Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic

Someone left a comment to my Blues Verification post, saying that when they visited the page in question their A-V software terminated the connection upon detection of a “HTML:Iframe-gen” virus, which, a quick Google informs me, might mean some sort of malicious SQL injection thingy. Does anyone know about such stuff? I certainly would feel bad about sending lots of readers off to some compromised site to get infected with malware.

Matthew Yglesias was kind enough to link to my Necrotrends post. In comments over there I explained that, in all false modesty, I actually hadn’t worked out whether I thought it was a seance story or a zombie story. Is it Mark Penn as the kid in “Sixth Sense” – ‘I poll dead people’. Or is it William McKinley stashed in a shed like the former roommate at the end of “Shaun of the Dead”? Unclear, is all I can conclude. (One commenter suggested BOTH: si se puede! Fair enough.) But mostly I bring this up because Bruce Bartlett showed up in comements over there. As there was considerable speculation in comments to my original post as to whether the man could say such things with a straight face … I report, you decide: [click to continue…]

Being vexed by Stanley Fish is a mug’s game. But here goes:

Even in courses where the materials are politically and ideologically charged, the questions that arise are academic, not political. A classroom discussion of Herbert Marcuse and Leo Strauss, for example, does not (or at least should not) have the goal of determining whether the socialist or the conservative philosopher is right about how the body politic should be organized. Rather, the (academic) goal would be to describe the positions of the two theorists, compare them, note their place in the history of political thought, trace the influences that produced them and chart their own influence on subsequent thinkers in the tradition. And a discussion of this kind could be led and guided by an instructor of any political persuasion whatsoever, and it would make no difference given that the point of the exercise was not to decide a political question but to analyze it.

So you are allowed to describe positions and arguments but not to venture evaluation. You may not test ideas, theories, positions for validity or intellectual merit. In political philosophy, to argue for or against a political philosophy would be ‘un-academic’. Justification and academia are twain and never the two shall meet. So far as politics go. So most of those we think of as academic political philosophers – Marcuse, Strauss, Rawls, the list is really quite long – aren’t ‘academic’. Because they attempt to justify their own views about how the body politics should be organized. Which disqualifies them. Fine. Whatever.

I really wasn’t going to rise to the bait but the man has a follow up, which concludes:

The demand for justification, as I have said in other places, always come from those outside the enterprise. Those inside the enterprise should resist it, because to justify something is to diminish it by implying that its value lies elsewhere. If the question What justifies what you do? won’t go away, the best answer to give is “nothing.”

Now, to be fair, Fish is talking specifically about justification of the liberal arts here. There is something to be said for the liberal arts as a good ‘in itself’. But Fish feels free to formulate his defense so expansively because he has gotten too comfy with a position that is a silly sort of know-nothingism – justify-nothingism, rather. Being an academic means never having to say you’re sorry for not having reasons. Fish presents this as gracious abstention from public debates academics should not meddle in. That would be bad enough, in my book. What makes it worse is that I suspect Fish thinks the flip-side of this is academic immunity from public criticism. This gets into my reading of his other writings, which I won’t go into right now. What academic ‘interpretive communities’ do is perfectly hermetic and externally unaccountable. I don’t see how that can be right, on the most generous liberal arts education as end in itself view.

Am I unfair to the man?

UPDATE: Julian Sanchez responds thoughtfully to my post. He objects that I am too uncharitable. I think it’s fair to be rather hard-nosed in this case, but your mileage may vary. I like this bit. “On this model [Fish’s], teaching philosophy would look a little like teaching theological interpretation to atheists.” I think that is very apt. I think that in some ways Fish is to intellectual justification as atheists are to God. He just doesn’t believe in the stuff. Or rather, he believes that the things we call ‘justifications’ are all, in some deep, anti-foundational sense, just arbitrary moves in language-games. This drives him to say some odd stuff, per the title of the post.

Via Tina at Scatterplot, you must buy Wicked Anomie’s terrific Blind Reviewer Voodoo Doll. Designed for those moments when you need more than just a brisk letter to the journal editor explaining that your reviewer is unclear on a few points.

This 9-inch doll (without hair) is lovingly crafted within the anomie studio and arrives finished and ready to be put to good use. This doll comes unstuffed, so that you can enjoy the cathartic act of shredding your own offending documents and stuffing them inside the doll. Finishing instructions and extra yarn included.

Proceeds go to fund designer’s trip to Annual Conference. Crooked Timber is not responsible for any stabbing pains you may experience in light of purchases encouraged by this post.

During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….

On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)¹

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.

One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
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Speaking of public intellectuals, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk here a couple days ago on privacy and surveillance, developing the ideas here. (For one thing, he now prefers “Cryptopticon” to “Nonopticon.”)

Siva thinks we should stop our Foucauldian worrying about Bentham’s Panopticon. He says he’s lived in the Panopticon, in New York, where there are lots of visible cameras everywhere (when I lived in one of the home counties, where it is said you can go all day without being out of CCTV range, I knew the feeling). Siva points out a lot of the cameras aren’t maintained, monitored, or even attached to anything; that’s not the point of them. They’re not there to watch you, they’re there to make you think that you’re being watched. Such reminders (your call may be monitored) are supposed to get you to become your own social superego.

On balance, Siva seems to think, this is pretty harmless. The point of the Panopticon is to get you to behave, to hide your real self, to conform. About which we can note two things: one, if you’ve been to London or New York, you see that in the real Panopticon people get their freak on just fine, thank you very much. And two, to the extent that it does work, the Panopticon actually reinforces privacy—getting you to hide your real self draws the boundaries around that real self. What we really need to worry about is unannounced, concealed surveillance: the NonCryptopticon.
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Greetings from <a href=”http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com”>the edge of the American West</a>, in the neighborhood of which friendly folks have been urging academics to brush up on <a href=”http://www.law.berkeley.edu/news/2008/edley041008.html”>how to fire each other</a>.  In the midst of everyone scurrying around and <a href=”http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/bylaws/so1039.html”>reading rules</a> and shouting, some of us noticed an article (<a href=”http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer”>not really online</a>) in <em>The New Yorker</em>, which makes one wonder, is it maybe bad for academic freedom to have a free speech expert as university president?

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No. Nothing to do with Spitzer. I’ve been reading some of the works of 18th Century right-wing blogger German counter-Enlightenment intellectual Justus Möser. (Wikipedia.) [click to continue…]

There are some books that mankind was never supposed to read. From a review by Pete Rawlik in the most recent issue of the _New York Review of Science-Fiction._

Over the years, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has been melded with a multitude of other genres by a bevy [sic, even though the article then goes on to list eight writers] of authors … Marion Zimmer Bradley and Esther Friesner have adeptly created Cthulhu romances …

The mind squirbles. But not as much as it does at the revelation (which I saw somewhere on the Internets in the last few weeks, meant to blog, and forgot about) that Henry James and H.G. Wells once seriously discussed collaborating on a novel set on the Red Planet. “A Princess Casamassima of Mars” or somesuch. There is that famous James story about the popular author and the literary one who swap places, which I’ve always presumed (without ever bothering to look it up) is based on the James-Wells relationship. Finally, changing the subject back to Lovecraft, “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/01/hope_for_the_hobbit.php argues that it’s a good thing that Guillermo del Toro is being signed up to do _The Hobbit_, as he, like Peter Jackson, understands how to make digital special effects seem tactile and organic. I’m not entirely sure that this is true of Jackson – while Gollum was awesome, some other bits of digital wizardry in the LOTR trilogy seemed pretty lame; the movie’s Balrog was yer standard roaring demon, instead of Tolkien’s own evocative if difficult-to-film shadow among flames, and the skeleton-ghosts in the Paths of the Dead looked as though they had staggered off the leftovers shelf of Pirates of the Caribbean. However, it’s certainly true of del Toro – _Hellboy_, in addition to being a criminally underrated popcorn movie has the best pastiche-Lovecraft sfx that I’ve seen to date – the squamousness of the tentacle-things is _sans-pareil._

I know, I know. But I’m going to talk about it anyway. Here he is, today:

I tried to explain, for those whose feelings were so hurt they didn’t even crack the spine, that the title Liberal Fascism comes from a speech delivered by H. G. Wells, one of the most important and influential progressive and socialist intellectuals of the 20th century. He wanted to re-brand liberalism as “liberal fascism” and even “enlightened Nazism.” He believed these terms best described his own political views — views that deeply informed American progressivism and New Deal liberalism.

I happen to know a thing or two about this, through research on Wells’ work on his cinematic (Wells scripted, Korda produced, Menzies directed) good-bad boondoggle, the 1936 SF film, Things To Come [wikipedia].
I’ve posted about the film before on CT here. I wrote a really fun post about it at the Valve: how H.G. Wells prevented steampunk. [click to continue…]

I’m reading David Frum, Comeback Conservatism [amazon]. So far, so mushy. But it does, at the very least, contain the third silliest argument I’ve encountered in the last 6 hours. (The top two contenders arrived, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, in his bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson.)

Here is Frum, protesting the notion that John Edwards is a friend of the poor, or in any sense an economic egalitarian:

Voters sense this truth. It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.” These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.

Meanwhile, the most unequal parts of Missouri, the cities and especially the city of St. Louis, voted heavily Democratic. Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money. (p. 37)

One commenter makes a point that renders the Hillary possibility moot. “Of course, the big problem will be to convince Dick Cheney to resign from the post.” The interesting thing is that Cheney might be quite right not to resign. [click to continue…]

Jonah Goldberg’s forthcoming Liberal Fascism. Ahem. [click to continue…]

Santa came a little early this year. The single most exciting possibility in American politics remains, of course, the idea that Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA might emerge from the underground to campaign for the office of President of the United States. Alas, my appeal to him to do this has so far gone unanswered.

Instead, all we’ve had lately is a very long speech in which Chairman Bob talks about himself in the third person. What’s necessary is “a culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian,” he says. Well, sure. But first you sort of need a reason to call a press conference. This is where the 24 hour news cycle is your friend. From a single spark….

In the meantime, Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP newspaper, has come out with a cogent and thorough critique (pdf) of Avakian’s recent writings and the entire cult(ure) around him.

All irony to the side, I must say that this is a pretty interesting document, and so is the rest of Ely’s website. It is clearly the work of someone whose Maoism comes by way of Godard and Badiou as well as the RCP’s idiosyncratic Gang of Four-ism. For those who are interested in that kind of thing, it is the kind of thing they will find interesting. Thanks to Santa’s elves for bringing it to my attention.