Acephalous

Donate to Team Acephalous . . .

. . . because I like money. 

I read Waxbanks' post on Jason Kottke's decision to ask his readers to become "micropatrons."  His chutzpah earned him points for bravado and derision for hubris from the MeFi community.  So I started thinking about thresholds.  Do I provide $0.25 worth of enjoyment monthly?  $1.00?  $10.00?  Kottke's plan to quit his job and "work" on his blog full-time failed in part because he set his threshold at $30.  That's brazen times n^STUPID.   

Thinking about this seriously, I wonder whether this economic model could work.  For example, the average graduate student in English has to supplement his or her income in a variety of ethically unsavory ways—tutoring children of wealth so that they score even higher on standardized tests foremost among them.  Could that income be replaced by being interesting? 

Imagine you and my 700 or so other daily visitors each donated $0.25 a month.  That'd equal some number someone who can multiply would label a "reasonable supplemental income."  Suppose they each donated $0.50.   That'd triple that already reasonable supplemental income by two.  All for less than it'd cost you to have Coinstar turn that change into money.  I'd wager most people only enthusiastically read $5 or $6 worth of blogs per month.  This system would create a furious competition among bloggers to generate interesting and original content.

The readers would reap the rewards of their generosity and create a feedback loop.  As bloggers became more interesting they would earn more money, which would in turn force them to be even more interesting, lest they lose the audience they have.  Influence could be measured by donations and popular linkdumps like Instapundit would suffer the fate of all uninteresting portals:

Oblivion.

My actual investment in this idea comes from my research for that article I'm writing and/or panel I'm a part of.  I've been thinking about the cost of individual subscriptions to Project Muse and JSTOR and the OED—in particular, about the inability of independent scholars to access the resources most of us in academia take for granted.  If we take seriously the argument that academic blogs signal the breakdown between "formal" and "informal" contributions to our collective knowledge, then we need to find some legal way to afford "informal" contributors the same access to academic archives that we "formal" sorts have.  I can think of a number of scholars whose work I think important enough to contribute a third of a cup of coffee a month to allow them such access.  The thing is, the same stigma dogging the panhandler hounds the blogger who explicitly asks for contributions. 

The only way this system could work is if it became standard practice.  I'm not sure how that would happen.  But in the meantime,  did I mention I like money?

The Idiot's Guide to Scott's Idiosyncratic Theoretical Orientation (Sadly, Not Complete With Cartoons)

I'm not up to producing original content tonight.   Fortunately, Forgotten Boy and N. Pepperell are having an incredibly stimulating conversation down in the comments to this post.  Were I able to put two and two together tonight I'd jump in.  (Forgotten Boy continues to write circles around the competition.  I wish I'd wished to be hit by a car to write like him before.  I'd wish it now, but it'd be in poor taste.  Don't want to be offending myself after all.) 

Also, a number of people have professed a desire to understand my particular theoretical orientation.  Here are some links to posts in which its contours are visible:

1. My long meditation on theoretical eclecticism.  It's my contribution to the Theory's Empire event and discusses why I value a confrontational mode of literary scholarship. 
2. Another long post, this time about New Historicists' love of homologies and my problem with them.
3. A veritable sonnet concerning my devotion to historical accuracy over and above all commitments theoretical. 
4. Speaking of which: my feelings about uncritical theoretical commitments.  (Be sure to read the comments.)
5. A bit about my tortured relatonship with Foucault.  (The second bit of which is, as Matt'll tell you, still pending.)
6. My intellectual history.
7. The funnier version of my intellectual history.
8. The New Historicist reading list I put together earlier this year.
9. The text of my public lecture about historicisms old and new.

All of these pieces are flawed and incomplete, but as I've never written a comprehensive account of my critical position, they'll have to suffice for the moment.  Needless to say, I've changed my mind about some of that since I wrote it, but it'll provide those who seek to understand my position better a sound starting point.

P.S.  Some of you have websites whose banner and layout bore me to sleep before I have a chance read a word you say.  Luckily for you I have a solution: Lauren's "willing 2 work 4 fud."  You can find some examples of her work on Feministe as well as the sites she links to in that post.  Like Dr. B's.  How can you not love that banner?  It's classic.  Yours can be too.  Were I not married to a graphic designer, dirt poor and on the path that terminates in Dickensian gutters, I'd hire her myself.

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.)

Theory vs. Continental Philosophy: BLOGFIGHT!

This is an updated version—in the sense that I've elaborated some points and abridged others—of an email I wrote yesterday.  Writing it clarified some issues for me and my interlocutor, so I thought I'd post another version up here tonight.  I've decided to elide the names of those persons who don't have a significant web-presence, since I don't have their permission to write about their lives and work.

There's something about modernist literature which lends itself to and/or is consonant with continental philosophy.  Joyce, Proust, Woolf, &c. attract people who study Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, &c.  The attraction is some combination of the characteristics of the text and the characteristics of the minds attracted to such texts, but whatever the explanation, the effect is palpable.  There's certainly a relationship between continental philosophy and European modernism, as evidenced by the fact that almost everyone who works on the latter does so through the former.  I'm being careful here to specify "continental philosophy" instead of Theory, since it's "continental philosophy" and not Theory which interests literary modernists.  The reason?

Modernism starts, depending on who you ask, with the European-inflected thought of William James on Gertrude Stein; or with Bergson's influence on Woolf and Joyce; or with any number of French intellectuals on Joyce, Beckett, and Pound; &c.  There's a kind of historicist heart to the modernist's embrace of continental philosophy, since it's often essential to understanding the formal properties of the works being studied or the works which have influenced them.

So, as an undergraduate I studied with M.P., a Joycean who split time between Santa Cruz and Paris in the '70s.  He attended Lacan's seminars, worked with Derrida, and wrote a dissertation on Joyce under the direction of Fredric Jameson and Hayden White.  (In graduate school, he, T.B.—now a notorious historicist—and M.B.W.—now just notorious—were close friends.)  M.P. fancied himself a continental philosopher of sorts, but when he hit the market, he was considered a "theorist" because he was a continental philosopher of sorts who worked in an English department.

My graduate school agenda, hatched with M.P. during many a long office hour, was to continue to massage my philosophically-inclined Joycean interests by coming to Irvine, where I could work with Derrida (who got a backchannel letter from M.P. vouching for me, a copy of which was sent to N.M., a prominent Wake scholar.  To round out my undergraduate education, I sought out a guy in the French department named John Protevi.  (You may know him as a frequent commenter on Michael's blog.)  He's the editor of the Yale University Press's Dictionary of Continental Philosophy, and his personal interests are in Foucault and all things Deleuzoguattarian.  He and I clicked, so I started reading Foucault and many things Deleuzoguattarian, learning about the conflicts internal to the continental tradition.  So my graduate project, such that it was, entailed me coming to Irvine and continuing this course of study.

The Genius of Little Men plus Darwin's Wizard Work

Maurice Thompson's "The Domain of Romance" (1889) forwards an unusual argument about Darwin’s relationship to realism and romance.  According to Thompson, the “little realists” took down the last historical romantcer, Victor Hugo, then proceeded to

yelp like jackals around the great man’s knees as he lay dethroned, and the burden of their barking was: “Give us commonplace; we are tired of heroics.” They could not see that out of a mass of commonplace Darwin had wrung the romance whose significance filled the whole area of life.  The epoch-interpreter had spoken through the “Origin of Species” and the “Descent of Man.” The petty analytical fictions and the smooth verses of mediocrity fell dead-born.  But some one may suggest that the world has not taken the works of Darwin for romance.  Well, the world has not, but that goes for nothing; it remains true that they are romance; nor does this impair their scientific vale.  Truth is not less true because it satisfies the imagination.  If Darwin’s theory is true, it is so because it satisfies the imagination; the missing links of facts are many and important. Darwin comes no nearer absolute proof of the conclusions arrived at ini his masterly romance of the rocks, plants, and animals, than Hugo comes to proof of those reached in “Les Miserables.” In the far future the most valuable significance of the theory of evolution will attach to the fertilizing effect it had upon the imagination of the age...

There’s too much to parse in there, but needless to say, it interests me that—contra the conventional accounts of the relationship of evolutionary theory to literature—Thompson claims that Darwinism will murder realism and revivify romance.  To wit:

What wonder is it that, just at the time when science was thus flowering forth in a mighty raceme of romance, the smaller fry of geniuses should make the mistake of realism?  They saw nothing of Darwin’s wizard work save his lucid catalogue of facts and his half-repressed statements of conclusions; but they shrewdly guessed that the world was hungry for fiction of the Darwinian sort.  It appeared very easy to satisfy public appetite by writing novels on the scientific plan.  They overlooked the central secret, the romance inclosed in Darwin’s work, and they refused to see that the world adores wonders.  They saw Darwin’s petty analyses; they failed to see his grand synthesis, the work of a colossal imagination.  The time is past for any novelist to redeem the error.  Darwin has forestalled realism.

While not quite so spectacularly wrong as, say, the JV basketball coach who cut Michael Jordan because he thought His Eventual Airness lacked potential, that’s still pretty spectacularly wrong.

Caleb Crain on "Academic Criticism," Only Not Really

[X-posted to environs Valvular.]

Radiating delight, I read Caleb Crain‘s article on “Academic Criticism” in the new n+1. According to the prelude to “American Writing Today: A Symposium,” Crain’s article addresses “the conditions of production of new [academic criticism]; its character and traits; and the figures and creators who have most influenced each field” (63). 

It didn’t; it didn’t; and it didn’t. 

A Day in the Life of a College Student, Circa 1928

Jim:  Andy was lit up like a church last night!

Jim #2:  Was he?  I can't remember.  I'd wet my goozle with some hard knockout drops soon as the sun dropped.

Andy:  (stumbling in)  So I drank some corn juice, I remember that much . . .

Sam:  'Pifflicated, you were!

Andy:  I was at that.  I was seeing snakes for sure.  What happened to Mary?

All:  Let's not talk about the after-date.

Andy:  Why not?  She was strong for lovin' last I recall.  (a confuzzled look crosses his face)  I was . . .

Sam #2:  You're no big butter and egg man from out West anymore.

Andy:  What's your insinnuendo?  I showed some mean stuff and now she just gives me air?

Jim:  You shouldn't have told her 'bout your surety.  She thinks you a chicken duster now.

Andy:  I'm no . . . I suppose it's not worth discussing.  I'm not sloptimist enough to think I can open her gate now. 

Jim #2:  Plus Jim over there told her you were a chest-pounder.

Andy:  Why'd you go and do that?  Drift, brother, and close the door behind you.  (Jim leaves.  Andy turns to the Sams)  What happened last night?  Which slicker brought panther-sweat to our private tunk?

Sam:  You did.

Andy:  I did?

Sam #2:  You came blustering in about not cookie-pushing for any more high higs and how you were coming to this and every future rub stag. 

Andy:  She was a knock-out and a darb, but my father isn't paying this grill four thousand a year for me to be some rare lady's tea hound.  I mean, she knows her oil . . .

Jim #2:  She is full of vinegar.

Sam #2:  And she never breaks a wing.

Andy:  But she gives a lot of house. 

Sam #2:  That's not what I heard tell. 

Andy:  Where's your muffler?

Sam #2:  Sorry.  I can be such a sock.  You want to join our cram tonight?

Jim #2:  You should.  You're on the mat and Sam really knows his onions.

Andy:  I should.  I don't want to get a letter from His Highness.

Sam:  You're next invite to the Dean's formal will be your last. 

Andy:  (slumps)  This Jewish engineering has me down on all fours.  Don't get me wrong.  The professor's pretty hot.  When we chum he has the oil and keeps cramming.  But I thought his would be a pipe and now it's all whip and over.

Sam #2:  Just be sure to bone and you won't get a footing.

Jim:  (runs in)  C'mon, peaches, here's your can!  (Jim #2, Sam, Sam #2 and Andy give chase.  Homosocial hilarity ensues.)

The Wayback Machine: May 4, 2006

[Because many of my readers are of recent vintage—not to mention the fact that your Irvine Derridevils have a double-header tonight—I present to you this blast from the past.  Originally posted on May 4, 2005, "How Not to Open, Close or Anything In-Between an Academic Essay" marked my entry into big-time blogging.  No, not the sort of "big-time" that would unleash the hoards of boingboing on my (limited) bandwidth—but a more modest "big-time."  My readership spiked from 25 to about 70 after this post, so I have a spot for it as soft as the one I have for its subject is sore.  Note the reference to the fictional "A. Cephalous" which pepper it.  Also note the overwrought prose of someone who tries far too hard.  Ain't the fact that I don't have to do the former no more grand?  Of the latter, the less said the better.]

The discussion at The Valve keeps spurring memories of my erstwhile conversion to Church of Theory and Latter Day Feints in the Spring of '98.  [Ugh.]  The Critical Tradition clutched to my chest,  I would speak to anyone willing to listen about "Butler's fascinating essay," presumably "Imitation and Gender Subordination," which at the time I felt "the most eye-opening thing I'd read all semester, in that the perspective it offered me [was] so different from what I assumed the 'gay' perspective to be that I [had] a distinct urge to round up everyone I know who's gay and interrogate them."  [Maybe I should've mentioned that those quotations came from the statement of purpose that landed me this swank position at UCI.  And this paragraph—did it really need to be this long?  No.] 

[And now it isn't.]  Very impolitic, I know, but at the time I only knew two verbs and "intervene" didn't work either.  Also, I had spent the previous paragraph "intervening in Irigaray's critique of male-dominated hegemonic practices," and too much intervention left the young A. Cephalous feeling less effective than a Clintonian Democrat.  (His phrase, not mine.)  [Don't you love how I complain about tediously overwritten prose in tediously overwritten prose?  I'm so ironic.  And intentionally, no less.]  And so when it came time to write an Honors thesis, I chose the topic closest to my heart: "a Wittgensteinian critique of the discursive function of the feminine and the cyborg in schlemihlhood in Thomas Pynchon's V.  and Gravity's Rainbow."  According to my abstract,

By utilizing Donna Harraway's all-inclusive conception of cyborg identity I will investigate the realities Pynchon imposes on his characters' bodies without limiting the factual information provided about those realities to the demands on a system I impose on the text.  Instead I will work with the epistemological boundaries present in the text itself, provided by the interaction of the historical details, literary allusions, and philosophical and scientific arguments.  This will allow me to explicate the text's complexity without reducing it to a more palatable but less accurate representation of itself.  [Why didn't I take the opportunity to interlace criticism into this beastly paragraph?  See the mistakes an amateur blogger will make?] I am most interested in how these complexities destabilize the systems which impose limitations on the text, both from within and without; prevent critical orthodoxies from establishing interpretive dominance based on the discourse at work outside the novels and the imperial regimes from establishing a hegemonic dominance based on discreet categorical entities within the novels themselves.

I remember spending countless hours working on my Honors thesis, but looking back, I wonder what I spent those hours doing.  Certainly not anything constructive.  You would think the thesis that followed would be more intelligent than its abstract, as it could not possibly be less.  You would be wrong.  [But if you thought I should've stopped the sentence before that one at the word "abstract," removed the conjuctive "as" and let "It could not possibly be less" stand on its own, you would be right.]  The thesis of my thesis, unlike my enemy's enemy, is no one's friend:

Cyborg identities reveal and resist the process of naturalization that molds bodies into categorical entities whose social, familial, and sexual roles are predetermined, providing what Donna Haraway calls "a reference point for the theoretical and practical struggles against...the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism [and] scienticism."

"Look at how oppositional I am!" declaimed ["Declaimed"?  Did "cried" have a prior engagement?  Was "shouted" booked that week?] an embattled A. Cephalous.  "Whatever it is, I'm against it!"  I attacked  every category of category, ranting about how, "like other cyborgs, Pynchon's have their otherness written in/on their bodies," or how "this bodily otherness  is then incorporated into their cyborg identities, which deconstruct the wholeness implicit in the exclusionary principle at the heart of a binary conception of identity."  I felt powerful.  Who transgressed borders?  I transgressed borders.  Which ones?  Why

the whole body of lived social relations, since their identities are "predicated on transgressed boundaries"--between such terms as organic/machinic, man/woman, nature/culture, public/private, civilized/primitive, heterosexual/polymorphously perverse--boundaries which society considers inviolable.

[Finally, a bit that works from start to finish.  Only took me, what?  Nine-hundred words?] Before the workings of my radical mind "all the formerly reliable oppositions/dualisms [were] destabilized and the identities constructed from them [were offered] up for reexamination."  Then I discussed nouns and something I called "the historical/social ramifications of analytic desiccation."  This withering analytic tatooed shudder-quotes on the shoulders of 78% of available nouns, and so when I turned, predictably, to discuss "how cyborg 'identity' in the form of 'information-processing devices' [worked] to further destabilize the 'post-colonial' environs of 1922 Sudwestafrika," is it any wonder I lost track of "what" I had "argued"?  Was I still talking about "a fundamental divide (in the Kantian sense) between a human understanding of the world and a knowledge of the world as it is"?  And had my "argument" evaporated before or after the chart in which I made "the implications of this situation less confusing" by categorizing everything as "Raw Sferical Data Weissmann Transcribes Exists in the World," "Raw Data Transcribed by Weissmann" and "Information Decoded by Weissmann under Wittgensteinian Dictates"? 

I cannot answers these questions now, and suspect I couldn't then either.  (Though I would've protested, loudly, repeatedly, loudly, repeatedly, and then rather loudly that your inability to follow my argument is your fault.  Jackass.)

Why am I sharing this?  On the one hand, it's because I was thinking about the vehemence of my position in the this week's discussion on the Valve.  How did I come to distrust the suggestiveness of Theory?  Then I remembered: A. Cephalous, you little shit, you penned "Cyborg Identity and the Destabilization of Epistemological Boundaries in Thomas Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow."  What frightens me about this document (excerpts of which will now lurk the darker corners of the internet until the most inopportune moment possible) is that I earnestly believed I was saying something about something.  [I still believe that I believed that, but I have spent one more year agonizing over the why and how-possibly-could-I-have.]  What frightens me more generally are those occasions when I stumble across articles seemingly no better than my honors thesis in academic journals.  Granted, some of those critics undoubtedly walk the walk I only talked, but since none of them really talk all that better than I did, I wonder about the quality of their walking. 

One final historical note: Seven months after completing my opera mictilis I officially forswore Theory in an essay on the current state of Hawthorne Studies.  Why I forswore there instead of forswearing somewhere else or appropriate even escapes me.

[Here endeth the lesson.  I hope those of you who hadn't read it enjoyed it, and those of you who had didn't bother to read it again.  Great concept, lackluster execution.  I should really revise these things and distribute them in less ephemeral format . . . ]

Historians, Start Your Engines...

The same day I get tagged by the History Carnival for my post on "Useable Pasts" sees my friend, the UPS man, arrive at my door to deliver Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography.  How fortuitous.  David Brown's book demonstrates one problem with the field of intellectual history:

Intellectual historians often take the thinkers they write about at their word.  I know you know the dead horse I wallop here.*  For those who don't, a refresher course.  The chapter on Social Darwinism and American Thought opens promisingly enough.  "The New Deal changed everything," Brown writes. 

And it did. 

The influence of the New Deal and the reaction of those who, like Hofstadter, stood to Roosevelt's left cannot be quashed from any responsible intellectual history of the period.  The New Deal shaped the dissertating Hofstadter's politics to a great extent, so much so that the former Communist critic of the New Deal created a mythic philosophical movement with which the New Dealers could pound their opponents.  But from that point forward the quality of the chapter declines steeply. 

Example #1:

But Hofstadter produced his thesis under the eye of Merle Curti, a pioneer in the emerging field of intellectual history.  Liberated from the Progressive penchant for appointing heroes and villains, Hofstadter was able to merge both his politics and scholarship into a powerful critique of the great titans. (29)

What?  You want to know how Hofstadter "liberated himself from Progressive penchant for appointing heroes and villains," don't you?  So do I.  I've read few books as many times as I've read Social Darwinism and that statement so disconforms from my knowledge of the book that I'm barely able to type the following summary of Hofstadter's "Table of Contents":

1. "The Coming of Darwinism": Summary of the period.
2. "The Vogue of Spencer": Spencer is a big fat villain.
3. "William Graham Sumner: Social Darwinist": So is Sumner.
4. "Lester Ward: Critic": My Hero!
5. "Evolution, Ethics, and Society": Huxley dreamy, Kidd nightmarish.
6. "The Dissenters": My Heroes!
7. "The Current of Pragmatism": Williams James and John Dewey!  Give me a "P"!  Give me an "R"!  Give me . . .

I could continue, but I think I've made my point.  Hofstadter went to great lengths to create heroes and villains in his turn-of-the-century yarn.  On some level, even Brown knows this:

Hofstadter found a foil to Sumner's philosophy in the impressive scholarship of Lester Ward. (32)

How, I wonder, does one have a foil without antipodes?  And if Sumner plays foil to "the impressive" Lester Ward, how does that antipodal logic not cast Sumner as the villain and Ward as the hero?  I'm baffled.  I could continue all night, but I want to save some material for tomorrow.  I'm only three pages into the chapter on Social Darwinism, but I should stop now, as I'm tempted to say, pace Ms. Parker, that this book should not be tossed lightly aside but hurled with great force.

*Those with access to the OED can witness the fine pun I stumbled into there.

The End of The Valve?

[X-posted.  FYI: This is written in the spirit of yesterday's "misogynistic" post.]

The vibe around [The Valve] has been terrible of late.  Dismissive.  Drained, nay! desanguified.  Why?  An unhealthy percentage of our readership responds rigidly and unthinkingly to what we publish.  Constitutionally incapable of actual research, this lot prefers to think intuitively.  They are frequently hostile, with bitter and ill-tempered dispositions.  They flap their corrosive tongues in an attempt to dominate conversation. 

You heard me, ladies, I'm calling you out.  I learned all about you in an article I read today:

Intellectual activities unsex a woman, and she pays a high price for her intellectual life.  As a result, she is prone to all sorts of nervous disorders and may become severely maladjusted.  There is little hope she will marry, and, in a few cases, her intellectual activities are said to make her frigid.  In any case, intellectual activities seem to make some women cold and lacking in human warmth.

Of course, that only applies to our unattractive female readership, as the rare "hottie" (as the kids say) isn't even "credible to many, and ingenious explanations are necessary to accont for her scholarly interests.  Usually the explanation is some type of early psychological experience." 

"Unattractive women," however, "are perfectly credible as scholars and their interests in intellectual activities do not require any explanation."  Better unspeakably traumatized than unattractive, as "no greater misfortune can befall a woman than to be physically unattractive, and this misfortune of physical unattractiveness warps her soul and makes her a spiteful creature."

On The Origin of Academic Jargon, Part II

Of academics I obtained twenty-six kinds who speak of "deterritorialization" without fear of fructuous or vegetal reprisal.  Seeing this gradation of thought in one large but intimately related group of scholars, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of thought in an isolated department, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.  Mr. Gould observed that subsequent to one scholar uttering the phrase "phallogocentritheatricality," his compatriots brooded for days over the Butlerian intervention into the Cixousian supplement of the Derridean "text."   Although they were supremely frustrated by their inability to crack this nut, their consternation afforded Mr. Gould and I an opportunity to note the disharmony among the various scholarly species. 

The most curious fact is the perfect differentiation in the mind of each critic.  Of sub-group Astructatornis, lately brought from French confines, the eight species can often be seen entering the thorniest of vines and removing from them nuts of the aforementioned sort.  Astructatornis then examine the nut and determine it both the cause of their hunger and of their satisfaction.  If their earnest and searching cogitation fails, the nut will be turned over to their sexually dimorphic, booby-infatuated associates.  The vampiric Zizicornis feed off the blood of boobies.  They will stare at the nut for some time before determining it neither booby nor sublimated surrogate and therefore unimportant.  Unwilling to be induced to undertake the office of Butlerian nut-cracker, Zizicornis defer to the bald-headed tyrant-catcher Mr. Waterhouse christened Powapowacornis (after its unique but ultimately repetitive song).   They sing their signature hymnal then depart in anger at the nut's inability to understand that its very nuttiness is constituted by its presence on the beach, amidst these illustrious examples of adaptive radiation.  Excluded from Powapowacornis' august company are the desanguiated boobies asleep on the beach.

The sleeping boobies dream.  They dream of an island on which none but boobies alight and of another on which the scholars fail to crack nuts in the company of other scholars.  For generations each exists in utter isolation.   When by force of accident the scholars venture into unfamiliar environs the indigenous response is of unequivocal hostility.

[X-posted.]

On The Origin of Academic Jargon, Part I

As I read Amardeep's contribution to the Spivak MMTOR (to which I will contribute when time and dissertation committee permit) I had one of those moments.  You know the ones: 

You're walking home from class, grousing under your breath about the "progress" you made on your dissertation yesterday, then suddenly something clicks when you think you hear Karen O screaming something which sounds surprisingly like "ZORK!" 

Tonight's random confluence comes from a click "overhead" as I read Amardeep's post.  I had been thinking about how to reply to Belle Lettre and N. Pepperell's comments on something I wrote in an exaggerated fit of annoyance about the idea of "a useable past."  The unacknowledged cherry atop my conceptual complaint had been the feather-fluffing prose in which these historical distortions declaimed.  I thought I'd write a sarcastic "Note to Self" about new regulations limiting the number of unchecked facts OSHA allows one to balance simultaneously on a soap box.  I'd outline the regulations in bureaucratic detail and lull the majority of my audience into a stupor . . . so I ranted instead. 

As my prosopalgic complaints accumulated my prosodic ones dropped from sight.  All conceptual headache and no complaints about rhetoric!  What was I thinking? 

This.  Such were the thoughts my mind's eye lazily half-scanned as I read Amardeep's post after a day of relentless dissertating . . . then it clicked.  Endless thought about the Origin of Species had organized an opinion on academic jargon with little or no intervention from my preoccupied mind! 

To Be Continued . . .

On "Useable" History: A Rant in One Long, Hoarse Howl

In his 1985 Social Text article "History and the Canon," Paul Lauter writes the following sentence:

The search of the social movements for a useable past led out this closed [canonical] circle. (94)

The emphasis is mine.  While I hate the entire sentence, I reserve special hatred for its emphasized phrase.  I find the idea that what literary scholars ought to seek is "a useable past" offensive.  Scratch that.  I admit that previous historical models were slim on all things not pale and sans penises.  Rectifying such omissions was of the utmost importance.  Why?  Because with more than half its content stricken from it the historical record is what those in the business call "beyond useless."  It speaks only to those who were spoken for and rewards those whose skin or unmentionables are the social equivalent of a firmly raised and vigorous waved hand in a small classroom.  Take a peek into my book:

Undermining white patriarchal privilege?  An unmitigated good.

Why?  Because undue attention on particular particulars skews the record.  I want to know what happened, not what happened to popular pricks whose girlfriends and "girlfriends" were on the yearbook staff.  That sort of selective memory compels tears from my eyes and small angry flecks of spittle from the corners of my mouth.  I hate it.  What many literary scholars fail to realize is that the sin is the sin no matter who commits it.  To move to a central locale some work of marginal literature is to strip said work of its unique engagement with the majoritarian culture.  Perhaps that work attempts, Tolson-style, to outwit Eliot at his own game.  Or perhaps the work attempts, Toomer-style, to recast the marginal as central on its own terms. 

To segregate a tradition from its context in order to establish its gendered or racial or ethnic uniqueness is to refuse to hear its protestation for fear it'll be considered protestant.  Protestant.  The irony menaces like thick chunks of corrosive fog.  I understand the impulse to create a tradition separate from that of your adversary.  I do.  I don't understand massaging it into some useful form for some contemporary struggle.  That elevates the needs of the now above the sacrifices of the then.  And it bothers me. 

Current you-never-saw-this-coming-type example?  Feminist evaluations of S.W. Mitchell and "The Rest Cure."  Is it malice or ignorance which drove scholars to ignore his incredible string of successes among women of extraordinary intelligence so that they might pillory him as the embodiment of paternalistic condescension?  Does it matter?  Yes.  I'm no defender of Mitchell—the chapter whose slave I currently am does the man's reputation no favors—but I do balk at condemnations of his life and work on the basis of his misdiagnosis of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  Did he punt it?  You need not even ask.  Did he punt every woman he treated and is he therefore the epitome of all that is vile and patriarchal in nineteenth-century American culture?  Nope.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" may, as Paula A. Treichler argues, enact "a clash between diagnosis and women's discourse," and Mitchell may play the worse for the performance.  But must Treichler have taken Gilman's word for it?  Could she not have looked at accounts written by his other female patients before determining that Mitchell imposed his "No Reading No Writing" policy on all his female patients.  [parenthetical deleted. thanks Lauren!]  He didn't.  Only on those whose symptoms led him to believe that they suffered from overstimulation.  Some of his female patients, including Owen Wister's exhausted sister Sarah, were prescribed the very activities Mitchell barred Gilman from doing.  I grant that the charge of paternalism still sticks—but only in the way it would to any medical professional you hire.  Mitchell's treatment of Gilman was the product of his paying particular attention to her complaints and advocating a treatment tailored to her as an individual.

I understand that Gilman didn't recognize this.  But how is it that prior to 2005 published scholars hadn't either?  I wager that Mitchell was too juicy a foil to relinquish, that the story is too wonderfully useful to abandon in favor of one complete and accurate.

All this when his actual sins are so representative and plentiful.  If we dismiss him as a simple sexist we'll never see him in all his imperialistic and heteronormative glory.  We'll never see the budding eugenicist and aristocratic dupe for who he is.  We'll only know him as Gilman's foil.   He was so much more . . . or less.

Finally! Another Dissertation Chapter Finished

Oops.  That should read "I Didn't Finish Another Dissertation Chapter Tonight!"  [Edited to remove ambiguity.]  So no new post tonight.  I feel like I've let the blog down.  Like I'm the reprobate of the blog community.  Like I've been jackbooted by this adorable monstrosity.  (It's real . . . and it's fantastic.)  So in lieu of new content I share this:

Someone emailed a graduate student listserv I subscribe to with a link to something dissertating graduate students would love.  I thought that since I've been having difficulty dissertating, I'd like a little comic relief in the form of something dissertating graduate students would love.  So I clicked on the link:

http://tinyurl.com/k229y

Can I communicate in words how "much" that helped me out?  Really.  Then again, who better to commiserate with?

Sunday, 16 April 2006

Progress progress progress progress progress progress progress revise revise revise.  Revise qualify progress progress progress progress revise.  Quantify quantify quantify.  Progress progress progress progress qualify progress quantify progress progress progress progress edit for style edit for style edit for style. 

Progress edit for style qualify.  Think think think.  Quantify.  Explicate.  Think.  Progress progress progress progress progress revise revise.  Pace.  Pace.  Pace.  Qualify.  Meditate.  Medicate.  Read read read read read. 

Progress progress progress progress.  Research research.  Revise revise research.  Revise revise revise.  Edit for style.  Qualify.  Progress progress progress regress regress regress.  Delete delete delete delete.  Ctrl-Z Ctrl-Z.  Revise.  Edit for style. 

Progress progress progress. 

Progress?

PROGRESS.

DOUBT.   

PROGRESS. 

DOUBT. 

PROGRESS. 

DOUBT. 

PROGRESS. 

DOUBT. 

PROGRESS. 

DOUBT. 

PROGRESS.

DOUBT.  DOUBT DOUBT DOUBT.  Bawl bawl bawl.  Recover.  Bawl bawl bawl.  Success.  Happiness.  Elation.  Future.  7-11.   Harvard.  Circle K.  Yale.  Walmart.   North Northwestern Montana Community College.  The Fightin' Tundras.  Cold.  Dog.  Fire.  Life.

On the Art of Finishing a Chapter & Other Minor Abominations

About said art I know little, having finished a whopping two to this point.  As I refine the document on the right side of my screen by retyping the unpolished nonsense everywhere apparent in the draft open on the left, I'm consistently struck by the inelegance of my prose.  Will a reviewer one day argue for the usefulness of my work "despite its minor abominations of style," as Francis Sumner once said of Vernon Kellogg's.  Will he or she say

the style of the work is seriously marred by the cumbersomeness of many of the sentences.  The writer tells us how thoroughly he has delved in the German evolutionary literature of the day.  And of this his own style bears abundant witness.  The pages abound in lengthy and involved sentences, and parenthetical clauses, so much so as to threaten with aphasia the unfortunate one who many venture to read them aloud. (495)

Will he or she laugh when I write "a paragraph of twenty lines, constituted by a single sentence, composed of 17 words and containing two parentheses."  And while he or she is "mentioning these petty blemishes," will the "frequent dissonances in the word combinations employed . . . 'curiously nearly completely subjective'; 'more or less nearly entirely'; 'influence of extrinsic influences,' followed by a third 'influence' in the same sentence; 'readily directly'; 'practically generally'" among them, fall before my hypothetical reviewer's sharpened wit? 

If I don't spend the next 48 hours vigorously revising, I fear all signs my Magic 8-Ball returns will point to a perpetual "Yes." 

Murglarizing American History the Reginald Kenneth Dwight Way

Two posts about The Battle of New Orleans on one blog?  Insanity!  And yet:

As I watched the underrated Elizabethtown recently, I made a mental note of the fact that Cameron Crowe has now had two films in which Elton John songs figure prominently.  Like every kid who came of age after Say Anything premiered, I fancied myself "a Lloyd" and sought out heartbreakers so I too could hoist a stereo above my head and "serenade" my Diane with "In Your Eyes."  Alas!  Instead I ended up heavily medicated in a tree outside my first love's window alternately bawling and asleep.  (I had an excuse . . . and a head swaddled such that I had a gauzy half-leia thing going on.  How could she have resisted?)  But I digress. 

Why Intelligent Women Invariably Have a Narrow Pelvis; or, S.W. Mitchell Week Continues

This morning Mary Ann asked "What's up with the part [of the S.W. Mitchell's Quote of Quotes] that says 'over brain-work tends to contract [a woman's] pelvis.'"  Mary Ann, luckily you challenged this continent's foremost expert in Mitchellana (Mitchellalia?) to answer a question about ol' S.W. and his roundaboutly sexist theory of anatomical development in educated women. 

I say "roundaboutly" not because his ideas weren't retrograde—they certainly were—but because they were encompassed by his general theory that all Americans were unhealthily overworked.  In Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, Mitchell argued that the rise in nervous disorders among the educated classes could be directly attributed to the combination of a sedentary lifestyle, untreated "mental fatigue" and poor working conditions.  He prescribed the infamous "rest cure" to as many men as women; his reputation suffers because one of the woman it failed to "cure" wrote such a forceful account of its failure.

Not to defend Mitchell, but even by Gilman's own account, the "rest cure" worked.  In "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper," she wrote Mitchell "put [her] to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still-good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with [her]."  Condemnations of Mitchell don't actually address the merits of his "rest cure" but his suggestion that Gilman "live as domestic a life as far as possible," "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never touch a pen, brush or pencil again."  Those recommendations are consonant with Mitchell's treatment of patients with severe nervous disorders.  They are not general recommendations for women who seek intellectual stimulation, as three waves of feminist scholarship on Gilman have held. 

Women suffer, however, from "physiological limitations" which should limit such stimulation.  In "When College Is Hurtful to a Girl," Mitchell argues that

women at college work harder than men; out of their eagerness arise disregard of physiological limitations, the tendency to shirk play and exercise for study, the cutting short of meal leisure, and the robbing of sleep to add to the hours of the day.

Men don't have this problem because they are "foolish," "profligate" and love to "waste time."  Their weakness of character makes them better suited for intellectual labor because they're averse to it.  Because "the man yearns for exercise" he is less likely than his female compatriot to push himself past his "physiological limitations."  I balk at that notion as much as the next denizen of the 21st Century.  However, to return to Mary's question about why "over brain-work tends to contract a woman's pelvis," the reason for this isn't biological so much as social:

Women have to adhere to a strict (and constricting) standard of dress.  Too many hours spent in feminine attire at a desk curve the spine and narrow the pelvis.  Mitchell, ever the man of his moment, never advocated a change in female dress.  Instead he recommended fewer hours before a desk engaging in a practice known to cause nervous distress.  All of which is only to say:

Contra his reputation among literary scholars, Mitchell wasn't that kind of sexist.  He firmly believed in heteronormative relations and that women should consider themselves mothers above all else; but he was no biological essentialist.  One thing which irks me about much of the advocacy criticism I read is that, while correct in a general sense, all the specifics miss the mark. 

Was Mitchell a sexist?  Certainly.  Was he a sexist in the way contemporary critics define 19th Century sexism?  Certainly not.  That hasn't prevented contemporary critics from shoehorning him in there anyway.  As an historicist I'm not satisfied with presentist indictments followed by high-handed dismissals.  It's not enough to know that he was sexist. 

One should strive to know exactly what kind of sexist he was.

The Best Quotation in the History of Everything: Why Intelligent Women Shouldn't Reproduce (Circa 1900)

[To all thems I owe 1) an email, 2) a theoretical justification for historicism or 3) an update on the state of the Valve's publishing enterprise . . . I apologize.  I will reconnect with y'all on the other side of this chapter.]

Those of you who don't keep close eye on my progress may be confused by my vehement assertion that the following quotation is the Best Quotation in the History of Everything: "I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother." 

"That's sorta awesome Scott," y'all say, "But, um, why?"

Because Silas Weir Mitchell wrote it.  For months now I've been digging through vast pastures of Mitchell's prose in search of direct evidence of his Lamarckian tendencies.  Until yesterday I had found nothing.  Because I've read his prose and poetry and scientific disquisitions, I knew him to be a Lamarckian . . . only I couldn't prove it.  I had to rely on induction and forceful interpretation to establish his indebtedness to Lamarck.  I knew I had him pegged but couldn't be certain others wouldn't tilt their heads quizzically when they read my chapter.  Now I'm certain they won't.  When hiring committees read my writing sample they'll know I'm not peddling nonsense. 

I caught Mitchell red-handed.  He is a Lamarckian.  There is no other evolutionary model popular at the time which assumes that an increase in the intelligence of a mother 1)  increases the size of said mother's brain, which 2) increases the diameter of said mother's head, which 3) she passes on to her children, thereby 4) increasing the diameter of her baby's brain-pan and 5) the likelihood of a difficult birth. 

More succinctly:

I win. 

Now will somebody give me a cookie already?

Women + Education = Death or Other People Have It Easy

[To be posted on the Valve sometime tomorrow so Clancy's excellent post remains front and center.]

Last May I noted the existence of articles in other disciplines which consist entirely of the research required by ours.  As I said then: "How did someone else publish my background research as a scholarly article?"  Today I ran across another example of this distressing phenonemon: "The Neurologic Content of S. Weir Mitchell's Fiction [pdf]."

According to the abstract, the "objective" of this article—published in the 14 February 2006 issue of Neurology—is "to assess the extent that references to neurologic topics were present in Mitchell's fiction, whether these neurologic references reflected Mitchell's scientific interests and contributions, and whether his fictional accounts of neurologic topics would precede those in his scientific writings."  Fair enough.  Their method?  "The authors read Silas Weir Mitchell's novels and short stories."  Despite the fact that poetry "lends itself less to neurologic reference than does prose . . . for completeness, [the authors] read this poetry and provide a brief comment on its neurologic content."

I agree that the best way of assessing the extent to which something appears in a body of literature is to read that body of literature.  But how are these neurologists
going to read it?  Will they analyze the developmental patterns of characters in Mitchell's novels and corollate them to contemporary neurological theory?  Will they document the structural relation of particular plots to specific neurological stimuli like the stressors of the white-collar world and the Civil War?  Or will they count?

I think you know the answer ah-ah-ah-ah.  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, "seventeen of the twenty-seven fictional works contained neurologic references" ah-ah-ah-ah.  One, two, three, four, five . . . fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, "fifty-five of seventy-nine references were brief" ah-ah-ah-ah. 

Their conclusion?

"The majority of Mitchell's fictional works contained references to neurologic topics but most contained brief references" ah-ah-ah-ah.   This isn't to say the article's devoid of evaluative criticism: "Mitchell's novels were known for their dramatic flair."  He "was a prolific writer of both science and fiction" whose "novels were well regarded in his day."  He "also had a life-long interest in snake venom." 

What importance their dry tallying has for the medical community escapes me.  But theirs is "the only study to [their] knowledge that has systematically reviewed Mitchell's novels and short stories, detailed his neurologic citations in this fiction, and discussed these with reference to his interests and contributions as a neurologist."  What a cunning use of flags!  I now have imperial claims to unseat. 

No worries. 

This afternoon I found the Greatest Quotation in the History of Everything.  It reads: "I have sometimes been led to think that over brain-work tends not only to stunt the body and to contract the pelvis, but, by the law of evolution, to develop bigger headed offspring, or at least offspring with heads relatively disproportioned to the pelvis of the mother." 

Explanation tomorrow, because I tried to explain it tonight but couldn't contain my glee . . . which has nothing to do with the politics of that quotation.  It is validation of my cental hunch expressed in a particularly pernicious way.  More later.  I'm celebrating good times tonight ah-ah-ah-ah . . . I mean come on!