Thursday, September 30, 2010
Gay Dorm Suicide
International Translation Day
Friday, September 24, 2010
Like candy
Thursday, September 23, 2010
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.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
German Jobs
Bookstores and Libraries
Sunday, September 19, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, September 13, 2010
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.