154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Friday, June 29, 2012

 

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154. What's Hot in the Streets and What's Cool in Philosophy: The Balkan Connection.

Americans have to talk about cool because they can't talk about goodness.  "We're better than you."  That's ugly and dangerous.  "Better," coming from Americans in the Balkans, means "more rational, less credulous," and when a Serb or a Croat finds out that 31% of Americans believe in astrology and that 43% believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so" (Gallup, 2007) their tongues are stopped.  Looking at rumor-charged Balkan killers and saying, "Change, be more like us," is not an option."

Claims about what's cool in your country, though, are comparatively safe.  "Sure, there are a lot of Americans believing those things but they're not considered cool, not by educated Americans."

What do you mean, "not by educated Americans"?  More than 30% of Americans over 25 hold bachelor's degrees (2012 Census Bureau).  You must have plenty of educated people believing unbelievable things.

OK, by educated I have to mean, "having learned to be careful about belief," and not "having acquired a lot of knowledge."  The latter can certainly get you all kinds of degrees — professional ones, mainly — but in America (I'll risk it) it won't make you cool.  I mean not as long as traditional philosophy is thought of as cool.

And by "traditional" you mean?

Of the tradition that descends from Plato's Socrates, the careful step-by-step testing that lets limited human beings establish reliable beliefs, the testing that eventually gave us the scientific method — though from Plato's starting points he could never get to what we call science.

What percentage of people in any country are going to be careful enough to meet Socrates' standards?

The number doesn't matter.  As long as those standards are thought cool by people — heck, 2% — that the others think are cool a nation won't wander too far into dangerous belief, that is, careless belief about things that matter, things you go to war over. 

And that 2%, those are professors, I take it.

You take it wrong, though you can expect to find professors, trained academics, to be prominent among those who are careful about belief.  Anybody, schooled or unschooled, can be in the 2%.  Faulkner's barber, Hawkshaw, was in the 2% of careful people in that town of his that did the lynching.  "Get the facts, boys, get the facts."

"Facts, hell!" they said.  "You're a fine white man."

Then the leader, McLendon, the officer, the one who had commanded troops in France: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  He's the one they look up to and they join his mob, leaving Hawkshaw standing.  No prof ever defended the academic tradition more firmly, or more futilely. 

And the lesson for Balkan people?  You're not equating them with Southern racists, are you?

No, but I'm pointing to a comparable need.  Hawkshaw needed some standing in Jefferson.  A coterie, some cool fellows in the drinking places, some fear of their wit from behind the pool cues, somebody to give skepticism a better name.  They don't have to be scholars, they don't have to speak good English.  All they have to have, if they know they have some backing, is a voice.  "McLendon, you're out of your fucking mind."  That might have been enough.

I see.  And if in the Balkans a voice, with some backing, had said, "General Strugar, you're out of your fucking mind," that might have been enough.

Might have, but words like that too easily lead to fights.  Better the teacher's words, the composition teacher going over McLendon's sentence: "Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  Pronoun reference, Jack.  What do you have in mind each time you use "it"? 

These comp teachers are bears on reference.  Noun reference. "Does this word refer to something in the reader's world, not just your world? Something he or she can check on, and call true or false or something in between.  Assume checking.  Assume Socrates."

Slavov Zizek couldn't assume that if he taught composition. "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  He has to assume concession.

How should those of us with a stake in the old academic tradition respond to Zizek?  We know that his position can't be reconciled with ours.  We doubt that the continental tradition that tolerates and even encourages his position can be reconciled with ours.  Indeed, if we listen to Martha Nussbaum, we'll doubt that reconciliation is possible.  She found the portrait of philosophy in Astra Taylor's documentary, concentrating on figures (like Zizek) outside the strict discipline of philosophy, a "betrayal" of our tradition (see

http://www.thepointmag.com/2010/reviews/inheriting-socrates ).

 So, you hear Zizek's voice: "Truth...measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."  Do you pass by indifferently?  So much noise?

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It will depend on where you are.  If you're in a student drinking place that's not noise.  It could be the future.  Raise a warning flag.  "Fire danger: high."  If the drinking place is in a Balkan capital, sound the alarm.  The woods are burning.

153. Balkans: Checking for Cool.

You don't want to know what the professors are saying in their books and lectures.  You don't want to know what the pundits are saying in their columns.  You want to know what the students are saying in their drinking places.

That's what will determine the future.  Politicians and wise men can talk up something all they want but if the next generation of college students doesn't think it's cool it's dead.  A zero in the historical force column. 

I had heard this said but was suspicious until I heard a man, a successful modern poet, tell of his literature classes at Vanderbilt in the twenties.  The Mighty Romantics and the Great Victorians were still all the rage then with the profs, but the students, even as the room resounded with Tennyson's mighty lines, were passing around mimeographed copies of "The Waste Land."

Can you feel that, the cool of it?  If you can't, picture one of those graduate seminars in Southern universities attended after the war by second-tier New York intellectuals squeezed south by the GI competition for Eastern schools.  CCNY types.  Deliver your opinion and they say, "You sure of that?"  Then they're there with the goods.  Out of Morris Cohen (Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method), who taught at Columbia.  Those guys are cool.  Over beer afterward one of them, about to say the word "God," pauses and says, "if you'll pardon the expression."   Atheism becomes cool.  Marxism and Freudianism follow.

That's what I mean by cool and that's what it was in 1947 Louisiana.  It doesn't have to be subversive and it doesn't have to be outside the curriculum.  When Cleanth Brooks arrived at Yale with the New Criticism the students greeted him warmly ("Mistah Brooks, he come" headlined the student newspaper) and ate up his teaching.

What's the equivalent of that now in Ljubljana and Zagreb and Belgrade?  Sean O'Hagan says that Slavoj Zizek is now "the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  Is that true?  Could I confirm it by listening in on student talk?  I, a two-week tourist?  Not a chance.

But I know what I'd be looking for.  First, the student who says what students (or anybody, really) can say in a hundred different ways in a time of crisis: "Are you with us in the movement?"  Second, the student who says, "Are you sure of that?"  I'd look at the listening students.  If they think the first one is cool they (and their country) face one kind of future; if they think the second one is cool they face an entirely different kind.

It's not obvious which one is better.  Everything depends on where you are, when.  You're marching for civil rights in '63 (or for independence in '76) you want to know who's with you and who isn't.  You want them charged up.  You're sword-fighting in a phalanx you want your buddy on your left to be super-charged.  That's your unprotected side and your life depends on it.

Those who have been in those situations will tell you: you're not going to do a Ph.D. oral on what did the charging.  The British spin experts doctor a picture of Hitler to make him more hateful.  It fires us up and we fight harder to defeat his armies.  Anything that gets us home quicker is cool.

Academic cool can be ugly.  Picture the places where it's most easily maintained: in America with 3,000 miles of ocean on each side and 1500 missiles securely in their silos; in Scandinavia, with all that water around and a homogeneous population. It's easy to look at the Balkans and forget the mixed-up population and close, over-the-mountain borders — with wall-mounted rifles on the other side of them.

What kind of cool is the right kind is always going to be a close call there.  Times and situations change so.  Outsiders, even when they're willing to risk ugliness, can hardly ever speak positively.  "Let's just quit talking about cool.  We'll never be able to say anything helpful.  Forget the whole category."

At this point I hear one of my profs breaking in.  Sam Monk.  "You think there's no cool any more.  You want to know cool?  I'll show you cool.  My period.  Early 18th century.  England is looking back at a bad religious war.  The Western continent is looking back at worse ones.  The Holy Roman Empire, with its little states, has torn itself into Protestant-Catholic shreds.  Here's Jonathan Swift's Gulliver explaining it to the leader of the Houyhnhnms:

Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire; what is the best color for a coat, whether black, red, white, or gray; and whether it should be long or short, dirty or clean; with many more.  Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long continuance, as those occasioned by difference of opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent.

That's cool.  Enlightenment cool."

Is it always and everywhere cool?  It doesn't have to be, not for anybody who feels sorry for the sweet people locked into those Balkan situations.  If it's occasionally helpful that's enough.

152. English Composition vs. Slavoj Zizek, Again

So the next day the New York Review (7-12-12) arrives with a piece on Zizek.  I learn (1) that he sees in Hegel "a new kind of 'paraconsistent logic' in which a proposition is 'is not really suppressed by its negation.'" and (2) that whether Marxian ideas "correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant."

 Is that latter a defect, as it would be according to traditional tests of the worth of an idea?  "No," explains Zizek, "The truth we are dealing with here is not an 'objective' truth, but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.

General Strugar couldn't have put it better.  The NYR piece makes me, as the author of Post #151, feel like a fool.  Why was I trimming fingernails when all these bones are broken?

It also makes me feel helpless.  I need the talent of a satirist like Swift or Pope, and I don't have it.  All I can come up with is the crudest transposition of Zizek's words, and anybody who has followed me on my Balkan tour will have already put them in the mouth I hear them coming out of, General Strugar's.  "No. no." he is saying at his trial, "that about the Croatian troops in Dubrovnik was only a falsehood in your sense.  In the paraconsistent sense it was what we call a self-relating truth, measured by the way it affected the subjective position of enunciation."  In other words,  "It worked for me — and on the boys in the army and the people in Belgrade."  We can go on from there to re-measure every inflammatory appeal to bloodlust in history.

In the state I am in coming back from the Balkans I simply cannot see Zizek as a fellow academic, despite his credentials as an honoree (visiting professor) at the best American Universities — Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Minnesota, Michigan, California at Irvine.  I have spent too much time there (not just in Serbia; they all had a General Strugar, more or less) asking, "Where were the academic standards?", with no doubt about what "academic standards" in that question had to mean: "application of reliable tests of belief."  If you can say that people in their eighties have passionate yearnings I think you could safely say that we were, with every bullet-riddled building we saw, yearning more and more passionately to hear of people who tested for truth, people, anybody, who just cared about the truth.

I should say a word about yearning for different behavior.  Displayed in a foreign country it is, like indignation, often an assertion of national superiority:  "Oh that they might rise to our level."  Or displayed anywhere, personal superiority: "Oh that human nature might change — as mine has."  But then there's the display to each other, modestly, over an evening drink or a morning coffee: "Oh if only the things that could have been done had been done."  That's what you get to after you've done enough reading and lived enough life to have given up on a change in human nature and asserted enough national vanity to be tired of it.

What could they have done here, what that's important and doable?  Reduce the inflammatory rumors.  Stop one pre-emptive strike based on rumor and you have, in this land of the pre-emptive strike, done something.  But how do you do that, reduce inflammatory rumor?

"By teaching writing standards," the retired composition teachers (there's always a sprinkling in Elderhostel) jump in to say.  "In practice, getting students to scratch out, from each sentence, every unjustified or intemperate word.  Until a habit is formed."

So there's how we get what we're yearning for.  "Wasn't there somebody, anybody, in that situation who just wanted to make sure of the facts?"  Yes, our guide answers, there was this kid who believed his comp teacher and became a reporter.

And there's my problem with Zizek.  How can I, who taught composition for 35 years, call myself a colleague of somebody who blows its standards away?

"Here's how," says a defender of Zizek — say the one who invited him to the conference.  "The academy is a place open to all views, and you yourself are not an academic if you fail to tolerate a view or allow its full expression in our circle." 

It's a common reply and it's based on the same failure to grasp a fundamental truth about the academic circle: that admission to it depends on acceptance of its supporting rules, most of them set by Plato in the first Academy.  Those rules are what allow the famous tolerance, culminating in the openness of scientific inquiry.  If you claim that you belong in the circle no matter the rules you make yourself indistinguishable from creationists, who also would like to be taken as colleagues.

Now here's a point of strain that I would like to see my genuine colleagues address.  We hate to be caught in a self-contradiction, right?  And people in philosophy departments, our leaders, hate it most, right? (Have you ever heard them debate over there?  "One cannot say, on pain of contradiction, that x...." and, when it's demonstrated, nobody says x any more.)  Now I want you to picture a teacher who, after his English Composition class, walks across the hall to listen to, or even, by assignment, teach, what Zizek teaches.  (Of course it doesn't have to be exactly Zizek; there are plenty of others now who will keep on saying x without respect to demonstration or evidence.)

Now I think all who still feel the pain of contradiction will feel the pain that the composition teacher, alternately holding to and abandoning traditional academic standards, is feeling.  So I hope they will understand his request (or, my request in his name) to his leaders in the philosophy departments of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, NYU, Cal, Minnesota, and Michigan, insofar as they have influence as faculty senators or administrators or members of curriculum committees: either have your university give up English Composition or quit honoring Slavoj Zizek.

151. A Slovenian Philosopher

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The Balkan philosopher best known to me is Slavoj Zizek, one of eight contemporary philosophers chosen by Astra Taylor to present their ideas in her documentary Examined Life — one of those movies those unable to keep up with philosophy are sure to be drawn to.  (You think you can learn what's going on without killing yourself.)

Back home I found that Zizek was a Ljubljana native who, after getting his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and studying psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (where the influence of Lacan and Heidegger on his thinking significantly deepened), went on to make such a reputation for himself as a political and cultural theorist that there is now a whole periodical, the International Journal of Zizek Studies, devoted to his work.

But his fame apparently goes well beyond the academy.  According to Sean O'Hagan (The Observer, 6-27-10), "Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  If you had to be "influential" to make Taylor's list of eight I suppose this alone would have qualified Zizek.

So, wouldn't you know, I fly straight from Ljubjana, Slovenia, to Athens, Ohio, and there, waiting for me, is the 7 June London Review of Books with a piece by Slavoj Zizek in it.  You can guess how I'll approach it: as the English Composition teacher with an eye out to squash Heidegger and his students (Posts #45 and 120).

The visit to the Balkans has made that role attractive again.  They must have composition (writing) courses in college there; what do the students learn?  What do they learn before that? What's their elementary-school teaching like?  What do their graduate students talk about over their evening drinks?  What's cool?  Those are the questions that, after two weeks of puzzling over the terrible, irresolvable conflicts here, we found ourselves asking.

Now, the Zizek piece.  He is arguing that the Greeks, in fighting austerity, are fighting "the European economic establishment" which, though it claims to be saving Greece is actually destroying it.  Greece's best hope, and ours if we are Europeans, is that the anti-austerity party, Syriza, wins the coming election.  Its leader, Alexis Tsipras, deserves our support.  "By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself."

That's what I get from it.  But how do I get it?  There's this sentence: "If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels's technocracy and anti-immigrant populism."

Zizek knows what the European establishment will hope.  But can it hope this?  Would it call its own program, the one Syriza will interrupt, a "vicious cycle of mutual complicity"? No, that's Zizek speaking.  And Zizek knows far more than we know.  He knows just who the complicit parties are: Brussels technocracy and anti-immigrant populism.  All who know what he's referring to raise your hands. Anybody know how it's a cycle?  "See," I tell the writer after he's read his paper to the class, "you've got to explain.  Your readers are bright and informed but these are complicated matters and not everybody agrees on them."

But satisfying such readers is not Zizek's way and it's not in his tradition.  It is not, I think, going to be in any tradition that looks to aristocracy, as I think the tradition of continental philosophizing does.  I feel it in modern French philosophers, who by their scorn of the bourgeois seem driven to aristocratic habits — in speech, anyway. 

I hear a lord speaking in Zizek's conclusion: Syriza's voice "is not the voice of extreme left 'madness', but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology."  The voice speaking on Zizek's side is the voice of reason.  "You down there.  You're mad.  Believe it because I tell you."

Lordly speech.  How do you acquire it in Eastern Europe, where there was no middle class to scorn?  Was there only the peasant alternative?  Maybe, though, years under authoritarian regimes, a succession of them, any kind, encourage lordly speech, as official to underling.  Maybe any authoritarian lecture system, the teacher addressing an amphitheatre, encourages it.  Who knows?

The opposite of the authoritarian lecturer is the dialectical questioner, epitomized in the Oxbridge tutor, who says to the student (or whom the student can hear saying, whether he says it or not), "This subject is deeper than either of us but let's see what we can dig out together."

It's in the digging that care with words is developed, and insisted on by the tutor — in an oddly authoritarian way.  R. M. Hare, accounting years ago for the difference between British philosophy and continental philosophy, told a reporter that (I've quoted it a hundred times), "here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him." There's no getting out of it.  You've got to make sense to an ordinary, informed reader, for whom your tutor speaks.

That, though often cramped in its expression into marginal comment and quick conference, is (or was) the ideal of English Composition in America.  We in big midwestern universities after the war had our eyes on Oxford and Cambridge, the mothers of lucid scholarship and sharp debate.

So now I want to put Zizek in the student's chair.  He's given a thing to his teacher that says, "The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a 'Europe with Asian values' — which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."

That word "outmanoeuvred," Slavoj, what do you mean by that?  Does it mean anything more than being defeated in an election?  No?  Well, maybe you'd better just say that.  And "Asian values," what are they?  And whom are you quoting?  Ah, you can supply that.  Good.  Better do it.  That should be easy.  But here's a hard one, this "tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."  Do you mean "deny people the vote"?  Do you know where this has happened and who did it?  Better give some examples.  Ah, you don't have any particular ones in mind, where capitalism was the cause?  Then you shouldn't suggest that you do.  It's like your reference to behind-the-scenes manoeuvering.  If you know what went on, tell us; if you don't, or don't know reliably, hold off.  Say only what your knowledge limits you to.

Here's where I start hearing all the other Balkan voices I've recently heard, or tuned in on:  General Strugar exhorting his fellow citizens to rise to the threat of Croat soldiers in Dubrovnik, a Vecernie Novosti writer reporting that forty Serb civilians were killed in Pakrac by Croatians, another that forty Serb babies had been killed in Vukovar, Radio Television of Serbia explaining that the people of Dubrovnik were burning automobile tires to simulate the destruction of the city.

"Say only what your knowledge limits you to."  It's cool instruction in a classroom or office, easily delivered in a time of peace or in a secure country.  But it trains.  And in broader ways than first appears.  In learning to write better students learn to listen better, and become critical. 

That last is how they can make their teachers most proud of them, up at the civic level.  A General Strugar (or his American equivalent) speaks and the student says, "Hang on a minute.  Do you really know that? For a fact?"  The retired teacher (Elderhostel is thick with them) who hears that will of course feel proud, but he'll feel more: he'll feel better about the future of his country.

How do retired Slovenian or Serbian or Croatian teachers feel about the time they spent in their classrooms?  Were those classrooms like ours, or not?  That's the trouble with these two-week tours: you don't have time or opportunity to find out.