Acephalous

Michelle Obama's Senior Thesis: Representative, though not as Embarrassing as Mine, Damn It

Travis Kavulla has some "Thoughts on Michelle Obama's Thesis."  As his title suggests, they are neither smart nor sound thoughts: they are merely thoughts.  Kavulla is not a dumb man.  He may even be a nice man.  So I grant, for the moment, that his thoughts on Michelle's Obama's thesis represent neither his mind nor his character; because if they did, they would speak quite poorly of both. 

First and foremost, the object of his critique is an undergraduate thesis.  It is not written deliberately—with the care a graduate student would write a seminar paper or a law student compose a sample brief—but in bursts of research crammed in between unrelated coursework.  (No scholar works on a paper while simultaneously trying to master studentized range distributions and Bowen's reaction series.*)  So undergraduate theses tend to resemble fun-house reflections of their committee's interests.

For example, remember my undergraduate thesis?  Were someone to dredge it up when my wife went up for tenure on the assumption it reflected my current beliefs and standards, I would dismiss them as frivolous.  My senior thesis is the product of an immature mind warping John Protevi's passion for continental philosophy into an embarrassing melange of big words and bad ideas.  Like any successful undergraduate, I could outline [.pdf] other people's thoughts but had problems generating any of my own.  So I did what every undergraduate does:

I mimicked.  I experimented.  I minced the careful prose of my betters until it emitted a fragrance I thought odoriferous, everyone else odorous. 

But I've changed.  In the years since I wrote my undergraduate thesis, I've learned how to parrot the conventions of my betters more convincingly, and that research consists of more than finding a theory that conveniently accounts for what I've already determined to be very important facts.  In short, I've honed the skills I once wielded with all the subtlety of toddler with a broadsword. 

Now for the ironic part:

I'd still be an oversized infant struggling to hack with a sword twice as wide as he was tall were it not for one of Kavulla's co-bloggers.  When I first arrived in Irvine, I talked BIG TALK.  I impressed people with my manifest impressiveness.  One day, after witnessing me conquer fellow graduate students in an after-seminar bull-session, a fellow by the name of Jim Zeigler pulled me aside and recommended I read Mark Bauerlein's Literary Criticism: An Autopsy. 

I was humbled.  Not that I agreed (or agree) with Bauerlein, but the idea that someone was challenging the theoretical orthodoxy I'd come to believe sacred was exactly the corrective I needed.  I'd uncritically embraced post-modern/post-structuralist theory as an undergraduate and needed some distance.  I needed to read something like this:

["Discourse"] has a loaded meaning, but a vague referent, and the vagueness is necessary to this mode of inquiry.  In using it, critics can attenuate their descriptions, yet still sound authoritative.  "Discourse" usage converts a methodological weakness into a theoretical exigency.  "Discourse" is an essential constituent of inquiry, description, definition, and so an inquiry into any particular discourse must hold off from being too determinate, too positive.  The ubiquitousness of discursive products (norms, values, distinctions, etc.) fosters a healthy skepticism toward the methods of empirical investigation (hypothesis testing, observation, fact-finding).  Hence critics can make incidental citations of this and that discourse, the mention of them indicating a world of relevant sociopolitical processes, and rightly neglect to fill in the concrete sociopolitical ingredients of the discourses cited.  The meaning of "discourse" and the methodological evanescence of it vindicate empirical thinness and oblique statement. (57)

Before you ask: I'm only quoting the conclusion; Bauerlein shows his work in the book.  Reading that forced me to refine my vague Foucauldian notion of what constituted "discourse" into something methodologically respectful ... something I couldn't use to lord over my fellows in a cloud of abstraction.  I became a respectable scholar in graduate school. 

Would that Kavulla could give Michelle Obama the benefit of that same doubt. 

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*Lynn Fichter is right: Mineral pictures are hot.

The Key to Literary Theory: Don't be an Asshole

Since this comment's been linked to a few times, I thought I'd lift it from the thread and score a cheap post.  The context:

I turned in the paper savaged in yesterday's post.  It came back with comments to the effect of:

I'm giving you an "A," but come talk to me. You don't want to become an asshole. 

But There Is Danger. 

Office hours Monday. Please attend. Don't, and for certain, you'll become an asshole.

I showed up on Monday morning to receive my dressing-down.  Went something like this:

You like theory, and that's awesome. I wish more kids were enthusiastic. BUT—and this is an ALL-CAPS, BOLDED "BUT"—there are different ways to approach theoretical problems. I'll charitably define yours as an "entitled imperialism," because you believe that reading a tiny excerpt of a three-part philosophical masterpiece entitles you to lay waste to Kant's entire project. You can't do that. Only assholes can. Hence, The Danger. You have to take writers seriously, study them, the commentary on them, and then—and ONLY then—should you assert yourself as you did in this paper.

Only it took an hour to deliver, and was peppered with detailed examples from secondary literature on Kant to show me what engaged critique actually looks like.  I left the office in tears, but with a firm idea of what solid theoretical critique looked like.  If only it hadn't taken three years for me to produce any ... but that's another story.

(Also, if you haven't read the comments on that last post, you've missed out on J.S. Nelson's maudlin tale of intellectual un-discovery and Human's inspiring story of Kant, conversion, and sexual discovery ... and are the worse for it.)

Update on the Jena Six David Duke

David Duke's released a statement attacking the media for its coverage of the Jena Six.  (Did I mention Kevin's mensch-work before?  I did?  It bears mentioning again.)  Duke likes to paint himself not as a white supremacist, but as an advocate of white pride.  Whites aren't better, by this logic, merely different in a way that should be celebrated.  His complaint is that the media is focused on how much Jena celebrates their white heritage, when, in fact, the entire state of Louisiana does:

Much has been made of the fact that I won an overwhelming majority of votes in Jena Louisiana in my election bids for U.S. Senator and for Governor. Such is said to falsely label the people in Jena as “racists.” In fact, I won the overwhelming majority of the White vote in the entire state of Louisiana, not just in Jena.

He's understandably upset by how the white population in Jena has been portrayed as racist.  The prosecutor who charged black kids while letting white adults walk for the same crime was supporting his race.  After all,

White people in America have lost our basic civil rights. Whites are now deprived of human rights by racial discrimination in jobs, promotions, scholarships, college admissions and in many other programs.

But why harp on commonplace hypocrisy when you can expose virulent racism to the light?  On the same board to which I wouldn't link previously, David Duke posted his statement.  The comments it elicits are ... telling:

The blacks all believe that if they show up in mass numbers they can get their ways. And up to now they have been right. Hopefully the people of Jena will wake up and help turn the tide of the plague that has invaded their once peaceful community.

Thank you Dr. Duke for standing up for the people of Jena. Thank you for all you have done for all of us of White European Heritage!

Not that it's all positive:

Why doesn't Duke do what Sharpton does ... Be Active instead of recapping the whole incident for us. We need a white Sharpton, not someone else who sits back and complains. He surely has the recognition, and support to organize big protests, yet seems think he's doing us a valuable service by telling us what we already know. Gee, thanks.

Duke himself responds:

You younger guys reading this, it is time you stepped up to the plate. My focus today is on getting a lot of David Duke's [sic] going hot and heavy! Getting a lot of David Duke's [sic] motivated and knowledgeable! Getting a lot of David Duke's [sic] elected! I have been more successful at that in Europe than the US, but hopefully that will soon change.

So, if you like what I say and think I should do more what you say I should, then please be my guest, do what you think I should! I urge every White activist who reads these words to do the same.

David Duke wants to get other David Dukes hot and heavy?  This is homosexuality-as-misdirected-narcissism at its finest.  But I digress: when not busy turning on himself in others, Duke is very busy, so you'll have to forgive him:

But friend, you have no idea what I do. You have no idea of my schedule, my struggles, my work, my efforts, cause you only see what I do that makes headlines, not the thousands of bits of hard work that don't.

Pity the poor white champion, won't you?  This guy recognizes how difficult Duke's life—and unique his contribution—is:

He can go where no politician would be trusted and he is listened to without as much of the media Jew-speaking in your ear while he is trying to get his message out.

The Jew Media would keep him from being President here, but they can never shut him up as our leading advocate.

Fortunately, the Jew media is on its last legs:

Look at the awakening that is going on throughout Europe, I know at times it is hard to see, but just look at the numbers that they can raise at a protest or concert.

Nationalists from Russia, Germany, Sweden, The Ukraine, Belgium and other European countries are gathering in large numbers while here in America if you get 100 to show up you're happy.

But when they do gather, they must be careful:

We don't need to show up as racists but as American Patriots.

This graduate student agrees:

The leaders of the WN movement should come from the universities and colleges across our nation. However, they are being squashed at every opportunity by liberal whites. On our campus, there have been several rallys about gay and nigra pride.

But when one white activist left WN fliers in library books, there was a campus wide warning by the administration against such actions as this was deemed "hate speech." To step up to the plate means severe persecution in today's time. If I did so, I could probably not finish graduate school. Anyways, I believe that persecution is one of the reasons people don't really step up to the plate and do more for the cause.

Whites do not have the same voice as minorities and the white southern male is the new nigra.

I emphasized that because ... because I couldn't believe someone actually said it.  Fortunately, the "new nigras" have some support from overseas:

I am not sure that my post will be approved by the mods and will appear in this thread but if it will be than I'd like to say that most White Americans are mentally lazy and therefore they are afraid to speak up for their interests and for themselves in daily life, they turned into some sort of Homer Simpsons already.

I am from former Soviet Union and when I came here, I was very surprised to know that Americans were acting tough in the Hollywood movies only such as "Rocky," but in real life they are cats, so it's going to be helpful if the Blacks will beat them up from time to time so that at least their I-am-goofy-all-happy-Cubs-win let-me-have-another-beer expression on their faces will be replaces with a face of a real White Man ...

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The Real Victim in the Jena Six Case: David Duke

I've been to Jena.  It's an hour north of Bunkie, where I road four-wheelers with anti-semites; and an hour west of Kingston, Mississippi, where I'll some day own land once tilled by slaves.*  For the past few weeks, I wanted to write about the Jena Six, but didn't know what to say.  How many ways can a person not express surprise?**  (Besides, Kevin's mensch-work assuaged my compulsion to address the issue, as through him I found Sylvia, Vox, and Elle.)

This isn't to say I haven't been reading and researching.  I have.  Yesterday, at a popular online forum to which I won't link, I found David Duke complaining about media coverage of the case.  He quotes this (from an article no longer online):

Still others, however, acknowledge troubling racial undercurrents in a town where 16 years ago white voters cast most of their ballots for David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who ran for Louisiana governor.

Then complains:

Well that proves the White folks of Jena must be a really bad bunch. They voted for me about 75 percent.

This is one more biased article meant to instill White guilt and shame. In Jena, Blacks a quite small minority commit most of the crimes and many of them are quite beastly, but Whites are the ones painted as devils here!

When I talk about the South to people whose experience of racism is almost wholly institutional, they accuse me of trying to change the subject.**  Not the case.  Only 25 percent of the white population didn't vote for an outspoken white supremacist.  This bears repeating with thunder:

Only 25 percent of the white population didn't vote for an outspoken white supremacist.

Let me put this another way: in the 2004 election, La Salle Parish (of which Jena is the seat) voted overwhelmingly for Bush, to the tune of a 80-20 margin.  In the 2003 gubernatorial election, however, Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco took La Salle by a 60-40 margin over her Republican opponent.  Remarkable, no?  Not really.  This was her opponent:

Most of the time, you see his first name in quotation marks, lest anyone forget "Bobby" Jindal's first name is Piyush.

However, I will agree with Duke on one thing: the AP article on Mychal Bell's conviction stating that he was found guilty by "an all-white jury" suggests some sort of judicial misconduct.  That's not entirely fair.  An all-white jury couldn't be avoided: no blacks answered the summons for jury duty.  Moreover, given that Jena is 85 percent white (as is La Salle Parish, if they chose to expand the jury pool), it's statistically unlikely a black person would be chosen.  Of course, the history of systematic disenfranchisement (only registered voters are summoned) and the whole jury-of-your-peers thing merit consideration ...

* Ironically, this land was first settled by immigrants from New Jersey.  (That's right: those Swayzes.)  It took three centuries, but that land will eventually be back in good Jersey hands.  The North shall rise again.

** A few years back, I was branded a racist on the department listserv for mentioning the KKK in a debate about institutional racism.  "The KKK is beside the point!" yelled someone who's obviously lived his whole life in California.