Not Everyone Gets to be Adorno

Consider the lifespan of German-Jewish refugees who wandered out into the far stretches of the American university system to land in places they had never imagined before fleeing Vienna or Munich.  Most never managed to return after the war.  Not everyone gets to be Adorno.

Their biographies are often quite sparse. They are historical figures who have not managed the leap over the digital divide.  They lived too far back in the twentieth century to now be included in Google.  Yet there is something quite poignant in the short biographies that do appear online.  Take Leo Hertel’s life as described by the North Dakota State University library:

“Leo Hertel was born on April 7, 1902 in Schwerin on the Warthe, Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1928 and married Elsa Alletzhauser in 1932. Before coming to North Dakota State University (NDSU), Dr. Hertel worked as a professor at Dakota Wesleyan University from 1934-1936 and Franklin College from 1936-1952. He took two years off from teaching to work as a civilian employee of the United States Office of Strategic Services from 1944-1945. From 1952-1972, Hertel was the editor for the North Dakota Institute for Regional Studies publication program, as well as a professor at NDSU. In 1969, he was presented with the Doctor of Service Award from the Blue Key Fraternity. Leo Hertel died on April 10, 1979 in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

The names and dates strung together form the recognizable pattern of a German Jew fleeing Nazi anti-Semitism almost immediately after Hitler came to power.  What currents had him land in North Dakota?  What kept him there for the rest of his life?  What secret work did he perform during the war?  The curious local honors of Midwest American life seem to define his post-war life—so very quiet in comparison to the first 43 years. 

Hertel was by no means the exception.  Many German-Jewish academics remained where they had first found shelter and continued teaching for another thirty years.  Why return to a bombed out continent when you could own a house in the middle of the US?  But surely there are dozens of other explanations, and they would be well worth hearing.

Distant - Close Reading has a History

Why set distant and close readings off against each other?  Surely they can play together?  These oppositions seem relevant only those dreading the end of the humanities or those looking to join a revolution.  As I sit in bed reading a 731-page dissertation from the 1970s, which never got published as a book, I feel like an old scholar, huddled in his cold garret after midnight.  Digital media has not changed all the habits of intellectuals.  This is close reading as Edgar Allen Poe or Walter Benjamin understood it. 

For our digital eyes, this dissertation is a curious material object:  It is hand typed, neatly by a professional.  The footnotes are numbered 1,2,3 for each page separately so you could adjust the notes as you typed.  Now, if we insert a footnote, Word automatically renumbers all the rest.  In the 1970s, you confined your numbering to a single page, and even then if you forgot a footnote, you had to retype the whole page, which this author didn’t always do.  Instead he used a pen and White Out to cover his few mistakes.  

This now archaic work had to be ordered from the University of Chicago library directly.  There are no digital copies available.  It arrived as two four-inch thick volumes--heavier that anything you have read in decades.

In good old-fashioned, close-reading fashion, the dissertation analyses one long eighteenth-century book with the hopes of explaining how the Jesuits represented China.  Only a University of Chicago graduate student would cite such a vast array of sources.  If only we could channel through the many tomes the Jesuits produced on China, then compare them with works of the New World.  Distant reading promises to churn through writing systems like the hundreds of thousands of missionary letters written back to superiors explaining the strange territory and fascinating people they had been sent to save. 

Theodore Foss defended his dissertation in 1979.  The title, A Jesuit Encyclopedia for China: A Guide to Jen-Baptiste Du Halde’s Description ….De La Chine (1735) looks straight-forward enough, but what it covers is the eighteenth-century attempt to compile all the scholarly books and missionary reports sent by Jesuits from East Asia to Europe. Sitting in Paris, Du Halde’s job was to read everything on China and then to edit the Jesuit sources into respectable publications.  Du Halde was the super-reader of a vast array of writing.  He came closest to becoming a machine reader that the eighteenth-century could produce.  All the while he had to keep his good style, rhetorical composure and diplomatic sense in selecting and revising which letters, which books would be recapitulated in the massive tomes he produced.

If eighteenth-century Jesuits could have used computers for running their global network, they would have been the best IT guys in Europe.  The Republic of Letters would have run on fiber optic cable.  Instead of the NSA, Rome’s Office of Propaganda Fide would have done large-scale searches looking for heretical, rather than terrorist, messages—all without disturbing the religious life of the faithful. Distant reading, in other words, has been a humanist dream for centuries.  It has always been compatible with close reading.  The Jesuit’s built their vast network, after all, to combat the heretical appropriations of the Bible.  

Ted Underwood explained at the last MLA and in his blog that distant reading allows us to more accurately defining the contours of a discourse.  Rather than taking Foucault’s word for it, we could have statistical analysis of a discourse, showing how Jesuits defined heresy, idolatry, natural theology, and science.  We could follow trends over at least 200 years to discover previously unknown patterns in European relations with the world.  As has been pointed out often, no single person can comb through the Jesuit correspondences, not even ten University of Chicago graduate students.  Thus, distant reading allows us to gather data together in order to better understand a single text.  One basic assumption of immanent analysis, as Adorno called it, was that the further you burrowed into the text, the more you learned about society as a whole.  This is the magic turn of mediation, wherein the microcosm transforms into the macrocosm.   

Mediation, the conversion of one media into another, the poem into the cosmos, has been a dream of humanists for centuries.  Distant reading helps bring the two poles together.  There is no need to abandon one epistemology for the other, rather we should think about how to combine them in our own reading practices.

Digital Unconscious

While it may a new experience, it really is not so surprising that we dream about Facebook friends.  After all, social media gives you the feeling of having regular contact with people, you haven’t seen in years, perhaps never.   For those friends who post a lot, you get a vague sense that you know what they did last week.  The network calls them friends, and while curmudgeons complain that these are fake friendships, your unconscious happily accepts the request.  “We all want to be loved and what’s wrong with 587 people loving me?”  We’ll never be Elvis or Marilyn.  Social media takes our fifteen minutes of fame and stretches it out over time, making it less glamorous, but giving us a media audience nevertheless, which is to say our psyche expands to cover more relationship than we could ever manage in person.  Social media streams us onto the screens of all our friends, and they can mirror back that they have seen us. 

Of course postings are always already filtered. The most harmless, pet postings, are sometimes just screens.  Safe images you can discuss without giving too much away, phatic discourse, chatter for the sake of keeping in touch, for the sake of conversation itself.  What lies behind the pet posting?  When does the really important message sneak out?  Are cats more of a deception than dogs?  What about wildlife photos?  How about hippos saving antelopes from marauding crocodiles?  What’s the subliminal message there?  Is everything an allegory?

These are questions about how to read behind the image FB presents, but what about when FB seeps into your dreams?  When FB becomes an active part of your off-screen life?  What does it mean when you dream about meeting an old friend, and they look much older now, but a little like their profile picture?  For the grownups, FB shows how much we have aged.  We are no longer the skinny kids with clothes hanging off our gawky shoulders.  Now we hide our bellies behind children, desks, pets and shorter loved ones.

 So what happens when you dream about your FB friend and they look and sound like some balance between their young and the old photos?  When they look like their profile picture, with all its evasions, and are still charming, still wonderful to see again?  The reunion FB promised when you first joined, that longed for rediscovery of your lost friends, becomes an even richer reality when they enter your dreams.  You walk and you talk, smile, tell old stories, while busy acting out whatever drama your dream has invented. You’re in the office and your old FB friend walks down the hall.  You’re at a big convention and there you see the pixilated friend turned into a real dream image. 

Does FB stir memory?  Does it create a string of associations that could only exist in dreams?  Your second high school sweetheart chats with the boss you had three jobs ago.  And of course they are both teasing you.  That’s why you baited them with your post in the first place, and now those two people, who would seem to have nothing in common, except for having once known you, are side-by-side on the screen, or at least their names and photos are.  Perhaps, the unconscious is structured like a network.  And at its best, FB works like a dream.

The Shrug of Sympathy: Senior Professors and the Plight of Lecturers

We are all familiar with the distinguished professor who turns to the assistant professor to ask "What did you think of the exhibition?" while ignoring the lecturer standing next to him.  This gesture, a familiar one in any department, represents the power dynamic that motivates the current blog war about the MLA and non-tenured faculty.   

The reason that the accusations have become so vituperative and the reason that some bloggers make the ultimately outlandish comparison between tenure and white privilege is because non-tenure track faculty have in most practical terms been made invisible within the university, even as they have become an ever increasingly vital component of its operation.  Lecturers feel betrayed by senior faculty precisely because their more established colleagues implicitly affirm the economic system that reduces adjuncts to hired help every time they treat them as inferiors, both intellectually and administratively.  

The fury at the MLA arises from the no doubt mistaken belief that the organization could act politically to defend and represent the academic under-class.  Recent history shows, the power of the MLA stops at the dean's keyboard.  Throughout the public debate about adjuncts and the MLA, too many senior faculty have stated that they support the claims of the non-tenured, but that they are powerless to change the university system.  "I'd like to help you, but the dean would allow it."  That statement is the moment of betrayal as far as adjuncts are concerned.  Explaining that ten years ago, we wrote a report about the mistreatment of lecturers no longer suffices to establish a sympathetic solidarity between the academic classes.  Senior, i.e. tenured, faculty have to go beyond the shrug of sympathy.  

We need to include the entire faculty in our political agenda and our intellectual discourse.

Ethical Decisions at the MLA Job Market

Got to speak at two panels on Saturday at the MLA.  The second talk was a last minute substitution for an absent panelist on something I have been researching for years, the other was a roundtable discussion on the ethical obligations graduate programs have to their students.  The scholarly talk was fun, the round table quickly turned into polemics.  If only people got as angry about Goethe poems as often as they do about blogs.

Scott Jaschik wrote about the panel for Inside Higher Ed.  He really tries to summarize what the speakers said: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/13/speakers-mla-generally-are-skeptical-idea-shrinking-phd-programs

And then Karen at “The Professor is In” just went on her own riff with it.

http://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/13/who-is-us-thoughts-on-the-mla/

In the spirit of a spirited debate, here’s one speaker’s version of how to insert ethical decision making into the MLA job market.

The panel “Who Benefits? Competing Agendas and Ethics in Graduate Education” had something of a demographic spread: two tenured guys, two guys just starting out, a super competent woman from the MLA with all the data—the other woman on the panel couldn’t make it.

So off the top, one important distinction is between ethics and politics.  There are so many important political actions humanities scholars need to undertake to make sure that cultural learning does not get swept out into a sea of economic necessity.  This means that humanities teachers have obligations to the books and artifacts they teach.  We have an obligation to the past, to hold and preserve it in the memory of the next generation.  We have an obligation to mediate between cultures, to explain why people far away do things differently, why they talk funny and eat strangely, why the kill each other and how they have fun. 

Advocating for public funding for education, re-introducing democracy to top-down administrations, protecting employees from arbitrary decisions, securing a decent income for graduate students and other university faculty are political decisions, requiring organization and publicity.  All too often ethics is used a substitute for political action that has failed.  So many times political activists fall back onto ethical arguments when they can’t change the system politically.

So let’s be clear about when we are acting collectively as a political group and when we are making ethical decisions as individuals.

Closing down humanities programs does not constitute an ethical decision that will help the suffering of students and lecturers.  Eliminating educational opportunities does not equal better lives, more jobs and higher incomes for new PhDs.  It’s one thing for deans and vice presidents to reduce the size of departments for budgetary reasons, but to argue that faculty have an ethical obligation to eliminate their own departments for the sake of future graduate students who might be duped into learning makes no sense.  It smacks of self-effacement and the abandonment of all that is sacred in higher education.

You don’t close the church just because the pews aren’t full.  You don’t shutter the theater just because the audience is home playing with their tablets.  You find new ways to draw an audience.  You rejuvenate, you don’t abandon your life’s calling.

But now to the ethical part:
There is no question that professors can be blithely ignorant of their privilege and thoroughly cavalier about how they treat people below them in the academic class system. And behind every comfy hiring committee stand an array of deans, provosts, and vice presidents for money who set the parameters of the search.  Not that this layering of responsibility should remove responsibility from the faculty hiring committee, but the anger from the recent blog wars and quit lit rarely trickles up to the administrators. 

As many people have argued, we really need do need to change the ethical behavior of hiring committees.  If there is one pasha moment in academia, it is the process of deciding which one of these many super qualified candidates will be invited on campus.  At the MLA interview the decision narrows significantly between 10, no more than 12 candidates being examined by anywhere from two to eight committee members, with ranked distinctions in each group.  It is in these small rooms, where a single phrase can make or break a candidate that ethical obligations are most important. 

Candidates are extremely aware of how much is riding on their every word and they think quickly about all they say, yet in contrast to the candidates circumspection committee members often feel the MLA interview is just the moment to let their own subjectivity hang out.  They try to be fair, yet they speak far more in terms of institutional politics than as intellectuals.  One key undefinable element is the question: Will this person make a good colleague?  Here the ethical bind unfolds, rarely do hiring committees judge candidates in terms of how they will change the department, how will they make us improve what we already do. Only in moments of crisis do committees look for someone different.  Very often, utterly subjective judgments are invoked in order to make sure the hiring committee is not threatened.  Is a candidate too high brow?  Did they speak too softly?  Did they not stop and make eye contact enough?  Did they tell too many jokes? Did they grasp my subtle theoretical allusion?  Will they like my guacamole?  (Ok, not this last one)

All of these objections to a young person’s summary of their research amount to the same issue:  how threatened is the committee by the new and the different. It is at this central moment, that ethical obligation enters.  All it takes is for two members of the hiring committee to agree that someone is “not a good fit” and their candidacy is decided, regardless of what the rest of the committee thinks.  All this subtle power is possible because there are so many good candidates on the market.  No hiring committee needs to argue with itself because there is inevitably always a high-quality consensus candidate available.

The ethical obligation here is to empathize with the candidate.  See things from their perspective.  How do they feel having flown across country for the sake of these 45 minutes?  What can we do to ease the situation?  How might we restructure the hiring process so that the candidate is at their best when they speak about their research?  How can we empower them rather than intimidate them?  If candidates felt that the MLA interview made them feel smarter, if everyone came out of the room having learned something new, then the hiring process would benefit all parties involved.

Out of this ethical moment, politics emerges.  Empathizing with the other people in the room motivates you to fight for them politically as well.  The blog wars, the new rage at supposedly privileged faculty burn that emotional connection and have us fighting amongst ourselves rather than organizing politically.