SOME THOUGHTS TOWARDS PRINCIPLES OF CRITICISM

I apologise for the lack of updates lately. The work that I get evaluated on/paid for has to take precedence over this blog sometimes. I do have a few long things in the offing, though, that will hopefully go up within the next week or so, and I'm working on a few reviews to have up in the meantime. For now, I'll offer some food for thought about criticism, via a few passages that have me thinking about what it is I'm trying to do here and why. 

The first, from Robertson Davies' excellent novel The Rebel Angels,  is Arthur Cornish's statement of his ambitions to Maria Theotoky:

"I am going to be a patron. . . . Of course Uncle Frank put some money in the hands of living artists, and spotted some winners and encouraged them and gave them what they want most--which is sympathetic understanding--but he wasn't a patron on the grand scale. . . . [which is a] great animateur; somebody who breathes life into things. I suppose you might call it a great encourager, but also a begetter, a director who keeps artists on the tracks, and provides the power--which isn't all money, but any means--that makes them go. It's a kind of person--a very rare kind--that has to work in opera, or ballet, or the theatre; he's the central point for a group of artists of various kinds, and he has to be the autocrat. That's what calls for tact and firmness, but most of all for exceptional taste. It has to be the authoritative taste artists recognize and wants to please. . . . You're taken aback because I lay claim to exceptional taste. It's queer what people are allowed to boast about; if I told you I was an unusually good money-man and had a flair for it, you wouldn't be surprised in the least. Why shouldn't I say I have exceptional taste?"

The second comes from Giovanni Tiso's blog Bat Bean Beam (a real treat if you haven't checked it out before), the obviously applicable "An Essay on Criticism:"

So is disliking anything at all bad in itself? Again it's hard to say but there may be something of a clue in the first line of the song. "It's okay to not like things." It's not good or fine. Merely okay. We don't really endorse it, but if you must, then at least try not to be a dick about it. . . . 

Do many people really feel that the problem with the internet or society in general is people hating on the things that they like? Who does that anymore? Are there even any genuine snobs left? Are there cultural critics willing to argue that, say, reality television is bad for its public and for society, and that if you watch Police Ten 7 you just might be an arsehole? Or is it true on the contrary that even the most derivative or exploitative manifestations of mass culture have been almost universally subsumed under the rubric of taste, concerning which, as we have known for some time, there can be no dispute? . . . 

Everything must pass through the social networks, therefore everything must be liked . . . If all goes according to hype, soon there will be no publishers nor editors and so the logic of this social layer, that is to say of efficient consumption, will be alone in governing access to information and ultimately most forms of culture. It's the future we bought, the future we agreed to. It plays in chunks of sixteen seconds to the sound of an upbeat tune.

The final comes from K-Punk, perhaps most clearly articulated on his site in this post (and from which I'll quote for not having another source handy), but more fully developed in the final chapter of his book, Capitalist Realism:

Nothing could be a clearer illustration of the famous failure of the Father function, the crisis of the paternal superego in late capitalism, than a typical edition of Supernanny. . . . 

Rather like many teachers or other workers in what used to be called "public service," Supernanny has to sort out problems of socialization that the family can no longer resolve. A Marxist Supernanny would of course turn away from the troubleshooting of individual families to look at the structural causes which produce the same repeated effect. 

The problem is that late capitalism insists and relies upon the very equation of desire with interests that parenting used to [be] based on rejecting. In a culture in which the "paternal" concept of duty has been subsumed into the "maternal" imperative to enjoy, it can seem that the parent is failing in their duty if they in any way impede their children's absolute right to enjoyment. . . . The parental disavowal of this role is doubled at the level of cultural production by the refusal of "gatekeepers" to do anything but give audiences what they already (appear to) want. The concrete question is: if a return to the paternal superego--the stern father in the home, Reithian superciliousness in broadcasting--is neither possible nor desirable, then how are we to move beyond the culture of monotonous moribund conformity that results from a refusal to challenege or educate? . . . 

Late capitalism certainly articulates many of its injunctions via an appeal to (a certain version of) health. . . . But there are limits to this emphasis on good health: mental health and intellectual development barely feature at all, for instance. (When will there be a Channel 4 programme called "You Are What You Read?") What we see instead is a reductive, hedonic model of health which is all about "feeling good." To tell people how to lose weight, or how to better decorate their neo-liberal burrow, is acceptable; but to call for any kind of cultural improvement  is to be oppressive and elitist.

While not necessarily identical, and while not necessarily always in agreement with each other, these three examples point to an important function of criticism, one that I'm increasingly feeling that I could do a better job pursuing in my writing here. I can't make claims to exceptional taste--if I could, why would I have not only bought, but enjoyed the soundtrack to Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (and I can't even lie and say it was because of Madonna's awesome "Beautiful Stranger;" I wanted to hear R.E.M.'s cover of "Dragging the Line")--but I can probably do more talk about the wider implications of the cultural objects I discuss and review. After all, as Lukacs notes in "Class Consciousness," in the undeveloped proletarian consciousness, issues of culture "occupy an almost wholly isolated position in the consciousness of the proletariat; the organic bonds connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat as well as with society as a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness." If what I write on here is to do any good, obviously I need to start pushing beyond my own isolated position.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON TEACHING PROMPTED BY READING JOURNALS

It's getting toward the end of the semester and I've just collected my students' reading journals in order to have a look at what they've been writing throughout the second half of the semester. They were supposed to make an entry into the journal every day they had a reading assignment (from a quick scan, it looks like less than half of them managed to do this), and their entry was to identify problems they were having, ideas they came up with while reading, general reactions to the text, etc. It's a fairly standard practice with some fairly standard goals: to ensure that they read, to help them think about material before coming into class so they have points to contribute to discussion, and to give them a chance to develop paper ideas/topics in an informal, low stakes way.

The most frequent comment I've seen so far in my students' reading journals--it's at the top of every entry, it seems, repeated like a mantra--is "This story was confusing." Sometimes there are slight variations--"This story makes no sense," "I'm so lost"--but mostly, the recurring theme is confusion. I was surprised that the frequency of these comments didn't drop as the semester went on; I'd structured the reading assignments to go from Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (the most difficult, in my mind) to John Cheever's "The Swimmer" (the easiest), with the idea that the frustration and difficulty they encountered in reading Kafka would spur them to develop (aided by class discussion and writing) the tools to read difficult material. Thus, by the time they came to the final reading assignment of the semester, Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, which we just finished, any confusion or frustration they encountered would immediately suggest to them strategies for reading and engaging with the material that would quickly move them beyond confusion as their sole reaction to the text.

Unfortunately, their reading journals don't reflect this. Even when the students were able to quite effectively produce interpretations and begin to make claims out of their confusion, they still circled back to that as their dominant (to the point of exclusivity) reaction. That the development I anticipated hasn't taken place is obviously a point on which I need to think further--what more can I do to help them get over this hump and start developing their reading skills?--but also seems like it might be related to other larger cultural factors.

A few passages from Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? seem pertinent here:

Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many--and these are A-level students mind you--will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be "boring." What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate "New Flesh" that is "too wired to concentrate" and the confining, concentrated logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp--and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension--that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche. (23-24)

If, then, something like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism--a consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture. Similarly, what is called dyslexia may in many cases amount to a post-lexia. Teenagers process capital's image-dense data very effectively without any need to read--slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane. (25)

Teachers are now put under intolerable pressure to mediate between the post-literate subjectivity of the late capitalist consumer and the demands of the disciplinary regime (to pass examinations, etc). . . . Teachers are caught between being facilitator-entertainers and disciplinarian-authoritarians. Teachers want to help students to pass the exams; they want us to be authority figures who tell them what to do. Teachers being interpellated by students as authority figures exacerbates the "boredom" problem, since isn't anything that comes from the place of authority a priori boring? (25-26)

While I think Fisher's take on this is perhaps slightly exaggerated at this point--although perhaps in the UK system in which he works he is in fact totally on the mark--I do feel that the process of educating students and the relationship between students, teachers, and material is trending ever more in this direction. The "indigestibility" he discusses seems related to my students' confusion. They want story without the process, the content without the form, because the act of reading, of deciphering, of making the story appear in a difficult text--which is a necessary and inseparable part of the text--runs against the grain of their mode of consuming and interpreting data. Thus, even when my students succeed in overcoming this confusion, it is the confusion they have no choice but to focus on rather than what that confusion allows/offers them.

A possibly related--though at this point wholly unsubstantiated--speculation on my part is that the breakdown in the disciplinary regime that Fisher discusses, taken together with its usurpation by Deleuze's societies of control--has something to do with my students' confusion with the material they've been reading because the stories have tended to talk about time in a way that my students no longer experience/think about time. Disciplinary society's discrete units of time, in which events are asynchronous from each other (8:00-10:00 is a block of work; 10:00-10:15 is a break that allows for socialization; 10:15-12:00 is another block of work) without any sort of overlap or simultaneity, are part of what the stories we have been reading have been playing with: the boundaries between formerly asynchronous events are breached, time becomes fluid. "The Swimmer" relies on time passing in several ways at once: the passing of an afternoon is linked to the process of aging from virility into senescence and to the cycle of seasons. Pedro Páramo cuts between events happening years apart, with effects often discussed before causes are established, and confuses chronology even further through the presence of an active population of ghosts who continue to live in the town of Comala long after their deaths.

For my students, though, time is already fluid. The seventy five minutes that delineates our class time no longer designates a time solely dedicated to learning about writing and argumentation via literature; as long as students are connected, via their cell phones (as much as I try to ban them, inevitably at some point at least one will make an appearance), they can continually escape this attempt to create a discrete block of time. The same thing applies, as Fisher notes, to the presence of food in class--students will attempt to bring whole meals into class, once again resisting the attempt to separate periods for consuming food/media/entertainment from class time. Bringing materials from other classes (ones deemed more important than a class devoted to writing and literature) to work on during our class is another form of this. The "New Flesh" Fisher mentions, constantly "wired into the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture," does not have the sense of time as a series of discrete events against which simultaneity can be a flashpoint. Thus, attempts by these texts to use and play with time in this way is confusing to students because it is alien to their sense of the world and to how time operates within it.

Alongside this phenomenon of confusion, though, lurks the ever-present spectre of "value." What value does my class have for a student? What are they getting out of it? I would venture a guess that our thoughts on this (mine and my students') are not the same. I was pointed to why do we have to learn recently. A quick scan of the entries reveals the usual suspects--literature, philosophy, history, geography--but also a surprising number of entries dedicated to the sciences and math. There seem to be two basic arguments that students are putting forth in the tweets collated on this site:

1) Why do I have to learn about [x] when there is [computer program/hardware device that approximates one aspect of that discipline]? Example: "What's the point of learning about maps and stuff when we have GPS and Navigation systems."

2) What's the point of learning about [x] when I'm not going to be [occupation that would make use of that subject] when I grow up? Example: "Why do we learn physics? I'm not going to be an electrician when I grow up anyway o_o"

This is obviously not a new development, though it does point to a disturbing commodification of education by evaluating the process and content along the lines one would use while shopping. Here, education becomes positioned as an unnecessary frippery/luxury item: why buy this when I don't need what it does? Of course, the fact that students often misunderstand or misinterpret the "what it does" part when it comes to education makes this mindset even more damaging. I sometimes think of a shopper dismissing a bucket of water as a luxury item while his/her home is on fire when I consider this, though the premise of this attitude toward education still seems wrong.

For one thing, this attitude is a fairly obvious (though silent) way in which austerity rhetoric creeps into arguments about the structure and purpose of higher education. Fredric Jameson is right to insist that we decouple personified metaphors about balancing budgets in households from issues like national budgets and debts, as here the "we're all in this together" and "we all need to tighten our belts" kind of sentiments become the logic of the students' critique of the value of their education. As an unnecessary luxury--in their eyes--in the current economic climate, philosophy (or literature, history, etc.) is something that students must tighten their belts against, rather than something that can offer an alternative to "the entertainment-control circuits of hypermediated consumer culture" and its attendant logic of students being reducible to their consumer habits and occupation. Also, the "common sense" retort to this that so often seems to be promoted--encourage the students to understand the value of a degree in philosophy, literature, etc. in terms of potential career opportunities--serves only to further solidify the logic of the students' critique, as it progresses from the assumption that this critique (and the ideology that encourages students to launch this critique) is correct.

One final passage from Fisher on this topic:

It is worth stressing that none of the students I taught had any legal obligation to be at college. They could leave if they wanted to. But the lack of any meaningful employment opportunities, together with cynical encouragement from government means that college seems to be the easier, safer option. Deleuze says that Control societies are based on debt rather than enclosure; but there is a way in which the current education system both indebts and encloses students. Pay for your own exploitation, the logic insists--get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you'd left school at sixteen. . . (26)

Combating this logic requires not a concession to its soundness, but rather a commitment to overturning the economic and social conditions that engender it. Taking the "indigestibility" of Nietzsche that Fisher mentions and using it as the counter to students' questions of "value," of "utility," as the way to engage students in a discussion of how the question they are asking/the critique they are attempting to voice is formed and whose interests that question/critique serves is important, but it's only one part of the fight. Based on the above, those who worry about the value of the humanities in the current age would do well to focus on student debt, on economic reform, on the struggles that movements like Occupy have brought to national attention, as that is the organizational battleground out of which the ideologies that must be opposed can be most effectively fought.  

HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME

. . . And that's the first and last reference to Eliot on this blog, I promise (if anyone finds another one, don't tell me. It'll crush me). Aren't you glad this means I won't ever make some horrible joke about April being the cruelest month?

It's been a rainy day here, though it hasn't ever really stormed hard enough to cause anyone to head for the hills or anything. Mostly, it's been drizzling on and off throughout the day. The weather and the light (it's been fairly bright in a gloomy sort of way) coupled with the giant tree outside the window I face as I work at my desk reminds me of Oregon (though it's the wrong kind of tree). Given that I've spent most of the day looking back through old assignments, lesson plans, and readings (I'm teaching some stuff this coming semester I haven't even read since the summer before I started teaching at OSU--I'd better brush up. . .), that's kind of appropriate. I've just about finished my syllabus and I've started reworking all my assignment sheets so that I can get into the office tomorrow and get all my photocopying done before the rush. It's hard to believe, but the semester starts one week from today (actually, it'll start one week from 8:00 this morning). On the one hand, I'll agree with everyone I've spoken to that this summer has flown by. On the other hand, last week and this coming week seem to be edging along so slowly. I'll be glad to get into a routine when classes start.

This coming semester will mark the start of my third year of teaching. I remember reading somewhere (an interview with someone? I honestly can't remember) that after three years the amount of learning that you do as a teacher tends to drop off dramatically (in the sense that more and more student responses to your teaching--what they like, what they don't like, what could be improved, what needs to change, what should stay the same, etc., etc.--tend to be repeats) and the general style of your teaching is fairly solidified by the end of that third year. It would be nice to think that this were the case (you mean after this year I'll stop feeling completely and hopelessly underprepared at all times and will start feeling like I know what I'm doing?), but I'm not convinced. In fact, I don't want to be convinced. I'd like to hope that I (and my students) don't have to settle into a rut from here on out to eternity (I guess it will change slightly when [if?] I start teaching courses that aren't freshman comp before reverting to monotony), mostly because I'm not convinced I'm a very good teacher yet, and I would really like to get a lot better before any rut-settling takes place.

I'll be teaching at eight in the morning this coming semester on MWF, and that means I'll be my students' first exposure to university. I'm kind of blown away by that idea: our class next Monday will literally be their first ever class in university. In some ways, I feel a lot of pressure to step up my teaching game in response to this fact. I've been going over and over what I want to say on the first day. I want to make sure that--in the words of (probably) my favourite piece of pedagogy I've ever read, Peter Elbow's "Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process"*--"the students [I] certify really understand or can do what [I] teach, to see that the grades and credits and degrees [I] give really have the meaning or currency they are supposed to have," but I wonder if I shouldn't spend just a little extra time and energy on the other side of the process, the contrary to that "guardian" stance: "to be [my students'] all[y] . . . as [I] instruct and share: to invite all students to enter in and join [me] as members of a learning community--even if they have difficulty. . . . to assume they are all capable of learning, to see things through their eyes, to help bring out their best rather than their worst when it comes to tests and grades." I don't think I've necessarily shirked this aspect in the past--or, at least, not intentionally--but I'd like to spend a whole lot more time this semester in that ally role, rather than that guardian role. I'd like to think that I'm confident enough as a teacher now that I don't need to be a hardass to prove a point or anything like that.

And (as I suddenly see sunshine outside my window), at the very least, I think I'll be more fun than Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education today: while I'm sympathetic to his claim that teaching the "classics" (but "whose classics?" is of course the inevitable question here--based on his list, pre-WWII and almost exclusively white. He might be shocked to learn that of the names he's listed, DuBois is the only one who holds any real appeal for me) is important regardless of their relevance, I can't agree with his suggestion that we shouldn't teach the "materials of mass culture" because they are "vulgar, transient, and thin" and "aren't worth the labor." I understand his point that the classics can be useful in helping to develop our students' critical thinking skills (a term I absolutely hate. I'm with Rob Jenkins: what you mean when you say critical thinking is, in fact, thinking), I mean, I teach "A Modest Proposal" and "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and all those kinds of things, and I also teach all the "nu-classics" of the modern composition classroom he decries: beer ads, music videos, television and movie clips, song lyrics. Hell, last year I taught part of Kanye West's Twitter stream. What drives me crazy is the opinion, one that the author of that article very clearly holds, that the two are mutually exclusive in terms of fostering critical approaches to texts and contemporary culture. That only through teaching "past high culture" can teachers "raise [their students'] critical thinking about contemporary mass culture."

There is an absolute wealth of great contemporary mass culture that trains its viewers/readers/listeners/participants to think critically about that mass culture. There's definite value in having students work their way through a difficult text in order to come to an awareness of a method of cultural critique (or simply to explore another viewpoint), but there's nothing that says "easy" texts like television shows can't do an equally effective job (other than that author's opinion that they can't because they're not as "rich" or "worthwhile" or "lasting" or whatever terms he wants to contrast with "thin, vulgar, and transient"). In fact, he stakes his claim around this idea of teaching classics regardless of their "relevance," but I think it's actually something of a red herring: I don't teach the materials of contemporary mass culture because I think they're so much more relevant than the classics, I teach them because I honestly think they're more effective at helping students to learn and develop certain skills.

He goes on to suggest (in shockingly violent language that casts critical reading/viewing/listening skills and cultural literacy as analogous to a physical confrontation) that these mass culture materials are not effective because: "A few days with images taken from great photography and film will equip them to 'read' music videos much more effectively than will a few days with those videos themselves" and "The language of Romantic poetry exercises critical thinking about language better than does the language of billboard jingles." While both of the "high culture" elements he mentions here have value (and it's fun to expose students to those things, particularly if they've never had access [or even known they could have access] to those things before), he does nothing to actually establish that those claims are true, he simply holds it to be so. Indeed, he's as negative towards contemporary mass culture as Adorno at his worst, an elitist who does nothing to hide his elitism and is deaf to any other viewpoints because, bottom line, he holds contemporary mass culture to be incapable of producing anything that could be challenging, that could disrupt students' "saturation with media." While that's certainly true for aspects of contemporary mass culture, it's by no means true of it all (to offer an easy example [this is, like, low-hanging fruit here]: Arrested Development and the idea of intertextuality--I have seen in the past few months no fewer than four separate references to AD as the standard for an illustration of that concept; to offer another: The Daily Show/Colbert Report and their increasingly naked pedagogical/didactic approach to the consumption of media).

Students are saturated with the present and their own cultural moment, I'll agree with that, but that's no reason to turn away from teaching that material in favour of texts that one loudly and triumphantly proclaims to hold no relevance (is there anything that will drive students away from those classics faster?). Connect the two, the classic and the material of contemporary mass culture, and watch the lovely things that happen.

[EDIT: A former professor might have had the best response to the article: "Wow--who knew Matthew Arnold wrote for The Chronicle?"]

Anyway, enough of that for now. I'm betting chances are good that if you're reading this blog, you're probably fairly sympathetic to the quality and worthiness of contemporary mass culture. Speaking of which, one more worthy example of it before I go: in keeping with my Mogwai appreciation from last night, I thought I'd offer up this live version of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong." I'd long heard about what a transcendent live act Mogwai are, but I mostly assumed it had to do with sheer volume and their approach to their louder songs. This version of "2 Rights," though, from their live album Special Moves, is as heart-stoppingly beautiful as the album version. I can only imagine what it's like to experience it in person.


*No link for you on that one, unfortunately. It's on JSTOR if you have access, in College English 45.4 (1983): 327-39. I should say, also, that I haven't read all that much pedagogy, if my choice of favourite insults your sensibilities.