Humanities

Evaluating a recent book about Derrida at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Nancy J. Holland says:

One wonders, for instance, about the statement that philosophy in America “has the role of legitimating the US government and the scientific enterprise” leading to the suggestions that analytic philosophy “has as its telos the establishment of a universal culture for a static, totalitarian universal civilization” (pp. 124-125). Intriguing, and possibly even largely justified, but surely in need of much more argument.

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Over the years, my interest in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis has more than once led to a moment of conversational awkwardness, when it turned out that the other party had been quietly distracted by the effort to figure out what the anti-totalitarian left had to do with taking peyote.

With time I have learned to detect the signs of struggle early, and so make haste to point out that I don’t mean Carlos Castaneda, whose tales of cosmic shenanigans with Yaqui shaman Don Juan once played a big part in the counterculture.
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As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
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A long article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed covers the findings and recommendations in the MLA’s final report on tenure. Much of the same material is covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education here, I’d guess, but who knows? Short of selling blood — and quite a lot of it — I cannot afford to read anything they publish.
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I interviewed Michael Bérubé by phone over the weekend for a podcast now available from Inside Higher Ed. As you might expect, Bérubé is well-spoken. Alas, the gremlins were just as efficient in doing their work, for there is a certain amount of hiss from the phone line. Here’s hoping some people will try to listen past it. My colleague Elia Powers made heroic efforts to remove the noise. I’m told that this made Bérubé sound like a robot. Which, come to think of it, might have been pretty cool: A case can be made for doing all interviews with a Vocoder, à la Laurie Anderson.

As it is, though, we did get in a little bit of “Long Black Veil” as covered in 1985 by Baby Opaque, with Bérubé on drums and Ian MacKaye (in transit between Minor Threat and Fugazi) on vocals. For the full recording, go here.

Word is that suspects are being rounded up for an online symposium on What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? later in the semester. It’s understandable that the book should get the lion’s share of attention. It’s from a trade press. But the other one, Rhetorical Occasions, from the University of North Carolina Press, will be a lot more interesting to many CT readers.

You would be able to see why, had the good folks at UNCP provided the table of contents, instead of this.

Tuesday is, of course, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. There is by now a considerable body of pirate historiography. But is the field of piracy studies sufficiently well theorized?

Aye, often have I axed myself, only to be distracted by the plundering of booty.
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In the comments to my post on Onsager, Maynard Handley explains why he finds himself somewhat unsympathetic, as Onsager apparently did not expend the effort necessary to make himself understood by others.

You, the author of the paper, have a responsibility to make your ideas comprehensible. If the first method you choose to explain them fails, then you listen to what people say about where they lost all track of understanding and write a new paper—- with NEW explanations, not the same explanations that failed last time only renumbered. … [This is] not something that is drilled into young scientists; that it is YOUR responsibility to make your ideas clear to others, not their responsibility to try to figure out what you are talking about. As science grows ever larger and ever more complex, I think it is time for all scientists to be much more explicit and much more ruthless on this point.

Whether this is really a fair criticism of Onsager, I couldn’t say, but the general point is true, important, and a perfect hook for the next thing I wanted to post about.

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This is one of the most exciting things to have happened in a long time. Scientists using a new photographic technique have made amazing strides in deciphering the famed Oxyrhynchus papyrii (the contents of an Egyptian trash-heap). Apparently, just in the last few days, they have discovered previously unknown writings by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod, and Lucian, as well as a long epic passage from Archilochos. It’s not particularly likely that you’ve ever had a look at how much Archilochos there is in the world, but let me tell you: ain’t a whole lot. Not even one complete poem, if memory serves. (Oxford’s Delectus ex Iambis et Elegis Graecis has all the details.) From the Independent:

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi (“Progeny”) by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery.

Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work – the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day.

Go Mormons! (Now if only you could find those darn gold plates and diamond spectacles!) I know every Classics scholar and enthusiast in the whole world is waiting with bated breath…
On the other hand, this Scotsman headline is enthusiastic but misleading: “‘Lost’ classical manuscripts give up their secrets after 9,000 years.” What’s 7,000-odd years among friends, after all?

As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!

Edward Said “is dead”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/25/obituaries/25WIRE-SAID.html .

Geoffrey Nunberg has good column in TAP about the strange history of the word liberal in America. Maybe I should have expected the following data, but I was really stunned by how strong the race and class connotations of liberal have become over here.

bq. From a semantic point of view, this negative branding campaign has largely succeeded in changing the meaning of the word liberal itself. In major newspapers, for example, the phrases “middle-class liberals” and “middle-class Democrats” are used with about the same frequency. But the phrase “working-class liberals” is almost nonexistent; it’s outnumbered by “working-class Democrats” by about 30-to-1. And while “white liberals” is used about as frequently as “white Democrats,” the phrase “black Democrats” outnumbers “black liberals” by better than 15-to-1. The patterns are similar if you plug in “African American,” “Latino” and the like.

bq. By contrast, the press refers to working-class conservatives as frequently as it does to working-class Republicans — and far more frequently than it refers to working-class liberals. And there are five times as many references to black conservatives as to black liberals, though references to black Democrats vastly outnumber references to black Republicans. The implication is that unlike conservatives, liberals are rarely found among minorities or the working class. When those groups vote Democratic, it’s presumably out of narrow self-interest or traditional party loyalty rather than because of any underlying ideological commitment. From that point of view, the political attitudes that make someone a liberal are simply the outward expression of a particular social identity, no different from a predilection for granite countertops or bottled water. For all intents and purposes, liberal has become as much a referential term as Bolshevik was.

I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.

The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.

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