And by “he” you mean “everyone”?
“He had a constant interest in ideas, which made him an entertaining companion. They meant nothing to him really, since they never had any effect on him; but he treated them as he might have pieces of china in an auction-room, handling them with pleasure in their shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and then, putting them back into their case, thought of them no more.” (Maugham, Of Human Bondage)
If you treat ideas as tools rather than as pieces of china, are they then actually tools (I almost said “do they then become tools” but that’s not what I mean), or do you just end up trying to hammer with a china plate and breaking the plate all over the floor and having to find a broom—a real broom, not an idea-broom—to clean it all up?
In other news on the abstraction front, I don’t know what an opinion is. Plato’s definition never really made sense to me—or at least I assume that’s why I can’t remember a thing he said on the subject—and neither does anyone else’s. It’s hard to teach kids to express their opinions, not to mention back up their opinions with “evidence,” if you don’t know what you’re trying to teach them.
Fanon
“Forgetting racism as a consequence, one concentrates on racism as cause. Campaigns of deintoxication are launched. Appeal is made to the sense of humanity, to love, to respect for the supreme values…
“Race prejudice in fact obeys a flawless logic. A country that lives, draws its substance from the exploitation of other peoples, makes those poeples inferior. Race prejudice applied to those peoples is normal.
“Racism is therefore not a constant of the human spirit.” (from the essay “Racism and Culture”)
Funny: before I read that happy final line, I was seeing only the direr (damn, I almost said “darker”) consequences of Fanon’s inversion of causality, i.e., that nothing can be accomplished by appealing to senses of humanity and love and respect, all of which I understand at least to some degree—we must turn to the economy, which utterly baffles me. Yes, I know this is not a new revelation.
More Tillich
“Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. They are immanent within each other: The sting of fear is anxiety, and anxiety strives toward fear. Fear is being afraid of something, a pain, the rejection by a person or group, the loss of something or somebody, the moment of dying. But in the anticipation of the threat originating in these things, it is not the negativity itself which they will bring upon the subject that is frightening but the anxiety about the possible implications of this negativity. The outstanding example—and more than an example—is the fear of dying. Insofar as it is fear its object is the anticipated event of being killed by sickness or an accident and thereby suffering agony and the loss of everything. Insofar as it is anxiety its object is the absolutely unknown “after death,” the nonbeing which remains nonbeing even if it is filled with images of our present experience. . . . Each of the situations described in the Inferno could be met by courage on the basis of participation and love. But of course the meaning is that this is impossible; in other words they are not real situations but symbols of the objectless, of nonbeing.
“The fear of death determines the element of anxiety in every fear. Anxiety, if not modified by the fear of an object, anxiety in its nakedness, is always the anxiety of ultimate nonbeing. . . .
“This situation drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. It is impossible for a finite being to stand naked anxiety for more than a flash of time. People who have experienced these moments, as for instance some mystics in their visions of the ‘night of the soul,’ or Luther under the despair of the demonic assault or Nietzsche-Zarathustra in the experience of the ‘great disgust,’ have told of the unimaginable horror of it. This horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety; and there is a relation between the two. For facing the God who is really God means facing also the absolute threat of nonbeing. The ‘naked absolute’ (to use a phrase of Luther’s) produces ‘naked anxiety’; for it is the extinction of every finite self-affirmation, and not a possible object of fear and courage. But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.”
Andrew Solomon spent much of The Noonday Demon arguing that anxiety and depression are not middle-class phenomena, but I still feel guilty privileging the horror of existential anxiety over the horrors of object-ful fear, if only if I have a lot more of the former than the latter. Anxiety (as Tillich uses the term) is so much more aesthetically pleasing and ethically undemanding than fear. This is probably not a good thing.
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Plurality and Pluralism
This topic positively begs for a “vs.” in its title, but, in the interest of plurality—or is it pluralism?—I leave Either/Or to my beloved Kierkegaard and title this in the spirit of Both/And.
But about that spirit. In my senior year of college my father noticed that plurality had become something of a theme in (to put it pretentiously, especially for an undergraduate) “my work.” My senior essay began with the metaphysics of George Moore (the philosopher, not the novelist) and ended in the ethics of Virginia Woolf, somehow justifying its meandering from the former to the latter by invoking this concept of “plurality” or “both/and logic” or “multiple perspectives” or “cubism” or whatever you want to call it. Woolf, I said, used cubist perspective(s) in her writing to combat the decidedly anti-pluralist fascism in whose shadow she lived the last few years of her life. I titled my essay “The Threat of Truth” and saw it rather like a big fat tomato to be hurled at anyone preaching Accuracy.
A year later, I was reading The Satanic Verses for a graduate seminar with Homi Bhabha when I noticed my fingers itching to rip in half every oxymoronic doubleword the book inflicted upon me: “angelicdevilish,” informationinspiration,” and so on—and on and on and on. I felt deprived of meaning, not glutted with it, by these goodbad updown oppositepairs. The two halves cancelled; they did not add, and I, poor reader, was left with nothingness.
I am fascist, I thought. I who styled myself a lover of novels in all their polyvocal glory had betrayed not only Bakhtin but also democracy, dialogue—nay, tolerance itself. For Rushdie, “The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world… The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining.” Further, “It is a novel,” says Rushdie, that challenges “imposed orthodoxies of all types” and “the view that the world is quite clearly This and not That.” And I, poor lost soul, did not much care for it.
And then, as so often happens, a Ph.D. student at the University of Southern Denmark came to my rescue. Sten Pultz Moslund, in “An Analysis of the Discursive Strategies in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” doubts Rushdie’s (self-?)portrait of the novel as challenger of orthodoxies and usherer of newness into the world. For Moslund, “a claim like this may be said to represent a discourse of ‘an even more comprehensive secret unity, or a more extensive totality’, to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari, than discourses which openly discriminate (Deleuze & Guattari 2003, 6). That is, if a discourse ever wins on the basis that people think it represents a conquest of discourse, that it represents only freedom, its success will correspond to a dangerous conquest of criticism, so to speak, a conquest of desirable alternatives outside its inclusiveness. This would make an unquestioned domination of balance possible which, ironically, defies the movement and change many writers and critics think are so essential to freedom.” (Moslund, 17-18 )
Moslund goes on to say—actually he says this earlier in the article, but you know what I mean—“As Russell Jacoby observes in The End of Utopia, a basic contradiction may be identified at the heart of the idea of pluralism. On the one hand, there is a politics of difference which says that diverse ideas and states of being should be recognized and allowed to maintain a distinct identity. On the other hand, pluralism contains a principle of equality which says that no idea or state of being should be granted more power than others, all epistemologies must be able to co-exist on an equal footing (Jacoby 1999, 56). The question that needs to be asked on this background is: how open, inclusive and flexible is the idea of pluralism?
“As much as pluralism is an idea that encourages you to maintain diversity, it is also an idea that asks you not to be so different and singular that you extract yourself from its space of inclusiveness. In that way pluralism may be said to impose itself as a discourse of balance between difference and uniformity, confining any identity or truth formation within these two poles. Hence, the idea of pluralism ceases to be an idea that sets everything afloat and destabilizes fixed discursive structures. Rather, it emerges as a fixed structure that sets up limits of alternative development. Rather than functioning as an exponent of shifting power relations, pluralism paradoxically reveals itself as a new totality.” (Moslund, 14)
Oh. So doth the Dane protest too much, or can I put the “versus” back in my title?
Fanon says that “For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him.” Can “objectivity” be replaced by “pluralism” in that sentence? (Ch. 1 of The Wretched of the Earth—“On Violence”) ‘Twould be fun to accuse Salman Rushdie of colonialism, methinks.
Chatting
WRT this speech…
B: it’s so attractive to say yeah, fuck schools, because then all we would-be school reformers who have no idea what the hell to do and feel overwhelmed all the time could stop feeling overwhelmed and just teach our own children and that would be enough
B: it doesn’t make sense to compare us to other industrial countries, who have compulsory education, in order to argue against the latter–are we just too incompetent to manage it?
B: he’s also against “recreational sex”
B: but the whole thing is really attractive
B: and well argued in general
A: an interesting point. America does have an interesting set of exceptions to other OECD countries. And the fight against capitalism has become so dire that I violently rebel against anything that takes funds from almost anything thats not the military. And yes it has many resonances with the moralism of the right, though obviously libertarian would be a better description-the recreational sex thing I obviously cant go along with.
B: i think his negative arguments are excellent and compelling but his positive arguments are lacking
B: (which is true of a lot of arguments)
A: yes. Actually I think even his positive arguments have merit. I see a lot of what I lack in there-the confidence to accomplish tasks independently etc. Maybe I should’ve done more sports or something
B: right… but family values is not the answer. how are moms already working three jobs gonna school their kids too? (because it’s gonna be the moms, not the dads.)
A: That’s absolutely correct. I do think that kids should be given more free time though. I wish someone had introduced me to Foucault in high school and helped me to understand that
B: SO TRUE.
B: how is it that nothing i was really deeply philosophically involved with came to me in high school?
A: I guess this critique ends up practically in more well-trodden territory-less tests and more freedom for teachers. The myopia that rejects those postulates to me seems fanatical
B: yes. as long as teachers are good. but gatto’s critique is so much more essential to the concept of schooling per se–it’s so much farther “out” than attacks on NCLB and such
B: i don’t really know what to do with it, you know? i can daydream about it, but i can’t apply it
B: the daydreams are amazing, but…
B: i guess we just need the revolution to come
A: yes. Thats unfortunate, And you cant just give your kids 70 dollars to take a trip with their parents
B: exactly
Descriptions of Depression
I never let myself include Virginia Woolf in lists of favorite quotations and such because once I start trying to quote her I end up wanting to quote whole pages and chapters and books and eventually I just want to stick her entire essence and existence (yes, Sartre would say the two are one and the same) there on the page where clearly they neither fit nor belong. But I am making an exception:
“There rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.” (Jacob’s Room)
There is also Gide’s, the most precise I have ever found:
“The word ennui is doubtless too weak to describe the fits of intolerable depression to which I have been subject ever since I can remember; they overcome one suddenly; something indefinable in the air starts them; a second before, all was smiling, all was enjoyable; suddenly a murky vapor rises from the depths of the soul and interposes itself between desire and life; it forms a kind of livid screen that separates us from the rest of the world, whose warmth, love, color, and harmony can now only reach us as a refracted, warped, transposed abstraction; we are aware of things, but they fail to move us, and the desperate effort to break through the screen that thus isolates our soul, might well lead us into any sort of crime—murder or suicide, or madness…” (Isabelle)
And Coetzee’s, most reminiscent of Rilke and other Existentialists:
“There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think of this as a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out—it looks to us like an illusion now, one of those illusions sustained only by the concentrated gaze of everyone in the room. Remover your gaze for but an instant, and the mirror falls to the floor and shatters.” (Elizabeth Costello)
And Byron’s criminally yet seductively Romanticized one:
“There is a very life in our despair,
Vitality of poison—a quick root
Which feeds these deadly branches; for it were
As nothing did we die; but Life will suit
Itself to Sorrow’s most detested fruit,
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore,
All ashes to the taste. Did man compute
Existence by enjoyment, and count o’er
Such hours ’gainst years of life, say, would he name threescore?” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage)
And Forster’s, in the context of a horribly Orientalist book:
“She had come to that state where the horror of the universe and its smallness are both visible at the same time—the twilight of the double vision in which so many elderly people are involved. If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation—one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision, a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.” (A Passage to India)
And that of Julian Barnes:
“All that straining—to what end? There is no formal response to the painting’s main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love)—how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.” (A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters)
That last is so problematic, though, as is anything that crosses the line from talking about emotion to talking about the human condition (I would say “from the subjective to the objective,” but have not those words been as utterly emptied of meaning as the world seen by a depressive?). It perpetuates the “happy people are deluded” idea, which has not been an especially helpful one in my life at least.
Stop Wasting My Time–Just Dictate
One day I was substituting for my mentor teacher in addition to teaching my own class, and to make it easy on me, she had created a review packet for her students to work on for much of the period. All I had to do was help them with the packet, which reviewed Act III of Romeo and Juliet, and then play on CD and help them understand, at a basic level, the first scene of Act IV. About two thirds of the way through the class period, I saw that many students were losing stamina. The packet was long, and they were tired: some who had begun well gave up and put their heads down, and others grew more and more distracted and hence disruptive. When I realized that I was spending more time encouraging students to do their work at all than answering their questions about the work they were trying to do, I began to wonder if I should switch things up and go through IV.i right then instead of saving it for the end of class as I had planned. I stopped the class and asked whether they wanted to keep working on the review packet or switch gears for a few minutes and then come back to the review packet. At first they were all very insistent that I do what they preferred: some wanted very much to take a break from the packet, while others were on a roll and strongly resented the idea of being interrupted. As soon as I began to hesitate visibly, though, my students’ demands changed. “YOU’RE in charge—just decide,” they said. That seemed to be a unanimous sentiment, so I did “just decide”—and as soon as it was clear that I had made my decision, the complaints from the opposing party stopped and everyone got ready to listen to the CD.
Comfort
When Xiu Xiu released its latest album, Jamie Stewart offered to write haiku for the first 234 fans who filled out his online survey and sent in pictures of themselves. I told his survey that I am from Hawai‘i and that my most precious possession is my mortality, and so he wrote:
walk the volcano
mortality will not fail
hold it close to you
I have been thinking for years what I just found out a philosopher named Emil Cioran also thought: “Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself a long time ago.”
Cocktails and Cockiness
Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe follows Kenneth Burke in likening academia to a cocktail party: “People who walk up to a conversation, listen to what is going on to find out what the interlocutors are already talking about, then make a contribution to this pre-existing conversation generally have more success than those who interrupt whomever is speaking and launch into an unrelated discourse about whatever happens to be on their minds.”
The problem, Graff says, is that “if the writing samples submitted with graduate applications are meaningful evidence, the decontextualized exercises that undergraduates [and high school students, as he says elsewhere] are asked to write in many courses are poor training not just for getting into graduate school, but for explaining oneself and persuading others in any career or situation. The shame of this situation is that applicants who submit writing samples that are studiously pointless would never think to communicate this way in real life. It took them years of education to learn to speak with no context to no one.”
It’s a wonderful chapter, yet the final half-paragraph does its best utterly to invalidate everything that preceded it. Why do writers do this to themselves and to their readers? Graff concludes thus: “Of course, if this proposal were adopted, unheard of consequences would follow: high schools that now amount to little more than social centers attached to test-taking factories would have to devote themselves to furthering the intellectual life. Whether America could handle such a thing remains to be seen, but it is worth finding out.”
Oh, really? Wow, no one else is aware that your goal is a worthy one, Professor. And no one else is dedicated to it, either. No teachers anywhere are busting their asses in the effort to realize it. Good thing you’re here to enlighten us.
The book as a whole, however, is superb.
Therapy
“The Stoic recommendation of suicide is not directed to those who are conquered by life but to those who have conquered life, are able both to live and to die, and can choose freely between them. Suicide as an escape, dictated by fear, contradicts the Stoic courage to be.” -Tillich, The Courage to Be
Next time you’re contemplating suicide, just remember: chances are that you’ve lost to life rather than conquering it and that consequently you are too much of a loser to die. That’ll fix you.
When Hopelessness Was Allowed
Medievalists complain that their chunk of European history is unfairly maligned as a time in which nothing happened and no one wanted or expected anything to happen in this world except that it its inhabitants would all eventually be approved for transfer to the next. It’s nostalgia, though, not malignancy, that keeps the myth alive. We who express dissatisfaction with the status quo these days have to do something to change it; otherwise we’re hypocrites, complicit in everything we denounce. That is as it should be. But oh, the hopeless luxury of being able to talk about how much this world sucks without believing that it could ever change…
(… not to the mention freedom from the originality fetish in art, from which I suffer acutely.)
“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” -Hélder Câmara
Amazing Grace
“While the ancient world valued the individual not as an individual but as a representative of something universal, e.g. a virtue, the rebirth of antiquity saw in the individual as an individual a unique expression of the universe, incomparable, irreplaceable, and of infinite significance.” -Tillich, The Courage to Be
Some individuals, anyway.
“This diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.” -G.B. Shaw, “The Progressive”
That would be me, a few years ago. Now I’m just evading the choice and blinding myself to the dichotomy.
Chapter books are not worth finishing–or even beginning.
John Taylor Gatto, radical education dude about whom I should know more, saith:
“Suppose that you and I … decided to create some structural way to make young people indifferent to everything. And suppose we came up with the idea that we would enthusiastically launch them on an hourly basis on one or another project of art or thinking and then we would ring a bell and say you must stop and move immediately away from this. And we did that for year after year after year after year. Would that not produce an internal mechanism that said nothing is worth finishing? And if nothing’s worth finishing, isn’t the next logical step that nothing’s worth beginning?” (quoted in Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe)
I guess. But only bad teachers launch their students hourly on projects that take more than an hour to complete (yes, the overarching project of learning math or history takes more than an hour, but is that really going to be accomplished all in one sitting anyway?), and having a bad teacher all day as opposed to for an hour would not seem to be an improvement over things as they are now. Doesn’t schooling also try to send the message that everything is worth beginning and that, um, we’re mortal and time is limited? Is it really that hard to plan a lesson that both feels whole unto itself and fits into a class period? (And yet, when I first read the quote above, I thought it something approaching divine revelation.)
