History without Strings

Been reading Lord Acton over winter break, something I have wanted to do since grad school. He is one of those ancient nineteenth-century British historians who always seem to have a clever quote. You still find him cited in mid-twentieth-century histories of Europe and his principles clearly continue to influence senior historians today, the ones who eschew all reference to theory.

Acton explains why historians so wish to avoid methods that require some sort of moral judgment. He explains the need for autonomy in scholarship with a clarity and vigor I had no seen before. In reviewing German schools of history, he credits Leopold von Ranke with writing as a dispassionate, detached, apolitical story teller.

Now Ranke, and his brand of historicism, is often denounced in a few swift, familiar moves. A quote from Benjamin here and a few "don't you know" statements about Prussian nationalism, then he is finished.

On the question of autonomy, however, Acton explains what an innovation it was for an historian to write with automatically being in the service of the state, politics, or church theology. Ranke was different from his predecessors for they wrote history as "applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or [in] the school of patriotism." Today we would add the free market to the list of institutions which demand obedience in writing history. Write history so that it will sell well, reads the injunction.

Now impartiality is often an excuse for allowing prejudices to remain unchallenged, and surprisingly Lord Acton acknowledges just that--Ranke refrained from judging history so as to not disturb German patriotic allegiances to historical figures, such as Martin Luther or Frederick the Great, who clearly could be subject to moral criticism.

Autonomy in historical scholarship is sometimes open to political critique, but really these days it is much more challenged by market forces. How many times have we sat on committees where we discussed whether a potential dissertation topic was saleable? The job market and the reading market and the dean's market shape our conversations much more than any supposed drive to know.

Surely this was true for Ranke, as well. He sold gobs of books to the general audience. Acton does not mention the importance of this market, it is still invisible to his academic eyes, yet his argument for autonomy, for writing without serving an immediate end, applies brilliantly to our own neo-liberal institution.

History departments jettison fields because they don't want to hire faculty to teach in them. European history no longer matters in a global, post-colonial world, it is sometimes said, so some departments stop teaching in it. Surely there is no scholarly justification for tossing out entire fields of history, but in a budget driven, enrollment-oriented university, it takes just a few meetings to put an end to an entire field of knowledge.

This is the new threat to autonomy, far more serious a concern than the intrusion of theory into history. It is an entirely different pressure on scholarship than the ones Acton and Ranke recognized.

source: Acton, Lord, "German Schools of History," English Historical Review, 1 (1886): 7-42.

Childhood Revenge

Back in the 1970s, boys still played war games that re-enacted the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. Our block was transformed into an urban battle zone, in the imaginary sense only. Life in my working-class Jewish neighborhood was pretty safe. That's my most people had moved there from the Bronx or Upper Manhattan. So the battle zone was in our heads, but real enough.

As the only German kid around, I was always asked but never agreed to play the Nazi. There was nothing worse than being the target of a dozen machine gun totting kids who all wanted to make up for the horrors of the War and the Holocaust. Speaking German made me a Nazi anyway, and I got beaten up for it lots, but in war games I was always an American, and as such we all wanted to kill Hitler.

"What would you do if your saw Hitler?" Standard question in the back yards and play grounds. "I'd shoot a million rounds of ammo into him with my machine gun." "I'd blow his head off with a grenade." I had the same answers as all the other kids to this rather transparent loyalty test, the trick was coming up with another way to destroy the Führer. And in my day dreams I imagined running into Hitler and firing away at him with my machine gun. In the hail of bullets, I remember discovering a rage that went far beyond the normal play ground combativeness. I hated Hitler not just cause he was the number one evil guy in the world, but because he had ruined my life, made me the object of daily scorn, burdened me with a guilt I would never wear off. So as I fired clip after clip into his writhing body, I discovered the real reason I hated Hitler, he had fucked up my life.

All this came back to me as I watched Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, a movie my students recommended to me after a semester of showing them Emil Jannings, Leni Riefenstahl, and Bruno Ganz movies.

Harlan: In the Shadow of Jud Süss

I have to admit that I never have watched Jud Süss, despite that it is the most notorious anti-semitic film made in German. Of course, it was never on late night television when I was growing up in Queens, but ever since grad school it gets shown, discussed, footnoted enough so that I might have gotten around to seeing it. Certainly, I have gotten used to teaching Riefenstahl, even talking at length about her technique without worrying that I was getting sucked over to the dark side--Afterall what Super Bowl halftime show is not indebted to Frau Leni.

Jud Süss always seemed different because it did not seem to offer an intellectual side door from which to elude the melodramatic inevitability of a mob attacking a lone Jew. Felix Moeller's documentary film Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss provides just such an historical framework to analyze the movie. The documentary interviews the children and grandchildren of Jud Süss director, Harlan Veit. It quickly presents the political and legal consequences Veit faced after the war for having made the film, and then it intelligently walks through the different experiences and judgments of the Veit's offspring, from the eldest son whose entire career seems defined in opposition to his father to the nimble genealogical narrative of the youngest French grand daughter.

The different wings of the family have strikingly antithetical positions, from the daughters who married into and converted to Judaism after the war, which results in a generation of grand daughters who point out that their one grandfather was responsible for the murder of their other grandparents. The documentary is not only an Auseindandersetzung with the evil things you did during the war, daddy. By taking the view across three generations, the film shows how the post-sixties grandchildren inherited both their grandfather's guilt and their parents' confrontations with him.

The documentary takes a long view, in which the layers of reconciliation and antagonism produce children both wise and naive in the horrors of the genocidal campaigns. Tellingly it is the children living outside Germany who have the smartest things to say, whereas the German grandchildren are often wide-eyed and speechless. The interspersed shots from Jud Süss, and Harlan Veit's other 1930s films, made it clear to me that it is time to confront them from the security of my historical distance.

Kafka reading Hegel on China

Dabei gilt in China kein Ansehen des hohen oder niedrigen Ranges. Ein Feldherr des Reiches, der sich sehr ausgezeichnet hatte, wurde beim Kaiser verleumdet, und er bekam zur Strafe des Vergehens, dessen man ihn beschuldigte, das Amt aufzupassen, wer den Schnee in den Gassen nicht wegkehre.

Vorlesung ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte

Crawling out from Under

Soon the grading will be done and reading will commence, perchance a little writing, too.

Until then a philosophical thought from a fashionable source

Die Zeitung für die elegante Welt 1805

"Wohl sind die Philosophen die größten Egoisten! Denn steckt nicht Jeder von ihnen das Lehrgebäude seines Vorgängers in Brand, um sein philosophisches Ei dabei zu sieden?"

Innovation does not equal high enrollment

There are just so many examples of how institutions undermine themselves, despite their best intentions. In the era of budget cuts, administrators have become more concerned than ever with maintaining high enrollments. So now some universities have begun a review of courses in order to eliminate the “under-enrolled.” Missing in much of the discussion about course enrollment is a consideration of course content.

A common distinction, in graduate courses, is made between courses that are listed, and often required, by the department bulletin and “special topic” courses which are taught by faculty interested in developing a new research topic. These “special topic” courses have been targeted increasingly because they are under-enrolled. However, the low enrollment in such courses does not indicate that these courses are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact this year’s special topics course may become a requirement in five years, it’s just that no one can predict that today.

Special topic seminars are, in my experience, where the new research happens. Every literature department can fill a course on Romanticism, but not everyone is willing to take a course on race theory in German Idealism. Just wait though a few more years, and those handful of students who took the race theory course will be publishing up a storm. The Romanticism students will probably be following in their tracks. Yes, its more pleasant to discuss Wordsworth crossing the Alps than the Haitian Revolution. But if we pause a little, we will find that of course Wordsworth has a few things to say about slavery in the Caribbean and before you know it we have dissertations on race theory in Romanticism—here’s the point though. The race theory class was first presented as a “special topics” course, something outside the mainstream curriculum, an innovation, an experiment, a professor’s first attempt at laying out a long and complex argument. Someday we may all think Wordsworth’s most daring poem was dedicated to Toussaint L’Ouverture. But you heard it first in a “special topics” seminar.

So if you want a university that innovates, that does not fall back on the familiar, a university that grows and develops new research, please, dear high-level administrators, do not cut the special topics seminars, just because they are under enrolled.

Global Encyclopedia

Globalization operates as an encyclopedic form of knowledge of which the internet is of course the ideal media. With globalization, we all get to rove around uncovering and learning tidy bits of knowledge from faraway places without putting them into any grand historical context.

We get to talk about one or two moments in history, connect them through a network and then draw some striking conclusion about a different previously unrelated matter. The kind of dialectical juxtaposition Walter Benjamin nurtured in his Arcades Project, where the commodities sold in nineteenth-century Parisian side streets revealed something about the rise of Hitler, is now acceptable across the globe, so long as one has a theoretical model that allows us to make an article about Kojak reruns in Thailand explain post-Vietnam War economic relations in South East Asia.

The other side of encyclopedic knowledge is the potential for fakery. You don’t have to be an elaborate forgery to assert knowledge. You just merely need to have read an article or two on the subject. Expertise feeds the encyclopedia. Without some scholars who know the particular field, you would not have a convincing article on Wikipedia, but once the article is on the internet, there is room for endless circulation and appropriation. We can claim knowledge of Shanghai city planning while sitting in Illinois.

Eighteenth-century Europe was full of such armchair experts. Everyone who could read devoured travel literature about places far from Europe. Immanuel Kant lectured for years on anthropology without having left his hometown. Christian Wolff could generate treatises on a host of subjects not just one or two. Being learned meant knowing a lot about many things. We are again floating into such an encyclopedic phase. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary. We all get to hold forth like a contemporary English professor, who can teach a seminar on Hitchcock or Kafka. We get to spin historical connections like a German philosopher of old, compare Chinese history to Egyptian in 22 deft pages.

As an old Medievalist once told my multilingual friend—you’re either brilliant or a fraud. Alas the majority of us will just be panting to keep up.

Peer-reviewed

The reliance on strict rules to evaluate the intellectual quality of academic publications is by no means a unique American phenomenon. With the integration of university degrees across the European Union, professors and researchers are increasingly evaluated in terms of well-defined scales that rate the quality of anything put into print. In Belgium, for example, academic publications are grouped broadly into letter categories (A, B, C) with subdivisions within each.

The first purpose for this standardization is to rate professors within a university, and then, secondly, to compare regional and national systems to each other.

Thus a web site urging students to attend French-speaking universities in Belgium will compare the total number of publications in peer-reviewed journals within the Walloon system to other European Union areas.

Here is an example of the kind of claim used to compare one European region to another:

“Various international surveys show that Belgium is one of the countries that publishes most and whose publications are among the most often cited, with regard to its number of inhabitants and to its gross domestic product. This international visibility is confirmed by numerous publications in renowned scientific journals. In 2003, the European Commission published its “Third Report on science and technology indicators 2003”. This report assesses the quality of publications in the major universities of the EU countries and rates those of Belgian researchers highly.”

http://www.studyinbelgium.be/start.php?lang=en&rub=3

The number of peer-reviewed publications is then compared to the per capita ration of university trained researchers within a regional economy. So if Belgium has a higher density of researchers within the general population, this is interpreted as an indication that the Belgian economy supports growth through universities. The next statistic linked to peer-reviewed publications and density of researchers is the number of new companies started in a region. The more spin-offs and start-ups, the better the integration between universities and the economy must be, for new technology firms are often derived from university research. Hence the famous research belts around universities specialized in technological research.

The problem arises when these indicators are used in a reverse manner so that they become rules for hiring and firing faculty, for structuring universities, for evaluating students. These indicators may show that a university is operating successfully, but they may not at all be the reason for its success. Requiring that researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals is in a sense pushing the indicator, i.e., trying to artificially increase the numbers that once were a neutral sign of educational accomplishment. If researchers used to publish only half their articles in peer-reviewed journals, and the rest as book chapters, conference proceedings, and editorial-board journals, they will not have necessarily increased their intellectual productivity by now publishing 75% of their work in peer-reviewed journals. They may well be accomplishing as much as they did before, they are just changing the media they use to publish.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that peer-review actually produces innovative research. In fact one could argue it produces more mainstream conclusions that are less likely to disturb existing norms. The really radical approach to a research question may well appear in a small journal catering to a select group of readers, rather than in the official institutional journal.

Quality indicators run the risk of stifling exactly that which they are measuring when they become mandatory rules, for they tend to produce conformity

So to return to the Belgian example above, Belgium has a high rate of highly rated, peer-review publications, which is used to claim that Belgium has a better university system than other parts of Europe. However, the same statistic is also an indication that Belgium is much stricter in policing its academics and that it more aggressively enforces rules requiring faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

While there is no question that Belgium has excellent universities, and we should all be so privileged as to teach there, the question remains whether the Belgian universities are truly better than those in other regions, where a faculty member’s curriculum vitae might not be so strictly evaluated. Is it possible that British or Dutch universities are also excellent, they just don’t worry as much about indicators as much as the Belgians do?

At every level of the university system, from the classroom to the EU-wide comparison, a grading system has to distinguish between those students who follow instructions carefully and those who have really smart ideas. Relying on indicators and then enforcing them is very much like having homework written out neatly and turned in on time –this is very important, to be sure. Still, the indicators to the extent that they are mandatory are likely to become indictors of how well the administrative apparatus operates, rather than signs that the ideas on the page are clever.

Given that as teachers and administrators we are all interested in having students learn more than punctuality and proper form, we should be clear that measuring indicators does not foster creative intelligence, it might just do the opposite.

Assisting Asssitants

The job market has been such that universities have, for some time now gotten, a much higher quality pool of incoming faculty than would have been the case twenty years ago. We have had time to watched some of these people go through the acclimatization process of leaving their high-grade graduate programs to settle into mainstream universities.

We all know that the decisions about who gets to teach at primo universities and who ends up somewhere else are not so finely tuned. There are a fair number of high quality, brand new scholars who land at universities that really are not used to having such hot house flowers on their faculty. What becomes of these delicate researchers and writers in the tussle of tenure and administrative review? What becomes of their great promise? Why do some cruise on to publish lots of fine books and articles, while others stick to their one track?

University administrations would love to know how to separate the long term producers from those who settle into a comfortable routine after tenure. I am definitely not here to conjure some answer to this perennial question. There are lots of people out there making such judgments. Universities have an enormous array of reviews and evaluations to pick the wheat from the chafe.

And while the pressure of a deadline has a wonderful effect concentrating the mind on finishing a manuscript, more needs to said about how the review process creates a conformity that undermines its own goal of fostering faculty productivity.

Review processes very often insist that faculty publish in one kind of journal rather than another. For example, there is the concept of a mainstream flag ship journal, one that represents the best scholarship in a given field. For some universities, it is important that their faculty demonstrate their scholarly prowess by publishing in these journals. At other universities, publishing in mainstream journals is a sign of mediocrity, that a scholar is not really cutting edge.

But the rule varies from one discipline to another, from one scholar to another. The problem is when university administrations make broad rules in favor of one over the other, without considering the character of each contribution, i.e. when the quality of an article is judged by the journal in which appears. For young faculty this problem is heightened because very often they went to a graduate school where one rule applied and then they end up teaching at a university where the opposite rule governs tenure decisions.

Add to this-- the general unwillingness of bureaucracies to allow for flexibility. Every educational institution I have ever attended has governed its internal decisions with the presumption that its rules are the only true and correct ones. There is a long list of German departments in this country who all believe they are the best. The University of Michigan has no trouble thumbing its nose at the University of Chicago. And while UC Riverside may understand that it is not in the same league as Princeton, it will insist that its junior faculty follow the California state conventions for demonstrating scholarly excellence, never mind what they told you back east.

I am pulling these examples out of thin air, there are no hidden stories behind them, I am not thinking of anyone in particularly as I write this summary of 20 years experience. I may be totally unfair to the individual institutions but the tendency is common enough,

Still, I have heard department heads of big, Midwestern universities declare that they would never let their best students apply to an Ivy League graduate program, because “they don’t have a comprehensive curriculum there.” Similarly, I have seen Ivy League professors quietly pass over State university PhDs because they don’t come from "truly innovative programs."

OK, so we all know academia is full of picky jealousy.

The trouble arises for junior faculty who have not yet mastered the different standards. And the real problem is that in the long run, the pressure to switch from one standard of scholarship turns clever thinkers into conformists. If you were trained to find the hottest new trend in art coming out of Europe, you are going to have a hard time publishing in a flagship journal. Likewise, if you think like a social scientist about journals, you French colleagues may smile in disbelief.

While the Ivy League can readily afford to toss away excellent scholars, because there is always another wave of brilliance rolling in, other universities might pause to consider the varieties of scholarly accomplishment, to bend a little more.

Docks of Berlin

The restored silent film The Docks of New York offers all sorts of enticing interconnections. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Docks of New York gives you a highly stylized view of a dive bar hotel back when New York was still a seaport.

George Bancroft plays a steam ship stoker who has a night on shore during which he rescues a woman who has just thrown herself into the East River. She is played seductively by Betty Compson. There is lots of lush lighting in the foggy night. George Bancroft swaggers around in his slick black jacket like he’s the tough old uncle Robert Mitchum tried to emulate. And Betty Compson is clearly the prototype for Marlene Dietrich. She vamps about like Courtney Love, looks enticingly disheveled throughout the movie. Clothes, putting them on, taking them off, runs as a theme throughout the movie. In fact, the plot ends with a court room drama about a tight-fitting, glittery dress.

There is a swath of restored silent movies out there to be seen. Makes you realize people made slinky, sexy movies long before sound and color. The restoration slows the movie down, gives the images a three dimensional quality, the lighting suddenly has depth and when the actors move you can see the sensuality in their swagger and stutter.

Just from reading the back of DVD packages, you would have thought that Josef von Sternberg was a Jewish Austrian count, who rose to fame in Berlin and then fled the Nazis. Yeah, but turns out he grew up in Queens, dropped out of Jamaica high school, and hung around as a kid in NY and NJ movie studios. Sure he became famous when he made Dietrich famous, but he shot these cinematographic wonders before going to Berlin, thereby complicating the old claim that it was German Expressionism that introduced Hollywood to the wonders of atmospheric effects in movies. --Maybe it was German intellectuals from Queens who learned their tricks in Berlin.

Can’t wait to see the next one in the queue.

Wilder Still

Sometimes you think that all film scholars are grumpy people with chips on their shoulders about not getting the respect they feel they lack

And then you read Gerd Gemünden’s delightful book on Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (Berghahn Books, 2008).

Good cheer, wit and irony are the by-products of watching a Billy Wilder movie, and Gemünden does not spoil anything with his light, fast, smart analysis. As the title suggests, Gemünden shows how Wilder brings an immigrant’s perspective to Hollywood, the foreign affair is not in Berlin but LA. Not only does Gemünden compare Wilder to Adorno in SoCal exile, he sustains the juxtaposition across the book, so that the academic heavy-weight reader starts recognizing the cultural critique in Wilder’s fast-paced success.

Wilder’s Weimar Berlin career has always loomed just over the horizon in my mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find an archival trove of early, early movies, screen plays from Wilder in 1920s Berlin. Gemünden carries that idea into the famous Hollywood films. We will surely never be able to download Wilder’s early screenplay credit Der Teufelsreporter: Nebel in der Grossstadt. Wilder and Gemünden assure us that it is crap, but I always want to believe that there is a dissertation’s worth of urban modernity in that film.

No need for such fantasies, Gemünden finds that same sensibility in Wilder’s American movies. More than Adorno, Gemünden’s argument seems motivated by Georg Simmel’s essay on The Stranger—that alien figure who resides amongst us, knows us perhaps too well and never quite stops being other. The outsider as insider does not just have to write Minima Moralia, he can also direct Marilyn Monroe.

English as facade

Fascinating interview in today's NZZ on the need to learn foreign languages. English serves as the language for foreign diplomacy and image building, which has little to do with local, or national, politics.

The quote below calls attention to the split between global English statements and native language talk, but it projects the source for this division onto some kind of foreign trickery, as if speaking in English were now a ruse. Really Western European and American readers have contributed to the separation of local and global discourses by not pursuing an education in foreign languages

NZZ Online: Herr Detweiler, als Sinologe sprechen Sie Chinesisch und haben in China gelebt. Nun gibt es in den Research-Abteilungen der Banken viele Experten, die noch nie einen Fuss auf chinesischen Boden gesetzt haben, aber ganze Research-Paper zum Thema verfassen. Kann man die chinesische Wirtschaft überhaupt analysieren und verstehen, ohne die Sprache, das Land, die Mentalität und die Politik zu kennen?

Christopher Detweiler: Analysieren geht. Aber in China gibt es zwei unterschiedliche Welten: Eine Welt für die Bevölkerung – die Zeitungen und die Reden der hohen Funktionäre der Partei sind auf Chinesisch –, und es gibt eine zweite, englische Welt, die allein für das Ausland bestimmt ist. Je nach Sprache liest und erfährt man ganz andere Sachen. Wer kein Chinesisch spricht, hat eine ganz andere Perspektive auf das Land als die Chinesen selbst.

New Future for Old Movies

Went to a film festival, --man was it fun to be in a crowded theater with an enthusiastic undergraduate crowd watching a classic. Michael Bérubé organized the “Bad Futures” film series this weekend as part of the Institute for Arts and Humanities. There are so many excellent things about a film festival

first, you see the movie on a giant screen, which really makes a ‘huge’ difference, especially if you are watching Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey You cannot experience the cinematic sublime on a small screen. Just as rock bands are better live, so too movies are better in a cinema.

Second, the lobby was crowded with intensely wound up audience members all mingling about talking, getting snacks, watching each other. I was able to have more than a few conversations about the movie! How exciting is that! See a work of art, talk about it with other members of the audience. Much as I enjoy downloading movies, I relish hanging out and discussing the films with smart people I don’t normally get to see. This sense of a shared intellectual experience in public—get your Habermas ready, folks—inspires the audience to even more thought. A video going viral is the lonely version of an exciting evening at the theater.

Back in the seventies, when New York City had long stretches of low-rent sleaze, there were theaters up and down Broadway and across Bleecker St. that showed no end of great old movies, and the latest foreign releases. I got to see Truffaut to my hearts content, but also obscure Italian releases that barely made it over the ocean and ran for just a week. I remember vividly going to see “Il Prato” which the New York Times listed as interesting because it was the first major film performance by the daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini. I really liked Ingrid Bergman, so my friend Andrew and I wandered off to see Isabella Rossellini in a love triangle loosely based on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther with an Italian Marxist context. Instead of committing suicide, the unhappy lover dies of rabies after being bitten by a wild dog. Good stuff. Something about growing up in Queens in the 70s made me want to trek into the city to see the kind of movies television did not broadcast. If only I had started a movie company like the Weinstein brothers, rather than go to grad school. Living in the outer borough, you were close enough to see what was available in Manhattan, and yet far enough away still to really desire it intensely.

The point is that seeing films in a cinema with friends around where you can discuss and then reminisce about the movies adds enormously to the experience. Film festivals are well-suited to college campuses. Manhattan no longer has old movie houses, but the camaraderie and curiosity of universities makes them the perfect place to gather together in front of the big screen and then to talk, talk, talk about it afterwards, maybe even write the occasional blog entry as well.

Oakland

Oakland really did have a bit of Metropolis about it. We could go on about the segregation of the city into separate quarters, and even the buildings looked like they might have come off Fritz Lang's drawing board.

Critical Tenacity

Saw for the first time the author, psychoanalyst and former political prisoner, Karl-Heinz Bomberg, here on campus at a series of events hosted by Greg Eghigian. Bomberg has a warm, intense presence and a touch of the ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one in three. Listening to him talk about the psychological impact of being imprisoned in Communist Germany, I was struck by how urgent the topic still was in the moment, and yet how quickly contemporaries want to forget about all that.

There is a tendency, in myself as in others, to let the tortures of totalitarianism slip away into quiet forgetfulness. Hearing Ingrid Miethe a feminist historian at the University of Giessen speak at the recent German Studies Association conference brought across the same point. Miethe spoke about East German feminists with a lively polemical tone as if the DDR and its women’s movement were still in existence. She still spoke in the present tense about family and social policies that have been overrun by the West.

Miethe and Bomberg have a trait in common with the Nobel laureate, Herta Müller, namely the continued analysis, critique and revision of life under Communism. They surely do not share the same experiences nor hold the same political positions today, but for all three the Communist system has an actuality that most Westerners (with the exception of right-wing conservatives) and many Easterners who were born under Communism no longer recognize. Their engagement has nothing to do with nostalgia, it is more a sign of critical tenacity. Whereas right-wingers scare their listeners by talking about Socialism as if it were everywhere, these three writers preserve the vanishing reality of Communism because it is an inescapable part of their lives.

The GSA Experience

Back from Oakland and the German Studies Association conference, a serious scholarly affair where German professors get to hang out with their own kind, discuss the future of the profession, sniff out what's blowing in the wind (not always a delight) and trot out their newest ideas.

This year the conference was organized according to themes, which to some grad student in the future will give a fair summary of the buzz words big in 2010: money, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and cities were among the mix. But then again, these terms show themselves at most any humanities conference these days.

Underneath these catch phrases were a great number of papers that paid homage to the moment and then proceeded to discuss whatever the presenter was working on. So you can be busy in the eighteenth century, as I am, and still be transnational--a trend that was not obvious ten years ago, when transnational was confined to a handful of contemporary writers.

The other major trend: papers on Goethe, particularly his lyric poetry, which on the face of it would seem to be the antithesis of transnational, but only to the uninitiated. The string of Goethe panels was in many ways the bastion of literary analysis in the midst of cultural studies. If brand names rule the humanities as they do everything else, then Goethe was a name that a great number could rally around. Goethe is the big tent name. We could talk about Schiller of course, but Spinoza and God fit in as well, especially when there is a hard rain falling.

One lesson from the GSA: Goethe scholars still think like members of a guild, and most were delighted to see the Chicago master of Goethe scholarship give a paper that once again made clear to all in the room how it is supposed to be done. It was reassuring to watch a scholar so very excellent at his calling--made you think for a moment that the hierarchy of universities was actually correct, that tenure decisions at fine universities really were based on excellence. David Wellbery made everyone feel that there was an order to intellectual institutions, and we were all pleased.

And there was the old time favorite: I saw a wonderful paper by Ute Gerhardt, old school feminist historian, speaking in eloquent academic German, an essay ready for immediate publication in Die Zeit. If the audience was not enormous, my delight in hearing her speak certainly was.

A few steady old war horses, like Peter Albrecht, made the trek, but in general the West coast location meant that far fewer Germans attended. Usually there is a crowd of middle aged German political scientists at the GSA ready to discuss the meaning of Europe or the last election, this time there was hardly one in sight.

Gay Dorm Suicide

If you read around in old letters, biographies and memoirs, it really does not take long before you run across just such a story. Young gay man, frustrated and then humiliated in a dormitory, commits suicide rather than confront his torment.

Read around in old college records and you will find any number of such stories in nineteenth century America. This is not a new phenomena, it is not a recent occurence. It goes back as far as there have been dormitories and boys living together.

You can read Bridehead Revisited for the happier, more luxurious version, or you can read the story of Washington Roebling, who helped build the Brooklyn Bridge. When as a young man at Rensselaer College, Roebling had a particularly passionate friend, whose affections he did not share. The friend took an overdose from a chemistry lab, and the nineteenth century quietly let the story disappear, except for Roebling who remembered him in his memoirs as a drinking old man. The young boy who died out of love was a regular tale in old college days. It shows up in novels and short stories, famous ones and those that have been forgotten, but for a few graduate students. The tragedy of confused and scared young students trying out their sexuality, an ancient experiment.

Now the sad young man who has jumped to his death appears on the cover of the New York Times--that is really the most significant change--that the tale is not hushed up by deans and councillors. Instead it becomes a cause in its own right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01suicide.html?hp

International Translation Day

Susan Bernofsky, a most excellent scholar and translator of modern German literature, points out that today is International Translation Day, --on the feast of St. Jerome--an early Church translator of the Bible.

Here are a bunch of events in Germany

http://www.literaturuebersetzer.de/pages/veranstaltungen-archiv/veranst-iut10.htm

ProZ the online translator exchange is holding a virtual conference today

http://www.proz.com/translation3

If you are interested in getting work as a translator or want to talk to other translators about tricky formulations in a whole host of languages, ProZ is an excellent resource

Like candy

Professors sneaking into student facilities, --sounds a little questionable, but, no, we are talking about rooms filled with high tech equipment. I am sitting here comfortably in a computer lab, 20 pretty Macs available in air conditioned solitude. Not a soul to be found in this newly renovated room on a Friday afternoon. So instead of sweating in my 1930s office, I can sneak down a flight of stairs and work in cool, quiet air conditioned comfort, where the students are not but the equipment waits for them patiently.

How often do we professors piggy-back on undergraduate facilities? How often do I feel that the library is just there for me and a handful of foreign graduate students, because on a weekend I can walk through the chilly, dark stacks researching to my heart's content. And, trust me, I can check books out from the library like no one else. They have to cut me off at 200, then I finagle and maneuver to cross the limit with interlibrary loan books--they are on a separate list.

These student facilities are superb, and as a humanities professor I appreciate having the opportunity to use fancy machines whenever the undergrads are out at play.

Baroque Rome

Andreas Gryphius

Als Er aus Rom geschidn

ADe! Begriff der Welt! Stadt der nichts gleich gewesen /

Vnd nichts zu gleichen ist / in der man alles siht

Was zwischen Ost und West / und Nord und Suden blüht.

Was die Natur erdacht / was je ein Mensch gelesen.

Du / derer Aschen man nur nicht vorhin mit Bäsen

Auff einen Hauffen kährt / in der man sich bemüht

Zu suchen wo dein Grauß / (fliht trüben Jahre! Fliht / )

Bist nach dem Fall erhöht / nach langem Ach / genäsen.

Ihr Wunder der Gemäld' / ihr Kirchen und Palläst /

Ob den die Kunst erstarr't / du starck bewehrte Fest /

Du herrlichs Vatican, dem man nichts gleich kan bauen:

Ihr Bücher / Gärten / Grüfft; ihr Bilder / Nadeln / Stein /

Ihr / die diß und noch mehr schliß't in die Sinnen ein /

Fahrt wol! Man kan euch nicht satt mit zwey Augen schauen.

What a wonderful poem. Rome the city that is a compendium of things, which the poet divides between nature and books. What you can find anywhere else, is here. Rome is a city of trade, filled with people and commodities from what the poet considers to be the entire world. He hints at the reputation for the illicit in Rome when he mentions that you can encounter everything written in books there too. But it is not the city that is a text, rather whatever a person ever read appears there. As if the city brings to life what one reads about elsewhere—a feeling Goethe had a century later as well. Rome is the fantasmagoria of imagination in material existence.

He repeatedly mentions that he cannot compare Rome to any other place. This is not just the poet expressing the inexpressible, making his point about the superlative character of Rome by stating that he cannot make is point. Gryphius is also using a medieval trope reserved for the Holy Land. Walther von der Vogelweide declares the Holy Land incomparable, impossible to compare to any other place—but tellingly the medieval poets do not rave about all the marvelous things in Palestine, rather they are motivated by the presence of Christ having once walked there. The Holy Land is not described in medieval literature, it is declared sacred and thus incomparable.

Gryphius picks up on this line, applies it to Rome, which is after all sacred and the site of pilgrimages, but he lists the palaces, churches and works of art amassed in there—the Vatican library as well. The text above was lifted from the German Projekt Gutenberg, fittingly enough

Rome fills the senses, particularly sight. The city is a spectacle of which one can never see enough—again an ancient trope—St. Augustine warned long before against the visual distractions of the coliseum games, almost as if the Christian's soul would be pulled out by the sight of so many marvelous, shocking things. Gryphius is still enraptured as he departs, and not particularly concerned for his soul, either. We are left at the end with the poet’s taking his leave, even as he laments that he cannot see enough.

German Jobs

The MLA job market actually looks more solid this year in German. There are many more stable positions--tenure track--in colleges, fewer jobs in big research universities, and of course a few choice positions. My impression is that institutions with a classic Liberal Arts curriculum and endowments are hiring German professors, while state-funded institutions are holding back. In past years, you could guess which positions would be retracted before the season was over. This year's offerings do not look shaky.

Bookstores and Libraries

Man hat Mühe, sich eine Stadt als vollkommen wohleingerichtet vorzustellen, wenn gelehrte und ungeIehrte Einwohner und Fremde zum Unterricht und zu ihrer Ergötzung die erforderlichen Bücher alter und neuer Zeiten darinnen nicht zu Kauf oder zur Anleihe erhalten können.

Johann Peter Willibrand 1775 Grundriß einer schönen Stadt

Writing Excess

The curse of minimalism and the free market is that so very often students deliver their homework just in time with only the most basic answers. They often write just what an assignment requires, rather than going beyond the bare bones expectations to show what additional knowledge they have. There are many reasons for this minimalist habit. and yes, of course, we can’t forget sloth and laziness. There are a great number of tasks I finish too late and just barely, but there is also a general pervasive cultural sense nowadays that when it comes to intellectual questions—too much is something to avoid. Write clearly about one idea—a simplicity that makes simple. My professor in grad school, Sander Gilman, would often point out that if you set a minimum, it quickly becomes the maximum. If you lay out a basic administrative standard, most people will perform only up to that requirement, rather than exceeding it.

When writing, why give just one explanation, when you can come up with eight?

There is a point where the drive for efficiency turns into laziness, where having completed only what is required, does not result in more high quality work in other subjects, but instead just a great empty lull.

In a different cultural moment, in a different historical period, we would strive to overwhelm a question with answers. We would layer one possible explanation on top of another, give theories that blend into each other, cite book after book rather than just the one canonical work that everyone has read. The love of the esoteric, the curiosity to explore trivial and unknown subjects has been wiped out by the demand that intellectuals produce efficiently and often.

Michel Foucault once called his relentless research into the buried manuscripts, documents, Berichte and diaries of sexuality and madness a “feverish laziness.”—an ironic phrase for such a prolific scholar. His style of baroque distraction requires loads of free research time, patience, a personal secretary (he had one), extra years where no major books appear, and a general sense that the minimal answer is unsatisfactory. It also includes an academic will to power to smother a research question, to upend the familiar by shoving forgotten and irrelevant information to the fore. It means giving far more information than anyone ever expected.

So this is the paradox: ordinary students can give back the answer on the test that comes from the textbook, extra ordinary students write much more, but to do so they have to get lost in other books--i.e. waste time doing more than the class requires. Similarly, regular academics can crank out articles for the c.v., but let's have more lunatics who waste their time reading irrelevant tomes.

The continued importance of Content

There are of course many reasons why faculty and administration don’t feel comfortable sitting next to each other in the same room. But we'll leave most of those aside to focus on a basic difference. No matter how theoretical and abstract a professor’s work may be, it always involves a distinct commitment to a specific content. There is a subject area, a set of texts, or data, a problem with many thorny questions to solve. Something tangible that motivates and inspires, students in the class, researchers in the lab, writers at the keyboard.

What is troublesome about administrative operation, and indeed most management techniques generally, is their disengagement from the specific content of the work they are managing. Just as many successful store managers don’t really have to care about the product they are selling beyond the basic ability to interact with customers, so too administrators do not need to know the specifics of faculty research. They rely on general formulas to determine the success or failure of that research, but these formulas leave unaddressed the specific material questions that the research addresses. Whether you write on the history of medieval cities in Tuscany or methane gas abatement in coal mining facilities you are judged by general indicators, such as student enrollment, number of publications, placement of students, that have no direct connection to the actual subject matter of your research.

From the administrative perspective, it is important to evaluative criteria that reach across difference departments and colleges so that the many apples and oranges within a university can be compared. From the faculty perspective these general categories often have an implicit bias towards one type of research over another, even as they make no explicit attempt to judge the qualitative material of research.

Without directly addressing the long history of critiques made against the rational organization of knowledge and culture, we could jump to one key early debate in this to compare Kant’s architectonic organization of knowledge into a system in which the philosopher places individual sciences in relation to each other, in order to evaluate both how complete their claim to knowledge is and to judge whether these sciences set together into a whole serve the ethical needs of humanity, and Hegel’s historical account of how the material substance of knowledge and art both enables and restricts the expression of ideas.

Hegel argued that Kant’s formal organization of the basic preconditions of knowledge or beauty failed to account for the physical, hands-on, material substance that underlies any expression of thought. This debate between Kant and Hegel has implications for every discipline in the university. So for example, you could ask: Does architecture consist in a schematic plan drawn on paper or a computer screen, or is it the space created out of light, air, and the stone, wood, glass or steel as it has been shaped into a unity?

In general, most academic knowledge is created from an engagement with materials—data, texts, objects. Kant, even at his most formal remove, knew that science requires empirical data in order to develop reliable results. He added though, that the scientist sometimes did not have the full picture of what his research meant, and it was the job of the architectonic philosopher to bring the many strands of knowledge together into a coherent whole.

I hope all the administrators out there reading this blog appreciate the comparison to a Kantian/Socratic philosopher.

Alas, as it turns out, of course, the criteria in a university are more economic, than Kantian, even if they share a similar formal apparatus.

Tenure improves teaching, for those who have it

In reading this very eloquent account of how tenure helps professors become better, more expansive teachers http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2010/08/tenure-and-teaching.html

I was struck with how few faculty actually have the opportunities described in this piece.

Tenure allows teachers, first of all, to read far beyond their specialization and to thereby develop complex connections between historical periods and texts. Only with tenure does it feel safe to devote the long stretches of time it takes to read and understand Hegel or Descartes in detail. When you are struggling to justify yourself every other semester to the administrative apparatus, you would never dare take up the challenge of a new field. I could never have explored Renaissance architecture before having tenure. Only when you believe you have the time, can you stop and think.

But this ability to calmly ponder is become more and more an exclusive luxury. Far too many colleagues are worried about their next review to undertake a new research project that might not generate an article for a year or three. Even with tenure, I constantly feel the pressure of "What have you done lately?" It is far more oppressive for the rest of academia than it is for us senior fellows. You need quite a thick skin, or the protective haze of professorial forgetfulness, to shield yourself from the many intrusions on your research.

That having been said, check out the "I cite" link above.

Resistance is futile

Resistance is futile but not for the usual reasons. The old Marxist model saw avant-garde culture as the last holdout against an all consuming culture industry. Back then it seemed that talent scouts were about searching for the newest art in order to incorporate it into mainstream entertainment. Now there is no such tension. Avoiding appropriation is easy, no one in Hollywood is paying attention anyway. Political critiques of entertainment are shrugged off as irrelevant, queer readings are welcomed.

What does this mean for academic criticism? While it once seemed surprising to apply the critical tools of academic commentary to popular entertainment, this sort of cultural studies hardly seems challenging anymore. It is so easy to make a critical political reading of a contemporary film that even the most ardent old school leftist must suspect something. The culture industry does not worry that critics will unveil the neo-liberal message implicit in children's cartoons. The screenwriters worked hard to put it there, they're flattered some professor noticed.

Increasingly the purpose of cultural criticism is to show that art today can have political importance and that once upon a time it did have a social charge. History is the last refuge of criticism. "No one worries about the avant-garde anymore. But they used to seem explosive." Criticism needs to show how art could be radical, shocking, inspiring. We don't need to only use the language of the avant-garde either. This newest historicism seeks to explain the tensions in earlier historical periods, in order to make clear that it could be so once more. Romanticism was once revolutionary, in fact "revolution" used to be revolutionary--the very word has been tamed.

Academic criticism followed the path of the avant-garde in the 1970s by adopting increasingly complex and arcane procedures which separated it from ordinary culture. This specialization was less an attempt to legitimate theory by giving it a jargon than it was an attempt to insist on an academic version of aesthetic autonomy through the use of experimental writing techniques.

In the end, autonomy has brought with it dismissal and ignorance. "You can keep your autonomy" has been the attitude of such institutional voices as the New York Times. That academic writing is dismissed by the Times and so many other mainstream outlets is partially the result of the theory movement's disdain for compromised writing, its insistence on a purity of language even as it demonstrated its impossibility. The age of theory is over not just because that entire generation has died, but also because the shock value of highly complex thought has worn off. Couple that with a political culture that celebrates populist ignorance of history, grammar and logic, then you have the current gulf between the university and the rest of society. So the trick is to write sophisticated commentaries in a new manner.

Culture is no longer ideology

Thesis One: Contemporary culture, wherever it might be hiding, is no longer providing emotional and ideological support for the elite that dominate the United States' political order. The ruling classes can carry on just fine without symbolic references that establish their superior position in society. Philanthropy is at most an activity between the wealthy, but it no longer serves as a compensation for the wealthy to show that they are willing to share. There is no need for such displays anymore.

Culture is an outdated habit, a hobby for those who cannot afford it, a collection of practices by fragmented groups, but certainly no longer monolithic.

Popular entertainment likewise feels little need for cultural legitimation. It operates on its own history without looking more than a generation back into the past.

Translating Globalizations

Once upon a time foreign language departments were small monadic re-creations of the homeland. If you walked down the hall of a French department, everyone spoke French. As a matter of course, you switched into the language as you entered the office space of the department. German departments did the same, they held department meetings in German, they hung around the mail room speaking German, classes were of course in German. If you saw each other in the supermarket, you spoke German. This had the great advantage of giving students the opportunity to practice their language skills, it also intimidated the younger folks and sealed the department culture off, creating an unusual cohesion inside the department that was distinct from the rest of the university.

Now the situation is quite changed. Foreign language departments can not carry on isolated in their own cultures. Translation, not of literary classics, but of basic cultural assumptions is constantly required. We are compelled as foreign language teachers to mediate between the US and other cultures, and not just the language we teach, but it seems increasingly that Europe as a whole has become a strange place to Americans, and so an Italian professor might easily have a wider function than representing just his or her own culture.

Germans have been making this transition for a while. When I teach German history, it really becomes a course in the formation of Europe from the Roman Empire onward. This has a lot to do with being a"good German," that post Nazi, old-Nato ethos of showing that Germans will in future work cooperatively with other Europeans, rather than taking over their countries.

Now, though, it also has this extra charge of explaining the post-Communist unification of Europe as well. There are many different varieties of globalization, and increasingly foreign language departments are required to translate one globalization into another. How do the European interconnections translate into the American mode of making global links? Obviously there are profound differences. The US model is driven enormously by military interventions whereas the European is more mercantile, more deliberative.

Changing clothes/Changing Tones/Mocking Gender

"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes." What always gets me about this line is that female singer is using a misogynist line to mock her male lover. It is as if she wants to sound like a tough old guy--like Clint Eastwood, but in order to insult her boyfriend, she has to denigrate women. Indeed by putting women down she legitimates herself as capable of insulting a man for being "feminine."

Even better, in the video Katy Perry is wearing a white wedding dress as she first sings the line, signaling that she does not want to change her dress, she wants to continue as the bride. The groom on the other hand is too girly to marry. The bride is "man enough" to make a commitment, the groom not.

This tough girl talk is also the aural strategy in many conservative political commercials, where the voice over is a (white) woman passing along skeptical remarks about Barack Obama. Because the voice sounds female, it gets away with remarks that might otherwise sound like a harraning white guy. This seeming contradiction defines the rhetoric fascination for Sarah Palin, and all those other soccer mom spokeswomen for the right-wing, -- she speaks more like an old white guy than any old white guy, even as she sounds female. Feminine is definitely not how the woman speaking wants to sound, because in this rhetorical context femininity becomes a negative attribute that the conservative, tough-guy female voice accuses the male liberal of having become--soft, indecisive, moody and eager to spend money, a string of attributes that are meant to mock his claim to masculinity.

Just wait, conservative political women are going to sound more and more like Katy Perry--minus the whipped cream spraying.

Yoko Tawada in Dutch

The first translation of Yoko Tawada into Dutch is now available

Yoko Tawada, De Berghollander, translated by Bettina Brandt & Desirée Schyns

The Mountain Dutchmen (in English)

Published by Vootnoet

German-Jewish Marriage

A fascinating interview with Christiane Kubrick, the German widow of director Stanley Kubrick, about their marriage, her family and making a film about the Holocaust. She speaks about her uncle who was notorious for having filmed Jud Süss at Goebbel's behest and about the difficulty Kubrick had putting together a film about the Holocaust. What's also impressive his the ease with which all these topics flow in the conversation. Allows you to have another look at Kubrick, which is a treat in itself.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2010/aug/10/christiane-kubrick-stanley-dancer

Christiane Kubrick's notorious uncle was Harlan Veit, who directed numerous films for the the Nazis and was specifically picked by Goebbels to direct Jud Süss, the appalling anti-semitic film. In his trial after the war, Veit claimed that he was forced to work with Goebbels, or he and his family would have been killed. There were protests against the court's decisions even at the time, and calls for a boycott against Veit's post-war films. Greg Eghigian recommends taking a look at the documentary "Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss," which details how Veit's family dealt with their unrepentant father. You can catch a preview of the documentary here: http://www.myvideo.de/watc

h/6513553/Video_des_Tages_Dokumentarfilm_Harlan_Im_Schatten_von_Jud_Suess

Subway Systems of the World Unite!

Imagine you could walk a quarter of a mile, wait ten minutes, then get on a train that would connect you with any major shopping center or office building within fifty miles. It would cost you $2.50 to take the ride and it would take 24 minutes to arrive at your location. On the way home you could take the same ride, anytime up until 12:30 AM.

Your children could take the train to after school events, friend's houses and practice sessions. You would not have to drive them everywhere after school and on weekends. They would learn independence and responsibility. They would figure out how to negotiate the wider world, become less introverted and screen obsessed, learn to be polite to strangers, help old ladies of face the stares of other passengers.

Imagine you did not have to own two cars.

Here is a web site that shows you how its done

http://world.nycsubway.org/world/index.html

Light rail--we are not talking about graffiti covered intimidation, rather a world full of smooth efficient reliable modern transportation.

All we need to do is build a few less aircraft carriers.

No French citizenship for you

Check out this German report on how Sarkozy wants to retract the citizenship of foreign-born French who commit crimes. This is the kind of move that in the US would seem to require a constitutional amendment, and perhaps even in France there might be some debate on this legal question, yet there is no doubt that US officials have at times tried the same maneuver.

Amazing how Sarkozy borrows from the American right-wing and the rest of Europe watches with bated breath

http://www.ardmediathek.de/ard/servlet/content/3517136?documentId=5081698

Adorno on Vacation

A wonderful essay about Theodor Adorno's vacation habits, indeed about the word "Urlaub" and its historical formation. As time goes by, and more material is published, we get to read his lectures, his letters to his parents, his childhood biography so that Adorno and company become historical beings. Someday we read about his Hollywood romances, no doubt. It makes them all the more fascinating, in their particularities. High theory goes down well with a dash of gossip.

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub5C2BFD49230B472BA96E0B2CF9FAB88C/Doc~EDA119C6AA77044DEA602233FC505CAD2~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Father's Rights in Germany

A painful topic under the best of circumstances,

New rulings allowing unmarried fathers custodial rights in Germany

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub594835B672714A1DB1A121534F010EE1/Doc~ECD0674D56D2B4115B809830CFA73B744~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

A friend put English subtitles on this brief ZDF report about fathers' rights in Germany

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qeu-Rzsq6As&hd=1

Back in the Game

Facebook is just not the place for academic chatter, so here goes with the ruminations on culture.

English as an Alibi

Lots of people in Europe speak English, but what is really fascinating is why they do so. On the surface, they all learn English so that they can participate in the global economy, the internet, English pop culture, American science, you name it.

Still, behind the obvious rational reasons, lie others: The desire to preserve their own culture. A paradox, learn English so that you don't have to give up your native tongue. This is a deal that small religious groups have long had--the worldly language, the private language and the sacred language. Secular Europe has the first two.

So every worldly Dutchman learns English, but never with the thought of abandoning his native tongue. Indeed, the bond is stronger than ever. Learning English does not make Europeans less nationalistic, it allows them to quiet, discretely become more so.

It is easy to pay respect to the global behemoth, who can deny the dominance of English, but then once having done so, Europeans no longer need to learn the many other languages spoken around them.

I remember in the late eighties watching a young Frenchman speaking to a teller in a Frankfurt bank. They both were speaking awkward English to each other about some financial transaction. In another era, the German woman would have spoke some French and the visiting Frenchman some German. But in an English dominated world, they were not compelled to learn each other's language.

Now Europeans can increasingly retreat behind their native languages without imagining that they are speaking to a European audience. The Dutch are speaking only to other Dutch speakers--not to the Brits, the Germans or the French, because they can safely assume that people from those language groups are likely to only have English as their second language.

The first thing to creep back into the picture, then is nationalism, initially aimed against non-European immigrants who speak no English.

Schluss

Ciao for now

The Question of the Foreigner

Derrida opens Of Hospitality by repeating the phrase “the question of the foreigner.” In his characteristic style, he repeats the phrase, lending emphasis on different words in the phrase in order to draw out its many connotations. These terms have much to say about transnational literature as well as the security of national boundaries. Here are a few of the different meanings that “the question of the foreigner” can have:

The question of the foreigner

---the questions that the foreigner asks the native. Why do you do this thing this way ? Why do you have this habit? The foreigner questions in an anthropological way, his attempt to understand a different society opens up implications that society could be different. The foreigner’s questions challenges the organization of society, the conventions which govern it. The question suggests an alternative way of doing things, a different practice. It suggests that things do not need to be this one way. They could be very different. The cement of society softens in the face of this question. The question does not need to be hostile to have this effect, it could be playful, slightly innocent even, a naïve asking, rarely though does it have the simplicity of a child, who usually receives a definitive answer from the educating adult, whereas the foreigner is given a more cautious answer.

---the problem of the foreigner. Perhaps in relation to the first questions of the foreigner, the native answers by challenging the legitimacy of the foreigner to belong, to visit, to exist here. The “problem” of the foreigner immediately posits an answer, to ask the question suggests a hostility, a suspicion , a distinction between we, who discuss the question, and those who are questioned. To raise the question is to assume a position of security outside the question. The question identifies you as not foreign. To ask about the Jewish question in the nineteenth century, or the Palestinian question today, or the immigrant question is to speak from the somewhere outside the question’s object. The questioner is not within the question.

---to interrogate the foreigner. The question of the foreigner serves to answer his question with another. Who are you? What do you want? Why are you here? This question reveals a concern that the foreigner brings trouble, that a potential disaster follows the foreigner, has motivated the foreigner to arrive upon our shores. Is he here to steal from us or to bring secret violence? Oedipus at Colonus, is the foreigner cursed? Does he bring a god’s wrath with him? Is he Orestes? Doe she carry a bomb in the form of a plague or something in his shoe? The Greek scapegoat was once as threatening as a refugee terrorist might seem to us. We have not gotten beyond superstitious fear.

---to doubt about the foreigner –does the foreigner even exist as a full person any more? What being has the foreigner lost by leaving his home? Is the state of foreignness a diminishment of being? Does the foreigner have less weight, credibility, currency (to use Paul Simon’s phrase)?

--the overall question of being, which the foreigner raises? To exist as a refugee is to wonder about the security of existence. The grounding of humans’ being becomes less certain by being foreign. This questioning does not necessarily lead to a loss of significance: for we can ask whether the foreigner is weaker than the native or stronger? Is the foreigner a helpless supplicant, or a worldly traveler, or a trickster sophist, come to sell us his story. Anyone who has lived in a foreign country has a more complicated relationship with his native land.

Marketing your Class

This week I went to several lectures and dinners in which all sorts of professors were expostulating the need to insert a greater sense of marketing in to how they teach the humanities. This sounds great, if by marketing we mean something like persuasion. Professors should certainly strive to convince students that a subject matters, they should show its importance in the world, and not just pedantically assume that just because the topic has been considered important in the past that it will continue to be so. We should be light on our feet, witty, approachable, smiling.

The problem with marketing as a university principle arises when the very disciplines are structured according to a rewards system that is meant to mimic a market. Universities are not actually organized like an economy. They bend over backwards to reorganize themselves as if they were but the inherent hierarchy means that they do not operate through their own mechanisms. There is always the hand of an administrator acting as if he or she were the invisible one allocating resources. The free market model is more often a jargon to justify policies that administrators perceive as marketable, but not because the market has chosen them through its own operations.

Universities use business economics as a model, but they are not actually operating as an open system of competition. The very structures that are meant to measure the economic value of a discipline end up restricting their competitiveness. For example, any university that rewards departments for having high enrollment needs to enact rules on how to count students. Even in fields where interdisciplinarity is considered important, the mechanisms that measure the market flow of enrollments end up restricting it.

Students, for example, are routinely told they must take courses within their department because of enrollment counts. This of course undermines the free flow of the market. The reason students are treated like precious commodities within a mercantilist economy is that all department advisors know they are being measured by an administration that wants to see high numbers. Thus they prevent students from taking courses outside their department. The administrative mechanism that is intend to measure market place movements ends up hampering that very ebb and flow. Only by not counting enrollments and by lifting restrictions on where students take courses will a college simulate a market.

The real trouble is that universities are not interested in just selling classes. They also want to produce smart graduates, innovative research, famous professors. Marketing does not produce the most intelligent argument. The tendency is to develop a product so that it appeals broadly by deploying the most common denominator within the target audience. Very complex thought may go into designing the product, there is indeed often great art in simplicity, but most things up for sale are not so well thought through. They fit a familiar pattern; they confirm existing tastes and prejudices. History departments, if they were driven by market forces, would teach nothing but the American Civil War, World War Two, maybe some Roman history if it did not involve too much Latin.

Marketed products are not supposed to disturb the expectations of the audience. Television appeals to the assumptions that the audience already possesses; rarely does it seek to alter them, more often than not it confirms them by giving them a product that is consciously crafted to excite the feelings that have already been shown to exist. Innovation is important to marketing design only in order to distinguish a product from its competitors, but only to the extent that the new image promises a variation on an already familiar pattern.

If university courses were structured like sit-coms or reality shows then they would quickly stop developing new ideas. They would sell lots of seats perhaps, but they would not actually generate creative innovation. Instead they would reiterate the status quo, as opposed to changing it.