Ph.D. Octopus

By Julian 

Do you own dog-eared copies of David Hollinger and Charles Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition? Do you get into heated arguments with your philosopher friends about the continued relevance of the pragmatist tradition? Did you consider a career in finance, but instead opt for the much more sensible life choice of writing academic articles about the social history of ideas? If you answered yes to any of these questions, there’s a good possibility that you might be interested in putting together a panel for the Fifth Annual United States Intellectual History Conference next November in New York City. The Call for Papers has just been posted here. This year’s theme is “Communities of Discourse.”

Speaking of intellectual networks, and in the interest of full disclosure, three out of the five of us here at PhD Octopus have presented papers at this conference in the past. There’s no doubt that our own communities of discourse have expanded as a result. Since I began attending the meetings four years ago, I’ve always come away impressed with the conference’s sustained growth, the quality of scholarship on the panels, and its organizers’ tendency to highlight innovative historical work that also has obvious contemporary relevance. Besides all that, it’s nice to attend a meeting where the participants actually seem happy to be there, rather than nervous about the anxiety-inducing job interview to come.

The roots go much deeper.

By Julian

Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.

The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”

The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades.  It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.

In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.

To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.

By Nemo

Whatever happened to the couch?

If you haven’t already read Marcia Angell’s two review essays on the state of psychiatry in the New York Review of Books, I urge you to do so now. They are absolutely devastating. Angell, the former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, provides so much evidence of systematic corruption at the heart of the profession that it might just give you a newfound respect for the Church of Scientology. (Okay, maybe not.)

Others have documented the growing number of seemingly common forms of behavior that psychiatrists describe as mental illness, the increasing prevalence of drugs over talk therapy as a preferred method of treatment, and the vast sums of cash that pharmaceutical companies spend marketing their wares. Angell ties these phenomena together. She also raises serious questions about the quality of research that justifies the prescription of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications.
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By Nemo

Am I the only one out there who prefers Treme to The Wire? While reviews for Treme have been mixed, many critics have dubbed The Wire the best television series of all time. Everyone seems to love The Wire’s epic portrayal of the drug trade in West Baltimore.  Pundits from across the political spectrum blogged about it. Top legal scholars and sociologists have used it as a teaching tool. President Obama called it his favorite television series. Attorney General, Eric Holder, requested a sixth season (probably to his embarrassment). In 2010, the show’s creator, David Simon, even won a coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. By contrast, the critical response to Treme, Simon’s recent series on post-Katrinia New Orleans, has been much more reserved, with viewers complaining about its supposedly slow pace and irritating characters.
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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 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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I’ve been fortunate enough to have great working relationships with all my graduate advisers.  As everyone in academia knows, however, many graduate students are not so lucky. We’ve all heard horror stories about advisers that can be controlling and manipulative, or alternatively, totally uninterested in anything related to their students. These cases, while rare, sometimes happen.

Errol Morris

The student-adviser relationship can be particularly fraught because of the intense power dynamic at work in the relationship. Advisers play a serious role in their students’ professional advancement: they write letters of recommendation, they make academic contacts, and, ultimately, decide whether or not to sign off on  dissertations. Fortunately, they also have an incentive to see their students produce excellent work and achieve professional success: it reflects well on them.

Anyhow, I only bring this all up to flag famous documentarian Errol Morris’ op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. It turns out that before he started making probing films about the death penalty and the ethics of war, he was briefly a graduate student in the history of science at Princeton. In the op-ed, Morris describes his contentious relationship with his renowned adviser, Thomas Kuhn. If you haven’t already read the piece, it describes an episode in which Kuhn throws an ashtray at Morris for questioning his argument about the incommensurable nature of scientific paradigms (at least there wasn’t any fireplace pokers involved).

While many graduate students would probably still find it difficult to challenge one of their advisers core theories, since smoking has been banned from most universities, there is at least less of a chance that they will have an ashtray launched their way.

by Nemo

What does Judith Butler have in common with Ronald Reagan? How about Jerry Falwell and John Rawls? Cornel West and Milton Friedman? In his sweeping history of American social thought during the last quarter of the twentieth century, Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers argues that these figures share more in common than one might think.

According to Rodgers fracture or what he (less poetically) calls “disaggregation” characterizes the main currents of intellectual life from the early 1970s to our own day. He argues that a mid-century focus on the social power of tradition and institutions, whether economic, political and religious, gave way to competing models of social life that stressed individual agency, historical contingency, and the amorphous power of culture. Early on in Age of Fracture, Rodgers sharply contrasts the social thought of the Cold War and the period that followed in terms of human nature. Rodgers writes,

Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. (Rodgers, 3)

In economics, Rodgers argues, this transformation was especially acute and would have serious consequences for social policy and social thought more generally. As the repeated financial crises of the 1970s seemed to discredit the effectiveness of Keynesianism, a number of schools of economic thought stepped into the fill the vacuum (often with major funding from recently established conservative think tanks)—all with strong libertarian tendencies.

harbinger of fracture?

Proponents of monetarism, rational choice theory, and supply-side economics might have disagreed on certain principles, but all believed that the best economic outcomes were produced when individuals made their way into the open market without interference from labor unions and government regulators. Individualism ruled; deep notions of power waned. At the same time, social theorists started to blame the rise of an urban “underclass” on the very government agencies created to serve them (while downplaying years of de-industrialization, institutional racism, and declining tax revenues due to white flight).

One of the most striking contributions of Rodgers’ book, however, is to show that shrinking ideas of the “social” were not limited to free-market economists, but also characterized nearly every sphere of the period’s intellectual life.  Across the era’s social sciences, Rodgers notes an interest in thought experiments involving game theory, prisoners’ dilemmas, and “veils of ignorance” (in John Rawls’ famous Theory of Justice) that showed little concern for context, history, and power. Attention shifted toward abstraction and individual choice.  Legal originalists discounted centuries of jurisprudence and social context to uncover the “true” meaning of the constitution at its foundational moment. Meanwhile, leading economists believed they could ignore the legacy of the past and shepherd Eastern Europe into a capitalist future through “shock therapy.”

As the social movements of the 1960s moved forward into the 1970s and 1980s, Rodgers sees fragmentation across the board. Inspired by the New Left idea of participatory democracy, influential liberal thinkers embraced pluralism and communal participation, which served to downplay earlier visions of a national social contract and economic redistribution (on the right, many showed a similar concern for the well-being of “mediating institutions” supposedly threatened by an intrusive federal government).

Feminists who had once believed “sisterhood is powerful,” now debated the usefulness of the concept of “woman.” Did it risk further marginalizing the distinctive voices of black women, working-class women, and queer women? At the same time, influential black intellectuals in the United States and England such as Paul Gilroy, Cornell West, and Henry Louis Gates rejected one-dimensional understandings of a unified black experience—and instead called for an understanding of blackness that conformed to the complex legacies of life within the African Diaspora.

For all the commonalities Rodgers sees running through the period’s social thought, this is not a consensus history of the 1980s. Even with though he sees the pull of “disaggregation” leaving a mark across the period’s ideological spectrum, he remains sensitive to political conflict, for example, noting contentious battles over Central America, nuclear weapons, and social issues such as abortion.

Nor is Age of Fracture yet another declension narrative about irresponsible radicals and “identity politics” somehow bearing responsibility for the revival of the country’s political right. In fact, Rodgers sees a major difference between the social thought of the 1960s, which tended to focus more closely on the power of institutions and social forces such as the government, the military, and capital in shaping inequality, and the period that followed with its emphasis on fracture, agency, and culture. Rodgers also sees much to praise in social thought since the 1970s, particularly the way it has helped legitimize racial and sexual difference.

A rite-of-passage for many graduate students.

He does believe, however, that the era’s strong emphasis on culture, rupture, and agency has lead to a neglect of key questions about power and history. At the end of his chapter on race, Rodgers argues that the,

growth of more complex understandings of identity was also the retreat of history. A culture reshaped in the choices and present moment preoccupations of a market-saturated society had transposed the frame of argument. In a liberation that was also the age’s deficit, a certain loss of memory had occurred. (Rodgers, 143)

Is this really the case though? Is it true that thinkers such as Cornel West and Judith Butler really had less of a concern with institutions, history, and power than their predecessors? Or was it that they aimed to capture a more nuanced and sophisticated version of the way history unfolded, power functioned, and identities were created?  No one who has read Foucault for a graduate seminar would be unfamiliar with questions of power and institutions—even though the answers he encourages might not be as straightforward as a Marxian or even an “interest group pluralism” reading of the concept might provide. Does a focus on everyday performances of power really have to come into conflict with one attuned to the power of history and institutions?

In addition, is Rodgers correct to lump most of the period’s social thought under the concept of disaggregation? Can we really see any commonalities between the interpretive strategies of an influential anti-foundationalist literary critic like Stanley Fish and a biblical fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell? Rodgers acknowledges that the period’s conservative thinkers (and many self-proclaimed liberals) tended to obsess over combating the moral relativism and multicultural fragmentation that they saw characterizing intellectual life. Conservative Christians, in particular, proclaimed a universalistic understanding of human nature and longed for fixed gender binaries totally at odds with celebrations of gender trouble or the indeterminacy of texts.

Rodgers argues, however, that even among the religious right and cultural conservatives, one finds dissension on questions of gender, free speech, and foreign policy. While this is surely the case (when was any social movement wholly unified?), Rodgers might have done even more to explain how evangelicals fit into his broader theme of fracture.

While some readers may take issue with the book’s conceptual preference for lumping rather than splitting (though Rodgers always does an excellent job describing particular ideas), others might feel that the question of causality is left too open-ended. If fracture characterized the age, what exactly caused it to break out? Rodgers notes the value of works by David Harvey and Frederick Jameson, which examine the economic roots of the “post-modern condition,” but rejects what he sees as the determinism implicit in such models. Rodgers believes that ideas about fracture often preceded economic change and helped condition responses to it.  It’s hard to disagree with this point, but it’s not surprising that discussion has already begun over the question of causality and the book’s principal argument.

Whatever minor issues readers find with the book however, they are likely to be impressed by its scope, its analytical ambitions, and its sensitivity to nuance, not to mention its readability. For many years it will serve as a key reference point for scholars investigating particular questions about social thought since the 1970s. In addition, Rodgers implicit normative stance, which calls on scholars to engage deeply with history, institutions, and power—particularly when dealing with questions of inequality—rings very true today, as we continue to live through the legacy of the age of fracture that he describes so effectively.

by Nemo

Over at the U.S. Intellectual History Blog, Andrew Hartman has a thoughtful post on the Arizona anti-ethnic studies law. What I especially like about the piece is the way that Hartman wrestles with the concept of “ethnic solidarity.” On the one hand, he fears that the concept can promote as much harm as it does good. He points out that conservative campaigns (such as the one successfully launched by the Texas Board of Education) to present a sanitized version of the nation’s past essentially amount to “an egregious form of ethnic, religious, and political solidarity that has no place in the schools.” On the other hand, however, he argues that whatever “ethnic solidarity” Chicano Studies may promote, it would be unfair to equate the programs’ view of history to those on the right. To make his case, he provides a brief historical account of the intellectual origins of Chicano Studies, in which he emphasizes the movement’s anti-racism and internationalist orientation (concerns that the School Board in Texas and Arizona State Legislature seem to lack).

I would also emphasize that the Chicano Studies movement aimed to promote ethnic pride by providing a more accurate portrayal of United States history: one in which Mexicans and Mexican-Americans played an important part of the story. Some of this history, of course, would be characterized by conquest and exploitation.

Much of today’s right, by contrast, seems intent on sweeping such unpleasantness under the rug. Consider the Tennessee Tea Party’s recent statement (which Hartman also quotes) that “no portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.” The group’s spokesperson, a Fayette County Attorney, later elaborated that the point was designed to combat: “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.”

Textbooks wars, as Joseph Moreau shows in his book Schoolbook Nation, have long played a role in American life. They predate the 1960s by at least a century. Still, it would be hard to beat the Tennessee Tea Party in its recent exercise in historical “revisionism.”

by Nemo

As some of us anxiously await our next batch of course evaluations (and worry about what influence they might have on our future career prospects), Tenured Radical offers up some sensible advice. I’m often impressed by the psychological havoc evaluations can produce, so I thought that this observation was especially on the money:

One curious phenomenon is that practically everybody I know can get 99% great to good teaching evaluations, and the one nasty evaluation can have a particularly devastating effect.  Regardless of how incoherent it is, or how wrong, an anonymous student cutting you off at the knees about a course that you poured yourself into can feel like a stab in the back. 

The post goes on to make the point that for all their absurdity, there is often much to learn from student evaluations. While in my grimmer moments I worry that evaluations function as a sort of “consumer satisfaction report,” which contribute to higher education’s decline into a high-class shopping experience, I agree that they can provide valuable insights into one’s teaching. Now if only more students would comment on our actual classes rather than our places on a “hotness” scale.