More on Postmodernism
I have had this conversation SO many times. Here is an excerpt from last night’s version:
A: Something like Sin City objectifies women, but only in order to make men uncomfortable with their complicity in that objectification. It’s postmodernism, self-aware and self-problematizing, and so ultimately it’s progressive.
B: Intellectually, yes, but the problem is that the intellectual experience is often out of reach for anyone who is not already privileged. As a woman (an oversensitive one, admittedly, but by no means unique in that respect) I don’t have the luxury of intellectualizing Sin City; I am so incapacitated by my emotional reaction that I never make it to any more productive phase of cognition. I feel like shit and I either shut down or run away–end of story. That’s why I was uncomfortable with your valorizing the self-conscious critique of racism in Heart of Darkness earlier. Intellectually I do have faith that, if Conrad and even his narrator Marlowe were asked to explain their views on race, they would be fairly unobjectionable, because the book does include some pretty clear antiracist and anticolonialist rhetoric. I just don’t feel comfortable praising the book because it makes its point so viscerally that I assume my ability to reduce or raise everything in it to the level of intellectual argument is dependent on my immunity, as a white person, from certain sources of personal pain.
C: Yeah, postmodernism has enabled a return to all sorts of degrading imagery in the name of ironic consumption and self-problematization, and intellectually it does legitimately critique that degradation–but on balance I think it does more harm than good just by forcing people to sit through so much that is terribly painful to them.
More Quoting
“It was a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand bodies.” -Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
Yes, excerpting does violence to text just as photography does violence to time, but I can’t help myself.
Rilke of the Day
“Is it possible, it thinks, that we have not yet seen, known or said anything real and important: Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, meditate, and record, and that we have let these thousands of years slip away like a recess at school, when there is just enough time to eat your sandwich and an apple?
“Yes, it is possible.
“Is it possible that despite our discoveries and advances, despite our culture, religion, and science, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even this surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an incredibly tedious material, which makes it look like living-room furniture during the summer vacation?
“Yes, it is possible.
“Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false, because we have always spoken about its masses, just as if we were telling about a gathering of many people, instead of talking about the one person they were standing around because he was a stranger and was dying?
“Yes, it is possible.
“Is it possible that we thought we had to retrieve what happened before we were born? Is it possible that every one of us would have to be reminded that he had his origin in all who have gone before, that consequently he contains this past and has nothing to learn from those who assert that their knowledge is greater?
“Yes, it is possible.
“Is it possible that all these people know, with perfect accuracy, a past that never existed? Is it possible that all realities are nothing to them; that their life is running down, unconnected with anything, like a clock in an empty room—?
“Is it possible that we know nothing about young girls, who are nevertheless living? Is it possible that we say “women,” “children,” “boys,” not suspecting (despite all our culture, not suspecting) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
“Yes, it is possible.”
Pascal’s Premodernist Manifesto
“Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree, or he has no meaning at all.” -Pensées 683
*Edit: “All err the more dangerously, as they each follow a truth. Their fault is not in following a falsehood, but in not following another truth.” -Pensées 862
So there are multiple truths but only one true truth? What?
*Edit the second: He also says, more radically, that “we are incapable both of truth and goodness.”
He also says, more moderately, that “plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.”
Also note, ironically and metaliterarily, that the whole of Pensées, which I am reading in one bound volume, is/are “merely” a bunch of thought-fragments collected and published posthumously by Pascal’s friends.
“Everyday Antiracism”
Last semester I took a class–a required component of my master’s degree program in “urban education”–called “Everyday Antiracism.” The class text was a book by the same name. We wrote weekly journal entries throughout the course, and at the end, a final entry was assigned in response to given prompts. I was just rereading what I wrote for that last assignment, and I thought I’d try posting it below.
—
I was excited at the beginning of this module. Everyday antiracism is something I talk about, well, every day—with my friends, my students, my colleagues, my classmates, and my family. It is fast becoming an obsession and, I hope, a compulsion with me. I couldn’t wait to read [the professor]’s book and talk about it with her and with my classmates.
The class saddened and angered me beyond belief. I found myself reading essays that presented as revelations facts and concepts such as the biological unreality but social reality of “race,” the fact that it is better to see our students as complex individuals than as stereotypes, and the rather leaden “gold nugget” idea that talking about race can be difficult. Wow, I thought. Thanks for letting me know. I felt condescended to, which hurt, but beyond that, I felt embarrassed and angry. As I sat in class on the first day, I had to fight an overwhelming urge to get up and run out of the room, so ashamed of myself and the situation did I feel. Here was I, a white person and a Harvard student and a Boston Public Schools teacher, claiming that what I was “doing”—being told that there was a history of racism in the world and that it was a bad thing—constituted real, meaningful, and productive antiracism. It was not just an issue of sitting in classroom rather than going “out into the world”—it was the fact that we were taking intellectual steps backward rather than forward that bothered me. We needed to problematize and explore racism and antiracism, not reduce it to a fourth-grade “American” History textbook’s treatment of the issue. I suppose I could say that what I learned about “how best to inquire on such issues with colleagues in the future” is that it is best not to begin by announcing, as if your interlocutors were not aware of the fact, the bare existence of racism in the world. A little subtlety will both inform and flatter them, not to mention make it seem as if you actually have something to say worth hearing.
As for “how the issues raised in the essays do and do not relate to my practice”—for several weeks I could not see how anything in this class could help my practice. Then I learned. I had an interview in which I was asked, basically, how I practice everyday antiracism as an educator. I answered by talking about how everything is on the table in my classroom, how my students are free to talk and tease and laugh and ask about my whiteness, how I point out Shakespeare’s trope of lightness-goodness vs. darkness-evil and how it has influenced everything from clichés in modern English to Western colonialism, how I tell my students why I don’t like hearing the n-word but invite them to argue the point with me, and so on. When I was done, I apologized for the long-windedness and possible incoherence of my answer, but my interviewer said that, on the contrary, what I had said was very impressive because I had not just talked about showing a video about Martin Luther King, Jr. for Black History Month or some such thing. I was pleased from a self-interested point of view but appalled, on the world’s behalf, at the idea that anyone would have to expect to hear such a thing from a prospective teacher. Partitioning off units of time to be devoted to antiracism—a video about the civil rights movement, a distinct lesson on Black history, etc.—can do more harm than good if it implies that antiracism inhabits that lesson only and that there is any beginning, end, or limit at all to the lesson of antiracism. Just as guilty liberals attend one lecture on poverty to placate their consciences and build up their pictures of themselves as activists so that they can leave the lecture content to go on with their capitalist existences as usual, students and especially teachers can begin to think that they are fighting racism when really they are confining it to specific times and places in which life’s other activities are suspended, thus rendering themselves and others incapable of actually living as antiracists. For such students and teachers, then, this class would indeed be revelatory, for its very title would appear to them an oxymoron.
My classmates and I, though, were not, as far as I know and as far as I could tell from hearing others’ reactions to the class, “such students and teachers.” Most of us learned nothing from the class, and many were discouraged in their efforts at everyday antiracism. This makes me sad. I liked the concept of the class and I liked the concept of [the professor]’s book, but content did not live up to concept. I read articles telling me to see my students as individuals, to avoid stereotyping, to encourage my students to avoid stereotyping, to get to know my students, and to accept the inevitable open-endedness of conversations about race. These are good lessons for second-graders; they did not help me. I felt like I was reading page after page, hearing speech after speech, of nothingness and platitudes. This frustrated me, because I do have productive and real conversations about race with my friends and family and students. It is possible. I am not one who thinks talking accomplishes nothing. But in this class, we accomplished nothing or worse than nothing. I can only hope that this class in no way influences my practice—that I can purge it from my mind as soon as possible.
I do think a module on everyday antiracism is essential to [our] program, but please, please change it. What we did this year was not good, ethically and otherwise. It was a good try, and I am glad we tried, but we failed.
Yet Another Article on No Child Left Behind
The article is here; an excerpt is below.
“Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among the law’s goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In fact, the latter term – which had been prominent in previous versions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – appears nowhere in NCLB. (No doubt an anonymous Congressional staffer performed a search-and-delete operation on the bill, just as one did with the word bilingual, which was also expunged.)
“What’s the significance of this shift in terminology? Achievement gap is all about measurable “outputs” – standardized test scores – and not about equalizing resources, addressing poverty, combating segregation, or guaranteeing children an opportunity to learn. NCLB is silent on such matters. Dropping equal educational opportunity, which highlights the role of inputs, has a subtle but powerful effect on how we think about accountability. It shifts the entire burden of reform from legislators and policymakers to teachers and kids and schools.”
Pensées
I LOVE reading very intelligent people with whom I disagree. Take Pascal:
“How rightly do we distinguish men by external appearances rather than by internal qualities! Which of us two shall have precedence? Who will give place to the other? The least clever. But I am as clever as he. We should have to fight over this. He has four lackeys, and I have only one. This can be seen; we have only to count. It falls to me to yield, and I am a fool if I contest the matter. By this means we are at peace, which is the greatest of boons.
“The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men. What is less reasonable than to choose the eldest son of a queen to rule a state? … This law would be absurd and unjust; but because men are so themselves, and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just. For whom will men choose, as the most virtuous and able? We at once come to blows, as each claims to be the most virtuous and able. Let us then attach this quality to something indisputible. This is the king’s eldest son. That is clear, and there is no dispute. Reason can do no better, for civil war is the greatest of evils.
“It is then true to say that all the world is under a delusion; for, although the opinions of the people are sound, they are not so as conceived by them, since they think the truth to be where it is not. Truth is indeed in their opinions, but not at the point where they imagine it. It is true that we must honour noblemen, but not because noble birth is real superiority.
“True Christians comply with folly, not because they respect folly, but the command of God who for the punishment of men has made them subject to these follies.
“We are incapable both of truth and goodness.”
And the award for “Most Counterproductive Article of the Day” goes to…
The New York Times Magazine’s recent article on shared parenting seems to have made Kathleen Parker a bit uncomfortable, for today she has devoted her column to reminding everyone that men and women are different after all–that women are genetically, not “just” socially, engineered to enjoy childcare so much that sometimes they simply refuse to allow their willing husbands to help them out.
Source of Counterproductivity #1: Parker reinforces the gender dichotomy that so many transgender and genderless people are trying so very hard to deconstruct. She also takes for granted the heterosexual two-parent model of a nuclear family that excludes so many homosexual and single parents, not to mention grandparents and others raising children. Of course the Times article did the same thing, but its purpose was quite clearly to discuss parenting as it occurs in heterosexual two-parent households, whereas Parker seems more interested in making sweeping claims about human nature as a whole. If I read an article on two different groups of people neither of which includes me, I am not offended; if I read an article on those same two groups of people that attempts to force me into one of them, that’s a problem.
Source of Counterproductivity #2: The supposed nature/nurture dichotomy has been terminally ill for quite a while now. Sometimes it’s a useful schema, but not the way Parker uses it. What does it even mean to say, as Parker does, that women are genetically predisposed to childcare because it was their role in hunter-gatherer societies? Is it anything different from saying women have been molded into child-raisers by society for a very long time? If there is a difference, it seems one of degree (of difficulty for reformers, among other things) rather than one of quality.
Source of Counterproductivity #3: Even allowing that the difference supposed above is quite qualitatively real, what’s the point of dwelling on it, other than to provide ready-made excuses to negligent fathers and husbands? I don’t see it.
Cool
Students in New York City produced a film using the game Second Life to explore institutional racism in education systems.
Baudelaire of the Day
“I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.”
Incidentally, I found the quote not in a volume of Baudelaire but in William Styron’s Darkness Visible, a memoir of depression. Apparently some other depressive liked the line too, because there’s a whole site on depression at wingofmadness.com. I don’t know if it’s any good, but there it is.
Obama, Bill Cosby, et al.
Obama’s recent speech on Black fatherhood made me remember something I’ve been wanting to say:
I just spent a year–the first of several, hopefully–teaching in a high school that serves students primarily from very poor Black and Latino communities. I remember two students in particular who impressed me with the strength of their beliefs in the American meritocracy. This was not naivete–they were perfectly aware of all the isms working against them–it was just, I don’t know, self-efficacy. One said she was going to work hard so she could go to Yale and Harvard like I did. The other said that I must be really smart because I went to those schools.
Instead of the white middle-class teacher being disabused of her idealism by the defeatist cynicism of her students, I was the defeatist one more often than not. I wanted to encourage these kids, but I also wanted to tell them that I went to Harvard partly because I had gone to Yale and I went to Yale partly because I had two academics for parents who had the money to buy me books and the time to read to me and help me with my homework and the relative leisure to wash the dishes and cook dinner and even wash and iron my clothes so that I could devote myself to impressive classes at my impressive school with impressive extra-curricular activities, and also because my family had enough money to make an Ivy League education possible but not enough so that we didn’t receive generous financial aid packages, and that in fact I would never have gone to Yale at all if it hadn’t given me more money than any other school offered. In short, I wanted to tell them that it wouldn’t exactly be their fault if they didn’t end up where I did.
I know these are only two students and I am only one teacher, and I’m not trying to say either that all my students held similar beliefs or that no one has ever used racism, classism, sexism, or any other such thing as an excuse for mediocrity or failure. But really, when I’m talking to kids like that, the Bill Cosby argument seems nearly criminal. Even if defeatism does exist, wouldn’t it be more productive to fix its causes (by which I mean structural inequalities, not laziness or whatever) rather than telling everyone to get over them? In talking to my students, neither their optimism nor my pessimism seems justified, and I can’t see a way out of that dead-end conversation that doesn’t include changing realities as well as beliefs.
Minimanifesto
My own education accomplished inadvertently what I believe should be the purposeful aim of every child’s education: the development of critical thinking. I attended a Montessori elementary school that prided itself on its progressive liberalism. We learned math with marbles, set goals for ourselves, received what many schools would not recognize as report cards, learned in multi-age groups, and self-reflected ad nauseam. From there, I moved to a secondary school that prided itself on having once served sons (no daughters until about a decade before I matriculated) of royalty and, more currently, on generating more National Merit Scholars and Ivy League acceptances than any other school in the state. Ranks and GPAs reigned, teachers (not students) set goals, and self-reflection wasted instructional time.
My tendency to think critically about education—which led first to a college application essay comparing the two schools described above and then to graduate school in education—was an accidental side effect of attending two such radically different schools. I never thought so deeply about the advantages, disadvantages, and values of Montessori schooling until I left it behind; I would never have been so critical of my high school experience without another educational model with which to compare it. What stimulated my thought was not either school’s value system in isolation but rather the necessity of making sense of the discrepancies between two equally plausible versions of “the right way” and coming to my own conclusions. Ideally, that necessity—the necessity of thinking critically—would be present in every school, not only in the spaces and contrasts between schools. In this way, the development of critical thought, an essential purpose of education, would be accomplished on purpose rather than by accident.
Plato said it best long ago: “I regard as non-stimulants all the objects which do not end by giving us at the same moment two contradictory perceptions. On the other hand, all the objects which do end in that way I consider stimulants—meaning those cases in which the perception . . . communicates two equally vivid, but contradictory impressions. . . . It is natural for the mind in such circumstances to call in the aid of reasoning and reflection, and to endeavor to make out whether each announcement is single or double.” (Republic bk. VII)
Up to a point, coherence is necessary to surviving with sanity intact; past that point, it can be misleading, even dangerous—and certainly antithetical to critical thought.
And the world is incoherent. Worse, it is often deceitful and subtly oppressive. What children need is not to be taught that everything makes sense or that everything fits together in some sort of coherent whole. Instead they need to be exposed to incoherence—not harshly, but honestly, with plenty of support and guidance. They need to practice questioning what they are told, not simply because they do not like it, but because they can see viable alternatives, even if they are not attractive ones. Schools, then, must give their teachers and students the desire, the confidence, and the resources to study incoherence—between Newtonian and relativistic physics, between materialist and idealist explanations of history, between English and Japanese syntactic categories, or between formalist and deconstructionist and archetypal theories of literature. Only thus will students become critical thinkers capable of constructing their own views of the world instead of submitting, unwitting, to injustice of the subtlest and most insidious variety.
“Angry Clinton Women <3 McCain?”
Frank Rich’s answer, at least, is NO. This is better news than the article I posted a while back that said the exact opposite.
Modernism Post
For hours of dorky fun, scrutinize this “modernism vs. postmodernism” chart until you can place your reaction to each of its constructed dichotomies into one of the following categories:
1. Yes. Oh yes.
2. No. Hell no.
3. Hey, that’s been my theory since I was twelve. I’m such a genius.
4. Wtf does that mean?
5. Well, it depends. The truth is, I’m so well-read that my nuanced understanding of the world will never submit to charts and isms. Let me drop some names to show you what I mean.
That’s pretty much how my responses sorted themselves out, at least. I’d pontificate in more detail here, but I’m going to go stare at the chart some more instead.
Disjointed Paragraphs Showing No Clear Progression of Thought and Indeed No Clear Reason for Existing, Let Alone Being Read
I was talking with my father about Orientalism. He took issue with the theory that only members of a group can talk about that group with any degree of authenticity. I said to attribute such a theory to Said is to misread him, for he deliberately sidesteps the question of whether Europe’s images of the Orient have ever been accurate (if that is what “authentic” even means, which is debatable) and focuses rather on the effects of those images, such as they are.
But the authenticity discussion is worth having, I know. I have more than once been chastised by people of color for allowing my whiteness to scare me away from discussions of nonwhiteness, but I also know the dangers of pretending to know what I cannot possibly know. (As a woman, I am on the other side of the socially constructed divide, as it were, when male knowledge is at issue—though race and gender are of course far from analogous.)
“Dare to be reductive!” says Gerald Graff to his students when he wants them to write more coherently. He argues that clarity giveth rather than taketh away insight, nuance, and all sorts of other desirables. I am all for lucidity in academic writing, but not when it turns into something like Renan’s wonderfully clear analogy in which “the Semitic race is to the Indo-European family what a pencil sketch is to a painting; it lacks that variety, that amplitude, that abundance of life which is the condition of perfectibility” (quoted in Orientalism). Oh, NOW I get it.
It turns out that I sort of wrote a whole paper on this topic in college. Now my most stunning achievement in college was scrupulously keeping every trace of “politics” out of my writing and inexplicably reducing such themes as narratology, subjectivity, plurality of perspective, and the source of compassion to purely formal concerns. This paper, then, purported to be something about the unattainable paradox of unmediated art. It began thus:
“Joyce narrates the events of Ulysses with an almost ostentatious emphasis on his own active role in the book. He is a painstaking arranger, a presenter of highly organized, heavily mediated information delivered in carefully chosen packages. The text, along with the titles and schemas that accompany every section of it, suggests that perceiving the true significance of each episode, character, and event in the novel requires viewing them through the multiple lenses of color, symbol, allusion, and intertextual correspondence. At the same time, however, parts of Ulysses famously epitomize stream-of-consciousness technique, as if the author desires above all to render a direct, unmediated, convincing recreation of the mental experiences of his characters, no matter how confused or confusing those experiences may appear. Readers thus receive mixed messages: is the truth of Molly’s nature best apprehended by taking a broad literary-historical view and comparing her to Penelope and other archetypal wives, or by entering into her consciousness and seeing herself and her world through her own limited, undiscriminating, yet authentic perspective?”
The thing went on to show how “a clear presentation of content comes at the cost of a clear and direct view of the scene being narrated” and that “the most logically disorganized passages in the novel are also the most vivid.” (Somehow, despite Joyce’s considerable reputation for misogyny, the paper manages to avoid making the rather obvious point that the rational, organized passages mostly describe men and that the vivid sensual chaotic bits are more about women.)
Whatever. This post, being neither organized nor terribly vibrant, is sufficient proof that my college essay posited a false dichotomy. But is Graff really allowed to equate reductive with productive? Does it depend on the subject matter (things vs. people, self vs. others)?
Uninspired and Unoriginal Anticapitalist Rant
I hate the notion of insurance. I always see those ads: “No more worries about lost or stolen luggage!” At first I think they’re about extra-careful baggage handlers, but then I realize they’re about insurance. Is it insufferably self-righteous—or perhaps materialistic?—of me to balk at the suggestion that I would cheerfully give up my belongings in return for their equivalent in dollars?
I know this is an old and obvious issue; it’s just on my mind. Life insurance. Settlements in court. Fines. Ugh. The worst of it is that it all seems to work so well.
Quote of the Day, Without Commentary
“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what Feminism is: I only know that people call me a Feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” -Rebecca West
“The Plain Sense of Things”
After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.
It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.
The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence
Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as necessity requires.
