Did You Miss Me?

You certainly missed new content—site stats don't lie, they merely differ markedly as to the number of you who stop by and the frequency with which you do so—and after five days of flying knees-tight in airplanes; driving spine-crunched in cars; sitting through commencement speeches dull enough to melt your unmentionables; and spending one evening among old friends—one of whom reads this blog but bails out on you at 1 AM (ONE AM!) pleading exhaustion—after five days of that you're just going to have to settle for missing it some more.  As of now I'm only able to produce sentences of Faulknerian length and Fourth Gradian clarity. 

But I have quite a bit on the burner for this week, including:

1. A substantial review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World. 
2. Advance notice of a project in which I'll devote a post per week to a prominent thespian whose works I've expressed strong dislike for in the past but which, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I've acquired a sudden desire to read seriously.
3. Answering all the email which has graced my inbox unanswered for the past three weeks or so, as well as an explanation as to why I sometimes find it difficult to answer the five or emails I daily receive from you wonderful strangers when I also have 297 student emails in my inbox.
4. Responding to the comments left whilst I was without reliable internet connection.  (There are some great ones which need responses from some better version of me than I can currently muster.)
5. Writing a response to Laura's comment  (and Marco's too) about loving the one you're with you teach, which strikes me far more forcefully now than it did last week (and which, yes, has something to do with both #1 and #2).
6. (As does the post I plan to write in response to CR's comment about the relationship of teachers to careers vis-a-vis last week's "revelatory" post about my intellectual heritage.  (I have posts responding to pretty much every comment in that thread.  I'm currently unsure which will be comments and which will stand alone as posts.  I reserve the right to change my mind without being held accountable for doing so.)
7. Recounting the two very interesting conversations I had on the trip to Houston and on the trip back.  The first has to do with Sean's current celebrity; the second, with my future celebrity.
8. And, finally, responding to the flurry of debate about a certain novel by a certain expat Russian novelist which lately has been getting reduced to, well, openly advocating pedophilia.  But doesn't.  That needs to be said and hasn't been yet. I will bravely swim counter-current and demand people stop taking literature for propaganda despite frequently treating it as such.  (Because that's how I roll . . .  hypocritical.)

And that's just the beginning. 

A week without blogging will bring harvest to this barren blog.  (Or will if I don't drown in work come tomorrow.)

Comments

[CR]

(Sure, I accept that literary value and economic value are in some ways related -- but not through labor.)

So, see, Rich, that's where your essay starts. Why don't you write it up, instead of blogposting the whole thing off?

It's, like, permissable to disagree with Spivak. This is what we academics do. This is exactly the sort of thing that is fair game - to take Spivak one level deeper on the economic / literary value conjunction.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Cr: "There are dangers with both the theoretical model and the democracy of physicists model and what you're deploying as Scott's model, to be sure."

But what you're describing as banality is the common condition that everyone faces, right? The construction worker doesn't get to build only provocative buildings; the child care worker does not get to raise only brilliant children. I'm not making John's argument, although there are clearly similarities enough -- I really do think that there is a political aspect to the system of value and likely failure mode ("overestimating the provocation value of their findings") embedded into theoretically-driven style (where theory means the recent historical periodization, etc.). It's a criterion that some artists may strive towards, yes. But academics aren't artists.

[CR]

Rich,

I know where you're going with this, and its a little bit interesting, but also quite silly. The construction worker doesn't build lame buildings because he's a good leftist. The hamburger flipper doesn't make mcdonaldsy shite because out of class solidarity.

But what you're describing as banality is the common condition that everyone faces, right?

Because other workers are alienated, you'd like academics, out of a sense of solidarity, voluntarily to alienate themselves? Because the guy cutting lawns can't really aim for anything better, I'm to tone down the pitch of my work? Especially, it seems, if my work is aimed at improving the lot of the guy cutting lawns, right?

You might be interested in William Morris, and via Morris, Ruskin for more on this issue.

[Rich Puchalsky]

CR: "Because other workers are alienated, you'd like academics, out of a sense of solidarity, voluntarily to alienate themselves?"

Nope, not at all, everyone should do what they think best. My point is that even in a fully non-alienated society, non-provocative buildings would have to get built, children who are not brilliant would have to be raised. Even if people didn't specialize in one field of work as they do now, someone would still have to do the work at least part of their time. The concept of banality merely as failure isn't consistent with a view that rejects the very alienation that you're talking about.

CR: "So, see, Rich, that's where your essay starts. Why don't you write it up, instead of blogposting the whole thing off?"

Because, among many other reasons, Spivak's essay provides no useful starting point. The labor theory of value does not provide an explanation for literary value, no, but no one really thought that it did, and Spivak doesn't really make an argument rather than a word-game that it does.

[CR]

I don't know if it makes sense for us to play around in utopia. When we get there, we can sort out the proper practice of post-alienated lit crit.

[Rich Puchalsky]

OK -- but what I've been saying from the first is that the element of attempting to always exceed (so to speak) in theory is a symptom of alienation rather than a rejection of it. These concepts don't have to do with what literary criticism in utopia would look like so much as they have to do with which attitudes now are really consistent with a worldview that is supposed to lead in a leftist direction. No one should purposefully work towards banality out of solidarity, no -- but there's a conflict between scorning banality and claiming to be working towards a future in which some people get to do all the boring work and some people never do.

On the other hand, there's Bob Black. Sometimes I think that Zizek's public intellectual pieces would be more interesting if he did a quick read through Black. Maybe he already has somewhere.

[Adam Kotsko]

Rich,

As you yourself point out in one of the awful bloated threads at John and Belle, the careful scholarly stuff is actually part of Derrida's method. That is, it's not that his method doesn't "work" without it -- without it, it's just not his method anymore.

For this to have any relation to reality, it seems that we would have to establish that there was at some point a widespread trend of doing a "deconstruction-sans-hard-work." Obviously there wouldn't be such a trend right now, because deconstruction seems to have gone out of style among the lit folks. Maybe there was such a trend! Anything's possible. We'd need some empirical evidence, though. Are you well-equipped to provide that?

(Jonathan's comments on the Thread to End All Threads have made me a bit more cautious about doing things like "Sure, those lit people are bastards, but Derrida's still good." No need to slander an entire discipline just to win some minor level of traction in a debate.)

[Rich Puchalsky]

And here's Adam with his unique style of contribution. Let's see: Matt asked for an example, I replied. Lit person doing contemporary work? Check. Works in Derrida's tradition? Check. Arguably (according to my argument, anyway) not careful in the same way as Derrida? Check. Read and commented on by a large number of lit (sort of) people as still being work of contemporary importance? Check.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm addressing these issues backwards:

Adam: Jonathan's comments on the Thread to End All Threads have made me a bit more cautious about doing things like "Sure, those lit people are bastards, but Derrida's still good." No need to slander an entire discipline just to win some minor level of traction in a debate.

There's no need to, but there's plenty cause enough. Jonathan and I don't have the luxury of putting forward candidates (the perils of non-anonymity), but Rich or CR could nominate a few. There are still terrible, flip deconstructive readings out there; more common are moments in literary analyses in which terrible, flip deconstructive assertions are made via reference or allusion to larger deconstructive arguments. Derrida's thought has become so watered down, or better yet, it's in the water, such that a sustained engagement with it isn't required before one borrows its methods and/or conclusions. Guarantee you that 95% of the references to "supplement" in literary studies presuppose a trite logic of supplementarity that bears little relation to Derrida's.

John: Stop refering to CR in the 3rd person. This isn't the TLS (but oh! to have it reprinted there).

CR: Loading the text with Pertinent Historical Contextualization until the argument itself disappears under the weight of what Little Man A told the Manchester Shipward Reporter in 1897, the color of the socks that Little Man B wore the day he left Bolton, that sort of thing.

I didn't take the original as an insult, largely because I'm constantly worried that I've buried my point beneath a mountain of datapoints; thing is, I also find that situation comforting (if frustrating), because it assuages my concerns that I'm inventing whole-cloth things no one actually thought at a time. (That's different from explaining the blindspots people living in a moment have about that moment, which is something we all do to various degrees of success; by which I mean, explanation, good, self-righteous presentism, bad.) That said, I haven't seen many socks-departing-Bolton arguments outside of Joycean criticism, esp. not in any of the major journals; whereas I constantly see remarkably naive readings of Derrida/Foucault/Lacan/&c. in many of them. Well, not naive readings of them, but naive readings of them which lead to formulaic applications of their thought and bland, predictable conclusions about the article's nominal subject.

Matt: Rich's account of Specters of Marx strikes me as an intelligent engagement with the text, and his characterization of it as a "useful failure" seems both judicious and in accord with a lot of the secondary literature written about it (as well as Derrida's own later misgivings). That said, an anonymous, too-smart-for-his-own-good cohort of mine recently wrote a little something about a recent lecture which seems apropos:

Yesterday I made it out to a lecture by a man named Staten on Derrida and the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Staten's point was that Derrida was aiming, via deconstruction, at a kind of materialism in line with neuroscientific attacks on the unity of the ego. Apparently, the newest research suggests that our thoughts wander around, homeless, with starving bellies and eyes, in a structure known as a "pandemonium architecture," until a particularly mean group of them bands together to form an intention. I like this, because I like the anarchistic openness of it and the drama of affiliation, but precisely because it is a model of "demons" (Staten's term) uniting to form The Decision To Cook Dinner, it's not very Derridean. When Staten had finished, Gayatri Spivak, moving her arms very slowly in deprecatory gestures, told him that he had re-fashioned Derrida into something subjective and false. It took her a long time to say it: she kept promising to read Daniel Dennett and to argue with him later. She was utterly graceful; her voice was resonant with thoughtful, deep concern; and yet, because she was having an essentially private conversation, the moment bordered on farce. I felt with particular keenness how the drama of "pandemonium architecture" was getting lost in Derrida's remembrance, giving way to a discussion which reeked of age, of positions advanced and regretted, of a whole school of thought gradually losing its way in a Saramago fog. Several of the Irvine students there were pupils of Spivak's, or at least intimately connected to the "theory" professors at Irvine, and I imagine this was food to them. I was no part of it. Staten kept stressing that men are machines; that we must think of ourselves as machines; and that, contra analytical philosophy, there are no such thing as "zombies" which appear human but lack the inner experience of humanity. This is all quite true, and quite irrelevant to a world full of unwilling zombies working jobs they hate. Spivak said, "Derrida insists on the double bind," which is probably true, but it's also why she and he must discuss this later, when they have read more (she recommended a physicist's book to him). A little bit later, another book -- they will certainly make the trip to the lighthouse tomorrow, if the weather is fair. There was one professor who spent a while arguing with Staten about the Marxist revolution, after which it wouldn't be necessary to insist on absurd negations like "man is a machine." I didn't learn his name, but he did call for "a self-regulating world of human possibility." It doesn't sound very utopian, I know -- he should have added something about beautiful people in meadows -- but it was the best we got. I kept looking at Staten's hair, which is very long, and was pulled back harshly. Black shirt, black tapered jeans, black shoes. The work of mourning, indeed; while I sat there, they all went looking for their noble father in the dust.

[Adam Kotsko]

Oh, whatever.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Huh?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Whoever forgottenboy is, he's a good writer.

[Adam Kotsko]

I'm trying to be more Agambenian. The coming community is the whatever community.

[laura]

what and where is the thread you are calling the thread to end all threads?

[laura]

Hey Scott. I've been meaning to ask. What's the purpose of the VoS & Teaching carnival etc stuff down the left sidebar? It doesn't display properly on my browser.

[Adam Kotsko]

Laura,

Look on this thread, ye mighty, and despair!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Rich, you don't know the half of it. The kid's head-and-shoulders above the rest of us. Mauled me in chess for about three weeks straight before I called a stop to our regularly playing chess. Were he to weigh in on this thread--or any others, for that matter--he'd blow our minds.

Laura, I've been trying to write a script that'll display relevant sections of the Voice of the Shuttle and particular posts from Teaching Carnivals past that I want to keep in circulation. I want the thing to be dynamic, but since I had the idea a month or two ago, I've only been able to spend about an afternoon on it all told. I fiddle around with it, then when I (inevitably) fail, I shrink and blacken the text. (Turning off a typelist in TypePad requires about eleven steps. Shrinking and blackening the texts requires one.) All of which is only to say that I'm both lazy and incompetent, but hope to take care of it once the quarter ends and I can spend a day or two working on it.

[Matt]

Oh, I don't know. For obvious reasons the debates over economics with Rich tend to stall, but his "reading" of Specters didn't really, um, what's the word...impress.

(Anyway there's an article coming out shortly which will conclusively answer all these questions.)

So those are the only notes then, Scott? What did Spivak talk about? We're counting on you, to be an objective observer!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt, I don't know the article of which you speak, but I still don't think Rich's engagement with Specters is as insufficient and/or scandalous as you seem to. As I said, he himself had a problem with it--I vaguely remember a bit about his flirtation with a "utopian Charybdis," but I don't know why that particular locution springs to mind--as have many other critics. I see Rich's engagement with it as honest, and his assessment of it--something which, while in the end mistaken, is a usefully so--an indication that he's being more generous than you give him credit for. Also, a reading need not "impress" to be cogent or pointed, no?

As to this particular Spivak event, I didn't show up. Had I know Staten would be discussing Dennett, I would've made time to; but in accordance with nightmarish scheduling imperatives, the majority of the interesting and/or influential talks occur when I'm swamped or physically incapable of being in two places at one time. The Staten falls under the latter category. However, I can ask forgottenboy--who has, I shit you not, total recall--to give a more thorough, less entertaining account of the event. (That sounds like an insult, but I'm serious: he has total recall. He remembers conversations we had during Welcome Week four years ago, i.e. when I was even stupider.)

[Matt]

Scott, thanks for the reply.

Not to persist in what may seem a persecutorial tone, but let me see if I have this straight. Rich's "reading" is a useful failure in what sense, exactly? And Derrida's book is likewise a useful failure? How so? What "later misgivings" are you referring to here, specifically?

Jonathan and I don't have the luxury of putting forward candidates (the perils of non-anonymity), but Rich or CR could nominate a few.

Oh, go on. Anyone can be anonymous here whenever they well like.

There are still terrible, flip deconstructive readings out there...

The term is really "mimetic contagion," no? And it's hardly the exclusive province of literature departments, nor continental philosophy, though the former may be the popular impression now approaching cliché status after several decades use. The cliché may be somewhat earned. Then again, it may largely be not. Has it ever occured to you, Scott, that the only honest way to "cure" such people is to not dignify them with attention, but rather and most importantly to simply do better? (Look at it this way, they're certainly not about to listen to someone who won't, or can't demonstrate precisely how their readings suffer for being shallow. Literature departments need continental philosophy (and theology!) departments, in other words, in this poststructural day and age when the disciplines have refreshingly begun to open up. People are still stretching their arms after centuries of being cramped, and sometimes they overstretch a bit, but that will decrease as the new freedom becomes more familiar, and new lines are drawn.)

One certainly wouldn't want to treat these worst examples as representative or definitive, much less normative, because to do that would be to cast a dismissive and lazy glance over decades of work - much of it responsible, original and scholarly (I'm not pseudonymous but I could provide examples) - not to mention indirectly provide ammunition for those perennial enemies of intellectual culture whose active pursuit of the already relatively meagre funding for these departments is the price, well, that any democracy must always pay (for instance, a pursuit against "Theory" in favor of the latest scientification fad, et cetera).

Anyway. Sorry to ramble on; it's late, and I imagine you'll want to disagree with much of this. Not to be overly sinister or anything ("reactionary scientologists plot jealous revenge on cross-disciplinary insurgents"). Please don't feel burdened to take the time in lieu of more important tasks, such as pasta dinner with the family, for instance.