come out

Music: Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works, Volume Two (1994)

Every now and then I entreat lurking Rosechron readers to come out of the e-closet and announce their identities. I've met some scholarly friends this way over the years. I'm also just curious to know who is stopping by. I have a stat counter that can tell me ISP identities, but this is not necessarily a good measure of who is reading: a have a buddy in the Carolina's whose ISP comes up Minneapolis.

The readership of Rosechron is modest: in the summer, this blog averages about 40-80 discrete visitors a day (weekends 40, weekdays 80). During the normal academic year, readership is about 100 to 150 a day, unless I post something about forensics/debate, in which case readership bumps up to 400 or more.

I'm just curious, perhaps a little narcissistic: who are the bulk of you? I know my buddies read regularly, but I'm curious about the strangers who visit: are you academics? In grad school? Fellow academics? Come out! Come out! What are your names, what do you do? Do you have a blog of your own?

it's synth-pop friday!

binge writing

Music: Marconi Union 13 (2009)

This academic year I have not been terribly "productive," or at least by my usual standards. In part, this is because of the new preps I had and my many travels. It also has something to do with my focus on textbook writing (which is not "counted" by my place of employment as work---only peer reviewed stuff "counts"). And as it turns out, I shall lose my summer "writing months" to preparing a tenure packet, the minutiae of which is just overwhelming (good lord the paperwork!). And, since I'm leaving town here in a couple of weeks, I figured I better sit down and pump something out or I'll have nothing "in the pipeline" for post-promotion evaluation. If I ever want to get a raise for promotion, or post-promotion, peer-reviewed puppies must manifest.

But heck, I also enjoy writing and I have a couple of projects I'd like to bang out this summer. One is a generic criticism of The Passion of the Christ. The other project is to finish-up my draft of "On Speech and Public Release," a talk I gave last fall that I'm trying to turn into an article. I'm happy to report I just now finished drafting the latter. Woo-hoo. It took me three straight days to do---and I had to skip July 4th festivities last evening, but dang it, it's done. I do feel accomplished having got this down on paper—with 150 endnotes, to boot. It's well-researched, if I do say so.

(I am sometimes annoyed by work in my field's journals, which is under-researched, lacking in notes and appropriate shout-outs.)

So, I'm coming off a binger. The essay is not ready to send out, but at least it's all out, on paper. I am now printing out the 45 page whopper. I shall soon make me a boulevardier beverage, and commence editing with a red pen as I sip my victory drink.

Tomorrow: car repairs, class prep, and figuring out how to fill out all these tenure forms and formats. For now, however, I go a-gloating. Here's a teaser conclusion:

III. CONCLUDING REMARKS: ESCAPE FROM TEXT MOUNTAIN

Expression is the expression of affect, of the passion at the origin of language, of a speech that was first substituted for song, marked by tone and force. . . . The force of expression amounts only to vocalic sounds, when the subject is there in person to utter his passion. When the subject is no longer there, force, intonation, and accent are lost in the concept.
--Jacques Derrida (1967)

In what is perhaps his most important work, Of Grammatology, Derrida concludes with a critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's views on the inferiority or writing to speech. Like the philosophers of antiquity, Rousseau believed speech was superior to writing because it more readily made present the thought and feelings of a speaker to listeners. Derrida undermines this popular speech sentiment by arguing both writing and speech are posterior to language (or the symbolic), and consequently speech is merely another from of inscription. Privileging speech derives from the "metaphysics of presence," and more specifically the article of faith that something outside of language-some transcendental signified-guarantees meaning. Derrida argued that speech presences a subject no more readily or realistically than does writing.

Be that as it may, with recourse to the theoretical literature in public feelings, psychoanalysis, and elocution, in this essay I have argued that speech has what we might call "presence effects." I suggested that such effects are affective and sexual in character, and that the felt presence of speech---real or illusory, it does not matter---continues to challenge any tidy public/private distinction. Rather, an attention to the presence of speech---particularly speech that violates or transgresses some norm---helps us to see better how the public/private distinction is in crisis and continually born anew. In this respect, Clinton's "misty moment" in the recent presidential campaign marked a new intimate form of publicity-a newly permissible form of public feeling. I also argued that in our culture we learn at a very young age to distinguish between masculine and feminine voices, the former paired with reason and control, the latter with emotion and the body. Because the way in which the misogynistic norms of speech are heard and felt, not merely thought, I argued that an attention to vocal tones and uncontrolled speech can help critics to discern their cultural labor. Alternately put, my point here is that tone is essentially pointless, but it is not normless; assuredly, for example, on the spoken side of language tone is gendered. As the cultural reception of female grunting demonstrates, aggressive tones are less permitted in the female voice than they are in the male voice. Studying the cultural norms of uncontrolled speech provides us with a renewed way to reckon with the sexual dynamics of contemporary public address, perhaps even a sort of renewed elocutionary approach to sexuality and citizenship in the postmodern republic.

In advocating an attention to the norms of uncontrolled speech or to the limits of emotive permissibility, I mean to pose an alternative to what I would term the monstrosity of textualism, or if you prefer, the august mountain of "Text." As Dilip Gaonkar once wrote, the enigmatic arrival of the oratorical text was announced at the first meeting of the bi-annual Public Address Conference, then known as "The Wisconsin Symposium on Public Address: Case Studies in Political Rhetoric." The text "arrived" at the very same moment that the field formerly known as Speech Communication was killing off speech and administering its last rites.iv For some of us, "text" replaced the oratorical object, while it sent others packing for the Hills of Foucault and critical rhetoric. Yet the arrival of the text was also the arrival of a certain sort of violence-the violence of deconstruction and poststructuralism. As the subsequent controversy over the text has demonstrated, text poses a kind of antidiscipliary violence; its domain is seemingly boundless. On the other hand, text is given over to the signifier. Text speaks only to the subject of the signifier, and in so doing, overlooks precisely that dimension of oratory that excited our forbears in the early twentieth century. Sadly, the arrival of the text was the death knell for oratory. It is as if oratory has rolled under the couch, dragging the forgotten canon of delivery with it. To recover and expand on rhetorical institutional traditions, I argue along with Frank E.X. Dance for a return to the object of speech and the sound of voice. In concert with Debra Hawhee and others, I commend the cartography of the body's rhetorical dimensions. To these voices I add a call to the study of public feelings. Focusing on the body in feeling and speech as its symptom, I am arguing for a renewed focus on the canon of delivery.

Let us take the field of political science as a warning: as a number those who work in the area of political communication would recognize, few of our colleagues in political science can account for emotion and feeling. By moving toward the subject of the signifier in pursuit of demonstrable and quantifiable knowledge, the so-called rational choice model achieved hegemony. Such a model is useless for explaining the love of and for a leader. In the field formerly known as speech communication, we already have a rich and complicated body of theory at our disposal for a vocabulary, and we have other domains of theory, such as psychoanalysis, and colleagues in cognate subfields, such as performance studies, to help us renew an attention to speech.

If the oratory of our contemporary election cycle teaches us anything, it is that the measure of eloquence is not so much the choice of words, but in delivery, in how those words are carried aloft by modulations in tone that tease the auditor with the safe threat of involuntary speech. The eloquent orator is the one who conveys a longing that does not collapse into moaning, who ignites excitement and passion without resorting to the barbaric yawp. Or, taking the Dean Scream as our normative limit, eloquent is she who hints at the unspoken and uncontrolled. Eloquent is she who projects animus and amity but without the grunt or the cry. Eloquent is she who bodies forth feeling to the limits of linguistic control. And eloquent is she who demonstrates the fullness of human being and becoming, of feeling and of saying, in speech.

it's synth-pop friday!

aberrations of mourning

Music: Marconi Union: A Lost Connection (2008)

Much of the last couple of days has been spent in planes and automobiles, but that does not mean I have been able to escape the spectre of Michael Jackson, who seems to haunt every screen and speaker. Flying high above Oklahoma I was subjected to the Jackson's grunts for hundreds of miles as the passenger seated next to me reacquainted himself with Jackson's back catalog on his overly loud iPod (interspersed with screeches and kicks to the back of my seat by the misbehaving toddler behind me). Every airport cable television was airing tributes to Jackson's life and music. In the hotel room, cable new programs have been airing continuous coverage of Jackson's demise. ABC has been milking the Living with Michael Jackson docu, a humiliating and altogether bizarre series of interview with that shameless douchebag, Martin Bashir. If you are awake in America, you have been enjoined to mourn. MOURN, OR ELSE!

The mainstream media's maudlin machines have been reengaged, and we are implored toward melancholia (for as long as it sells eyeballs and music, commemorative disposables). Mourning has become a major business in the United States; the conditions of this possibility are the InterTubes and real-time broadcasting, avenues that both elongate the sense of the present and forestall the normal processes of letting-go and giving-up (that is, turning off). Mediated melancholia is an attempt to prolong mourning as long as possible, not simply for healing (which it does achieve) but perpetuating a sense of collective tragedy. Michael Jackson's death is a perfect, commodifyable event: we must mourn, but we cannot martyr.

Of anything I've read or seen, Roger Ebert's eulogistic observations in "The Boy Who Never Grew Up" is the most succinct and poignant explanation for why this mediated mourning is particularly successful at marshalling the melancholic subject. Ebert addresses the central element by offering a rationale for pedophilic desire: Jackson just wanted to be a kid. The issue with mourning Mike that makes it difficult to close up the wound and to let the love object die is the possibility Jackson fucked up/fucked with adolescent boys.

I remember loving Michael Jackson very much as an adolescent. I remember with vividness my favorite Easter: Peter Rabbit brought me a huge basket of peeps, Reese's peanut butter eggs, and a cassette of Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Jackson as been no stranger to the Rosechron because of his weirdness. As I wrote many years ago, his figure is the perfect blog material because so much of American culture is projected on to him---including adolescent sexuality. Yesterday listening to Bashir comment on his unethical, manipulative interviews with Jackson, I couldn't help but remember Zizek's observations about Jackson in an essay on "fantasy":

When a couple of years ago, the disclosure of Michael Jackson’s alleged ‘immoral’ private behavior (his sexual games with underage boys) dealt a blow to his innocent Peter Pan image, elevated beyond sexual and racial differences (or concerns), some penetrating commentators asked the obvious question: What’s all the fuss about? Wasn’t this so-called ‘dark side of Michael Jackson’ always here for us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)? The Unconscious is outside, not hidden away in any unfathomable depths—or, to quote the X Files motto: ‘The truth is out there.

And it will be repressed, but not until the melancholic inability to mourn has done its (commercial) work. Not until the fantasy man/boy love has been enjoyed/denied, not until Jackson has been fully victimized himself. This aberration of mourning, with nods to Larry Rickels, must go on.

taking a walk with sanford

Music: Soundtrack to Mahogany (1975)

For decades I have puzzled over a certain reference in a favorite Cure tune, "The Walk." The song begins with these lyrics: "I called you after midnight/then ran until my heart bust/I passed the howling woman/and stood outside your door." I've always understood that this was a love song, since after Smith professes his undying love he pleads, "take me for a walk, lets go for a walk," where walk means "fuck." I never could figure out who or what the "howling woman" was. After (former) Gov. Sanford's press conference yesterday, I finally got an answer:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

That's her in the upper left corner, the woman who begins to grin the moment Sanford's voice begins to quiver and the confession comes out. She's joined for a good few minutes by a taller woman who also starts grinning (and then texting, or obviously looking at a phone), but ultimately it is only the one, grinning woman who remains gleeful until the end. Technically, she is not howling, but I suspect for most television viewers she might as well have belted out a maniacal screech for the duration of the press conference.

I confess the press conference was fascinating, for all sorts of reasons. The confession itself was rather boring and predictable and, of course, strategically a very bad idea. From a political perspective, Sanford confessed to little more than his own narcissism. We all know the kind of person who screws over many people and then, after all the damage is done, falls on his or her knees and apologies, claiming to "face the music." Then they repeat the routine. He might be able to come back, but he'll be on the Newt Gingrich "I-abandoned-my-dying-wife-for-another-woman" ten year plan. He should have released a press statement instead.

What was more interesting than the "rhetoric" was the staging and the gleeful women in the upper left. Why were they smiling when Sanford appears close to completely losing himself? What was so amusing about this man's pain? I could only surmise that these women were among Sanford's staff, whom he misled and made endure all sorts of media pressure. Perhaps after what he put them through, they were happy to seem to fall.

On television and the InterTubes today and yesterday, however, I've heard people remark of these woman, "what were they thinking?" and "oh, how rude" and so forth. But is it, really? What if a man was grinning behind them? Would he have received the same scrutiny? Probably not. Given the context of the situation---a man's bad behavior---I suppose the smiling women were destined to be received as the "howling women," the castrating women, the very same threat that motivates philandering in the first place. Cheating on one's life's partner may be motivated by sexual desire, even the impossible love of long distance (I get that one, truly I do). But cheating on one's wife---and lets face it, four kids---is also tantamount to saying, "no woman has a purchase on me; I can have more than one," at least at some level. The figure of the castrating woman is the figure who threatens to "cut if off" if you adopt such a posture.

I suggest that the howling woman, the grinning women, were entirely fitting for this on-screen ob-scene. Their presence, and utter disregard for Sanford's mea culpa routine, is a statement from women that, yes, they can castrate and, in this one instance, they'll do so to the deserving . . . with a smile.

public feelings in public address

Music: Jackson Browne, For Everyman (1973)

I've switched my writing gears from the textbook gear to the academic essay gear. I am much more comfortable in the higher gear. I've wanted for months to get back to writing my "On Speech and Public Release" essay. To better contextualize the piece, I thought it would be good to provide a background for where all this recent stuff in "affect" is coming from, but focused in particular on work that would interest public address scholars. That, seems to me, is stuff folks are working on that engages notions of publics and publicity. It also means I get to mention the reading group I joined last year, headed up by a very busy Ann Cvetkovich in the English department. Ann is an amazing scholar and a jet-setting rock star, so sometimes she's hard to get a hold of. (Ann, if you're reading, pretty please come talk to my class this fall?)

Nevertheless, here's a tease, a draft on the place of public feelings research in rhetorical studies (and more narrowly, public address as I understand it):

For almost two decades Lauren Berlant has enriched our understanding of the public sphere by arguing "it" has become intimate and multiple. That is, there is no one public sphere, but many public spheres (or as she would concede in later work, "publics") that are more or less made coherent and assumed to be singular over the binary of "public/private."[i] Historically, the "proper relation between public and private" was mapped over "spaces traditionally associated with the gendered division of labor," perhaps most familiar to rhetorical scholars in terms of the domestic, private world of women and the public domain of men that so characterized the cult of true womanhood.[ii] Although a gender binary continues to underwrite expressions of the public/private distinction-a point to which I shall return in respect to the human voice-the movement of women into new spaces, both imaginary and real, the consequently transformed divisions of labor, and the ever-multiplying technologies of communication driven by the motor of consumerism, have collectively contributed to a new sense of public belonging that seems to continuously publicize the putatively private.[iii] Berlant terms this new sense of public belonging "public intimacy." The conceptual locus of public intimacy is described as the "intimate public sphere" in earlier work, and as "intimate publics" in her more recent work.

According to Berlant in her landmark 1997 study, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, the intimate public sphere is the achievement of a conservative ideology born in the 1970s and that ripened into the "right-wing cultural agenda of the Reagan revolution."iv The gist of the earlier version of her argument focused at the level of the nation state; think, here, of the popular or cultural imaginary secured by television screens:

In the patriotically-permeated pseudopublic sphere of the present tense, national politics does not involve starting with a view of the nation as a space of struggle violently separated by racial, sexual, and economic inequities . . . . Instead, the dominant idea marked by patriotic traditionalists is of a core nation whose survival depends on personal acts and identities performed in the intimate domains of the quotidian. It is in this sense that the political public sphere has become an intimate public sphere. . . . the intimate public sphere of the U.S. present tense renders citizenship as a condition of social membership produced by personal acts and values, especially acts originating and directed toward the family sphere. No longer valuing personhood as something directed toward public life, contemporary nationalist ideology recognizes a public good only in a particularly constrained nation of simultaneously lived private worlds.[v]

Berlant has in mind the turn to so-called cultural issues on the Right, such as the welfare of children, anti-abortion crusades, and the regulation of sodomy and same-sex marriage. For Berlant, conservatives have "transformed the scenes of privacy into the main public spheres of nationality . . . ."vi What one does in the bedroom has become, for example, a public issue even though it remains conceptually off-screen (in the ob-scene).[vii]

In addition to the privatization of citizenship in the national imaginary, in subsequent work Berlant has also focused on the "intimate publics" created by the culture industries, such as "women's culture":

An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers, claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people's particular core interests and desires. When this kind of 'culture of circulation' takes hold, participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is common among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and their ongoing attachments and actions. Their participation seems to confirm the sense that even before there was a market addressed to them, there existed a world of strangers who would be emotionally literate in each other's experience of power, intimacy, desire, discontent, with all that entails . . . . "Women's culture" was the first such mass-marketed intimate public in the United States of significant scale.[viii]

Whereas Berlant describes the intimate public sphere as an (incomplete) implosion of the public and private at the level of the U.S. national political imaginary, she suggests an "intimate public" denotes a people brought into being through the consumerist circulation of personal or private experiences. These may very well overlap depending on one's focus (e.g., a politician appearing on a late night talk show, for which the viewing public brought into being is mostly young and male). The difference between the "intimate public sphere" and an "intimate public" is one of scale and politics, of national identification with the former and any number of interest groups or audiences with the latter. Berlant's project should be understood as a part of a larger scholarly push to grapple with how publics (and counterpublics) are fundamentally affective in character and, perhaps, "how affective experience can provide the basis for new cultures," as Ann Cvetkovich has suggested.[ix] Berlant and Cvetkovich's work on citizenship, publics, and intimacy, in turn, is partially a result of the agenda of small group of scholars in the humanities researching what Cvetkovich has dubbed "public feelings."[x] Historically, Cvetkovich explains that the loosely affiliated group's research trajectory was a result of the "collective meetings on the future of gender and sexuality and the question of how to give feminism greater impact in the public sphere."[xi] Gradually, however, a "Public Feelings group" emerged in "the shadow of September 11 and its ongoing consequences. Rather than analyzing the geopolitical underpinnings of these developments," says Cvetkovich, the Public Feelings group has "been more interested in their emotional dynamics."xii This focus on the emotional dynamics of public cultures can, in turn, be further contextualized as part of a still larger "affective turn" in the theoretical humanities, a turn that is receiving much attention recently in communication studies.[xiii]

What do rhetorical scholars have to offer for understanding public feelings and intimate publics? And why should we be thinking about public intimacy at all? Answering the second question makes it easier to approach the first. If it is the case that both the public sphere and publics have become "intimate" in the past century, fusing the private, the political, and profit-making into public zones of intimacy, then the character of public address must have also changed in ways that recommend increased attention toward public affect. With this transformation taken as a given, I think a characteristically rhetorical contribution to the larger, theoretical engagement with public affect asks scholars to reconsider the object of criticism. For their critical work, Public Feelings scholars have tended to focus on spectacles of one sort or another for evidentiary support: readings of films, performance art, monuments, literature, and other scenic objects have carried the weight of critical observation. For example, in her widely read An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich focuses on performance art because it is "emblematic of the public cultures that intrigue me," but also because it "creates publics by bringing together live bodies in space . . . ."xiv Berlant has examined objects of "mass-mediated popular culture," such as novels and films, because these objects help to foment "a sense of focused belonging to an evolving world."xv If we begin with the assumption that there are many publics, as well as numerous circulating objects that call them into being, what would be the object of a public feelings approach in public address?

The overdetermined answer is plain: the object is "address," which is traditionally understood as a formal speech. And even though formal speeches no longer center all modes of public address, there remains at the very least a condition of address that has persisted for millennia. As Herbert A. Wichelns once wrote, "human nature being what it is, there is no likelihood that face to face persuasion will cease to be a principle mode of exerting influence . . . ."[xvi] In 1925, of course, Wichelns could not have foreseen television, cell phones, the Internet, and video teleconferencing, but the spirit of his observation continues to haunt: the intimacy of human vocalization, of speech, influences people because the default context for speech remains everyday interpersonal encounter.xvii Furthermore, even in a world dominated by screens and speakers, the human voice continues to convey and evoke human emotion, formally and informally. I submit that the experience of human speech, mediated or not, is the most direct route to feelings and intimacy in publics and, consequently, that a focus on speech as such should center work on public feelings and affect from a rhetorical perspective. Rhetorical scholars have at their disposal centuries of theories about the human voice and its relationship to human feelings, and thus are uniquely primed to address public affect via the object of speech. To make this case, I will demonstrate how human speech is intimately associated, both symbolically and physiologically, with the most intimate and "private" of human feelings, and then show how these feelings are rhetorically managed and manipulated in publics.

Notes
i For more on the concept of "publics," see Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005).
ii Berlant, "Intimacy," 3. Cite Karlyn here;
iii The ideology of publicity is also at work here. See Jodi Dean, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); and Joshua Gunn, "Death By Publicity: U.S. Freemasonry and the Public Drama of Secrecy." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (2008): 243-278.
iv Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 7.
v Berlant, Queen, 5.
vi Berlant, Queen, 177.
vii For more on this paradoxical dynamic, see Davin A. Grindstaff, Rhetorical Secrets: Mapping Gay Identity and Queer Resistance (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006).
viii Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 5.
ix Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
x Ann Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (2007): 459-468.
xi Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," 459. Some of the members are located in Austin, Texas and affiliated with the University of Austin (including the author), while a good core of them are located in Chicago and originally dubbed themselves the "Feel Tank Chicago." Scholars associated with the group-officialy and unofficially by way of citation-include Berlant and Cvetkovich, as well Lisa Duggan, Avery Gordon, Debbie Gould, Vanalyne Greene, Mary Patten, Rebecca Zorach and many others.
xii Cvetkovich, "Public Feelings," 460.
xiii See Patrica Tincineto Clough and Jean Halley, Eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Duham: Duke University Press, 2007). For notable engagements with the affective turn in communication studies, see Barbara A. Biesecker's edited discussion forum on affect in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 193-219.
xiv Cvetkovich, An Archive, 9.
xv Berlant, Female Complaint, 13.
xvi Wichelns, "Literary Criticism," 4.
xvii See Frank E.X. Dance, "A Speech Theory of Human Communication: Implications and Applications," Journal of Applied Communication Research 10 (1982): 1-8. Of course, the view that quotidian face-to-face communication is the default has been contested; for an overview of the interpersonal vis-à-vis mediation literature, see Leah A. Lievrouw, "New Media, Mediation, and Communication Study," Information, Communication & Society 12 (2009): 303-325.

it's synthpop synthrock friday!

cable news is alarming

Music: Iron & Wine: Around the Well (2009)

Y'all can file this post under the "where've you been, Sherlock?" category, because what I say will be obvious to most of you. Still, it's something akin to "emotional news" to me. I'm astonished by cable programming; it makes me feel like I might die tomorrow.

A couple of weeks ago I had cable installed. I do not watch a lot of television, and what I do watch consists mostly of news and court television shows (I turn on the latter I'm working for a sense of "company," as well as the occasional distraction). I've been working very hard to make myself watch television. Last night I decided to clean the house, but had FOX News and CNN on for a few hours.

I was surprised not by the content, but by the tone of this "news" programming. The O'Reilly Factor and the show on after it was alarmist in character, and the irony of "we report it, you decide" was amusing. On CNN I listened to Nancy Grace as I swept and mopped. This show was also very apocalyptic: it was as if John Williams scored the doom-and-gloom motifs that faded in an out of commercial interruptions and courtroom drama. Yes, I've watched this stuff in the past when traveling or visiting others, but I've never been alone with a television set for two weeks watching cable; it makes me feel funny.

Trying to make sense of these feelings, I can only grasp at two concepts: flow and tone. In television studies, Raymond Williams advanced the concept of "flow" to explain how television producers tried to get audiences to experience a feeling of continuity between programs by doing things to keep them in front of the set. Commercials were incorporated into programs; credits would feature bloopers from the show, or dump the viewer right into the opening sequence of the next program. Williams meant to indicate that "flow" was a perceptual suspension of temporality as well as an affective dimension or "structure of feeling" that made you want to never leave the screen.

Some have argued that, with hundreds of channels and the variety of cable programming, narrowcasting and nitsch programming have destroyed "flow." Now we DVR our favorite programs and, consequently, flow has disintegrated. I disagree. The auratic quality of these "cable news" shows is tremendous and high energy; the affective tone of the programs and operatic emotions they attempt to evoke are stronger than anything I've ever sensed from television. I know most of y'all are used to this, but I found myself sucked into these programs such that I didn't realize it was past my bedtime. Not sure what else to say, except that flow is a tone, and the tone is alarmist.

Yeah, yeah, this is all obvious. Still, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I think my recent sensitivity toward haters and violence may simply be my adjustment to cable television. Huh.

summer of hate

Music: Frausdots: Couture, Couture, Couture (2004)

I overheard someone say on television that "when you are a hammer, you think everything is a nail." I've been feeling that way lately as if I have become a human hate sensor: I just keep seeing hatemongering everywhere and over and over and am wondering, what new imaginary of violence has this summer brought? And why? What's up with all you mean haters out there? Can't you just make a Mint Julep or Mohito and chill the fuck out?

Chip posted a link to Frank Rich's NYT Op-Ed this morning that advances something of an answer: conservative pundits have been changing the tone of their attacks on the Obama administration, as if to "activate" psycho-haters across the country. First Tiller is assassinated, then the shooting spree in DC happened in the span of two weeks. Rich reports that even Fox News anchor Shepard Smith made an open plea to viewers to be careful and perhaps even be worried, that paranoid extremists have been sending more and more vituperative email messages to the network (heres the video). Camille Paglia's essay on "hate radio" also notes a marked shift in tone on political talk shows; it started in May, but now it seems the conspiratorial muttering is getting louder and the "the Right" is teetering into a "paranoid mood." Rich warns that violence, including increased presidential assassination attempts, is coming.

Rich's essay makes for good reading after watching O'Reilly's abuse of Joan Walsh of Salon:

Rich and Paglia's stress on tone is absolutely precise: O'Reilly is sniveling, practically spitting, doing everything in his emotional power to get Walsh to scream at him. It's not what he is saying that is important; it's what he's feeling---what he is projecting---and the pedagogy he is teaching. While the weapon is the brutality of insulting speech, O'Reilly is nevertheless performing a kind of violence on Walsh. He is "teaching" the viewing audience how to target and destroy a political opponent (never let them speak, create false dichotomies, and so on).

As I wrote about last week, hatred is another name for projective identification. Projective identification is when a person "projects" onto others something about themselves that they dislike. You and I tend to dislike those people who remind us, in some way, of a part of our "self" that we loathe. There is no hate for its own sake; hatred is always about "me" and that other person who is not me. Hate is one of the ways that people develop and maintain a positive identity. O'Reilly is displaying in this clip pure hatred toward Walsh, and through her symbolic destruction his identity as reconfirmed.

Last week a Slovenian reporter interviewed me for my take on Carrie Prejean, the Miss USA who was fired for saying on television that she is against gay marriage. Do you think she was fired, I was asked, because of political correctness? I gave the careful, academic answer (it's a newspaper). I think, however, it's more to the point to say that Prejean was fired because she was a hater; that is, she chose this very hot, political issue---especially for Californians---to take a stand about. I think for most people, taking a stand and fashioning one's identity on denying full humanity to other people is just not very pretty. Beauty contests, of course, require you to be pretty.

Homophobes and racists and anti-abortion crusaders are rising, the Republichristians are mobilizing, the academy continues downsizing. I don't mean to be needlessly apocalyptic, but I am sensing the hateful paranoia too. How long will it be for this new mood to affect my daily life in some material way?

it's synth-pop friday!

on hatred in the news, breasts

Music: The Orb: Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions (1991)

This has been the week of hate and hating in mainstream news. Glambert "came out" (again) in Rolling Stone; that this was an event at all signifies a seething hatred somewhere out there, or else it simply would not be news at all (remember?). Reverend Jeremiah Wright quipped that "them Jews" are keeping Obama from speaking to him. And just two days ago James von Brunn, a man consumed with hatred for racialized Other, attempted to storm the National Holocaust Museum and kill anyone in sight; he shot officer Stephen Tyrone and will be charged for murder.

In my field, the dominant theory for understanding aggression toward others---the sexed, the raced, and the queer---is that of "scapegoating," and in particular the scapegoating theory advanced by Kenneth Burke. Burke argues that human beings are born into various hierarchies, which leads to a sense of mystery about an out-group. Curiosity about the out-group in turn leads to a transgression against that group---a faux pas or rule-breaking or something---and then "victimage": blaming the self ("mortification") or the other ("scapegoating") to deal with the guilt of transgression. (Nate Stormer's suggested illustration has always stuck with me.) Aggression towards others is explained in terms of how one recons with guilt.

Such a theory is gravely unsatisfying as an explanation for aggression we've witnessed this week, as its pretty much helpless to describe psychotic aggression. Moreover, it's just too Christian; taking a cue from Melanie Klein, it seems to me feelings of narcissism and envy are closer to the core of aggression. Guilt, it seems to me, is a much more mature and evolved emotion. Futhermore, for some reason Burke's fairly sophisticated understanding of identification (narcissistic in character) was never worked through his theory of victimage, such that both perspectives lack---however ironically---motive. The missing piece is ego, and more specifically, the ideal ego [i(a)]. For today's post, I'd like to sketch a projective identification theory that may help us to distinguish different types scapegoating along a continuum of aggression; one side is indifference, while the other is hate.

There are three conceptual components to this sketch: the ideal ego, primary narcissism, and projective identification. The first is Lacanian in character, and refers to an imaginary fantasy structure that always holds out the promise of completion and unity. The ideal ego is a kind of image that forms in one's head of one's supreme omnipotence, an image that dominates the self-conception of toddlers (think about the aggression of the "terrible twos"). For Lacan, one usually learns to temper this imaginary fantasy of oneself as "all powerful" with the "ego ideal," a symbolic limitation, an understanding of one's finitude, that comes from without. In a sense, most psychotic behavior is an infantile regression to a sense of omnipotence, and a general inability to understand limit, the almighty "no."

Although Klein doesn't work with the ideal ego/ego ideal distinction (in part because Freud is really unclear), we can see it in her discussion of primary narcissism and projective identification. Primary narcissism simply refers to the normal, basic focus of an infant and toddler on itself until, of course, the ego ideal develops. The hallmark of primary narcissism is magical thinking (making the word change by will alone, as with "The Secret" and other forms of popular bullshittery). This process is initially worked-out in relation to ideal objects, and for Klein, this is first and foremost the breast (or we can say bottle if the child is bottle fed---the object needs to negotiate need and demand). The kid words works out all kinds of stuff with these mysterious, tantalizing objects.

The problem with breasts, from the kid's point of view, is they're inconsistent. They don't always miraculously appear when the kid is hungry. And sometimes they don't always yield milk. This leads to feelings of envy and the consequent agression---the kid wants to "have" the boobs all to him or herself, to suckle and squeeze whever s/he wants!

Now, I know this sounds ridiculous, but stick with me; we're tying to imagine what it must be like to be very, very little. Clearly at the age of breast feeding we don't have words or language, but we do have feelings, and worse, these feelings don't have language or symbols to help navigate them---good and bad feelings are without censor. Small children are raging fonts of affect (again, think of the temper tantrums at the age of 2). So, when Klein says kids feel "envy" for the breast, she doesn't mean it like, say, I feel envy for someone's busy sex life. She means the kid feels like it wants the breasts to itself, all the time, any time.

Projective identification, for Klein, develops early in relation to the first ideal objects, objects that can become "bad." Since the kid really doesn't understand it is distinct from mother yet, a "bad" breast that doesn't appear when it wants to eat, or that doesn't give milk, is confusing. To deal with this, the child "rejects" the bad breast in an aggressive way—in kind of tantrum. For Klein, this is a very early defense mechanism termed "splitting": rejection or aggression toward the "bad" breast is a projection of the "bad" part of self onto an outside object. Of course, this is also a challenge to the ideal ego, which is all harmony and unity and omnipotent. Klein says splitting is necessary for normal development, but can become pathological:

These mechanisms and defenses are part of normal development and at the same time from the basis for later schizophrenic illness. I described the processes underlying identification by projection as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them on to another person, and some of the effects of this identification has on normal schizoid object relations.

By "schizophrenic" Klein is not referring to the DSM-IV condition, but something akin to a subject position. The "schizoid-paranoid" subject position is one in which the ideal ego dominates; it is an infantile, psychotic state of omnipotence. Klein argues that one eventually must move to a "depressive" state (depressive in the sense that one "gives up" this quest for unity and has to make reparations for splitting from mother). This distinction is not so important at the moment; it's only crucial to note here that projective identification involves projecting bad parts of me on to an object outside of me, and that object can be a person.

Now, why is projective identification and improvement over identification in the Burkean sense? It is an improvement because it stresses, first, the narcissistic basis of all identification. Yet more importantly, projective identification explains what hate actually is. The key to Klein's theory is that one is not "done" with projective identification; rather, it is continual and constitutive of a psychotic ego, since the "bad object" is never sent out into the wilderness, as a scapegoat would be. Rather, the bad object is projected onto so that the person can keep it within the domain of his/her omnipotence. In other words, I project that which I don't like onto mother, so she holds on to this bad thing, but she is still my mother and therefore part of me, and so projection cycles. Only by literally splitting from mother---making a clean break---am I released from this cycle and its psychosis.

Or something like that.

So, if we think of identification in this way, then James von Brunn's anti-Semitism starts to make sense as a life-long fashioning of the ideal ego—a psychotic one. Stories have been circulating about Brunn that he didn't just dislike Jews, but was obsessed with all things Jewish and his hatred was all consuming. His wife apparently left him in the 70s because his whole world revolved around hating the Jews. In other words, this was a man whose identity was foundationally regressive: his self-understanding was entirely based on projective identification and a complete inability to recognize his own limitations, his own failures. Without the Jews, Brunn would cease to exist. This is hatred in its purest sense, the opposite of indifference, and the flip side of love.

We can also see projective identification at work in homophobia—perhaps even better. As the film American Beauty made cliché, folks closeted to themselves are the most aggressive homophobes. If we consider the fact that we all have homoerotic desire to greater or lesser extents, we'd be much better off as a people. Instead, for some reason in the United States (certainly in other parts of the world too, but especially in the U.S.) homoerotic desire is the scene of an awful lot of projective identification. Some individuals are choosing to develop their identity on the basis being "not gay." For example, the massive amounts of time and energy that have gone into fighting "gay marriage" really helps to demonstrate just how much hatred is used to constitute identity. The passionate defenses of marriage between a man and a woman are doing the work of identity-maintenance. This is why the fight must be continual and never-ending; for the most vocal and ardent opponents, without the projection of "I'm not gay!" their identity implodes.

Homophobes cannot stop being homophobes; they are in the process self-fashioning---a psychotic and infantile one.

This is why we have to understand hatred as "active," and why you cannot convince an active hater not to hate. If someone is a conspicuous hater, then projective identification is funding the core of his or her being---she would cease to exist without the bad object, which is split off and then kept within the zone of his or her illusions of omnipotence. Pure hate is a projection zone and, in some sense, the object can become interchangeable ("if its not the gays, then it is the Jews"), but the object cannot be completely obliterated because it sustains the hating identity. This is how ideology gets its fuel (and in a sense, all I'm doing is explaining Athusser's understanding of interpellation from a Kleinian vantage)---affect, and very primitive or infantile ones at that!

One final point: haters seem to be more prominent among the very young and the very old. It seems to me the vast majority of people are indifferent to bad objects. For example, this von Brunn hater is 88 years old; he had always hated, but the psychotic fantasy of omnipotence---his toddler tantrum---didn't occur until the November of his years. I've also noticed, in my own family, that at least one person seems to get more racist the older he gets. I do not remember growing up with racist people in the least, and can even remember my parents teaching me lessons of tolerance. Now when I go home, however, I hear lots of racial slurs and growing fantasies about the "spics" and "Koreans" taking over the world. I've been personally baffled by this creeping transformation, but its clear to me the hatred has become "active" in that it is cycling to prop an identity that has been slowly sinking into a mid-to-late life depression.

well hung

Music: Between Interval: The Edge of a Fairytale (2009)

This weekend was a lovely mix of work and friendship. I attended a beautiful wedding reception on Saturday, followed by the Austin Air Sex Finals with some folks at the Alamo. Christopher popped by on Sunday, and we had a leisurely visit (with a fun visit to Shangri-La, hardly a natural paradise but certainly a good place for conversation). I've also been working on a speech I've been asked to give tonight at my lodge's annual Festive Board, a formal black-tie dinner with lots of toasts and speeches celebrating fellowship. Last year I spoke on the topic of Masonry's oral tradition. This year is a follow up, a defense of our secrecy. I cannot share the whole speech, but I thought I'd post a teaser, per usual on work in progress:

On the Well Hung Tongue,
Or
An Understanding of the Esoteric in Freemasonry

Brethren, it is my distinct pleasure to speak before you again at our annual festive board, an exclusive meeting intended for a certain ear---an open or catholic ear, to be more precise. Many of you will recall that last year I argued that speech was to the nourishment of the ear as food was to the mouth and body. A festive board is a total feeding, if you will, of bodies and minds, of eating and saying, of digesting and hearing. Tonight I intend to expand my argument about the importance of speech to an analysis of its counterpart: silence. Or to put the matter differently, tonight I shall argue that the counterpart to Masonic speech is a certain willful silence, a silence most of us understand as the keeping of secrets. Because the Masonic obligation all of us have taken-not once, not twice, but three times-is fundamentally a promise to never reveal the signs, tokens, and passwords of each degree, I take it as axiomatic that a certain willful silence is just as important to our fraternity as speech.

Of course, by suggesting that Masonic silence is just as important as Masonic speech-and here I mean principally the ritual and catechism-I do not mean to suggest silence in an ordinary sense. Silence in Freemasonry is willful and contemplative; for example, from time to time, sadly, we have silent moments to reckon with the dead and dying. Silence is symbolic, since the absence of speech is a reminder that we are all united by a coming silence of our own. Yet Masonic silence is also a recognition of the obligation, in a sense the sonorous trace of what was once the blindfold of a candidate.

I am beginning, however, to get ahead of myself. So let me simply state, at the outset, that tonight I offer you an argument, an argument with which you are invited to agree or disagree. In fact, I would be honored with open disagreement, as this is what the original speculative lodges were created to protect; in the 18th century men went to the lodge to talk about ideas that may not please the king or pope-ideas like the pros and cons of republican democracy. Nevertheless, my argument is this: the dialectic between speech and silence--that is, the movement from one to the other, the shifting from the saying to the unsaid---is the cornerstone of esoteric work. Esotericism cannot be understood simply as the oral transmission of the catechism. Rather, esotericism must be understood as a kind of dynamic, a kind of logic, that ceaselessly moves from speech to silence. This movement includes the telling and keeping of secrets, but this movement is also between men, good men who are permitted to pass seated men and who are, in the end, raised in a reckoning with death. Movement between that which is present and absent, that which is said and unsaid, those who are in the know and those who are not, those who are blind and those who can see, those who hear jibberish and those who hear meaning, the movement between life and death, in other words, is central to understanding the esoteric.

I will also argue that, by definition, the esoteric work of Masonry requires us to be mute in respect to some teachings and modes of self-recognition. Of course, there are, in my view, a large number of Masonic truths and teachings that are NOT secret that many believe are, in fact, secret---and we'll get to that too. However, we do have secrets and are required-or as I shall suggest, are unavoidably compelled-to remain silent about them when among non-Masons. Unfortunately, owing to the pressures of popular culture and the misguided pursuit of publicity for its own sake, a number of prominent Masons have been disavowing esotericism and its mechanism of secrecy as a synonym for the occult. I shall return to the perils of recent Masonic publicity shortly, as I think it poses the most serious threat to the Craft, though, as I shall also soon discuss, this has been the since the inception of speculative Masonry.

In any event, to make my case the remainder of my talk is organized into three parts. In the first part, I shall discuss the esoteric tradition and define what it is. After defining the esoteric, I will then move to a discussion of secrecy and its relationship to elitism. To confront the elitism inherent in the esoteric is to confront the largest paradox of our fraternity: equality through privilege. Finally, I will turn my attention to recent attempts by very prominent Masons to downplay our esoteric traditions in what is, I think, a shift from republicanism to outright populism, of which I am unabashedly if not righteously against.

THE MASONIC ESOTERIC TRADITION

As a kind of self-evidence, I begin by telling a secret. That secret is the full title of my talk tonight. I confess I withheld part of the title from Brother Sterzing for fear that y'all might get the wrong idea. The full title is this: "On the Well Hung Tongue, or, An Understanding of the Esoteric in Freemasonry." Of course, in the parlance of the young, rightfully vocal and liberated women of our time, a well hung tongue is a much different desideratum than it was for our 18th century brothers. Even less than a century ago, the word "tongue" was a synonym for speech, and especially speech that carried information about a person. For example, you've all heard of a candidate "coming under the tongue of good report." Consider this excerpt from a now defunct catechism as it was known in 1723 and published in a British newspaper titled, The Flying Post:

QUESTION: Is there a Key to your Lodge?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: What is't?
ANSWER: A well hung Tongue.
QUESTION: Where is it Kept?
ANSWER: In an Ivory Box between my Teeth, or under the Lap of my Liver, where the Secrets of my Heart are not.
QUESTION: Is there a chain to it?
ANSWER: Yes.
QUESTION: How long is it?
ANSWER: As long as from my Tongue to my Heart.

Today we no longer speak of a "hung tongue," but apparently it was a central concept to the earliest recorded catechism---this being the first of what would become a floodtide of subsequent exposures. A hung tongue, of course, was one that was put away, a tongue that did not wag, a tongue incapable of telling the secrets that it swore to keep. Ironically, the more our 18th and 19th century Brethren stressed the importance and necessity of a hung tongue, the more and more were bookmakers, pamphleteers, and eventually newspaper publishers anxious to expose the Masonic ritual and catechism. In a very real sense, the history of Masonry is the history of the unhung tongue!

The well hung tongue, however, is not simply about keeping one's obligation. Metaphorically, the well hung tongue is the door to the outer chamber of the Masonic temple-or better, to the outer door of our Masonic university. The promise to keep a secret is the promise to participate in the esoteric, and yes, it is properly understood as an initiation into the occult tradition.

. . . .

it's synth-pop friday!

GET CONFUSED

digitizing the life neurotic

Music: Loney, Dear: Loney, Noir (2005)

Watering the garden this morning, I thought to take some photographs. The garden has grown from when I first planted everything a little over a month ago: just compare this April 25th shot to today's shot. I've moved a few things, but clearly things are growing. I harvested two tomatoes a few days ago. I worry the zucchini I planted will not bear fruit, as I've yet to see a bee. The peppers are just starting to bloom (three varieties, and this year no habanero!). During my mother's visit last week, she bought me a couple of hanging plants. I'm sitting on the patio as I type this; it's 85 degrees but there is a gentle breeze. I'm trying to enjoy the garden before July gets here and burns everything up. I'll try to remember to take a photo then, when the heat of summer has killed everything. We are in the September of Austin's garden season. Here is the full gallery.

A lot has happened these past few weeks, and I've found myself impulsively grabbing the camera. School finished up and I threw a dance party. A few buddies visited and left. Then, glorious James popped by for a few, and this was followed by E!, who had a remarkably beautiful and intimate wedding. Then my mother dropped in for a visit for five days, and then I DJ-ed a "last hurrah" party at Dale and Hoa's much beloved gathering place (they sold their house, in anticipation of leaving Austin next year). On Sunday, I attended a colleague's baby shower, and then hooked up with some peeps for the Alamo's "Air Sex Dark Horse Final Rounds," which was hilarious. Finally, on Monday I got to see Jer and Sal's new behbee, Kellar!

In retrospect, here on the eve of school starting again, it's been an intense few weeks, and much of this has involved someone else's significant life events. In the lull between marriages and babies and teaching class tomorrow (and another wedding this weekend), I've been beset with the strange feeling of calm: what do I do with this calm?

I garden.

And write.

And reflect.

In light of the excitement and love and belonging of the past few weeks, writing and gardening are admittedly unsatisfying substitutes. These are beautiful, in their own ways, of course---ways that cannot really be digitized. I want to say that beauty is analogical, that the fantasy of presence is a repetition of sorts, that it is nothing born anew from a trace or coordinate.

There are events. I think about my work as a critic and teacher, and realize I am a satellite. I should put down the camera for a change.

my favorite bush is covered

on postmodern racism

Music: Iron & Wine: Around the Well (2009)

For many, many years I resisted using the term "postmodern" because I thought it was a placeholder word for the many ways in which modernity was realizing itself. I thought at the heart of modernity was a certain dream or fantasy---a moment, say, signified by those futuristic commercials for eyeglasses that adjust their tint to the amount of available sunlight. While I do prefer to think of the postmodern as a temporal conception---a kind of futurity ensconced principally in film, architecture, and high theory---I have become more comfortable using the label to describe novel shifts in the popular imaginary, especially shifts hastened by a change in the forces of production. In the context of the contemporary media cycle---a cycle that is content to broadcast low quality, YouTube videos as archival footage, for example---I think the nomination process for Sonia Sotomayor is generating a discourse that one is hard-pressed to term anything other than "postmodern." Something has changed, and our dominant U.S. rhetorical theories are incapable of describing this change.

I'm thinking, principally, of how certain "conservative" (read, not conservative at all, but something quite new) talking heads are calling Sotomayor a "racist." Newt Gingrich made the claim first, but yesterday on the political shows Rush Limbaugh was given much airplay for his follow-up:

Rush "Are You Getting This AP?" Limbaugh is certainly amplifying his remarks for attention: "Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one...to the U.S. Supreme Court," said Limbaugh. "So now he's got a hack. He got a party hack that he's put on the court that's likely to be confirmed. . . . We are confronting a radical assault on this nation, a radical assault today on the U.S. Supreme Court, and moderates in the Republican party are distracting our ability to organize the opposition." The argument has three claims: (1) Sotomayor is a racist; and (2) her appointment is part of a larger, "liberal" conspiracy to take over the U.S. government; (3) Republican moderates are letting it happen.

Of course, the claim that Sotomayor is a racist is simply preposterous and is very difficult to take seriously. The judge claimed that her experience as a Hispanic influences how she thinks. My experience as a southern white boy in bumblefuck Georgia in a low-income/working class family certainly influences how I think. The second claim is also ridiculous: what I see is neoliberalism back in the house a la Bill Clinton. Sotomayor's record, for the record, is fairly conservative (or to use the MSM word, "moderate") from what I'm reading. Her record on free speech is pretty much a bummer, and her stance on abortion-related issues is uncertain. I'm not particularly thrilled about her appointment, myself.

The postmodern element of these attacks, however, is located in the third claim. Limbaugh and others are arguing that moderates are playing it too safe. The truth is that Limbaugh and Gingrich are saying this vituperative stuff so that moderates don't have to. Politically, failing to confirm Sotomayor is akin to suicide, and the Republichristians know this. Gingrich and Limbaugh, however, are functioning something like an airbladder, keeping a certain cultural agenda afloat while so-called moderates work to make the confirmation hearings as fair as possible. There is, in other words, a certain symbiosis in this rhetoric---one that was made plain when, for a brief month period, Limbaugh was half-jokingly hailed as the leader of the GOP.

People of color are now in prominent positions of power and spectacle. It is astonishing to me that the "race card" is still being dealt for political labor, although I probably should confess that the idealistic reality of the academy---our active working toward equality---shields me from the harsher, brute reality of non-academic careers. I suppose this absurd rhetoric is proof positive there is no such thing as post-racial politics. Same as it ever was . . . but with one difference: in the days of acceptable racism, one would use racial slurs without a thought. Today, the racists exercise their racism by calling the racialized Other racists.

love vigilantes

Music: Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)

We know how this one endures; it's a blank stare, on repeat.

the stupidity of university bashing

Music: Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life (1976)

Stupidity is commonly defined as "lacking intelligence or common sense." Bryan sent me a link to yet another editorial calling for the end of the university as we know it, demonstrating both a lack of intelligence and common sense, in equal measure. Let me address each in turn.

Elizabeth Young, on behalf of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, argues that "university research harms student learning." This is a claim of fact, and an implied causal claim. In support of her claim, she argues:

1. "Research" provides society with "very little, if any benefit."
2. Only "13%" of research occurs at universities; the rest is privately funded. (Corollary: this means that government "doesn't need to fund research at all").
3. Texas spent $9 billion dollars on research investment, with only 8.3 million return. (Corollary: research is a bad investment).
4. The average university professor spends 21% of her time with students; the rest is spent on research and administrative duties.

In sum: research provides little benefit to society, most of it is privately funded, there is little rate of return, and it distracts professors from teaching. "Let’s change the incentives at our public universities. Don’t increase funding for research; enact policies that will shift professors’ focus back to their original mission – educating university customers."

Hopefully with this description the problems of this argument are made obvious, but just in case, let's go for the lack of common sense first: what is "research" here? Presumably we're talking medical, biological, computer, and this sort of thing---since that's what the MSM usually mean by research (not, for example, what I do; again, the report she relies on specifies journal articles for limited audiences, but Liz is using a much broader brush). Poor Elizabeth could use a good university education in argument and policy-making, because she would understand that it's important to define one's terms.

Now, to say that there is very little, if any benefit from university research programs is patently silly. How many cures for disease would I need to mention before "very little" becomes "very huge?" I can imagine Lizzy responding: but that research was privately funded! I would respond: where did the researchers learn to do their research? Where are their labs located? Hmm?

Furthermore, one wonders where this "conservative" got her statistics. I don’t have time to research them, but there is a contradiction with her initial parenthetical assertion that university research is "largely taxpayer funded" and the fact that external funding makes the research at universities go, not taxpayer dollars.

We can easily dismiss Lizzy's argument if we go straight for its underlying reasoning: the university is a business that is designed to serve its customers. As a business, the university should be focused primarily on teaching. If we argue, however, that the university is not a business and that students are not customers, then her argument makes no sense. The "rate of return" isn't an index of success. Rather, innovation, expanding our knowledge, curing disease, solving social problems, teaching critical thinking---these are the goods internal to the practice of a university. Money is an external good, it is what allows the internal goods to thrive. Money should not, however, drive the university mission.

If you look at the warrant, here, we find Lizzy in quite the pickle. The good she emphasizes, teaching, is internal to the practice of university life. But without research, what would we teach? Universities need both good teaching and good research to support their missions. And isn't part of the university's mission to teach future, private sector researchers how to research?

Now, how about the "lack of intelligence?" Lizzy opposes house bill 51, on the grounds that it contributes to "more research." The bill passed by a landslide. Why was there little opposition, even from Republichristians? Perhaps because the bill had nothing to do with what Lizzy said it did. I actually read the bill this morning, which really was a baby-step in support of a bigger deal, senate bill 1560. That bill should have been the one Lizzy read.

What happened is this. Lizzy read Rick O'Donnell's opinion piece and bought it whole, without actually researching (doh!) the bills in question. O'Donnell, of course, is a senior fellow at her advocacy group, so she's citing her own group's research as evidence. Regardless, had she read SB 1560, what she would have found is that the our congress-people are trying to create a "National Research University Fund" to promote state universities that are on the up-and-up. The idea here is to encourage emerging schools like UT-El Paso, UT- San Antonio, UT- Dallas, UT- Arlington, the University of Houston, Texas Tech, and the University of North Texas to pursue a more prominent research status nationwide. Basically, the fund is an incentive for each of these schools to raise their own endowments (sort of like matching funds) and produce more Ph.D. students. It's sort of like the Corporation of Public Broadcasting: each school must meet a threshold before they are entitled to research funds. Much of these monies will be for infrastructure, too. Finally, although the fund will receive monies from the state, it will also be for private and charitable donations.

The irony of all this is that part of the forces behind the push to have more top-tier researcher institutions is financial: R1 institutions bring in industry, develop communities, and so forth. The same financial logic that informs Lizzy's editorial is behind the bill she critiques.

I don't think there is any way we can resist the increasing corporatization of the academy, and much of this is done in the name of business ("external funding," especially). I think forcing professors to teach more and research less, however, would destroy the university entirely. Some of us actually teach better when we teach less; we bring our research back to the classroom. One activity informs the other. Balance is key.

formal longing and the singular plot

Music: Spiritualized: The Complete Works, Volume One (1993)

It is wedding season, which means I've been thinking about Louis Althusser. I DJ weddings. I officiate nuptials. I attend that private publicity of pact-making. Last night, fortunately, I was a guest at a wedding between two lovely people whom I adore; it was the first wedding I've been to in two years in which I wasn't working. I had a great time.

In the thick of fun, however, the critical mind never shuts-off. As a number of scholars will tell you, it's difficult for many of us to avoid thinking critically about highly affective, symbolic moments. And so, as my friends and I tried to push back the tears the beautiful bride's quivering voice inspired, I found myself also thinking: nothing says interpellation like "I do," and strangely in a funerary tone. Caused to ponder a future, we face death and, over that unpleasant certainty, we make promises to others on our steady march. All speech pacts are made in relation to death.

So mote it be.

Overhearing such promises one can develop a lump in the throat and be tempted to sob; I thought about my tearing eyes and how my happiness for my friends was also in some sense un-self-reflectively mournful. This emotional tone is not simply the cultural bromide of two folks who now don't have to "die alone" (or, well, at least one of them won't have to); it has something to do with the completion of form, the packaging of desire into convention. It is curiously a return to the tonic. From a very early age the singular story of life provides little deviance from this plot-line: the couple unto death.

The language of life plots---and I mean to evoke both meanings here---is taken from Lauren Berlant's work on public feelings and intimacies. In a special issue of Critical Inquiry on "intimacy," Berlant argues that intimacy on the way to convention is really a kind of "wild thing" spanked into behaving through ideology:

Contradictory desires mark the intimacy of daily life: people want to be both overwhelmed and omnipotent, caring and aggressive, known and incognito. These polar energies get played out in the intimate zones of everyday life and can be recognized in psychoanalysis, yet mainly they are seen not as intimacy but as a danger to it. Likewise, desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws and stable spaces of culture in which to clarify and to cultivate them. What happens to the energy of attachment when it has no designated place? To the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon?

I think they get a Sunday. And a blog. They get the day after Christmas, or the day right after you've finished writing your dissertation. They get to occupy "the critique."

The couple unto death is a life plot all of us have, as a song of life, a certain melody that has made itself a raging earwig. I say to my shrink all that huffing and acid I did as a teen purged the plot from my innermost, but she often reminds me this is not true (especially when I have realized I have fallen in love, even if its with more than one person). It's not simply that there are alternatives, some better, some worse; rather, the couple unto death is part of who we are, as subjects. We cannot help ourselves; we must enjoy the plot because its the only one we got; there is nothing else. There is nothing behind the plot that it obscures. That is, there is no-thing. And no-thing---Das Ding?---is awe-ful. The pact is an admission of this no-thing, but the way we, as a culture, have attempted to create an affective net so that we can go live, in person.

And everyone is thinking it, perhaps not consciously so, but where there are tears, there are love and death. The couple unto death is neither good nor bad; I'm not critiquing the plot or the conventional way it gets elaborated (marriage). I'm just saying the formal declaration of the couple is a mournful scriptedness.

For example: the couple heralds the demise of the group (couples always threaten solidarity); Larry Rickels teaches us that you cannot understand the failure of social movements without recourse to a coupling. I would also insist that with any couple, there is always an invisible third person, too---but I won't go into the third today---the Other One, the body over which the pact is made, the altar.

The trouble with the couple unto death is that I've seen the story unravel because there was no affect driving the narrative. The narrative was sort of driving itself. That wasn't the case with last night's couple; you could feel it thick in the room. And like a virus, their true love started to infect the singularities.

Last night, for the second time, I spoke with a beautiful woman from Stockholm, a woman with the kind of idealism and personal politics that makes me want to cook her dinner (not possible, however, since she lives in Sweden). At times she had glassy eyes, when I had the courage to look into them. It is easy to fall into a kind of love at a wedding.

In short, the couple unto death is an inescapable plot because there is nothing else.