Quoted in Howard Zinn
“We, the governments of Great Britain and the United States, in the name of India, Burma, Malaya, Australia, British East Africa, British Guiana, Hong Kong, Siam, Singapore, Egypt, Palestine, Canada, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, as well as Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Alaska, and the Virgin Islands, hereby declare most emphatically, that this is not an imperialist war.” – U.S. Communist party skit, 1939
More Therapy
I’m reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, which you should read for many reasons. But I keep reading this one passage over and over in a very unhealthy escapist way:
“Women were important and respected in Iroquois society. Families were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down through the female members, whose husbands joined the family, while sons who married then joined their wives’ families. Each extended family lived in a ‘long house.’ When a woman wanted a divorce, she set her husband’s things outside the door.
“Families were grouped in clans, and a dozen or more clans might make up a village. The senior women in the village named the men who represented the clans at village and tribal councils. They also named the forty-nine chiefs who were the ruling council for the Five Nation confederacy of the Iroquois. The women attended clan meetings, stood behind the circle of men who spoke and voted, and removed the men from office if they strayed too far from the wishes of the women.
“The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White and Black: ‘Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society.”
I quote this not because I’m a huge fan of simplistic anthropological summaries of “ways of life” or because I’m now under the impression that no Iroquois woman ever hurried home for fear of being raped at night but rather because I’m a little weirded out by the way I’ve latched on to these paragraphs.
Continuing Therapy for Recovering Apolitical-Liberal-Humanists Like Me
“The impotence of liberal humanism is a symptom of its essentially contradictory relationship to modern capitalism. For although it forms part of the ‘official’ ideology of such a society, and the ‘humanities’ exist to reproduce it, the social order within which it exists has in one sense very little time for it at all. Who is concerned with the uniqueness of the individual, the imperishable truths of the human condition or the sensuous textures of lived experience in the Foreign Office or the boardroom of Standard Oil? Capitalism’s reverential hat-tipping to the arts is obvious hypocrisy, except when it can hang them on its walls as a sound investment. Yet capitalist states have continued to direct funds into higher education humanities departments, and though such departments are usually the first in line for savage cutting when capitalism enters on one of its periodic crises, it is doubtful that it is only hypocrisy, a fear of appearing in its true philistine colours, which compels this grudging support. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster. The ‘unique individual’ is indeed important when it comes to defending the business entrepreneur’s right to make profit while throwing men and women out of work; the individual must at all costs have the ‘right to choose,’ provided this means the right to buy one’s child an expensive private education while other children are deprived of their school meals, rather than the rights of women to decide whether to have children in the first place. The ‘imperishable truths of the human condition’ include such verities as freedom and democracy, the essences of which are embodied in our particular way of life. The ’sensuous textures of lived experience’ can be roughly translated as reacting from the gut–judging according to habit, prejudice and ‘common sense,’ rather than according to some inconvenient, ‘aridly theoretical’ set of debatable ideas. There is, after all, room for the humanities yet, much as those who guarantee our freedom and democracy despise them.” -Terry Eagleton
Ouch.
Why I’m A Bad Postmodernist: Reason #1
I fetishize art. When I hear a band perform a song live, I hear the song aspiring to achieve the perfection of its recorded version, a sort of time- and space-bound shadow of the piece’s timeless Platonic Form. The same is true when I play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto: the performance, even if it were that of an accomplished violinist instead of mine, is never the Piece but only ever an approximation of it. I seem to value live music in direct proportion to my lack of familiarity with it: I especially enjoyed the Pitchfork Music Festival last weekend because it was my first time hearing many of the bands, whereas I’m not sure I’d want to hear Radiohead live because I have so many of their songs memorized, and if there were a definitive original recording of the Mozart Requiem I would never listen to a newer one.
So I think you should read this book.
I’m reading James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, which you need to read for more reasons than I can describe. Its thesis and favorite quote: “It is not only radical or currently unfashionable ideas that the texts [United States history textbooks] leave out–it is all ideas, including those of their heroes” (Frances FitzGerald).
How To Spend Your College’s Massive Endowment Other Than Building Shiny New Gyms
“BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and ‘poor white mountaineers,’ accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.” [article]
Two of my uncles went there back in the day. I’ve never met anyone outside my family who has ever heard of it, so I’m glad it’s getting some publicity. Way to spend your endowment well, Berea. (Says the Yale and Harvard graduate. Oh dear.)
[Ibid.]
It is possible that you, gentle reader, begin to weary of Terry Eagleton. Your weariness, however, would be impossible without your existence, and since it would be pretentious of me as an obscure web-logger to assume the existence of readers, we (I) will likewise have to make do without the assumption of your weariness. Hence, more Eagleton. This time it’s a rather random collection of greatest hits from his discussion of the New Criticism, that monster to which standardized testing and by extension the entire education system has too long been held hostage (in the United States, at least). Anyway:
“The poem was as opaque to rational enquiry as the Almighty himself: it existed as a self-enclosed object, mysteriously intact in its own unique being. The poem was that which could not be paraphrased, expressed in any language other than itself: each of its parts was folded in on the others in a complex organic unity which it would be a kind of blasphemy to violate. The literary text, for American New Criticism as for I. A. Richards, was therefore grasped in what might be called ‘functionalist’ terms: just as American functionalist sociology developed a ‘conflict-free’ model of society, in which every element ‘adapted’ to every other, so the poem abolished all friction, irregularity and contradiction in the symmetrical cooperation of its various features. ‘Coherence’ and ‘integration’ were the keynotes; but if the poem was also to induce in the reader a definite ideological attitude to the world–one, roughly, of contemplative acceptance–this emphasis on internal coherence could not be pushed to the point where the poem was cut off from reality altogether, splendidly revolving in its own autonomous being. It was therefore necessary to combine this stress on the text’s internal unity with an insistence that, through such unity, the work ‘corresponded’ in some sense to reality itself. New Criticism, in other words, stopped short of a full-blooded formalism, awkwardly tempering it with a kind of empiricism–a belief that the poem’s discourse somehow ‘included’ reality within itself.”
“If the poem was really to become an object in itself, New Criticism had to sever it from both author and reader. I. A. Richards had naively assumed that the poem was no more than a transparent medium through which we could observe the poet’s psychological processes: reading was just a matter of recreating in our own mind the mental condition of the author. Indeed much traditional literary criticism had held this view in one form or another. Great literature is the product of Great Men, and its value lies chiefly in allowing us intimate access to their souls. There are several problems with such a position. To begin with, it reduces all literature to a covert form of autobiography; we are not reading literary works as literary works, simply as second-hand ways of getting to know somebody. For another thing, such a view entails that literary works are indeed ‘expressions’ of an author’s mind, which does not seem a particularly helpful way of discussing ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or some highly stylized courtly love lyric. Even if I do have access to Shakespeare’s mind when reading Hamlet, what is the point of putting it this way, since all of his mind that I have access to is the text of Hamlet?”
“The poem became a spatial figure rather than a temporal process. . . . Literature was a solution to social problems, not part of them; the poem must be plucked free of the wreckage of history and hoisted into a sublime space above it. . . . What New Criticism did, in fact, was to convert the poem into a fetish. If I. A. Richards had ‘dematerialized’ the text, reducing it to a transparent window on the poet’s psyche, the American New Critics rematerialized it with a vengeance, making it seem less like a process of meaning than something with four corners and a pebbledash front. This is ironic, since the very social order against which such poetry was a protest was rife with such ‘reifications,’ transforming people, processes and institutions into ‘things.’”
“New Criticism’s view of the poem as a delicate equipoise of contending attitudes, a disinterested reconciliation of opposing impulses, proved deeply attractive to sceptical liberal intellectuals disoriented by the clashing dogmas of the Cold War. Reading poetry in the New Critical way meant committing yourself to nothing: all that poetry taught you was ‘disinterestedness,’ a serene, speculative, impeccably even-handed rejection of anything in particular. It drove you less to oppose McCarthyism or further civil rights than to experience such pressures as merely partial, no doubt harmoniously balanced somewhere else in the world by their complementary opposites. It was, in other words, a recipe for political inertia, and thus for submission to the political status quo.”
“The critics I have just reviewed are strikingly uninterested in what might rather simplistically be called ‘thought.’ The criticism of Eliot displays an extraordinary lack of interest in what literary works actually say: its attention is almost entirely confined to qualities of language, styles of feeling, the relations of image and experience. A ‘classic’ for Eliot is a work which springs from a structure of shared beliefs, but what those beliefs are is less important than the fact that they are commonly shared.”
“A broken hammer is more of a hammer than an unbroken one.”
That is Eagleton’s summary of defamiliarization in the context of phenomenology.
Eagleton on English
“It took rather longer for English, a subject fit for women, workers and those wishing to impress the natives, to penetrate the bastions of ruling-class power in Oxford and Cambridge. English was an upstart, amateurish affair as academic subjects went, hardly able to compete on equal terms with the rigours of Greats or philology; since every English gentleman read his own literature in his spare time anyway, what was the point of submitting it to systematic study? Fierce rearguard actions were fought by both ancient Universities against this distressingly dilettante subject: the definition of an academic subject was what could be examined, and since English was no more than idle gossip about literary taste it was difficult to know how to make it unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit. This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved. The frivolous contempt for his subject displayed by the first really ‘literary’ Oxford professor, Sir Walter Raleigh, has to be read to be believed. Raleigh held his post in the years leading up to the First World War, and his relief at the outbreak of the war, an event which allowed him to abandon the feminine vagaries of literature and put his pen to something more manly–war propaganda–is palpable in his writing. The only way in which English seemed likely to justify its existence in the ancient Universities was by systematically mistaking itself for the Classics; but the classicists were hardly keen to have this pathetic parody of themselves around.” [from Literary Theory: An Introduction]
It’s astonishing, the things that were once revolutionary. Unfortunately for my radical cred, I majored in English about a century after it Established itself.
“Is buying a gun a suicidal act?”
That is the question Steve Chapman asks himself in this article. His answer, directed at gun control advocates who point out that gun deaths are more suicides than homicides and that suicide attempts involving guns are the most fatal variety by far, is in the negative. His logic: “People who use guns are generally hellbent on ending their lives. So deprived of a sidearm, they will no doubt find another reliable method–rather than swallow a dozen aspirin and wake up in the emergency room.” He does back up his claims with statistics, but I’m doubtful, having seen at least as many statistics on the other side of the controversy and finding the logical foundations of his argument rather ludicrous.
People who kill themselves with guns are not generally “hellbent on ending their lives.” Indeed I find it difficult to picture a suicidal person being hellbent on much of anything. For most of us, the nadir of depression is a place pretty well inaccessible to anything so lifelike as motivation and planning. The brain shuts down, often unable even to muster the will to “make” a bowl of cereal. It is a rare depressive who, wanting to die but finding no means of doing so immediately at hand, will manage to take stock of her options, choose one, get dressed, leave the house, haul herself to the top of a building or to a railroad track, and fling her body in a direction that will result in certain death. It’s just too damn hard most of the time.
Some suicides can be described as “hellbent on ending their lives,” especially those suffering from the delusions of psychosis (schizophrenics, for example) rather than the pall of depression. Many, though–as any intro psychology class will point out–are by no means resolved to die. Some are ambivalent, flirting with death rather than taking it to the altar: they take unnecessary risks; they experiment; they cannot decide whether to live or die and therefore let chance do the deciding for them. Some are crying for help and attention: they plan a suicide attempt rather than a suicide–and hope all goes as planned. Other depressives, including myself–I don’t even know what they are thinking.
My own version of suicidality usually involves gazing, catatonic, at whatever bottle of pills happens to be nearest me. Once or twice this has led to my picking up the pills and taking a few before deciding I don’t want to die after all. Putting a couple of bullets in my head and then changing my mind wouldn’t have worked nearly as well.
I’m glad I’ve never been in a house with a gun, and I wish that were true of more people. I guess that’s all I really want to say.
How Art Excused Itself from the World
I’m reading Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction. It’s teaching me everything I already knew but couldn’t articulate–among other things, the process by which Romantic radicalism managed, almost as soon as it came into existence, to turn itself into the most apolitical of aestheticism in 18th- and 19th-century England. An excerpt:
“The privilege accorded by the Romantics to the ‘creative imagination’ can be seen as considerably more than idle escapism. On the contrary, ‘literature’ now appears as one of the few enclaves in which the creative values expunged from the face of English society by industrial capitalism can be celebrated and affirmed. ‘Imaginative creation’ can be offered as an image of non-alienated labour; the intuitive, transcendental scope of the poetic mind can provide a living criticism of those rationalist or empiricist ideologies enslaved to ‘fact.’ The literary work itself comes to be seen as a mysterious organic unity, in contrast to the fragmented individualism of the capitalist marketplace: it is ’spontaneous’ rather than rationally calculated, creative rather than mechanical. The word ‘poetry,’ then, no longer refers simply to a technical mode of writing: it has deep social, political and philosophical implications, and at the sound of it the ruling class might literally reach for its gun. Literature has become a whole alternative ideology, and the ‘imagination’ itself, as with Blake and Shelley, becomes a political force. Its task is to transform society in the name of those energies and values which art embodies. Most of the major Romantic poets were themselves political activists, perceiving continuity rather than conflict between their literary and social commitments.
“Yet we can already begin to detect within this literary radicalism another, and to us more familiar, emphasis: a stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination, its splendid remoteness from the merely prosaic matters of feeding one’s children or struggling for political justice. If the ‘transcendental’ nature of the imagination offered a challenge to anaemic rationalism, it could also offer the writer a comfortingly absolute alternative to history itself. Indeed such a detachment from history reflected the Romantic writer’s actual situation. Art was becoming a commodity like anything else, and the Romantic artist little more than a minor commodity producer; for all his rhetorical claim to be ‘representative’ of humankind, to speak with the voice of the people and utter eternal verities, he existed more and more on the margins of a society which was not inclined to pay high wages to prophets. The finely passionate idealism of the Romantics, then, was also idealist in a more philosophical sense of the word. Deprived of any proper place within the social movements which might actually have transformed industrial capitalism into a just society, the writer was increasingly drived back into the solitariness of his own mind. The vision of a just society was often enough inverted into an impotent nostalgia for the old ‘organic’ England which had passed away. It was not until the time of William Morris, who in the late nineteenth century harnessed this Romantic humanism to the cause of the working-class movement, that the gap between poetic vision and political practice was significantly narrowed.
“It is no accident that the period we are discussing sees the rise of modern ‘aesthetics,’ or the philosophy of art. It is mainly from this era, in the work of Kant, Hegel, Schiller, Coleridge and others, that we inherit our contemporary ideas of the ’symbol and ‘aesthetic experience,’ of ‘aesthetic harmony and the unique nature of the artefact. Previously men and women had written poems, staged plays or painted pictures for a variety of purposes, while others had read, watched or viewed them in a variety of ways. Now these concrete, historically variable practices were being subsumed into some special, mysterious faculty known as the ‘aesthetic,’ and a new breed of aestheticians sought to lay bare its inmost structures. It was not that such questions had not been raised before, but now they began to assume a new significance. The assumption that there was an unchanging object known as ‘art,’ or an isolatable experience called ‘beauty’ or the ‘aesthetic,’ was largely a product of the very alienation of art from social life which we have already touched on. If literature had ceased to have any obvious function–if the writer was no longer a traditional figure in the pay of the court, the church or an aristocratic patron–then it was possible to turn this fact to literature’s advantage. The whole point of ‘creative’ writing was that it was gloriously useless, an ‘end in itself’ loftily removed from any sordid social purpose. . . . Art was extricated from the material practices, social relations and ideological meanings in which it is always caught up, and raised to the status of a solitary fetish.”
Thus Romanticism, along with its twentieth-century heirs, “became a defensive elite which . . . viewed itself as ‘central’ while being in fact peripheral, believed itself to be the ‘real’ Cambridge while the real Cambridge was busy denying it academic posts, and perceived itself as the vanguard of civilization while nostalgically lauding the organic wholeness of exploited seventeenth-century farm labourers.”
And thus the most radical of artistic movements delivered itself into the hands of reactionaries: “Since literature, as we know, deals in universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil wars, the oppression of women or the dispossession of the English peasantry, it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control over their own lives, and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties.”
“Capitalism’s Reality Check”
One of those really simple but (or therefore?) important articles: here.
UnDialogue
Whenever I hear arguments for and against charter schools, it seems to me that each party is arguing at cross purposes with the other. There seems to be a strong and not terribly strongly contested case for charter schools benefiting their own students, and proponents of charter schools rely mainly on that case for their self-justification. Meanwhile, their opponents often argue primarily from the premise that charter schools benefit a few students—their own—while stealing resources from and thus disadvantaging many other students—the ones who attend “regular” public schools in the same districts.
What confuses me is that neither of these arguments really refutes the other. I believe that charter schools can do wonderful things for the students they serve; I also believe that they may make things more difficult for the children they do not serve. I do not know the facts, but these arguments are not helping me to discover them.
But what the hell. I’ll be working at a pilot school next year, which is the golden mean of the two, so I’m in the right no matter what.
Strange Pensées
Pascal’s argument, as far as I can tell, runs basically as follows:
1. If one is not Christian, one is a bad person for that reason.
2. The fact that bad people disbelieve proves that Christian belief is good.
Shouldn’t a mathematician be able to recognize a circle when he sees one?
The Critics’ Revenge
“Critics choose their most-loathed books.” Blog refrains from commenting, at least for now.
