Archive for the ‘Civic Culture’ Category

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#522 – Roll Over Ranke and Tell Hofstadter the News

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

more on no more plan b and the future of history.

Tenured Radical (Claire Potter) has a typically incisive blog post about the recent “No More Plan B” brouhaha (upcoming panel this Friday at the AHA in Chicago). Calling Grafton a rock star, hers is a synthesis of his call to restructure the values of advanced historical training and Jesse Lemisch’s retort that what we need are jobs, jobs, jobs in education.

Of course, as TR points out, we need both:

Although I think that Lemisch would agree with me on the point I make above, the implications of his argument are that expanded employment (which would enact other kinds of social justice agendas, not the least of which would be expanded opportunities for education) would be enough. I disagree: it is not enough, and this is why Anthony Grafton is a rock star. Arguing that we stop pushing young scholars into a failed market where the most successful will be constrained in their opportunities and intellectual choices, Grafton wants to change the values that have been ineffective in creating jobs for historians. Public history has the potential to create a more free employment system that would support an expanded intellectual community and allow creativity collaborations to flourish.

Furthermore, in a topic that I will take up in part II of this series, Grafton is arguing that the most path-breaking and influential scholarship in the twenty-first century is likely to be collaborative and accessible to a broad public.  Breaking with the model of the exceptional individual, who works in private and competes successfully among professionally and narrowly similar peers, a paradigm that has governed access to the profession for over a century, is in its own way revolutionary.

There’s a lot to consider in TR’s synthesis, but I want to weigh in again with the point that we need to honor the desire of many hopeful history graduate students to become tenure-track professors. Yes, we can, should, and must imagine new modes of cooperative, public historical scholarship (digital humanities in the house). We just need to do so in ways that do not wind up reinforcing experiences of precarity, exploitation, and contingency among the intellectual laborers in the field of history.

In other words, there are important things to cling to in the older, increasingly impossible model of tenure-track professorships. In fact, the longing to be a tenure-track professor seems to me to be connected to the larger critique of intellectual labor within neoliberal capitalism implicit in Lemisch’s curmudgeonly response to Grafton and Grossman. People want to practice the independent craft of history securely, with a range of autonomy and freedom that empowers democratic historical activity rather than impoverishes it.

Ultimately, the question is not just what kind of history we pursue, but also what kind of public we pursue it in. We need to imagine and work toward a public life that supports the knitting together of university history departments, public institutions, and people’s lives in ways that are robustly intellectual and economically innovative. It needs to be a public that expands individual autonomy and collaborative historical research at the same time.

If we do not think carefully about the profession and public life in tandem and work toward changing both, we risk creating a field and a public that merely incorporate historians into existing, exploitative labor markets instead of transforming labor conditions to unleash improved historical investigation and a better public life.

This project, however, will require more collective modes of historical creativity, not just a rock star in the spotlight.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Educational Culture, Historical Culture, Public Culture | 2 Comments »

#514 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

art, energy, politics.

Art can create an energy. Actually, the fact that art cannot change things makes it a neutral place for exchanges and discussions, and then enables it to change the world.

- Artist JR, in Raffi Khatchadourian, “In the Picture,” New Yorker, 28 November 2011

Links:

Posted in Arts Culture, Civic Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Political Culture, Public Culture, Visual Culture | No Comments »

#433 – Quantifying Public Intellect, Qualifying Public Intellect

Friday, February 18th, 2011

numb and numbered or text and textured?

Being a public intellectual is a way of cementing that public’s investment in the intellectual life. – Cathy Davidson

In her blog today, Cathy Davidson celebrates the size of the Scholars forums on HASTAC (pronounced haystack, and standing for the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, Technology Advanced Collaboratory) as an example of public intellectualism. She compares the number of readers for a typical academic book (400 she claims) to the 350,000 unique hits that the HASTAC forums has received over the last three years.

There is much to celebrate about the HASTAC Scholars forums, which have become a rich and vibrant online exchange network for ideas, responses, arguments, and debates of all sorts. But the framing of public intellectualism around size of audience made me wonder: what do we mean by the term public intellectual in the digital age? How should we qualify it as well as quantify it as we assess what we might do—or think, since thinking is a kind of doing—with all this technologically-enabled knowledge creation?

I want to be clear that I am asking these questions as a supporter of HASTAC, not as a neo-luddite or anti-digital humanities person. I am asking these questions because I am concerned about the scales and “metrics” we can easily and uncritically adopt to judge public intellectual life. Which is to ask: when it comes to knowledge and learning, what is the relationship, exactly, between quantity of participation and quality?

I do not have an answer to this question, though I do think there is ample evidence—indeed, overwhelming evidence—of the quality of intellectual interaction on the HASTAC forums. What I mean is how does the quality, not the quantity, of the public intellectual engagement on HASTAC connect to—or remain disconnected from—the public? How do we give context and texture to numerical measurements of intellectual life?

And what does Cathy mean exactly by arguing that “being a public intellectual is a way of cementing that public’s investment in the intellectual life”? Is she suggesting that the conversations on HASTAC confirm an initial public expenditure on intellectual endeavors, or is she proposing that HASTAC forums are themselves generative, inspiring public interest in the life of the mind? Or both? (I think “cementing” and “investment” are the words I am having trouble fully understanding here.)

As they always tend to in provocative and productive ways, Cathy Davidson’s blog posts addressed pressing contemporary issues. But in this case, her blog also sent me back in time, thinking about how the connection between intellectual endeavors and the shaping of public life has a long and vexed history.

One thinks of Walter Lippmann’s “phantom public,” in which experts were needed in modern, industrial society to step in and guide the common citizen  overwhelmed by access to information (and that was in the 1920s, what would Lippmann have made of the Internet!?). One thinks of John Dewey’s insistence, partially in response to Lippmann, that a kind of social democratic harmonization of the individual citizen and the mass public was possible, and that science, arts, and education (the intellect, for Dewey) were precisely the means to sing the euphonious song.

I also think of Jurgen Habermas’s work on legitimation between facts and norms, his theory of social organization potentially moving from loosely-affiliated public interactions in the vernacular lifeworld up through to governmental instrumentalizations of power in the system (one also thinks of the dangers Habermas foresaw in the growing colonization of the lifeworld by the system).

And I think of the Marxist Gramscian tradition, which pictures intellectuals as class warriors in civil society—which is to say ideological and affective fighters among both the institutions and the open spaces of public life in a democracy. Here, civil society becomes a terrain of struggle, a battle zone of positions in what Gramsci calls a war of position. In this understanding of the public, there is an ongoing competition between different social classes as they compete for hegemonic control over determining what seems like common sense to people. This is, of course, a much more conflictual model than the prior ones.

Most of all, I think of Michael Walzer’s notion of the “connected critic.” I think this might be the best model for scholarly engagement on the HASTAC Scholars forums. Of course Walzer was not thinking of being connected in the digital sense, but for lack of a better word the connection is there.

So one question, if HASTAC Scholars are indeed to think of themselves as public intellectuals, might be: how do they further articulate, elucidate, and critically engage the quality of exchange on HASTAC itself, as well as the quantity? Moreover, how can those who are participating, who have been bitten by the knowledge bug, who seek to join a lineage of specialized academic study (a monastic tradition, after all, that sought to get away from society, though always found itself wrapped up in issues of power, patronage, and hierarchy), how can they democratize their learning, share their findings, while also remaining necessarily wary, alienated, critical, and maybe even unquantifiable in their value to society? What kind of learning community would this be substantively? How do you transform 350,000 unique hits into a space of shared uniqueness?

Perhaps HASTAC Scholars might imagine themselves as gadflys among the gadgets rather than cement pourers filling in frames at the public’s feet. They are not seeking to secure an “investment” in the stock of intellectual life, but rather they might serve as in a role at once more tricky, yet also immeasurably important. They might seek to map out what it means to become not only public intellectuals, but also democratic intellectuals: active participants at the open borders of a republic of letters as well as numbers; thinkers on the edges conversing about ideas as well as crunching data; connected critics balancing individual voices and idiosyncratic views on the scales of collective digital interaction and communication.

Links:

Posted in Academic Culture, Civic Culture, Critical Culture, Culture Rover, Digital Culture, Intellectual Culture, Marxist Culture, Mass Culture, Media Culture, Public Culture | 3 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 »

#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 »

#336 – And Now For Something Completely Different

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

michael palin stresses comedy’s changing role.

A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious. It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.

- Michael Palin, quoted in “On Comedy’s Flying Trapeze,” by Charles McGrath, New York Times

monty-pythons-flying-circus-logo

One can surely find exceptions, but Palin’s comments seem spot on. Comedy was about breaking free ecstatically in the 60s and 70s, whereas contemporary comedy has oddly become the opposite. On “The Office,” “The Daily Show,” and, in deeply ironic mode, “The Colbert Report,” among other programs, comedy has become a call for restraint and common sense.

This isn’t a bad thing. It just is. And it is still funny. But it also has a larger significance.

In the 1960s, laughter marked what John Cleese called, in the New York Times article, “screams of liberation” against the limitations of society. But in a contemporary public culture that sometimes feels as if it has no more limits, less and less structure, and fewer boundaries of civility or standards of decency, comedy is no longer the clarion call for freedom. Goofy satire worthy of Aristophanes no longer does the trick.

In the 60s, the goal was to show that the emperor had no clothes. In the 2000s, when the clothes off various emperors were finally torn off, what we then saw were obscene and indecent abuses of power. And in the last year’s health care debates, we learned that efforts to engage in civic dialogue only resulted in screams of a different sort — not cries of liberation but coordinated efforts at distortion and obstruction.

Comedy becomes a barometer for this situation, but this barometer is a strange one, for it can make the weather as well as measure it. What role comedy will play beyond the Bush years of undisclosed locations, bungled wars, inept governance, and economic meltdown and subterfuge remains to be seen. But it’s not liberation we need anymore. We need something completely different.

So maybe it is good that contemporary comedy seems almost moral, with fish slapping replaced by ironic modes of  fingerwagging. The “screams of liberation” have become dire sighs of exasperation. And once those sighs are exhaled at “the human condition under stress,” perhaps we will be able to breathe again with a bit more ease.

Posted in Civic Culture, Comedy Culture, Culture Rover, Public Culture, Sixties Culture, Television Culture | 3 Comments »

#331 – The Public Health

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

struggles over the care of bodies private and public.

What has been most fascinating about the otherwise utterly scary town hall protests by radical right wingers around the U.S. (guns and swastikas anyone?) is that these protests point to a larger struggle going on currently in Obama’s America: the struggle over who will control representations of the American public.

It is odd, but somehow fitting, that this larger contest over representing the public is taking place through an issue that is most of all about the intimate and private dimensions of our lives: the health care of our bodies.

Central to the right wing’s goals when disrupting town hall meetings was not only to shift public debate itself, but also to recast perceptions of who the public was. Whether coordinated or spontaneous or both, these protests rippled through the mass media with a new representation of public opinion: of what “the people” of the republic, the citizens, us in the U.S., were thinking.

Being noisy, putting private bodies and voices into public forums (or what passes for them), was an effective way to re-represent whose political opinions were legitimate and worthy of explicit political representation, in other words of who the public was and what they desired. Right-wing protesters transformed what seems to be, demographically-speaking, a small fringe population into the population writ large: the people were speaking, their protests suggested as they circulated through the media, and this public was saying that they might have to water the tree of liberty with their “natural manure.”

The struggle over the representation of the public is largely a matter of scale and mode of expression: in a mass society, an effective roar by a few citizens can overwhelm quieter but more widely-held opinions. And, if you think about it, what do we think and want, anyway? Privately, I would wager, many Americans have quite complex and intricate attitudes, particularly when it comes to the issue of health care. So the individuals in the American public, and the concept of the public itself, are both very amorphous.

And yet, in a democracy, the public is an essential — perhaps even required — concept. Whether one argues that consent gets manufactured in this public, or that opinions can arise authentically from debate and discussion, in order for democracy to be democratic, it requires a public. This social body has to arise out of private citizens whose opinions, whether freely-formed or manipulatively forged, define what seems normal and right. More importantly, this public’s opinion,  its perceived beliefs and values, give ballast to the actions of the state. Without the public, in a sense, there is no democracy — even a questionably democratic one.

So the public and how it gets represented is very important. Maybe this is why the left as well as the right has been spending so much time exploring how it might function now in the age of the blogosphere. Could a new kind of public emerge from online interactions of opinion and information? What sort of public?

The health care debate is becoming a test, in a sense, of the left’s ability to represent the public that supported and elected Obama. The idea (always a distortion) that the left was a small group of “latte-drinking” liberals controlling the larger American public no longer holds in post-Obama America. But then, what sort of public replaces this representation by the right of the left over the last ten or twenty years?

Yesterday, we began to see that new, amorphous public coming into view. Progressives were able to pressure their representatives in the House into making the “public option” (interesting appearance of that word, in this case as a representation of the state) a non-negotiable item for the health care bill that might emerge in Congress. And Internet-savvy activists flooded television and other forms of media to represent the constituents of those House reps — which we might call “the public,” of course, that is demanding the “public option.”

It helps, too, that the mass media itself has had to respond to these changes in the public by representing progressive voices and bodies. A station such as MSNBC is doing this for commercial gain, but commerce, like politics, is rooted in perceptions of who the public is and what they want.

Was it any accident, then, that this dramatic change in perceptions of the public debating — and the public debate over —health care occurred the same week as Netroots Nation? Probably just a coincidence, but a telling one. “Changing the face of progressive politics,” which Netroots Nation declares as its slogan, has everything to do with putting a new face on the public: who is in it and what it desires.

It turns out the health care of individual bodies has everything to do with the care paid to the social body. We live and die by what we think the public is and want it wants.

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Mass Culture, Media Culture, Private Culture, Public Culture, Television Culture | 1 Comment »

#329 – Highest Common Denominator

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

envisioning the dream of the commons in mass culture.

An increase in scale does not always entail reductiveness: one effect of the best mass culture is to trace or forge the connections among the unprecedentedly diverse experiences of its unprecedentedly broad audience. When artists find this common ground, the experience, however fleeting, of so enormous a community is visionary and exalting. When they fail, they can retreat into an irony that thrives in the vast range and dense detail of American consumer culture.

- George Scialabba, writing against Dwight Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult”

Posted in Arts Culture, Civic Culture, Consumer Culture, Culture Rover, Mass Culture, Popular Culture, Public Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | 1 Comment »

#314 – Alleyway Allegory

Monday, May 25th, 2009

the imperfect necessities of state intervention.

civil

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Visual Culture | No Comments »

#304 – Culture Rover’s Unfamiliar Quotations

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

of massy bodies & mutual concert.

The greatest difficulty lies, in setting a huge massy body in motion. To point out to mankind their real interest, is easy enough; but to convince them of their duty, and to persuade those who are activiated by different views, and subject to different passions, to lay aside their prejudices, to give up a strong attachment to their immediate interests, and to act in mutual concert, for the good of the whole, is an arduous task.

- “Libertas at Natale Solum,” South-Carolina Gazette, 20 August 1770, quoted in T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution

Posted in Civic Culture, Culture Rover, Political Culture, Unfamiliar Quotations | No Comments »

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