Invisible Adjunct

Nice post. It seems to me too that many of the people I know experience this "weariness" in the face of what's become a program of seeking out meaning in order to destroy it. The problem though, is that at it's core, in Nietzsche and Heidegger, the "post-modern" critique is powerful and I've yet to hear a convincing response to it.

Pretty big topic here. When the Foucault-Derrida stuff first came out it seemed liberating -- from Marxism, scientism, the old left, etc. But the anti-humanism and nihilism -- "Show me what you've got and I'll debunk it for you" -- pretty much precluded any favorable outcome.

Speaking of Derrida, Foucault said that what he was offering was "the tyranny of the professor" (not exact quote") The whimsical, impressionistic methodology plus the refusal to connect to any outside and the renunciation of hopeful politics basically meant that the professor could say anything he wanted and it was up to his students to a.) figure out what he "meant" and b.) figure out how to perform at that level himself, in order to get the professor's approval (and recommendation).

Sound like the academic bureaucracy of today? The postmodernists have renounced a lot and they sometimes still talk liberation talk. But they have not renounced their own jobs and tenure. Nor control of their departments and professional associations. Nor their power to impose their "methodology" or "paradigm" or "problematic" or whatever they call it these days on anyone who wants to enter the field.

So the only thing they're not deconstructing is their own cash cow. Well, well, well. What an amazing turn of events.

More generally, cynicism, skepticism, and hihilism always seem immediately liberating, since you renounce the existing without any obligation to improve it. After a few years, though, it gets extremely depressing. (I'm thinking of someone who discovers cynicism at age 15-20, and then ten years later). Generally cynics end up saying, "The world is shit, but at least I can make some money and have some fun". I've been watching this going on for 30+ years by now. ("....he said, nodding wisely").

And after the fire, what then? Something like Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values" is not sustainable as a permanent way of thinking about and inhabiting the world. Once the "eternal verities" of a previous world have been shown to be constructed and contingent, then what? To spend a career, or a life (or the life of an entire generation) denouncing "totality" or "grand narrative" (and as far as I can tell the totalities and grand narratives being denounced are almost always peculiarly "Western"--read any grand denunciations of Lao Tzu, lately?) is to remain always at the stage of clearing away, always with the fire, and never to enter the stage of new growth (to adopt a "grand narrative" some might call "biologism").

I sometimes wonder if the severe delimitation of ideas that has been imposed by the "near-enemy" technique Ruddick talks about is a generation's strategy for holding onto power (employment) in American universities.

Even though I respect the ideas of postmodernism, I remain suspicious of any philosophy that downplays people's ability to participate in critical endeavors such as "solidarity" "identity" "resistance" and "freedom." Notice that as soon as minority groups and the working class began to participate in these above-mentioned endeavors, along comes a "philosophy" that told them that these are fruitless pursuits, or (better yet) that they don't exist at all! The resulting fragmentation of postmodern philosophy should be of great concern to anyone interested in social justice. After all, for most of the world, issues of work and survival continue to be central, no matter your opinion of Marx or not!

I think that Nietzsche was very aware of the potential danger his advocacy of living outside or apart from the grand recits of western history posed in a world becoming increasingly managerial and institutional in its forms. Extreme positions, I believe he said, are never succeeded by moderate ones, but by extreme positions no less extreme than the ones they are intended to counter. The "human," in Nietzsche's sense of the term, resides neither on the conserving right nor in the hyper-critical, petty-debunking tactics fouind within todays supposed "left"; the human, as I understand it, is a dynamic affective experience that is possible only by maintaining the openness of the in-between.

If this has led to what Foucault calls the "tryanny of the professors," it does so by way of an opportunistic, and flagrantly cynical melding of Nietzschean nihilism with American Taylorism. Taylor (I think his first name is Frederick, perhaps the historians can correct me) is the father of modern mangement theory, and one of his primary tenets is the enforcement of a disconnect between the person and knowledge of the employee and the task at hand. It is a very rigid approach and yet is almost taken for granted in our world of work and employment: "you may be a poet, a spiritual seer, a brilliant scientist, but today your job is to pick up those boxes and put them on the truck, so get to work." What is truly perverse, of course, is that this same philosophy of disconnection -- and dis-affection, and, in Ruddick's terms, de-moralization -- has become ingrained within the "profession" of humanities professing. And I think that when "we" (meaning adjuncts, one-years, and other non-tenured academic workers) attempt to tell of our plight to either tenured faculty, Chairs, or adminsitrators, this "Taylorist" distortion of Nietzschean thought is, in part, the void into which our cries disappear.

Two aspects of this post sadden me. First, is the reference to a schism between "a traditionally humanist right and an antihumanist left." As matter of anthropology, it’s a fair assessment of the state of the humanities. It’s also deeply preposterous. Why should a position on the scholarly approach to the cannon, or the utility of deconstructionist theory imply a view on income redistribution, abortion, or foreign policy. Indeed, the move to a ‘de-moralized’ ontology should debar any support of politics beyond the merely sentimental. I mean, it’s not like a low tax rate could be morally wrong, could it?

A second and related depressing aspect of this post is that a smart and able person (like the Invisible Adjunct) seems to take anti-foundationalism as a given. Or at least, the burden of proof is shifted to the supporters of ‘eternal verities.’

How was this accomplished? I find irksome the invocation of anti-foundationalism as if it represents some validated model of paradigm change akin to relativity in physics. The invisible adjunct writes that she cannot sign on to timeless truths and eternal verities.” Really? Why not? Not to get into simplistic rationalist snit here, but I would imagine most of us have fairly strong intuitions that 5+7 isn’t going to equal 17 because of a change in the seasons. Without going into deep philosophy, and an explication by ogged of the postmodern critique he finds so compelling, let me offer a couple points of intellectual history I find suggestive.

1. Skepticism about value and ‘eternal verities’ is hardly a recent feature of the intellectual landscape. These arguments were formulated powerfully in the past, but obtained less success within the elite opinion when advanced by, say, Hume or Lucretious.

2. Anti-foundationalism’s march through the humanities has been least successful in philosophy, precisely the discipline which one would think best equipped to assess anti-foundationalist claims. Rorty, for example, often writes as if anti-foundationalism rerpesents the dominant strain of post-1950s philosophy (“we post-Kuhnian Quineans…”). As a matter of intellectual history this is inaccurate.
3. There seems to be, as observed above, a strange and illogical connection between certain “de-moralizing” quasi-philosophical views, and a species of (moralizing) politics.

So, the philosophical arguments are not new, they were not as successful in the past, and they are least successful in the fields best equipped to assess them. In addition, there exists a tight correlation between advocating the “demoralizing” philosophical position and supporting a left political project.

These points suggest at least two possible hypotheses.

1. The power of the anti-foundationalist critique has been stated much more powerfully recently than in times past, when in any event its acceptance was hindered by prejudice (as it is now in philosophy departments). The connection between anti-foundationalism and political leftism is merely coincidental.

2.Anti-foundationalism remains a possible philosophical view. But its recent institutional success derives from its political utility, not from the development of more intellectually powerful arguments or access to new evidence about the nature of the world.

I would ague hypothesis two offers a better explanation of the facts. Any takers?

I tend to agree that hypothesis 2 above probably offers a closer account of the present. The irony (?), though, is that the political utility that anti-foundationalist philosophies have contributed to tend to be on the right, via a kind of 'back to the future' conservatism, rather than the left. The left in America has done a very poor job grasping the implications of deconstruction and anti-foundationalist arguments, and has been largely hamstrung in the arena of cultural politics.

The mobilization of what Ruddick called the "near enemy" so often articulated by self-professed "leftists" has had far more benefit for the right: 'no foundations, the "human" is a fiction, "all that is solid melts into air," great, that means your worth yesterday has melted down today to a mere fraction of what it was, now get to work'.

Give a medal to Chris for the "Taylorism" analogy. "That's my job and I just do it" isn't really so awful if you are in fact unloading trucks, but when I hear scholars talking that way -- not just grad students, but even people who have achieved tenure -- it's sickening.

A friend of mine was given a B in a grad philosophy course in a major school because he questioned some of the teacher's premises (the teacher was a Nozick-type). The teacher was happy to say to him "This is an A paper, but you broke the implied contract".

BAA,

I don't want to get too far away from IA's post, so I'll try to keep this short. Let's make a distinction between "eternal verities," which have often been called into question, and foundationalism, which hasn't. (Even Hume ultimately sets his skepticism aside as uncongeneal to living one's life.) I'd say it's true that the historical perspective which rejects the search for foundations as such "has been stated much more powerfully recently than in times past."

That Anglo philosophers have ignored or ridiculed the anti-foundationalist strain could be evidence that it's ridiculous or it could be evidence that they've gone seriously wrong. Pointing to the fact doesn't settle anything (you seem to acknowledge this).

As for the "anti-humanist left," I don't think the "connection between anti-foundationalism and political leftism is merely coincidental." Insofar as foundationalism is identified with systems of rules (which invariably benefit the powerful more than the weak), then anti-foundationalism works for liberty, which is the core concern of the left.

All that said, there's no doubt that "Theory" as it's practiced now is barren. I'm just not quite so cynical about why it retains its grip: you say "political utility," I'd say philosophical intractability.

Specifically, as IA and Lisa Ruddick describe quite well, "Theory" seems to have ruled out any appeals to the good, such that its practitioners (who are the only ones who believe the things they say) are moving themselves and the humanities willy-nilly into amorality. That leaves the less-than-convinced with the choice of an amoral liberationism (liberated from what? for the sake of what?) or a decent but philosophically untenable traditionalism. Are you saying it's not so untenable? I'm all eyes.

A very thought-proviking post, IA. It seems to me that humanities education (as it is conducted at present) appears to inculate students with high levels of cynicism. I don't think this was true of traditional humanities education, and I don't think it is true of present-day education in engineering or the sciences. But students whose education is "general" or "liberal arts" get a pretty good dose of cynicsm, even if they don't go past a bachelor's degree.

One might respect a cynic if he had come by his cynicsm as a result of personal experience (say, four years on the Western Front during WWI). But there's not much to respect about a cynicism taken from books and lectures.

From a social point of view, what are cynics good for? It might be amusing and provocative to have a few of them around, but when we talk about substantial parts of an entire generation, things begin to look different. Conservatives can fairly argue that cynics aren't very useful for sustaining and improving an existing society; liberals can fairly argue that they aren't very useful for transforming it. Whose interests are served by the production of cynics, and why are we spending billions of dollars (and uncounted person-years of student time) to produce them?

Here's a thought, or at least a prolegomenon to some future exchange. If we're going to spend words on foundationalism, eternal verities (not Verity Harte), postmodernism, and so on, it'd be helpful to have at least some rough-and-ready glosses on these notions, since people from different backgrounds seem to use the terms in significantly different ways.

For example, I think I know what analytic epistemologists mean by "foundationalism," but I'm sure ogged has something broader in mind, because I have no idea how a structural claim about knowledge and epistemic justification might relate to rules which benefit the powerful. This isn't socratic ignorance, just a plea for clarification.

(An egregious and public example of the danger is Stanley Fish's idiotic response to the idiotic charge that 9-11 was not just a joke in yo' town but the end of moral relativism. Either Fish is deeply confused, or we mean different things by MR. That 'or' is oh-so-inclusive, btw.)

Ogged,

A couple quick points.

First, in an odd resonance to your citation of Hume, we were just nattering on about the famous "and then I go play backgammon' quote on bandarlog. I would argue, however, that Hume's sentiment captures precisely the tone of anti-foundationalists like Rorty: Yeah, there's no *truth* but we can go on as before with our preferred projects (Toryism for Hume, NY review of Books leftism for Rorty).

Second, you're right that it's no argument for X that analytic philosophers think -X (who am I, Brian Leiter?). It is, however, an important datum when a philosophical theory is less popular among philosophers than among other acadmics. (How would we feel about an economic theory popular mainly among philosophers? Dubious, is my answer.)

Also, it's not like analytic philosophers have *ignored* anti-foundationalism. In Quine, for example, one would find as powerful a value-free pragmatism as one would want. And in responses to Quine, one might find objections. Likewise, in ethical philosophy,modern neo-Kantians will make claims that if true, blow up Humean sentimentalism. We're not going to answer the question here, but it's not like all analytics have blinders on.

Third, I think anyone who identifies foundationalism with systems of rules and the absence of rules with the protection of the weak is just making bad inferences. Now, I don't deny that you've described the reasoning of certain academics accurately, but golly, what horrible reasoning! Are these the people we trust to adjudicate between Kant and Heidigger?

Last, so what exactly is so untenable about traditionalism? How about this as an operating assumption: I want my instruction to develop students critical intelligence and to expose them to the most subtle and beautiful creations of the human intellect. Thus, I assign close readings of Kierkegaard and Blake instead of gender/body theory on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If there's some capital "T" Theory that makes this statement puzzling I stipulate that it bears the burden of proof.

Sorry to run on.

BA

Though I'm neither a philosopher nor an economist, I'd always be more inclined to trust a philosopher's economics. Governments don't hire philosophers to justify their economic policies.

Unfortunately, I don't think that we can substantiate the claim that Blake and Kierkegaard are objectively more subtle or beautiful than Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A better case could be made that they are more so than the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but this is still very much in the eye of the beholding discourse community. You did compare gender/body theory on the show instead, but there are those (I've seen them) for whom such theory is the most beautiful and subtle thing in the world.

Is Sloterdijk's position on the issues raised by Ruddick still relevant?

IA, you've brought up the part of Ruddick's article that I wanted to comment on, but didn't quite get to, yesterday -- the correlation between the rise of methodologies that suggest "there is no real authenticity anywhere," on the one hand, and the depressed job market for humanists, on the other. Although I think if I were making the argument, it would be more like "we send new Ph.D.s out into the fray convinced that they have nothing to hold onto apart from their professional identities" (also one of Ruddick's points), and therefore can't leave the profession or do anything but continue deconstructing everything.

Speaking of the loss of "a person's sense of having a vital interior life apart from his or her professional identity," have you seen the latest First Person column at the Chronicle? (http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/07/2003071001c.htm) "Will Stallings" describes how he and his wife found their new jobs at "Crestridge College" permeating every aspect of their lives, to the point where they felt "trapped" and decided to leave. Seems like an indication that creeping professional numbness is as much a problem (albeit for different reasons) in small teaching schools as at, say, Yale or UC Irvine.

To #s 11 and 12, let me just clarify a bit and duck out of the way, as Amanda is moving the discussion in an interesting direction.

I was using anti-foundationalism pretty broadly and not (I think) in the sense common to analytic philosophy. I meant the perceived impossibility of a justifiable "ought." That accords, it seems to me, with what IA described as "a depletion of the possibilities for creating and sustaining morally significant meaning."

Hope that clarifies. Maybe the discussion will swing around again and I'll open a comment thread on my blog if you'd like to pursue it.

As for your other points, BAA, I think we're in substantial agreement. The traditionalism you describe is just what's needed, but I haven't been able to satisfy myself with any justification of it. I may be asking the wrong kind of question, but that's where I am anyway.

I did not know that foundationalism was a sin until I read this stuff. I thought foundations were a good thing, they kept your house standing.

Ogged:

"The problem though, is that at it's core, in Nietzsche and Heidegger, the "post-modern" critique is powerful and I've yet to hear a convincing response to it."

You won't be convinced and I don't care. But every philosophy must meet the following test:

"By their fruits you shall know them."

Nietzsche and Heidegger must be held accountable for Hitler and the Marxists must be held accountable for the multiple crimes of the Soviet, Chinese, Cambodian and Cuba regimes.

The answer is that nihlism is the acid that can dissolve any container. Adolecents enjoy playing with it, but people with lives to live have no use for it.

The really depressing part is that you think I should pay $150K, so my child can go to college for four years to learn this stuff. I have a better idea. $75K will buy me a 2004 Jaguar XJ. The other $75K goes into in my retirement account. The kid goes and finds herself a job.

And you wonder why the job market for the humanities sucks?

The Anglo-american philosophers ignore what passes for theory outside of philosophy? This somehow proves that stuff was wrong?

Two points:

A. This is another "data point" only because it is precisely how those Naughty People with Naughty Theories in other sectors of the infotainment industry behave. When you say they're fools, you're as much as admitting that the social behaviour of philosophers is equally absurd.

Look fellows, the Kantian university is over and done with. Kaput. The Anglo-American university is not organised around Wissenschaft, Truth, or Freedom or any other grand idea. Just look around you. Department A ridicules the output of Department B, and vice versa. Academic Faction C reflexively trashes the work of Faction D, and vice versa. Truth for you is the object of my scorn. By now you think I'm an idiot. Need I add that entire universities have committed themselves to staking out "intellectual property rights"? Secrecy, obfuscation, and even outright fabrication of research data are the (entirely predictable) result. The present day university (which refuses to die!) doesn't look like anything like a community committed to the truth.

If the university isn't about truth what is it aobut? Ask your students. They'll tell you. It's about middle class careerism, about ME and the supreme importance of MY consumer lifestyle. Who are you to say they've misunderstood? Because guess what? It's pretty much the same for the teachers, too. This means, among other, more important things, that philo has been deposed as queen of the sciences. Anything will do as long as it gets ME ahead. Academics can cling to notions of the centrality of their intellectual micro fiefdoms, (or, if you prefer, the centrality of decentring their own discourses with some supremely central marginality yadda yadda yadda.), but then, they would, wouldn't they? That's what you have to do advance your career in bureaucratic hierarchies.

B.And besides, so what if philosophers pooh-pooh something, especially pomoismo? No one reads academic philosophers except other academic philosophers. If that makes you feel bad, remember no one reads what people in English departments, either. No one wants to read something written primarily to advance the author's career. Do you? I sure as hell don't.

So kids, this is not about people reading the Wrong Books and being perverted-n-diverted from the One True Path. It's a heartworming little tale about a bunch of rats on a sinking ship.

ciao,

che

I was hoping that the sociological argument ("analytic philosophy tends to scorn X, so X is untenable") was the start of the conversation, not the end of it.

If I understand the foundationalist ogged has mind, this character thinks there's no shared Rortian 'final vocabulary,' i.e., a sort of appeal that serves as justificatory bedrock for some/most/all participants in the discourse (candidates, in various arenas, might include God, sense data, Ross-style moral intuitions...).

The most interesting thing about this, I think, is the extent to which something like this is *needed*, as Rorty and Hume are alleged to have denied, and the extent to which its failure means that we can't go on as before. A handy example: Chun's comment

"I don't think that we can substantiate the claim that Blake and Kierkegaard are objectively more subtle or beautiful than Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

It may be that highminded notions of objectivity are off the table, but it doesn't follow that objectivity is, since it's not at all clear that objectivity requires the rather grandiose machinery sometimes attributed to it. For example, Peter Unger thinks that nothing's flat, and that nothing is known, because he attributes a bizarre set of requirements to ordinary talk about knowledge and flatness, and then says that nothing can meet the requirements. Mackie thinks that moral claims require objective prescriptivity in order to be true, and concludes that they're all false. This is the sort of mistake that shouldn't be made, post-Wittgenstein. So the real question about Buffy is how much aesthetic objectivity we can save once we admit that much of the highminded talk about Value is just bluff. Correspondingly, worries about foundations face the same sort of questions. I'm happy with true moral claims that are less ambitious than Mackie's, and I wonder how many parallel moves might be made elsewhere.

"who am I, Brian Leiter": nice!

I wasn't going to post anything since BAA robbed me of my words, but to say that "no one reads academic philosophers" or "no one reads what people in English departments" writes is to make two mistakes. One that there is no one in philosophy and English departments writing for a mainstream audience, and two it underestimates the publics intelligence.

As anecdotal evidence my field of study is philosophy but I work in IT. I find that many of the individuals I've worked with over the last 10 years are very well read, especially in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. I happen to work in a court where I have judges and attorneys who ask me about books on a regular basis. Many of them studied philosophy or English prelaw and have kept up with the field. So I think it’s a fallacy to think the only people reading these texts are locked in ivory towers.

che: It's untrue that no non-philosophers read philosophy. Some subfields of computer science, like formal semantics, machine learning, and computational linguistics, drink from the same well as analytic philosophy. Ideas like denotational semantics, modal logic, casual models, and category theory have been shared by the two disciplines.

Robert at 16,

"By their fruits you shall know them."

But disciples aren't fruits (except, of course, for the ones that are). I named Nietzsche and Heidegger and called them the "core" to distinguish them from the people who have perverted them. I agree that spending money and time to be inculcated with the dogma of aggreived jargonmeisters is a waste. But there are real issues here (quite apart from nihilism, a charge which doesn't stick to either N or H) and I'm desperate to be convinced by something. Moreover, with respect, I think you should care, because I'm certainly not alone.

In fact, IA and Ruddick seemed to me to be describing this very dilemma and also not as people using nihilism as acid, but ones who'd like to keep it at bay. IA?

Robert Schwartz,

Your comments about Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Marxists are radically uninformed and also subscribe to the same type of vulgar Marxist criticism (not "critique"--most overused word in the language) you'd denounce if it were made of a figure whose politics you like: "Milton Friedman is a bourgeois economist, and thus you must judge him by the fruits of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil."

And also, having seen several likenesses of each, I remain confident in the transcendent objectivity of my judgment about the beauty of the character Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs. Blake and Kierekegaard.

Maybe this is an obvious point, but as I understand it Nietzschean nihilism is not a negative or pessimistic condition, but rather is an historical condition for the possibility of overcoming: traditional biases, cultural and class prejudices, metaphysical bromides, easy and facile forms of legitimation, etc., etc. But, to resort to a non-Nietzschean vocabulary, the task of overcoming requires a relentless and vigilant imagination that can actually see beyond its own comfort -- and comfort can sometimes take the form of negativism.
Where I'm heading here is toward Amanda's excellent and frankly discomforting point:

"'we send new Ph.D.s out into the fray convinced that they have nothing to hold onto apart from their professional identities' (also one of Ruddick's points), and therefore can't leave the profession or do anything but continue deconstructing everything."

First, as far as my expereince in academe goes, I think Amanda has squarely hit the nail on its head. Second, I think her succint description of a deconstructing machine chewing up everythig in its path simply because it can imagine nothing better or more aptly characterizes the existential, ethical, and political vacuity that animates the present-day culture of the humanities. And, to add a literary allusion to this, the machine she describes is akin to Melville's whale, a dumb, thoughtless, morally neutral, dangerous, deadly and violent brute.

I still am holding to my "Taylorist" model that I metioned a day ago. The "job" of a humanities academic has become rife with Taylorist methodology: it is now a detached, disconnected, morally and politically neutral job of hyper-critique -- critique for critique's sake alone. Moreover, the semi-practioners of this omniverous deconstructing tactic have altogether missed the ethical dimension to the deconstructive project. Deconstruction was never meant to become simply an aimless tactic, or a kind of party trick -- 'look what I can do!

I think the proof to my claim can be found in the (to me, to us) very apparent blind spot iterated in the professorial deconstructive trick, which is the never-touched status and title of the professor. These deconstructors who deploy it like a Heideggerian "Technik" range over everything but their own position, their own institutional identity and status. So while the bodies are falling all around them, the modern-day hyper critical, semi-deconstructing professor goes on blithley deconstructing sacred cows, calling it radical, calling it left, all the while enforcing a willed blindness to the bodies lying all around them. Little professors comfortably enscounced on the tenure track who portray themselves as devotees mining the terrain of obscure Victorian fiction; and others, similarly enscounced, who calmly imagine a happy retirement at age 70 -- at the latest -- which in no way involves the phrase 'Hi, welcome to Walmart' are examples of this quietism.

In the extreme, this second-nature critical/deconstructive sensibility that has become the rule of the day seems to me to be a bit like the string quartet playing Mozart at Auschwitz.

Ah Mozart ...

(sorry for going on so)

There's a lot here that I'd like to respond to. But at the moment I'm sick as a dog and my head is swimming. So please excuse if this doesn't make as much sense as it should.

I didn't use the terms foundationalism or anti-foundationalism but I did cite Schochet's use of the terms. I understand these in the looser sense that ogged provides above, and I approach these questions not as a philosopher but as a historian. I am thinking about the foundations of moral, political and social claims, and concerned about the loss of an authority from which we derive and to which we refer such claims. How do we arrive at "ought" claims, and on what grounds do we explain/justify our "oughts"? And what do we do when there are competing "ought" claims that are derived from different, perhaps conflicting, authorities? Is there something outside of just ourselves and our history (God, Providence, Nature), or are we the legislators of our own morality?

I believe it is the latter, and this is something that worries me. I don't think foundationalism is a sin, but I do think it is untenable. If I thought it were tenable, I would no longer be a lapsed Catholic, and I would happily return to the fold.

Of course there are people who believe in various moral authorities (eg, God) outside of human creation. But at the very least, they have to come to terms with the fact that they are living in a world in which others believe in other authorities, and in which some others don't believe in any such authorities at all. Which is to say, that this is in part the problem of pluralism (and here I don't refer only to recent multiculti debates but would rather trace this back to the confessional divide that was the result of the Reformation): there are competing "oughts" and who is to say which "oughts" are to have the final say? This is the condition of the modern west, and it is the source both of the liberties that we often take for granted (eg, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech) and of the risks of nihilism that some have mentioned in this thread.

In terms of curriculum, I would rather people had to read canonical works than "gender/body theory on Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Or at least, it would bother me if students were reading gender/body theory on Buffy instead of important works in the history of moral, social and political theory. I don't have an objective reason for this preference, and part of it may be aesthetic. Though I would also argue on the basis of tradition: ie, that a central component of education in the humanities should be to introduce students into the various traditions of thought that have gone into the making of our world.

Short comment: I think that the critical acumen one can acquire from reading, say, Luther, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Heidegger, Foucault and anales school historians, can be, and even should be applied to the example at hand -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Some of the work on Buffy, as well as other pop-culture figures, is fascinating, and some of it, as one can expect, is dreadful.

The issue, I think, is that our culture has decided to simultaneously stream-line and water-down its educational approach. And with this combined stream-lining and diluting, we have introduced through the back-door a healthy dose of protestant vocationalism and anti-intellectualism. This has led to the "Me" University, as someone characterized it above.

Okay, this is longer than I envisions -- sorry. The virtue of gender/body theory interpretations of Buffy is that it deomstrates the present-day appliciability of the critical insights/models found within the intellectual tradition of the west. To me, that's not a bad thing. If once can show a kid that seemingly superfluous and superfical pop-cultural entitites such as Buffy can be read as complex ideological sites, maybe the effect will be that the kid becomes curious about the source of these readings, and then embarks on a reading of Hegel, Freud, Adorno et. al.

Maybe I'm being too simplistic. Or maybe I've spent one too many years trying to reach my point-and-click generation students with whatever means I can muster. But still, I think the ends can justify the means here.

Chun,

wm. blake was a hottie, and only fascists deny this. no way YOU get to ride in the jag.

IA,

Feel better.

I think it's important to keep in mind that there are different sorts of ought-judgments (you ought to keep promises, you ought not eat paint chips, you ought to use the outermost fork first...) and these are justified by appeal to different sorts of reasons. My warning about overambitious metaphysics was meant, in part, to bring up the possibility that certain kinds of justifications (e.g., appeals to God) aren't needed for the sorts of objectivity we need, nor for the authority we seem to demand.

I guess the point of all this is that I'm more concerned about objections from below (concerning what goes on *in* the practice, whether the sorts of reasons we give and take in the course of, say, moralizing, or some other form of evaluation, are coherent or not) than from above (whether there's the right sort of authority lurking in the starry sky above). I think the inference from the denial that there's

"something outside of just ourselves and our history"

to a strong conclusion about, say, the reasonable irresolvability of evaluative disagreement (and beyond, to the sketchy status of the discourse itself) is unwarranted precisely because it requires something of our evaluations that they don't, in fact, need.

Here's what makes me nervous: you say you'd go to church if you became a foundationalist (of the broad sort we've been discussing), but these two things seem like apples and oranges. Being a non-lapsed Catholic requires some beliefs about one God in three Persons, the nature of sacraments, and so on, while being a foundationalist has to do either with your views about what sorts of justification are available for a variety of normative claims, or about your views of the importance of the unavailability of those justifications. My point is that you don't need something as metaphysically extravagant as the old guy with the white beard to defend some mitigated foundationalism.

I believe that it was Rorty who cited the story of the philosophy professor who thought that the whole argument about the nature and role of philosophy was silly: "Philosophy is **what philosophers do**". The question "Who is a philosopher" was apparently simple for him: Anyone tenured in Philosophy.

He was talking about analytic philosophers, BTW. Analytic philosophy and postmodernism have a shared commitment to the autonomy of scholarship, as well as a shared contempt for everyday non-professional discourse. Both, in fact, delight in being "counterintuitive" and shocking.

The invulnerability given by tenure makes indifference to common concerns much easier.

Besides the Taylorism analogy, how about the "inland drainage"? Nothing ever flows out of the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea.

There is a historical precedent to think about. The word "dunce" comes from the name of Duns Scotus, whose epigone dominated academic (scholastic) philosophy around 1500. The humanists hated the Dunists and coined the phrase. It originally meant "hairsplitting academic" but came simple to mean "idiot". To me, analytic philosophy and postmodernism both have that Scholastic flavor.

Fontana speaks the truth. The metaphysical aspect of academic angst seems oddly off-point. True enough, if you believe your scholarship and teaching worthless, you'll be miserable. That level of meaning, however, does not require a realm of platonic ideas. An academic could be perfectly satisfied by finding her research enjoyable or thinking she helped students.

So let me suggest that the metaphysical angst of those in the grasp of theory is epiphenomenal. Academics in the humanities aren't miserable because Theory as an *argument* has has undermined all truth. Rather, Theory as a *fad* has caused many people to do research they don't enjoy (and consider bogus), and to teach classes they don't think students benefit from.

A supporting anecdote: Erin O'Connor's touching post on her own experience writing a book she now (largely) considers bunk.

#21

"I named Nietzsche and Heidegger and called them the "core" to distinguish them from the people who have perverted them."

So they live in some empyrean realm where reality can not obtrude? I don't think so. Either their theories can be put to empirical test or they are so much hot air.

"I agree that spending money and time to be inculcated with the dogma of aggreived jargonmeisters is a waste."

We agree on that much.

"But there are real issues here (quite apart from nihilism, a charge which doesn't stick to either N or H) and I'm desperate to be convinced by something."

I can not convince you of anything. Conviction is an internal state that only you can change. The available evidence is that continuing your dogmatic studies will not bring conviction but only further confusion and despair. If you are in a hole, stop digging.

How to change your internal state? psychiatry -- prozac or, if that fails, electroshock, psychotherapy -- tedious and expensive, join a religious community -- take your pick, every tradition and ethic group has a few.

I was not accusing Nietzsche and Heidegger of nihlism, I was accusing them of facisim. The nihilists are the PoMo's who are nihilistic about everything other than their own tenure as Zikah pointed out in #2 above.

"Moreover, with respect, I think you should care, because I'm certainly not alone. In fact, IA and Ruddick seemed to me to be describing this very dilemma and also not as people using nihilism as acid, but ones who'd like to keep it at bay.

OK. I care, because you seem to be a nice fellow who has responded mildly to an unasked for provocation, and I like our esteemed hostess. But there is not much I can do to help you. I can attempt to defund the academy, but that only would punish the careerists and it would not relieve your perplexity. The only thing I can tell you is that you cannot get out of your hole with the shovel you used to dig it, you will have to find and use other tools.

#22

"Your comments about Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Marxists are radically uninformed"

Is that different from being conservativly uninfomed?

"and also subscribe to the same type of vulgar Marxist"

Vulgar -- sure lots of people have accused me of vulgarity. Say have you heard the one about the farmer's daughter. . .

But Marxist. Never, my mother was a refugee from the Soviet Union, we were liberal anti-communists before anti-communism was cool.

"criticism (not "critique"--most overused word in the language)"

Wasn't on this years list:

http://www.lssu.edu/whats_new/articles.php?articleid=361

"you'd denounce if it were made of a figure whose politics you like: "Milton Friedman is a bourgeois economist, and thus you must judge him by the fruits of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil."

First I am Marxists now I am a libertarian.

In fact, I am sympathetic to libertairians, not to Marxists. But more importantly Chile, Argentina, and Brazil are functioning democracies, whats wrong with that? Damn, stupid question. I forgot I am supposed to be a Marxist and disdain such bourgeois nonsense? C'nest pas?

"And also, having seen several likenesses of each, I remain confident in the transcendent objectivity of my judgment about the beauty of the character Buffy the Vampire Slayer vs. Blake and Kierekegaard."

Hush ma mouth!

Robert,

"Radical" means "at root" in the context in which I used it. Nietzsche was well acquainted with the proto-fascism of his day, and he despised it. Holding Marx responsible for Stalin and Pol Pot is as convincing as blaming Paul for the Inquisition (maybe not the best example, Paul being Paul, but you get the point). Heidegger was a Nazi, true, but if you think that invalidates his philosophical arguments, you also have to agree with soi disant Marxist critics who'd claim that Stevens and Eliot's poetry only justifies bankerly and insurance-execly values (these positions are commonly referred to as "vulgar" Marxism).

You could, I suppose, refer to ABC as "functioning democracies," but my point would be better illustrated by a review of how they came to achieve that exalted state.

Robert, you and BAA are making similar points, though he managed to avoid recommending electroshock. Nevertheless, I was smiling as I read your post so I'll continue being a nice fellow.

I wonder if you're not both confusing what IA and Ruddick and I are describing (though I don't presume to speak for them) with plain old adolescent angst. I'm not hung up on whether my life has meaning: I think you're correct that the cure for that feeling is not any academic exercise. The problem in the original post is much more specific: "demoralization" in a double sense: an undermining of justifiable "oughts" and the depression of living in the consequent abysmal ethical community.

Fontana makes an important distinction regarding the different kinds of "ought" judgements, but I'd like to hear what help mitigated foundationalism would be in arguing with someone who thinks homosexuality is condemned in the Bible and therefore immoral.

ogged, I'll take you up on that, I hope tomorrow, but first I wanted to ask, partly because it might lighten the mood,

is it true that Paul DeMan's middle name was 'Adolph'?

I've heard this from someone who might know, and I really hope it's true, but, of course, that's not always a reliable mark of what is.

...or I'll just do a half-assed job now.

I'm not sure I see why this would be a problem case. First, a tu quoque: how does the denial of foundationalism let us say anything more? (I think Rorty thinks it does, at times, but I'm convinced this is a mistake.)

Second. Here's what *I* might say to someone like this, if I were so inclined: "here are my reasons for thinking that there is no such Being, and for thinking that the moral claims contained in your carefully selected passages are problematic, and for thinking that every extant argument against the permissibility of hot, hot, hot gay sex fails. Now it's your turn."

The point behind this pedantry is that it's *not* as though we have to stop talking when it's revealed that my interlocutor takes the Bible to be a source of reasons and I don't. We have between us, most likely, standards of argumentation that allow us to adjudicate the deeper dispute. I think I have a psychological story (a patronizing one, granted) that helps explain the intransigence of my interlocutor's commitment. Most likely no one will budge, but the existence of disagreement by itself is not so bad-- I'm on good terms with astronomy despite the Flat Earth Society.

What *hasn't* happend is that I've made some appeal to a cartoonish FOUNDATION and told her that she must agree on pain of irrationality. I've worked, as much as possible, from claims she'll assent to, using inference rules she accepts as truth-preserving, to get to conclusions she doesn't like. (As Richard Miller remarked, it's a fortunate accident that Biblical cosmology isn't very good, and that even Biblical literalists have to acknowledge the reliability of their senses.)

I've lost track of how foundationalism plays into this. It doesn't give me extra premises so much as it lowers the justificatory bar, I'd think. But tell me how I've missed the boat and we'll go from there.

I don't think that we can substantiate the claim that Blake and Kierkegaard are objectively more subtle or beautiful than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I suspect this could be said and believed only by an academic, and statements like this (designed to épater bourgeois who barely exist any more) are a prime reason sensible people pay no attention to most academics these days. It's the Beavis & Butthead approach to intellectual life... and yes, I know, Beavis & Butthead are just as significant as Plato and I can't prove (excuse me, "substantiate") otherwise. Huh huh huh.

If one can show a kid that seemingly superfluous and superfical pop-cultural entitites such as Buffy can be read as complex ideological sites, maybe the effect will be that the kid becomes curious about the source of these readings, and then embarks on a reading of Hegel, Freud, Adorno et al.

Chris: A reasonable point, but how is it that previous generations managed to become interested in philosophy without having it steeped in Buffy (or generational equivalent) first?

IA: Feel better. Also, I think you have the most interesting comment threads around.

I hope Tim Burke completes his book on the Zimbawean chiefs and does so without a heavy overlay of irrelevant theory. Large royalty streams are the best revenge.

Chun...please clarify..when you say: "I don't think that we can substantiate the claim that Blake and Kierkegaard are objectively more subtle or beautiful than Buffy the Vampire Slayer," is your comment specific to Buffy, or do you mean "can't substantiate that Blake and Kierkegaard are objectively more subtle or beautiful than X," where X might be, for example, Beavis & Butthead...? That is, are you actually asserting that "objectively more subtle/beautiful" is a meaningless concept?

[Warning: exasperated rant from someone at non-elite college follows. Read at own risk.]

I'm a little puzzled. "C. A. Wilcox" and "Dept. Chair" were both, er, critiqued for their prejudices, which emerged from their privileged (an overused term, but the proper one here) grounding in elite research institutions that prioritized theoretical acumen and extensive publishing. Meanwhile, Lisa Ruddick, who is writing from the exact same position of privilege, produces an article which reflects an experience of institutional life based in the same priorities...and it becomes a reasonable measuring stick for judging the normative practices, aspirations, and despairs of the amorphous "profession"? Ruddick isn't wrong, not by a long-shot--I thoroughly believe her account of "paralysis"--but her vision of pain is so completely disembodied, so grounded in a world in which faculty expect to superintend each other's research, teach "their work," and regard Eve Sedgwick as the very model of a modern major scholar, that it bears no resemblance to what the average academic at an average small state school or non-selective private institution is likely to experience. Most of Ruddick's priorities have been reflected in this thread, in which pain is measured out by the problems of "making meaning" in an "anti-foundationalist world," pretentious graduate students snuff out one's interest in research, and it's seriously possible to discuss the pros and cons of teaching Buffy the Vampire Slayer as opposed to Blake.

When I first read Ruddick's piece, back in 2001, my mind drifted back to the woman I met who taught in a Southern regional comprehensive. Her teaching load was 5-5 (mostly in GE and composition); she had minimal library resources and little or no funding for research and conference travel; her colleagues (even the younger ones) were fairly conservative and uninterested in "theory"; she was in a rural area with no nearby urban center; and her pay was lower than that of most full-time lecturers. The idea that this woman's experience or her response to it could even remotely begin to be comprehended in Ruddick's terms (or the terms of this thread) boggles the mind. And while her "comfortable" position is fairly extreme in terms of its awfulness, it is far closer to what most academics experience than is the hermetic circle of Reasonably Selective University and Anonymous Elite Liberal Arts College. Had Ruddick been writing from the far more common position of having a 3-4 or 4-4 load with heavy service responsibilities, just-about-adequate pay, and a lot of composition/GE classes, then her angst would have looked rather different, wouldn't it?

Go to the college and university homepage list linked at Voice of the Shuttle and start pulling up the homepages for colleges and universities of which you've never heard. How many courses do the faculty teach? What kind of courses are they? Where do the faculty get their degrees? What kind of libraries do they have? And what happens when you run their names through the MLA database? Even in the most research-friendly situations in otherwise teaching-oriented colleges, nobody is going to care about your research in the way that your colleagues at Dartmouth or Harvard would care (and interfere). Nor are you likely to sit around pondering how to challenge the tenets of Western Civ in the manner best liable to advance your career, especially if your school has a teacher preparation mandate and you spend much of your time thinking about NCATE compliance, primary vs. secondary credentials, permanent certification, and the ethical issues pertaining thereto. The students don't need "your research." The inhumanity of having to use a jargon you don't believe in tends to be somewhere off the radar screens of the average faculty member at a minor U of Wisc, CSU, or SUNY, let alone Church-Affiliated School, Average Community College, Small Directional State and Even Smaller Satellite Campus. Their worries tend to be somewhat more pragmatic--avoiding burn-out after years of essentially remedial teaching; battling with the physical exhaustion of teaching schedules that begin at 8:00 AM and end at 10:00 PM; trying to survive on a meager salary in a major urban area; and reconciling the needs of students who work full-time or are raising families with curricular demands. Many of the ones I've met have long, frustrating war-stories about doing endless battle with their unresponsive administrations over working conditions, the tenure process, hiring, pay, and yes, adjuncts.

[End exasperated rant.]

Language Hat,

The only reason you believe that Blake and Kierkegaard are "objectively more subtle and beautiful" than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (remember how italics disambiguate) is because of the long toil of academics. Without them, there would be no Blake except in scattered museums and private collections, and you very likely would never have heard anything of the Danish churchyard. More importantly, their cultural heft comes from accumulated academic comment. There is nothing "in" the prophetic books, the concluding unscientific postscripts, or the soap opera that you do not bring to it. Our minds read these 'texts' as our culture conditions them to; and, for better or worse, that culture is dominated by the academics you scorn.

DF, yes I mean it that way. You could also substitute The Jeffersons, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, or Battlefield Earth.

I applaud Miriam's thoughtful comment on the heretofore-unremarked hothouse flower nature of Ruddick's lament. Some recognition on Ruddick's part that she's tenured at a major university because of contingency and not intrinsic merit would bolster her ethos; I'm not asking for Maoist self-criticism, though that may be in order, just a bit of humility and sense of audience.

Fontana at 32 and 33.

Nothing like Hitler to lighten the mood. Paul Adolph Michel de Man it was. Though I came to Heidegger by way of the Jesuits, not the Derridians, so I had to look it up.

http://www.library.yale.edu/humanities/english/literarytheory.html

As for the substance of your post, what you describe sounds like an amicable exchange of views. As you say, “no one is likely to budge.” Is that really not so bad? I think it’s telling that you substitute astronomy for homosexuality. That fact is that you and your interlocutor each believes the other is wrong about a serious issue. And neither of you has recourse to the argumentative tools to bring the other around. That’s the heart of the anti-foundationalist crisis: the absence of shared principles based upon which members of a community can adjudicate their moral disputes.

But there have always been irresolvable interpersonal disputes. What’s unique about a post-foundationalist community is 1) that individuals don’t think they can justify themselves even to themselves and 2) moral arguments are considered, in principle, irresolvable. So, perhaps the challenge of convincing someone was unfair; does mitigated foundationalism help with issues 1 and 2?

The sexiness of a theory is proportional to its contraintuitiveness and claims for universality

I would like to add a kind of sociological perspective here.
It just _is_ more interesting to propose a theory that rejects all notions of a self than one that rejects _some_ notions of a self. It is way cooler to denounce all of science than to denounce specific parts on well-documented grounds. It is a much better feeling to be a complete anti-foundationalist than to be anti-foundationalist some of the time, depending on the context. Your citation index will be much higher if you claim that the central perspective is completely arbitrary and historically dependent than if you discuss how the illusion of depth is created by manipulating certain aspects of our visual perception.

Chun writes:
"There is nothing "in" the prophetic books, the concluding unscientific postscripts, or the soap opera that you do not bring to it. Our minds read these 'texts' as our culture conditions them to; and, for better or worse, that culture is dominated by the academics you scorn."

The implication of this statement is that there is no way we could tell a page of text from Kierkegaard from a page of text from a Buffy script. This is obviously wrong, but it just is _much_ cooler to do this complete rejection of any intrinsic meaning in a text than to talk about the complex interrelation between the text and the historically changing interpretation.

The high grades go to the students who are willing to ignore all their intuition and actual experience in favor of buying into the next upcoming radical claim. And as pointed out, this works like brainwashing since it creates a conflict between the group and those outside the group.
For example: The larger a role scientific method plays in the world, the more interesting it is to denounce it as an arbitrary construct. This buys you cred, but it isolates you from the rest of the world.

-That's just the way it works: The more radical, contra-intuitive, and universal claims we make, the higher the stakes feel, the cooler we come out, the more friends we make, the more we are quoted and, hence, the more tenure we get.

Perhaps we should begin appreciating unsexy theory instead?

-Jesper Juul

Chun at 38,

I'll bite, although I'm not convinced you're serious and don't understand how you might know that Sarah Michelle Geller is more beautiful than either William Blake or Soren Kierkegaard.

I have just one question. You write, "The only reason you believe that Blake and Kierkegaard are "objectively more subtle and beautiful" than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (remember how italics disambiguate) is because of the long toil of academics."

How do you justify that "only?"

Jesper,

What I wrote does not imply that those two things are indistinguishable, just that the elements of meaning which distinguish them are present in the mind of the reader. I don't think of this as particularly counterintuitive, nor am I making any claims about its sexiness. A lot goes wrong when we start talking about how a 'text' creates meaning rather than focusing on the psychological and sociological processes by which meaning is created out of them.

And ogged, as I mentioned, Blake and Kierkegaard wouldn't exist as known authors without academic labor. The editions you read, the articles about them you've read in encyclopedias and textbooks, lectures you hear from teachers--all academic products. Don't confuse certain practicing academics at this moment with all academics past, present, and future.

I, personally, tend to find (some) Kierkegaard and Blake more stimulating than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I'm in no way prepared to make universal value judgments from this fact. Which of these 'texts' should be taught in which context is an entirely different question from which of them has the most intrinsic value. The latter is an easy question, actually: "intrinsic value" is meaningless.

This thread is like its own blog. Yikes.

ogged at 39:

We've reached the deep waters, I think. Preliminaries: Astronomy is the example because it's an area with unresolvable disagreement (in one sense of the term) that doesn't and ought not undermine our confidence that its central claims are true. (Similarly, the biblical types don't undermine my confidence in my pro-sodomy stance, because what they say is unconvincing, often by their own lights.) So it's not just any disagreement that's undermining, and we need a story about why moral disagreement (for example) is different.

(For what it's worth, I'm trying to provide some of that story, though I think the way to do this has nothing to do with old chestnuts like homosexuality, abortion, etc etc. Those disputes seem not to undermine confidence, for various reasons.)

(2), then, is, according to me, less plausible than a lot of people seem to think. Much of its plausibility stems from the actual-world prevalence of intellectual laziness and politeness-- keeping in mind that only a certain kind of 'unresolvedness' matters.

When we get to "the absence of shared principles based upon which members of a community can adjudicate their moral disputes" I'm tempted to wave the equivocation flag and declare the dispute spurious, not genuine. (And, wouldn't you know, I've got another story about what's going on in those cases.)

The correctness of the judgment contained in (1) ["I cannot justify myself to myself"] depends on (a) the irresolvability of dispute and (b) the epistemological significance of that disagreement. Some people (Scanlon, e.g.) think that even real fundamental disagreement, by itself, oughtn't prompt us to back off from our commitments, but this strikes me as too quick. To answer the question, we'll need a general epistemological view about disagreements, reasonable and otherwise, or a view about moral commitments that explains why they wouldn't answer to the same epistemic challenge as, say, straightforward 'descriptive' beliefs, or both.

Caveat emptor: a mitigated foundationalism wouldn't help with (1) and (2) in any external metaphysical-in-the-pejorative-sense way; it would, I guess, provide the relevant epistemology, meta-ethics, etc. that allows us to do our thang.

Chun...just curious how far you are willing to extend this. Does life have a higher intrinsic value than death, or is that question also meaningless?

DF,

In the context, I was referring to "aesthetic value." I think there are arguments to be made that "intrinsic value" is meaningless in ethics, but I was not making them.

In other words, it is meaningless to say that "Dostoyevsky is a better writer than Gissing," but not to say that "many readers are enculturated to find more insight in Dostoyevsky than Gissing."

Chun: I too find it hard to believe you're serious (I suppose a moniker like Chun the Unavoidable may be a factor here), but:

Without them, there would be no Blake except in scattered museums and private collections, and you very likely would never have heard anything of the Danish churchyard. More importantly, their cultural heft comes from accumulated academic comment... Our minds read these 'texts' as our culture conditions them to; and, for better or worse, that culture is dominated by the academics you scorn.

But I don't "scorn" academics; I am quite aware of the importance of academics in bringing Blake and Kierkegaard into the culture at large, and deeply grateful for it. Those academics, you see (do I really have to point this out?), still respected the traditional academic values, particularly the pursuit of truth. How ludicrous that was! Now, we have academics (in the humanities, of course, scientists having to contend with actual facts) who dismiss the very idea of truth, not to mention beauty, morality, and the other silly old will-o'-the-wisps, and proudly proclaim that Buffy (or Butthead or whatever is the latest pop fad) is interchangeable with Blake (or whatever Dead White Male is currently most fun to beat up). I suspect this is largely a desperate attempt to catch the train of cultural relevance as it pulls out of the station ("if I don't talk about Buffy, the kids won't listen to me!"), but it doesn't work; people at large just don't care what English professors have to say about Buffy. And that's what I said:

sensible people pay no attention to most academics these days

Note the "sensible"; note the "most"; note especially the "these days."

If it is meaningless to say that Dostoyevsky is a better writer than Gissing, then it is meaningless to say anything at all. Why are you wasting your time in this meaningless thread when you could be down at the bar playing pool?

Miriam (37): if the job is so awful and burdensome, how about we trade?

Language Hat (34): I think we would need to examine the changes in education, pedagogic philosophies, curriculums, as well as the culture in general to be able to even begin to respond.

That said, as a literary critic, I find a lot in BtVS that is interesting and worth examining, though at the same time I grant Chun's distinction (32) between the universally prescribed form of 'texts create their meanings' and the need to take into account the social, psychological, and I would add historical and ideological conditions that inflect the meaning
(s) we discern.

LH,

There's nothing funny about Chun the Unavoidable, and I genuinely envy anyone who doesn't recognize the name (and who does the necessary reading [what kind of aesthete hasn't read The Dying Earth?]).

I admire the strength of your inner Harold Bloom, but I think you're allowing outrage to interfere with your understanding of what I'm saying. Even on an aesthetic level, I happen to think Gissing is a more interesting novelist that Dostoyevsky; but we cannot usefully generalize about their 'intrinsic merit.' 'Eternal verities' are distilled ideology.

Chun,

Part of the reason I can't decide whether you're serious is that you're not making any arguments. You write, "'Eternal verities' are distilled ideology." Suppose someone doesn't believe that. What would you say if you were interested in convincing her?

Ogged,

I've long admired the strategic use of the word "argument" that excludes the OED's 3.a when it's convenient for your 3.a to do so (all the while implying that definition 4 is the only coin of the realm).

Now, on to "eternal verities." I wrote that they were distilled ideology. I did this because I don't believe that literature reveals eternal truths about human behavior. The way in which literature is read in a given historical moment--the way that it is encouraged to be read by what we could Althusser's ISAs--reveals the values endemic to the power elite in that moment. It does not reveal, though it may reflect or refract, anything in the literature itself. "Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus" can mean many things to our desperately reading Susan, but I hope that we can see that the interstices of psychology, experience, and history in Susan Caballero, daughter of Pinochetian generals on scholarship to Dartmouth in 1976, will differ from those of Susan Matak, orphaned by Indonesian generals, on scholarship at UC-Santa Barbara in 2001--differ, moreover, in such radically variable ways that notions of immanent truth or objective correlative wilt before their complexities.

This conversation is fascinating. Reading all of this has had me thinking back to my own education; I've been trying to determine whether the tyranny of theory ever rose up to squash my ideas or to trounce my evidence.

Honestly, I've been having a hard time doing so. I can recall only one incidence of a theory-dedicat (a Marxist feminist) refusing to accept my work as valid. (It looked at the construction of masculinity in the 1950s.) Perhaps ironically, similar work done at the same time for a class in a different field was enthusiastically praised.

I have to say that both the position of eternally reinventing the wheel and the position of destroying all wheels are unsatisfying to me. So far I have been lucky in getting a good reception for developing a new tapestry out of the strands of the old (to shift metaphors) and tying it to the firm grounding of the historical past. (Something that gives me at least as many conniption fits as trying to wend my way through the theoretical strands I'm re-weaving!)

Of course, we'll see what happens when the book comes out. If my dissertation was anything to go by, it will be cataloged into a field where my scholarly audiences are unlikely to find it! (The combination of theory and place-based topic proved daunting to the cataloguers -- human ecology? geography? bioregionalism? environmental history? environmental studies?)

But that's another can of worms.

It seems as if there are at least three sets of implied questions woven through the thread above:

(1) How do academics/scholars decide where to locate their values and on what to base them? What are the ends of scholarly critique and pursuit of knowledge? (More specifically -- is there an alternative to the endless destruction of deconstruction, and if so, what?)

(2) How is scholarly work valued by society as a whole? How do scholars address the needs of society (of which they are a part, however much some may deny it)? How do they reconcile those needs to their own obligations to intellectual integrity, recognition of past scholarship, etc.?

(3) How are tensions and contradictions between (1) and (2) resolved? Whose values prevail?

(I would argue that probably those whose advocates are the most confident in the worth of their value system -- which, of late, has not been academics.)

IA -- I hope you're feeling better soon!

I cannot think of a single "theorist," be it Benjamin, Adorno, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, or Bhabha, who advocates the notion that texts are utterly empty of meaning, intrinsic or otherwise. The oft stated idea of a plurality of meaning(s), or multiple and often contradictory meaning/significance does not lead logically to the assertion of no meaning. At the risk of coming across as either cranky or arrogant -- or both -- this "conclusion," which unfortunately gets so much play in current academic debates,is the result of shabby, unsubtle, and superficial readings of the aforementioned theorists. And, to take a further, and probably even more inflamatory step, these kinds of readings have always seemed to me to be the kind of bromides of academic careerists who need to say something quick, get it published, and further their nascent careers.

Chris,

I'm not sure if your last comment was addressed to me, but, if so, you'll notice that what I say is different from what you discuss--which I don't recognize from my reading.

Well sadly, chun, if that's the meaning he was encultured to derive from your post, we're at a loss to go further. Right?

Chris: I'm afraid you missed the point. What I was objecting to was the enthusiasm for taking refuge in distancing, hyper-theoretical jargon in order to project the experiences of a privileged few onto the rest of the world--which I thought this thread was supposed to be attacking, not supporting. I mean, of course I wasn't paying attention to the cries of the adjuncts when I suddenly found myself without any money for food this past winter (not hyperbole, unfortunately, and trust me, that wasn't comfortable), just as of course someone who is worrying about childcare, shuttling back-and-forth in a commuter relationship, or doing the work of three people because the administration is "saving money" is probably not thinking about the adjuncts either. Similarly, of course there's no reason for you to be sympathetic to someone who has some sort of tenure-track job, no matter how awful, just as, to be honest, of course there's no reason for me to conjure up much, if any, sympathy for the travails of someone earning twice my salary for half the work at a Research I. But why should a--what was it?--Taylorist careerist meritocratic leftist deconstructionist Nietzchean, who is a string of pejorative adjectives and not a human being, care about your pain? If someone is at a school in the middle of nowhere, with no further career prospects, no opportunity to do any research, and poor working conditions (and, if the ones I know are any indication, with few illusions about "the meritocracy"), what good does calling them a TCMLDN do, when it doesn't even begin to explain their lives? Isn't there more common ground in saying to t-t faculty member X "you can barely afford to rent a one-br apt. in this area, while the adjuncts are doubling up in studios--the exploitation is in degree, not in kind, but you've got more power and bureaucratic traction than we do, so let's get to work now to end this situation"?

"Similarly, of course there's no reason for you to be sympathetic to someone who has some sort of tenure-track job, no matter how awful, just as, to be honest, of course there's no reason for me to conjure up much, if any, sympathy for the travails of someone earning twice my salary for half the work at a Research I."

--My God, Miriam, we agree!

"But why should a--what was it?--Taylorist careerist meritocratic leftist deconstructionist Nietzchean, who is a string of pejorative adjectives and not a human being, care about your pain?"

--As far as I can see, they don't.

"If someone is at a school in the middle of nowhere, with no further career prospects, no opportunity to do any research, and poor working conditions (and, if the ones I know are any indication, with few illusions about "the meritocracy"), what good does calling them a TCMLDN do, when it doesn't even begin to explain their lives?"

--I will say what I said before: since things are so bleak for you, I'll take the job off your hands. It's a hardship, but I'm a nice guy. All you have to do is inform your chair that instead of a Victorianist, this Fall s/he will be receiving a specialist in 20th Century Irish and Northern Irish Lit, Anglo-European modernism, South African Writing, deconstructive and postcolonial theory, and for good measure can also teach some 19th century American, and in a pinch, can teach Brit. Romanticism.

Alrighty, then. Remember to leave me an address to forward the mail to, k?

TTFN

"What I was objecting to was the enthusiasm for taking refuge in distancing, hyper-theoretical jargon in order to project the experiences of a privileged few onto the rest of the world--which I thought this thread was supposed to be attacking, not supporting."

We adjuncts move in such a rarefied atmosphere that we sometimes do need to be pulled back down to earth.

Seriously, Miriam, I agree with you about finding common ground. But I also understand Chris' frustration. The fact is, most full-time faculty display little to no interest in finding such common ground. With a few notable exceptions, full-time faculty are either wilfully blind to the problem, or else they view it from on high, as something that happens to those other, pitiable creatures who don't get tenure-track jobs: it's a shame about those poor adjuncts, maybe they should organize themselves or something -- as if adjunctification isn't something that is happening to the academic professions, as if the problem didn't call for a response from faculty who have more power and traction, as if there were no relationship between the growing reliance on part-time faculty and the stagnation (in some cases even deflation) of full-time salaries in the adjunct-heavy disciplines.

If a full-time tt faculty member has trouble making ends meet, then I actually do have some sympathy. It's not a zero-sum game, I'm sure there's more than enough misery to go around.

Re: your first post (37), I don't agree with the dichotomy on which you seem to rely. You imply that one is concerned either with pragmatic, material issues or with intellectualized issues that can only be the province of a privileged elite. But Ruddick's argument concerning the "moral ignorance" of academic expertise clearly resonates beyond the charmed circle to which she undoubtedly belongs. And as a matter of fact, though this weblog often deals with the pragmatic materiality of the academic labor system, I have been addressing questions and concerns relating to academic specialization, scholarly conversation, and the teaching of the humanities from day 1.

Actually, I'm pretty pleased with my job (er, besides the fact that I can't pay off the debts I incurred while being an adjunct, and spend more time than my parents would like surviving on bread and jelly), but if we can ever get that 20th c. Brit hire we've requested, I'll let them know that there's this guy--um, you are a guy, right?--in NY with multiple books who has all sorts of ideas for our new committee on adjunct working conditions (currently recommending doubling adjunct pay to $5000/course and job security for the full timers).

"Actually, I'm pretty pleased with my job (er, besides the fact that I can't pay off the debts I incurred while being an adjunct, and spend more time than my parents would like surviving on bread and jelly)"

--And then there are all those backyard get-togethers with the crew. Rock on, girl, rock on.

"but if we can ever get that 20th c. Brit hire we've requested, I'll let them know that there's this guy--um, you are a guy, right?--in NY"

--Right on the gender front, but wrong on the location (but I did go to grad. school in lovely Buffalo, NY)

"with multiple books"

--No, just one edited collection, and couple o' essays.

"who has all sorts of ideas for our new committee on adjunct working conditions (currently recommending doubling adjunct pay to $5000/course and job security for the full timers)."

--Uping the salary is not enough. You forgot to mention full health benefits, one of those way-cool TIAA/CREF retirement funds, and periodic paid leave.

We do brunch inside, Chris. We're not that far from Buffalo--you know the winter drill :)

I'm on the other side of the country from my copy of the last proposal, but it certainly had health benefits for the part-timers (not sure how many courses they would have to teach to get it, however); full-time temps already have the same benefits as the t-t faculty (health, retirement, research funds, cost-of-living increases, merit pay, offices, computers, etc.), so their priorities for this committee are different. Don't know how much of this will survive our governor, however--I've been too scared to read the "New York region" reports on our budget in the NYT...