Chris Bertram

bq. “Goddammit, Morris, what are we going to do with this guy Swallow? He claims he ain’t _got_ a field.” Morris has recommended putting Philip down to teach English 99, a routine introduction to the literary genres and critical method for English majors, and English 305, a course in novel-writing. As Euphoric State’s resident novelist, Garth Robinson, was in fact very rarely resident, orbiting the University in an almost unbroken cycle of grants, fellowships, leaves of absence and alcoholic cures, the teaching of English 305 usually fell to some unwilling and unqualified member of the regular teaching staff. As Morris said, “If he makes a fuck-up of English 305, nobody’s going to notice. And any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English 99.”
“He doesn’t have a PhD, ” Hogan said.
“What?”
“They have a different system in England, Morris. The PhD isn’t so important.”
“You mean the jobs are hereditary?”

I quote this passage from David Lodge’s “Changing Places”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140170987/junius-20 in reaction to reading some of “the comments about Simon Schama”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000471.html over at Invisible Adjunct. As is happens, I don’t have a PhD either, and nor do several prominent British philosophers of my generation (such as UCL’s Jo Wolff, a contemporary of mine on the M.Phil at UCL in the early 80s). In the previous generation hardly anyone did the PhD or DPhil, most people got appointed after doing the Oxford B.Phil or the London M.Phil or something similar (these are both two-year postgraduate degrees involving a combination of examination and dissertation).

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I’ve been rereading parts of the “German Ideology”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the “marxists.org”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm website anyway, never mind ….]

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Following the whole “Max Cleland, Ann Coulter, Mark Steyn controversy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001352.html the other day, I was struck by the fact that the defenders of the smearers thought it a sufficient reply to their critics to say that what was said was literally true. (Whether it was literally true is, of course, another matter.) For once, it seems to me, philosophy can be of some use in showing that such a reply is inadequate.

Speech act theory is a pretty unsexy branch of philosophy of language these days (though elsewhere people like Habermas keep it above the visibility threshold, and there have been some daft attempts to deploy it in defence of the idea that pornography silences women). Indeed I’m not even sure that students get taught the basic distinctions on phil lang courses (which tend to be post-Davidsonian in content). But when it comes to thinking about what is going on in political discourse, it isn’t half helpful.

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I’ll be on strike on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I’m sure that the bourgeoisie are making plans to flee the country and that their lackeys in the capitalist press will be uttering their denunciations … but I don’t care.

Actually, I feel duty bound to participate because I’m a member of the union, and the ballot went in favour of a strike. But since “the union”:http://www.aut.org.uk/ is possibly the feeblest one in the TUC, has no ideas for how to get money into higher education, is challenging a deal that every other campus union has signed up to already and is most famous for marching under the stirring banner “Rectify the Anomaly!”:http://web.bham.ac.uk/J.C.Duffy/prentice.htm , I hold out no hope of success. The BBC has “some”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3508209.stm “details”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3507137.stm on the dispute, as does “the Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/specialreports/lecturerspay/story/0,5500,1153895,00.html , but most of the newsmedia have so far chosen to ignore the strike completely.

Comrades! To the barricades!

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me the following passage in the late Jean Hampton’s “Political Philosophy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813308585/junius-20 . Professor Hampton, who died in 1996, must have thought it inconceivable that a certain person would achieve high political office:

bq. Now while it is undeniable that some people are smarter or more virtuous or stronger than other people, these differences by themselves do not seem relevant to establishing political domination. Think, for example, of all the ways in which people are different from one another, physically, mentally and temperamentally. If someone has greater muscle strength than another, does that mean that he gets to rule the other? No: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not considered, by virtue of his physical prowess, a political authority. (p. 19)

Professor Edward Feser “continues his self-immolation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/022004C.html on TechCentralStation (see previous episodes “here”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/021304A.html and “here”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/021604A.html and Brian Leiter’s takes “here”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000817.html#000817 and “here”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000822.html ) and, in the course of doing so issues a challenge to his critics:

bq. The real question is whether on balance, in general, students tend to become more liberal as a result of their university experience; and this question can, for clarity’s sake, be broken up into a number of sub-questions [details below].

The answer to the questions is, according to Professor Feser, “yes”, indeed he

bq. … simply den[ies] the intellectual honesty of anyone who claims to believe otherwise — or at least doubt that he’s spent much time among university students. Yet to acknowledge that these questions must be answered in the affirmative is to acknowledge that the modern university does indeed serve the de facto function of undermining the commitment of the young to the traditional institutions of Western civilization.

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According to conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, “Immanuel Kant would have been a supporter of the Iraq war”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-5-1749.jsp . I’m posting this as a curiosity, really, since it seems unlikely to me that Kant, who didn’t allow peoples the right to overthrow despots (however much he might rejoice at the consequences) would have allowed the legitimacy of one people overthrowing another people’s regime (however despotic).

I’ve recently started going to German classes in an attempt to move beyond my dismal O-level German of thirty years ago. One thing I this has spurred me to want to do is to watch Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/ again. Heimat is the 11-episode-long dramatic chronicle of a German village from 1919 to the 1980s and tracks the ordinary lives of Germans against the background of political and military cataclysm. When it was broadcast by the BBC on successive evenings in the 1980s we stayed in and watched the whole thing (we had a small baby at the time, so staying in was just the way it was). Reitz’s immensely humane film makes explicable, but does not excuse, how German society could succumb to the lure of Nazism and it has to rate as one of the best things I’ve ever seen in TV. Its successor, “Die zweite Heimat”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0105906/ , dealing with the lives of young Germans in Munich from the postwar period to the present was much less compelling – but still good. Now I see that a further series, “Heimat 3”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0312142/ , is in production. Disappointingly, as far as I can tell, Heimat is not available on DVD or video but if anyone knows differently — let me know.

(Here’s “a page with some clips”:http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/germn/glossen/heft9/heimat.html in MOV format.)

Inspired by “Michael Brooke’s post”:http://www.michaelbrooke.com/archive/2004_02_15_index.html#107714320022442574 on “The Gender Genie”:http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html , a site that analyses text and guesses whether the author is male or female, I’ve just run samples of the Crooked Timber team’s writings though the test. It turns out that Ted is probably a woman and that all the rest of us (including Eszter and Maria) are men! Harry, whom I had down as a caring-sharing type, turns out to have gallons of testosterone coursing through his sentences. Who’d uv thunk it?

Just a pointer: be sure not to miss John Holbo’s post on “conservatives in academia”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/andrew_stuttafo.html and Belle Waring’s memoir of “one she knew”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/the_story_of_c.html in the Berkeley Classics Department.

I was at a meeting the other day where the question of “normal” boy and girl behaviour came up. I mean by this what girls and boys, especially teenagers, take to be normal behaviour for those of their own and the opposite gender. I _don’t_ mean what they ought to do. The opinion was voiced by others present that these norms had shifted appreciably in the last twenty or thirty years. Wearing makeup, for instance, they thought, was far more acceptable for boys today that for boys “twenty or thirty years ago”.

Since I was myself a teenager thirty years ago, I think I can say with some authority that this is mistaken, at least for the UK. Sexual intercourse was, as we know, “invented in 1963”:http://alt.venus.co.uk/weed/writings/poems/plam.htm , and by the early-to-mid-1970s glam-rock in the shape of David Bowie and Marc Bolan had made all kinds of flirting with cross-dressing and ambiguous gender identity acceptable for teenage boys. Punk followed almost immediately afterwards. (I’m told that things were different and more backward in the US, which, for James Miller, in his magisterial “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684865602/junius-20 , explains Bowie’s initial lack of success over there — until he toned things down.) But my guess is that, in the UK at least, teenagers were more ready to play with mixed sexual signals in the 1970s than they are today (and have been since the advent of “new laddism” in the 1990s).

My reading of the evolution of teenage mores may, of course, be wide of the mark. But my point in making it is just to observe how common is the notion of a “dreamtime” about “twenty or thirty years ago” when 1950s moral and cultural norms are supposed to have applied. Probably such standards didn’t obtain in the 1950s either, but people look on the past with a permanently moving horizon before which things were different, everybody was straight, lived in conventional families and playing with sexuality (and indeed being serious about it) was the preserve of intellectuals, poets and German cabaret artistes. It wasn’t like that.

There’s been light blogging from me over the past few days as I’ve been in “Bilbao”:http://www.bilbao.net/WebBilbaonet/home_c.jsp?idioma=c , biggest city in the Basque country and home to Frank Gehry’s wonderful “Guggenheim Museum”:http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/idioma.htm. The Guggenheim is really the main reason to visit the city and is a visual and technological marvel. The computer-generated curves link sufaces of stone, glass and most memorably titanium scales which shimmer over the bank of the Nervion river. Gehry isn’t the only architect in town, though, with Norman Foster represented by “the new Metro”:http://www.metrobilbao.net/Indicei.html which runs all the way out to the sea. Building the Guggenheim cost around US$100 million of public money but the effect has been to regenerate a decaying industrial city and put it back on the map as a tourist destination. Good to see a practical demonstration of the power of compulsory taxation and state-sponsored public works projects!

A friend emails with details of “a Flash presentation”:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/liberty.php (full screen version “here”:http://www.jonathangullible.com/mmedia/PhilosophyOfLiberty-english_music.swf ) explaining why libertarianism is the most appropriate political philosophy for matchstick people who have swallowed a collection of bizarre objects and like listening to Tubular Bells (TB on smaller version only).

“Today is the 200th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s death”:http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1441_A_1112709_1_A,00.html , a day that shouldn’t pass unremarked on a site whose title is drawn from his writings. For comment elsewhere see “Normblog”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/02/categorically_n.html and “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_02_01_archive.html#107659111717193752 (where Chris Brooke has assembled some of Kant’s choicest footnotes).