Best MSM Media Criticism of the Year

There's a downside and an upside to this post. On the pessimistic hand, the sale of the Star Tribune to the seductively-named Avista Capital Partners most likely means more divestment in local news reporting. Already this year, Twin Cities news staff cutbacks have been felt as one consequence of the recent sale of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The upshot is that Star Trib columnist Nick Coleman has written the most trenchant critique of media economics I've ever seen published in a mainstream news source. It's particularly rare because he mocks both the old and new owners of his own paper. While Coleman is a bit too nostalgic about the erstwhile patriarchal rule of McClatchy's founder, he pointedly describes the greedy grubbing for minute increases in profit margin that led to the sale of the Star Tribune, which had been McClatchy's "flagship" newspaper. He gets right to the heart of the newspaper business's suicidal short-term run for profits and the neoliberal ethos that makes this possible by suspending all value considerations aside from immediate profit.


Check Coleman's column out at: http://www.startribune.com/357/story/903516.html

Schooling Thought

During my break between semesters, I get to read a more diverse range of books than I would get to taking classes that fit into my degree. I've picked up break reading somewhat randomly. A good friend sent me Nancy Chodorow's "The Power of Feeling." Browsing through library shelves, I came across a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories set in St. Paul (edited by Patricia Hampl, who I had a great class with last year). I've also grabbed some essay collections.

Being able to read in this way has particularly brought into a focus a way of thinking/reading/educating I've found rampant in graduate school, what I’m calling developing a school of thought. Again, I'm going to take the easy way out an not put much effort into really describing this phenomenon very well, but I'm guessing most grad students and academic types will know what I'm talking about. It's the attempt to develop a somewhat fixed, somewhat flexible, perspective. Situating yourself within a school of thought helps determine what kind of questions you ask as much as how you will answer them. It leads you to read certain people, ignore others, and usually fixate on a cluster of concepts and keyterms. Schools tend to validate particular ways of knowing (textual analysis, ethnography, therapeutic experience, etc) and discard others. While contemporary schools of thought attempt to avoid pinning themselves down too much as grand theories or narratives, they still work enormously to restrict curiosity. Not having many external demands right now gives me a chance to breath new life into that undisciplined curiosity.

There are great advantages to developing a school of thought. Once you've laid the foundation, you are able to address new issues through your established framework, or by making rhetorical moves that have become easier with practice. Schools of thought go hand in hand with professionalization and academic legitimacy. Academics authority and credibility comes from peer (or descendent) validation. I am pretty thoroughly convinced that not much academic writing would be compelling without such regimes of validation. Anyone who picks up a book by Larry Grossberg, Derrida, or Nancy Chodorow would probably not find it at all interesting without already being somewhat drawn to their established credibility. This is not to say the contextual situatedness of each of these writers within respect to their discourses makes their work less worthwhile. I'm just trying to point out the dependency on interpretive communities or regimes of legitimacy and validation.

As a student, it takes a certain disciplining to be able to think in the school of thought sort of way. It requires an internalization of the impulse to suppress certain kinds of questions and the productive power to create others that adhere to rules of the school. There's no way out of this. Without developing some kind of adherence to a school of thought, it might be impossible to develop a voice or write in a way that can escape schizophrenic illegibility. Yet, I do believe there's room for negotiation as to how disciplined you allow yourself to become. At least, I hope that is so. I try to keep asking questions of cultural studies, of critical theory, etc, even when I'm pretty cognizant that my questions aren't going to "fit" very well within the trajectories of the discourses I'm working within. My reference point for determining what is compelling (perhaps the most crucial question of all intellectual orientation) is usually to consider what I can talk about with a generally educated and engaged group of people rather than what a group of disciplinary specialists would consider compelling. Of course, my own "generally educated and engaged group" is a historically and socially specific; sometimes I think of the public that reads Harpers, sometimes a group of my own friends. Clearly, this is no universal category.

Structurally, a school of thought mentality could be characterized as "modernist," even though the structure is repeated often by schools of thought that claim postmodern positions. The structure I'm referring to has to do with how knowledge and insight accumulate. School of thought-ers tend to construct intellectual lineages that map progressions of insight. A parody: Husserl figured this out, Hiedegaar then made this advance, then Foucault gave us this concept, etc. This accumulation tends to occur among a group of people who are taught by or at least influenced by each other (as opposed to, let’s say, an intellectual bricoleur who pieces together ways of thinking from people who do not have much to do with each other). Now it doesn’t always work in such a straightforward linear way. It’s often most fashionable to find the roots of an idea in a neglected forefather (i.e. Bahktin, Benjamin, etc.). The point is that understanding comes from intellectual mastery of this lineage with the emergent critique in mind.

This route towards knowledge differs greatly from the path of the poet, literary writer or the everyday philosopher. Like many students, I’m trying to find a way to preserve my curiosity, uncertainty and respect for many different ways of knowing, while being able to produce writing that can make a contribution to an ongoing conversation.

Florida Holiday

Last winter while I was visiting my folks in Georgia, Wendy's restaurant and Airtran airlines run an irresistible promotion – buy 32 sodas from Wendy’s and get a free one-way ticket. Feeling the tug of both my grad student financial situation and a thriving travel-bug, I blitzed Wendy's during my week with my parents, hitting up chain location from Warner Robins (where my parents live) and throughout central Georgia on our short trip to Savannah. At first, I'd go in with my folks, order five sodas, and we'd attempt to drink them. But soon enough, we dropped all pretence of indulging in the beverage and just ordered straight-up cups, no soda necessary. The servers knew what I was up to, and of course, they couldn’t have cared less. However, others apparently had the same idea as me, as I noticed other patrons leaving the counter with tell-tale stacks of cups. Soon every location was strictly enforcing the 5-cup limit per order. Still, I accumulated enough cups for two round trip tickets.

But the Wendy’s tickets were only good for a one-year. Having one ticket left that I had to use before February, Alice and I decided to take a winter vacation. The restrictions on the promotional tickets, as to be expected, were pretty severe and annoying. We almost booked a flight to New York, but a little hesitation left the ideal times unavailable once we decided to go for it. Since we had only a few days open for our trip, spending 8 + hours (with connecting flights) out to LA or other destinations west didn’t appeal to us. So we randomly choose the one warm place the ticket would take us - Fort Meyers Beach, Florida.

It appears as if the hotel we booked on priceline caters to the Northern snowbird, especially, according to the cheers of their websites, those who are Packers or Steelers fans. It also features an “exotic” tiki bar. So stay tuned for reports from FMB coming the first week of January . . .

Tuneless Chairs

While I typically buzz around different coffee shops throughout the Twin Cities, for the past couple months, I’ve buried myself in the blossom of Cahoots almost every day. Cahoots has the most perfect atmosphere for serious study - from chairs to temperature to people - Cahoots is wonderful! But I’ve started to feel I’ve been spending too much time there, probably averaging 4 or more hours each day.

So today I’ve come back to my long-lost Wedge neighborhood favorite, Caffetto. It’s a lovely day in here, sunny, not crowed, a cascade of rhythms flowing from the speakers at just the right level. But something's missing. The flower chairs are gone!! One reason I use to come here so often is because they had very cozy yet upright chairs. True, these chairs would not win any points for pleasing the eye. The chairs were covered with a flower patterned plastic upholstery. The pattern consisted of early 80’s- era dull puke colors – avocado green, a light brown and a pastel pink, all sullied with the years of gook that had accumulated on the sticky surface. Most of these chairs had ripped at some point during their tenure, and out of their gashes spewed tangled masses of a crunchy filling that looked like Spanish moss. So yes, the flower chairs were ugly, ugly as hell. More grimy, even, than the dilapidated chairs of the erstwhile Someday Cafe in Sommerville. But something about them just fit me so well. For the way I sit, they were some of the most comfortable working chairs I’ve found in the Twin Cities. Even more comfortable than Cahoot’s legendary orange cradlers.

The new chairs don’t have any personality yet. Hard wood backs, a bit too low and too curved for me. Red vinyl-covered seats, no gashes. No flowers.

What I like in an essay (1 . . . or is it 2?)

Finally, I'm able to take a bit of a breather from some frantic paper writing and cramming other loose ends at the end of a semester. Every semester, I tell myself that I will not wait to start writing papers until the last few weeks. I know its a bad tactic for me. I've heard some of my peers talk about how they need the pressure to catalyze their academic muse, and admittedly a sudden burst of inspiration hit me near the middle of my two week paper. But for the most part I think writing a longer non-fiction work during a concentrated period encourages me to look for short cuts (i.e. coming to conclusions too easily) more than it serves to light my fire for any sort of thoughtful inspiration. I want to build my papers more gradually throughout the semester, writing whenever the inspirations comes, which is usually just after I read something provocative or having a good conversation.

But the title of this post refers to essays I like to read, not write, tho of course their is a emulative relationship between the two. Reading essays from different sorts of journala and book chapters lately, I've realized that there are some academic essays/articles that indeed have a certain similarity in form to the "bohemian essay" that I adore so much. The essays I like are the ones that tread along a path of thought full of switchbacks and twists. They are unpredictable. They don't exhaust their ability to provide insight or stimulation in a thesis money-shot at the beginning. Instead they are rich with the acuity of the wandering eye. I think the most graceful bohemian essays tend to render insight in an even more offhand way than good academic essays can. Baldwin, Gopnik and the like can throw out just one line or one phrase that puts an aspect of life in a completely new light, then move on to the next thought without hesitation. Academic essays rarely get away with that level of nonchalance, but maybe a stray paragraph or two, perhaps something that stretches to a far off counterexample more for an intellectual challenge rather than the demands of the economy of an argument. While these sorts of academic essays may still have a thesis, they do not move along the arborescent outline format that I teach students to do.

Workplace politics

These past two weeks have been particularly stressful for me as a paper deadline and Ph.D. applications deadlines near. So all I have to offer is a re-posting from my cultural studies class blog:

Please forgive me for the second-person voice –

I certainly agree that academic jobs/lifestyles seem to offer a lot more opportunities for many types of political activity than most job because, even if the "hours" are longer, academic demands tend to be much more flexible. After working for several years in jobs where I had to be a specific place at specific times for 40 + hr/wk, I revel in the luxery having less than 12 hours a week where I have to be a specific place at a specific time. Also, academic employment seems to offer much more flexibility in how you can appropriate your time. The time you spend researching for an intellectual project could also be part of a political project.

That said, much to my surprise, I've found myself less politically involved since I came back to grad school than while I was working. Obviously I don't mean to suggest my own pattern mirrors everyone else's. But I think a big factor that makes political involvement much more likely or less likely is whether your community is politicized, i.e. whether the people around you are involved in political projects. Not only does a general political culture help motivate people to participate in political activities, making it social and fun, but it's a lot easier to find interesting ways to get involved when you know others who are working on specific projects. It is indeed difficult to walk into to an organization cold, and say you want to work with them and find yourself doing something more interesting than canvassing, making fundraising calls, etc. Even in the case where you can go to an organization and propose a specific way to work with them, your ability to find the inspiration to make such a proposal is correlated (I think) with the degree to which your everyday life allows you some intimate knowledge of the organization or issue. When you hear your friends or coworkers talking about the cool stuff they are working on, you’re more likely to think of some way your own skills and interests might contribute to those projects.

This is all meant to bring me up to a point to say that at certain times university campuses are places where political activity thrives and other times they are not. I can only imagine that during certain times in the 60’s it would be, culturally, very difficult to identify as a Marxist scholar or critic of patriarchy, let’s say, and not be involved in any of the related political activity surrounding you. At other times, it may be difficult to be such a scholar and feel any connection to or affinity with work that’s being done outside the academy.

Hopefully this kairos is not entirely fixed. Collectively we can make it a little easier to blend academic and “extra-academic” political work.

Mariposa

This morning in the Twin Cities is bright and crisp. There's a sweet damp scent in the air. It's probably the smell, more than the weather, that triggered a strong memory for me while I was walking to the 2nd Moon Coffee Shop. It was not a particular event, but rather an old routine and place that suddenly came to mind.

The last year I spent in Boston, I worked on Massachusetts Ave several blocks south of Central Square. Central Square was usually bustling when I got there during the peak of the morning rush, throngs of people exiting and entering the T, catching the bus or rushing from their apartment doors down Mass Ave by foot. But especially on cool fall or spring morning, there would be an aura of morning calm, a paradoxical stillness, to all this movement. It was the marriage of chaos and equanimity that you can observe in a shaken snow dome. Walking from the T station to my office, I would always pass a coffee shop called Mariposa and look in longingly at its denizens reading morning papers and conversing. It wasn't an addiction to coffee or a dread of work, but the idea of the pleasure to be had spending a morning in the world of journalism or books at a coffee shop that filled me with yearning. A few mornings I would be able to rouse myself from bed early enough to spend an hour or so at Mariposa before I had to be at work. I love sleep and I always love it most just as it is ending, so it was only on the most glorious mornings when I was willing to make the trade-off of sleep for coffee shopping. But when I did, the pleasure I had fantasized about on my rushed walks to work proved to be not just an illusion. As I wrote in my journal on those special mornings, I'd be able to see, temporally, the chaos of my anxieties in that beautiful morning light, fluttering with the graceful disorder of butterflies in an atrium.

I'm going to go over the berlin wall!!

Admittedly, this is another re-posting from a class blog, but I thought it was general enough to land here as well:


Why are some many in cultural studies worried that Theory might eat up cultural studies? Why does Angela McRobbie say, “Cultural Studies itself can thus be deconstructed to show how postructuralist work has occupied a position of authority as ‘theory’. . .?” Why does she need to justify her call back to experience through the authority of two of the most densely post-structural feminists?

I just want to suggest a few reasons for the enticement of theory in the academia. Please, don’t read this as an anti-theoretical rant. I certainly don’t believe any work is unmediated by theory whether explicated or not. I just want to suggest some reasons a theoretical orientation might have a comparative advantage in valorization among intellectuals versus other methods.

1. Theory is relatively safe from political persecution. I agree that theory might do important political work (given the right sort of conjuncture), but as of now theory is one of the safest ways to claim radicalism without institutional backlash. Even if it is political, it is generally so hard to for anyone without immersion in it to comprehend that it is not seen as a threat. Butler and Spivak, for instance, did not make David Horowitz’s list of 100 Most Dangerous Professors despite their fame. (This of course could also be a strategic advantage of working theoretically in oppressive times).

2. Theory promises the ultimate intellectual capital. To the extent that everything meaningful happening in the world is reduced to a structural or post-structural process (it really doesn’t matter whether or not signifiers slip, all that matters is whether you recognize the process of that slippage), significations or articulations may change but it’s the derivative of that change that underlies everything. The intellectuals who have accumulated the most knowledge of those processes are best positioned to understand the world. Structuralism/Post-structuralism is the string theory of the humanities. Once semiotic processes are all that really matters, knowing the nature of semiotics process relieves one from having to deal with the messy world of actual historical contingencies and experiences.

3. Theoretical writing is hard to understand, thus it enchants us with its mystery. I feel this all the time myself. Having an understanding of writing is usually a pre-requisite to being able to evaluate it, criticize it and see its limits. When you can’t understand what Derrida or Lacan is saying, and yet you have invested faith in the institutions/communities that seem to affirm the dire importance of what they are saying, their writings offer an almost religious mystique. The bible, Torah, the Vedas, etc. are all enigmatic, not just by coincidence. (However, this is not to say the only value of difficult writing is its mystery- the cryptic is valued in the first place because at times it can indeed lead to profound epistemic breakthroughs)

4. Theory insulates the intellectual from all criticism from outside the academy. Theory forms a specialized knowledge that can only be critiqued by specialized knowledge of the same kind. Once the “political claims” made by a theorist are all staked on the sophistication of their semiotic analysis, the intellectual is safe from challenges by others based on their experiences or memories (which are of course thought to be constituted by these very semiotic rules that they can’t recognize them). For instance, when a theorist talks about battles of signification over words like “queer” from a purely semiotic standpoint, the experiences and testimonies of “everyday people” (i.e. people who do not articulate their experience through the grid of poststructural analysis) have no way to enter the debate. Thus the rigor of theory is channeled and managed by making it accountable only to peers who have been similarly trained. Only 6 people in the room of a hundred can begin to challenge Homi Bhabha, the rest better keep quiet.

Academic Reading I Like

Just as critics of "mass culture" have described one of the debilitating effects of TV to be its relentless flow outpacing the viewers capacity for judgment, as a graduate student I often feel my critical faculties struggling to tread water in a deluge of words. One tactic for dealing this may be to suspend judgment and evaluation for the duration of the flood, and assume my student position to be one from which I should not put a stake in evaluating what I read but just collect a map of what others for thought. This way I could build an excellent citational dexterity and maybe think things out later. More realistically, however, it seems grad school encourages us to organize the onslaught of readings by developing a taxonomy of intellectual trends and positions, then pick one of those positions from which we can arm ourselves with general approaches towards critiquing the other positions (i.e. semiotics is too formalism, enthographic work erases political context, etc).

Yesterday at a concert I talked with an old friend of mine who just started a grad program in geography. He described the ways of certain well-performing students in one of his classes as conforming to pattern that appeared familiar to me. These students, he said, would pick a position then defend it very well. They talked in a language difficult to comprehend outside of their theoretical circles, a language with a forcefulness to it that seemed to foreclosed other perspectives. (Perhaps this is the kind of "theoretical fluency" that Stuart Hall observed proliferating among American cultural theorists). Among these students there was little room for ruminating or playing with indeterminate judgments; they would usually launch right into full-throttle criticism. My friend's image reminded me of the theory I had formed while living in Cambridge that so many Ivy students were not driven by intellectual curiosity but rather by a sense of competition that had pervaded throughout their lives. They had always been really good with at least one thing in their live, and often this thing would change (dance, a sport, a collectors knowledge of 30's jazz, etc). I thought many of them might have just well have been lawyers because debating and arguing seemed to be their game much more than the activity I in my own taste valorize as the intellectual in the most profound form, "grappling."

Perhaps most of the writing I read now is the product of such a drive. Competition might morph into a drive towards mastery, for unlike a lawyer who must continually reshuffle rhetoric as she is forced into new circumstances, the academic can steep themselves in a domain from which it is very hard for others to challenge them. They become unrivaled experts about a certain topic. A cultural studies orientation might work against the comfort of mastery, but may just leave us in the sphere of competition.

With this disaffected view of how the academy might work, my pleasure comes in encounters with writers who seem to retain that spirit of grappling. For all the countless pages consume of writers pounding out the flow of their narratives to conform to a structure of unilateral support for their theses, I delight in the few moments where I come across a pausing, wavering, uncertain voice that indicates a moment of real thinking.

A footnote:
Now as I write this I wonder if I've caught this same forensic disease, all too certain of my own categories. Yet for me the topography of academics that I'm evoking feels as if it is just a suggestion, one possible frame that makes sense with some of my experience but not necessarily one I want to hold onto. Perhaps this attitude, though, is shared by all of my fellow debates who I have chastised here, just they do not have the opportunity for such a footnote. For even with the footnote, the language I used above is still all too sure of itself.

Reading without Reading

This weekend I talked with Julia and Joe, a couple who are in my cultural studies class, about work scheduling. Both have been in grad school for a couple more years than me, and I'm always impressed by how well prepared they come to class - appearing to have good notes on the readings, often having articulated positions on what they think are the key themes for the week, etc. Therefore, I was quite surprised when they both said they would usually end school work by 5 or 6 each night! I haven't even been able to attain my goal of ending work at 9 on weeknight.

How was this possible? Were they both just extraordinary quick readers? I think I found part of the answer as Joe explained to me his approach to reading: don't read every word! At least that was his take on most reading assignments. He said that he reads things quickly, somewhere between skimming and reading, marking the pages up a good bit, then he goes back at least a day later and reconstructs the arguments through an outline.

This approach might not work with philosophical work where the meaning of key terms and turns will be lost without very careful sensitive reading (and probably still will be in that case). But as regards most of the cultural studies academic articles I've been assigned lately, this seems like a perfect approach. Not just for its time efficiency, but because I think I'll actually end up remembering and taking more away from the articles choosing to put more time into constructing my own outlines of them rather than giving them more sentence-caressing readings. On a later post, I'll talk about how I differentiate the educational goals of knowledge, understanding and voice. Joe's approach I think will get me towards "voice," which is the goal I care about most.

Routines, Rituals and Schedules

For the past several years when I've felt that I haven't been making progress towards my most important goals, I've blamed it largely on my tendency to designate time more to the tune of "external" pressures (work demands, friends' requests, family obligations) than internal ones (in this case, referring to my ideal long-term aspirations). Further, I thought this tendency had a pretty logical basis, the external pressures tended have a certain time urgency; whereas, the steps to take towards long-term goals could always be deferred. To the extent I was making decisions about how to spend time on a moment-to-moment basis, those more timely external demands would always trump the long-term goals, which may have a had a higher priority overall but were never punctuated by urgency.

So the solution, I thought, must be to stop making decisions about how to spend my time always in the moment. I needed to make allocations in a more reflective mode that could plan longer-term strategies. I needed a schedule.

Since then I've had a faith that just creating the right schedule and sticking to it would be the answer to all these woes. But I have yet to create a schedule that's really caught on for me. I've tried different techniques, from low-intensity to-do lists to more elaborate hour-by-hour scheduling with the aid of a palm pilot (given to me by my pal Bobby). Failure after failure. This weekend I made another attempt and realized just how incapable I was of estimating how long certain tasks would take, and more damning to the scheduling enterprise, I realize by now that it is not time but energy that matters most to productivity, something a linear schedule cannot capture. But I am trying a new technique - creating rituals. My first scheduled ritual: spending a half hour Monday and Friday mornings on this blog.

Teaching and Activism

Yes, it's been a long absence. And now I'm pulling a cheap move just to keep some momentum on the blog rolling. I'm double-posting a comment I left on the blog for our cultural studies class. I want to work on this idea some more, as it's something I've continued to think about this past week:

I’m positing two rather extreme and overly-simplified positions on teaching (which I’m sure are a bit reductive of the views people have expressed), then deploy some of our CS concepts as an alternative to these two poles.

1. The first pole is a hopeful, though not complacent, view of the social impact/function of university instructors. From this perspective, universities may produce all sorts of status-quo boosting effects (training workforce, all the other points listed in Matt’s first comment) and their state or private funding may even be based on such justifications, but still they are loose enough structures so that classrooms are not entirely determined by such structural forces. Teachers, in this view, have the opportunity to appropriate the space and resources of the university for progressive or even radical ends through leading students to critical thinking and to question ideologies.

2. The second pole, which I think is close to Matt’s fear of the absolute cooption of university, denies that individual professors (or programs) can effectively fight against the ways in which universities are overdetermined by these structural forces/relationships. From this perspective, even if teachers are able to help students learn critical thinking skills and incite their resistance to accepted ideologies, the net effect of this effort may really just enhance capitalism by creating a class of more valuable creative workers, more nuanced in their understanding of culture. Under this view, students might become “critical” of capitalism, racism, sexism, etc on an ideological level, but so what? Their ideological conversions will have no effect on the ways in which these oppressions are played out through institutional means. You can love Marx and voice as much dissent as you want on an ideological level, but end up working for an ad agency, employing your cultural sophisication for capital, if that’s the “best” opportunity you see for your career.

I believe both 1 & 2 have a lot of validity. However, I think a better alternative can be described through thinking about education as a practice in CS and materialist terms: education as the possibility of creating new subject positions. From this angle, educators have a stake in subject positions students come to identify as. These subject positions are not only nominal categories, like “educated liberal,” “queer liberationist,” etc, but they are articulated to specific practices enacted outside the classroom. For example, I think education can be (though certainly not always!) good at producing the position of the “educated liberal” who renounces the practices of vulgar prejudice, such as making racist jokes or displaying intolerance for certain cultural differences. Another subject position could be articulated to economic practices such as not shopping at Walmart or buying from fair trade vendors.

The question of effects is not such much over how much student’s ideological outlooks might change through class but what kinds of practices will be linked to their new subject positions. A great limitation on teaching, however, is that the articulation between beliefs-as-subject-positions and practices aren’t often forged in the classroom. These types of articulations depend on a broader cultural matrix of opportunities. What kinds of practices will be articulated to new subjects positions is beyond the control of the teacher. Much of it is fortuitous. If there is a strong anti-sweatshop movement on campus making demands on students to take part in actions or not, then teaching Marx, leading students into some sort of “marxist-sympathetic” subject position, is likely to be articulated with organizing, protesting or other practices that are part of that movement. If such a movement does not exist on campus, then the same class could win students identity as marxist-sympathetic subjects but in a way that is not articulated with any practices contesting labor policies on campus.

So do I think teaching is a hopeless endeavor for contributing to progress or radical causes unless the cultural opportunities are ripe for students to articulate new conceptions of themselves with political practices? In a way, yes. Perhaps the content being taught in American universities in the late 60’s wasn’t any more radical or revolutionary than content being taught today but the cultural matrix at the time articulated educated subjects to more overt political practices. I know from my own experience college seemed to take on a whole different tone when the whole campus was shaken by protest over Iraq sanctions, Kosovo, etc.
The challenge for committed educators, then, in times that are not fomenting with political unrest is to create this political culture outside of the classroom. We need to work with allies outside the university. The excuse of doing enough for the cause in the classroom doesn’t cut it, at least not unless the conditions are right for classroom efforts to be articulated with extracurricular practices.

Reading Susan's Journal

A link arrived in my email today from a friend wagering, “because we’re in love with public intellectuals …why should we not read them in [their] private [moments]…?”. The click took me to a section of the NYT’s magazine that reprinted entries from Susan Sontag’s journals. (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/magazine/10sontag.html?pagewanted=1)

I have always been fascinated by the prospect of reading diaries and journals (as mentioned on my first post). Regarding influential or famous people, the idea is not that their diaries will represent an authentic revelation of their non-public souls, as I would bet they (famous people) always write with some consciousness of potential public eyes. Perhaps many have so deeply ingrained the mental habit of publicity that the public, or a relatively broad public at least, is the default addressee of most of their thoughts. So it is not a chance to peel beneath all persona and posturing that is unique about encountering them through journals, but rather the opportunity to see how they write without revision. It may not always be true, but I assume that journals entries are written with greater haste and much less editing than published works (even for Kerouac). This speed I assume does reveal what comes most “naturally” for them as writers, meaning only the habits of thinking/writing that are most automatic for them. What I look for is: what kinds of mental connections and associations arise most reflexively for the writer? This is a vague statement, so let me break it down in two exemplary but not exhaustive ways. What is the texture of their quick writing like, i.e. the vocabulary range and specificity of detail? And what is the style of their narrative? Underlying these investigations is the question of how naturally (in the sense above) good writing comes to great writers. Inevitably I end up making comparisons with my own journal writing, which I tend to think of as involving overly earnest narratives and a dependance on cliched phrasing

So how did Sontag’s journal affect me? Most striking is the energy and frenzy of her thought (along with the fixated self-consciousness which is something I’ll leave unexamined here). Many of the entries follow the logic of a list, as I assumed she followed whims and swirls of thought/memory rather than approaching her journal with desire to sort everything out into a neat little story. Even through lists, she evokes some enchantment, an oddball kind of energy. She is not without her cliches. I noticed a few words that might make it to my list of “fresh words” – deracinated, marauding – but not many.

The frenetic aspect of her impression may come in part from the spin with which the journals are introduced by the Times, “Susan Sontag appears, to a reader of her journals, to have filled every idle moment with a notation.” I have sometimes thought I should pursue relentless note-taking to be really productive (of course at a certain bulk notes would lose their advantages of condensed guides, but the point is more to exercise the passage of experience to words). I can’t really say from the journal selections if Sontag had this fantasy too or fulfilled it, but clearly writing was crucial to her even in the form of notes.

Not so cool

Often when meeting a new person of a similar demographic, I find myself brandishing my knowledge of "cool" things - local bands, experimental films, coffee shops, etc. Am I just showing off a kind of indie culture connoisseureship? Maybe such cool is just an excuse to legitimize a taste for eccentricity?

Back at the U

By nature I must be an optimist because I always enjoy beginnings. Whether it’s first moving somewhere, starting a new job or kicking off a new school year, the beginning of any of these transitions always charges me with energy to fill a slate of newness with positive vision. Unfortunately I’m not the kind of optimist who is able to remain ever hopeful and optimistic about any situation once routines have set in and the horizon of possibility is more clearly defined by the land mass of actuality.

I’m aware of this pattern, and the unrealistic expectations that go along with fresh starts for me generally, but still my optimism is in full force for the beginning of this school year. Last year, admittedly, I became quite frustrated with my school progress. Was I really pushing my potential to learn, stretching my mind as calastenically as I thought I should be during a time of intensive education? I didn’t think so, and this isn’t a criticism of my graduate institution but rather it was just a fact that I hadn’t found the intellectual focus or inspiration I had hoped to find. I hadn’t kept up with the exercises I had designed for myself (such as the metaphor-a-day), hadn’t written anything for alternative press as I had wanted to do, nor had I could I be sure I had found that ever elusive writing voice any more clearly than I had in the past . I was living to the tempo of the steady mundane almost all of last year when I had been craving a more blustery rhythm. My vision of scholarship was of something more engaged, maybe even more mystical, than what I found myself able to access.

Now, I haven’t done much to reconcile the split between aspiration and reality. Still, all these good feelings of freshness are making me see a rosy semester once again.

No Hands

I finally did it! There was a prolonged moment of indecision and trepidation, like jumping off the high dive for the first time. But then I just let go and raised my hands in the air. I was cruising down a hill along the Mississippi River. Throughout my life, I've seen people do it like it was nothing. This summer in DC I saw lots of young kids looking cool as salmon as they swerved and speeded on their bikes through patchy Capital Hill streets, arms flopping at their sides. I figured riding with no hands was a skill that you either had and felt totally comfortable doing, or one you didn't and you would mess yourself up if you tried it. Like riding a bike itself. I hadn't taken the plunge when I was younger, so my adult self had grown catious and inhibitted. But this new bike with its fat mountain tires gave me new courage. It's much smoother than my old Gary Fischer Aquila, which was stolen from the UMN campus last year, and incomparible better than the beat up bmx bike I was riding this summer.

It felt like a new world I was perched upon while I coasting down that hill without hands. A world that just let me glide through it, taking care to prop me up so I didn't be concerned about myself. Then I tried pedaling -- back to the world of holding on.

When You Got A Subject And A Predicate

These past two mornings I’ve been attending a workshop on grading and commenting on student writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me until after starting this session that most of the commenting I’ll be doing for my intro to public speaking course will be responding to speeches rather than writing per se. Still, the session was worthwhile. I ended up going to both session rather than skipping out as I intended to do if it just seemed like go-thru-the-motions bullshit. But it helped me realize how difficult it is to comment on student writing in a way that’s time efficient and helpful to the student.

On the first sample essays that I practiced commenting on, I leaned heavily towards copy editing in a journalistic way. Truncating sentences, shedding otiose adjectives, trying to suggest a more confident voice. This is the kind of feedback that I have particularly appreciated as of late (especially comments from Bill Lindeke from excitablemedia). Personally, I would love the chance to work with a good editor who would rip my language apart, just so I could start to see other possibilities for word choice and flow and identify my unconscious habits and self-imposed restrictions. The workshop, however, helped me realize this is not likely the kind comment that most undergrads need most. Perhaps the greatest single lesson of the workshop was the suggestion to think about how students will react to a first glance of the paper handed back to them. What will they think of something splotched with red on almost every line? A simple thought experiment in empathy that now seems obvious. The facilitator of the workshop suggested that comments need to be selected strategically based on where intervention is needed most – not only as a time saving strategy on the part of the instructor but also so as not to overwhelm the students.

It’s easy to think of writing instruction as a boring, mundane part of the job of an academic. It doesn’t help that the culture and publications that I’ve seen from the world of composition seem about as bland as it gets - perhaps this derives from an attempt by all parties to insulate writing instruction (in practice if not lipservice at least) from theory, politics . . . all the exciting stuff going on in universities. However, writing instruction is full of all sorts of deeply political and artistic questions. Writing practice (at whatever level) is certainly a technology of self. Helping students develop “their voice” in writing is a hotspot of institutional intervention on subjectivities and communicative habits.

The New Gazelle

Over the past few months, this little nook of the www has gotten as dusty as the peace studies section of the White House library, but now it's time for a little late summer cleaning. I just added "New" to the blog title, as a little R&D has led to a new and improved product. The number one finding: lower expectations. No more grasping at profundity in each post, despite all the gushing comments that suggested the old format was so popular.

No, now my goal is to find some sort of regular blogging rhythm that will work for me. I'll try to make it interesting and keep up with friends through this blog, but admittedly this is one of my mental exercises to routinize new forms of thought. Another one of these exercises is what I call "metaphor-a-day." Every day I'm trying to write down one metaphor I come across in reading or conversation that strikes me. The original plan was also to write my own metaphor each day, in hopes these twin exercises would grease up the associative flow of metaphoric thinking for me. Can't say I've been diligent enough at it yet to say whether it will work.

Here’s today’s metaphor from an article on Edmund Wilson by Louis Menand (found it while sifting through some old magazines):
"He was not obliged, as professors are, to pick out a single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career was devoted to the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important and, by doing some homework and taking care with exposition, make it interesting and important to other people."

Pre-emptive writers' bloc

Is all thought in language? Some answer yes to this question (Volosinov, others), but to accept this seems to accept a very limitted definition of thought. The most easily explainable problem with this thesis is sensory imagination. Is the artist or architect not thinking when she images her next project?

Of course, there's all sorts of angles we could come at the relationship between thought and language, and it could be argued that even if all thought is not "inner-language" then at the very least all thought is thoroughly structured by language. Or that even images and other forms of sensual imagination are all semiotic, so in the end its all just like language. But really, it's not this particular dispute which concerns me now. The problem that's prompting this post is certain kind of frustration I want to describe, a feeling of having something to say or express but not having/knowing to accomplish that. Sometimes I call this writer's block.

The reason the thought-language dispute pertains to this problem is that most painful moments of writer's block come when it seems I have a thought, at least in some nebulous cerebral form, but can't find language to express it. The initial thought, it appears, is phenomenal, meaningful but non-linguistic.

Now this could be just a meditation on writers bloc, but my poststructual line of thinking wants to chime in and say the whole model is wrong. Am I setting this whole equation up on a model of a soveriegn speaking subject? Is this an outdated transmission model of communication? A thought appears to a subject as some sort of interior self-created apprehension, then the thought is translated into words endowed with a meaning through the force of the subject's intention?
While poststructuralists often seem like they strip any theory of language, besides those located in their own intellectual genealogy, of its nuance and complexity, I might as well just say I'm guilty here of their accusation. The model of speaking I'm working off here is much closer to a rather traditional modernist than their own. Yet, perhaps in my mind I've overextended the poststructualists dogmatism. Maybe invoking a transmission model of communication to grapple with the particular kind of frustration I'm dealing with here isn't so much a sin in their eyes. Perhaps different models of subjects and communication really can be deployed at different instances. Or perhaps, that poststructualist inside of me might anticipate with glee, the frustration I'm encountering is an inevitable problem of modernism, the desire to "express a non-linguistic thought in speaking" will always be frustrated. Maybe, but so far I haven't encountered a poststructual diagnosis that resonates with me.

Still, I won't argue that language in any way can act as "mirror" to reflect any non-linguistic phenomenon. Translation into language is not only always messy, but always a complete leap into another form entirely.

Redundancy of Theory 1

In theory circles, at least from what I can surmise about them from my little grad student seat, there are a few refrains that come up again and again as to the nature of the grand illusion and religious fantasy of modern thought. One is that steadfast belief in a unified autonomous and effective self, a belief absolutely saturating all powerful modern institutions, except curiously enough, certain humanities departments at universities.

What are other such refrains?

Pleasure & Learning

So, first a suggestion of five, often overlapping, "motivating forces": pleasure, survival, obligation, strategy and habit. I'm sure you can find ways that all of these support learning in some ways, but I'm going to zero in on pleasure for the moment.

Another disclaimer - I'm thinking about the question of "what motivates learning?" in general to some extent, but mostly drawing on preparation for an academic career.

Now, to get even more schematic, let's go to three kinds of pleasure that could go along with learning -

1. Autonomous Pleasure
The pleasure that is often figured as most ideal. It is the pleasure that arises spontaneously from the activity of learning. It is the immanent pleasure of the learning experience. It is like the pleasure of loving.
2. Social Reward
This is the pleasure that comes from social feedback loops as the learner masters or accomplishes something. It is the pleasurable reception of a goldstar, an A-plus, a field-trip privilege, a fellowship, a vigorous applause at the end of a presentation, a sense of respect and admiration from those around you.
3. Tension and Release
The pleasure that comes only after completing a stressful project. This resembles one of Freud's models of sexual arousal and satisfaction - that the initial stage is one of excitation, a stimulus whose contact causes a condition of tension that is unpleasant as well as pleasurable (as evidenced for Freud by the desire to linger in that state of tension rather than immediately move to orgasm). Writing a paper can be like this.

Compassion and Scholarship

One way to think of ethics is as self-consciously endorsed explanations or guides for behavior, at least intended behavior. Like any behavior we tend self-reflect upon, scholarship has its ethics. Yet discussions about the ethics of scholarship seem to be rather rare or narrow, even though you might think academics are just the sorts who ask such abstract questions regarding everyday activity. Perhaps scholars in general are loathsome to critically examine their own practices and routines beyond "method." Talk about "academic integrity" usually boils down to a rather simplistic set of laws about not fudging data/facts or plagiarism.

But certainly there are a lot more ethical questions we can ask about scholarship. For many there is an implicit ethic that the scholar tries brings to the fore those experiences that tend to be most marginalized or purposively hidden or excluded from public view. That's certainly a principle that guides me in what I'm looking for while reading as well as thinking about my own work. Yet I think this ethic would be more robust if scholarship was more often seen as something that can be guided by an ethic of compassion. Compassion, to me, is a good-willed curiosity oriented towards the unknown or the other. Compassion is a response to a confusing and undeniably cruel world that affirms a faithful commitment of goodwill to what might be a groundless existence. Compassion need not rule out all suspicious or revolt against oppression, though I think it does place goodwill and care first.

More than anything, an ethos of compassion might make academic dialogues more comfortable spaces to be for people of different knowledge backgrounds. My guess is that one cause of anti-intellectual attitudes is the well-known tendency of academics is to either take the potentially condescending attitude towards someone as a student or pounce on perceived ignorance with scorn and quick judgment. An ethic of compassion may help us work out a cooperative ethos rather than making so many academic discussions sounds like rounds at a debate tournament.

Environmental Energy

According to various media sources, from advertisement to health magazines to co-op newsletters, energy comes from certain consumables, from protein shakes, ginsing supplements, low-carb diets, wheat-free non-dairy raw-foods diets, or if you really want to unleash the beast without delay, you can get yourself a carbonated energy cocktail. From other sources, you might hear that exercise is really the way to go, and that its squats and swimming and ab crunches several times a week that will really get your juices flowing.

Images of either food or exercise as the sources of energy makes it seem like energy is something that people store up in their individual little tanks to later fuel biological engines. Now, I believe diet and exercise can help people feel more energetic. I've started putting a least one organic carrot in all my lunches, and I try to get to the gym a couple times a week. But as someone really seeking more energy, I've turned more of my attention to energy as something that comes from interaction with my environment. I'm trying to ask myself specifically what are the situations: simulate, inspire and call forth my effort. This energy can come from interactions with art, nature or architecture (a little credit to feng shui). But more than anything, individual energy is social. Even something as mythically lonely as writing, I see as largely motivated by networks of social energy. Without some sort of positive social feedback, it's hard to imagine that most anyone would be motivated to produce anything they do beyond what's necessary for subsistence.

Research Identity Statement

I'm in a class where we're been asked to write a statement on our research identity in terms of: 1. our disciplinary/scholarly affiliation (media studies, rhetorical criticism, etc)
2. our method (historiography, comparative, social science, etc)
3. why were're interested in our topic.

I'm still fumbling around trying to find the topics that really inspire me, and the above template presupposes a fixed "identity" and compartmentalization that doesn't really fit the kind of way I'd like to talk about my work. Yet, still I found this a very helpful exercise - it's pointed me towards refining some research questions and thoughts on approach.

Here's my statement as-is:

I am a media studies scholar investigating the role that media technologies and institutions play in cultural shifts and ideological transformations. I am particularly interested in contemporary activists and critics of neo-liberalism and their relationships with media institutions. Some of the questions I ask include: What groups of people do these activists try to influence and through what media do they communicate? What role do media institutions play in constructing the possibilities for such communication? How do certain practices of activists groups that fall outside the normative uses of mass media, such extralegal media appropriations or creating alternative media sites, affect relations between activists and media institutions? Through this research I seek to articulate the kinds of media practices that have been or might be successful in affecting cultural transformation. I am also seeking ways to participate in cooperative research/praxis projects with media activists.

Imagine all the bloggers . . .

When I was in an AmeriCorps program based in Denver, I heard an interesting story about a fellow corps member, Chris. He was on another team and I knew him only slightly as a sharp and somewhat enigmatic guy, but what I learned intrigued me even further. Chris was a writer and kept a prolific journal. What made his journal-keeping practices peculiar was what happened whenever he finished a volume -- he would go to the phonebook in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Milwaukee, or wherever his team was located, choose a random address, and send the lucky household his journal with no return address. He wouldn't even make a copy for himself. All his most intimate observations and accounts of feelings and experiences would end up in the possession of a complete stranger. I speculate that odds weren't too good that most of his journals avoided the fate of the graveyard of most modern things, the landfill. Yet I can only try to imagine the joy of those curious few who unexpectedly found the eccentric mind of a 22 year old in their mailbox one day. Perhaps some of them are still waiting in hopeless suspense for a sequel that will never arrive.

This was in 2002, before I had heard of the blogging phenomenon. At the time it was still possible for me to believe there would be something powerfully transcendent about diary sharing. Earlier that year I had been writing in my journal in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, a city I only planned on staying for a few weeks for a project, when I saw a young woman furiously writing in hers. She wrote in an unusual pattern, from bottom to top. Like me, she would pause between bursts of writing and look up with an expression on the stretched-out moment of hesitation before a sigh or smile. With the same passion, but different end in mind, of a sudden erotic desire, I wanted to read her journal. I wanted to propose a swap for an hour – what could possibly be a more intimate moment between two people who would never see each other again? But the standard social inhibition and concern about the creepy appearance of such a proposal, snuffed out another potential experience.

Now however if I want to peer into other’s minds and lives in such a way, I need not wait for a random journal show up in my mail or until the moment seems just right to make such a proposition at a coffee shop. I can simply do a random search on livejournal or scores of other blogging sites. Of course, blogs will not be written with the same lack of self-consciousness as diaries (and diaries themselves always presume some form of presentation and performance; while “public” and “private” are too bluntly overzealous as clear and distinct categories, it’s fair to say that the shift from diary to blog moves in the direction of public consciousness, tho perhaps also as something more ephemeral). Optimistic and pessimistic fantasies of where this shift could lead

- Imagine this utopia: Everyone in the world is a blogger (yes, there is no digital divide in this utopia). People write in their blogs as they do now in diaries or journals. In the first phase of this utopian transformation, all blogs are anonymous. Through random and strategic searches, you can swerve through the inner-most thoughts of all people, crossing boundaries of age, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Your empathy for the diversity of the people of the world becomes immense. You hear the intimate testimony of those who have been victimized as well as the guilt of those who have committed the crimes. You live in two worlds - one where people keep up all the fronts of confidence, certainty and absolute rightness as they do in terrestrial social life, then there is the blogosphere where all that is suppressed in terrestrial life is displayed most prominently

- “Private” diaries and journals were the last holdout where people could develop skills for articulating and reserve space for telling their most idiosyncratic, vulnerable and socially alien impulses and thoughts. Blogs may cover the same topics as diaries did in the past, but now under the gaze of social judgment. In the blogosphere, the defenses of wit and stylistic imperatives of the social must never be let up on, and thus these rules dig themselves deeper into our subjectivities. The truly idiosyncratic and socially defenseless imagination becomes submerged even deeper in the sea of silence.