307. Hume's Pile of Applesauce

You know, some philosophers are so damn wrong you've just got to quit being an academic and say, "This is a pile of applesauce."  And that's what I'm going to say about one of Alison Gopnik's favorite philosophers (The Atlantic, 10-15), and one of mine (once): David Hume.

The problem is The Self.  Hume says there is no such coherent thing.  There's just a bunch of perceptions and responses.  Gopnik  found that Buddha said pretty much the same thing and loved him for it, and loved connecting the two.  Postmodern French philosophers loved him for it, insofar as they can love any Anglophone philosopher.

OK, where's the applesauce?

J. D. Salinger points us to it.  Awed by the budding beauty and character of a British girl in the course of  his tearoom conversation with her (in "For Esmé, with Love and Squalor"), Salinger hears her put a standard slur on American soldiers.  "I hope that's not worthy of you," he says.  What would her slur not be worthy of?  My fourth-grade teacher hears me speaking the most awful trash on the playground, just so I can make it with some trashy kids, and says, "Roland, that's not you."  My mother, after I've verbally abused the girl downstairs, says, "That's not the Roland I know."  I blush with shame.

What I want Hume, Buddha, and all those postmodernists to tell me is this: What blushes?  What's your name for it?  Something raises expectations, something is trusted, something takes responsibility, something is embarrassed.  Even before my mother and my teachers spoke to me it was there, in me, an idea of what I was.  If it weren't why did I respond so?  Why did I blush?

Plato gave capitals to my idea of what I was. The Idea of Roland. That was abstract philosophy but it was close enough to my experience, to the words people around me used, to the words I used, in the world and inside myself, to check out.  Plato was twenty times closer to this thing my teachers saw in me and Salinger saw in the girl than Hume or Buddha or Paul de Man was.  The ordinary Medieval/Renaissance Christian, with his word "soul," was  thirty times closer.  Dante was forty times closer.  Donne sixty.  Milton a hundred.

Nobody whose time is short (not just me, friends) wants to waste any of it digging into a pile of applesauce.  We all could use a detector.  Here's one I'll pass on: any time you pick up "the destruction of the coherent Self," or any similar locution, keep going.  Life's too short.

298. What Do You Think "Critical" Means?

I suppose everybody knows by now which of its seven meanings "critical" has in the expressions "critical theory," "critical pedagogy," "critical ethnography," "critical psychology," "critical consciousness," and "critical race theory."  Nearly all have big entries in Wikipedia.

Well, maybe not everybody knows.  So I'll print the seven meanings and let you guess:

critical, adjective

1. inclined to find fault or to judge with severity, often too readily.

2. occupied with or skilled in criticism.

3. involving skillful judgment as to truth, merit, etc.; judicial: a critical analysis.

4. of or relating to critics or criticism: critical essays.

5. providing textual variants, proposed emendations, etc.:

a critical edition of Chaucer.

6. pertaining to or of the nature of a crisis: a critical shortage of food.

7. of decisive importance with respect to the outcome; crucial: a critical moment.

Since so many of you are of my generation maybe I ought to give you a hint.  Each one of the items with a Wikipedia entry is big in some universities and growing in most. 

So it's Number 3, right?  Wrong!  None of them fit.  Number 1 comes closest but I know you don't want to choose it.  Not with that judgment ("often too readily") appended to it.  Your kind start itching when you see a little tendentiousness.  This would be a kidney stone.

"Well now, after we go over your 'criticals' maybe we will choose Number 1.  What's critical ethnography and how is it different from ordinary ethnography?"

We get the answer right away in the Wiki entry: "In contrast to conventional ethnography which describes what is, critical ethnography also asks what could be in order to disrupt tacit power relationships and perceived social inequalities."

"And the rest of the 'criticals' are like that?  Implying that those of us who accept tacit power and inequality are 'uncritical'?"

Yes.   All are derivations from the parent critical," critical theory" of the Frankfurt school, known to us starkly, though not inaccurately, through Max Horkheimer, who "described a theory as critical insofar as it seeks 'to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.'"  They all have the purpose of liberation from oppressive circumstances.

"Surely not all.  There must be some that hold to 'critical' in the old sense."

Well, let's look.  Critical psychology, drawing "extensively" on "critical theory," "challenges mainstream psychology and attempts to apply psychological understandings in more progressive ways, often looking towards social change as a means of preventing and treating psychopathology." 

"Doesn't that propose social change that liberates?"

No, it looks towards it.  You're loading words.   Here just a little, but still you're giving them more weight than the author gives them.  An author, I might add, who freely appropriates the favorable load sense 3 has given our word.  But let that pass.  How about "critical race theory"?  It, "an academic discipline focused upon the application of critical theory," and proposing that white supremacy and racial power are maintained over time, "pursues a project of achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination."

"On the mark.  Aims at liberation from oppressive circumstances, finds fault, and judges with severity.  Bingo for sense Number 1."

So it's no surprise that "critical theology" is synonymous with "liberation theology," and "critical consciousness" means "political consciousness."

"No surprise.  They all more or less do what Horkheimer says critical theorists do.  And we, by our Socrates-loving leader, are being led to pass judgment, severe judgment.  Let me skip over a lot of what I see coming and put that judgment bluntly: critical theory stinks." 

Stinks?  You're having me use the word I used for clitorectomy cultures ("My Culture's Better Than Yours," Post 77).  I can't use it for academics but it does let me narrow my charge: critical theorists, the Frankfurt school, are not stinking up the world, they're only stinking up the house, the academic house.  That's all I want to say.  I leave open the possibility that they are right, that present power relationships are unbearable, and that they have the best program to relieve the pressure.  But even if they are right, even if the city, the nation, and the world will be better off going their way, we cannot live in the same house with them.

"But maybe you're exaggerating their importance.  Brian Leiter (Leiter Reports) says that postmodernism, which takes in what you're worried about, 'plays little or no role in most major academic disciplines.'  Even in his field, philosophy, where serious claims are most reliably honored, it has influence only 'at the margins.'"

Maybe so, but as long as those fields with the  greatest influence on undergraduates, to him English and history (I would add communications, sociology, anthropology, and minority studies), we have to worry about it.  We in the academic tradition, the tradition within which critical Socratic thinking has so long and so successfully been introduced to and nurtured among the young, cannot maintain that tradition if in our language the young accept "critical" as meaning "critical of everything except our starting assumptions."  The starting assumption of the Frankfurt school, and by extension of every school subscribing to "theory," is that the present power structure (to them that of late-stage capitalism) is oppressive and must be replaced.  For Socrates and anybody who pretends to follow him everything is open to critical examination, with replacement contingent on the examination.

"You wouldn't have taken so long if you had stuck with my verb 'stinks.'  In Socrates' house, the traditional university, the windows are open.  In Horkheimer's house the windows are closed and he and his friends are stinking it up."

Clever, but so unfair.  Stick with the metaphor and see the whole picture.  Outside the house the odor of critical theory, filling feminism and cultural studies and minority studies, can thrill us, esthetically and politically, with its fragrance.  Release it in the house, close the windows, and you've got an unbearable stink.

"How can you be so sure of that stink?  Have you done the research?  Do you have the statistics?"

No, but I have the writing, and that's enough.  People who say they are "enslaved" by "circumstances," and want to "disrupt tacit power relationship" aren't bothered by vagueness and don't make necessary distinctions. 

"You don't think there are oppressive, tacit power relationships?"

Of course there are, but if we make no distinction, and make a fuss about every one of them, we'll never get through a day.  "Let's face up to your power and fight it out right here, " he said to his doctor, shortly before finding himself at home treating his appendix himself.  Our welfare, our orderly life, our civilization itself, depends on "tacit power relationships."

"And writers who just slop the expression into Wikipedia (obviously a theorist wrote the entry) without recognizing its faulty reference, can't be taken seriously.  Not in the academic circle."

No.  They will show a lack of elementary training.  They will arouse suspicions of what Saul Bellow called "a certain fecal carelessness."

"Now you're being cleverly unfair.  Such writers are taken seriously.  Look at the universities.   Look at the conferences they host.  Who invites these people whose writing is so unlike that of gentlemen?"

Their fellow arrivistes, obviously.

"And what do you propose to do about them? "

Nothing.  And it's not that I'm too old or that the theory battle is over (it's not).  It's what I've indicated, that the lines I know how to communicate on are down.  What kept them up were the rules of serious discourse shown to us first by Socrates.  Deny them, deny the power of logic, deny common meaning, deny responsibility for objective reference, and you were closed out of the circle of discussion, which was open to everything else.  I can communicate seriously only with people in my circle.

"And, since in the critical theory circle your tacitly accepted rules are 'tacit power relationships,' you're closed out.  No wonder you two can't live in the same house."

And that's a shame because there's only one university house and that's the one our young go to.  I can't bear to think of theorists owning it.  I'd be evicted as a corrupter of youth.

"Oh nightmare!  Oh doom!  You're blinding yourself.  Look closely at the list of  'See also' entries following the critical pedagogy entry.  There, just below 'critical consciousness' and 'critical psychology,' is critical thinking, as blue as any of the others.  How it slipped in I don't know.  But a student clicking on it will find entries making every point you are trying to make.  'Socrates set the agenda for the tradition of critical thinking,' and on from there."

Will this do the job for her — a buried click, a string of inferences, recognition of a contradiction, destruction of a position?  That's asking a lot.

"You have to trust the young, as Socrates trusted them.  And as the theorists, with their denial of 'critical' to their own position, do not trust them.  Once the young start clicking from this 'critical thinking'' site there'll no stopping them.  From then on it will be all clicking and thinking and clicking and thinking.  All you will have to do is give them some help when they start writing."

235. Just ONE Manifestation of Postmodernism

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When you say you're hurt by postmodernism you've got to make clear which postmodernism is doing the hurting and where it hurts.  Because I didn't do that in Post #233 (Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore), I'd like to do it here.  There are too many people — architects, painters, interior designers — who aren't hurting anybody for me to give the impression that there's a general plague of abuse.

What hurt me was the manifestation of postmodernism in English departments, poststructuralism.  In one respect, its insistence on the many voices in a literary work ("multivocality"), poststructuralism had much in common with what I was used to, with what anybody of my generation was used to.  We were weaned on Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, cynosure of the New Criticism, and a most loving display of multivocality.  So in one way poststructuralism did not look so revolutionary — though its first advocate in our department made it appear so, setting it against the "univocal" New Critics.  (Just the way we distorted the Old Criticism when we had to give the New Criticism its revolutionary steam.)

In another respect, though, poststructuralism knocked the props out from under us.  It attacked the objectivity that we thought was necessary in the teaching of our courses.  How could we claim a place in the academic tradition if we weren't objective?  How could we claim tenure which (in the AAUP statement of 1940) was won from administrations and boards of trustees almost entirely by the promise to avoid advocacy (in those days, advocacy of communism) and present our material objectively. 

Poststructuralism's treatment of objectivity can now be seen as complicated and nuanced, but in the eighties it came to the Ohio University English Department in a pretty simple way, though our chair did his best to give us the full picture.  He set aside two years for instruction by specialists in the new approach, with plenty of time — time needed by a department so full of traditionalists — for discussion.

For me the whole two years can be summed up in one reply to one question, asked of one specialist (his areas of concentration were critical theory and cultural studies), late one afternoon.  He had gone over our earlier ideas of objectivity and shown, after poststructuralist critique, how little was left of them.  There was no such thing as objectivity.   Is there, he was then asked, such a thing as relative objectivity,  "No," said.  "There is no relative objectivity."

"Surely, you cannot mean what you are saying," said one of our traditionalists.

"Yes, I mean it," he said.  "There is not even a relative objectivity."

This was no young instructor, this was no graduate student, this was no sophomore.  This was a professor at the University of Californian, Irvine, who had just published a notable book, Interpretive Conventions, and would go on to publish several more in the field.  It wasn't till I was on the stairs heading out that I thought of the question that would have made sure he wasn't pulling our legs: "Do you mean that there is no difference between the statement, 'You are five feet six and weigh two hundred pounds' and the statement, 'You are fat'?"  But alas, I (no doubt along with others) was too late.  What was left dominating our minds was the notion that because of defects in our ideas of objectivity the subjectivity of social construction was justified.  "It all depends on which person, in which culture, is delivering the stuff to you, including the stuff you are accustomed to calling 'facts.'"

You can see how that is going to drive scientists up the wall.  "Look, it doesn't matter who is doing the experiment.  Are the needles in the same place when I lower the magnesium as they were when she lowered it?  Is the setup the same?  If so then her experiment is replicated and what she has discovered we'll call reliable knowledge, more reliable than what we had before.  Our gender, race, culture, politics, religion, and power relation to each other don't matter shit.  It's the needle position, you idiots, the objectively (or intersubjectively) verifiable position of the goddam needles."

This fury turned to laughter when the physicist Alan Sokal produced a jargon-filled manuscript that suggested that pi — you know, 3.14159, the relation of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — was culturally (i.e., not physically, not mathematically) determined, and had the manuscript accepted by the editors of the leading journal in [postmodern] cultural studies. 

All right, I could accept that as just more shouting over the gulf between science and the humanities if it weren't for the fact that half of what I taught in my part of the humanities was indistinguishable from science.  Aside from all the supporting historical and linguistic scholarship there was this, right at the heart of our discipline: reading a poem.  In the early stages of that crucial activity an inexperienced student had to be a scientist, a good scientist, or he wouldn't get anyplace.  Not any place that paid off, anyway.  To get to that place he first simply had to construe the sentences.  In that task everything depends on his making good (i.e., probable) inferences.  "There's a word I haven't seen before.  It's in a position in a structure I have seen before, though, so it's probably a verb.  I'll proceed on the assumption that that's what it is.  Now here's a word that has two meanings.  One goes with the others I have already decided on, and one doesn't — especially since it's not a verb.  So I'll take the first one."  

Note how he follows the precept given biology students learning to identify what they see under a microscope: when you hear hoof beats think horses, not zebras (i.e., first make the most probable inference).  Note more importantly that what he recognizes as a given, the grammatical conventions that tell him a word is a verb, is like what the scientist recognizes as a given, the nature that determines the position of the needles.  Neither one can be changed by the observer and both are independent of the observer — his gender, race, religion, politics, etc.  They are "objective entities."

By taking them so the inexperienced student is able to put the poem together — much more quickly, of course, than in my spell-out.  Before he's finished his similarity to the scientist will be clear: both advance into the unknown by making inferences from the known.  Both use the word "fact" for what they have established, or find established, as known.

How much did this change when I moved from first-year "Introduction to Literature" to fourth-year honors seminar?  The students there could construe sentences more easily, and we could start at a higher level, but still, if I were to hold to Socratic teaching, we had to inquire, and build, and establish beliefs much in the way of the scientist — which was, indeed, the way (though disguised by its unscientific, non-empirical premises) of the Platonic dialogue.  Make each step carefully, checking, testing, ordering, and if you avoided fallacy and stayed coherent you could credit yourself with an advance.

And what was the payoff?  With a poem you advanced onto the ground where the imagination, the freely ranging imagination, could take off, making all the bells of image, metaphor, and symbol ring.  Ring with ways that could vary with each reader.  With a piece of DNA you advanced onto the ground where conjecture could take off, making a whole line of future experiments light up the sky (and the NSF).  With lights that could vary with each scientist.  Even in the payoff the two were similar.

The way we each got into that happy, free land of the imagination was the way of Socrates and that, I take it, is the way of the academic tradition.  And that's what I saw postmodernism knocking the props out from under.  When I faced my students I felt I would have no ground to stand on, no theoretical foundation.  If a student, preferring a noun to a verb, said, "Grammatical conventions are what I see them as," I had no supported way to deny him.  Horses could become zebras any time he wanted them to. 

Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish (I forget which) calls that student an "obliging" student, meaning the rare one who gives attacking traditionalists the extreme example they need, but still he's the kind of student I felt facing me after postmodern literary theorists, represented most vividly in my mind by the California professor, had removed the ground of objectivity from under me. 

And, by what my postmodernist colleagues soon were writing in the journals, I saw I would have to feel the same groundlessness when I faced the administration or board of trustees.  Say they wanted to move against tenure.  In 1940 I could oppose their move on the ground that tenure was necessary to academic freedom, which was supported by a promise of objectivity, or disinterestedness.  And, looking at academic writing at that time, no administrator or trustee could find reason to doubt that promise.  But in 1990?  Look at what a trustee might see.  The two below are from College English, the teacher's journal with the largest circulation.

[For equality and democracy] the teacher must recognize that he or she must influence (perhaps manipulate is the more accurate word) students' values through charisma or power — he or she must accept the role as manipulator.  Therefore it is of course reasonable to try to inculcate into our students the conviction that the dominant order is repressive.   (Lead article.)

I would argue that political commitment — especially feminist commitment — is a legitimate classroom strategy and rhetorical imperative.  The feminist agenda offers a goal toward our students' conversions to emancipatory critical action.

If the trustee had said to me then, "It looks to me as if you in the English Department have broken your promise," I'd be hard pressed to say him nay.  Statements of the same kind, advocating advocacy courses, could be found in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and the Journal of Advanced Composition.  And if he said to me now, "You are still, on the evidence of those courses in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies at UCLA, breaking your promise, I'd be hard pressed to deny it.  I'd have to establish that, in the teaching of those courses, there was no advocacy, and I doubt that I could do that.

Even if I'm speaking ing from some distance up the wall, my friends in fine arts can see, I hope, how what postmodernism meant to me (a tectonic philosophical shift that deprived me of my foundation, my tradition, even my calling) is different from what it meant to them.  Their postmodernism, I take it (though I haven't looked carefully), knocks far fewer props out from under them, and does its knocking less forthrightly, with fewer words.

233. Regrets of an Anti-Postmodernist Bore

 In the early 90s, before I retired, I became an anti-postmodernist bore.  I couldn't shut up about what was happening in English departments.  Now I see in the Wall Street Journal (Opinion, Jan. 4-5) that UCLA has dropped its requirement that English majors take "one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton."  Instead it will require that they take "a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing."

Why didn't I bore more people?

219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.

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.

120. English Composition über alles.

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Why do you want to squash German Romanticism?

"Because it's behind postmodernism and the flatter we squash postmodernism the better life in American universities will be."

What do you mean, "squash"? You're in a university. You're supposed to "refute."   And you don't refute isms, you refute arguments.

"I know, ism-talk isn't our thing.  And refutation is our big thing.  But postmodernists don't do or say things you can take down by refutation. There it is, right in Wikipedia: 'Postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of approaching traditional ideas and practices in non-traditional ways.' So. You go after their relativism and you run into Barbara Herrnstein Smith: 'The relativism exhibited by this study is not a 'position,' not a 'conviction,' not a set of 'claims' about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value and so forth — really are. It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste.' All you can say about a taste is that it's bad. All you can do about the tastemakers is squash them."

But those tastemakers were academics. Surely you could argue with them.

"Believe me, I tried. The visiting postmodernist said, 'I don't recognize your categories.' Another visitor (we had to be instructed in the new theories) denied that there was even a relative objectivity. He (Stephen Mailloux) must have believed that there was no difference between 'You are fat' and 'You weigh 310 pounds.' I gave up."

I sympathize, but how is German Romanticism responsible?

"By reacting against the Enlightenment so successfully. The Enlightenment, as Isaiah Berlin described it for my generation, stood for rationality, universality, and empiricism. That is, it stood for reason, epitomized for us in the scientific method, universal values, epitomized in the Declaration of Independence (all men are created equal, with inalienable rights), and experience-based knowledge, epitomized in the work of primarily British philosophers (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume). The German Romantics doubted reason, universal truth, and, if not experience itself, the claim that it was the base for all knowledge. In the end (to take a liberty) their opposition to the Enlightenment gave us Martin Heidegger and all those French intellectuals and American professors who brought about the revolution in English departments in the 80s and 90s."

Sounds like a big philosophical enterprise, squashing all that.

"Yes, and 25 years ago that's what I thought it would take. Now I know there was a simple alternative. All I had to do was take my course in English Composition, the course nearly everybody had to teach one section of, with philosophical seriousness. What did my textbook tell students to do when they were writing an argumentative essay? 'Cite evidence.' That is, appeal to experience. 'Anticipate objections.' Yes, test, probe, look for counter-examples, respect the law of non-contradiction — just as in the scientific method. 'Watch out for absolute generalizations, beware of catch-all explanations, don't evade the question.' Yes, reason well. 'Don't sneer.' Yes, keep attitude out. Remain objective. When I explain these things to students I'm promoting care in establishing belief, just as those trying to free themselves from medieval superstition did. Just as scientists now do, though much more systematically. The more thoroughly I explain the more deeply I commit myself to the values of the Enlightenment.

"That's what English Composition teaches the teacher. Learn its lessons and you'll see that you can't be a postmodernist any place but in your office, writing articles. Go to your Parking Committee meeting. Try to decide which department has the better claim to a lot. You're stuck with the need for facts and logic. Do you believe in academic freedom? You're stuck with the need to be objective. Professorial objectivity was a condition of its recognition in the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges. Do you want tenure? Your main argument for it (made by your representatives) is that it's necessary to preserve academic freedom.

"One great thing about Composition is that it shows you (as you show your students) what sticks you with what. Fling down a general statement and you're stuck with its implications. Roll out a beautiful first paragraph and you're stuck with the expectations it raises. All must fit together. And the glue (which you learn to use in argument essays) is logic. The other great thing about Composition is that it pulls you into the practical world, the one the people you're trying to inform or influence live in.

"All right, you learn that in your classroom and then you go back to your office and what do you find? That you're as stuck with reason, universal truth, and experience-based knowledge (the heart of the epistemology that Stanley Fish said was "lying in ruins around us") as your students were with their own topic sentence. You are stuck with the rationality required in the practical world. You were stuck as soon as you described the course in the catalog.

"Finally, after you follow all that your practice implies, you get to your theoretical foundations, the ones your feet are really stuck in. You see that nobody, no German Romantic, no Heidegger, no Derrida, has kicked them away, nor, as long as you're crossing the hall to teach those freshmen, can they kick them away."

As long as the glue holds. If logic is relative — and it's going to be for those who let pi itself be relative — then the structure falls apart, the implications of practice for theory fail to hold, and the postmodernist can remain comfortably in his office.

"I know. That's why I say 'squash' instead of 'argue.' I hope to make him uncomfortable there."

Note: When I speak of "universal truth" above I have in mind only what the 19th century mathematician William Kingdon Clifford had in mind when he said, "It is wrong, always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

109. "Science Wars"

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If there's one thing outsiders have learned about that dust-up in universities called "the science wars" — you remember, postmodernists versus scientists, Stanley Fish, the Sokal Hoax — it's that studying it is a high-risk operation. You know that this kind of conflict is going to break out again, you suspect it's fundamental, you feel you ought to understand it, then you get into it and the dust is so thick you lose any track you thought you were on. You waste hours, days.

Well, let me, as a frequent loser of tracks, tell you how to save time reading the people — postmodernists, scientists, philosophers of science, poets, general humanists, whatever — who might be attacking or defending a position in this war, or any future one.

First: don't read further in any author who uses the word "science" without meaning "product-testing." No, I don't mean torturing rabbits with your cosmetic to make sure it doesn't irritate humans. By product I mean what a scientist comes up with — article, proof, talk at a conference, scheme in a book — as an addition to or correction of what's known. It's what's out there for testing. I choose the word "product" to keep what's out there distinct from what got it there, the process.

This is a heads-or-tails distinction. If you don't believe that go to a conference of mathematicians, our model scientists. Try to imagine anything — sickness, low income, grinding oppression, pathetic dress — that will excuse a leaking proof. It's the testing of the product, and only the product, that gives meaning, the operative meaning, the one that has to be dealt with in the world, to the word "science." And it's the one that, perhaps because it's fatal to any attempt to displace science downward, is most commonly ignored. If your author ignores it, drop him. He's not going to say anything useful about science.

Second tip, for those whose author keeps them reading: stop when you find that the author fails to put his own favorite concepts — like paradigms, or vocabularies, or any other large, all-embracing idea — on the testing ground. That author has denied that science is an open-ended discipline, one with no boundaries, no limits, no categories safe from test — all that let us say that scientists were engaged in "a self-correcting enterprise." Unless your author quickly steps in and explains how he's redefining "science," drop him.

Now for those who hate the slightest waste of time a third, riskier, tip: look for the first signs of anything resembling creationism. Read an argument for intelligent design and you hear in the end, "See, there is room for God." In between there will be moves to get anything that crowds God out (the particulars of belief, the details in Scripture, the things people really want to believe in) off the testing ground.  The author wants to move the whole mass toward abstraction.  For a quick exit from the whole thing listen for the first "See, there is room for..."  But listen closely. We want there to be room for mystery, room for poetry, room for dreams, room for psychoanalysis, room for anger and pity.  The author is taking advantage of that desire in order to make room for garbage.  His first moves will look very much like the legitimate ones.  It will be difficult but if you can detect in them an interest in God, even the faintest, you can save yourself a ton of garbage.

107. The Structure of Academic Revolutions

Want to know what drives a revolution in an academic discipline? Ask a young searcher for truth what he would rather have in his hand at the end of three years, a new statement of truth or a letter from the dean granting him tenure.

OK, your subject may well plump for the truth. That's nothing to sneeze at, a bona fide truth. But now do this: substitute in his hand a statement of what might possibly be the truth and put around him peers who possibly won't, or can't, recognize it as the truth. He could live alone with it, in an attic, for decades. Put that against a grant of tenure.

You there in the outside world, struggling to hang onto your job, running the rat race, getting by on a smile and a shoeshine, surely you understand the desire for tenure. I mean, a lifetime hold on well-paid independence? a yearly three-month vacation? What's not to understand? But still, you can under-estimate, you can fail to feel the full strength of it, the belief in it.  Have you ever heard that awed statement about the philosophy professor who had made himself into the purest possible nihilist (believer in nothing)?  "He believes only in tenure."

All right you've got that strong desire for tenure. Now give those who don't have it only three or four years to get it. Have them during those years teach some large lower-level courses. Give them a few of the administrative jobs the tenured profs are sick of. Anything to make sure a new Ph. D. doesn't have the time to sit back and think deeply — the way nearly every other discoverer of a significant truth has had to do. Then, a key provision: make publication in a refereed journal — a journal in which our young searcher will have to compete with all those in his discipline who have had the time to sit back and think deeply — a condition of his obtaining tenure.

The young searcher knows about learned journals. You get into them by stirring up truth. And he's got clear eyes. He sees that he's churning garbage. What else can he do on his schedule? Last, he's got a very reasonable human fear: that those deep thinkers, and particularly the journal editors, are good enough at garbage detection to see what he's doing. His only hope is that the distinction between truth and garbage can be obscured long enough for his garbage to get past the editor and onto the list the dean uses to grant tenure. And where does garbage most easily get a pass? In a revolution. You know, like the thing Sigmund Freud pulled off.

But you've got to be sure of the conditions. You don't want any garbage detectors coming down from the dean's office, or one department raking over another department's garbage. So look for department autonomy. Then if you can find a department that has successfully rejected the tests for garbage, or disputed the category, or denied it had distinguishing features, you're on the way. Your ideal, I think, is what Sinclair Lewis called the state university of his time, "a vast department store" — that is, a university from which the notion of a common academic enterprise had been entirely removed.

You have to be careful in your choice of a department. There's no hope in those fields where a new arrival can go to a frontier of knowledge and, using established research methods, add, or stir up, some recognizable truth. You want a field where there's no frontier, or if there is one nobody agrees on where it is, or whether it's moving forward or backward. Like in the arts and, often, the humanities.

You'll find a field of confusion somewhere in there. Uncovering a good one is not nearly so hard as it was before the German Ph. D. program became the model for everybody. Now there are so many arts, crafts, skills, and sports made into "fields" with a "graduate faculty" imposing "responsible standards," so many young scholars wandering around looking for a non-existent frontier, so much pointless rigor, so much free-floating scientism, so much confusion, that you can start a revolution without half trying.

And, without too much effort, you can keep it going — long enough, maybe (if you still haven't had time to really think) to get a promotion out of it. It won't be hard if you've started right. If you've got people revolting against predecessors whose position can be easily, but not too obviously, caricatured; if they've chosen, as a latently revolutionary father, someone who won't disown them when they give his doctrines the necessary exaggeration; if they've introduced enough new terminology to earn credit for new ideas (a vocabulary shift is a sign of a paradigm shift, right?); and if they've managed to start a journal where display of these things will be safe from non-revolutionary criticism, then, since the criteria for promotion are pretty much the same as those for tenure, you'll have no trouble.

The only thing your revolution really has to fear is a revival of the Socratic tradition. When Socrates put the pursuit of the good life at the center of the academic enterprise he marginalized (to spear a good word out of one revolution) every specialty to come. Specialists were the servants of those examining and, yes, enjoying, what was good — the art, the craft, the skill, the sport. The philologist in this tradition is prized for his service to the Chaucer story, the joy in it, not for his philology.

Since your revolution presumes the specialization of the Germanic tradition, with fields and disciplines and a graduate faculty and publication, it's going to fall apart in any institution that decenters (ah, another good word) it in favor of the Socratic tradition. The center (or, more appropriately, the heart) will be in the undergraduate classroom, or in the sculpt lab, or out on the track. With joy going for it. You're not going to be able to build up much steam for a revolution out on the margins.

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