Category: ordinary life

Theoretical insult poetry & half forgotten pedagogy

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I quite liked this laconic description of a pedagogical scene.

About ten years ago while a graduate student at Cornell I studied Pali with a linguist of southeast Asian languages, James Gair, co-author of A New Course In Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha.

I retain little of it now but recall a string of sunny mornings in Jim’s office under the eaves overlooking the quad, light coming ovoid through the round window as I combed my pencil through the suttas while being corrected and encouraged by Jim, cheered by the smiles in his giant beard.

A lot of pedagogy eventuates in forgetting, and it can only be called a stroke of luck if that forgetting happens to supplement itself with smile-laden facial hair. In this case, the forgetting is being accomplished by a curious poet, Gabe Gudding — whose course in writing I in turn mostly forget. (It was while I was in college.)

Gabe, a poet, describes poetry thus:

Poetry is the country music of literature. Given to schmaltz, nostalgia, over extension, socio-emotional reactivity, and alienation from material reality. The flipside is the hipster reaction to this: flaff, whathaveyou, langpo, N/Oulipian generativity (hipster maximalist masculinist compulsive text generation), irony as a modal approximation of self-awareness, and a conflation of experiment in form with soi-disant radical politics (the result being merely a more extravagant quietism). Our capacity for delusion is almost total.

If you read the rest of this interview you’ll see that he is attempting what reads like a most curious integration of prose poetry and Bourdieuian sociology of poetic production. There’s a certain resonance, it strikes me, at the level of illocutionary force, between Gudding’s absurdist insult poetry and Bourdieu’s rhythmically intense complaints about academia. Let’s try a quick comparison.

Here’s Bourdieu at the height of his tirade of reproaches to academia in the introduction to homo academicus (p. 19):

“There are no doubt few worlds which provide so much scope, or even so much institutional support, for the game of self-deceit and for the gap between the representation experienced and the true position occupied in a social field or space; the tolerance granted to this gap doubtless reveals the inner truth of a milieu which authorizes and encourages all forms of splitting the ego, in other words all ways of making the confusedly perceived objective truth coexist with its negation, thus permitting those most lacking in symbolic capital to survive in this struggle of each against all, where everyone depends on everyone else, at once his competitor and client, his opponent and judge, for the determination of his own truth and value, that is, of his symbolic life and death.”

Bourdieu of course always disowned all “personalistic” readings of his poems… er, sociological analyses. But still. Compare with a passage from Gabe that contains, really, a rather similar message, albeit in a somewhat different rhyme and register:

“For I would more expect a Pigeon to tote a rifle

than a wise syllable issue from your cheesepipe.

And as your nose is packed with Error I advise you to pick it often.”

Does this last line not sum up Bourdieu’s whole theory of ceaselessly vigilant reflexivity in a nutshell?

Commodification of the sacred in campus landscapes

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Kind of amazed to read this article, “The Power of Place on Campus,” by one Earl Broussard, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (temp link). Striking because it is so obviously a further step in the marketization of every aspect of campus life. The sacred is invoked as a new fund-raising activity. Is this what happens when anthropologists decide to become consultants to college administrators? Broussard writes:

Colleges and universities should never underestimate the power of special, transformational, and even sacred spaces on their campuses… Universities are products of history and tradition. Not only are they institutions of scholarly learning, but they also are sites of memory and meaning, with cultural spaces that have played host to decades or even centuries of ritual.

…Such transformational places with unique emotional resonance have an almost sacred nature. The word “religious” comes from the Latin verb religare, meaning to bind or reconnect. Thus, anything that reconnects us is, inherently, a deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning — and the university campus is ripe with opportunities for people to reconnect.

…Elite universities understand the importance of branding in creating long-lasting loyalty among students, and they use very specific and often-repeated images in such efforts… such imagery typically has very little to do with dormitories, classrooms, libraries, or students working late into the night. Most images focus on the campus as a landscape, with views of special buildings, students walking or lounging on an open green, and, of course, football players or bands performing on the stadium’s holy ground.

So the sacred spaces on campus are something to be branded. Something to be created as a spectacular image that will produce “unique emotional resonance,” that will give us a “deeply personal or spiritual experience that has great meaning.” This Orwellian language deserves, I think, to be stood on its head: “unique” here really means “totally generic,” and “deeply personal” amounts to “totally determined by cunning advertisers.” For there is after all nothing personal in a pre-scripted contact with the sacred, except through the medium of delusion.

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The failed fantasy of pure meritocracy

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From a post on a New York Times blog specifically about college admissions:

My daughter is a senior from a public school with a class size of 589. She has a 4.0 GPA with mostly advanced and AP classes, except required classes. She has an SAT of 2,250, ACT 36. So she is a National Merit finalist, President Scholar candidate, and a winner of MI Southeast Conference All Academy Award (only five students in her school win). She is a cellist in symphony orchestra and a varsity crew member on the rowing team.

Yet she was rejected by four Ivy schools and put on the waiting list for the University of Chicago. What went wrong? Her counselor was stunned by her rejection. What should she do to get off the waiting list?

…
Answer:Your daughter sounds like a terrific scholar, musician, and athlete. The world of selective college admissions is so hyper-competitive that trying to read the tea leaves about why decisions were rendered is almost impossible…

One feels sorry for the daughter, she is such a quantitatively perfect person. Her SAT score is higher than most graduate students’ monthly incomes. She has perfect grades. She has perfect stats. She has more honors and decoratations than a military veteran. She comes from a public school, so she isn’t too marked by obvious badges of class status. She appears, at least to her parent, as a completely flawless unit ready for insertion into what was, evidently, expected to be a flawlessly meritocratic system.
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The farce of the private university campus job

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Marc Bousquet has commented in great detail about the deliriously bad conditions of student employment in some places (particularly at UPS in Louisville, TN). As of his figures of last year, in 1964 it would have taken 22 hours of minimum-wage work per week to pay for public university education (room and board and all), or 36 hours/week for a private university. Today, it would take 55 hours of minimum-wage work per week (ie, way more than full time) to pay your way through a public university degree, and an insane 136 hours per week to pay for a private university. If you had to pay out of pocket, that is (Financial aid, obviously, might make a huge difference here, and I’m not sure that Bousquet factors it in.)

But just to give some sense of the ludicrous nature of student work at private universities, in a bit of an echo of Bousquet’s argument, I want to share some quick figures that I’ve come up with. In essence, it turns out that if you’re working minimum wage jobs at private universities, you’re arguably still paying the university to be at those jobs.

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Academic boredom and ambivalence

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Always strange what one can find in the more obscure corners of the academic world. I get the impression that there are a lot of academics who have written one or maybe two odd articles on academic culture, seldom as their primary research project, and left them to languish in odd corners of the literature.

In 2005, Amir Baghdadchi of the University of Cambridge published an article called “On Academic Boredom.” His argument proceeded in several stages. Boredom, he said, is an institutionally induced affect in academia. It is “the sense that the seminar is never going to end, that the speaker will never get to the point, that the articles one is reading are proceeding at a glacial pace, that one simply cannot get into a discussion, that one dreads getting into it in the first place” (319). Although he doesn’t phrase it in temporal terms, the gist is that boredom is what you feel when time has stopped and you are stuck in a bad present, with no capacity, for the time being, to picture a desirable or livable future.

He then argues that academia in general wears people down and tires them out. “Boredom is corrosive. I have seen my classmates begin their graduate work with great vivacity and curiosity, and I have seen them slowly ground down into duller, quieter, less omnivorously interested people” (320). So boredom, over the long term, is what happens to you when you are saturated or “corroded” by your bad situation, when you become where you are. Boredom, over the long term, makes people permanently more boring. A sensation, an affect, becomes habitual. A moment becomes a regime.

Boredom, he continues, has more than purely subjective origins, since one is bored by some external stimulus; and yet no outside object, he observes, is ever boring in itself, but only boring in relation to its audience. What kind of relation to one’s academic audience elicits boredom, then? He suggests that “boredom occurs when we are unable to make use of a work” (321). But this boredom, he claims, need not be sheer accident. To induce boredom, on the contrary, is to defend one’s work by precluding potentially hostile engagement with it. You (mostly) give up your chance to criticize me if you are too bored to listen to what I’m saying. “Sometimes,” he continues, “it even seems as if we have a Mutually Assured Boredom pact. I get up and bore you, you get up and bore me, and, at the end of the day, we are all left standing. It would not be hard to find graduate students whose measure of a successful conference paper lies entirely in whether they were ‘shot down’ or not. In this situation, being boring is a very good policy indeed.”

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Department of Photography + Surveillance

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photography dept + surveillance

At NYU. This is a picture of an art gallery from the street. The street reflected in the background. Some random art in the bottom.

But really I was just tremendously entertained that the DEPARTMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY & IMAGING stuck its name right next to a surveillance camera. I guess they are afraid someone might steal their images? Or at least they want to have images of people stealing their images? Or perhaps the security camera is actually part of the exhibit? The white of the camera body blends so nicely with with the white of the wall. It reminds me of a little robot that has stuck its iron fist through the sheetrock and is waving for attention.

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Campus monkey invasion and the inversion of academic values

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According to a hilarious article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, “a troop of 80 to 100 of [rhesus macaque] monkeys have terrorized the campus [of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences] for several years, entering waiting rooms, biting people, and grabbing food from patients and visitors.” Apparently the administrators have tried to have them caught, but unsuccessfully; and have tried to frighten them away with other monkeys, but that hasn’t worked either. And the article concludes on an even darker note:

As if the monkeys weren’t bad enough, a new problem recently visited itself upon the institute: stray dogs that attack doctors returning to their dorms late at night. A letter of complaint from the institute’s faculty association says the dogs run through the teaching block, the wards, and the operating theaters. “The excreta can be seen all over, all the time,” the letter says. “It is the worst possible start to the day.”

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Academic despotism, praised in iambic tetrameter

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Department Head

“His kingdom isn’t large, but still
He rules it with a royal will
And, as his colleagues sometimes moan,
Needs but a scepter and a throne.
Part teacher only, he’s between
A full professor and a dean.
More like a congressman, by rights,
He represents his field and fights
For added space and extra books,
More office space and shelves and hooks.
He counts his majors, keenly knowing
He has to make a stronger showing
Or (how his loyal heart is torn)
His budget will be sadly shorn.
Above his colleagues quite a distance,
He has a phone and two assistants
And teaches what he wants and when
And takes a day off now and then.
The students all are scared to death,
The new instructor holds his breath,
The others envy, hate, admire,
And try to guess when he’ll retire.”

-Richard Armour, 1956, College English 17(8):450. (There are other examples of this doggerel out there too.)

Let me just note that it’s interesting that the three themes of this poem are: the structure of departmental power (somewhere between monarchy and legislative bargaining); the budget and material supplies (down to the shelves and hooks); and the chair’s affective relations with colleagues and students (envy, fear, suspense, admiration…).

Universities and economic slowdown

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Timothy Burke predicts the end of university growth in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. He says that colleges will no longer be able to keep raising tuition at such high rates; that endowments will get much lower rates of return (or possibly shrink outright); that fundraising will be harder; and public funds will be scarce.

That gloomy future is perhaps already arriving at even the wealthiest universities. Alison Sider’s article this week at the Maroon, the University of Chicago’s newspaper, indicates that “the University informed nearly 3,000 graduate students that it had lost its major lending partner and could no longer offer student loans.” According to administrators, “most students remained relatively unaffected by the change,” but nonetheless, “international applicants often lack the credit references necessary to obtain loans from increasingly wary banks.”

Not to mention that international students are often more precarious because they can’t legally work off campus. As usual, economic problems hit hardest on the more financially vulnerable.

the temporary morgue at the university of chicago

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I was stunned the other day to discover that my campus has plans for a temporary morgue in case of emergency. They read as follows:

The Hospital morgue has a limited capacity to store the deceased. If the Hospital is no longer able to accept the deceased they will contact the Chicago Department of Public Health to request refrigerated trailers. While waiting for the refrigerated trailer to be delivered, the following sites could be used as temporary morgues. The temporary morgues must be capable of being secured.

They are:

  1. Gross Anatomy (BSLC)
  2. First floor Henry Crown Field House
    • Batting practice room
    • Racket ball courts

The following supplies will be needed to store the deceased:

  • Body bags
  • Portable air conditioning units

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Contradictions of graduate education in anthropology

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I’ve recently been thinking a lot about socialization of graduate students in anthropology, and on Friday just had a very exciting session at the AAA Annual Meetings, which I titled Trauma, tactics and transformation. I won’t repeat here what I’ve said elsewhere about the ethical need to analyze our own profession and reckon with our own moral contradictions. But I do want to report on some of the major issues I left thinking about:

  • At an abstract level, how should socialization of graduate students look as a process? Should it be auto-socialization, self-socialization, where we mostly do the work of socializing ourselves into the professional world? Or should it be faculty-directed, top-down, a process of being led into the promised land of scholarly pleasure? Or should it be group-organized, a process in which students socialize each other and form a kind of social collective that learns from and teaches itself? Of course it is all of these, but I think that often our dissatisfactions have to do with the proportions between them. Each has its disadvantages: loneliness, authoritarianism, peer pressure.
  • Thinking about graduate education is a form of reflexivity, but reflexivity has its disadvantages: it can waste time that could be better spent elsewhere; it can be a means through which we end up resigning ourselves to the present; it can even become a weapon turned against our colleagues. Still, the first question in the panel, and one that I like very much, is: what are the costs of not being reflexive? As Anneeth Hundle pointed out, these can be very concrete: the perpetuation of bad racial dynamics in a department, for instance. And it seems to me that the ethics of the status quo are inherently bad ethics, because they seem to presuppose that the actual world is as good as it can ever get.
  • But the thing about reflexivity is that you have to be reflexive even about your reflexive moments: a potentially infinite regress. And one of the new questions that comes to my mind is: what kind of recognition and reward are we looking for in questioning graduate education? Do we expect to be pleased through the validation of our peers? The panel wasn’t perfect, in those respects; everyone surely had to walk away without feeling like their concerns were fully answered.
  • Dominic Boyer argued (gently) against me that reform is impossible, and that thus we should settle for therapy. My first thought here is that even doing therapy is already a kind of reform, and that he’s understating his own accomplishments in teaching theory reflexively. (Though the crucial question might be: does he believe in therapy that cures? Or just in therapy that helps us cope with what we can’t change?) My second thought is that I don’t really care if we call it “therapy” or “reform” as long as the underlying ethical and psychological issues are being addressed. But my last thought is that I wonder if it’s worthwhile for us as graduate students to try to reform the current system at this exact moment. What if we ask instead: how will we do things differently when we are in a position of institutional power, when we have our own students; how does graduate education look when we dream of ourselves as the professors? The status quo has so much inertia that I think we need to look for hope partly in the future rather than in the immediate present.
  • Finally, a major issue, raised by Anneeth Hundle but not finished, is: how are we silenced by academic institutions? And how are these silences structured and distributed? It’s a question with no immediate answer.

academic writing in common english

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Sometimes you hear people, non-academic people, telling you that postmodern writing is gibberish. But remember the old Yankee saying, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?”

Likewise with writing: what’s gibberish to my parents is, I must admit, pretty comprehensible to me. This is because academic language is a tool of social differentiation, used to separate academics from laypeople. But even so, translation is possible. Take the following snip of academic language I saw in an email:

Hi Everyone,

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating. Landscape is often implicated in power relations. Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership. The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project. In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I would translate this banal bit of prose as follows:

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating.

“I am an academic, and I am fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live.”

Elaboration: “I enjoy taking common words like “place” and “power” and treating them as major conceptual problems. I consider this activity truly fascinating. “Place” and “power” could mean any of a huge number of things, but I’ll probably just talk about them in connection with some minor research problem of my own. However, I will make sure to distill any particular places into the abstract, general idea of “PLACE.” Likewise with “POWER.” What I mean by ‘power’ is basically what kids in the street call “the Man” — it has dim connotations of the government, or big corporations, or colonialism, or parents, or all of these and more… And now, an additional twist! Since we’re supposing that there’s some kind of general relationship between POWER and PLACE, we can then ask what happens to POWER when someone or something is ‘out of place.’ Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, they mean that being ‘out of place’ is also being made into a rarified academic concept, disconnected from popular usage. But wait — one final note! Since other scholars have also been talking about these abstractions for some time, I will be able to make myself matter by joining their discussion.”

Landscape is often implicated in power relations.

“The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together.”

Elaboration: ” ‘Implicated in’ just means ‘related to.’ And ‘often’ is completely meaningless in this context — I don’t really mean that most power relations involve a landscape, because a moment’s thought suggests that lots and lots of power relations don’t have much to do with landscapes. I just stuck in the ‘often’ to make it sound like I’m doing work on something important, and to make myself sound legitimate — which is an important part of making yourself a good academic, OK? so get off my back!”

Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership.

“People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it.”

Elaboration: “I live in South Africa, and people down here naturally tend to think about academic questions from a South African perspective. We used to be a colony, but now we’re a post-colony, so we consequently have a post-colonial point of view. One of the things we study is how people try to prove their rights to own land by using certain ideas about land. These ideas have been changing since the colonial era.”

The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project.

“People think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I wouldn’t want to say what exactly.”

“Again, the words ‘often’ and ‘closely’ have no meaning here aside from making me sound important.”

In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

“I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in connection with those.”

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

“Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out?”

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

“If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”

So, if you put the whole translation together, it looks like so:

“I am an academic, and I am truly fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live. The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together. People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it. Also, people think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I’m not saying what exactly. Anyway, I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in that connection. Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out? If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”