[lbo-talk] presdinetial (tm) debate, roots, french theory, holey lederhosen

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Sep 27 09:17:21 PDT 2008


1. I know zippo abt McCain, in terms of seeing him much on teevee. what i've seen lately irritated. i puke in my mouth every time i saw him fumble through, all homespun an' folksy. He's embarrassing to me. And yet he sounded in command last night. I generally find his voice a sedative, something diff last night. In that regard, he exceeded what I expected.

2. Obama: ho hum. how about them mets? After months of everyone analyzing his foreign policy rhetoric, anyone is surprised? please.

3. I think they're setting the bar so low for Palin, she might cream some ass on accident next debate.

4. I listened distractedly to Palin's interview; did not find her stupid sounding. Watching: yes. *shrug* I was distracted, which may have much to do with it.

5. I awoke at 11:40 with crust of drool around my mouth. Must have fallen asleep half way through.

6. B, i think Democrats love creative destruction as much as the repubs. They're as responsible for most of the policies that have created bubble/bust after bubble/bust. And Bill's right: if you follow through on the logic, why support people who make the capitalist state work most efficiently?

Burn, baby, burn it's a fiscal inferno! :)

At 10:23 AM 9/27/2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>Why elect an Ay-rab president when we're at war with the Ay-rabs?
>
><http://wonkette.com/403090/kentucky-rednecks-have-edifying-insight-about-this-hussein-ay-rab-preznint
> >

oh god. it brings back memories of sitting in various neighborhood bars in a city where i used to live in NY, listening to people talk politics on occasion. especially the guy driving. perfectly specimen of the drunk hanging out at the Blarney Stone on Syracuse's West side Irish neighborhood.

question, though. at wonkette, they write in the blog post: "Here are three drunk Kentucky hillbillies ranting about Obama while sitting on a filthy AIDS unicorn."

what the freak is an AIDS unicorn? googled it: no joy. ----- doug: And thank god there are no pix of me in lederhosen!

--------------------------- when discussing economics at work, i often mention your opinions and when ppl ask abt who you are, i tell the story. but the more i've said it, the more i've realized: it's a great story because it says nothing.

---------------------------

As for Carl's question about _French Theory_. I think Cusset's worth a read. If you dislike 'French Theory' there'll be lots here with which to arm yourself. Don't get me wrong on that score: Cusset's turning out to advance the view that some people are good and worthwhile students of FT, doing the good 'n' proper thing; the rest? ne'er-do-wells. But of course, by merely reading this book just for the money quotes, you'd be doing precisely what Cusset complains about in the following passage from the chapter intriguingly entitled "Students and Users" (which I love b/c he is mocking "user friendly" design and writing: pabulum to spoon feed the masses. he's actually wrong about what user-centered design is about, but that's another problem. heh.):

The Play of Parataxis

...

"Even deconstruction offers a paradoxically easy method: because t seeks to invalidate the principle of the "organize unity" of a text and of "its rhetoric, structure and argument," and reveals, instead, the impasses and gaps that exist between language and its apparent content, even students without any philosophical background or experience in standard semantic criticism "can quite easily produce 'deconstructive readings' that have all the marks of professional accomplishment," as Peter Brooks observes. In the interest of intellectual performance, in order to maximize personal results with minimal effort, it is best to proceed *directly( to deconstruction -- as it is conceived in literature departments -- rather than reverting to a contextual, referential, or biographical reading of the text in question.

Beyond the *profitability* offered by theory, and the politically defiant stances of minority students, the language and arguments of the theoretical approach lend themselves much more readily than traditional methods to the development of insiders' codes and playful reapprorpriation. They are better suited to the empathetic and lighthearted qualities of student conversation and its free uses of tactics such as name-dropping and spontaneous association of incompatible concepts, a heady collage of notions in which thinking up the most incongruous combination is a mark of intellectual ease and brilliance. The referential chain was broken, or seriously compromises; it was no longer necessary to present the credentials of works one has mastered or canon one has studied to make an attempt at theorizing oneself. As Edward Said concludes, readers "seized on [certain] words as if they were magic wands by which to transform the humdrum scholastic readings into eye-catching theoretical 'text'"

(added break for reading ease)

In this milieu, the aura of revered figures is often diminished by nicknames (e.g., Deridoodle, or D&G for the authors of Anti-Oedipus), handy concepts are adjusted at will ("panoptikon" with the visual image of its watchtower conveyed by the "k," or BwO, signifying "Bodies without Organs"), and paralogical or ironic reasoning prevails over the slower and less easily mastered tactics of argumentative rationality. What is unjustifiable becomes a justification in itself: quotations taken out of context or misplaced arguments are legitimate *as such*, in opposition to grand logical constructions, seen as massive, musty, and unfashionable. For those too young to master all the implications of a text, theory provided a great windfall.

It all comes back to the notion of 'parataxis,' the literary technique of spasmodic enumeration and elliptical juxtaposition, free of any connector, that formed the common element between the *theorists'* logic and American literature courses -- and would explain the fruitfulness of their encounter. In literature courses in the United States, students most often encounter works via the impressionistic format of excerpts and overviews. Reading, moreover, is less concentrated on the literary works themselves (according to Said, students spend less than a fifth of their study time reading them) than on comparing, evaluating,and commenting on the various critical or theoretical approaches -- which represents the chief aim of many courses. The way of reading theoretical texts is itself characterized by parataxis and fragmentation: one chapter can sum up an entire work, and often an American commentator's summary discourages readers from consulting the relevant French author's text.

(break added for reading ease)

In the _Kristeva Reader_, an excerpt dedicated to the theme of the 'black sun" replaces Kristeva's long essay on "depression and melancholy"; an American introduction to one of Foucault's works dispenses with reading his main writings; and a structural analysis of Shakespeare could even replace his works themselves. This kind of critical periphery is a pedagogical tradition in the U.S., as critic Gustave Lanson found in 1912, when he came to teach at Columbia and was stunned by this "singular ability to do without the texts, ...to substitute a knowledge what has been said about authors for that of what the authors said" -- and when Lanson told student who asked what they must read, simply "the author's text," he "could see that they were surprised and found the reading list rather slim."

...

(In a literature course today a traditional) "reading list" goes beyond the notion of providing an overview and encourages freedom of choice between texts and movements; the resulting perspective is exhaustive but often crudely dissected, and the overall list functions like a menu, from which the students make a selection and behave like customers, confronted with theis display of critical and theoretical products, with varying "costs" to the user.

(_French Theory_, p 219-220)

Which is all rather interesting given James Heartfield's claim that this book is an apologia for pomo wank.

rotflmao

As for nostalgia, it doesn't feel like a nostalgia trip to me. Most of what he's covering happened before my time - 70s through 80s. I wasn't academically conscious when they chanted, "hey, hey, ho, ho, Western civ has got to go." But I did get a taste of the afterburn throughout the 90s. E.g., I entered graduate school on a fellowship to work at one of the only social theory departments in the country, but by the end of my first year my mentor told me that I'd best get to doing an *empirical* dissertation b/c he couldn't get enough support to see to it that I'd get through writing the theoretical dissertation I'd planned to write.

Why? Because the almost dead white guys in the department who taught theory were overtaken and pushed to the margins by feminists, race and ethnic studies folks who were virulently anti-theory as the domain of western civ's fat dead white guys.

In retrospect, I do not regret this experience. It forced me to master both: empirical work and theoretical work; traditional works of western civ and the texts of the canon busters. I had already been doing that as an undergraduate, of course, having encountered a lit prof who, when I came in to create a course intended to cover the classics of American literature (the dead white guys), gave me the 'five whys' routine. I was really quite irked at the time. Having not been able to get a college education for years, I was hell bent on making sure I had me some cultcha because, at least for me, my working and political life had suggested that I was missing me some o' that cultcha. (I don't think I'm unusual. Conversation with adults students who took extension campuses courses indicated the same sense of needing a little more cultcha in order to make it in the world.)

But, I thank her for arguing with me because she introduced me to a tradition of African American literature and theory in this country that changed my life. From then on, even though I took courses on the canon, I made sure to create courses that encompassed a much wider swath than merely the classics of the canon. I could do this because, at my weirdo school, we created our own courses and had what I came to find out were heavy reading loads: at least 10 full length texts per course, plus whatever you read on your own. And being that it was self-learning, I ended up reading outside the course book list to get a handle on whatever it was I didn't understand, since I didn't always have a professor or fellow students to ask. And when I did ask tutors and mentors, they sent me off to the stacks to read more. (E.g., when I took a course on History of Family, I kept asking, "What do they mean by culture?" (this was with a prof from Cornell, btw, if Seth's reading.) Dewd handed me yet another reading list, which we ended up turning into another course, "What is Culture?"

anyway, excuse this bit of nostalgia of my own.

I'm finding it interesting because I've:

1. never understand what lit theory people mean by theory. it wasn't like any theory i'd come to understand as theory by the time i got to grad school. in this regard what was most helpful were the pre-history chapters explaining what literature and theory were before FT.

2. Never been exposed to undergrad students of lit studies on a traditional campus, so i'm not familiar with what he describes above.

3. Never learned the habits of non-reading described above, though certainly had to deal with and combat it effects when i was teaching.

4. never encountered the behavior described above as something confined to graduate lit students, either. it was ubiquitous across disciplines, and was endemic among tenured faculty. i've often said that grad school was about teaching you how to have an opinion about something you've never read. you see it on this list all the time as well.

bitchily,

shag

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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