Well, thank goodness somebody’s finally thinking about the children.

In reality, the question of whether professors should bring their .45s and glock nines to faculty meetings has very little bearing on student safety.  But it would definitely raise the stakes for the discussion of whether to revise the Literature Before 1800 requirement of the English major.

h/t.

UPDATE:   via Instapundit:  Reader Christopher Johnson writes: “I’m guessing the ‘she’s a human’ part won’t get talked about much in the MSM. But if she had been a District 9 alien it’d lead every evening news cast for two months.”

The problem—if there is one—is that time is tight, and the party will need to move on several fronts at once.  What follows is not an exhaustive list, but rather a series of first steps Democrats will need to take if they are to remain a meaningful majority party.

Scaling back the gay agenda

The voters of Massachusetts know only too well the damage wrought by the Obama Administration’s relentless pursuit of radical GLBTQ policies.  Tuesday’s exit polls revealed that 77 percent of voters were “opposed” or “strongly opposed” to the Obama Administration’s promotion of arranged gay marriages in which prospective partners were “chosen” (or, more accurately, assigned) by a lottery conducted by each state’s Secretary of State.  Opposition to Obama’s “Queering Coupledom” initiative rose to over 90 percent when voters were informed that the program allowed state officials to dissolve existing heterosexual marriages and re-assign husbands and wives to state-sanctioned same-sex couples.

The lesson is clear.  From the moment he chose Harvey Fierstein to deliver the invocation at his inauguration to the week he conducted a special White House “webinar” on Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal, Barack Obama has put straight America on notice that he considers the United States to be a Queer Nation.  It is only fitting that the electoral rebuke to Obama’s insistence on the “fierce urgency of queering America now” came in the form of a virile heterosexual Republican who looks pretty darn good with his shirt off.

Full employment and empty arms

Nothing says “socialist maniac” like a full-employment policy, and Obama’s is no exception.  When the markets bottomed out last March, Obama could have taken the opportunity to restore confidence in the world’s financial system and to keep faith with America’s hardworking bank executives and hedge fund managers.  Instead, Obama declared war on the very people he needed to cultivate as allies, announcing the creation of a “Ten Million Good Jobs” program to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure—freeways, tunnels, bridges, high-speed rail, and, most controversially, low-income housing.  Coupled with Obama’s decision to nationalize the banking system and freeze the assets of global financial services firms Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the “Ten Million Good Jobs” program sounded to many ordinary Americans like a homegrown version of China’s Great Leap Forward, complete with sham production quotas and widespread famine.  It was not long before the Obama Administration’s obsessive drive to reduce the unemployment rate to zero met with significant pushback from voters who understand that freedom isn’t free.  Additionally, Democrats did themselves no favors by ridiculing the GOP’s “alternative budget” last spring, even though the budget clearly promised lower taxes, reforms to Medicare and Medicaid, universal access to affordable health coverage, and limits on federal spending.  Americans may not understand all the details of the federal budget process, but they know rude behavior when they see it, and they know they didn’t send their elected representatives to Washington to get their jollies by mocking their opponents’ proposals for economic recovery.

℞ for health care reform

No issue enrages the Democrats’ far-left base more than health care, and nothing reveals the Obama Administration’s craven capitulation to that base more readily than its take-no-prisoners approach to the issue.  From the outset, when the President himself declared that he would “brush off” skeptics of his plan and would not “suffer fools gladly” in negotiations, the Obama Administration has charged into this sensitive political arena with all the subtlety of the Tazmanian Devil.  Congressional leaders were left out of the loop, as White House advisors told them “we’re not making the mistakes of 1993 again—we’re just going to ram this thing through whether you like it or not.” Give me single-payer or give me death was the rallying cry, and no one should have been surprised when, last August, many voters heard that slogan as a coded call for “death panels” that would oversee a brutal, heartless regime of healthcare rationing for the elderly and disabled.  Fortunately, widely respected healthcare experts such as Betsy McCaughey and Megan McArdle exposed Obama’s Eurosocialistcare for what it was, and the Tea Party Patriots™ were born.  In less than a year after the first national Tea Party™ rally, Scott Brown, Tea Party Patriot™ in good standing, was elected to the Senate.  The symbolism couldn’t be any more evocative: Brown’s election not only renews the original Tea Party revolt in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it also allows ordinary taxpaying Americans to dance on Ted Kennedy’s grave.

Historians will long wonder what might have happened—and what real social progress might have been achieved—if only Obama had sought a moderate, bipartisan solution to America’s healthcare crisis.

Executive power and its discontents

Prudent constitutionalists have been taken aback by Obama’s slash-and-burn attitude toward federal appointees.  Ordinarily, this would be a wonky, inside-baseball consideration, but Obama’s excesses have registered even with Joe and Judy Six-Pack.  The appointment of Maulana Ron Karenga as Secretary of Education was a warning sign, followed swiftly by “Operation Blackout,” the Obama Administration’s plan to stack the federal judiciary with ACORN-approved attorneys and underqualified campaign workers whose only interview question was “what is it about Barack Obama that makes you want to serve him?”  As longtime Democratic pollster and advisor Patrick Caddell acknowledged in August, Obama’s bench-packing amounted to “a gross violation of the idea of an independent judiciary and a responsible executive branch.”

The politics of vengeance

Obama’s vendetta against the Bush Administration achieved at least one of its goals: it destroyed what little was left of comity and civility in Washington.  Announcing, in only the first week of his Presidency, that he would “not rest until Dick Cheney hangs in The Hague,” Obama proceeded to embark on a program of vilification and vituperation more suited to a banana republic than to the world’s only superpower.  “Dick Cheney was precisely the wrong target for Obama,” notes veteran Democratic advisor Lanny Davis.  “Americans don’t see him as their enemy.  Americans see him as a kind of crazy old Uncle Fester—but an Uncle Fester who kept them safe.”  Obama’s determination to “root out torture,” “bring John Yoo to justice,” and “get to the bottom of those fishy Gitmo suicides” alienated independent voters across the country, who understand intuitively why the Bush Administration had to take aggressive measures to stop terrorism after inheriting the tragedy of September 11, 2000.  “Let’s not bicker and argue about who tortured who,” wrote Democratic advisor Dan Gerstein last April.  “We need to look forward, not backward.”  But the White House would hear none of it, and now it reaps the whirlwind.

Clearly, the Democrats have a great deal of rebuilding to do.  The loss in Massachusetts should serve as a wake-up call to the wing of the Democratic Party that wants the federal government to overreach, overspend, and overprosecute.  Let’s hope that this time, there’s someone in the White House ready and willing to answer the phone.

x-posted

Should Down Syndrome Be Cured?

The guest post here on Friday—about the birth of Cash Van Rowe during a blizzard, and the jolting news that he had Down syndrome—led many of you to leave comments for his parents, assuring them that the road ahead was a journey they would cherish.

But what if Cash’s Down syndrome could be cured—or, more precisely, be mitigated?

News out of Stanford University late last year hinted that this might one day be possible. Researchers from its medical school and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital explored why children born with Down syndrome do not start life developmentally delayed but rather fall behind as they get older. By using mice that were genetically engineered to mimic Down syndrome, they found that neural memory deficits prevent such children from collecting learned experiences, and that they could improve memory and cognition by medically boosting norepinephrine signaling in the brain.

The study (which was published in the November issue of the journal Science Translational Medicine) and the accompanying announcement by Stanford hinted at an eventual cure. “If you intervene early enough, you will be able to help kids with Down syndrome to collect and modulate information,” said Ahmad Salehi, a neurologist and the primary author of the study. “Theoretically, that could lead to an improvement in cognitive functions in these kids.”

There are already drugs on the market that boost norepinephrine signaling. They are used to treat depression and A.D.H.D., and Salehi expressed the hope that his findings would soon lead to trials of such drugs on babies with Down syndrome.

Good news, right? Not necessarily. The announcement of a potential breakthrough (which, it should be noted, is still mostly theoretical and well in the future) has led to some soul-searching among parents of children with Down syndrome who wonder how much the presence of an extra chromosome makes their children who they are.

On the Web site Contrarian, Jenn Power, a Canadian mother of twin boys with Down syndrome (and the daughter-in-law of the Web site’s author), is described as greeting the news with tears. Explaining her reaction, she wrote:

As you know, I have many years of history supporting people with intellectual disabilities. Through my connections with these remarkable people, both personal and professional, I have become more and more convinced of the fundamental human dignity present in each person, the vital importance of diversity among the human race, and the particular and irreplaceable role that folks with intellectual disabilities play in creating a more humane, compassionate, and hospitable society. It is clear to me that, as a society, we need what people with intellectual disabilities have to offer.

Before we welcomed Josh and Jacob into our family, I might have had a much easier time responding to this particular piece of research. But as a mother of two little boys with Down syndrome, boys whose identity, personality, appearance, is linked to that extra chromosome, my ability to rationally argue my point is seriously compromised. I find it hard to read this article without hearing a judgment on the value of my children, children who have transformed my life and the lives of many others—for the better—with the help of an extra chromosome.

In the debate surrounding disability, there is an assumption that we all agree on a definition of what is good, what is better, what is the ideal. Who decided that smarter is better? Who decided that independence takes precedence over community? Who decided that both the individual and the society are better off without Down syndrome? I would assert that something important is lost as our genetic diversity diminishes.

I would also assert that people with disabilities may not themselves choose to be ‘cured.’ The bioethicist and disability activist Gregor Wolbring, who happens to have no legs as a result of the effects of thalidomide, asserts that, if given the choice, he would want to remain ‘disabled.’ He feels it gives him an evolutionary advantage, even as it allows him to weed out the ‘jerks’ who treat him differently as a result of his disability. He poses the compelling question: ‘What exactly is the problem? Is the problem that I have no legs, or is the problem that I live in a leg-dominated society?’ Similarly, what exactly is the problem with Down syndrome? Is the problem that my boys have a low I.Q., or that they live in an I.Q.-dominated society?

I believe that our lives are lived not only for ourselves but for others. My experience with people with intellectual disabilities is that their lives enrich the lives of others, and of the world around them, in significant and irreplaceable ways. I see this everyday in the school where my boys are in Grade Primary. I see how their presence brings out compassion, kindness, even tenderness, in the older kids at the school. How much money do we pour into anti-bullying strategies? Why do we not see the important ways that kids with disabilities help to reduce bullying in schools?

In the end, for me, this all comes back to people. Josh, Jacob, Mary, Cathy, Kate, Janet … these people have Down syndrome. These people are my family, my friends, my teachers. Without the benefit of that extra chromosome, they would not be who they are. Their intellectual ‘impairment’ gives them an insight and an emotional intelligence and maturity that I can only aspire to. They do not need a needle in their brain to make them more functional, to help them find their car keys. What they need is a society that values what they have to offer. I would like to think that I can be a part of creating that society.

The Powers asked Salehi for his thoughts, and he did not disagree. He wrote:

The goal of our research is not to change the personality of a person with Down syndrome but rather to help them lead more independent lives.

There are many aspects of people with Down syndrome that we should consider a blessing. Their positive interactions with others, their cheerfulness and affection, and their nonjudgmental attitude are just a few examples. The question whether all people with Down syndrome need some kind of treatment is entirely personal and completely depends on the individual situation. Nevertheless, not every child with Down syndrome is as lucky as Jenn’s children. There are many places in the world that may not look at Down syndrome the way that Jenn does. For these children, finding a way to even partially restore cognition or preventing further deterioration in their learning and memory would be extremely important and helpful in their very competitive societies.

On the one hand, parents of children with disabilities are emotionally well served to find a silver lining in that disability. It makes it easier to get through the day if you focus on what life has given TO your child, rather than what has been taken away. On the other hand, optimism is not merely denial. It is based on an intimate familiarity with a condition and a firsthand knowledge of what life looks like from inside the disability, looking out.

If there were a cure for your child that would fundamentally change who he is, would you welcome it?

And then come dozens of epic-fail comments, in which the overwhelming majority of Ms. Belkin’s readers insist that parents who are skeptical of “curing” Down syndrome are selfish, irresponsible, deluded, and even colonialist.  Colonialist!  That’s a new one.

Look, before we go any further here, let me start by saying that the title of my post is supposed to be every bit as provocative and misleading as the title of Ms. Belkin’s. I am not against cures for things. As I have pointed out many times in disability-studies debates, the discourse of the “cure” is most controversial with regard to Deaf culture, partly because of the long history of “oralism” (which involved more than a century of trying to stamp out sign language) and partly because there are myriad social contexts (you’re reading one now!) in which it is no disability at all to be deaf.  But even in the most cure-averse precincts of disability studies, there is no Polio Restoration Society, no Smallpox Appreciation League.  And hey, even though I am very, very, very skeptical that there could ever be a cure for Alzheimer’s, would I be happy if we discovered the magic Alzheimer’s-B-Gon mineral on the planet Pandora?  You betcha!  I would even be in favor of mining for it.  As I’ve tried to tell people over the years, Jamie has a phenomenal memory, and he collects learned experiences better than many nondisabled people I know.  I can’t really bear the thought of him living through the experience of having that wonderful faculty eroded gradually and inexorably, to his complete and utter confusion.

But there are two important points being elided totally ignored here.  The first is that we need to understand that disability cannot be collapsed into disease, and disease is not synonymous with disability.  Some diseases are disabling, yes; others are potentially disabling (diabetes, Graves, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis) but can be palliated with medication.  And most disabilities have no disease etiologies whatsoever.  Applying the cure/disease model to those disabilities is a category error, and fundamentally mucks up our thinking about how to accommodate disability in society as best we can.

When I’m in one of my black-humor moods, the kind into which I was plunged last night upon reading that comment thread, I tend to say, “the reason all the T-shirts say ‘RACE FOR THE CURE’ is that ‘RACE FOR THE REASONABLE ACCOMMODATION’ doesn’t fit neatly on one side of the shirt.”  By which I mean, of course, that the discourse of the cure is everywhere, and the discourse of reasonable accommodation, so far as I can see, is understood only by those people who already know something about disability, US disability law, ramps, kneeling buses, in-class paraprofessionals, and job coaches.  It’s almost like a kind of sign language, spoken only by those who are already disability-literate.

So yes, some things should be cured, and their cure would be an unambiguous species-wide good.  Tay-Sachs disease, for example.  Alzheimer’s.  Perhaps Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, too.  But Down syndrome and deafness aren’t anything like these.  So when I see people saying (and this is a comment recommended, at last count, by 60 readers!),

Are babies who are born with cleft palates fundamentally who they are so we should not use surgery to fix them? Are babies born with a genetic disorders such as celiac disease, Tay-Sachs or Sickle-cell be lft to suffer because to do anything would compromise “who they are?” This is ridiculous. If there’s something you can do to help your children get along better in the world you do it. Anything else is about you and is fundamentally selfish.

I have to say, are you seriously comparing Down syndrome to fatal conditions? Have you the faintest idea what in the world you’re talking about?  Sure, you should do things to help your children get along better in the world.  Janet and I do those things too.  That’s why we watch what Jamie eats, and try to make sure he stays active in swimming and basketball and tang soo do (and lately, 45-minute workouts at the gym with his father).  That’s why Janet downloads all kinds of music onto his iPod and talks to him about the differences between rock and folk and punk and soul and blues.  That’s why we buy him all the art books he asks for, from Leonardo to Edward Hopper.  That’s why we hire a tutor for an hour per week to help him with his second-year French homework, because even though he’s mastered the verb endings for the past participles of regular verbs in the passé composé (é for verbs ending in “er,” i for “ir” verbs, u for “re” verbs, and don’t tell me you didn’t know that already), he has trouble with the irregular verbs and more trouble understanding why “aller” takes être rather than avoir as its auxiliary.  And we do all this, believe it or not, without medical intervention.  We simply try to build on his strengths and compensate for his weaknesses (he still has no idea how to spend or keep track of money, which is either a disability or a qualification for an eight-figure bonus, depending on whether you have Down syndrome or a job on Wall Street).

The second thing is that the entire premise of the discussion here is wrong, wrong, wrong, and the wrongness starts in Ms. Belkin’s second paragraph.  Once again with feeling:

But what if Cash’s Down syndrome could be cured—or, more precisely, be mitigated?

Yeah, well, so much for that “more precisely.”  Because once the word “cure” appears—as it does, unfortunately, in Ms. Belkin’s concluding question to her readership—the game is up, and the brain shuts down.  Of course cures are good!  Only crazy selfish irresponsible people are against cures.

But as the great Allen Iverson once said, we’re talking about mitigation.  Not a cure, not a cure, not a cure, we’re talking about mitigation.  Mitigation.  Not a cure.  Not a cure.  I mean, how many times do I have to say it?  We’re talking about mitigation.  Not a cure.

Actually, it’s even more tenuous than that.  We’re talking about the potential for the mitigation of some aspects of Down syndrome.  Not a “cure.”

It isn’t until the 69th comment (recommended by only six readers!) that someone points this out.  Laura from Boston, you win the thread:

This really isn’t a question of curing Down Syndrome; it’s a question of mitigating certain aspects of Down Syndrome to make it easier for those with DS to live independent, healthy lives.

See, we’re talking about potential mitigation.  Not a cure!  And mitigation can take many forms—including reasonable accommodation!  That’s right, folks, when you make it easier for people with disabilities to get around in society, whether they have mobility impairments or intellectual disabilities, you are mitigating the effects of their disabilities.  And who could possibly be against that?  Clearly, the only people who oppose support services, vans, job coaches, widened doors and bathroom stalls, closed captioning, Braille, guide animals and handicapped-parking spaces are selfish, irresponsible, deluded, and even colonialist.  Let’s fix these broken people today!

And don’t forget to race for the reasonable accommodation while you’re at it.

(x-posted.)

Apparently that’s the inscription at the base of the new “young Barack Obama” statue recently unveiled in Jakarta—on a site that was once an athletic field used by Obama’s elementary school. In what appears to be a deliberate provocation to the American right, the young Obama holds in his left hand a crumpled copy of his Kenyan birth certificate, which according to the laws of Othercountriestan entitles him to Indonesian citizenship.

Rumors that the base of the statue contains hidden “death panels” are as yet unsubstantiated.

“We welcome the statue, which is designed to give Indonesian children the spirit to become President of the United States,” Central Jakarta Mayor Sylviana Murni said.

“There is a message through the young Obama statue that any child and anyone from any background can become President of the United States if they fight for it persistently—and make sure to destroy their original birth certificate,” she added.

Elsewhere in the world, Obama has recently met with a chillier reception.  In Oslo to accept the Nobel Escalation Prize, Obama has reportedly angered his Norwegian hosts by declining to attend a concert in his honor, meet with schoolchildren at City Hall, tour the Nobel Peace Center, and have lunch with King Harald V.

“The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king, especially when his royal chefs have prepared hamburgers specially dressed with the fancy Dijon mustard beloved by Obama.”

Meanwhile, back at home, Obama faces daunting challenges on every front, from unemployment to health care.  Aides say that Obama is considering a major address to the American people upon his return to the United States, calling for a “new era of translucency” in government.  “Transparency is a pain in the ass,” said one senior advisor known for his profanity-laced tirades.  “It’s like closing Guantanamo—it’s just too damn difficult.  So we looked around for the next best thing, and we hit upon translucency.  What we want, basically, is an administration with a scrim and a little back-lighting, where you can see shadowy shapes moving around but can’t tell exactly what they’re doing.  We think that’s the kind of government Americans need at this point in history.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, reached for comment, said that translucency would be an “unmitigated disaster for America” and that he personally would turn to dust and be scattered to the winds if ever he were to be struck by sunlight.

By having Catherine and Heathcliff audition for Twilight, that’s how.

(True story tangent: a few years ago I was riding Amtrak on my way to a Modern Language Association committee meeting.  From a nearby seat, a man in his mid-thirties asked whether I might be Michael Bérubé of the University of Illinois.  Startled, I said that I was indeed myself but had moved to Penn State in 2001.  He told me he had been a student of mine in an American lit survey class in the spring of 1990, acknowledging that 1990 was quite some time ago and that I probably wouldn’t remember him.  I admitted that I did not remember him by face, but could look up his name on this very device on the seatback tray in front of me, and promptly retrieved all the records from the class, including his.  He was flabbergasted, mostly in a good way, even though on my end the feat was no more remarkable than, say, writing out the alphabet.)

Needless to say, one significant difference between my files and my e-files is that I don’t really have to throw away any of the latter.  My first “professional” computer—purchased with the $2000 computer allowance I was given as a new assistant professor at Illinois—was an IBM PS/2 286, and it had an amazing twenty megabytes of storage on the hard drive.  (I see that these items are somewhat less expensive today.)  But after a couple of years, that wasn’t enough to hold all my course stuff, correspondence, miscellaneous detritus, and the manuscript of my first book, so when the book was published I deleted it from the hard drive.  It might still be on some 3.5” disks somewhere—I don’t know, because I haven’t seen a 3.5” disk in many years.  But that was probably the last time I deleted a manuscript.  Today, I have hundreds of these manuscript and protomanuscripty things sitting around, and I could have thousands more without straining my one-quindecillion-byte storage capacity even a teeny bit.  And so it is that I found an orphaned essay over the weekend, an essay I’m dragging out of the back of the e-closet and offering to you free of charge, just this once.

It was a whimsical piece of fluff for a major national magazine, and I wrote it about seven years ago.  But it was an assignment, not an over-the-transom thing, and the occasion was the publication of National Geographic’s survey of “geographic literacy.”  There were apparently some people who hoped that the events of 9/11 would have led Americans to learn a bit more about Othercountriestan, but they were deeply disappointed to find that in 2002, Americans were almost precisely as colossally ignorant of Othercountriestan as they had been in 1988.  I decided, however, not to take the obvious “9/11 taught us nothing” bait, and offer instead what I thought was a cute little hook in the final paragraph.  My editor liked it, but his editor considered it “evergreen” material, the kind of thing one cannot run even on the slowest news day when nothing is happening except for “Area Dog Bites Man Again.”  I’d thought that the final-graf hook was a pre-emptive answer to that complaint (which is why I thought it up!), but alas, it wasn’t.  I admit that most of the time, when an essay of mine gets rejected (and this happens with some frequency, you know), it’s because the essay sucks.  But this was one of the very few times when the essay didn’t clearly suck (though you may disagree!), so I wound up getting an odd consolation prize out of the experience: my editor passed me along to a friend who worked for Golf magazine, where I wound up writing two 900-word pieces five or six years ago.  (They didn’t like my second effort at all, really—I wanted to argue that the 1979 reformatting of the Ryder Cup, which pitted the US against Europe instead of  just UK/Ireland and led to Europe’s epochal victory in 1985—the first US loss in almost thirty years—provided the impetus for the creation of the European Union.  Not really, of course, but the point is that US postwar dominance of the Ryder Cup maps pretty well onto US postwar dominance of everything else, and maybe now the times they are a-changin’. Golf magazine wanted me to stick to predicting the outcome.  So that didn’t work.  But I loved writing about the Masters for them, and still hope someday to be sent to Augusta National on assignment.)

Anyway, here’s the poor orphaned thing.  It was called “Where in the World,” and I do hope you don’t mind my dredging it out of its probably-deserved obscurity.  I can’t help adding proudly that Jamie, then 11, did better on the geography test than 90+ percent of his American peers (preteen with Down syndrome pwns American public!).  Nick, then 16, did better than 99.99 percent of ‘em, but then, Nick is a former Geography Bee star, having made it to the 1997 Illinois state finals at the tender age of eleven.  I like it that my kids know stuff.

___

In November, the National Geographic Education Foundation released the results of its “2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey.”  18-to-24-year-olds in nine countries were tested by the survey—Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—along with 25-to-34-year-olds in the US.  And even for those of us who have long since grown accustomed to hearing that young Americans are four times more ignorant of everything than their peers elsewhere, the report is stupefying.

Where to start?  Thirty percent of US respondents could not locate the Pacific Ocean.  A meager thirteen percent recognized Iraq on a world map; one wonders whether there was any significant overlap between this group and the fourteen percent who could locate Israel. Fifty-eight percent knew that Afghanistan was the home base for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but only 17 percent could locate the actual home of that home base.  Astonishingly, every other nation in the survey outperformed the US on this question; 63 percent of Mexicans got it right, 70 percent of the French, and so on, all the way up to 84 percent for Great Britain and Sweden.  On a related front, 67 percent of French young adults, and 66 percent of Italians, knew that the disputed Kashmir region is disputed by India and Pakistan.  Thirty-six percent of Americans got that one.

Reports like these are now a routine part of the American cultural landscape; it may even be possible to say that the American public is reasonably well-informed about the fact that it cannot even identify the countries whose ten-year-olds clean our clocks in geography quizzes.  So, too, liberals’ and conservatives’ responses to such reports have become routine in turn.

The pattern is especially predictable when the issue is American history, and the pattern runs something like this: the Exasperated Educational Institute announces that 45 percent of American college students do not know in which century the American Civil War occurred, and another 23 percent do not know that there was a Civil War at all.  The William Bennett Foundation for a Solid Foundation blames the results on watered-down, “feelgood” college curricula and academic leftists’ disdain for objective knowledge.  The Association of Earnest Liberal Academics replies that students shouldn’t simply memorize names and dates; it’s more important for them to understand the origins of the Federal Reserve System and its relations to emerging global markets than to identify Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle on multiple-choice tests.

This is a plausible enough answer on its face.  Its only flaw is that earnest liberal academics like myself actually aren’t all that sure that most American college students understand the Federal Reserve System and its relations to anything.  So we sometimes fall back on our second line of argument, namely, that college students in 1964 or 1982 were every bit as ignorant as this year’s survey victims.  We’re usually right about this, and the Bill Bennett people are usually wrong in thinking that everything went downhill right around the time the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.  But rarely is it so depressing for an educator to be “right” about her students and fellow citizens.

What’s interesting about the National Geographic survey, however, is that there simply doesn’t seem to be a cogent strategy for explaining it away.  It’s quite impossible to argue that college-age Americans don’t have to be able to identify foreign countries so long as they know about large-scale population dynamics, migration patterns, and other subjects relevant to “social geography.”  The survey shows quite clearly that college-age Americans don’t know anything about those subjects, either.

Some of my colleagues would suggest that Americans’ ignorance of the world makes perfect sense: the country rallies behind wars in distant countries, surely, because so few Americans have any idea where those countries are or what US policy toward them has been.  Americans are a singularly insular, self-absorbed bunch, and if they knew more about the world outside their borders, they’d be more receptive to internationalist analyses of the world outside their borders.

This argument has some merit, but the National Geographic survey is even more unsettling.  It turns out, for instance, that Americans are not merely ignorant about the world; they’re also staggeringly ignorant about the United States.  Only 25 percent of respondents knew that the U.S. population is between 150 and 350 million; 30 percent put it at 1-2 billion.  Only 51 percent could point to New York on a U.S. map (and only 39 percent of the 25-34 group could do so); 30 percent managed to find New Jersey.  Eleven percent of Americans could not find the US at all—though we can take cold comfort in the fact that in the last survey, in 1988, that figure was eighteen percent.

Two other things have happened since 1988: the number of Americans who think that reading maps is “absolutely necessary” has declined from 74 to 43 percent, and—although the National Geographic survey does not take stock of this—the number of global positioning systems available to ordinary Americans has increased by approximately infinity percent, from zero in 1988 to many, many now.  Automobiles, recreational boats, golf carts, televisions and watches come equipped with GPS; the laptop on which I write this can tell me precisely where on Earth it is.  Perhaps there is an inverse relation between our collective expertise and our collective knowledge: the more sophisticated our navigational systems become, the less we think we need to know.  It is as if we Americans have surrounded ourselves with systems that can tell us precisely where we are—but not, unfortunately, where anyone else might be.  Every last one of us knows that we are exactly where we are right now, and so we shall remain, until our nation’s geographers and educators provide us with the Global Decentering System we so desperately need.

The academic job search process is under way, and in the modern languages, things look quite dismal.  Yes, I know, things have looked quite dismal for some time now, but this is extra extra dismal, because the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now.  Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc.  And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised.  But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out.

Let me explain what that means in raw numbers.  When I first went looking for an academic job, there was a surprise “bubble.”  In 1987-88, the MLA Job Information List advertised over 1900 jobs in English—a spike from the previous year’s 1700, and well above the 1400-1500 average from 1975 onward.  The year I was on the market, 1988-89, an amazing 2,025 positions were listed in the JIL—and that was just in English: there were also 1,824 advertised positions in the foreign languages.  The next year, 1,867 in English, 1,609 in the foreign languages.  People actually spoke of a “seller’s market,” and they weren’t totally crazy, because at the time, there were only about 750 Ph.D.s granted in English annually, and about 400-500 foreign-language Ph.D.s.  (Now you all know how I snuck into the academy in the first place!) These, of course, were the years when you could hear people predicting a faculty shortage in the mid- to late 1990s.  But people didn’t talk that way for long, because starting in 1991-92, the bottom dropped out: English positions declined from 1,480 to 1,271 to 1,133 to 1,054, foreign language positions from 1,453 to 1,214 to 1,090 to 1,037.  And remember, these aren’t tenure-track positions; those are but a subset of all positions, an increasingly small subset.  The number of tenure-track positions advertised in the October edition of the English edition of the JIL was 926 in 1990, 735 in 1991, 620 in 1992, 624 in 1993.  (I’m digging these figures out of an old copy of Profession: Bettina J. Huber, “Recent Trends in the Modern Language Job Market,” Profession 94: 94-105.)

In more recent years, the number of positions advertised in English has hovered around 1600-1700.  This year, one of my students told me that she’d heard the number would be something like 250.  “WTF,” I calmly replied. “Where did that number come from?”  It came from a wiki of some kind, which is apparently what These Kids Today use when they’re not twittering on the FaceSpace.  “That would be a Depression-era number,” I said, “because I don’t believe there’s been a time since the MLA started keeping stats when the number was below 1,000.”  Well, it’s now looking like 250 is indeed a very low estimate.  But it’s quite possible that the number will wind up being below 1,000, which is a problem, because all the MLA charts run from 1,000 to 2,000, so that 2009-10 might require the MLA to redesign the things or face the prospect of publishing one of those cartoon-charts where the plummeting line runs right off the page.

More seriously, a number below 1,000 is a problem for the actual Ph.D. candidates searching for actually existing jobs.  No word yet on how many of those perhaps-fewer-than-one-thousand jobs will be tenure-track.

OK, so that’s the backdrop to what I came to say—a backdrop of anxiety and despair.

What I came to say is this: just as in the dark days of the 1990s, I am stunned by what some departments want their job candidates to submit, and I’d like to hear from people in other disciplines (and perhaps even other countries!  where, I hear, people do things differently for some reason).  I would be stunned by these things even in a year more favorable to jobseekers, but in an abysmal year these things seem especially obnoxious, particularly when they are expensive.  For example: in the 1990s, it came to my attention (and Cary Nelson’s, and many other people’s) that certain schools—and we were looking at you, schools of the University of California system—were requiring job applicants to submit enormous packages of materials up front: not just the usual application letter/ cv/ dossier (sent under separate cover), but writing samples as well.  This doesn’t sound like a major human rights issue, no, but when you stop to consider that these jobs would routinely have 500-1000 applicants, each of whom was sending out 30-page writing samples, you realize that’s an enormous amount of waste paper and a gratuitous expense for the job candidates.  Protestations from various UC professors that their search committees really were reading 500-1000 dissertation chapters between October and December were, how shall I say, not always credible.  It made more sense, Cary and I thought, to ask departments to require only the letter/cv/dossier (and maybe dissertation abstract) package first, and then make requests for writing samples on the basis of those materials.  That’s what most search committees do, after all: they get a huge pile of stuff in September and October, read frantically in order to decide which 50 or 100 (your numbers may vary) writing samples to request, then request them at some point in November, then read those frantically in order to decide which 8-to-12 (your numbers may vary) candidates to interview at the MLA convention, whereupon, after the interviews are over, they meet to determine which two or three candidates to invite to campus.

This year, I’m hearing of universities that want job candidates to send transcripts.  Yes, transcripts.  Transcripts of graduate school grades, and even, in some cases, transcripts of undergraduate grades.  I’m tempted to reply LOLcats style, APPLIKASHUN PROCESS: UR DOIN IT WRONG, but I thought I’d ask around first.  Do other disciplines do this?  If so, why?  You’re hiring professors, people, not students.  You don’t need to look at their GPAs.  You need to look at their dissertations and teaching portfolios.

Now, I hear that one of the places demanding transcripts is the University of Colorado, and who knows?  Maybe this is part of a post-Ward Churchill thing whereby departments are checking to see if their candidates have Ph.D.s.  But still.  It’s expensive for candidates, and (I think) completely unnecessary for search committees.  Which brings me to thing two: are there other disciplines in which graduate school grades actually matter in some way?  Because in my business, the grades usually run the gamut from A to A-, and everybody knows (or else should know) that the really important evaluations are the substantive, written ones—the kind you give students on their essays and/or presentations, the kind you’re asked to submit whenever a student is being assessed by the program as a whole (as, in some departments, when they complete the M.A. and apply for the Ph.D. program).

Again, I know that in a job market this bad, departments asking for transcripts and/or writing samples up front aren’t the worst things that job candidates are facing.  For most people, I hope, these are merely minor annoyances.  (I should probably add that a year this bad will have ripple effects for years to come, just as the lean years of the 1990s did, because of all the 2009-10 Ph.D.s who will still be looking for jobs in 2010-11, 2011-12, and beyond—years that may wind up being just as lean as this one.)  And in an academic job system that is deeply broken, it may sound silly to ask that some aspects of it should be relatively sane.  But I remain curious about how other disciplines (and perhaps even other countries, where I hear they do things differently) conduct their junior-level job searches.

About that broken job system more generally: I’ll try to be back next week with a reply to Louis Menand.

I recently published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education.   People responded.  The brief recap is here, though you should also check out this post from Andrew Seal, this one from Philip Gentry, and this comment by Josh Gunn, who helpfully kicks things off by explaining that my essay is “bullshit.”

My general reaction to the response is: good.  I wanted to provoke discussion, and I got it.  And, begging your indulgence, I’d like to carry on that discussion here, by picking up where my blog’s last comment thread leaves off.

Warning: Clicking “click to continue” will lead you to a two-part, Internets-straining essay.
OK, you were warned.

Part One: Critical Populism and its Discontents

Well, honestly, I wasn’t hoping to provoke responses like “this article is bullshit,” but that comes with the territory too.  Mostly, I was hoping to hear things like “you’ve overlooked the influence of cultural studies on X,” or “here at the University of Z we have a cultural studies program that does Y,” so that the collective response would actually help to change the public image of cultural studies in the US (and yes, before anyone else steps up to remind me that I am overlooking Latin American, Asian, and Australian cultural studies, I deliberately focused on the situation of cultural studies in the US).  Because I really do believe that that public image is pretty bad, and that’s one of the things I argued in response to Ami Sommariva, one of the UC Davis cultural studies students who showed up on my blog to ask:

I got the impression from your comment in CHE that you thought American cultural studies work today is mostly a bunch of pablum: “associated with a cheery “Pop culture is fun!” approach.” Above, however, you say that you “wish cultural studies had some impact on [economics, political science, psychology, and international relations].”  Do you mean that you want those fields to take a cheery “Pop culture if fun!” approach? Or are you saying that cultural studies—which is a field that produces important scholarship—has an image problem within the university at large that prevents some disciplines from actively engaging with it?

I replied:

I’m very sorry not to have been clearer about this.  The answer is (b), cultural studies has a serious image problem, and it can get pretty depressing explaining to colleagues (and students!) in other disciplines that actually, Michael Warner and Chantal Mouffe are more important to the field than Jon and Kate [note to people who don’t follow the adventures of Jon and Kate: never mind, it’s not important].  That image problem is, in some precincts, even worse outside the university.  Read some of the nonacademic responses to Tom Frank’s One Market Under God—they’re even more depressing.  For example, and for another example.  And a third (that one really hurts, since it’s written by the usually wonderful Michelle Goldberg, who calls Alan Wolfe a cultural studies professor).

The only positive review of Frank’s book that gave me a jolt of schadenfreude was this one, whose title pretty much sums up its sensibility.

The next challenge came from Aaron @ zunguzungu, a graduate student at Berkeley:

It’s true that “it would be a very weird kind of cultural studies that simply didn’t care about, or dismissed out of hand, what nonacademic progressives and leftists think about cultural studies” but I don’t see anyone who’s arguing that we should….

[I] remain confused about what a phrase like this is supposed to mean:

[quoting my essay] “cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with ‘cultural criticism’ in general, and associated with a cheery ‘Pop culture is fun!’ approach.”

Like the Davis signatories, I just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about there; “Pop culture is Fun” still seems like a straw man to me, not at all aided by all the passive voiced verbs through which you’re beating on it.

So reluctantly, I went back into those reviews of Frank’s book to dredge up the relevant excerpts, to try to show that when I say cultural studies has been conflated with cultural criticism and associated with pop-culture-is-fun, I’m not just using passive verbs to beat a straw man.  From the first link:

The 1990s cultural studies profs have rivaled Rush in their rejection of the kind of socio-political analysis of culture practiced by the Frankfurt School—critics like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, who stressed mass culture’s power to control and alienate.

The cultstuds, on the other hand, lecture about the postmodern and transgressive power of the consumer to mold and manipulate received culture to suit one’s own tastes, which Frank reminds us is not the same as political freedom practiced in a democracy. On the contrary, the license to choose Coke over Pepsi is a freedom emptied of political content. Obsession with the shallow led to absurdities like the normally astute cultural critic bell hooks fawning in Spin Magazine over white corporate computer geek Jaron Lanier because of his fulsome dreadlocks. In a time when rebellion is just another consumer choice, corporate culture loves culture studies.

From the second:

In one chapter, he recounts the curious contemporary history of the “cultural studies” university intellectuals, many of whom have turned the academic defense of popular culture into an institutional apology for the “democratic” wisdom of consumption, and at least some of whom have defected to ad agencies and consultantships, where the rewards are definitely greener and the subjects—the target markets, that is—are truly interdisciplinary. While deftly deconstructing the self-proclaimed “cult studs,” Frank notes ironically (much of the funniest and most telling detail is in his backnotes) that One Market Under God will likely get its only thorough reading among the inhabitants of such university departments.

And the third:

In addition to cheerleaders like Peters, business has also been helped, Frank writes, by its putative opponents, the self-described radicals of university cultural studies departments, where scholars devote themselves to analyzing the “subversive” elements in pop culture. Frank’s indictment of the way cultural studies reinforces the status quo mirrors the argument Russell Jacoby made in last year’s penetrating “The End of Utopia.” The cultural studies professors both writers reprove tend to regard any criticism of consumer society as elitist, since it questions the taste and intelligence of ordinary consumers. Jacoby quotes cultural studies professor Alan Wolfe: “[W]hatever the literati once denounced, cultural studies will uphold: romance novels, ‘Star Trek’, heavy metal, Disneyland, punk rock, wrestling, Muzak, ‘Dallas’ … If shopping centers were for an earlier generation of Marxists symbols of the fetishism of commodities, then contemporary advocates of cultural studies … find them ‘overwhelming and constitutively paradoxical.’” These academics may regard themselves as latter-day Marxists, but this position ensures that they’ll forever be defending the market.

Wolfe, of course, was not championing cultural studies.

Now, I’ve had this debate with colleagues many times.  “Don’t bother with these uninformed journalistic accounts of cultural studies from Tom Frank’s reviewers,” they say, collectively and in unison.  “But, but, but,” I have replied, every time, “it actually matters that liberal and left and progressive journalists think this about us.  It’s one of the reasons cultural studies has had so little impact on American politics and nonacademic left intellectuals.”  Indeed, earlier this year I had something like this exchange with Larry Grossberg, who’s been promoting Stuart Hall’s work in the US for decades now; he looked over the last two chapters of The Left At War and was gracious but, ah, less than completely thrilled with them.  He directed me to his recent essay, “Does Cultural Studies Have Futures?  Should It?  (Or What’s the Matter with New York?)”—which, he said, offered a definitive rebuttal to Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?  That rebuttal arrives in the penultimate paragraph of the essay, and it consists of this:

In conclusion, let me explain the subtitle of my paper—“What’s the matter with New York?”  I am gesturing to Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, What’s the matter with Kansas? which unfortunately often stood in for a critical progressive analysis both before and after the US election of 2004.  In my argument, the answer to Frank’s question—what’s the matter with people living in the so-called “red states”—is—nothing.  The fact that they disagree with progressives does not mean there is something wrong with them.  On the other hand, there may be something wrong with people in the so-called “blue” states if they think that there is something “wrong” with conservatives (in Kansas) simply because they vote or think differently.  Political struggles cannot be reduced to a simple choice between right and wrong, as much as we may, in our everyday political and moral common sense, believe it.  As political intellectuals, we have to find ways of moving forward, both in our work and in the public realm.

You’ll pardon me, I’m sure, if I don’t find this to be a particularly compelling brief for why liberal and left intellectuals should take cultural studies seriously.  Yes, there’s nothing “wrong” with conservatives, and nothing to be gained by pathologizing them.  But that’s not a rebuttal of Frank’s argument about how conservatives have redefined “elite” so that it refers not to the rich but to to latte-sipping college professors, nor is it an argument against Frank’s account of how the moderate heartland GOP of Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Dole was transformed by movement conservatives into the raging heartland GOP of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts (and their even wingnuttier Senate colleagues to the immediate south, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe).  Grossberg’s response seems to say, instead, that in the struggle against wingnuttery, cultural studies has nothing much to offer except the promise of “moving forward.”

The heart of the UC Davis letter’s response to me is that my “caricature” of the field is unrecognizable—and potentially harmful.

On the one hand, we want to highlight the dangerous ways in which Bérubé’s critique obscures the more pressing issues facing scholars working in cultural studies.  On the other hand, we hardly recognize the field described at some length in Bérubé’s piece and that cannot pass without comment. Through claims unsupported by evidence beyond the anecdotal, Bérubé sketches out a caricature of a field as opposed to a set of dynamic, complex intellectual and institutional practices.

I think the first sentence is misguided.  By criticizing the prominence of the cultural-populist wing of cultural studies (e.g., its insistence on the figure of the “intellectual as fan” whose analysis should ideally align itself with that of the fans under study), I have allegedly obscured the more pressing issue, namely, the need for funding: “An indictment such as Bérubé’s ignores the larger institutional structures surrounding processes of knowledge production and directs attention away from the economic catastrophe currently threatening public education on a national scale.”  In other words, I should have been arguing for more support for cultural studies programs, full stop, instead of saying that cultural studies has gotten itself a bad rep in many quarters (sometimes deservedly) but should be taken seriously as a rich intellectual tradition that actually offers cogent explanations of (among other things) how hegemony works.  (I’ll get back to this funding question at the end of this post.)

Or, as Ami Sommariva puts it in her followup comment on my blog,

In short, I’m confused about what blaming cultural studies for their own image problem actually accomplishes, as your CHE piece certainly seems to do; most of your readers will come away with reinforced ammunition for exactly the belief that CS is just a bunch of hacks getting tenure for writing articles that should really appear in High Times that you were complaining about in that thread at Frameshift.

OK, I’ll try to be more careful about this.  My complaint about Frank’s account of cultural studies in One Market Under God (in a review essay reprinted in Rhetorical Occasions, titled “Idolatries of the Marketplace”) was (a) that it relies almost entirely on Bob McChesney’s “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” and (b) that Frank was simply unaware of the rich tradition, in cultural studies itself, of criticism of the field’s cultural populist wing.

So here’s the relevant passage from The Left At War (I tell you, the book covers absolutely everything in the world.  The second edition will cover all the other stuff):

It is, without question, a serious political and theoretical mistake to overestimate the importance of popular culture and the power of its consumers (even if they are also, in some ways, its producers), and to strain to find world-historical political consequences in the film Basic Instinct or televised “reality” shows.  But it is a still more egregious and lamentable mistake to ignore a vast terrain of popular culture and popular experience altogether, or to determine in advance (and in ignorance) that it can serve only reactionary ends, or to decide that certain cultural phenomena might be worth the attention of conscientious leftists—but only if they (the phenomena) have nothing to do with corporations.  At the time McChesney penned his attack, cultural studies had more than its share of enthusiastic celebrants of the “active audience” thesis, it is true; they had already been repeatedly criticized by other cultural studies theorists, as when Tony Bennett complained about his colleagues’ “sleuth-like searching for subversive practices just where you’d least expect to find them” (“Putting Policy into Cultural Studies,” 32) or when Simon Frith wrote of “defending popular culture from the populists” [footnote]. But it also contained plenty of people who understood that the struggle against the Reagan-Bush right could not be engaged exclusively on the terms of electoral politics, let alone defeated on the economic front by dragging out the charts and showing Americans that their real wages were falling while CEO wages were skyrocketing.

The Frith quote is footnoted like so: “Simon Frith, ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Saving Popular Culture from the Populists.’  diacritics 21.4 (1991): 101-15.  Other classic critiques of populism in cultural studies include John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value; Larry Grossberg, It’s a Sin; Jim McGuigan, Cultural Populism; Meaghan Morris, ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’; and, alphabetically last but chronologically first out of the box, Judith Williamson, ‘The Problems of Being Popular,’ from way back in 1985.”  In fact, McGuigan’s book, proclaiming itself “a sympathetic critique of cultural populism,” nevertheless argues that “neo-Gramscian hegemony theory’s approach to subcultural analysis was deconstructed and reoriented toward what became an uncritical understanding of youth cultural consumption.  A similar trajectory is traced in the construction of ‘popular television’ as an object of study, exemplified by the turn toward ‘the active audience,’ which in spite of its evident advantages neglects the economic, technological and political determinations of televisual culture.  The uncritical endorsement of popular taste and pleasure, from an entirely hermeneutic perspective, is curiously consistent with economic liberalism’s concept of ‘consumer sovereignty’” (6).

I suppose it can be argued that McGuigan’s critique obscured more pressing matters, like the defunding of public education, which was happening then, too.  But I wouldn’t argue that.  I would argue instead that despite McGuigan’s great arguments, and Frow’s, and John Michael’s critique of the “intellectual as fan” imperative in his 2000 book Anxious Intellects, lots of people inside the academy and out have gotten the idea that cultural studies involves writing books like Henry Jenkins’ The Wow Climax and Fans, Bloggers, Gamers.  And why would they have gotten that idea?  Click that link and check out the Claremont Review of Books review: “Jenkins persuasively argues in favor of taking the fan’s perspective in analyzing television—and this is the cornerstone of the new turn in Cultural Studies.”  And if Henry Jenkins isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always the career of John Fiske, to whom McChesney was responding in that “Is There Any Hope” essay.  That’s why crypto’s joke over at Frameshift hits home:

I read a lot of cultural studies stuff after I left college (in 1990, coincidentally), and by the mid-’90s I’d gotten bored with it—increasingly, a lot of the work felt like it was telling the same story over and over again. Like the kind of fan studies you describe: “Knock, knock!” “Who’s there?” “Subversion!” “Subversion who?” “Um, just Subversion, isn’t that enough?”

As a wise man once said, it’s funny because it’s true.

I thought that all this was widely known by now, and I do not know what purpose is served, at this late date, by acting as if this wing of cultural studies doesn’t exist or that it didn’t dominate public discussion of the field throughout the 1990s.

One last note on this front.  Ms. Sommariva writes:

I agree that there is an image problem, and I agree that it is extremely serious. However, given that insightful, innovative, and politically substantive work is done by people claiming to do cultural studies now (you mention Michael Warner and Chantal Mouffe), I would say that the image problem does not stem from the quality of our scholarship, but from several other factors….  Looking at the responses to the CHE piece, I get the impression that it gave many folks the impression that you believed that the field had become intellectually bankrupt, and thus the poor image was not an inaccurate one (with a few exceptions).

Respectfully, I think this is a serious misreading of those CHE comments.  For the most part, those are not the comments of people who came to cultural studies with an open mind, read my essay, and concluded that the field was bankrupt; those are the comments of people who hate cultural studies and want it to die (though not before it suffers mightily), and the only reason they’re commenting on my essay is that they can’t believe I still take cultural studies seriously and want it to flourish when really it should die, dead.  After suffering.  Because, you know, Marxism failed and evolutionary psychology has a better analysis of Thatcherism and cultural studies is shallow and leftist and pretentious, etc.

Part Two: What is To Be Done?

OK, now that that’s all cleared up, here’s Colin Danby with a question on another front:

Could a reader not conclude, Michael, that your Chronicle piece is first of all a polemic against the Chomsky-Herman-McChesney view, with an attached plaint that Cultural Studies has not had the institutional strength to join you in defeating it?

I write as a comrade in the long struggle against McChesneyism.  But if I were a cultural studies grad student I might be a little pissed off by the way you introduce criteria for the field’s success that I might not choose first.

I will have to accept some pissed-offness on that front, I suppose.  But no, the essay isn’t first of all a polemic against C-H-McC.  Could a reader conclude that, though?  Sure, because the polemic is certainly in there.  (Though I would modify it by way of my largely sympathetic (imho) reading of Manufacturing Consent.)  Like my ritual lament about critical populism in cultural studies, it’s a return to an old, old debate from the 1990s.

McChesney’s “Is There Any Hope for Cultural Studies?” (surprise answer: no!) was itself a reply to Larry Grossberg’s half of an exchange with Nicholas Garnham in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12.1 (March 1995), titled “Cultural Studies Vs. Political Economy: Is Anyone Else Bored with this Debate?” (surprise answer: no!)  Grossberg argued against (among other things) the “two lefts” approach that sets “merely cultural” politics at a discount:

No one in cultural studies denies the economic realities of racism or sexism, although they are likely to think that such inequalities cannot be directly mapped by or onto class relations. . . .  Thus, while I do agree with Garnham (along with a number of key figures in cultural studies like Meaghan Morris) that too much work in cultural studies fails to take economics seriously enough, I am also convinced that political economy—at least this version of it—fails to take culture seriously enough.  And ironically, I think it also fails to take capitalism seriously enough.

Taking Larry’s side on this one, I’m basically arguing like so: one, when cultural studies is seen as nothing more than the (celebratory) study of popular culture, it’s easy to dismiss—and two,  the political economy crowd has long had a vested interest in doing so, because cultural studies posed a direct challenge to them.  (Curiously enough, Todd Gitlin’s critiques of cultural studies over the past two decades have been nearly identical to McChesney’s.  Joel Pfister’s response to Gitlin in Critique for What? is pretty great.)

But critical populism isn’t the only thing working against the potential effectiveness of cultural studies.  You know what else can hurt the field, particularly in institutional settings?  Things like this, from the UC Davis letter:

We also do not recognize cultural studies as a field characterized by weak treatments of television shows and pop stars. Our field, as we know it, addresses such topics as the “war on terror,” nanotechnology, the visual culture of medicine, immigration and asylum, the corporatization of the university, tourism, the cultural history of food and wine, the science and technology of textiles, environmental racism, psychic formations, transnational media, militarization, memory and genocide, the production of knowledge outside the academy, histories of visual culture, and many many others. While these topics can be studied in other disciplines and fields, what differentiates our practice of cultural studies is a deep historicization of these instances in relation to questions of power.

I’m going to try to proceed very carefully here, because I’m probably stepping on somebody’s toes, and I don’t want to be misunderstood by people like Josh Gunn saying, “I disagree with a fundamental premise of Berube’s piece: that cultural studies is somehow unified by content.”  That was not a fundamental premise of my piece, and it’s not a fundamental premise of my critique of this list of topics.  (Though I do have to note that “psychic formations” and “the production of knowledge outside the academy” are so nebulous as to make the list sound a bit Borgesian.)  Rather, my critique of this list of topics is that it makes cultural studies sound like Whatever Our Students and Faculty Are Doing Right Now.  As one not-entirely-crazy commenter on the CHE thread says,

As a philosopher, I understand ‘no fixed content,’ but neither content nor methodology? Isn’t this reducible to ‘smart people talking about whatever interests them’?

Possibly, yes.  But I should add that this isn’t necessarily a problem by itself, since knowledge is diffuse and rhizomatic and can go every which way; it’s only a problem if you’re concerned about the institutional status (and funding!) of your field.  Because if I were an administrator (or prospective donor) and I was told that the program in cultural studies addresses such topics as these, I would conclude that I was being handed a list of what the program’s students and faculty are doing right now, and that in five or ten years it could be something altogether different (though presumably still committed to the deep historicization of its objects in relation to questions of power), depending on what students and faculty were doing then.

At this point I’m touching on a large (and, for some people, sore) subject—namely, cultural studies’ ambivalence about its own institutionalization.  You could argue that cultural studies has relatively few institutional homes in the US precisely because it has been so reluctant to define itself, and you could argue that this is a Good Thing.  Or you could argue, as did the editors of Lingua Franca in 2000, that this deliberate nebulousness can be a liability—as, for example, when people interpreted the Sokal Hoax as an attack on “cultural studies” (to which my initial reaction, thirteen years ago, was WTF?):

In many ways, the uncertainty over the identity of Social Text reflects the uncertainty surrounding the field of cultural studies itself.  In general, cultural studies has come to stand for the interdisciplinary study of how popular culture interacts with its audiences.  The discipline’s first institutional incarnation was the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a postgraduate research institute established in 1964 at the University of Birmingham in England.  Today, anthologies of cultural studies come out regularly, and with the exception of one or two early Birmingham Centre pieces, they contain none of the same essays.  American cultural studies is often said to be characterized by a movement away from the Birmingham school’s emphasis on social class toward other aspects of identity, such as race and gender; it has also come to be associated with the ideas of French poststructuralists targeted by Sokal; and it is just as often said to be characterized by a myopic enthusiasm for celebrities.  In fact, none of these characterizations account for the bewildering diversity of work done under its name.  Such ambiguity lent the Sokal debate an added resonance, since arguments about whether or not his article was a successful send-up of cultural studies could not help but presume what the real thing looked like.

Please, no threadjacking about the dang Sokal Hoax, please please.  I cite this passage merely as a fairly accurate account of the bewildering diversity of work done under the name of cultural studies.  And my point is that if you have great difficulty saying, “but that’s not cultural studies,” you’re ripe for pretty much any attack at all.  For my purposes (and I mentioned this in the intro to The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies), this became painfully obvious ten years ago, when a New Republic reviewer attributed Marjorie Garber’s book Dog Love to “cultural studies” (and not in a good way).  To which I replied, at the time, “but that’s not cultu … oh, I give up.”

And here’s another potential liability: people insisting that the field has no specifiable origin.  The UC Davis letter opens by going after my one-paragraph summary of the Birmingham story:

By starting with the conventional account of the Birmingham school, a truly interesting and important aspect of what has become known as “cultural studies,” we lose the opportunity to account for the innovations of film studies in the 1920’s and 30’s, Black intellectual thought in the United States, the development of American studies in the inter-war and post-war period, and the emergence of ethnic studies and women’s studies. In fact, what gets called the “Birmingham School” is itself a reworking of British Marxist social theory in response to critiques from these fields.

Likewise, Josh Gunn insists that I’ve gotten things all wrong:

there is virtually no understanding in his piece about how both cultural studies and communication studies came about: they arose in the midst of adult education movements.  Here in the states, communication studies arose in response to the sudden post-civil war rise of the land grant institution; the new university student created by state systems couldn’t read the standard textbooks. Teachers had to start relating ideas to common, popular objects of the experience of military brats and farmers kids. The founder of my department, Edwin Dubois Shurter, made his name on writing hybrid speech textbooks using popular examples that the “industrial class” kids could understand (incidentally, UT’s department of comm studies celebrates it’s 100th anniversary this year; go horns!).

Similarly, cultural studies arose later in Europe as part of their own adult education movement, which led to the approach and philosophy of the Birmingham School: use everyday life to teach the non-traditional (translated: non-upper class) university student.

(Aside: I have to love Gunn’s parting shot: “perhaps, he makes such pronouncements from the standpoint of someone who teaches literature to the well-to-do.”  Indeed, at Penn State my wealthy littrachur students are fond of sneering at those great unwashed Texas Longhorns.)

Folks, I am getting very cranky in my late 40s, and I have now heard versions of this gambit for over twenty years, so excuse me if I get impatient with this sort of thing.  Person A says, “well, the origins of cultural studies lie in Birming …” and along come persons B, C, D, E, F, etc. to say “but that story of origins excludes C. L. R. James” or “wholly overlooked here is the importance of the discipline of cultural anthropology and the legacy of colonialism” or “it’s diagnostic that this Birmingham account has no place for black intellectual thought in the US and the history of the land-grant university.” Lisa Duggan’s rebuke of the Standard Origin Narrative offers a good capsule summary of these objections:

There are, in addition, other genealogies for “cultural studies” that would include but branch out from the Birmingham School. You are choosing. Others of us might cite genealogies with multiple roots leading from several or many other “origin” sites, you know? I’m sure you think yours is the Right one, the Best one, but that in and of itself is revealing.

I assume that the revealing “that” in the final sentence refers to Lisa’s sense of sureness about my intentions.  But the interesting thing here is that this “oh no it didn’t simply start in Birmingham” gambit is now so routine that Lisa merely has to remind me, in the most general terms, that others might cite genealogies with multiple roots leading from several or many other “origin” sites.  (I hope I can still call her Lisa. Once upon a time we were friends: we met in 1990 when she was a postdoc at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at Illinois, and she had a quite wonderful and lasting effect on the place.  She also put me in touch with Stacey D’Erasmo and M. Mark at the Village Voice Literary Supplement when I was trying to find someone to publish my essay on political correctness in the spring of ‘91, and for that I will be forever grateful.  So it would be just too cold to say “Duggan.”)

It is possible, of course, to claim that cultural studies began when God expelled Adam and Eve from Eden.  After all, no one, not even Dennis Dworkin, the author of the very fine (and aptly-titled) Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies, denies that the Birmingham school arose in response to stuff that happened before it.  (Dworkin’s first chapter, which discusses the Communist Party’s Historians’ Group and radical historians such as Christopher Hill and Dona Torr, really should be read by anyone who wants to get into a serious discussion of Where Cultural Studies Came From.  Also, for Josh Gunn: Dworkin has a good discussion of the adult education movement!)  And no one—not even the editors of Lingua Franca—denies that the field has gone in a thousand different directions since the day E. P. Thompson took exception to Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution.  But when you combine the insistence that cultural studies has multiple genealogies from a variety of locations, trajectories, and practices with the insistence that cultural studies has no specific methodology or subject matter, well, then you’ve got yourself a field that consists of pretty much anything anybody wants to associate with it.  Which, again, is good in some ways, but not so good if you’re worried about its institutional locations and potential funding, and very, very bad if you want to defend the field from detractors who call Dog Love a work of cultural studies (or, to take an example from Frank’s One Market Under God, from detractors who want to call libertarian economist Tyler Cowen a cultural studies theorist).

So, then, dear (and international and interdisciplinary and exceptionally patient) readers, particularly those of you who are still wondering just what I think “cultural studies” might be, here are a couple of tentative suggestions.  They’re not the Right or the Best ones; they’re just mine, and I offer them as opportunities for further discussion.  Let me propose that cultural studies can be considered a salient field, though not fixed for all time, in the following ways:

(1) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich “culture and society” school of criticism, in which the many and various meanings of the first term (from the Arnoldian to the anthropological) are tracked with relation to the contours of the formal and legal apparatus of the latter term.  For instance: in 1993, Stuart Hall argued, “far from collapsing the complex questions of cultural identity and issues of social and political rights, what we need now is greater distance between them.  We need to be able to insist that rights of citizenship and the incommensurabilities of cultural difference are respected and that the one is not made a condition of the other.” This is not simply a condition-of-England question (as some people have complained about the “culture and society” tradition); it is critical to any attempt to think about hijab-wearing schoolgirls in France or Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists refusing medical care for their children in the US.  Yes, this school of thought arose out of radical historians’ work on the English working classes, but it didn’t stay there and doesn’t need to. The Empire Strikes Back:  Race and Racism in 70s Britain and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack:  The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation are responses to (and therefore part of) this tradition, and their revisionary accounts of British identity arguably helped result in the Parekh Report.

(2) it developed (and continues to develop) a rich tradition of analyzing the functions of mass media and mass culture in industrialized democracies.  The tradition was kicked off by Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and the broadly provocative final chapter of Williams’ Culture and Society, and has gone in, oh, roughly a thousand directions since, mostly in critical dialogue with the tradition of the Frankfurt school and the political economy wing of communications studies.  As with (1), there’s a lot of room for maneuver here, and any number of ways to go in the future.  But usually, cultural studies sees the “political economy” approach to mass media as Grossberg does—as necessary but finally insufficient for an explanation of how people understand media.  As I put it in my post on Manufacturing Consent, sometimes people respond to mass media by saying “this is bullshit,” and writing scathing liberal/left critiques of the mass media; or sometimes people say “this is bullshit” and proceed to blow a lot of Hot Air about how Rachel Ray is sending seekrit terrorist keffiyeh messages with the help of Dunkin Donuts and the librul media.  People are funny that way: for a variety of reasons, they sometimes refuse to believe what they’re told.

(3) in the 1970s, it developed New Left-inflected analyses of youth subcultures, “resistance through rituals,” and subcultural formations hovering around things like punk and ska.  This is the branch of the field that eventually led to too-celebratory accounts of fandom in the 1990s, and indeed it could be (and has been) argued that it romanticized white working-class boys back in the day.  But it served as a necessary rebuke to moral panics about “mugging” in the 1970s, as well as to a persistent kind of leftish moralism that sees only decay and hears only noise when it turns to the passions and pastimes of These Kids Today.  And it gave rise to some great, terrain-transforming feminist work on romance novels, slasher movies, soap operas, porn, etc.

(4) out of its work on subcultures, its work on mass media, and its work on culture and society, it developed (and continues, etc.) a Gramscian or neo-Gramscian or post-Gramscian analysis* of the dismantling of the postwar welfare-state consensus, the rise of the new right, and the workings of hegemonic political projects in civil society.  The impetus for this school was the rise of Thatcherism in the UK, but, again, it didn’t have to stay there and doesn’t need to.  It served as a necessary rebuke to the “body snatchers” theory of the left’s decline, as when Hall wrote, “Of course, there might be an essential Thatcherite subject hiding or concealed in each of us, struggling to get out.  But it seems more probable that Thatcherism has been able to constitute new subject positions from which its discourses about the world make sense.”  And it also tries to serve—though, as I argued in the Chronicle essay, not with great success so far—as a corrective to the “blame it all on neoliberalism” and “blame it all on false consciousness” tendencies in leftist thought.  Additionally, this tradition’s insistence on the diffuseness of “wars of position” enlisted it on the side of the “merely cultural” left in Ye Olde “Two-Lefts” Debate.  Again, Hall, from “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”:

The effect [of Gramsci’s work] is to multiply and proliferate the various fronts of politics, and to differentiate the different kinds of social antagonisms.  The different fronts of struggle are the various sites of political and social antagonism and constitute the objects of modern politics, when it is understood in the form of a “war of position.”  The traditional emphases, in which differentiated types of struggle, for example, around schooling, cultural or sexual politics, institutions of civil society like the family, traditional social organizations, ethnic and cultural institutions and the like, are all subordinated and reduced to an industrial struggle, condensed around the workplace, and a simple choice between trade union and insurrectionary or parliamentary forms of politics, is here systemically challenged and decisively overthrown.  The impact on the very conception of politics itself is little short of electrifying.

(5) As the UC Davis letter says, and many many others.  You’ve got transnational cultural studies dealing with diaspora and global flows, refugees and immigration; you’ve got cultural studies of science and technology; you’ve got cultural studies of disability and embodiment (hey, I do that stuff!), and so forth.  But I think it might be the effort to call these things by (something like) these more specific names, and to try to explain where they do and don’t intersect with the schools of thought sketched out above.

Finally, I think one of the best responses to my argument was one of the first, from way back when I delivered that paper to the Cultural Studies Association this past April:  that of my Penn State colleague Jeff Nealon, who said in the Q/A after that panel, and then developed the argument later that night over a couple of beers, that one could argue, contra me, that cultural studies has changed a great deal about the way humanists and social scientists think and work—insofar as nobody goes around anymore proposing to study this one text or that one event in isolation from everything else.  Everyone (well, just about everyone) knows that you’re not done with the analysis, you can’t punch out and go home, until you’ve located the text or event or object in some wider network of relations and explained what it’s doing there.  (Or to use the proper terms of art, until you’ve located the object or practice in relation to the various cultural formations and historical conjunctures to which it is or has been articulated.)  In that sense, Cultural Studies® may have had much less of an impact than people hoped or feared twenty years ago, but a lower-case and amorphous cultural studies has become lingua franca, so to speak, in dozens of fields.  I told Jeff at the time that I would still want to show up at a Cultural Studies Association conference panel on “the university after cultural studies” and refuse the invitation to triumphalism.  But I think his counterargument has considerable merit, so I’ll close with it, and turn things over to you.

___

• For the simple truth is that in the epochal Cup finals between the Althusserians and the neo-Gramscians, the Althusserians were decisively routed (and, even worse, charged with functionalism)—although, as I acknowledge in the afterword to this fine volume, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was offside, a few steps ahead of the play.  Many thanks to Ben Carrington for asking me to join the team and write something about cultural studies and sport.

In early July, Laura McKenna, a widely respected and longtime blogger, argued on her site, 11D, that blogging has perceptibly changed over the six years she’s been at it. Many of blogging’s heavy hitters, she observed, have ended up “absorbed into some other professional enterprise.” Meanwhile, newer or lesser-known bloggers aren’t getting the kind of links and attention they used to, which means that “good stuff” is no longer “bubbling to the top.” Her post prompted a couple of the medium’s most legendary, best-established hands to react: Matthew Yglesias (formerly of The Atlantic, now of ThinkProgress), confirmed that blogging has indeed become “institutionalized,” and Ezra Klein (formerly of The American Prospect, now of The Washington Post) concurred, “The place has professionalized.”

This confirms what I’ve been hearing from people like Maud Newton (whom I met last spring) and Lauren Bruce (whom I met last week while sightseeing in West Lafayette, Indiana).  Because of course, when I meet bloggers in real life, we take the opportunity to talk about blogging.  (Well, actually Maud and I were supposed to do that—it was a forum at Penn State on blogging and the arts.)  Note, by the bye, that all three of these bloggers are (1) widely respected, (2) longtime bloggers (Lauren, of course, invented blogging in 1985), and (3) women.  So of course we have to ask them: where were all the women bloggers?

Sorry.  Did I take you back for a moment?  Ah, 2004.  Bad times.  How bad, you ask?  Really, really bad.  Why, back in September of that year, blogging sold out and became corporate.

Anyway, a couple of thoughts on the consolidation-and-professionalization of the blogosphere since its last sellout.  First, Laura’s.  This is point 3 of nine (Laura would have had an even ten but for blogger burnout):

3. Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to.  It’s a lot of work to look for good posts elsewhere, and most bloggers have become burnt out. Drezner and Farrell had a theory that even small potato bloggers would have their day in the sun, if they wrote something so great that it garnered the attention of the big guys. But the big guys are too burnt out to find the hidden gems. So, good stuff is being written all the time, and it isn’t bubbling to the top.

Many have stopped using blogrolls, which means less love spread around the blogosphere. The politics of who should be on a blogroll was too much of a pain, so bloggers just deleted the whole thing.

Now, mine.

Thing the first. You knew this would happen eventually, right?  Check out Laura’s point four, about blogger burnout.  I said pretty much the same thing when I folded my own blog in early 2007—it’s just too much work.  Yes, I restarted Ye Olde Blog about a year ago, but it’s nowhere near the scale of what I was doing in 2005-06, and it has about one-quarter the readership of those heady days.  Which is, I think, just about right—i.e., manageable.

Thing the second, which follows from thing the first as the night the day.  Group blogs were always the way to go, because successful solo blogs are so difficult to maintain over many years.  Crooked Timber was simply way ahead of the curve.

Thing the third, it’s hard not to succumb to Blog Nostalgia in all this—for the wild and wooly days of the Rittenhouse Review (pbuh) and Steve Gilliard (pbuh) and Respectful of Otters and Fafblog’s interview with James Dobson, back when people wondered if Atrios was really Sidney Blumenthal, back when it was genuinely surprising that a major American political party would issue press credentials to bloggers attending its national convention. You know, back when blogging was cool, before it totally sold out and went mainstream.  Which brings me to

Thing the fourth.  Well, of course Crooked Timber was cooler before I showed up here.  Don’t think I don’t know that.  But I liked Hüsker Dü before you did, so there.

Thing the fifth.  Laura doesn’t mention this, but it came up in my conversations with Maud and Lauren: in the absence of the Koufax Awards, there really is no formal mechanism for bringing lesser-known bloggers to the attention of Liberal and Leftish Bloggers Everywhere. But:

Thing the sixth.  The demise of the Koufaxes is symptom, not cause: they started back in aught-two as a compensatory mechanism, as left-throwing bloggers huddled around the virtual oil can in fingerless gloves and lamented the fact that all the blogging awards, like the young blogosphere itself, were dominated by conservatives and glassy-eyed techno-utopian libertarians.  For the next couple of years, the Koufaxes were something like a big ol’ barbeque where you might meet people like Lindsay Beyerstein or Scott Lemieux hanging out by the keg.  By 2006, though, as the barbeque had to be moved to the football stadium, Dwight Meredith’s idea had gotten too big to manage.  (Here’s Meteor Blades talking up the Koufaxes in late 2005—for what would turn out to be the final year of the event.  And personally, I still have blog nostalgia for the Cobb Awards.  Could those have lasted more than one year?  Sadly, no.)

On the other hand, Open Pajamas Source Media.

Thing the seventh.  Wait a minute, Kathy G. and Jon Swift are no longer blogging?  You say they haven’t been blogging in months now?  But they just started!

Thing the eighth.  Back to Benjamin Carlson’s essay:

Of the top 50 blogs, 21 are owned by such familiar names as CNN, the New York Times, ABC, and AOL.

Well, the “political economy” media theorists were right about that—the Internet gets commercial, the big guys move in, and the weird turn pro.  But look again at the very tippy top of Carlson’s piece, where the teaser reads,

The blogosphere was supposed to democratize publishing and empower the little guy. Turns out, the big blogs are all run by The Man.

Ah, no, not exactly.  For one thing, the top-50 glass is still 58 percent full.  Apparently only 42 percent of the big blogs are Man-run.  Which is kind of remarkable, really, after seven-eight-nine years.  For another thing, the blogosphere certainly did democratize publishing, and it still does.  Why, you could start a blog right now!  Let’s not confuse the question of whether the blogosphere is a democratic medium with the question of how the structure of the blogosphere has changed over the decade, because that would be one of those blog-category mistakes.

Well, that’s all I have for now.  I’d come up with nine things, but I’m feeling blogger burnout.  Also, that’s AOL on the other line—gotta go!

And yet, in a fascinating passage at the outset of his essay on Christopher Hitchens, Scialabba acknowledges the temptations of the partisan review:

All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters.  In no time, I begin to find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed.  His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity. A prose style I thought deliciously suave and sinuous I now find preening and overelaborate. His fearless cheekiness has become truculent bravado; his namedropping has gone from endearing foible to excruciating tic; his extraordinary dialectical agility seems like resourceful and unscrupulous sophistry; his entertaining literary asides like garrulousness and vulgar display; his bracing contrariness, tiresome perversity. Strange, this alteration of perspective; and even stranger, it sometimes occurs to me that if he changed his opinions again and agreed with me, all his qualities would once more reverse polarity and appear in their original splendor. A very instructive experience, epistemologically speaking.

“Farewell, Hitch” is the most recent of Scialabba’s essays reprinted in What Are Intellectuals Good For?, dating from 2005; but unlike so many other farewells to Hitchens written after 9/11, Scialabba’s essay manages to be measured and circumspect—and all the more devastating as a result.  Surely Scialabba’s rigorous honesty, his willingness to predicate his review on that very instructive experience (epistemologically speaking), accounts both for the circumspection and the devastation.

The other admirable thing about Scialabba is his unpredictability.  How do you know when you’re dealing with the work of a hack?  When you can anticipate its every move, mentally writing the review talking point by stock phrase before you actually read it.  Scialabba’s reviews are basically the opposite of that.  As if it’s not hard enough to reconcile the skeptical pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the geopolitical worldview of Noam Chomsky, Scialabba also finds ways to reconcile the polemics of Alexander Cockburn and the jeremiads of Victor Davis Hanson.  You wouldn’t think that someone like Scialabba, who admires Chomsky and Cockburn as well as antifoundationalist stalwarts Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, would file friendly reviews of Hanson’s and Heath’s Who Killed Homer?, Richard Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue, and Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer’s Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century.  But you’d be wrong.  Reading George Scialabba is always illuminating and often surprising, and I mean that as high praise.  Late in the collection, Scialabba cites Leonardo Sciascia’s response to the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini: “Pasolini ‘may be wrong,’ Sciascia replied, he ‘may contradict himself,’ but he knows ‘how to think with a freedom which very few people today even aspire to.’” That’s precisely my response to What Are Intellectuals Good For?, and may even offer an answer to the collection’s titular question: to think with a freedom which very few people even aspire to.

The case of Bernstein’s Dictatorship of Virtue is instructive, epistemologically speaking.  Scialabba largely—indeed, almost entirely—agrees with Bernstein’s fierce critique of multiculturalism in academe and out, even to the matter of the title, which suggests an ominous parallel between multiculturalism and the Reign of Terror.  Actually, Scialabba offers a parallel to another, more recent reign of terror: “Emasculated text books, the frantic pursuit of an artificial inclusiveness, neglect or even suspicion of intellectual mastery, subtle or unsubtle disparagement of classical ideals and achievements, reflexive accusations of racism, sexism, and elitism– it sounds a little like an earlier Cultural Revolution; though this time, fortunately, the promised hundred flowers have turned out to be not poisonous but only plastic.”  I imagine that those plastic flowers are Scialabba’s way of admitting that the death toll attributable to multiculturalism and political correctness is rather lower than that of the French or Cultural Revolutions.  Be that as it may, Scialabba also agrees with Bernstein’s antidote to multiculturalist terror:  “Real educational equality consists in everyone’s being held—and, if necessary, helped—to the same high standards.  Which standards? Bernstein makes a modest and pragmatic case—which is therefore much more persuasive than the neoconservatives’ strident and dogmatic case—for Americanism and Eurocentrism.”  If it’s hard to imagine a Chomsky/Cockburn fan endorsing a modest, pragmatic version of the neocons’ espousal of Americanism and Eurocentrism, well, see “illuminating and surprising,” one paragraph above.

Part of Scialabba’s disdain for the multiculturalist wing of the academic left stems from his aversion to what one might call the diversity-management bureaucracy.  That much is understandable.  But reviewing these 1990s culture-wars reviews today, I get the sense that Scialabba, like Russell Jacoby and Paul Berman, was a little too eager to believe the worst of the academic left (with a few salient exceptions, like Rorty and Fish).  In a 1992 issue of Dissent, Richard Rorty had written, “One of the contributions of the newer [the radical-academic] left has been to enable professors, whose mild guilt about the comfort and security of their own lives once led them into extra-academic political activity, to say, ‘Sorry, I gave at the office.’” Scialabba is fond of this line, and cites it twice—once in his review of Dictatorship of Virtue and once in his review of Against the Grain.  There’s good reason to be fond of it, I suppose.  It gently deflates all those self-satisfied claims about the political urgency of intellectual work, and Moloch knows,  some of those claims needed deflating.  But in retrospect, I think there’s reason to wonder whether Scialabba’s healthy skepticism about the self-satisfied claims of the academic left didn’t lead him to be rather too generous to some writers and not altogether fair to others.

For Scialabba’s take on Bernstein’s take on multiculturalism didn’t rest wholly on his aversion to the diversity-management bureaucracy; it rested also on his conviction that the conservative critics of the academic left had chosen their targets well.  Here’s how Scialabba puts it in his review of Against the Grain:

In its crusade against the politicization of contemporary culture, The New Criterion is—on the whole, in the main, and not to put too fine a point on it—right. Notwithstanding the importance of legal and social equality for women, homosexuals, and members of racial minorities, most of the cultural strategies employed in the service of these ends have been—again, on the whole; and with many exceptions, not always duly acknowledged by conservative critics—misguided and counterproductive. Multiculturalist pedagogy; the promotion of “cultural diversity” through arts administration, philanthropy, and public policy; academic departments of Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies; the project of “critical theory”; and in general, the greatly increased weight—in teaching and research, hiring and funding, programming and grant-making—given to explicitly political considerations: altogether these things have done more harm than good. They have undoubtedly made possible some valuable work and attracted some people to culture who would otherwise have been lost to it. But they have also generated a really staggering amount of mediocre and tendentious work. And not only do these ideological priorities make for less accomplished artists and scholars; they also make for less effective citizens. Attempting to turn one’s professional enthusiasms and expertise to political account can distract from—can even serve to rationalize the avoidance of—everyday democratic activity, with all its tedium and frustration.

The following sentence cites Rorty’s line about academic leftists giving at the office.

This is a pretty overwhelming bill of particulars, and even at this late date it’s hard for me to resist the temptation to argue with it line by line. (How, for instance, has the promotion of “cultural diversity” through arts administration, philanthropy, and public policy done more harm than good?)  But I will resist, and confine myself simply to noting an important feature of Scialabba’s account: it is one thing to argue that the politicization of culture is bad for culture, leading to the overvaluation of mediocrity and agitprop; it is quite another to argue that the politicization of culture is bad for politics, making for less effective citizens.  Somehow, Scialabba manages to imply that our fellow citizens would be more deeply engaged in and by politics if more people heeded Hilton Kramer’s formalist call for “a return to connoisseurship i.e., ‘the close, comparative study of art objects [and literary texts] with a view to determining their relative levels of aesthetic quality.’” Scialabba likes Kramer’s conception of connoisseurship, and that’s fine by me.  But however impatient I might become when inundated with mediocrity and agitprop, I have a hard time believing that there is any strong connection between connoisseurship and citizenship.  (I will, however, return to aesthetics and politics at the end of the essay.)

Because he believes that cultural politics are bad for culture and bad for politics, Scialabba also agrees with Russell Jacoby’s complaint that the culture wars are a distraction from real and important business.  Again, in retrospect, it’s clear that there was some merit to the complaint: of all the forms of AIDS activism in the period, surely the protests against the Paul Verhoeven flick Basic Instinct were among the least important.  And yet almost everyone on the American left who complained about the “distraction” of the culture wars spent a good deal of time writing books about them.  Ah, they were a powerful distraction indeed.

At this point, though, it might be instructive to do a side-by-side comparison between Scialabba’s assessment of Dictatorship of Virtue and that of Louis Menand, who reviewed it for the New York Review of Books in October 1994.  Like Scialabba, Menand agrees that Bernstein has a case: “I think it was inevitable,” Menand writes, “that new groups entering the professional culture would ask, about the standards and the mores and the ‘great books’ they found already in place there, ‘Why are these things good for us?’ And I think that a culture that cannot answer this question reasonably and persuasively, or see that there are indeed other ways of doing things and other books to talk about, is not a culture entirely worth defending. But I agree with Bernstein that this questioning has been the excuse for the promulgation of a shallow, reflexive, self-righteous political orthodoxy.”  But Menand offers a few reasons for skepticism about Bernstein’s book that seem not to have occurred to Scialabba at the time.  I quote at length, because Menand lays out a principle that subtends this entire discussion:

Was it legitimate for Clarence Thomas to “play the race card” after listening to Anita Hill’s testimony against him? Was Hill justified in feeling “sexually harassed” by the behavior she alleged? Is it inappropriate to raise the subject of race in a discussion of the O.J. Simpson case? Would the first Rodney King jury have let the officers off if King had been a white man? If Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio” photographs are objectionable, is it because they depict sexual acts, or because they depict homosexual acts, or because they depict sado-masochistic homosexual acts? Exactly how solicitous are we supposed to be about the self-esteem of sado-masochists?

These are possibly questions a society with a lot of other problems shouldn’t be quite so obsessed with. But we’re obsessed with them anyway, and the consequence is a nearly complete lack of consensus about what’s tolerant and fair and what’s fanatical and “politically correct”; about what’s legitimate criticism or distaste and what’s racist, sexist, or homophobic; about what’s an excellent pickup line and what’s grounds for a lawsuit. It’s not just that people don’t want to get hauled up before some disciplinary tribunal for what they thought was a perfectly innocent remark; it’s also that people honestly don’t want to give offense when none is intended (and also, I suppose, want to be sure that they have given offense when it is intended), and they would like to know just where reasonable people think the line ought to be drawn.

The credibility of a book about multiculturalism depends to a considerable extent, therefore, on the author’s instinct for distinguishing the innocuous from the objectionable—or, perhaps more often, the objectionable from the more objectionable. Readers not already confident of their own instincts in these matters need to feel that the writer sees the merits in the cases he discusses in roughly the way they would see them, and that he won’t excuse offensive behavior just because the response to that behavior is also offensive. I think my attitude toward multiculturalism’s claims to represent a cogent and useful educational and social philosophy is fairly skeptical, but I had a very hard time entering into Bernstein’s sense of some of the situations he describes.

Bernstein is generally interested in cases in which people seem to have overreacted to inadvertent, misunderstood, or trivial affronts to their self-esteem. But his idea of what constitutes overreaction is sometimes hard to credit because his idea of what constitutes an affront seems rather limited. He tells us, in his opening pages, about an editorial run by the Philadelphia Inquirer proposing to decrease the number of poor, specifically black children by offering welfare mothers added benefits if they agree to use a contraceptive called Norplant, which makes women infertile for five years. Bernstein regards this rather eugenicist and racially targeted proposition as “the normal expression of opinion,” and he cannot understand why both black and white reporters became extremely upset about it, and why the paper decided to run an apology. . . .

The reaction to the Inquirer editorial does not seem to me, even on Bernstein’s account, to have been inappropriate. Among other things, the paper decided to require that editorials on controversial topics be approved in the future by the entire thirteen-member editorial board. Bernstein complains that this gives “veto power to the board’s three black members.” True enough. It also gives veto power to any one of the board’s ten non-black members.

I admire the distinctly Menandian deadpan quality of that final sentence.  But I admire even more Menand’s sense of how to gauge a writer’s credibility when it comes to matters about which there is no social consensus.  And on that count, I think it’s diagnostic that Bernstein directed his criticism not at an editorial calling for the temporary sterilization of black women but at the possibility that three black members of the Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board be granted veto power over editorials on controversial topics.  It’s a handy index to Bernstein’s sense of political priorities.  And it’s regrettable that Scialabba didn’t pick up on it, or, perhaps, didn’t have a harder time entering into Bernstein’s sense of some of the situations he describes.

If Scialabba is a bit too generous with Bernstein, he is not altogether fair to Edward Said. Culture and Imperialism, Scialabba writes, is “an inexhaustibly tiresome book.” “The writing is clumsy, stilted, verbose, imprecise, and marinated—pickled—in academic jargon”; worse still, “Said’s polemical manners, here as elsewhere, are atrocious: sneering, overweening, ad hominem. Too often, he innocently misinterprets or not-so-innocently misrepresents other people’s arguments.”  I suppose this is plausible enough—I’ve heard similar complaints about Said before.  But Scialabba’s distaste for atrocious polemical manners did not prevent him from writing an admiring review of Alexander Cockburn, so perhaps this is one of those cases to which Scialabba refers in his essay on Hitchens. Still, Scialabba is probably right to find Said’s reading of Austen’s Mansfield Park reductive and tendentious.  In response to Said’s claim that “the extraordinary formal and ideological dependence of the great French and English realistic novels on the facts of empire has never been studied from a general theoretical standpoint” (a claim which is buttressed in part by making much of Sir Thomas Bertram’s departure from Mansfield Park for his estate in Antigua), Scialabba is withering:

[Said’s] interpretive strategy is bold and ingenious. “How are we to assess Austen’s few references to Antigua, and what are we to make of them interpretively? … My contention is that by that very odd combination of casualness and stress, Austen reveals herself to be assuming … the importance of an empire to the situation at home.” This is the hermeneutics of suspicion a la folie.

In fact, not much more can usefully be said about the relation of Mansfield Park to the British Empire than that the former was written in the latter. “Extraordinary formal and ideological dependence,” my eye. It is just this sort of grandiloquent assertion that excited so many people about Orientalism and that makes Said’s celebrity so depressing.

It was a heady time—I remember it well, that particular postcolonialist moment in which the most urgent task at hand involved finding some way of linking Jane Austen to imperialism, slavery, and genocide.  I’m not surprised that Scialabba finds it all a bit overheated.  But I am surprised by the final paragraphs of the review, which basically charge Said with giving at the office:

For many people with aesthetic tastes and talents, real politics—anything likely to produce new legislation, not just new curriculum—is bound to seem like fearful drudgery. Since neither accepting irrelevance nor plunging into the pedestrian is an attractive option to most literary people, some have looked for reasons to consider the aesthetic as political. It’s too difficult getting up to speed to debate economics or foreign policy with smart right-wingers. And organizing the unfortunate is appallingly dull. So, since finding evidence (however far-fetched) of the “formal and ideological dependence” of art on social structure appears to provide work both congenial and useful, it is denominated “political.”

This is not such a contemptible evasion. The dilemma it is meant to resolve is a subtle one; to feel it at all is honorable. And Said has, to his credit, plunged into the pedestrian—into the details of contemporary political debate—more than most. But few of his epigoni have the energy to follow him there.

Here the strain is evident.  For whatever one’s opinion of Said’s politics—and he had legions of admirers and detractors on that score—it would seem incontrovertible that he had a politics, that he was intimately involved in one of the most explosive geopolitical conflicts on the left for most of his intellectual career, that he was a champion of the Palestinian cause in a United States deeply hostile to such champions (see also Chomsky, Noam).  It is simply implausible to accuse Edward Said of evading real politics by finding far-fetched evidence of the formal and ideological dependence of art on social structure.  And so Scialabba does not throw that pitch; instead, he sets, winds up, delivers . . . and stops himself at the last moment, admitting that Said plunged into political debate more than most and leveling the accusation instead at Said’s “epigoni.” They’re the ones who are giving at the office, yet for their lapses Said is apparently to blame. This, I think, is not quite cricket.

I’ll close, however, on another note.  Because insofar as Scialabba’s culture-wars dispatches argue that the politicization of culture leads to a trivial or attenuated form of politics, Scialabba clearly has a point, regardless of whether I agree with his reviews of Bernstein and Said.  So let’s take up matters of aesthetics.  In his review of Against the Grain, Scialabba takes issue with the New Criterion’s faith in “intrinsic merit.”  Kimball and Kramer write: “We proceed on the conviction that there is such a thing as intrinsic merit, that it can be discerned and rationally argued for, and that its rejection is a prescription for moral and cultural catastrophe.”  Scialabba’s response is smart and eloquent—and, in the end, questionable:

Well, then, what is intrinsic merit? “Intrinsic” can’t mean “universally agreed upon,” since no aesthetic criteria are. It can’t mean “independent of inherited, unconscious, or other local determination,” since no beliefs are. It can’t, in short, mean supra-historical and non-contingent, since nothing whatever is. What Fish, Rorty, and other pragmatists contend is that all criteria start out equal and must be justified to those who would be affected by their adoption—that democracy, in other words, is prior to philosophy. Beyond this, as Fish never tires of pointing out, antifoundationalism has no consequences. In any case, if Kramer and Kimball believe there are objective, irrefragable, rationally demonstrable aesthetic and moral criteria, they ought by now to have offered the rest of us a fairly precise idea of what they are, or in whose writings they can be found.

They haven’t, and they can’t. But then, they needn’t. They need only muddle along, employing and occasionally articulating the criteria that have emerged from our culture’s conversation since the Greeks initiated it, and showing that what used to and still usually does underwrite our judgments about beauty and truth is inconsistent with giving Robert Mapplethorpe a one-man show, or Karen Finley an NEA grant, or Toni Morrison a Nobel Prize. More than that, no one can do.

OK, I’ll take Finley off the table—she’s not exactly my cup of chocolate.  But Mapplethorpe and Morrison?  Really?

It’s hard to tell whether Scialabba is seriously saying that what used to and still usually does underwrite our judgments about beauty and truth is inconsistent with critically acclaiming Mapplethorpe and Morrison, or whether he is simply inhabiting and ventriloquizing the New Criterion worldview as a good reviewer should do.  But in either case, I think there are two possible responses.

The first is to take the low road, and deal simply with the political aspect of this judgment, be it Scialabba’s or Kimball and Kramer’s.  Mapplethorpe, Finley, and Andres Serrano (for Piss Christ) were, infamously, the basis for Patrick Buchanan’s kulturkampf campaign for the Presidency in 1992, and many leftists might reflexively think that any artist on the wrong side of Buchanan must be on the right side of history—and that anyone who criticizes such artists is therefore objectively pro-Buchanan.  But to make that argument is precisely to take cultural artifacts and cultural debates on narrow political terms, and to confirm Scialabba’s sense of why this is a bad thing to do.  So I’m going to go with the second response, and demur from this judgment on aesthetic grounds.

Regardless of whether one thinks Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio is “objectionable,” as Menand put it, I honestly don’t believe there can be any serious question as to the aesthetic quality of Mapplethorpe’s work in formalist terms; his photography is exquisite, and I’m willing to bet that quite a number of the people who have employed and articulated aesthetic criteria since the Greeks might agree.  Likewise, I see no problem whatsoever with awarding the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison; I think her narrative talent is on a par with Coetzee, Lessing, and Garcia Marquez, and surely neither the standards of the Nobel Prize nor the history of aesthetics was traduced when they received the award.

But to make this argument is to suggest that the faculty of judgment we bring to art and literature is inseparable from the faculty of judgment we bring to the rest of the world.  It is also to suggest that some aspects of the culture wars weren’t distractions at all; on the contrary, they were about nothing other than the employment and articulation of public standards of judgment.  And George Scialabba knows all this very well, which is why his many contributions to that conversation, then and now, remain so valuable—even, or especially, when his judgments don’t concur with mine.

OK, that was a moment.  Now back to talking about blogging.  Here’s Hilzoy:

The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn’t just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die.

I thought: we’ve gone mad. And I have to do something—not because I thought that I personally could have any appreciable effect on this, but because it felt like what Katherine called an all hands on deck moment. I had heard about times like this in the past—the McCarthy era, for instance—though I had never expected to live through one. Nonetheless, I was. And I had to try to do something, however insignificant.

When I read this, I had the eerie feeling that I’d heard it before—from Tristero, from Atrios, from pretty much everyone who started blogging in 2002, back when the blogosphere consisted mainly of techno-utopian libertarians, back when “Liberal Oasis” truly was a liberal oasis, back before the concept of the “shorter” was invented as a way of taming the Den Bestean beast.  (I didn’t start blogging then—but I started reading blogs then, searching for a liberal oasis in the midst of the madness.)  It’s not too much to say that the liberal blogosphere began largely in response to the insane policies and the sheer level of invective in the runup to war in Iraq—not only from the right, of course, but from the Very Serious People who, just after promising us a rose garden and a cakewalk, described even the most measured critics of an Iraq invasion as raving lunatics unfit for serious public discussion.

Does Hilzoy exaggerate?  Do I?  I’m afraid not.  Hilzoy’s farewell address reminds me of something I came across in the course of writing the-book-that-will-be-out-in-November, something that might be worth revisiting now.  In that book, whose title I forget, I spend a few dozen pages on the prelude to war in Iraq, and I mention Al Gore’s September 23, 2002 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California.  In that speech, Gore said things like this:

To begin with—to put first things first—I believe we should focus our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it. The vast majority of those who sponsored, planned and implemented the cold-blooded murder of more than 3,000 Americans are still at large, still neither located nor apprehended, much less punished and neutralized. I do not believe that we should allow ourselves to be distracted from this urgent task simply because it is proving to be more difficult and lengthy than was predicted. Great nations persevere and then prevail. They do not jump from one unfinished task to another. We should remain focused on the war against terrorism.

I believe that we are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion. If you’re going after Jesse James, you ought to organize the posse first. Especially if you’re in the middle of a gunfight with somebody who’s out after you.

I don’t think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. The fact that we don’t know where they are should not cause us to focus instead on some other enemy whose location may be easier to identify. We have other enemies, but we should focus first and foremost as our top priority on winning the war against terrorism.

Nevertheless, President Bush is telling us that America’s most urgent requirement of the moment—right now—is not to redouble our efforts against Al Qaeda, not to stabilize the nation of Afghanistan after driving its host government from power, even as Al Qaeda members slip back across the border to set up in Afghanistan again; rather, he is telling us that our most urgent task right now is to shift our focus and concentrate on immediately launching a new war against Saddam Hussein. And the president is proclaiming a new, uniquely American right to preemptively attack whomsoever he may deem represents a potential future threat.

Moreover, President Bush is demanding in this high political season that Congress speedily affirm that he has the necessary authority to proceed immediately against Iraq and, for that matter, under the language of his resolution, against any other nation in the region, regardless of subsequent developments or emerging circumstances. Now, the timing of this sudden burst of urgency to immediately take up this new cause as America’s new top priority, displacing our former top priority, the war against Osama Bin Laden, was explained innocently by the White House chief of staff in his now well-known statement that “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

Nevertheless, all Americans should acknowledge that Iraq does indeed pose a serious threat to the stability of the Persian Gulf region, and we should be about the business of organizing an international coalition to eliminate his access to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to completely deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Now, let’s be clear, there’s no international law that can prevent the United States from taking action to protect our vital interests when it is manifestly clear that there is a choice to be made between law and our survival. Indeed, international law itself recognizes that such choices stay within the purview of all nations. I believe, however, that such a choice is not presented in the case of Iraq. Indeed, should we decide to proceed, our action can be justified within the framework of international law rather than requiring us to go outside the framework of international law. In fact, even though a new United Nations resolution might be helpful in the effort to forge an international consensus, I think it’s abundantly clear that the existing U.N. resolutions passed 11 years ago are completely sufficient from a legal standpoint so long as it is clear that Saddam Hussein is in breach of the agreements made at the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War.

Go ahead and read the whole thing, as we used to say on blogs.  Pretty sane, centrist stuff, right?  Not according to the late Michael Kelly, who famously responded like so:

Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale.

Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts—bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.

Read that whole thing, too.  Kelly’s rant may have been spittle-flecked, but it was merely the spittle-flecked version of the conventional wisdom of the time.

And here’s something I decided to leave out of the book.  Kelly, you may recall, was the first American journalist to die in the Iraq war; he was killed on April 3, 2003 in a Humvee crash.  Today, there is a Michael Kelly Award in his honor—sponsored, as that home page tells you, by “Atlantic Media Company where Michael Kelly was Editor and Chief Editorial Advisor.”  Now, of course I understand that the man must be memorialized in some way, and of course it’s good to see that the award goes to actual investigative journalists doing actual investigative journalism.  But I have to admit that this bit makes me feel all squicky inside:  “The Michael Kelly Award honors a writer or editor whose work exemplifies a quality that animated Michael Kelly’s career: THE FEARLESS PURSUIT AND EXPRESSION OF TRUTH.”

Golly, I don’t know.  We are, after all, talking about the guy who replied to Gore’s sane speech with some pretty vile and contemptible hysteria—and who had spent, by that point, more than five years sliming Gore in this way.  Check out this timely column from November 15, 2000:

It’s a tossup as to what is most revolting about Al Gore’s determination to vote-rig his way into the White House. You could argue that it is the daylight-brazenness; decent people know that this sort of thing is done under cover—that’s how Boss Daley, father of Gore’s campaign chief, Bill Daley, always did it. Then there is the utterly reckless selfishness; the price of a Gore presidency will be a constitutional crisis, a divided nation and a taint on the presidency. But we’ve been there before, and as Gore’s boss said at that time, the important thing is just to win.

My sense is that there are already a couple of real awards for actual investigative journalists who are dedicated to the fearless pursuit and expression of truth; maybe the Kelly Award (since the man really should be memorialized in some way) should be reserved for something else, something that exemplifies some other quality that animated Kelly’s career.  Perhaps, to take a cue from Hilzoy, someone should propose a alternative Kelly Award honoring writers who, by means of their sheer level of invective, work to demonize liberals who hold perfectly reasonable views?

There is much talk among the literary Darwinists and their allies about not wanting to go back to the days of “old-boy humanism,” with its “impressionistic” reading and “belletristic” writing. (Only in English departments could good writing be considered a bad thing.) But no matter the age or gender of the practitioner, any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid. It will be a product of its times, though it will see beyond those times. It will not satisfy the dean’s desire for accumulable knowledge, the parent’s desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman’s desire for a generation of technologists. All it will do is help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we’re going. Until the literary academy is willing to stand up in public and defend that mission without apology, it will never find its way out of the maze.

OK, well, certainly Deresiewicz knows that the standard complaint about “belletristic” writing is not that it’s well written.  Traditionally, “belletrism” suggests a kind of glib, breezy dilettantism, the kind of thing for which this blogger is deservedly notorious.  So let’s get that straight.  But after that glib, breezy parenthesis, the rest of the paragraph is quite wonderful.  And I say so not only because it agrees so nicely with my conclusion in my 2003 essay, “The Utility of the Arts and Humanities,” where I write,

if we understand human history in its historicity, there will be no final answers to any of the questions we might pose about the American Civil War or the rise of the caliphate or the Edict of Nantes or the emergence of homo/hetero classifications for sexuality or any other significant historical event or process; no final interpretations in literature, anthropology, dance, philosophy, or music; no answers that cannot be challenged and answered again from fresh social and historical perspectives.  This is what we humanists do:  we try to determine what it all means, in the broadest sense of “it” and “means,” and just as important, how it all means.

No, I think Deresiewicz’s final paragraph is quite wonderful all on its own.  Its agreement with stuff I believe is just extra bonus points.

And even better, Deresiewicz’s essay contains a bunch of things I wish I’d said, like the conclusion of this piquant paragraph:

Again and again, Darwinian criticism sets out to say something specific, only to end up telling us something general. An essay that purports to explain Shakespeare’s preeminence as a playwright argues instead that drama appeals to us because it portrays the social dynamics of small human groups (as evidenced by the fact that Shakespeare’s casts range from eighteen to forty-seven characters). [Brian] Boyd devotes a hundred pages to the Odyssey without saying anything he couldn’t have said with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch or Proust. The discussion is nothing more than an illustration of Darwinian ideas, not an explication of Homeric meanings. Indeed, it’s an illustration of largely one idea, that before an artist can even worry about meanings, he needs to figure out how to hold his audience’s attention. If the point sounds banal, that is squarely within the emerging disciplinary tradition. I have read any number of Darwinian essays about Pride and Prejudice (one critic calls it their “fruit fly”), but I have yet to read one that told me anything interesting. The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.

Now, I haven’t yet read Boyd’s book (I’m slated to review it for the same place I reviewed Alan Sokal’s book last year), so I’ll reserve judgment about that, of course; I’m encouraged to see that Deresiewicz says that Boyd is “a clearer and more careful thinker than most of these other writers,” because those other writers are people like Denis Dutton, whose work has always seemed to me to be a variation on “the giraffe has a long neck, and the elephant has a long trunk, and therefore humans make abstract sculptures, just so!  Thus I have refuted Judith Butler!”  But, even with judgment reserved, I have to say I do love Deresiewicz’s final sentence, the idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.  Besides, everyone knows that Pride and Prejudice is not about mate selection.  Hart Crane’s The Bridge is about mate selection, as is Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and that’s where your literary Darwinism really comes in handy.

But I can only admire Deresiewicz’s essay so much, you know, because there are a couple of really false notes in it.  Here’s the worst of ‘em:

The humanities, meanwhile, are undergoing their own struggle for survival within the academic ecosystem. Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated. As the Darwinists are quick to point out, a lot of this suffering is self-inflicted. In literary studies in particular, the last several decades have witnessed the baleful reign of “Theory,” a mash-up of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense. Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation—not exactly the highest of mental virtues—rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural “difference,” is dead set against the notion of human universals. Theory has led literary studies into an intellectual and institutional cul-de-sac, and now that its own energies have been exhausted (the last major developments date to the early ‘90s), it has left it there.

This is the kind of thing “Landru” was saying in a recent thread at my place, and I think it’s worth taking up at some length.  So here we go, at some length.

First: there’s a grain of truth in there about the dogmatism and hermeticism associated with Theory.  I touched lightly on that phenomenon in my opening post on the great Valve-Theory’s Empire Wars of 2005, which led my theory-besotted blog to develop the series known as “Theory Tuesdays.”  In one of the better contributions to that debate, John McGowan acknowledged,

There is evidence of group-think out there. Let me give an example that bugged me for years. For a long time (happily that time now seems over), lots of people in literary studies knew that if Habermas said it, it must be wrong. The man couldn’t get a fair hearing in certain circles. The reasons for this failure in open-mindedness are many and complex. But we certainly should not discount the bad effects of a lousy job market and of the increasing pressure to publish. Conformity will result when it is very hard to get—and to keep—a place at the Theory’s Empire table.

(The passage has disappeared from the Internets but can be found on page 22 of this fine dead-tree publication, thanks to John Holbo.)

The “if Habermas said it, it must be wrong” era isn’t quite over, as evidenced by the response of some of the Theory crowd to What’s Liberal; that response went something like, “it’s all very well and good to talk about the separation of powers and the relative autonomy of civil society as forms of ‘liberalism,’ but everyone knows that liberalism is really just a stalkinghorse for the imperialist Enlightenment project of universal reason and also cannot account for its imbrication in the system of power/knowledge.”  People can write this stuff in their sleep, and some actually do.  Anyway, the claim that Theory involves hero worship is sometimes true.  But then, not everyone who does theory worships Theory’s heroes, and there are plenty of people who hate Theory and worship anti-Theory heroes of their own.

Second: when Deresiewicz charges that Theory “rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural ‘difference,’ is dead set against the notion of human universals,” again, there’s a grain of truth there.  Those of us in the humanities who know something about human biology—and this group would include Richard Powers, whose most recent novel Deresiewicz disdained for telling us too much about human biology—tend to agree that the Theory wing reaches for its guns when it hears the term “human universals.”  But as for “objective knowledge”—my stars!  What is this thing called “objective knowledge”?  Can you explain it for me?  Can you give me an example of it?  (And don’t give me an example of a brute fact, like “carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table.”  Give me an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their sense impressions, beliefs, etc.)  And then, when you’ve done all that, can you give me an explanation of what this appeal to “objective knowledge” is doing in an essay that insists that criticism “will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid”?  Because I could use an objective explanation of what’s going on here.

But enough with the grains of truth already!  Let’s get to the really annoying stuff.

Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated.

All of these things are true: our budgets are shrinking, our faculty positions are being lost, and our institutional prestige has all but evaporated.  All of these things are true, except the bit about the students.  Honest to Moloch, I’m beginning to think nobody takes me seriously when I cite the Digest of Higher Education Statistics, and that makes me sad.  But go ahead and click that link!  Discover there the shocking and surprising truth—that English enrollments plummeted between 1970 and 1980, from 63,914 degrees to 31,922, and then rebounded thereafter, reaching the 50,000 mark in 1990 and hovering in that vicinity ever since.  In other words, during the years when Theory was at its peak, when everybody knew that Habermas was wrong and that anything Gayatri Spivak told you three times was true, the English major actually drew in tens of thousands of new students, some of whom may actually have liked the fact that their literature classes were places they could read and think and talk about gender and sexuality and textuality and even some of that power/knowledge flimflammery.  (And in graduate programs, where Theory was thickest, enrollments soared:  to take one readily-available measure (.pdf), 3,299 humanities doctorates were awarded in 1987, 5,109 in 2007.)

Besides, everybody knows that the decline of the humanities, with regard to funding and prestige, has nothing to do with student enrollment.  It has to do with the Sokal Hoax, which proved once and for all that everything Sokal’s fans can’t stand is objectively wrong.  But since Janet has promised to bury me alive and cover me with quicklime if I ever mention the Sokal Hoax again, I have to offer an alternate theory of What Went Wrong with the Humanities.  And I have decided that the real reason that people no longer trust or respect humanists is that some of us write solemn essays about how their elite educations have rendered them incapable of making small talk with plumbers.  Call it the Higher David Brooksism.  (A serious aside: if your plumber is wearing a Red Sox cap and talks with a thick Boston accent, and you can’t even say a few words to him about the recent history of the Red Sox, that’s not the fault of your elite education.  It’s just you.  Sociability fail.)

More seriously, and on a less personal note: the truly false note in this lament about the baleful reign of Theory is this.

… other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense.

To paraphrase the mighty Fafblog, “Oh no! Not common sense! That’s where all my friends live!”  Certainly, we can’t have a form of literary criticism that cuts the field off from common sense.  Literary criticism should be devoted to the elaboration of insights that pretty much anybody could come to, and that most people would agree with.

And has Theory and its assorted abstrusiosomousiosites cut the field off from “society”?  Undoubtedly, because that’s where all my friends live, too.  Back in 1970, the field of literary criticism was part of society, and was even mentioned in the society pages of the New York Times.  Then Theory came along, and M. H. Abrams never appeared on The Tonight Show—or in the pages of the Times—again.

But the claim that Theory has cut the field of literary studies off from “the main currents of academic thought” is surely the strangest claim of all.  Because if there’s one thing that Theory clearly did, for good or for ill (mainly for good, I think, but with my usual caveats), it established a kind of interdisciplinary esperanto for humanists, artists, and social scientists.  As Michèle Lamont put it in one of her guest-posts here:

The relationship between philosophy and the humanities—where is it going in substantive terms? Is philosophy truly so disciplinarily isolated? With the progressive importation of French structuralism and post-structuralism over the last thirty some years, “European theory”—which generally means French, but also German and sometimes British theory) has become lingua franca across a number of humanities disciplines and interpretive social sciences and has allowed English and comparative literature experts to converse with art historians, architects, musicologists, anthropologists, etc. In philosophy, the continental tradition remained marginal. The influence of analytical philosophy facilitated other forms of interdisciplinary exchanges with fields such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, legal theory, etc. We have many forms of interdisciplinary dialogues, which function on different kinds of shared cognitive platforms—different currencies.

Interesting, is it not, when you adopt a wider disciplinary perspective than that provided by Deresiewicz?  Suddenly it looks like philosophy might have been isolated from the rest of the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences, and “theory” might have been the means by which scholars conversed across the disciplines of  English and comparative literature, art history, architecture, musicology, anthropology, etc.  For really—and I think we’re in the realm of objective human knowledge here—there’s no plausible way to claim that when literary studies started talking about Foucault, the discipline cut itself off from history and political theory and sociology and philosophy and anthropology.

Now, it’s always possible to claim that the rise of Theory and its spread across the disciplines is responsible for the decline in funding and prestige in certain sectors of the humanities and interpretive social sciences.  I think that claim would be contestable, but it is not implausible, since there might indeed be some correlation between “challenging common sense” and “losing funding and prestige.”  But you really can’t claim that the rise Theory cordoned off literary critics and left us unable to converse with people in other disciplines.  Because that would be just silly and blinkered and also wrong.

OK, I’m off to talk about these things with a bunch of people from the arts and humanities and sciences.  I’ll check in when I can.

x-posted.

Gail Collins:  David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the Applebee’s salad bar and never get up again.

OK, I admit it, I did indeed finish that conversation.  But only because I was fortified by this old chestnut first.  Once I regained the will to live, I read Brooks’ final comment:

what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

Right, of course, except for the people who don’t.

More importantly: to revive an argument I made in What’s Liberal and have been repeating ever since (like right now!), this kind of sober centrism doesn’t explain why seventy-something percent of Americans disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rejection of state bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia in 1967, but only about seventy-something people consider this a “hot-button social issue” now.  (For those of you who still haven’t read What’s Liberal despite my most earnest entreaties: I note in the epilogue that TV’s first interracial kiss occurred the next year, in 1968, on Star Trek—and that the episode was widely banned in the South.  This despite the fact that (a) Uhura and Kirk, the kissers in question, were not acting under their own power at the time, and (b) Kirk kisses every woman in the galaxy eventually.  Not to mention the ancillary fact that since this is Star Trek we’re talking about, the kiss took place in the twenty-third century, so even in 1968 it hadn’t really happened yet, which should have reassured Southerners and racists everywhere that their unspoken communal understandings about such matters would persist for quite some time.  (Flash forward to the twenty-first century: a check of the Google tells me that the only people upset by the Spock-Uhura kiss in the new Star Trek movie are the people at Stormfront, and no, no link to them.)

I keep coming back to Loving v. Virginia not only because it’s the obvious reference point for contemporary debates about gay marriage, but also because I think it’s an especially good device for asking one of Ye Oldest Questions in Ye Olde Historicist Handbook, namely, how does seismic cultural change like this happen?  Base, superstructure, determination in the last instance, you know the tune—the last time I tried to sing it, I wound up with this three-part essay on Raymond Williams’ “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.”  When I was out at Reed College earlier this month, I mentioned this in the course of a talk on the history of cultural studies, and since my audience consisted of about fifty alumni most of whom were twentysomethings when Loving v. Virginia was decided, we had a spirited discussion of this and much else.  One younger alumna wanted to know why there seems to have been such an amazing liberalization of popular opinion with regard to gay marriage, gays and lesbians in the military, etc., while progress on gender equity, measured from (say) the Neolithic period, has been so glacial; I responded, of course, by saying “you know, when you feel like you’ve been leapfrogged by gay marriage, this is where Williams’ dominant/ emergent/ residual argument comes in really handy.”  Then someone asked how I would account for the decline in smoking over the past forty years.  I said, more or less, that (a) maybe, just maybe, sometimes enormous, decades-long public-health campaigns actually work! and (b) at some point over those forty years, as the social stigma of smoking got stronger and stronger, smoking got itself more and more strongly associated with the poor and the working class, which surely accelerated the process of stigmatization.  These are pretty obvious arguments, I know.  If only I’d waited until Henry’s post went up!

Anyway, the point remains that the “people gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings” argument is just lazy and bad and also wrong.  Because sometimes, those unspoken communal understandings turn out to be no more substantial than a puff of smoke.

Here’s the Oyez summary of the case.  Since Garcetti involves the fate of a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was whistleblowing with regard to what appeared to be a fraudulent affidavit, most people didn’t realize that it might have implications for academic freedom.  Ah, but not the AAUP’s legal staff!  They were on the case, so to speak, from the start (here’s a .pdf of the brief).  Which is yet another reason you all (if you’re college professors) should have joined the AAUP by now, because (a) the AAUP sees these things coming when most of the rest of us don’t and (b) helps to fight ‘em in court.  Indeed, the AAUP/ Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brief seems to have caught the attention of David Souter, who, bless his retiring heart, wrote in dissent:

This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write “pursuant to official duties.”

In response, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, citing Bugs Bunny, replied, “ehhhhhh … could be!”  Though the actual language was this:

There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.

In other words, we’re leaving that door open, thanks—if any lower courts want to walk through it, just make sure they wipe their feet on the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom.

And don’t be fooled by Kennedy’s reference to “scholarship and teaching,” either. Anything you do or say as part of your job as a public-university employee—including ordinary university committee work that touches on matters of institutional policy and procedures—can now be grounds for disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.

Or so held the Hong court.  And as a result, the members of the Faculty Senate at the University of California-Davis recently received this letter:

Academic Senate colleagues,

The UC Davis Academic Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility has been carefully reviewing recent court cases in which professors have sought relief from real or perceived disciplinary actions against them by the university administrations at their institutions. These cases include Hong v UC Regents, Renken v Gregory et al. (representing University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), and Gorum v University of Delaware. Each case has unique circumstances, but the uniformity of the judicial rulings across these cases provides a clear and important message that we feel is necessary to make you aware of.

According to recent court rulings, your speech and behavior in job-related duties as a public employee rather than a private citizen have no First Amendment protection. This means that disciplinary action may be taken against you (including dismissal) for statements you make in the course of your employment. Any activity performed on the job falls within this purview. According to the recent court rulings, speech and actions in shared governance activities are certainly not protected. Historically, courts perceived that some First Amendment protection may exist for speech and actions related to your academic scholarship, but that subset of activities has never been directly evaluated by the Supreme Court. It may be that future cases will reverse the present trend and give support to faculty. Nevertheless, we recommend that you expect that your speech and behavior outside of your field of scholarship is absolutely not protected by the First Amendment.

Further, university policies on academic freedom (APM 010 and 015) only protect speech and behavior in your area of demonstrated academic scholarship. Do not expect that university policies give you a right to speak and act freely in your job duties on campus outside of your scholarship. For example, the Renken case illustrates that your speech and actions related to the management of your research grants are not protected, even though the activities covered by those grants are part of your academic scholarship. Our employment culture at UC Davis has been supportive of transparency and freedom, but it may not be a right.

In light of the present deep economic recession and dramatic cuts under discussion at UC Davis, faculty participating in shared governance are in a position in which they may voice strong views and concerns that could lead to lawful but punitive reaction by the administration, including denial of merits and even dismissal. Given the legal and policy realities at hand, we highly recommend that you use caution, restraint, and judgment in your speech and actions in all job-related duties.

Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility

How do I know this?  Because UC-Davis historian Eric Rauchway passed it along to me this weekend, and I forwarded it to the AAUP (with his permission), and now Eric has blogged about it as well.  (I did not know there was an Ari Fleischer University!  Ah, well, We Are All Ari Fleischer University Now.)  Here’s Eric:

In Hong v. Grant, Judge Cormac Carney ruled that it didn’t really matter why Hong had been denied his merit, because even if he had been denied on account of his statements, rather than on account of a modest research record, it would have been acceptable under Garcetti v. Ceballos.

Mr. Hong is under professional obligation to actively participate in the interworkings and administration of his department, including the approval of course content and manner of instruction.

If I follow the logic correctly, Hong is obliged to participate in the administration of his department. But the definition of “actively participate in the interworkings and administration of his department” appears here to be, “say only those things which won’t lose you a merit increase.”

Now so far, the implication of the case seems to be, don’t say anything bad about how the administration runs the university. None of this seems to touch utterances in the classroom or research. But it doesn’t exclude them, either. As Carney notes, “In the University of California system, a faculty member’s official duties are not limited to classroom instruction and professional research.” Which is to say, official duties include serving on committees and suchlike in addition to classroom instruction and professional research. The clear implication of this sentence is that classroom instruction and professional research would be covered under Garcetti, unless they were specifically exempted by such precedents as Souter cited.

What is to be done?  Well, I’ve already suggested, and will suggest again, that it’s a good time to join the AAUP and help fund our attempts to get this stuff overturned and reversed and rendered moot.  But in the meantime, if you’re working at a public university, you should probably set about revising your faculty handbook as well, just in case.  As it happened, earlier this year the Penn State Faculty Senate asked me to consult with them about threats to academic freedom, and asked whether I had any advice for them as they reviewed Penn State’s academic freedom guidelines.  “Oh boy, do I,” I replied, “and this time, my advice has nothing to do with He Who Shall Not Be Designated By His First Initial and a Drastic Truncation of His Surname.”  I showed up and proposed a specific revision to our handbook, along the lines of the language proposed by the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate.  At Minnesota, they’ve struck the phrase “as a public citizen” from the following, because the logic of Garcetti (and all its children) is that you still have First Amendment rights when you speak as a citizen; you just don’t have them as a public employee.  The italicized passage is the new language:

Academic freedom is the freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom; to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression; and to speak or write as a public citizen without institutional discipline or restraint on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the University. Academic responsibility implies the faithful performance of academic duties and obligations, the recognition of the demands of the scholarly enterprise, and the candor to make it clear that the individual is not speaking for the institution in matters of public interest.

Hat tip to my friend Cary Nelson, AAUP President, who called this to my attention in his forthcoming book, No Campus is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom.  (Due next spring from NYU Press.  Keep an eye out for it!)

It’s so funny, except of course that it’s not funny at all: you spend so much time and energy defending academic freedom from the culture warriors of the right, and then something else, completely unrelated, comes along and does far more systemic damage.  Interestingly, Ye Olde Culture Warriors of the Right haven’t had much to say about the Children of Garcetti either.  But since this development could certainly affect conservative professors (if there are any left in the United States after the Great Purge) at public universities who comment on their schools’ policies and procedures, maybe it would be a good time for everyone to recognize that it makes sense to protect faculty from institutional retaliation when they speak on matters “pertinent to official duties.”

x-posted.