Archive for the ‘Intellectual Culture’ Category

#383 – The Humane Society

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

the vital relevance of making the humanities irrelevant.

Which again raises the question of why anyone would study the humanities today. Then it occurred to me that this was not quite the right question, that we need to move away from asking how to make the humanities “relevant” to the inhumane world we find ourselves inhabiting, and instead try to imagine what kind of world, outside the Academy, would be hospitable to people who wish to make reflective inquiry a vital part of their lives.

- Rochelle Gurstein, “Oh, the Humanities! What liberal arts are good for,” New Republic 26 March 2010

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#370 – Critiquing Critique

Monday, March 1st, 2010

beyond beyond critical thinking.

In “Beyond Critical Thinking,” Michael Roth offers an intriguing argument that humanities scholars should turn from offering critique to creating norms. But ultimately it feels like a strawman argument.

Roth creates too strong a binary between norms-creation and critique. There are more supple ways to imagination the relationship between building ideas or values up and tearing them down.

One better question might be, as Joel Pfister puts it, critique for what? What’s the end of critique?

Another better question might be, what kind of critique?

It strikes me that there are many kinds of critique, offered with multiple motivations and goals, and articulated in multiple modes and idioms. There can be sympathetic critique, criticism offered in the spirit of negation, and condemnation offered as insistent refusal. There can be a critique driven by reason and one driven by emotions, and most driven by some combination of both. Critique can be nihilistic and suffocating and it can provide oxygen and life support. There can be the cliched “constructive critique” and there can be questioning that lingers between rejection and acceptance, and there can be a kind of Trojan Horse critique that arrives in the guise of a gift while actually seeking to destroy all.

Roth’s article begins to add nuance to the pedagogy of critique. Humanists might do more than teach our students the techniques of dismissal, the ability to locate inconsistencies and holes in arguments and drive a stake (or a truck) through them.

But dismissal and refusal are not the same thing as critique, which might be more elastic, capacious, and perhaps even generative than Roth suggests.

Posted in Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#360 – Public Intellectuals For What?

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

on making more efficient the inefficient pursuit of ideas.

X-posted from Hastac blog.

All men are intellectuals, . . . but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals.” – Antonio Gramsci

The publicity around Louis Menand’s new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University*, is generating lots of contemplation of public intellectualism.

Horace blogs about re-imagining the teacher as public intellectual. Ferule & Fescue add that part of this intellectual activity involves offering students “ways to be in the world”:

But more generally, and maybe more importantly, by being public intellectuals in the classroom, we’re modeling for our students what it means to be engaged by literature or history or art, and why those subjects might continue to matter and have relevance for them even once they’re out of school. I think often about a comment a reader left on my blog, a couple of years ago, after I’d written about three former students who had collectively asked me out to lunch. I was trying to figure out whether they were looking for me to be a friend, or were thinking about grad school, or what–and my reader remarked that many smart young people are just looking for ways to be in the world, and that we often model that for them in ways we’re not aware of.

I have Menand’s book on my list to read, as I imagine many others do too, but in the meantime, since all of this conversation is occurring on blogs and websites, I return to questions that have arisen on HASTAC before: what role digital technologies in public intellectual life if we broaden it to include more than just a “marketplace of ideas”? Why does Menand equate public culture with the marketplace — and how are we both replicating these assumptions, and also offering alternatives to them, in the digital humanities?

The question of the marketplace leads to the vexing issue of “efficiency,” an ideal that Menand embraces, but which I argue we should probe more carefully. In excerpts published in Harvard Magazine, Menand borrows from William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine’s study,  In Pursuit of the Ph.D., to explain why graduate students in the humanities take so much longer than other graduate or professional students to complete their degrees (often up to 10 years), Menand writes that Bowen and Rudenstine:

suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark.

Menand righteously criticizes the trick played on graduate students in higher education: the labor systems of universities exploit the old ideals of specialization to earn a Ph.D. in order to maintain a cheap labor pool of instructors; and even those who finish the degree then find themselves in an extremely difficult job market. Perhaps, he asks, if we abandon the dissertation for one peer-reviewed article and shorten the time to degree, this could improve the situation by making graduate school more efficient.

All well and good. But why does Menand obsessively focus on efficiency? Why a “marketplace of ideas” instead of some other form of public culture? Why are ideas — and the social institutions in which they are created — necessarily best operated on a market model?

I agree with Menand that, “there should be a lot more Ph.D.s.” I would also be willing to entertain the notion that Ph.D.s “should be much easier to get.” But I disagree about the rationale for this reform. Menand argues that it would lead to greater “efficiency” (this is a book titled The Marketplace of Ideas, after all). But this does not really address the deeper longings that drive people to seek graduate education.

Perhaps efficiency is the whole problem here. Menand bemoans that, “People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute.” But maybe that’s exactly what those students are looking for when they emulate their professors. To return to Ferule & Fescue’s post, they are doing more than “just looking for ways to be in the world.” For, perhaps what professors as public intellectuals (at least in the humanities) “model” for students is not so much “ways to be in the world” as ways to not be so certain how to be in the world? And maybe the world could use more of that uncertainty.

If we started to imagine models of public culture and public intellectualism (and teaching and graduate education and economic dynamics) that were not equated with a mere marketplace of ideas, could this lostness regain its value, its purpose? Shouldn’t markets serve public culture (and private longings) rather than vice-versa?

*I hope the (unintended) irony of linking to the Amazon.com page for Menand’s book has become apparent by the end of this post. It makes me think about the potential non-consumer dimensions of Amazon’s vast storehouse of book titles and reviews — non-consumer value from which Amazon, of course, seeks to profit (just turn on 1-click order!).

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Intellectual Culture, Public Culture | 2 Comments »

#357 – Doctoring the Doctor of Philosophy

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

imagining a clean bill of health for the ph.d. job market.

X-posted from HASTAC blog.

The yearly conferences in the humanities–MLA, AHA, and others–have brought an onslaught of handwringing over the purpose of graduate education in a collapsing academic job market (not that it was ever that good, even during the bubble years).

William Pannapacker, a.k.a. Thomas H. Benton, Dean Dad, Tenured Radical, and others have weighed in on what graduate students, potential graduate students, and graduate programs should do. Basic message: don’t go! Do something else!

Tenured Radical has some particulary intriguing recommendations for humanities graduate programs, her overall point being:

While I don’t think Ph.D, programs are responsible for unemployed graduates, they could do a better job of imagining what an intellectual life in the twenty-first century looks like and how the university can connect to the public sphere is more vital ways.

Lots of valid points made in these critiques, reflections, and comments, but there is one thing that always bothers me about them. We seem to pretend that the job market for intellectual work in the “public sphere” is robust compared to academia. Curating? Working in a library? Not so easy to get jobs in those fields, even if you train directly for them. Journalism? Not doing so well lately. “Content providers” on the Internet? Business isn’t exactly booming like it was in ye old digital revolution days.

Perhaps the larger problem is not that the academic job market is collapsing, but that the “public sphere” of “intellectual life in the twenty-first century” itself needs reimagining.

I don’t mean that everyone should start twittering and blogging and chattering away right now. What I mean is that the problem of the academy is also an opportunity to imagine a “public sphere” and an “intellectual life” whose institutions, economies, and values are not dominated by neo-liberal ideologies of efficiency, productivity, and profit, but also thought, interaction, care, deliberation, reading, and time-consuming investigations. Less banking, more seminars!

Maybe the answer, weirdly, is not that graduate admissions should be limited, but actually that more people should be going to graduate school rather than fewer.

They should be spending more time studying, and part of this study should be about developing a robust graduate education that connects the time-honored traditions of scholasticism–specialization, mentoring, arguing, getting a bit lost in a corner of a discipline–to the reimagining of the public sphere as a place in which the peculiarities of the academia and the general good intersect.

This would mean a dramatic turn in the kind of institutional work of academics, universities, and others. It would mean building a counter-movement to the corporatization of everything that for so many people now feels like the only path. It would mean a lot of struggle. But maybe if things keep getting worse, this struggle will make more and more sense.

Instead of all the banter about how liberal-arts training is the key to finding employment, let’s start talking about how we could imagine the kind of employment that would suit people with a liberal-arts orientation.*

For intriguing takes on the Ph.D. job situation, see:

*Admittedly, this kind of talk occurs more at the undergraduate level, but it’s part of the same mindset that dismisses Ph.D. training as pointless and irrelevant.

Posted in Academic Culture, Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Intellectual Culture | 2 Comments »

#347 – In Production

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

producing “the production of knowledge.”

This phrase, repeated incessantly in some quarters of the humanities, has long since slipped its original moorings, and owes more to American corporate lingo than to Althusser. – Scott McLemee, The Public Option,” Inside Higher Ed

Has anyone traced the actual history of this phrase, “the production of knowledge”? I think of Foucault when I hear it more than Althusser. And I am reminded, in particular, of Foucault’s focus on the broader, more intricate channels through which power flows, shaping of ideas and bodies as well as institutions of governance, all in the name of fostering a “regime” of control. So knowledge, for Foucault, gets “produced” based on the larger systems in which people think and know. And it does so through capillaries of everyday life as well as the main arteries of official power. The micro-production of knowledge as well as the macro. Is that accurate, oh ye Foucauldians out there, surveilling me?

And what of the “corporate lingo” dimensions? Corporations can be as anti-humanist and anti-Enlightenment as Mr. Foucault himself was, though with very different goals in mind. When did this phrase, “the production of knowlege,” appear in corporate boardrooms and at management retreats, and for what purposes?

Let us produce some knowledge, yes?

X-posted from HASTAC blog.

Posted in Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture | 3 Comments »

#346 – Come Gather Round (the Computer) People

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

of digital public intellectuals, civic engagers, and policy wonks.

(1) Michael Bérubé visited our Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual research workshop at Northwestern U in mid-October. He was smart and funny, offering a model of the public intellectual as witty and welcoming to others.

(2) He talked about his new project, The Left at War, which examines intra-progressive intellectual debates about the military responses to 9/11. Michael argues that cultural studies–particularly the legacy of Stuart Hall’s more explicit political examinations of the ideological background in which Thatcherism emerged in 1980s Britain–can help us gain a better sense of how to build a progressive multilateralism in the US and the world (imitating Hall’s famous phrase “Marxism without guarantees,” I’d call Michael’s vision “multilateralism without guarantees”). Michael’s point was to use Stuart Hall’s more political analysis rather than his more famous subcultural studies work in order to critique both the liberal hawk pro-war position, which was easily coopted by the right, and to criticize what Michael calls the “Manichean left,” which assumes that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (even in this case fundamentalist terrorists). Though I want to learn more from the book about how, exactly, cultural studies fits into this new model of progressive internationalism (Ellen Willis figures in the part of the book Michael did not discuss as much during his visit, which can’t be a bad thing!), Michael’s careful effort to think through how ideas and culture relate to the world of politics was captivating.

(3) Michael’s visit, which took place the same weekend as the wonderful conference at U of Iowa called Platforms for Public Scholars, made me think more consciously about the whole concept of the “public intellectual” in our time. I was left thinking about three different models of public intellectual that both overlap and diverge:

  • (a) The classic public intellectual is the heroic (foolhardy?) book reviewer or essayist with a desk copy, a 1000 to 5000 word limit, and a deadline for publication. This is the typical version of the public intellectual in which the world might become the alcoves at CUNY in the 1930s and 40s and we might become all New York Intellectuals sparring in the generalist, non-specialist public sphere of debate and discussion. The digital comes into play here as book reviews and essays give way to blogs and multimedia formats: can a general, broad, inclusive public sphere of intellectual engagement function in this new space? Can it be more democratic and widely participatory than the exclusivity of intellectual life in the world of New York Intellectuals and other cafe intellectual traditions?
  • (b) The Platforms for Public Scholars offered a different model of the public intellectual, what we might call the civic intellectual, a figure who works in radically-democratic, service-based collaboration with members of other communities (youth groups, schools, unions, associations, towns, and the like) on products of knowledge exploration and acquisition. The civic intellectual is not necessarily a generalist, but rather knows how to bring specialized training in a scholarly field to bear on a particular project, and also is open to learning from other, non-academic communities. This model most directly challenges older versions of university-centric scholarship, which is so influenced by its monastic origins. And the digital seems to offer one way by which civic intellectualism might flourish, bringing the university and the world beyond the campus gates together in productive and new ways. *But* this is not quite the same thing as (a) the classic public intellectual. And therein lies a tension concerning the public intellectual and the digital. What is gained, what lost, in the differences between these two models? How might they overlap in useful and worthy ways?
  • (c) Finally, a third kind of public intellectual is the policy wonk. This figure is more closely aligned with government and political parties. He (and often it’s a he, though increasingly less so) tends to think little of culture, and live in a world even more insular than the academic. It’s the institutions of policy wonkery to which Michael Bérubé wants to introduce the tools of cultural studies (though in doing so, he also wants to reshape what culture studies is, moving it away from simplistic pop culture transgression-equals-resistance assumptions to Hall’s more supple explorations of the linkages between culture, ideology, and politics). Unlike the classic public intellectual, the policy wonk is less concerned with maintaining a distance from centers of power. Unlike the civic intellectual, the policy wonk tends to be less concerned with the processes of “democraticizing knowledge” (by and large), and more concerned with actual ends and results through access to power.

(4) So, how might these three kinds of public intellectualism intersect and overlap and diverge? Where does the digital fit? Are there other kinds of public intellectual activity and what should be their relationships to the models above. I think there are great and perhaps even insurmountable differences between the three models above, and I am left thinking about the role of the digital in exacerbating these differences and, also, the potential of the digital to offer tools for reorganizing public intellectual life in new ways. I want to get away from the “digital is democratic, may a 1000 blogs bloom” euphoria. At the same time, I think the digital does offer enormous potential for a sense of quality intellectual engagement and civic belonging beyond both what the book, magazine, newspaper, and cafe could do in days of yore as well as what the campus could do with chalk and chalkboard.

(5) I’m starting to think about how the abstractions above can be applied to particular projects of scholarly inquiry. So as I begin to organize my next research projects, I am pondering how I might move among the three models above while developing a history of folk music festivals, a biography of Paul Goodman, or a history of the 1976 US bicentennial. And I am thinking about how the digital might be applied in this research, and I’m particularly contemplating how one might represent these different sorts of projects in U.S. intellectual and cultural history through digital means.

For instance, how might the participatory and multicultural dimensions of folk music festivals appear digitally? How might not only the analog music of banjos and clogs and slide guitars and accordions, but also the feeling of community and exchange at these festivals, be investigated through digital means? How might Goodman’s multi-genre approaches to public life appear online? How might the reader/viewer/interactor with this material contribute to making meaning out of it? How might I represent the knowledge gleaned from my research so that it can “go viral,” mutate, be used and re-used in new ways?

(7) Thanks again to Michael Bérubé for his enormous energy and generosity of time and spirit during his visit.

X-posted (and revised somewhat) from HASTAC blog.

Posted in Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Folk Culture, Historical Culture, Intellectual Culture, Media Culture, Musical Culture, Public Culture, Seventies Culture | 5 Comments »

#339 – (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Cultural Studies

Friday, October 16th, 2009

thinking about cultural studies, civil society, the humanities, and more with michael bérubé.

Today and tomorrow, Michael Berube joins us at Northwestern for a talk and seminar as part of the Engaged Humanities Scholar as Public Intellectual research workshop.

Recently, Michael published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “What’s the Matter with Cultural Studies?,” that sparked quite a debate. Perhaps the best place to start out in exploring this debate would be Michael’s post at Crooked Timber, They Call It Theory Monday.

There’s a lot circulating around in this debate: (1) the disciplinary home for (or homelessness of) cultural studies within the university, (2) the place of cultural studies beyond the university in the larger political and civic realms, (3) the history of cultural studies (British/British-French/Global/etc.), and (4) the distortions of cultural studies by its enemies, particularly by fellow progressive intellectuals on the “false consciousness” wing of the left — these who use the ill-defined populism of cultural studies to dismiss the field as confusing base and superstructure, focusing on culture when basic economics should be the purview of the left.

I’ll leave these (very worthy) debates to your own Internet explorations, but I do want to highlight one sentence from Michael’s article. In speaking about the goals of the left (and I think we could even say a goal beyond partisan politics), Michael argues against the notion that all we must do to improve society is lift the veil of media manipulation and “manufactured consent.” Instead, he writes, “you have to do a great deal of groundwork in civil society to try to forge an egalitarian response.”

I am hoping that this weekend, we can explore this concept of civil society and the kind of groundwork that humanities scholars might do using the tools and knowledge of specialized research to engage more broadly in civic endeavors (and one of those tools is listening, which I plan to do a lot of this weekend).

As part of this conversation, I (and I hope others) will post to HASTAC so that we can investigate the digital dimensions of this groundwork, starting with the question that’s been on my mind lately: how is digital networking not only affecting academic practice and knowledge production but civil society itself? And not just the netroots of political civil society, but the broader terrain of associational life, the “cultural ectoplasm” (as my teacher Bob Cantwell called it) of civil society? Now that seems a task that cultural studies (and cultural history, my own field) might be well-suited for.

Let the foundational (and anti-foundational, if your sensibility tends that way) labor begin!

X-posted to HASTAC blog.

Posted in Academic Culture, Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Educational Culture, Intellectual Culture | No Comments »

#327 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Friday, August 14th, 2009

the economic democracy/cultural democracy problématique.

Lumping humanity into two categories, the noble and the rest, may seem to lend itself to anti-democratic sentiments or even to a violently reactionary form of politics. But Scialabba affirms the distinction without snobbery. Perhaps he suspects that the division runs right down the middle of most of us. Even so, it can undermine the will to egalitarianism. Economic leveling means giving more to those who have less. Cultural leveling seldom has that implication. How, then, to resolve the tension?

- Scott McLemee, “A Worried Mind,” Introduction to What Are Intellectuals Good For? Essays and Reviews by George Scialabba.

Posted in Culture Rover, Economic Culture, Intellectual Culture, Political Culture, Popular Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

#300 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

The work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a distinct kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, is the politics of truth, for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality. — C. Wright Mills

(With a nod to Alan Wolfe, “Gonzo Sociology”)

Posted in American Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Intellectual Culture, Political Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »