Ph.D. Octopus

by Weiner

A few nights ago, my wife and I had the distinct pleasure of watching Teeth, the 2007 comedy/horror by writer, director, and co-producer Mitchell Lichtenstein, son of the famous artist Roy Lichtenstein. As some readers of this blog may know, I’m a big horror movie fan. But Teeth interested me for political reasons as well. Call it a horror film or a dark comedy, Teeth was in fact a brilliant political satire. And it was totally awesome.

The plot is simple enough: protagonist Dawn O’Keefe suffers from the mythological condition of vagina dentata: she has razor sharp teeth in her vagina. What gives the film its gravitas, and its humour, is the broader context. Dawn is the leader of an abstinence group in her high school, she dons a promise ring vowing to wait until marriage, and embraces traditional gender roles prizing women’s purity, all in a clearly over-the-top satirical manner. It seems as if nearly all the male characters are potential rapists, and several appendages meet their untimely demise beneath the sharp, interlocking teeth at Dawn’s crotch, and no, I’m not talking about her zipper.

Though I know many are turned off by gruesome horror (I’m thinking of you, Luce), this movie is really the ultimate in feminist schadenfreude. It’s a little scary, a little gory, but mostly funny, and with brilliant parodies of the Religious Right and the latent sexism and fear of women that lurks in the hearts of heterosexual men. This movie is truly great.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Nemo

Over at the American Intellectual History Blog, Andrew Hartman offers a positive assessment of François Cusset’s recent book French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. I found the review pertinent because I’m putting together a syllabus for an introductory course on the “postmodern condition.” While part of the class involves examining the difficulty of defining exactly what the postmodern condition entails, we will be exploring themes typically associated with postmodernism. These include the social construction of knowledge, the relationship between truth and power, and the deconstruction of essentialist categories of identity.  As one might expect, readings for the class include works by Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Judith Butler (among many others).

The postmodern condition explained

We’ll also be reading a number of postmodernism’s critics, which during its academic height in the 1990s were legion.  While its conservative opponents such as Allan Bloom probably got the most media attention, it also attracted plenty of condemnation by intellectuals from across the political spectrum. As I was searching out such critics for the syllabus, I came across this amazing 1995 list-serve post by Noam Chomsky. In it, he not only delivers a blistering attack on scholars such as Derrida, Kristeva and Lacan, but also on the American humanities establishment more generally.

Now, clearly, this wasn’t the first time Chomsky attacked the American academic class. Perhaps his most famous essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” published at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, tore into scholars whom he believed had abandoned their commitment to truth in favor of service to the state. In the years since, he has frequently laced into mainstream academia for what he considers its political complacency and ideological rigidity.

Unlike his more typical attacks on intellectual cheerleaders for American militarism, however, in the list-serve post Chomsky aims his rhetorical sites on the proponents of “postmodern theory.” Asked why he engaged so little with theorists such as Lyotard, Derrida, and Lacan, Chomsky responded:

I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.

Unlike postmodernism’s critics on the right, however, Chomsky doesn’t stop there. He goes on to argue that these theorists, far from being the dangerous radicals of the conservative imagination, are actually apolitical charlatans doing nothing to advance the cause of social justice. In a move that does echo the populist stance one more often associates with conservatives, though, Chomsky argues that most working-class Americans have an easier time understanding what’s wrong with the country than do many out-of-touch humanities professors. Discussing the challenges of explaining his views to different audiences, he notes:

I’ve never found that a problem [providing alternative frames of reference] when I speak to people lacking much or sometimes any formal education, though it’s true that it tends to become harder as you move up the educational ladder, so that indoctrination is much deeper, and the self-selection for obedience that is a good part of elite education has taken its toll.

This is how I took notes for comprehensive exams

Of course, Chomsky’s beef with many post-modern thinkers goes beyond their sometime incomprehensible language and their questionable scholarly rigor, but instead goes into deeper conflicts over questions such as basic understandings of the human condition. Chomsky’s admiration for the principles of the enlightenment and his belief in a universal human nature put him at odds with some of post-modernism’s main currents.  These disagreements are at the heart of his famous debate with Foucault in which the two disagree over the possibility of universal foundations for a just society (in the list-serve attack on postmodern theory, Chomsky makes some—but not too many—exceptions for Foucault’s work).

Personally, I’m sympathetic with much of Chomsky’s critique. Particularly the writers he refers too. On the other hand, I’m willing to be convinced that I’m just not familiar enough with their work. I do think, however, that people like Foucault, Butler, and Said (and Chomsky would certainly agree with me on the latter) have actually developed a number of insights not only worth considering for their own sake, but that are necessary sources of wisdom for any movement that claims to advocate for social justice—but that’s the subject of another blog post.

For now, I encourage you to read Chomsky’s blast. I’m curious to hear what people think, especially those more familiar with Kristeva, Lacan, etc.

By Wiz

The core assumption of our neoliberal moment, of course, is that markets are the best ways to distribute goods and organize society. Right-neoliberals end there, and declare war on all public goods and any attempt whatsoever to regulate that market. Left-neoliberals maintain that individuals should have access to some basic social welfare, but always reject the idea that the state should be in charge of distributing it. Thus you end up with bizarre, hideously complicated, and inefficient systems like Obama’s health care plan. Since it is almost literally unthinkable that the state could provide a good better than the Market could (every time you say the word Market, by the way, an angel should be playing flutes inside your brain), left-neoliberals have to invent complicated ways to bribe, coerce, and manage the Market God into sort-of-kind-of-not-really providing the resource that left-neoliberals admit is essential.

This critique of neoliberalism is well known. Two recent stories, though, have reminded me just how much this brand of brain-dead market worship isn’t just inefficient and wasteful, but contributes directly to corruption and the erosion of our democracy. First, this one from Albany. Charter schools are, of course, neoliberalism’s wet dreams– you get abundant public money, little oversight, and, best of all, get to hide behind cute disadvantaged kids, all while doing Goldman Sachs’ bidding. Problem is, of course, they don’t actually perform any better than most public schools, so given a choice parents might not send their children to charter schools. The first solution, of course, is to spend money on advertising, a horrible waste of public money, which doesn’t in any way contribute to a better educational experience. The second option we see in Albany, where Charter Schools are spending their money, which comes, remember, from the taxpayers, to advertise against the local school budget. Why? Well, the budget didn’t affect them at all, but it would increase support for the city’s public schools. So they used public money, in order to try to lower the funding for their competitors, who happen to be public schools. Cute, huh? Public money in order to hollow out public institutions.

Next, we have the prison industry, where the New York Times reports that private prisons are no cheaper, and often more expensive, then public government run prison. If Dostoevsky famously said that the conditions of prisons demonstrates the level of your civilization, then the fact that we have turned our prisons over to faceless, unaccountable corporations seems appropriate. But even more appropriate to our time, is that the prison industry often uses their money, which comes from the public, to advocate for brutal racist immigration policies that are guaranteed to produce more prisoners. Specifically, they were behind the push for Arizona’s notorious SB 1070 law, cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

Connecting both stories, obviously, is that fact that the market is not some neutral “tool” that can be manipulated to serve the ends of the state. By turning public goods over to private entities, we empower people who have a particular interest in public policy. The (attempted) underfunding of Albany schools and the racist immigration laws of Arizona, then, are partly the product of seemingly separate political decisions about how to provide certain services.

Left-neoliberal’s love to wrap themselves up in the language of hardheaded pragmatism (generally the sign that you are about to do something fucked up) and say that they don’t care how people get, say, health care, education, or safe streets. And if they have to resort to the market, they don’t mind doing it (implication– they care more about these issues than you, you dogmatic ideological leftist). Problem is, the market is not just some tool, that is completely neutral. Rather by using it as a means, we predetermine a set of ends that we never agreed upon in the first place: ends like anti-immigrant laws and poorly funded public schools, since those things are in the interests of the entities that we are funding to provide our services to us.

We’ve got a guest post here from Gruber, who is doing his PhD in modern Israeli history.

By Gruber

Last night when I was out to drinks with some friends of college, one of my close friends, who happens to be Israeli-born and works for an Israel-advocacy organization asked me flat out “Do you think there should be a Jewish state?” This is not an unfamiliar question, especially in light of all the recent brouhaha regarding the American Jewish community and Israel, provoked especially by Peter Beinart’s now infamous article and the Gaza Flotilla fiasco, which PhD Octopus has certainly examined before.

Of course, I had provoked this question to a certain extent, as I make no attempt to conceal my views on Israel/Palestine, especially among friends and family who I know consider me a radical when it comes to the topic, and accordingly may make snarky comments about the conflict that are framed playfully enough to avoid a full-blown argument which I know will devolve into back and forth yelling. So after comparing his disproportionate response to a small prank with Israeli policy, my friend stopped and asked me to answer this to-the-point question. “Do you think there should be a Jewish state?” After attempting to engage in a round of semantic acrobatics and careful qualifications, he demanded that I first answer the query with a simple yes or no. “No”, I said unhesitatingly. I quickly followed up however, saying that neither do I believe there should not be a Jewish state. Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

There is a way one settles into traveling; particularly if traveling alone and in a new city. Small details become important. The patterns of traffic are an object of scrutiny, the manner of greeting a muttered remembrance (“Grüss Gott,” the guy at Müller says and of course he does. It’s Bavaria. Munich). The Sonnenblumenbrötchen bought at a bakery by the Hauptbahnhof, which one realizes is essentially a French baguette disguised by sunflower seeds, turns into an object of first night annoyance. Hearty, excessively—deliciously—grained bread is one of the distinct pleasures of being a German historian. A woman on a bike clings her bell and yells at me as I walk back from the archive, backpack slung across my back, apparently causing the skirt of my dress to ride up. And so manner of dress and habit of walking begin a slow shift toward ones more suitable for summer archiving.

Bamberg

I’ve never been to Munich before, though I spent a month nearby in schönes Bamberg last summer — “Summit of Bavaria/ Excessively Gemütlich,” an 11th century poem in the Cambridge Songs, as liberally translated by a favorite medievalist, proclaims. Having experienced such a Bavarian wonder, I decided to save Munich for another day. And here I am now, with a few feminists to look through at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, and a brother, who has joined me for part of my trip, to entertain and try to show Germany. How does one show Germany to someone? I’ve never been a tour guide here, probably because I’ve only ever come here to work. So Germany is more a lifestyle than a sight for me. Look at that balcony, I tell him, imagining how nice it would be to have a Käsefrühstuck out there one morning. Berlin will be easier; I was once toured around there. I was a sophomore in college and I remember spending a long time staring across Berlin from the top of the Berliner Dom as my German professor rambled on. And a Love Weekend spent jumping up and down in an old factory building while Paul van Dyk spun techno.

The first two days I spent in Munich alone, jetlagged and located by the central train station, never my first choice for a home base. I stayed in a hostel by the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof for a night on my way back home last summer and worried I might carry bedbugs across the Atlantic to New York. Repatriation. I don’t know if there is a New York equivalent to the area around a European urban train station. Perhaps 1970s Times Square — its unromanticized version. Casinos and sex shops (the site of Beate Uhse’s shop was oddly comforting—the woman has history) clustered next to hostels whose young British and American revelers run over. Small lessons remembered: don’t buy your Brötchen or sleep near the train station, Grüss Gotts all around, keep your skirt down.

European casinos and sex shops always seem to have black mirrored entrances with strobe lights and Halloween streamers. Last year I went into a casino in Bamberg to print a train ticket. Two middle-aged women pulled levers at 2pm and a manager grumbled at me “Bathroom? No, printer? There, there,” she jabbed her finger. I bought a card that would either print me a train ticket to Berlin or give me four tries at the slots.

Arriving at the archive this past Friday, radically jetlagged and underslept, I managed to make my needs known through a slurge of mumbled German. Research is a series of roads left untraveled and bets with oneself. If I don’t take this down, will I find something better later? Perhaps I’ll just note its existence. A conference on new contraceptive methods in the early 1970s? A half hour painstakingly going through my feminist’s handwritten notes—not necessarily for their worth, but for fear I won’t be able to get my hands on any other report of the events. Two folders later, the proceedings appear in typewritten full. In Reading Berlin Peter Fritzsche describes the illegible city as central to 20th century modernism: the uncertainty of being able to see or represent clearly, “the larger, ongoing process of just rereading and rewriting.” Unfolding a modern city is not unlike unfolding a new archive—terrifying, illegible, incapable of being represented yet forced to be nonetheless. One synchronizes oneself into both eventually.

By Wiz

Our department’s librarian sends along this disturbing news: the Republican House is moving to eliminate the Teaching American History program.

I, along with many historians, have benefited from these grants in the past. They are Federal grants given to school districts in order to improve the quality of history education. In my case, I was paid a small amount of money ($3000 I believe) to give a semester’s worth of lectures on Civil War era historiography to New York City high school teachers. The point was to expose high school teachers to more nuanced academic debates than might appear in their textbooks. It was hardly an extravagant program– no one is exactly getting rich on $3000 dollars a semester– but it is a good program. I especially liked it because it offered a chance, however small, for Ivory Tower academic history to filter into more general audiences.

In the grand scheme of Obama era “Austerity,” it is small beans compared to the far greater cuts to education, health care, and housing that are being proposed or enacted. TAH’s entire budget is small (according to the National Coalition for History, in the 2011 budget it is given $46 Million, a rounding error for the Pentagon). But you can bet that if eliminated now, it is unlikely that it will ever be resurrected. A reminder that it won’t just be the poor, the elderly, and the vulnerable who will suffer from the bipartisan mania for cutting services, it will also be us Ivory Tower academics, as well as the general state of American education.

by Weiner

Here we go again. Only a short while after the Grant Hill versus Jalen Rose “Uncle Tom” controversy, and a few months after former middleweight championship boxer Bernard “The Executioner” Hopkins played the race card in the Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather Jr. debate, the same Hopkins has brought his politically incorrect opinions into the limelight again.

This time, B-Hop, a life-long Philadelphia sports fan, has gone after former Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. We’ve heard this tune before. Both men are prominent African American athletes. McNabb‘s crime? Like Grant Hill, he comes from a middle-class family. Read the rest of this entry »

by apini

I recently finished David Lodge’s Changing Places – a book in my favorite sub-genre of fiction, the campus novel. I’ve read Lucky Jim at least 5 times.  I read Lodge’s Small World last summer, as well as The British Museum is Falling Down.  I’ve just ordered Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man.  I particularly like the sub-sub-genre of British campus novels, but on the American side of things, I’m now reading Alex Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day and read Jane Smiley’s Moo during college.  I’ve even had my PhD Comic book signed by Jorge Cham!

One thing that struck me, finishing Changing Places, is a particular trope of British campus lit that the ‘university teachers’ or lecturers tend to find themselves in academia by chance.  Jim Dixon doesn’t seem particularly committed to his subject, and neither does Philip Swallow.  They stumbled into academia in a time when you could become a lecturer with only an MA.

This is interesting for a number of reasons.  First, from a literary perspective, Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

It’s already known that for Janet Malcolm, no profession is sacred, not even her own. Yet while remaining hyper-aware of her role as journalist in her latest book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, she also assumes the mantle and mentality (with intense psychological portraits) of lawyer, judge, and executioner, not to mention father of the dead, daughter of the accused, state-appointed law guardian, and alleged murderess. Some might call it a performative contradiction, but then again she sees all the characters in the trial as performers with deep contradictions. Perhaps she’s merely joining the gang, or perhaps her own performance is intended to highlight the inconsistencies that surround her.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills recounts the murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a physician and member of the Bukharan Jewish community in Forest Hills in Queens, accused of hiring a hitman to murder her ex-husband after a court ordered their young daughter be transferred into his custody. I recommend it wholeheartedly. About her protagonist, Malcolm writes, “she couldn’t have done it and she must have done it.” This appears on page 32 of 155 pages, and by the end the reader is left with no further conclusion than that. Either we remain satisfied with this impossibility, or we start doubting Janet Malcolm’s authority. But why doubt Malcolm’s authority rather than someone else’s? Take the judge for instance: Robert “Hang ‘em” Hanophy, whom one juror (apparently hand-selected for his gray everydayness) says (on page 96) is “real and down to earth and serious about his job. And funny. He had a good sense of humor.” But nearly 90 pages before, Malcolm has already described Hanophy as “a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate.”

I keep noting the timeline of the book because it tells us something about what Malcolm’s doing here. Malcolm doesn’t ask the reader to reach his or her own conclusions as testimony is laid out; she doesn’t pander to expectations of objectivity. The jurors and judge are already biased toward actions and behaviors that seem legitimate to their own understandings, and Malcolm isn’t about to let them get the monopoly on prejudice. Yet while Malcolm gives her narrative precedence, the nature of the written form allows her thoughts to become interwoven with those of other characters’; the reader flips back and forth to re-read a  Malcolm characterization of someone an interviewee has presented in a very different light. And so Malcolm’s own narrative can be retroactively challenged. While I was initially convinced by Malcolm’s claim that Borukhova both couldn’t have and had to have killed her ex-husband, at some point I began to doubt that she couldn’t have. Despite this deep paradox, Malcolm is more convinced that she knows Borukhova’s character than I am (though in a recent Paris Review interview, Malcolm admits, “As I went along I felt I undestood her less and less… [Borukhova] becomes who you imagined she is.”) Flawed legal evidence abounded, and Borukhova appeared to be a successful career woman, a devoted mother, and quite possibly an abused wife, but none of this convinced me that she couldn’t have done it.  Perhaps this makes me the radical relativist to the contrarian Malcolm, characterizations that make generational sense given her birth in 1934 and mine in 1983.

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by Nemo

Most observers seem to agree that the CUNY Board of Trustees made a boneheaded move by vetoing an honorary degree that the faculty and administration of John Jay College had planned to award to the playwright Tony Kushner. When you have people like Jeffrey Goldberg and Ed Koch attacking you for going too far with your “pro-Israel” activism, you know you probably went overboard. In fact, the trustees themselves seem to have realized the error in their ways, since they have now decided to overturn their previous decision.

Tony Kushner

Now, there were many reasons to criticize the board’s initial move to deny Kushner the degree. These include its unprecedented heavy-handedness (this was the first time that the board had overruled a motion for an honorary degree), its gross mischaracterization of Kushner’s views on Israel, and the obvious attempt it represented to narrow the range of acceptable debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even some of Kushner’s harshest critics believed that the vote to deny the honorary degree was patently unfair and gave Zionism a bad name. This is to their credit.

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