, when I was trying to develop a practice to react to a certain situation, theory was always there as a tool, a guideline. Like any good scientist, I can now use those experiences to refine theory. And so the great circle of intellectual development continues.

Re: The Examined Life. I fully agree with Singer's statement that the decision to spend money is a political act and is one of the most potent sites of resistance that subjects in a capitalist economy have. Can you image what would happen if everyone stopped shopping at Wal-Mart for a week? My question, though, is this: with whom does the burden of ethics lie? Let's take the university for example. As graduate students, tuition is paid on our behalf (whether out of our own pocket or through scholarships/packages). We are all well aware that the jobs that our PhD program are ostensibly preparing us for no longer exist. Therefore, universities have an ethical problem. However, is the burden of ethics on them for not being able/willing to provide the kind of career implicitly promised by the programs, or is it on us for handing over our money in the first place and thus complicity agreeing with what is happening?

I deleted my earlier message because after discussing with some colleagues I realized that my words greatly exceeded my intention and it seemed hostile to a part of academic studies which I don't yet quite understand. I think Camille has put it in much better words than I did, and I want to apologize to anyone whom I might have offended with my first post. As Andy so brilliantly shows, I messed up, and I want to move on.

I feel like Camille in the fact that I find it hard to identify with theoretical traditions. I've read a wide range of philosophical works, and it seems that I understand philosophy and theory in a contextual way, which has little bearing on how I act in everyday life. That said, I do realize that theories in all their different ways influence how I do my work, however it happens in an unconscious, organic way almost. It's like thinking about how suffragettes did not need feminist theory to understand the concept of patriarchy, for example. Theory for me is never a conscious, deliberate approach. I get an idea from a close reading, and I find a theory that helps to frame it. My work is determined by close readings and ideas that appear spontaneously as I read, not by a specific theory which I want to apply to a text. This is why I suppose I find using theory as a starting point is limiting somewhat. But again, that's just me, and some great work has been done using theory as a starting point, and I acknowledge the importance of these works.

I've been reflecting on my own earlier writing and realizing that I didn't quite examine it as I should have, and this is an answer to this examination which has kept me from sleeping for the last two nights. I'm currently taking a translation theory class (I'm not hostile to theory at all, as a concept), and what's interesting is that we're looking at these theories as they influence a translation practice. Translation theories are rooted in the act of translation, and the problems that this act entails. Each theoretical paradigm takes on a specific problem and tries to systematize an aspect of translation practice. They are rooted both in action and in text, and that makes it really easy to see their usefulness. The way I'd like to start thinking about literary theory is how they help frame the act of interpretation of literature, in a similar way as translation theory does with translation. I think I would be able to relate more easily to theory if it was presented as a way to understand the act of literary interpretation, which is our professional act just as translation is the act of the translator.

In my experience theory comes off as this highly abstract thing that tries to explain everything, but that is ultimately difficult to link to any physical, practical, material action. It may be that this premise is wrong, and I would love to be shown differently. But if I start thinking about theory as a framework through which many different acts of reading may be explained or systematized, then it makes a lot more sense. I just wish that it were made more accessible, and less "necessary" in the sense that Camille explains. If my work doesn't fit in the fashionable theoretical paradigm of the day, does it make it worthless? If I'm not using marxism or feminism or another -ism as my "lineage", can I still be a good literary scholar? Is good scholarship dependent on its fitting in these theoretical categories?

These are genuine questions that I am asking myself right now, and if they are necessary then I have to shift how I conceive my work. But if it is not, then why do I feel such pressure to do it anyway?

Whose lives do we want to examine, anyway?

I confess, like many other class members apparently, I found “The Examined Life” rather uninspiring. While I liked pieces of it, on the whole it didn’t really get my mental synapses firing. Reading the other posts on this blog did, though; thanks for that, everyone. A couple of comments in particular really resonated with me. I had the same response to Annabelle’s rhetorical question: “Theory as guidelines on how to live a human life? I don’t think so”, and Camille’s comment: “I am scared by the seemingly required use / deferral to theory” articulated my own reticence about theory in a way I hadn’t been able to. I think what I sense in these comments, and in my own thoughts about the film, is frustration with the idea (which Hardt so well expressed) that humanity needs to be “transformed”, that somehow theory has a sense of what is right and how people should behave, if only the masses (or even the doctoral students) could somehow be molded to fit the right model, or ‘buy in’ to the right idea.

Now, I realize not all theorists agree with this. Martha Nussbaum, for example, took great care to express that social theory, if it hopes to be effective or sustainable, must look at how people actually are. A theory of justice that works for everyone requires consideration not only of the different challenges facing various members of society but the very real fact that people grow and age, that our bodies today will not be those we have indefinitely. For me, this idea tied in with Cornel West’s interrogation of the Romantic Ideal, an ideal much theory has failed to challenge (even Marxist revolution, advocate for change though it is, believes than an ‘ideal’ space is possible). The belief that there is or was some universal which can accommodate everyone is bogus; can we please stop believing in it now?

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that theory, at least as I understand it, falls short of grasping life. I think it can be used as a tool to explain some facets of life (hence why literary scholars have embraced it as a way of reading texts). But if we really want to take the idea of ‘examining life’ seriously, doesn’t it make sense to stop thinking about how to express our own ideas and instead learn how to listen to what ‘ordinary people’ are trying to share with us? How do we know which ideas to teach ‘the masses’ if we don’t stop and hear the kinds of ideas these people are talking about on a daily basis? Rachel articulated a version of problem well in her discussion of West’s segment: “I found it kind of hilarious to listen to him offer these points as he sits ensconced in a car, driven by the director, making comments about the ignorance of people walking around him,” believing that “there’s a lot more going on in his mind than in those of the people going by in the street”. If philosophers in the academy continue to believe that they know more about life than those walking by them in the street (particularly those uneducated people walking by), then how can we trust their ideas? If they disdain the way most people live, why do we believe that they’re ideas are right? Doesn’t this fly in the face of the democratic ideal? Doesn’t the future of our discipline depend on understanding first and foremost where other people are at, rather than assuming a) we know they aren’t where they ‘should be’, and that b) we can help them get there?

What I’m trying to say here is: what makes certain kinds of knowledge, or even particular ways of framing that knowledge, ‘better’ or ‘smarter’ or ‘right’? Why do academics believe they are closer to this sense of what’s ‘right’ than the students, or members of society, they are trying to ‘teach’ (read: indoctrinate)? If Andy is right, that “for the most part, it seemed as though the academics interviewed just enjoyed hearing themselves speak” (I agree that this is a point of frustration!), can’t we at least stop speaking as if we know the answers?

On a total aside – I watched this with my husband and he said “I learned more in listening to these guys speak for 10 minutes than I would have in reading 500 pages of their work” (some of whom he has in fact read, so this isn’t totally pulled out of thin air). To me this raised the question of why the academic community continues, for the most part, to disseminate ideas in written form. Like Camille I found myself very interested in the peripheral aspects of each sequence, rather than (just) the ideas; clearly the human brain gleans a lot from visual cues, body language, setting etc. So why not explore film? It would at least help us get away from the academic penchant for “dollar words”…

Random Thoughts on the Film and the Book Excerpts

Response to the film:

When scholars in this film are asked to talk about self-examination, they turn to the issue one’s relationship with others and with the world at large. Avital Ronell proposes, for example, ethical relatedness (“The responsible being is one who thinks he is never responsible enough.”); Peter Singer reflects upon the ethics of individual consumption in relation to others. And Kwame Anthony Appiah’s monologue is specifically about the cosmopolitan mindset. While watching Appiah walking through an international airport with his suitcase and talking about his cosmopolitan family background (“I have the privilege of growing up in a couple of places. My mother came from England; my father came from Ghana.”), it suddenly occurred to me that to a number of people, including scholars (I do not mean Appiah), cosmopolitanism is perhaps more like some kind of capital to possess than a social ideal to strive for. Some people feel that they are superior to others because they think they have the knowledge and skills, or economic means, which can provide them with transnational mobilities that make ordinary people envy. For example, university professors are invited to different places in the world to attend conferences and deliver lectures; and this may be considered by them as an intellectual asset to show off. Now returning to cosmopolitanism as a social ideal. Cosmopolitanism envisages a world in which everybody is responsible for each other collectively, and in which diversities and differences are acknowledged and respected. This concept is tantalizing indeed, but it is equally vague. So it is worth pondering whether this utopian vision could be pinned down empirically in current situations (not just in the sense of the global exchange of goods) and whether the idealistic sentiment in mind could be transformed into concrete actions.

Response to the book excerpts:

Not until the early 1980s after the opening-up policy in China did Chinese scholars of foreign literature came into large contact with the Western literary discourse. New Criticism was the first literary school that was introduced into China, though it, by that time, had already fallen out of favor in the West. Now with three decades past, New Criticism teaching techniques still hold sway in almost all English departments in China at both graduate and undergraduate level. I picked up French theories hither and thither, and my knowledge of them is really patchy. Still, I indicated in my PhD application research proposal (“Exploring Contemporary American Cityscapes through the New Yorker Stories”) that I would draw on Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, together with many other scholarly sources such as Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, to examine the literary representation of particularized experiences of urban individuals in concrete realities. I first got to know his ideas when I was working as one of the TAs translating for the summer course “Feminist Cultural Studies” taught by two professors visiting our school from the University of Michigan. It was the first time that I was introduced to, in a more systematic way, diverse French intellectuals such as Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Pierre Bourdieu. If I am to situate my PhD project in an intellectual tradition, I hope it can reflect the rich legacies of everyday life theorizing. Some representative thinkers include Lefebvre, Debord, Certeau, and Bakhtin. Lefebvre in his Critique of Everyday Life criticizes the well-entrenched disregard for the everyday life and stresses its resistant qualities against alienation caused by modern consumer capitalism. Debord mourns for the degradation of social life from being into having and now into appearing, and proposes, together with other Situationists, the ideas of détournement and derive for an unalienated “authentic experience.” Certeau, unlike Lefebvre and Debord, who call for a total revolution of everyday life, discovers the creative nature of consumption and popular culture and celebrates the spontaneous energy of ordinary people. Bakhtin emphasizes the carnivalesque quality of the everyday, which can transgress the routinized and habitual aspects of daily life. I hope these intellectual resources with their micro-level perspective will in some way enlighten my exploration of the individual experience in the urban environment.

Learning to Learn Theory

The group I watched Examined Life with agreed that most of the clips presented interesting ideas that we could further engage with or use. To be honest, though, we were more interested in the somewhat distracting elements of the film’s production (whose idea was it put a philosopher in a rowboat? how do the clips’ settings reflect/undermine the philosopher’s message? What questions does Astra Taylor prompt her interviewees with?) than we were in the actual content of the philosopher’s interviews. I guess we were watching it like a movie, reading the whole text, and not engaging exclusively with its ideas. I guess we shouldn’t ask why it was a film, and not a radio production, or a play, because that demonstrates a failure to engage with the text in a big picture way. So, the film was neat, and fine, and I guess it must matter, but resulted in no great sea change of thought or profound reorganization of my thinking about theory. This response should not be confused for apathy or disengagement. I was actually really interested in Zizek‘s point about embracing catastrophe: I found his argument—we as humans ultimately benefit from catastrophes—profound and to my experiences truthful. Which is great, until you try to apply it. For example, I attended the Friday night screening of Zacharias Kunuk’s newest film Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. Can you imagine going north and telling the Inuit inhabitants of villages where, because of the permafrost melt, the ground is liquefying below them, where the landscape from which their culture has arisen is completely changing, to embrace the catastrophe of climate change? You could similarly go to France and tell the Sarkozy government to embrace rather than resist France’s burgeoning Islamic population, a demographic shift this government interprets as a catastrophe for traditional French culture. From these examples I could deconstruct Zizek’s model about dinosaurs and petroleum by arguing that today’s catastrophes are man-made and reflect the unbalanced power relations that French theory has so well analyzed but still failed to eliminate; that today’s catastrophes result in the homogenization of cultural variety and reduction of traditional knowledge available on this planet, things we deem valuable. But this response, too, is a failure, for simply deconstructing. I’m not being glib, but I am finding it very hard to adjust my reading strategies. Still, I think my ability to recognize this tendency in my work is a step in the right direction.

I am scared by the seemingly required use/deferral to theory: what can be original about the use of theory? Is it not a limiting system? Does theory persist to be a viable academic pursuit because we have new texts to apply it to, or does theory actually allow its user to create something new? It’s funny: we have been asked to consider what theory means to us and how it influences our studies/the world in the same class where we have been incited to stop using our deconstructive reading habits because they don’t offer anything new or exciting, and limit rather than deepen our discussion.

Cusset’s questioning of the role of theory in society, away from academia, made me wonder whether French theory has activist aims. If so, haven’t they been realized? One potential reason why not is that French theory benefits very little from any kind of intellectual trickledown effect, pooling by virtue of its inaccessibility in academia and circles of higher leaning, and has little impact on the other 98% of the population. This very inaccessibility undercuts the theory’s Marxist or egalitarian aims: how can we deconstruct the power structures that persist in today’s world when the texts that teach us how to do so must be interpreted to populations by academics? If, that is, this interpretation occurs at all. Historically there have been great concerns about populations having access to religious texts in their own language: such access would change how individuals thought about the world and their role in it. This is not the case for French theory, as it may as well be Latin.

If my response seems uneducated, it is because it is. For myself, theory is not a tradition, or an intellectual inheritance, but a technique, like any number of techniques I use, which is more or less effective. It is also a technique I am poorly skilled in, which is probably why I can recognize my use of theory’s tactics but am still unable to think beyond them. I understand every act of reading to simultaneously be an act of interpretation, and that in this sense every act of reading is also an act of theorization. But some readings/ theorizations are better or more useful than others, so we privilege them in academia. I struggle greatly just trying to understand theoretical texts, and for the most part I can’t forgive them their inaccessibility. This said, I recognize my need to reconcile with theory if I am to go on in academia, not only because I doubt there has been a dissertation submitted to any North American English Department in the last 10 years that does not reference Foucault, or Derrida, or Deleuze etc, but also because I suspect there is some intellectual amplification afforded to those who genuinely engage with theory. To this end, I would be deeply grateful if someone, professor or student, would help me learn how to learn theory.