7 posts tagged “politics”
One of my favorite passages in all literature, from Bachmann's "Among Murderers and Madmen" (Unter Mördern und Irren). I have liberally amended Michael Bullock's translation, in consultation with the original German text, to give it the requisite... fury.
"It seems to me that there is no solution whatever in this world. We grapple with life and aren't once able to clarify* this dim little situation for ourselves, and before us others have grappled with it, have managed to clarify nothing and have run to ruin, they were victims or executioners, and the deeper one descends into time the more impassable it becomes, I often feel completely lost in history, don't know where I can hang my heart, on which parties, groups, forces, for one can make out an infamous law that governs everything. And one can always merely be on the side of the victims, but that leads nowhere, they don't show us any way."
"That's the terrible thing," cried Friedl, "the victims, the many, many victims show no way whatsoever. And for the murderers times change. The victims are the victims. That's all. My father was a victim of the Dollfuss period, my grandfather a victim of the Monarchy, my brothers victims of Hitler, but that doesn't help me, do you understand what I mean? They simply fell down, were run over, were shot, put against the wall, little people who didn't have many opinions or thoughts. Well yes, two or three of them thought a bit, my grandfather thought of the coming Republic, but tell me, what for? Could it not have come without that death? And my father thought of social democracy, but tell me, who can claim his death, surely not our Workers' Party that wants to win the elections. It needs no death for that. Not for that. Jews were murdered because they were Jews, they were only victims, so many victims— but surely not so that today, finally, one can tell one's children that they're people? A bit late, don't you think? No, that's what no one understands, that the victims serve no purpose! That's exactly what no one understands and so it bothers no one that these victims have to get it for the sake of insights. Those insights just aren't needed. Who here doesn't know that one should not kill? That's been known for two thousand years. Is another word to be wasted over that? Oh, but in Haderer's last speech there is plenty of talk about it, there it has just been discovered, he balls up Humanity in his mouth, quotes the classics, quotes the Church Fathers and the latest metaphysical platitudes. But that's crazy. How can a person make a speech about that? It's absolutely insane or wicked. Who are we that we must be told such things?"
* aufklären, same root as the German word for "Enlightenment"— get it?— but "enlighten" didn't work grammatically for me here. Can you enlighten a situation? You can enlighten people. You can enlighten yourself about a situation. Sigh.
At right -- Vox's formatting blew up my face to alarming size, and I couldn't take it. "Large Bad Picture." Time to upload a new avatar. We live in a mad world, I tell you, for that sentence to have any meaning.
What else? I never thought I would be so afflicted by the long, unannounced New York Review hiatus: it's not like I live or die by John Leonard's effluvium, but the table of contents always matches my state of mind so well. We are screwed— but there are books! The TLS, with its devout, snarky Tory sense of the longue durée, can't measure up.
What else else? I was going to post something gloomy, but instead, at the Berkeley Bowl, this was on sale:
Close-up of that label:
I just learned from a New Yorker ad that the Israel Ministry of Tourism's present slogan is "Israel: No One Belongs Here More Than You."
The same issue (I regret to say that I spent a lot of time reading it) attacks a newly-published life of Garibaldi:
Riall eventually asks, “How special was Garibaldi?” That, she says, “is an especially tricky question to answer.” But, basically, the answer is not at all. “We no longer believe in ‘Great Men,’ ” she reminds us.
Much is at stake here. Men killed and went to their deaths for an ideal of national unity that came to be personified in Garibaldi. Present-day Italy was born from their blood. Are we to think of those men as victims of a clever propaganda campaign? Do we think the same about those who are killing and dying for national causes today, or about the founders of our own national communities?
Having deployed a vocabulary that constantly suggests falsification, Riall makes no attempt to establish “the truth” about Garibaldi. To do so, she tells us on the last page of her overlong book, would be “to miss completely the point about his life,” which was one where “image and reality were effectively indistinguishable.” Why insist, then, on the notion that the man was inauthentic, as if he would rather have been wearing a dinner jacket in downtown Turin than a poncho on lonely Caprera? And is there really no distinction to be made between obviously mendacious propaganda campaigns, such as the papal pamphlets telling stories of Garibaldi atrocities, and the letters home from Garibaldi’s volunteers in Sicily, all bubbling with idealism and excitement, of which Riall ungenerously remarks, “The epistolary evidence suggests a general consensus to construct . . . an exemplary Risorgimento narrative[”?]
Hey now, mister critic, those are awfully sharp little darts: not very sporting to throw them at a defenseless, tweedy semi-caricature.
One imagines the young men and women who sit in Professor Riall’s classes at the University of London. One wonders if she finishes her lectures as she does the chapters of this book, with a section headed “Conclusion,” in which she wearily repeats what was said in the previous pages, in case you weren’t paying attention. Perhaps, in the busy city outside the window, there is a call to arms, there are people urging us to take up a struggle. Perhaps a young man’s head lifts. He wants to be involved in the world. Should he answer the call? Should he submit to the enchantment of the embattled community? Is the struggle ugly? Is it beautiful? Is it worth a life? These questions are not resolved by deciding that all communication is propaganda.
Hmm. Maybe I'll stand outside the window holding up a banner that reads, YOU CANNOT BE MORAL. But as this humble site has established before [private post], we don't get a Nietzsche, we just get nightmares. I don't think this reviewer is particularly sharp, but he does get at one problem with Riall's sort of critique: it raises questions that are, famously, handled much better by literature, because the critic ends up having to try and occupy a vacant ground in order to adjudicate. That occupied ground often looks like a metropolis in a large developed Western democracy, in which mass movements are more or less physically impossible and armed insurgency is hilarious even to contemplate. It seems eternal, but it's not the historical, or geopolitical, norm; on the whole, though, it's a much better place to write and teach anything than sites of insurgency.
Is skepticism always a political virtue? What do you think? It's damned easy to naturalize.
I've been about through with my TLS subscription for a while, but I think this is the last straw: this amusing post tells the story of a very disgruntled, fairly scary historian. (Read the comments!) I open last week's TLS and— what do you know?— they're reviewing his book on page 5. I read eagerly, expecting an evisceration. No. It is praised to the skies.
The TLS is an expensive paper; Rupert Murdoch does not need my money, nor does the institution of sneering right-wing smugness need any subsidies from me. I can find plenty of good causes for my $150, or whatever it is these days, and catch up on back issues at the library. Add to the above Jean Bethke Elshtain's bizarre screed on man-hating feminists, any Kulturkritik from "In Brief," or the now-infamous review of Madness and Civilization, which failed, to my knowledge, to change a single person's thinking about Foucault, and was (I concede) an exercise in feather-ruffling... all fine if it costs a penny, but why pay for shit you can read for free at the National Review Online? Hey, they're intellectuals too!
So that's that. Any dissenters or defenders of the honor of this once-fine paper? I mean, the philosophy articles are decent, and it's not all Allen Bloom and Henry Kissinger. But I seem to open to those pages every time, and then I curse like the devil and complain.
Read this thread: it's what runs through my head as I wander around the Bay Area.
The January 12, 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a cover story about a new system of academic rankings, designed as an alternative to the established National Research Council rankings. The article is behind a subscriber firewall, but I'll quote selected passages:
The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, partly financed by the State University of New York at Stony Brook and produced by Academic Analytics, a for-profit company, rates faculty members' scholarly output at nearly 7,300 doctoral programs around the country. It examines the number of book and journal articles published by each program's faculty, as well as journal citations, awards, honors, and grants received.
[...]
The index relies on Scopus, a database that compiles journal publication and citation data from more than 15,000 journals, while it counts books using Amazon.com, whose database matches the Library of Congress catalog.The index incorporates grant data collected either from federal agencies directly or from information on their Web sites, including from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others, though notably not the Department of Defense, since it does not release data on grants to individuals.
The company collects information on honors and awards from the Web sites of 55 organizations, including those that grant Nobel Prizes and MacArthur fellowships.
The variables are weighted differently depending on the program. For example, in fields such as chemical engineering, where books are not considered a crucial measure of productivity, they are not calculated as part of the rankings. And in some fields where honors and awards are not considered important, such as animal science, those are not included.
[...]
Charlotte V. Kuh, director of the [National Research] council's study [that is, the standard ranking system for universities, the one that put Berkeley at the top in 1995 and so forth], says its latest version relies less on reputations. "The measures of perceived quality are actually grounded in things that can be measured," she says, such as publications and citations. Other data will round out the picture, including information on graduation rates and how long it takes students to get their degrees.That is a notable difference between the council's study and Academic Analytics' index. The former takes into account factors that directly influence graduate students, such as whether doctoral students get university-paid health-care benefits, whether teaching assistants have a collective-bargaining agreement, and the graduate student body's racial makeup. Both faculty members and graduate students were questioned for the council's latest study.
As for the financing delay, Ms. Kuh says, it couldn't be helped. The study was originally scheduled to be finished in 2005, but the data will not be available until the end of this year, with analytical essays and follow-up reports coming out in 2008.
[...]
[I]n physics, the council put Princeton at No. 2 and MIT at No. 3. Neither make Academic Analytics' top 10.Lydia S. Snover, director of institutional research at MIT, explains that Academic Analytics' methodology may be part of the problem.
Because the company counts only faculty members listed under specific departments, it missed some scientists connected to MIT's numerous interdisciplinary research centers. Some of those scholars are the principal investigators on multimillion-dollar grants that other physics faculty members also work on, says Ms. Snover. But those grants and the scholars' publications did not get counted in the physics rankings.
Mr. Martin counters that faculty members who are purposely not listed on a program's Web site should not be counted, because if they were heavily involved with graduate students, an important criterion for being part of a graduate program, they would be listed.
The upshot: this is more useful as an internal tool for administrators curious about trends in their faculty's productivity than as a guide for the general public, prospective grad students, etc. When I first heard about the rankings (via CUNY) and thought they were just counting articles, it seemed positively obscene: scholars who can produce large amounts of quality work are a pretty small minority in the humanities, and some brilliant people (and excellent mentors) often publish very few books and articles. In fact, the possibility of an inverse relationship occurred to me. In the sciences— MIT's skepticism aside— maybe it's different. But a cult of productivity in literary studies just seems ridiculous, compared to the value of productivity in biomedical research, for instance, where research productivity translates into pharmaceutical and therapeutic productivity. At this point I feel, for what it's worth, that teaching and interpersonal communication are the point, the goal, of literary studies. There's really nothing to prove, unless you're Moretti; and if you think of productivity as a quintessentially capitalist virtue, then the fact that there's no money to speak of to be made from it— no market, no well-defined position in a network of exchanges— makes high productivity seem nonsensical. But there you have CUNY's press release, which seemed to me to take pains to amplify the Chronicle's suggestion that Academic Analytics' system is an improvement on the NRC's, and the schools that benefit by it will, rationally enough, try to encourage the approach.
It's not bad to have a marketplace in higher education, don't get me wrong— the tyranny of prestige screws far more people than it helps. If the comp lit students at Vanderbilt can get some mileage off these results— assuming its insanely goal-driven faculty hasn't caused all of them to drop out from lack of attention— that's great for them. There's even a creepy possibility that the emphasis on productivity and "culling deadwood" will add liquidity to the job market, or reduce everyone to adjunct status. (Note terrifying memo: "No more than a reasonable number of lecturers (e.g. four or five) should share one office." The Black Hole of Cal State?) But I keep looking for the object of productivity, its final cause, and seeing a void instead, and something about it really unsettles me.
Oh, and lastly: I had to wash my hands after touching the Chronicle. Shudder.
I am still at a total loss to imagine how anyone in this country, with a normal amount of political power, could have prevented any of this from happening. I mean, I hear a lot of things, I hear that many "easy" steps could be taken to combat the erosion of the Constitution and the ever-increasing toxicity of political discourse and so on and so forth. I cannot predict the future, but in my privileged position as one U.S. citizen among millions, I will say that none of it looks very promising to me. No large-scale economic or social or political developments in this country seem likely to favor the Democrats or any other liberal party. Disgust with the Republicans or the war is not enough.
A couple of years ago I would have argued that ideas and idealism don't matter in politics, what matters is praxis. But we've had nothing but praxis for six years, leavened with various forms of cracked nonsense about freedom and democracy and evil which doesn't quite add up to an "idea."
People are getting used to it. That, God only knows, is not without historical precedent.
My mistrust of idealism in politics remains, however, strong enough to allow me to shift directly from "there's some hope" to "but then again, not enough to mention; what to do now?" without much sermonizing. You can find that all over the web today without looking too hard. You can probably find a whole mess of prescriptions for political action, too, and who am I to tell you they won't work? I realized we were fucked while looking out of the Roosevelt Island trolley at First Avenue on February 15th, 2003 — a bit later than some — but seriously, if you can find a reason to keep trying, keep trying. Something will happen.
This is all I have to say. Here's to you, J.S. Mill, for correctly pointing out that you can scream until you're blue in the face in a free society and no one will care.
...
But, no, I can't actually end there. The unspoken assumption behind all of this is that I would do anything, anything morally and legally feasible to usher the current government out of power, and I have been racking my fucking brains for six years in vain to figure out what anything would have a positive chance of success, and every one of those six years has been worse than the one before. I no longer have the heart to throw myself behind a single further losing strategy, even though I know this is the only life and the only world we've got and I ought to do something, no pietistic-quietistic cowardice etc. But people, nothing fucking works! What are we supposed to do now? What does anyone do at this point? It has happened before, it will happen again, where is the lesson? Where can I find it?
