Acephalous

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part VIII: Ekphrasis

Outside the second-floor bedroom of a small suburban mansion, dark clouds conspire in thunder.  Rivers will swell, cattle drown, claps one.  Gaudy Christmas sweaters will be drenched, another crashes.  Unaware of the cumulonimbus cabal overhead, Scott slips into an overlarge black leather chair and prepares to study.  The welt of its exaggerated box cushion wrinkles under his weight, revealing the richer shade of black the chair had been before the morning sun (which would have crawled the through east-facing window by now, were it not obscured by the chattering thunderheads) bleached its treated hide.   

So Scott reads, his left heel tapping the chair's tapered maple leg, his right elbow relaxing on its thick scrolled arm.  His head lolls, resting briefly on the descending crest of its thick, upholstered back.  In his left hand, he holds a copy of Amy Kaplan's The Anarchy of Empire, open to a chapter entitled "Manifest Domesticity."  It begins with a description of

a white pioneer family in a small clearing surrounded by a dense, towering forest.  The mother stands at the center of the picture, with her husband at her side holding his rifle, and her children at her feet, staring at a freshly killed deer.  An open cooking fire, a crude log cabin, and a few stalks of corn complete the scene.  (23)

Kaplan's approach to academic writing appeals to Scott, who smiles at how cleverly she employed ekphrasis to set the scene of her argument.  The critic of novels should be familiar enough—be it intuitively or theoretically—with the techniques of the novelist to use them as Kaplan has here.  Why not draw your readers in, he asks himself, with the one thing you can be certain appeals to them? 

As if in answer, a vision of himself writing the first paragraph of this post appears before him.  He reads his overblown prose and is disheartened by its forced archness, the way it wishes to be taken seriously but reeks of preemptive, defensive irony—tidy bulwarks against the possibility of suck—and remembers the old chestnut:

Those who can do, do.  Those who can't, write dissertations about those who can.

Previous Installments:

Part I: The Dawn of Man
Part II, part I: The State of the Field
Part II, part II: Killing All Fathers
Part III: The Historical Anecdote
Part IV: The Self-Aggrandizing Personal Anecdote
Part V: The Meta-Theoretical Apparatus
Part VI: The Balinese Cockfight
Part VII: The Modernist Newspaper Clipping

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.

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 . . . ]

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part VII: Ugh, or Why Can't I Invent What I Can't Prove?

I desperately want to open the Jack London chapter I'm currently working on with the following clipping from the August 10, 1902 edition of The New York Times:

QUEER CASE OF ATAVISM

German Physician Tells of Two Young Men Who Ruminate Their Food

BERLIN, Aug. 9—The Munich Medicinische Zeitschrift has an article by Dr. L.R. Mueller, head physician of the clinic at Erlangen, reporting a remarkable case of a family of ruminators.

The father of the family died in the clinic of cancer of the stomach.  His two sons digest their food like cows.

The young men say that after a quarter of an hour the food returns to the mouth and is rechewed.

After drinking water or beer the ruminating stops.  Dr. Mueller believes the case shows all the symptoms of atavism.

This short story captures all the confusions I confront in my chapter with an economy the chapter itself increasingly lacks.  Plus, it almost reads like a poem.  Most notable is the potential pun on the verb "ruminate" and its cognates.  Less salient but more powerful is the strange causality created by the juxtaposition in the second paragrah.

That "the father of the family died in the clinic of cancer of the stomach" is lamentable.  But it has nothing to do with the fact that "his two sons digest their food like cows."  Or does it?  Given the headline's declaration that these two sons  represent a "queer case of atavism," readers cannot be sure the father's stomach cancer is not the result of his own ruminative inclinations.  Atavism, however, should not be heritable.  During this period, the word "atavism" signals an acceptance of the work of criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso.  For Lombroso, some people were "born bad."  They were genetically inclined to steal, rape, murder and interpret texts literally.

According to Lombroso's essay in September 1895 edition of Forum, the judge incapable of "personal mental effort," who cannot "give free course to those associations of ideas and emotions of which complexity is so great," is as dangerous to society as the thief, rapist, murderer or masked epileptic.  "The judges," Lombroso laments, "pronounce judgment as if the crime formed the simplest incident in the life of the criminal."  In truth, however, they have been ruminating their food and washing it down with beer their entire life.  (How do you like them jarring apples?)

Lombroso concedes the value of education while acknowledging the innate depravity of children: "We must admit that there is a tendency to crime at a very early age.  Children are liars, thieves, etc.  This tendency in well-born children disappears with a good education."  In other words, contrary to Lombroso's insistence, atavism isn't a degeneration into a more primitive type so much as a bad education.  "If only little Jimmy hadn't neglected his numbers, he wouldn't have raped, murdered, or had epileptic fits."  Similarly, if only their father hadn't decided that pseudo-bulimia was the most efficient mode of eating, his children wouldn't ruminate their foods.

What's my point?  I don't know.  Why don't I know?  Because there's no rationale behind the categorization of behaviors in fin de siecle American culture or in the works of Jack London and it's beginning to infuriate me.  Distinctions between the fuzzy categories of "type," "race," "species" and "culture" are neither hard nor fast nor there at all.  Any one of those terms may mean any of the others, such that I'm almost tempted to say that it may be better for everyone if I invent the distinctions a responible scholar would merely describe because, well, because I see why those who came before me did. 

Social Darwinism?  Sure it didn't exist, but it's so much easier to understand everything if it did...

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part VI: The Balinese Cockfight

[Cross-posted over yonder.]

[Episodes I, II, II/II, III, IV and V have been catalogued for your convenience.  Now I present the promised installment on The Balinese Cockfight.]

The origins of the cockfight in literary studies are shrouded in mystery.  No mention of the cockfight appears in Stephen Greenblatt’s formulaic introduction to “The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance” (Genre 15: 1-2).  (Of that other New Historical tic, the one not involving dead chickens, i.e. the chiasmus, the same cannot be said.) The first appearance of the cockfight as “meta-social commentary” occurs in Houston Baker’s “To Move without Moving: An Analaysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison’s Trueblood Episode.” Baker quotes the following passage from Clifford Geertz’s seminal “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

Like any art form--for that, finally, is what we are dealing with--the cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have been...raised...to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.

Why Geertz felt the need to travel to Bali to discover the inherent meta-social commentary of a cockfight is curious.  A famous American orator and former cockfight referee once said that “as long as the Almighty permits intelligent men, created in His image and likeness, to fight in public and kill each other while the world looks on approvingly, it is not for me to deprive the chicken of the same privilege.” Ol’ Honest Abe nailed this whole metaphorical meta-social meta-commentary meta-long before Geertz wrote one word about cockfights.  Since Mr. Lincoln lacks the scholarly credentials of a Clifford Geertz, Baker quotes Geertz instead.  He doesn’t attempt to out-cockfight-cite the locus primus of the cockfight-cite.  We’re looking for someone who opens an essay with the cockfight-cite and unsurpisingly, that someone is Stephen Greenblatt.  In 1994.  From “The Eating of the Soul":

I have seen Balinese cockfights, and I can assure you that a resemblance to Shakespeare’s work of art is not immediately apparent.  No doubt the losing cock, bleeding in the dirt, feels the tragedy of the occasion...but the structure and duration of the cockfight, not to mention the expressive limitations of the cocks themselves, preclude the dignity and weight of tragedy.

Opening an essay with two colliding anecdotes draws attention to the structural similarities between, in this case, cockfighting and Shakespearean tragedy.  The effect of Geertz’s original juxtaposition of cockfighting and Macbeth, according to Greenblatt, is such that

Balinese cockfighting and the Shakespearean spectacle of treachery and damnation--apparently so distant from one another in their symbolic stakes and their cultural position--are made to touch and resonate.  The immediate result for the anthropologist is an air of dignity conferred upon Balinese cockfighting; that, and a kind of hermeneutical license linked to this dignity: cockfighting is a complex, symbolically charged text that can be profitably read by a gifted interpreter.

Greenblatt’s emphasis on the word “text” reveals the rhetoric for what it is: rhetoric.  Reduce the world to “text” and any “mundane narrative” can be juxtaposed, for effect, with a “literary narrative” counterpart.  Sonja Laden rightly argues in “Recuperating the Archive: Anecdotal Evidence and Questions of ‘Historical Realism’" that Greenblatt & Co. are “‘poetic’ New Historicists,” that is, they’ve more in common--minus the radical Marxist and feminist politics--with the literary journalism of John McPhee than conventional academic criticism.  Opening an essay with an irrelevent but structurally homologous anecdote thus transforms the lowly academic critic into an artist. 

How Not to Open, Close or Anything In-Between an Academic Essay, Part II: Welcome to Your New Low Opinion of Me

When I published the first chronicle of  my undergraduate stupidities, I mentioned that

Seven months after completing my magnum micturientem 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.

A few readers have asked whether I would post that as well.  I wrote them back, insisting that it's nowhere near as amusing as my Honors Thesis.  I told them, "It's not funny, and because it more closely resembles my current positions, I'd be limited to mocking its tedious self-righteousness."  But they insisted. 

I played coy, saying "I don't think I have it anymore."  They insisted, correctly, that I lied. 

I feigned anger, shouting "I don't want to!"  They insisted, correctly, that I did. 

I hid under the covers, whispering "I see dead people."  They insisted, correctly, that I didn't. 

They wore me down.  I can no longer keep from them the oral presentation during which I renounced my idiotic, incoherent theoretical assumptions in favor of some sound ones.  (Unfortunately, I had yet to renounce the prose tics of the contemporary theorist.  Ugh.)  I warn you: this rant is most notable for its actual vs. assigned length, as oral presentations consisting of eight single-spaced pages aren't ever really "short."

 

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part V: Build You a Metatheoretical Apparatus

The opening sections of Donald Pease's "Psychoanalyzing the Narrative Logics of Naturalism: The Call of the Wild" browbeat readers with metatheoretical noodling about the reputation of literary naturalism, the "critical re-evaluation of liberal individualism," "Foucaultian redescriptions of disciplinary society," United States imperialism, the family resemblance of free indirect discourse to the panopticon, Mark "Seltzer's systematic confusion," Mark "Seltzer's continuous confusion," and, finally, the "dual roles" psychoanalysis plays "as an intra-regulatory discourse responsible for the normalization of disciplinary individuals and as a counter-discourse which undermines the normative presuppositions upon which the disciplinary society rests."  Readers jaded by years of reading inexhaustive, uncomprehensive, un-all-inclusive metatheoretical apparatuses will delight to find paragraph after paragraph crammed with attempts to muscle psychoanalysis a bigger place between the theory propounded by John Bender in Imagining the Penitentiary and the (congenitally befuddled) Mark Seltzer in Bodies and Machines.*

The short-version of Bender's interesting thesis--too clever by half to be entirely believable but better than most too-clever-by-half-to-be-entirely-believable essays I read--argues that free indirect discourse "resembled the panopticon in that it positioned the narrator within an apparently unmediated purview with omniscient powers of observation that extended into the consciousnesses of fictional characters."  Old chestnuts about houses built on Foucault aside, this argument captures the invasive quality of free indirect discourse, in which characters do seem to be incarcerated in one of Benthem's panopticons and the narrator does seem to be like a prison guard who, from his position in that tower there, can peer into their innermost thoughts.  (So the metaphor breaks down.  They all do.) 

However confused Seltzer is, Mr. Pease pays him one form of respect: the always popular intricate rebuttal of metatheoretical minutiae.  Seltzer's thesis--also interesting, also too-clever-by-half-to-be-entirely-believable--argues that London's writing was governed by the logic of a "body-machine complex" in which bodies regulated by a Foucauldian disciplinary apparatus became awful machine-like.  That makes people (and dogs) unhappy.  Or, technically speaking, "anxious,"  as in

The anxiety which emanated from this scenario resides in the fear that individuals might lose the ability to distinguish between "natural" (sexual reproduction) and "unnatural" (machine reproduction). But since in Seltzer's account, the "natural" refers to the strategies whereby social norms are psychologically legitimized and delegitimated, the "natural" cannot be understood except as an effect of these processes of naturalization. The imagined threat through which the anxiety is communicated has deployed pre-existing psychic norms to police the boundary between bodies and machines. While this fantasy may have produced the competition between the "natural" body and the "unnatural" machine, it was the discourse of psychoanalysis that supplied the normative categories of the "natural" and the "unnatural" through which the body machine complex regulated Seltzer's disciplinary society. In the discourse of psychoanalysis, Seltzer finds the pre-existing meta-conceptual criteria enabling the distinction between the natural and the unnatural.

All clear?  No? 

The discourse of psychoanalysis instituted and thereafter enforced the normative distinctions--between "natural" and deviant disciplinary practices, between "natural" and pathological modes of reproduction--which at once precipitated and managed the anxieties through which the body-machine complex is communicated. The fantasy that the mechanical regulation of bodies constituted a threat to the maternal body has presupposed that women and sexuality exist mainly for the purposes of biological reproduction. The figure of the "maternal" thereby linked heterosexual norms and biological reproduction to the family as the normative basis for the social order. The fantasized threat to the maternal body assumes--and thereafter anxiously correlates--the normality of heterosexual practices with the biological imperative of reproduction.

What about now?  All better?

How Not to Open, Close or Anything In-Between an Academic Essay, Part I: My Formative Years

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.  The Critical Tradition clutched to my chest,  I would speak to anyone willing to listen about of "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."  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.)  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.  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.  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 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.

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.  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.

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part IV: The Self-Aggrandizing Personal Anecdote

The majority of Americans laugh at the Academy.  "You think you're so important," they say once they can catch their breath.

To counter this and similar withering denunciations, many academics fluff up their introductions with the Self-Aggrandizing Personal Anecdote (SAPA).  Since the SAPA frequently involves the dropping of names known to no one outside the academy, institutions often bear the load.  For instance, in an essay entitled "Mao II and the War on Terrorism," one SAP (Self-Aggrandizing Person) informs general and academic readers alike of his important contributions to the New York Times' coverage of September 11th:

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and the crash of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, I received a call from a reporter at the New York Times. Emily Eakin was working on a story about modern literature's response to earlier forms of terror, in particular the fictional representations of Russian revolutionaries in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1871–72) and European anarchists in Henry James's The Princess Casamassima (1886) and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907). Eakin reasonably assumed that great literature offers us means of coping with crises like September 11 and that this specific event was not historically unique. We talked by phone and e-mail about the national agendas of early modern revolutionary movements and the global terrorist aims of the Islamic fundamentalist Al-Qaeda, including the aesthetic means required to represent these different political cultures and historical periods. Call Don DeLillo, I urged Eakin, and read Mao II, his literary analysis of postmodern terrorism. Then call Jody McAuliffe and Frank Lentricchia at Duke, who are producing a dramatization of the novel in the spring of 2002. Eakin phoned none of the above and certainly did not read Mao II for her story. Reporters have deadlines; her story appeared eleven days after September 11.

In a single introductory paragraph, this SAP earns his name.  Through a personal anecdote readers learn that his name and number grace a card in one of the 4,397 rolodexes owned by people affiliated with New York Times; that he not only knows everything a person ought to know about forms of terrorism historical and contemporary; that he knows big shots like Frank Lentricchia and possesses inside information about upcoming theatrical performances of mediocre works of contemporary American literature; and finally, the reader learns how much better this SAP is than the one who called him for information on a topical news story because she didn't fulfill what this SAP, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, calls "the luxury and responsibility" of the scholar. 

Reading this SAP's introduction one would think Eakin didn't take any of his advice.  (One would also think this SAP consulted because of his expertise about "the aesthetic means required to represent these different political cultures and historical periods."  In her article, however, it's clear that Eakins consulted this SAP because, in her words, he's "a James scholar."  I'm sure our SAP meant to imply that instead of what he actually implied; then again, one of the virtues of being a SAP is never having to apologize for being a SAP.)  If you read Eakins' article, however, it becomes clear that not only did she not take his advice, she had the nerve to write the story she'd been assigned to write instead of the one he suggested.  She lacked the requisite luxury and sense of responsibility and so instead of following this SAP's advice, she wrote an article about "the literary preoccupation with terrorism" that goes back "to at least the 1870's." 

In other words, the SAPA enables the run-of-the-mill SAP to appear extraordinary because the SAPA need not bear any relation to the SAP's actual achievements.  Drawbacks to the SAPA include 1) the easy availability of newspaper archives that discredit the SAP's aggrandizing claims, 2) the potential for readers to grasp with theretofore unknown profundity the disconnect between the SAP's evaluation of him or herself and the forum in which the SAP publishes, and 3) the jealous stares of friends and colleagues who can't build themselves up with such effortless regularity.

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part III: Good Sir, I Implore You! vs. The Historical Anecdote

Since John Holbo over at the Valve was kind enough to mention my humble little project I thought it best to hop back on the horse and continue working on it.  Today I'll discuss two more introductions to my dissertation that differ not in content but in the way they address the reader.  Good Sir, I Implore You! entails forcing a particular series of impressions upon the reader in the most obvious possible manner:

Imagine an educated reader, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, glancing past the soft leather spine of a first edition On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and briefly mulling its ambiguous title. A student of philosophy might think it a treatment of the Platonic Ideas, Forms, or Species, an examination of the apodictic reality beyond the illusions of human experience. A logician might expect a discussion of the second of the five Predicables, that “Term affirmed of several things, which must express their whole essence, which is called a Species”; a Catholic, a treatise on the transubstantiation of bread and wine, the Eucharistic species, into the Very Body and Blood of Christ Himself; a politician, a banker, or a metallurgist, an account of “the different Rates at which the same Species of Foreign Coins do pass,” or of how “paper securities [are] held out as a currency … in lieu of the two great recognized species [gold and silver] that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind.”    Darwin frustrates potential readers, then as now, because, as John Dewey says, “few words in our language foreshorten intellectual history as much as does the word species.” In the Aristotelian tradition, ειδοσ—later translated into Latin, then English, as species—referred to the “formal activity which operates through a series of changes and holds them to a single course; which subordinates their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of structure and function." The Scholastics “deepened the force of the term” by applying it “to everything that in the universe observes order in flux and manifests consistency through change,” including the Platonic Forms, the second of the five Predicables, and the Very Body and Blood of Christ Himself.

For readability reasons I've omitted the citations, but I assure you of their existence and commend you on that tiny twinge of doubt you felt when you realized I hadn't reproduced them.  By forcing my readers to imagine the confusion felt by a hypothetical contemporary of Darwin, I'm able to traverse, quickly, the history of "species" as a term and melt its various possible meanings into the confusing pulp with which Darwin's contemporaries would've been confronted.  The intent is to militate against the associations that normally accompany discussions of Darwin and the species concept; that is, I'm out to confuse the reader in a manner that's compelling and historically accurate. 

The problem with this approach is that it's awful cute.  Not cute like a bunny, a pony, a puppy or a kitten, but cute like a bunny, pony, puppy or kitten who reads Derrida, mistakes academic puns for scholarly insights, and loves little more in life than jamming dashes, brackets, and parentheses into words.  Cute like a critic who thinks appending a definitive article to a word transforms it into a concept--e.g. "the preposterous"--and who, unable to leave well enough alone, then demonstrates how "the preposterous" is a function of the anticipation and subsequent disappointment of sexual gratification; that is, how "the preposterous" is really the "the pre/post(Eros)."  Cute like that.

Since Good Sir, I Implore You! forces readers to understand the complexity of a historical moment, all the potential excessive cuteness can be shoved aside by transforming it into its more pedestrian counterpart, the Historical Anecdote:

Darwin’s Origin of Species by National Selection is exciting much interest from the novelty of his views and the ability with which they are set forth. The work has been republished in America.

-Anonymous Review, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, March 1860

Shortly after reading this review of Darwin’s new work in the current Eclectic, Theophilus Parsons found himself glancing past the soft leather spine of a first edition On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), mulling its ambiguous title. He knew Darwin’s work was “exciting much interest,” brimming with “novelty” and written with “ability.” But what, exactly, was it about? Were he a student of philosophy, he would have thought it a treatment of the Platonic Ideas, Forms, or Species, an examination of the apodictic reality beyond the illusions of human experience. Were he a logician, he would expect a discussion of the second of the five Predicables, that “Term affirmed of several things, which must express their whole essence, which is called a Species"; a Catholic, a treatise on the transubstantiation of bread and wine, the Eucharistic species, into the Very Body and Blood of Christ Himself; a politician, a banker, or a metallurgist, an account of “the different Rates at which the same Species of Foreign Coins do pass,” or of how “paper securities [are] held out as a currency … in lieu of the two great recognized species [gold and silver] that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind.”  Darwin frustrates potential readers, then as now, because, as John Dewey says, “few words in our language foreshorten intellectual history as much as does the word species." In the Aristotelian tradition, ειδοσ—later translated into Latin, then English, as species—referred to the “formal activity which operates through a series of changes and holds them to a single course; which subordinates their aimless flux to its own perfect manifestation; which, leaping the boundaries of space and time, keeps individuals distant in space and remote in time to a uniform type of structure and function." The Scholastics “deepened the force of the term” by applying it “to everything that in the universe observes order in flux and manifests consistency through change," including the Platonic Forms, the second of the five Predicables, and the Very Body and Blood of Christ Himself.*

*Theophilus Parsons was, in fact, an early reader of On the Origin of Species. While serving as the Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, Parsons wrote one of its first American reviews in the American Journal of Science and the Arts, November 1860, 30: 1. His review concludes with speculation similar in form, though not chosen personage, to that with which I open this chapter.

I've included the explanatory footnote because it captures the difference between the hypothetical general reader I wrote into existence above and the actual historical figure, Theophilus Parsons, through whom I focalize all the confusion here.  Among the various families of Historical Anecdotes, the one I've written here belongs to the species Anecdota relevanta.  I could have begun this essay with a discussion of Balinese cockfighting or tourist attractions in natural parks, but I didn't.  (Don't worry: Greenblatt's on the agenda and will be discussed in time.   By which I mean "tomorrow.")  I chose instead to embody the confusion I earlier implored me readers to feel in an actual person who was, as it turns out, actually confused.  The strengths of this approach--besides the unbridled joy I feel whenever I type "Theophilus Parsons," a.k.a. the Second Stuffiest Man Alive as Judged by Name Alone--are in its conventionality.  It's not cute so much as appropriate.  Dull and appropriate.  But appropriate nonetheless.

Stay tuned, folks, as tomorrow I'll move away from navel-gazing and return to scholar-hazing as I discuss the relative merits of the Balinese Cockfight and the Call to Arms.

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part II, Part II: Know Thyself, Field Surveyor

In considering the relationship between the introductory paragraph of an academic essay and the logic of the argument that follows--and I am asserting that such a relationship exists and that, therefore, some combinations of intro. and argument are more felicitous than others--I think it might be instructive to think about how the introductions I've written affect the material which follows them.  To continue yesterday's inadequate analysis of the State of the Field intro., I dip into my archives and produce one of the approximately 17,491 introductory paragraphs I've written for the first chapter of my dissertation.  Comments on its shortcomings follow:

In his review of three recent books on American literary naturalism in the latest Modern Fiction Studies, Jeffory Clymer wonders whether “the withdrawal from organizing interpretations around naturalism per se may…represent a critical exhaustion with reconciling the genre’s inconsistencies.” These inconsistencies, Clymer argues, undermine “certain strands of Foucauldian New Historicism” by “demonstrating how brittle, monolithic, and ultimately unrevealing [they] can be.” The brittle quality of these monolithic accounts of naturalism result, Clymer implies, from the genre’s foundational inconsistency: its desire to depict a deterministic world in which the individual is governed by nature and its frequent, didactic appeals to individualism and human freedom. From a philosophical perspective, as John Conder ably demonstrated in Naturalism in American Fiction: The Classic Phase (1984), pessimistic determinism and an optimistic belief in free will and the possibility of moral improvement are reconcilable positions. Employing Hobbes’ notion that freedom works within inscribed terms and Bergson’s notion of a durational self, Conder reconciles determinism and individualism by arguing that the former produces the latter. Though philosophically sound, Conder’s argument relies on individual Americans naturalists developing in toto theories that would catapult Bergson to international celebrity when they were first published in 1907. In this dissertation I will focus on the theories of human and social development available to American literary naturalists at the time they were writing. Produced by the “evolution vogue” following the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), these models embraced or refused Darwin’s advances with wildly different degrees of enthusiasm or opprobrium. Over the next 50 years, these systems would develop in an echo chamber, the cacophony of each contributing to the cacophony of the whole. Deafened by too many incompatible propositions voiced so intelligently and authoritatively, fin de siècle authors cherry-picked individual propositions from larger theoretical schemes. Each author created his or her own idiosyncratic combination of essentialist, determinist, individualist and developmental principles drawn from the representative set of evolutionary concerns. The necessarily idiosyncratic nature of these selections, as well as their rationale, has been obscured by the presentism of the historians and historians of science whose work granted literary scholars access to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s intellectual milieu.

This introduction, like Dawes', opens with a subtle assertion about the timeliness of the article to follow.  Weathered hat in humble hands, eyes sounding the floor for evidence of structural uncomformities, this intro. says, nay, shucks "Smart people like Jeffory Clymer are publishing about the problems I address in important academic journals like Modern Fiction Studies."  Then, with a boldness born of short summary, it raises its eyes, puffs its chest and says "But even smart people publishing in important journals sometimes miss The Big Picture."  Clymer is correct, I claim, only insofar....  I count Only Insofar kin to the State of the Field.  Because the State of the Field implies that the critics and scholars who've traversed the Field before you are correct Only Insofar as the contingencies on which your argument stakes it claim have been ignored.  But not all State of the Field introductions employ the Only Insofar logic. 

Another popular variation is Kill All Fathers, in which you survey the State of the Field, find its current inhabitants unfit to waste the air you breath and start a conflagration.  Your readers are reminded of Dresden in '45 or Cambodia in '69, '70, and pretty much the rest Nixon Administration.  They witness this orgy of intellectual genocide and then find it difficult to take you very seriously.  In the following, the introductory paragraph strangles some fathers.  The footnote desecrates their graves.  To wit: 

The development of the evolutionary “modern synthesis” and the preeminence of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944) have combined to frustrate attempts to assess the impact of evolutionary theory on American political and social thought in the first decade of the 20^th century. Because Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Simpson incorporated Darwin’s mechanism of speciation into the “modern synthesis”—the synthesis of Darwin’s theory of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetic inheritance—the social and political theories of evolutionary thinkers who challenged Darwin have largely been forgotten. Following Hofstadter, generations of social and literary historians have discussed social Darwinism as if it were the only application of evolutionary thought to social policy popular between 1890 and 1910. It wasn’t.*
-----
* I am not alone in my reevaluation of the effect Darwinism had on American politics. Many historians have taken issue with Richard Hofstadter’s claim, in Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), that social Darwinism dominated the manifestations of Darwinian thought in American politics. In Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (1979), Robert Bannister argues that social Darwinists were not nearly as prominent as reform Darwinists, among whom he numbers Oliver Wendell Holmes, who “argued that evolutionary theory supported combination and group solidarity over individualism” (11). Following John Dewey, Bannister claims that classical liberals “rarely laced their prose with appeals to Darwinism …. Rather, they were suspicious if not downright frightened by the implications of the new theory. Such was even the case with Herbert Spencer and his American disciples—the stereotypical textbook social Darwinists—whose world view remained essentially pre-Darwinian” (1). Furthermore, “New Liberals, socialists, and other advocates of positive government appealed openly and with far greater regularity to Darwinism to support their causes” (1). See also Donald Bellomy, “Social Darwinism Revisted,” (Philadelphia, 1978); Burton J. Bledstein, Perspectives in American History 1 (1984): 1-129; Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of EvolutionThe Culture of Professionalism (New York, 1976).

Here I present the State of the Field as roughly equivalent to the current State of the Union.  This seems like an effective way to "intervene in a critical discourse."  After all, attacking the inadequacies of All Fathers clear-cuts a swath of territory in which your argument can range free.  Unfortunately, this development enrages All Fathers, and they respond with protestations of your inadequate schooling, your relative inexperience and your attitude.  As often as not, these protestations hit home.  This is because Killing All Fathers occurs during the earliest stages of intellectual development--speaking both generally and as regards particular projects--and should be avoided unless you want to communicate your intellectual immaturity to the profession at large.  True to form, I stole this intro. from the file "dissertation 1.0."  That would be the first draft I ever wrote of my initial dissertation chapter.  The example of Only Insofar above comes from "dissertation 1.38."  That would be the 38th draft of my first chapter.  The 36 interim drafts occupied my energies for the better part of a year.  A year in which I researched tirelessly; learned what I had only assumed and unlearned what I had assumed incorrectly; and, in a manner of speaking, stopped being a critic and started being a scholar.

I should add that I still think I'm right and Hofstadter wrong. Only I now know that can be communicated without debasing his intellectual legacy.  Over the course of the dissertation I will demonstrate with careful arguments, calculated gambles and a wealth of archival material that Hofstadter's thesis is correct, you guessed it, only insofar...

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part II: the State of the Field

[Editor's Note: Devoted readers may've noticed that this post consists of what had been the conclusion of the previous post.  This is not an error.  What happened in the interim is that A. Cephalous decided he would treat Dawes with the respect he deserves instead of appending an analysis of his introduction to the ass-end of some overwrought satire.] 

Among graduate students and the professoriate they slavishly imitate, the most popular introduction involves introducing the reader to the State of the Field.  James Dawes enraptures prospective readers of "Fictional Feeling: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and the American Gothic" by blandly informing them that

An interest in the deep structure of aesthetic pleasure and in the emotions that shake us when reading has in recent years come increasingly to the fore in literary and cultural studies.

The readers who survive the first smack into an equally uncompelling second sentence in which they learn how

This coalescing interest has gathered strength with the waning of reader-response criticism in the nineties, which had long been criticized for its tendency to privilege meaning over feeling and interpreting over imagining in its account of the reading experience, and with the concurrent and important rise of sensibility studies in Americanist research, which legitimized readerly emotion as a category of analysis but tended to do so primarily insofar as it could illuminate urgent political or cultural anxieties or needs.

I should stress that I'm not talking about the content of Dawes' argument, which I found interesting.  I chose Dawes' article because its presentation numbs readers.  The interest it never generates disinclines those readers who would otherwise find his argument compelling from continuing to read his article.   Shouldn't someone whose work concerns heightened states of "readerly emotion" recognize the soporific states his work produces?

How to Open an Academic Essay, Part I: Hostile Habilis

Dear Stan Slanders,

I spent this morning reading over my buddy's excellent first chapter.  It was very good.  I think he is smart.  But his chapter begins with an argument.  He assumes his readers will be interested in that argument because, well, because he is.  I know my buddy wants people to read his chapter, but I don't know how to tell him that most people find arguments boring.  What should I do?

Best,

A Colleague Enraged that People Hang Academics Living Outside the United States

Stan Slanders Replies:

Thanks for sharing, A.C.E.P.H.A.L.O.U.S.  I've enclosed a check for $7.50 American (or $8,987.64 Canadian).  Maybe we can save a couple Canadian scholars from the roaming Quebecois hordes.  Your question, however, demands a thoughtful response, but this'll have to suffice:

Of the many ways to open an academic essay, clearly the most traditional (among undergraduates) is to recapitulate in words the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Inform your reader that they're witnessing The Dawn of Man.  Talk about this (figurative) primitive human society--e.g. America before the advent of academic feminism or Western Culture before the fall of imperialism--and show some (figurative) ape-men fiddling around with some (figurative) bones.  Discuss how violent these (figurative) ape-men became after the arrival of something strange, unusual or otherwise discomfiting.  Cue Also Sprach Zarathustra.  Show how the new thing provokes a frenzied rage from the (figurative) ape-men.  Loose the bone!  Seamlessly jump-cut to a (figurative) spaceship following the same graceful trajectory and you have written the mother of all introductions.  (Essays introduced in this manner are often difficult to conclude.  Final paragraphs alternately baffle, entrance and stupify readers.)

Yours in Academic Vice, Virtue and Vitriol,

Stan Slanders