Out of the box

We’ve been talking about constraint and causation (or ‘enablement’, as Garfinkel might say), and this morning I’ve stumbled into a chain of associations that illustrate the point. Specifically, two juxtaposed reviews in the NYRB, on Edward St. Aubyn’s Melrose novels and Margaret Wertheim’s Physics on the Fringe; the book Rachel is reading, Charlatan, on medical quackery in the fin de siecle; her previous research on Olaus Rudbeck; and a movie we just watched, “(untitled).” All of these are cautionary tales about thinking outside the box, and therefore reminders of the enabling function of boxes.

Let’s start with Rudbeck, a Swedish scientist who taught Linnaeus and (perhaps) discovered the limbic system. Rightly celebrated as a Renaissance man, he spent the second half of his life and blew his reputation pursuing his idee fixe that Atlantis had been in Sweden. Clearly a creative thinker, once he got into a field where his thinking was unconstrained by conventions and a developmental programme of investigation he came unglued and started making stuff up to suit his emotional preferences, then selectively interpreting the evidence to fit. This fact was clear to everyone but him.

In the review of Wertheim, Freeman Dyson tells a similar story about Sir Arthur Eddington, a brilliant astronomer whose observations of deflected starlight were instrumental to the experimental support of Einsteinian relativity, and whose lucid writing and teaching on the subject helped establish the new orthodoxy. But Eddington also had his own “Fundamental Theory,” an idiosyncratic mishmash of “mathematical and verbal arguments… [with] no firm basis either in physics or mathematics.” “Two facts were clear. First, Eddington was talking nonsense. Second, in spite of the nonsense, he was still a great man.”

What’s striking about these examples is how people exquisitely functional within one set of conventions can spectacularly implode outside them, and without any apparent reflexive awareness that this is the case. St. Aubyn’s novels (which I have not read) would seem to be excruciating meditations on this theme. Patrick Melrose, the main character, is an unwilling participant observer in a horrifying upper-crust British social milieu in which publicly effective people behave abominably to each other in private, with no apparent sense of disconnect. In fact, they seem to use the effective parts of their lives as systematic displacements of self-reflection. Patrick, in contrast, is practically disabled by self-awareness (“how could he think his way out of the problem when the problem was the way he thought”) and floats through drug addiction before finally working himself around to an effective balance of interiority and exteriority.

Charlatan is about a guy who got rich transplanting goat testicles into the scrota of men anxious about their virility. Needless to say this was a fool’s errand and a septic nightmare, but neither he nor his patients seemed clear on these obvious facts. In Physics on the Fringe Wertheim writes about Jim Carter, a successful engineer and entrepreneur who spends his spare time concocting experiments to prove his pet theory that the universe is composed of hierarchies of “circlons,” of which smoke rings are the demonstrative exemplars. It turns out that unbeknownst to Carter a very similar theory was once entertained by Lord Kelvin, but dropped for lack of convincing evidence – despite/because of experiments much like Carter’s, experiments which he finds amply probative, although he cannot convince the scientific community to agree.

In his review of Wertheim, Dyson champions the fringe creatives working outside the box as courageous poetic visionaries. But the tricky thing is figuring out what the ‘good’ versions of this are, since both psychosis and ordinary crackpottery are also often characterized by poetic vision. “untitled” comes at this question from the arts side and shows that Dyson’s offloading of the question onto art only works because his understanding of art is romantic. (Of course he does not know this about himself.) The movie’s central characters are an experimental musician, his brother the painter, and the gallerist who takes an interest in both. The painter is a hack, but does not know it; his paintings sell very well to hospital chains for use as soothing motifs in their lobbies, which is how the gallerist funds her showings of the serious art that does not sell. The musician produces elaborate cacophanies; he tells us that tonality is over, now just a matter of “pushing notes around,” which is essentially what his brother the painter is doing with color. The problem is that although it’s clear the painter is a hack, it’s not at all clear whether the musician is something better. There are norms of judgment for the former, but not the latter. Is that just unpleasant noise, or is it a brilliant meditation on the contingency of norms of pleasantness? As the musician tells us, all sound is noise unless it’s welcome. What makes it welcome?

The problem turns out to be that outside the box, there’s no way to settle these questions, to move things forward or even to know what forward would be. “It’s all good,” as they say. But a river without banks is a swamp. So constraint, a box of some kind, is essential to getting anything done, even if all it does is provide the contrast space (Garfinkel again, but see here for another awesome citation controversy, although oddly enough a different Garfinkel) against which plausible innovation can be measured. Is that enough of a point for this post? It will have to be, because I’ve said all I had in mind to say at this time.

The elaborate self?

I’m butterfly-reading in the flu-encrusted post-semester haze, a little of this and a little of that, currently including a discussion of Hayek on the welfare state at Crooked Timber and more of Jim Livingstone’s provocation Against Thrift.

It strikes me that one of the more important current miscommunications concerns the origin of human personhood (and no, I’m not going to drag out Taylor’s massive tome to do this right). Some folks think you’re born with it; other folks think you earn it through a process of elaboration. The latter is the more ‘traditional’ notion, consistent in distinct but overlapping ways with the heroic origin-myths of noble orders, Protestant self-discipline, body-mutilating rites of passage and kicking lazy teenagers out of the house.

Or you can get your teenager/’welfare queen’ a primo data plan and feed it snacks while it facebooks and plays x-box. One nutshell of the current U.S. kulturkampf is the people who think personhood has to be earned worrying that they’ll end up doing all the work for everyone, that a shrinking minority of worker ant selves will be yoked to the lazy pseudo-selfhood of the grasshopper masses. This was clearly Hayek’s fear, and Ayn Rand’s.

Well, who can argue with the virtuous earning of important things? The cool move Jim Livingstone makes is to argue that this is now a false issue, because the modern economy has for at least a century made work, labor, elaboration an optional rather than essential human activity, and therefore an optional rather than essential foundation for human personhood. He asks us to think about a self that is more a matter of taste than necessity, and to consider consumer society as a kind of symbolic utopia, totemism unbound.

Aggregate, Arrange, Assemble

Today I had an ambitious day. I described paper writing to my intro World History sections as a process of aggregation, arrangement and assembly similar to the formation of stars as they collect atoms, compact them to fusion and burst forth in light. Then I told them about the episode of “Trailer Park Boys” in which Ricky breaks into a house to pick out an engagement ring for Lucy (aggregation = research), swallows the ring so he won’t get caught by the cops and throws it up again once they’re gone (arrangement = analysis), then hands it to Lucy and says “So, you want to get married or something?” (assembly = writing).

We talked about what’s wrong with stealing the ring (this would be the ‘plagiarized’ paper) and whether making Ricky a Viking who ‘plundered’ rather than ‘stole’ it made a difference. We considered why Lucy might have preferred a more ritualized arrangement of their eventual assembly, concluding that in this case the value of ritual lay at least in part in its enactment of focused competence and commitment in making arrangement for the assembled couple’s needs. It’s about credibility. We all agreed that the same ring might be stolen, plundered, bought or fabricated, transported in one’s guts or a velvet box, delivered via slingshot or placement in a glass of champagne, with each permutation of aggregation, arrangement and assembly making a significant difference in the meaning and value of ‘the same’ ring.

I took out some nice artisan multigrain bread I had aggregated to myself earlier and ate some. We talked about the process of chewing and digestion whereby the previous arrangement of the bread is broken down, rearranged into more directly nourishing compounds and waste, and ultimately reassembled into poo and me. We laughed a bit about making sure that these two assemblages not become mixed, and considered the consequences of substituting Skittles for bread in one’s regular diet. We talked about the paper that would result from just vomiting the bread back up or pooping it out without nutritional processing.

They may not immediately have digested all this, but they were intrigued and I had lots of fun.

Word to your Mama

I had a little fun with my scifi reading circle last week. They were pretty cranky about Gibson’s Neuromancer (although they picked it), which wasn’t giving them a nice clean linear narrative or conventionally identifiable / likeable characters. I told them it was all about getting cool with the unfamiliar, a slow difficult process in contrast for example to dating, boinking and marrying the woman who reminds you most of your mother. (It was boys doing the most vocal kvetching.) They were stricken.

[Update: It occurs to me that in a roundabout way this is one answer to Tim Burke's question in his current post about why we think critical thinking should be work, not fun, or why we are suspicious of people seemingly just having fun.]

A second brain

Found a great remark in a student journal, wanted to share / archive it.

Towards the end, we were asked to choose characters from history. We were asked to learn about the character and see the world from his/her eyes. I chose Adolf Hitler because I really wanted to understand how such a human being could leave such a remark. After all the massacres he lead, I found it more than interesting to discuss it. After each classmate chose a character, three random characters were chosen every time and a random topic such as freedom, power, authority, etc. were chosen for the characters to discuss. If you notice my first few journals, I mentioned the difficulty I faced thinking things through other people’s eyes. This activity has successfully opened my eyes and made me develop a second brain that can easily get isolated and put my feet in other people’s shoes.

I love the idea of a second brain. Maybe some people empathize more directly, but a virtual subroutine is a great way to start for those who don’t. This particular assignment is hard to grade and devolves easily into ignorant posturing by students who won’t or can’t get into the spirit of it, but when it works this is what happens.

Useful uselessness

Bookmark here. Something to connect to previous posts and conference papers about the usefulness of history being its uselessness. Found in Peter Manseau’s review of Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution:

All animals of a certain level of complexity, Bellah explains, engage in forms of “useful uselessness,” the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik’s term for behaviors that do not contribute to short-term survival yet do ensure long-term flourishing. In the play of animals, we can see a number of interesting elements: The action of play has limited immediate function; it is done for its own sake; it seems to alter existing social hierarchies; it is done again and again; and it is done within a “relaxed field,” during periods of calm and safety. Put another way: Play is time within time. It suggests to its participants the existence of multiple realities—one in which survival is the only measure of success, and another in which a different logic seems to apply.

‘Useful uselessness’ is how I’ve been framing history, so I’ll need to track down Gopnik. Other links: Gramsci’s advocacy of ‘dead languages’, Hegel’s remark about history being too different than the present to offer useful lessons, Watzlawick et. al.’s critique of Freudian psychology to the effect that knowing the causal origins of a complex in one’s developmental history is of no use in resolving it since we cannot go back in time and change them.

Aren’t all of the humanities, at least as taught in Gen Ed to people who will not be following them into serious scholarship, this kind of useful uselessness? Wouldn’t it be good to be clear about this fact and be appropriately playful about them?

Ponzirama

There’s Madoff. Then there’s Social Security according to Rick Perry. Now here’s an essay (from a website about a book) that ups the ante. Ellen Hodgson Brown argues that the entire global financial system is a Ponzi scheme.

Brown elegantly shows how the whole notion that the national debt has to be paid down or paid off is a red herring, a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system works (money is debt; the national debt is, essentially, the national money; it is therefore constantly both paying itself off and recreating itself in the normal course). But she also shows how leaving the creation of the debt/money supply in private hands, as it is now, keeps interest from circulating back into the economy where it can be earned back by debtors and used ongoingly to pay their debts, making the system unsustainable. Essentially this creates toxic debt sinks that eventually have to fill up, so that the deficit fretters end up being right albeit for the wrong reasons. She recommends public banking as the solution, which as she describes the problem does seem sensible, albeit further infuriating for the Ron Pauls (warning: balky script at this link) of the world.

The essay clarifies some things nicely and I recommend it. At the same time I’m suspicious of this kind of clarity, which feels a lot like the sort of self-help advice where everything will be cool if you exercise, eat right and get plenty of fiber. I have this intuition, maybe small-minded and self-serving, maybe I can get some Dao cred, or maybe it’s the same thing, that problems on a global scale are fundamentally unfathomable, indeed that to treat facts at that scale as problems is a kind of existential category error. Of course I know better from Marx, but then again we’re still waiting for Marx to pay off on the solution side.

Reading for evidence

After going through it yet again yesterday as a mini-lecture with two sections of introductory World History, I finally got around to boiling down the ninja reading rubric to a pithy one-page handout. It is depicted below and you should feel free to use it as creative commons (click the image for the doc file). I’d also welcome gentle critical improvement.

Even with this to put in the syllabus as a resource going forward, I think I’ll still do the lecture, because I can illustrate with examples to give wet flesh to the dry bones of the handout. For instance, I tell a story about walking past a used car lot and being accosted by a guy in a bad toupee and loud plaid jacket who says “Hey buddy, how ya doin’? Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” I suggest that the ‘text’ of this utterance is unlikely to be the whole story, then assert an ‘obvious’ homosexual subtext. At this point the students generally discover the interpretive joys of context all on their own.

To get at countertext this time I used the trivial example of the strange intertextual prevalence of the term ‘denigrate’ in the Critical Race Theory genre. Without being racists, these good progressives have somehow stumbled upon unironic use of the one term among many possible synonyms for degradation that contains within it the same linguistic root as the notorious ‘n-word’. Having thus used controversy already to focus the students’ minds I went all in and further offered the example of early Black football quarterbacks being commonly referred to as ‘instinctual’ rather than ‘intelligent’, and how every current mention of a Black quarterback’s intelligence, however favorable, inevitably takes part in this history; participating in a discursive history of racism without necessarily saying much about the racist intentions or not of particular speakers.

What done sign my name?

Tim Tyson, following the old black spiritual, says it’s blood. Blood Done Sign My Name (2004) centers on the murder of Henry “Dickie” Marrow in Oxford, east North Carolina in May, 1970. Marrow was beaten and shot to death by white merchant Robert Teel and his sons, supposedly for chatting up one of the sons’ wife outside their store. The actual tale of the murder takes up a few pages right in the middle of the book, most of which is historian Tyson’s autobiographical attempt to understand the event in context. He was 10 at the time, friends with another of the killer’s sons.

This is a rightly celebrated book (there’s also a movie). Tyson tells tales like someone raised in a rich oral tradition, which as the son and grandson of preachers he was. He’s at his best when he uses multiple narrative strands to frame each other, patiently weaving together stories and perspectives to create a densely layered reconstruction of a surprisingly complex situation. Tyson is not at his best when he gets impatient and steps outside the narrative to attempt more formal analysis. He has the genre’s understandable but unhelpful tendency to substitute moral preening for rigorous investigation, and like any ideology his liberalism and religiosity default to pat answers too quickly and easily.

I’m currently stuck on a section exemplary of both tendencies (I’m about 2/3 through the book, which I picked up in a thrift store and am reading as an homage to my colleague Peter Murray), so I’m kind of live-blogging here a little bit. Starting about p. 180 in the paperback Tyson sets up a lovely narrative contrast between three men, Robert Teel and two Tysons: Tim’s own father Vernon, Methodist pastor of Oxford, and his notorious second cousin Elias, aka ‘the Gator’. It turns out Teel and Vernon grew up a short distance from each other in virtually identical material circumstances; the same could be said for Gator. Yet they turned out very differently. Tim ponders this:

I have often contemplated the differences between my father and Gerald’s father, and how they shaped our lives. Daddy and Teel were within a year of each other in school and grew up only a few miles apart. Neither of them liked school worth a damn. They wore overalls, ate cornbread and beans, drank their iced tea heavily sweetened, and knew what it was to work hard in the tobacco fields from sunup to sundown. Each of them left eastern North Carolina wanting something better, something more.

Here we have one of those grails of explanatory analysis, the divergent effect from seemingly identical causes. Why, given all the common antecedents, did Robert become an angry, violent racist while Vernon became a decent, humane social activist? Here’s Tim:

The difference between them couldn’t be boiled down to socioeconomic class; neither of their families had a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, as the saying went. In fact, while Teel had his G.I. Bill educational benefits to pay his way through any school, my father had to borrow and scrounge. But Daddy went to a liberal arts college founded by the Quakers, where he met pacifists, liberals, radicals of various descriptions, and black people far more educated than himself. More important, he had Reverend Jack Tyson for a father. At the heart of our differences, I think, stand the many-sided visions of Jesus that haunt the South. Although eastern North Carolina was awash in Baptist fundamentalism, the Teel clan did not seem to have had the softening influence of the gospel in their lives, at least not the same gospel that Jack Tyson preached.

Hm. I’m sure this is right, and I like the image of ghostly kaleidoscopic Jesus. But among other things we might like to know why Vernon pursued school even without liking it, why he picked the Quaker one and stuck it out despite all the cognitive dissonance, how the family got entrained on the ‘right’ version of the gospel, and so on. Here as usual Tim’s storytelling steps up to do the much heavier lifting.

The first thing that stands out is a rather different home life. Coming after dozens of smoothly flowing pages of the Tysons’ wholesome, affectionate, mutually respecting loviness, Teel’s broken home puts a squeal in the brakes. The missing father, the hardscrabble, woman-centered plan B, and eventually the worshipped stepfather and underage army enlistment all invite armchair psychologizing: arrested development, thwarted masculinity, status anxiety, joining issues. Tim wisely declines the invitation, spraying facts like aerosol and letting them settle into their own pattern. The account of his own father’s upbringing is occasion for some more gratuitous (albeit snarktastic) moral coup-taking, but in the process we find ol’ Grampa Jack actually reading the Bible and thinking about what it says, against rather than with received wisdom, a striking fact that clicks into the matrix of the Tysons’ multi-generational orneriness and disregard for common sense — supported by tale after tale of quixotic deeds — to suggest that bucking the tide is a Tyson thang, of dubious larger significance until conditions align for the greater enablement of such dispositional change agents. We can well imagine the same people becoming Communists or Anabaptists or Lutherans under different ideological conditions, but in the rural American South at mid-century the friendly reading of the gospels was the available conceptual framework for that contrary disposition.

In short, the Tysons are the kind of holy hemorrhoids who are doomed to frustrating irrelevance during normal times, but come into their glory when the poo hits the fan. Another cat who refused to be herded was cousin Gator, the cautionary tale, whose charismatic orneriness did not get channeled into oppositional intellectuality, perhaps slipping through the cracks as the beautiful baby of the family, and who therefore drifted into a highly successful but ultimately self-destructive amoral dissipation of boozing, fighting, gambling and womanizing. Tyson uses Gator to deliver a little homily about original sin. Much more of a herd animal but with no herd of his own or developed sense of how to function in one, Teel had ambition and saw that the main line of acceptance, success and influence ran through material accumulation and status conformity, not intellectual pursuit. He may have shared a dislike of school with Vernon and Gator, but unlike the former he had no positive models of deep thinking and also didn’t see the use of it; and in terms of the locally-dominant aspirational discourse, he was right. No doubt he was religious in the way Weber suggests lots of Protestants are religious, as a networking tool and symbolic guarantee of his trustworthiness in business. And no doubt his racism, clearly a subset of a more generalized anger and violence as stories of his various scrapes show, was motivated directly by the status anxiety of a climber needing backs to climb on, but it also has all the overcooked theatricality of an arriviste trying way too hard without any sense of nuance. It contrasts markedly with the more serene and subtle racism of the town’s old guard, who quietly shut down all the public parks rather than integrate them — probably as much as anything to avoid ugly scenes.

It’s not that Tyson’s religious explanation for the differences among these men is wrong; as Weber told us long ago in rising to the challenge of Marx’s materialism, ideas may often act as ‘switchmen’ among materially possible tracks. But we also want to know how elective affinities, as he called them, are established between particular circumstances, concepts and ideals, and how the particularities of disposition, experience, conditions and possibilities come together to produce actual life courses. I think Tim’s book does that, and it’s interesting for someone as tracked into complex formal analysis as I am to see it happening not in the analysis, but in the stories.

For real-time analysis, my favorite figure so far in the book is Goldie Frinks, who apart from the awesome name was a civil rights activist and former nightclub owner who shows up on p. 150. A shrewd Wittgensteinian, Frinks specialized in seeing situations from multiple perspectives and changing the game to dissolve problems and create opportunities.

As he explained to [Tim] at his home in Edenton two decades later, Frinks understood that Southern whites could hardly present a united front. Few whites truly backed the movement, especially in their own communities, but there were many shades of weak support, moral queasiness, deep misgivings, and reluctant opposition, in addition to the fire-eating racists. “You couldn’t forget that you had some good white folks, and even the other ones wasn’t necessarily all bad…. They were cramped because of the age-old mores of time,” Frinks asserted…. Dr. King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” argued that such people were often worse than outright opponents. But Frinks saw them as an opportunity. “A lot of the good whites couldn’t just come down here and speak. ‘You’re wrong, Mr. Teel,’ they couldn’t say that, but they had what you might call a silence that I could hear. If you forgot that, you wouldn’t be nowhere. A man like Teel, getting his badge of honor from the murder of a man who had no cause to be put to death, that man was somewhat out of place.”

Somewhat out of place is a beautiful way to think about a guy like Teel, perceptive and without moral patness. Nor does it make Teel any less destructive or any less the queasifying instrument of a system of domination, which Frinks actively fought. But it’s a lovely reminder that giving people a sense of place is an important tactic and purpose of humanist activism, just like rudely displacing people and requiring heroic saintliness of them is not a promising strategy for positive change.

There but for the grace

It warms my heart that we live in a society that provides employment of great consequence and social honor to the socially challenged. We all have our weaknesses but this is no reason to waste our strengths. As perhaps a case in point here’s a piece of a conversation on NPR’s “Marketplace” between host Kai Ryssdal and Robert Whaley, professor of finance at Vanderbilt. They’re talking about Whaley’s VIX, or Market Volatility Index, which essentially uses activity in portfolio insurance instruments to measure how “freaked out” the stock markets are. (I’ve modified NPR’s sloppy transcript very slightly so it makes more sense and accords with my memory.)

Ryssdal: All right, well let me ask you this, then: Is it not possible that knowing what’s coming creates more volatility, [that] a rising VIX creates a rising VIX?

Whaley: Oh, can you frame that question a little differently?

Ryssdal: Sure. Is it possible that this thing, knowing how nervous people are, makes people more nervous?

Whaley: Um, that would a behavioral type of interpretation. What makes me more nervous, actually, is sort of the movements that we’re seeing in the stock market on a daily basis. This VIX is just telling you that they suspect those types of movements to persist. But yes, I mean, you’re seeing that the price of insurance is going up, and so it makes you wonder, if you’re seeing the price rise, whether people smarter that know there’s going to be an event, so you might jump in too.

The question just doesn’t track at first for Whaley, who clearly hasn’t thought of the matter that way and whose strength is therefore clearly not ‘behavioral types of interpretation’ — that is, what people actually do and why.

Relative immiseration

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? From the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany in the 1930s to anti-government demonstrations in Greece in 2010-11, austerity has tended to go hand in hand with politically motivated violence and social instability. In this paper, we assemble cross country evidence for the period 1919 to the present, and examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. The results show a clear positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. We test if the relationship simply reflects economic downturns, and conclude that this is not the key factor. We also analyse interactions with various economic and political variables. While autocracies and democracies show a broadly similar responses to budget cuts, countries with more constraints on the executive are less likely to see unrest as a result of austerity measures. Growing media penetration does not lead to a stronger effect of cut-backs on the level of unrest.

That’s the abstract of a long Centre for Economic Policy Research working paper (pdf), “Austerity and Anarchy: Budget Cuts and Social Unrest in Europe, 1919-2009″ by Jacopo Ponticelli, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Hans-Joachim Voth, UPF-ICREA, CREI and CEPR. Thanks to Duncan Law.

The dynamic is long familiar in social movement theory, often referred to as the ‘relative immiseration’ effect. It’s also familiar to people with more than one child. Basically, when you give folks stuff and then take it away, or give them relatively less stuff than reference groups, they get way more pissed off than if they never had anything to start with or deprivation is evenly distributed.

Relative immiseration is an important corrective to vulgarizations of Marxism in which capitalism is supposed to precipitate its own demise only if it reduces the working class to absolute abjection. Not so – just as all needs beyond mere subsistence are relative to particular social formations, revolutionary immiseration is relative to the general standard of well-being of particular social formations. Nowadays the poor in Western societies mostly have indoor plumbing that was not available even to kings just a few centuries ago. (They have fridges and microwaves, yes.) But that’s not the relevant measure of degradation – it’s where the poor stand in relation to the rich now. And as is well-known, that gap has been widening. The borrowing powers of governments have been filling the gap for the past several decades, but that compensatory regime seems to be hitting its unsustainability threshold. We live in interesting times.

Of course there’s nothing that says capitalists have to keep driving relative immiseration toward the brink. At least since Bismarck and the Gilded Age smart elites have recognized the need to spread the wealth to some degree to purchase social peace and secure the conditions for continued profit. All it takes is withdrawing some capital from speculative ‘investment’ and using it instead, directly or through government transfers, to build the consumption side of the economy – namely by hiring people and paying them well, whether they ‘earn’ it or not – compensating according to need, not productivity, as Marx argued and Jim Livingston keeps arguing.

If paying people to be consumers out of scale with their productivity seems immoral, it’s worth remembering that while credit default swaps may be called ‘products’ in the ‘industry’, they’re not actually making anything but wealth either. Aren’t (relative) need and general prosperity enough to ground public morals?

UPDATE: Dave Mazella at The Long Eighteenth has been rereading E.P. Thompson on “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” and finds rioters “trying to restore traditional understandings of collective rights and reciprocities, traditions that elites disrupted or ignored at their peril.” This is consistent with both the analysis here and JohnM’s disambiguating comment below, but adding another layer: I often have to resist the activist reflex to see in every little upheaval a foretaste of revolution, and Thompson reminds us of the complex dynamic robustness of existing arrangements.

European social/cultural history?

Chums, I’m teaching a seminar on Modern European Social and Cultural History this Fall. Obviously this is much too broad a topic to achieve comprehensive coverage, so I expect I’ll start with a case in relative depth, do some impressionistic comparisons, and then turn the students loose in the second half to develop research projects suggested by their own interests.

The opening case study will be late 19th-early 20th century southern Italy. The one book I’ve ordered is Gramsci’s short, pithy The Southern Question, which I’ll use to prime the analysis pump. We’ll find some primary sources online and work on critical reading, in the process discovering that language skills can be pretty important…. Then we’ll look at visual sources, in which the ‘language’ issues are more subtle, and quickly start watching movies. The ones I have in mind so far are “Padre Padrone” (Taviani brothers’ gritty collaborative adaptation of linguist Gavino Ledda’s autobiography of growing up as an illiterate Sardinian shepherd); “Kaos” (Taviani brothers’ anthology adaptation of several Pirandello stories); “The Leopard” (Burt Lancaster in classic film adaptation of Lampedusa’s great novel on the decline of the old Southern nobility); and maybe “Christ Stopped at Eboli” (from Carlo Levi’s account of his internal exile in Basilicata). I also thought of showing a spaghetti western (maybe “Fistful of Dollars”) for the fun of it, because of how steeped those are in Italian social history reimagined in the American West, but I doubt we’ll have time and it would probably just confuse the students even more than they’ll already be without a lecture/textbook master narrative to tell them what to think.

I’m open, even eager for other suggestions. I’m also eager for suggestions about films from other parts of Europe to provide the impressionistic comparisons. Do you have any favorites I should look at? Any other thoughts about how to make this class cool for a mixed group of majors and gen ed tourists?

Steering and the ruts

“He told me years later that serving the church in Oxford reminded him of driving an old Model T Ford on a muddy country road; the steering column had so much play in it that turning the wheel didn’t do much good and the car just followed the ruts anyway.”

Tim Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name

Digital Gramsci

Since I betched awhile back about the unavailability of Antonio Gramsci’s writings online, I am now happy to report the International Gramsci Society’s new effort to digitize his oeuvre. As the linked article notes, Spinoza, Kant and Nietzsche are online, so why not Gramsci too? For those whose Italian is rustier than mine here’s a rusty translation of the rationale:

The site is intended as a means of democratic diffusion of Gramsci’s works for an increasingly vast global public of readers increasingly less able to invest money in the purchase of books. Indeed, today’s demand for culture and education coming from below has characteristics and forms that must be intercepted and guided. Further, the site is intended to address recent new research methods, which need electronic supports unlike books and offer distinct research opportunities.

Well good for them. But still the old Leninism and just barely getting this newfangled technowhatsis, eh? In my mind there’s always been something retro, nostalgic, not hidebound exactly but sort of genially out-of-touch about the Gramsci scholarship which produces anxious claims of the Master’s enduring relevance (attualita’) with ritual frequency while sternly guarding the Gramscian essence in all the ways guaranteed to keep the cult small. Of course as a historian I’m fine with a past-tense Gramsci. It will be interesting to see if the current effort creates conditions that, intended or not, change the ethos any.

The new portal will be at gramscisource.it and is promised within months.

Learning from history

Totally going on the World History syllabus.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this, – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the Past. The pallid shades of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom of the Present. Looked at in this light, nothing can be shallower than the oft-repeated appeal to Greek and Roman examples during the French Revolution. Nothing is more diverse than the genius of those nations and that of our times. Hegel, Philosophy of History (1830-31)

Recommendation letter guidelines

Finally got around to writing a draft of this after years of wishing this was stuff students already knew and playing keystone-cops catch-up each time it turned out sure enough they didn’t. Suggestions welcome!

Dyke Recommendation Letter Guidelines

So you want a letter of recommendation from me. I’m happy to do it, and it’s part of my job! However, please read this handout about the process carefully. Your role is not over when I agree to write the letter. Our collaboration is just beginning.

First, you should know that sometimes letters of recommendation are formalities. They just want someone trustworthy other than you and your Mom to go on record that you’re not a complete waste of space and maybe even know a few things. If you know for a fact that this is the case for the present letter, please tell me. That kind of letter is much easier to write and like most people, I don’t enjoy wasting effort.

If the letter is not a mere formality, we’re going to need to work together to put you in the best possible light. This is not the time to be bashful and modest, because you’re up against serious competition. I’m going to need to say some things that distinguish you positively from all the other applicants. You should know that adjectives are not going to get it done. Everyone has letters that say they’re great, fantastic, wonderful, outstanding, quite possibly the best, etc.. Those letters may get you in the game, but they don’t win because all the letters say that. So for the win I’m going to have to be as specific as possible about why you’re great.

Now the thing is, if any part of our work together was before last week, I do not remember those specifics. I have a warm and fuzzy feeling about you, which is why I’ve agreed to write the letter. But I don’t remember why I feel that way because one, I have about a hundred students a semester and two, part of how I stay fresh in my profession is that I let the present crowd out the past in my working memory. (We’ll call this my zen so I don’t sound so much like a flake.) And obviously my own vague warm fuzzy feelings are not going to be persuasive to anyone else, which is something I’m sure you remember learning in my class, unless like me you don’t remember exactly where you learned things.

All this means you’re going to have to remind me, in writing because I don’t remember so well, what it was you did that gave me my happy feelings about you. Give me topics and summaries of work you turned in; tell the stories of our good times together; list the courses and expound on what you got out of them. If you have samples of your work with my comments, pass them back. Anything you can do to refresh specific memories that I can use to add concrete dramatic nouns and verbs to vague superlative adjectives will strengthen the letter I can write for you and improve the chances that it will actually do some good.

It would also be terrific if you could help me tailor my praise to the specific need. Think about this: what are the things I can say about you that you can’t credibly say about yourself? How can I fit a niche in your recommendation strategy, that is, say things that are not just being repeated by you and your other recommenders? Also, what exactly are you applying for and what subset of your general awesomeness are they actually interested in? Let’s not waste time and credibility telling them you can dunk or pull a mean espresso shot if what they care about is your ability to analyze and communicate about information. Speaking of which, did they give you any clues as to what they’re looking for? If you can pull out key quotes that show where they’re coming from (like you did in your papers for my class, no doubt, or I wouldn’t be writing you this letter) it would help me a bunch, and remind me again why I like you so much.

If there are official forms and envelopes, prepare them for me in a tidy, well-marked packet that I can find again easily in the clutter on my desk. I’ve got letterhead covered. Finally, you should know that I’m not going to work on this until the deadline is near. You need to tell me well in advance, in writing, when that deadline is, along with anything else I need to know about the process to calibrate my procrastination responsibly. It would also be extremely wise of you to gently nudge me as that date approaches, while being very careful not to nag. Just check in. I am not a letter-writing appliance that you can turn on and forget; I am a human being with most of the usual quirks and some of my own, and loads of other stuff on my plate. Remember that as much as I genuinely care about you and your success, you care about them more: they are yours, so keep on top of things.

OK – if you’re cool with all of this, let’s do it!

Art Pope

Art Pope is the name of a local conservative businessman who gives lots of money to the Republican Party. It’s also a great image, isn’t it? What a crazy job Art Pope would be. I invite your imaginings.

Meanwhile, Newsweek has a little snippet on the Venice Biennale, with remarks from the curator, Bice Curiger. She would be an Art Bishop or perhaps even Art Cardinal, I suppose. Anyhoo, she says something that struck me for its thoughtful, pragmatic balance, unusual in my experience of the arts:

I don’t think art is a very powerful instrument to change the world. But it can make you rethink certain things. It can break your conventions.

Yup. I think it’s good for people to have their conventions challenged; even as I think the efficient automations afforded by conventions are essential for day to day living. I think resilience is an essential trait in a complex world, and resilience is largely a function of ability to imagine and live otherwise. A background project for me of late is thinking about general education; Bice’s account of art also works nicely as an account of what a general education can and maybe should offer.

I don’t suppose Art Pope would approve, however. And speaking of aggressive narrow-mindedness, no matter how bad Newsweek was before, how much worse is it now that it’s gotten sucked into the Daily Beast? It’s an object lesson in the downside of the new media: superficial, cliché-ridden reporting and commentary by people who seem to have been selected on purpose for their obtuseness and fundamental ignorance about the topics at hand. But I get it for free due to the NPR donation, and even the blind squirrels find nuts sometimes, so into the bathroom it goes!

In conclusion, an amusing depiction of the cliché form courtesy of Wikipedia:

Obeasts go viral

Since I have nothing much to say lately, I’ll brag on Rachel instead. Fresh off a glowing local review of her MFA installation of the Obeast project (including a full-size taxidermied Obeast!), the news got picked up by Jezebel, where it has gotten almost 90,000 page-views.

The work is a humorous but pointed challenge to the common stigma around obesity. Rachel addresses the diminished humanity (or ‘spoiled identity’, as Goffman put it) of fat people by casting herself as the North American Obeast, an endangered species of terrestrial biped descended from large manatee-like aquatic ancestors and hunted almost to extinction for food, blubber oil, and sport.

From Jezebel the story went viral, showing up in a host of aggregators and provoking reactions from admiration to fretting in the blogosphere. The action in the commentary includes a cross-section of attack and defense strategies; it’s always interesting to see how fluidly people slide around among normative discourses seeking intellectual cover for their ‘ick’ responses. And because Rachel’s project is a meta-commentary on normative discourses, it stimulates a lot of anxiety for people stuck in the mirror-traps of reciprocal judgment. In her responses to the responses Rachel calmly declines to play that game.

Incidentally, a theme of the work is the questionable naturalization of fat by turning it into a medical condition, ‘obesity’. This is an interesting instance of the dynamics of information channeling or linkage Jacob and I have just gestured at. Fat tends to be a ‘double-whammy’ stigma, to use the technical jargon – it is physically gross, but then is further linked to chosen moral failing: gluttony and self-indulgence. In this sense fat works a lot like homosexuality and mental illness, so that for each, in a first moment stigma managers react strategically to seal off the moral linkage by drawing on the normative discourse of Nature, asserting that we did not choose but are born this way as part of the diversity of the natural order. And fair enough. However, no move is ever the last move, so what is first celebrated as normal variation can just as easily be restigmatized as medical pathology, complete with contagions, epidemics, quack cures and the whole range of grimly heroic interventions from castration to lobotomy to lap-band surgery. Hey, whoops, not that Nature, the other Nature!

Blog death

Seizing the moment of a three day weekend, I’ve been poking at this and other blogs a bit today. Checking in on the usual circuit, belatedly hooking up google reader to some of the usual suspects, getting caught up. So I was stunned to see that Edge of the West, one of the very best history/philosophy group blogs I’ve seen, went on hiatus late last year.

Why didn’t I see this earlier? Why wasn’t I paying attention? Maybe for the same reason they went dark. As smart, thoughtful and rigorous as they were, after awhile it got to where I pretty much knew where they and their commentariat were going to go with any given topic. Good as the moves were, they became predictable like a waltz; conversation became stereotyped and provocations were more and more ritually damped out. Each post became a well-informed iteration of an orthodoxy, the audience more and more a chorus. A terrific one, but still.

Is this different than earlier periods of intellectual history in anything but pace? Didn’t Platonists get sick of Aristotelians’ shit after awhile? How long did it take for Confucians to know the Legalist playbook by heart? How surprised was the Pope about Luther’s n+1 heresies? And at what point of the separate dinner parties does each group run out of ways to agree with each other and lapse into benevolent mumbling? Isn’t that what the port, cigars and washing up are for?

…and the look of real wood!

Please excuse the visual confusion. I’m trying to add feeds from other blogs, and the sidebar was already wicked cluttered, so I needed to change the theme to one that has more widget fields. As an unexpected bonus I kind of like about this theme that it gets more content into the front page at once, so multiple posts/authors can be ‘up’ at the same time. Let me know if you like or hate what you see.