Nietzsche as Reservoir Dog With ‘Style’

A few months ago, an  ex-student of mine sent me the image–courtesy bros.failblog.org–above. It made him chuckle out loud; he was in a library when he came across it and decided to send it to me because he thought I would have a similar reaction. (This was shortly after I had announced that I would be teaching a Nietzsche seminar in the spring semester.) Well, it made me chuckle and chortle a bit. I sent it on to a couple of friends–yup, they chuckled too–, and went so far as to make it my GMail profile image.

But what is so funny here? The juvenile rhyming, the placement of the sunglasses on Nietzsche’s otherwise solemn visage, the color coding in black and white that evokes Tarantino-cool? Well, of course. And they work because in turning Nietzsche into a Reservoir Dog,  the image reinforces a well-established not-so-academic impression of Nietzsche that supposedly appeals to angsty undergraduates and teenagers everywhere: the ass-kicking, taking-no-prisoners polemicist, slashing and burning his way through the thickets of orthodoxy.  (This is the Nietzsche imagined walking into a Wild West saloon, and suggesting, not so gently, that everyone put down their rotgut whisky and pay attention to the Zarathustrian gunslinger now in town.) It might also be the Nietzsche that tries to emerge from Ecce Homo, letting everyone know what time it is, and why indeed, the clocks have been commanded to do so by him.

Let’s not forget too, that if you wanted to dig a bit deeper, you could associate ‘sunglasses’ with ‘style,’ and well, when you think of Nietzsche, don’t you remember all those times he went on–and on–about ‘style’?

From The Gay Science, Book IV, Section 290:

Giving style” to one’s character – a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.

Or, from Twilight of the Idols, “Reconnaissance Raids of an Untimely Man”, Section 11:

The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in a grand style. The power which no longer needs any proof, which spurns pleasing, which does not answer lightly, which feels no witness near, which lives oblivious of all opposition to it, which reposes within itself, fatalistically, a law among laws — that speaks of itself as a grand style.

Finally, it might also be that we associate Nietzsche with laughter, for he often makes us laugh out loud when we read him. Sometimes the laughter is provoked by his wordplay, his puns; sometimes it is evoked by the pleasure he provides us as he goes after those that deserve his scorn, far more skillfully than we can imagine ourselves ever being able to. Nietzsche knows he can be a joker and a jester; in dressing him up as he has been above, we are reminded of that aspect of his persona. There was plenty of grimness in Nietzsche’s life, but his writing, at least, often tried its best to keep that at bay.

Must One Vote for President to Be Political?

I concluded yesterday’s post by saying:

There is a far more fundamental problem…it centers on my disillusionment with elections–especially in modern politics in this nation–and with my evolving understanding of my political responsibilities.

I should have been more specific above. I have acquired a profound dislike of presidential elections: the campaigning by candidates, the so-called ‘debates,’ the insincere campaign promises. I consider presidential elections the worst part of American democracy: for the opportunities for pandering and demagoguery they provide, for their choking off of reasoned discourse, and especially in the US, the inordinate amount of time, energy and money they consume. The Republican primaries began last year, or at least, it felt like they did. That’s a full year before the elections. Really, US polity, really? A year-long election season?

I dislike too, the elevation of the presidential election to the center-piece of American democracy–that somehow casting my vote for the president is the most important political act I can commit. This often results in guilt-mongering:  If you don’t vote for a presidential candidate, you’ve committed a grievous abdication of political responsibility. The propagandizing and resource consumption associated with presidential elections is especially insidious; their prioritization cripples a great deal of engagement with the political process; it denudes political activism of energy, purpose and resources by drawing too much attention to itself.

The privileging of these elections has meant all too many US citizens imagine that presidential elections are all there is to their democracy;’ that to participate in their polity, one need only show up once in four years to vote, followed by rapid disengagement. Presidential candidates, like Barack Obama, are guilty of the precise converse; they imagine that having won the election, there is no need anymore to engage with those that brought them to power. A fraction of the passion spent in engaging with the ‘base’ during the election season, had it been deployed during the last few years, might have earned Obama considerably more legislative victories, and not cost him the support of his ‘base.’ (It didn’t help, either, that the option chosen, instead, was denigration of the ‘base.’)

I’ve come to think of the presidential election as the deployment of a vast machinery of systematic obfuscation. The disappointed voter is a cliché now, precisely because he imagined that voting was all there was to it; better to ignore elections and do politics somewhere other than the presidential polling station. The real action lies elsewhere; in local elections where one might, for instance, vote for judges who can rule on important decisions affecting families and groups: divorce or bankruptcy proceedings for example.

A citizen can be political in many ways. I can be political by resisting the policies that my nation’s rulers seek to impose:  sometimes by writing here, sometimes by my daily utterances, sometimes in my teaching, sometimes in the lifestyle I adopt, and in those I encourage. My politics resides in my daily actions, in the many little decisions I make on a daily basis. The political process operates on many levels; it can be poked, prodded, and interacted with via a multiplicity of processes; voting for the president is but one of them.

Not Nearly Enough Change I Can Believe In

Yesterday’s post and Dan Kaufman’s comment on it, have prompted me to pen some thoughts on Barack Obama (and elections).

In 2008, I made two separate donations of $50 to Barack Obama’s campaign. I also drove down with some friends to Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania and spent the day walking around several neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and talking to residents about their possible election choices, thus helping the Obama campaign build up a map of voting patterns that they could use in estimating their chances in the region. I’d like to think that in some small way, I actively helped Obama’s victory in the elections that followed. I took these actions because, besides  wanting to vote for Obama in New York State, I wanted to contribute as much as I could elsewhere, to help the Obama campaign in the so-called swing states.  My vote in New York, a state that votes overwhelmingly Democratic, and where Obama was all but guaranteed the Electoral College votes, didn’t feel like that it would be that useful to Obama; at most it could help some him make some talking points about the size of his mandate.

By late 2008, as the elections approached, I was alarmed in a way that I had not been in 2004 (when I had voted for John Kerry). In 2004, I had merely voted; that was the extent of my involvement in the election process. But in 2008, I might have been described as a member of ‘the energized base’. I was ‘energized’ by Sarah Palin, by eight years of GW Bush, by the chance for change that I saw in Obama’s election. Back then, I was happy Obama had trumped Hilary Clinton’s campaign; even though her election would have been a historic event, I was made just a tad bit uneasy by her connection with the ‘old’ Democrats. Thus, I should have been more alarmed than I was by Obama’s selection of Joe Biden as vice-president; it was the first serious indicator, for me at least, that this candidate would indulge in a great deal of the ‘ol same-‘ol, same-‘ol.

Some three years on, as this election season heats up, and writing the day after Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage,  my disappointment remains acute. The language of betrayal is tempting, but I’m too weary to deploy it. Rather I’m inclined to think that I’ve just been reminded of the cartel-like nature of party politics in our nation, and of the disappointing inability of politicians to recognize where historical opportunities lie. Obama could have been a great one-term president; he has chosen, instead, to aspire to be a disappointing two-term president. I do not think I will send $100 to his campaign this year, and I most certainly will not take the time to go door-knocking for him in Pennsylvania or anywhere else. I wonder how many there are like me, and how much that will hurt Obama (Obama will have gained some new supporters in these past few years and perhaps they will be enough to get him over the finish line.) But I do not intend to fall for the tired old Democratic line ‘if you don’t vote for us, the bad old Republicans will come to power’. I do not feel like voting for Obama, and I certainly do not intend to vote Republican. Perhaps the Working Families Party? Who knows? November is still a long way away.

But there is a far more fundamental problem in all of this: it centers on my disillusionment with elections–especially in modern politics in this nation–and with my evolving understanding of my political responsibilities. More on that in a follow-up post tomorrow.

About Time, Mr. President

The following was intended as today’s post. It has been pre-empted by Obama’s endorsement, today, of same-sex marriage.

Barack Obama will soon sit down for an interview in which he will, in all probability, attempt to explain his ‘evolving’ views on gay marriage. Perhaps he will come out strongly in favor of gay marriage. Or perhaps he will equivocate a bit, and attempt to triangulate his desire to be re-elected–and thus the need to placate those segments of the electorate that thinks the president should take a stronger moral stance on this subject, whether it be condemnatory or laudatory–, his actual personal views on the subject, and his evident talent for backing away from the ‘soaring’ campaign rhetoric that so enthralled so many (and still continues to captivate many every time he deigns to address the nation on a matter of grave importance, or to offer clarification for some mysteriously weak-kneed response to his political opponents).

I have a suggestion for the President, a pointer to a course of action that might help his views ‘evolve.’ He should go to the Library of Congress, which I believe is located in Washington DC, contact a good reference librarian (after first getting a patron card filled out appropriately), and ask him or her for some help in locating some good historical material on the social institution of marriage. He should also ask for some historical material on institutionalized racism. The President could also put out an open call to academics the nation over, and ask them for book recommendations on these subjects. Then, he should sit down and read a couple of these books. (Only if he has time to spare from the relentless electioneering that will soon be his primary occupation; after all, elections are the most important part of a democracy, aren’t they?)

I think President Obama might be interested in what he will find in the course of these historical investigations. (I’m presuming here that he will read with an open mind, that he will deploy his intelligence, which I’m presuming has not been warped excessively or deformed by the extensive contact it has had with organized religion and its vile prejudices.)  In his readings on marriage, he will find that marriage has a history, that it has cultural variations, that it has served very particular functions in the past, many of them grounded in the preservation and promotion of very particular economic states of affairs. He will find that far from being a divinely exalted and sanctified expression of the love of man for woman (or vice-versa), marriage is infected with the profane, through and through. And when President Obama reads a history or two of institutionalized racism, he will be struck by the similarity of the language deployed as apologia for racism to the language used to delay and deny gay marriage today.

Mr. President: The denial of gay marriage, and its writing into state constitutions, are acts of bigotry. Get with the program, and use your bully pulpit to condemn it.  As I wrote today on Twitter: President Obama: If your views are “evolving” on gay marriage, please hurry the fuck up – that timescale is a little sluggish.

Earnin’ a Livin’ With Humiliation as a Perk

A New Yorker cartoon from last year shows a woman walking out from her boss’ office and saying to a co-worker, “That’s the worst humiliation I’ve been subjected to this week.” Or something like that. We laugh, a little nervously, or perhaps wince just a little, because the punchline hits home. Or we breathe a sigh of relief, just in case our workplace isn’t one that subjects us to situations that provoke and inspire cartoonists thus. (It is not an insignificant feature of this cartoon that the workers depicted are women; for more on which, see below.)

For too many workers–whether blue-collar or white–the workplace is where you go to be subjected to behavior that you wish your family would never come to know about.  It is where you go to be subjected to naked exertions of power; in the American context, the workplace is where you check the Constitution at the door. If I had a dollar for every time I have had to remind my students in my Philosophy of Law or Social and Political Philosophy classes about this simple fact…well, let’s just say my kids would be able to afford Brooklyn College’s steadily rising tuition quite easily.

The worker who returns home, seething with barely repressed anger, which is then channeled into either intemperate expressions directed against loved ones (“Having a bad day, love?”) or in seeking the bromides of intoxication–‘A quick one after work to take the edge off?”–is a well-established trope of our modern lives. There is a reason why ‘going postal‘ is one of the modern era’s most distinctive phrases. Anyone that has worked for a ‘boss’ and by that I mean, you know, someone that bosses you around, knows why. All too well. Which brings us back to the cartoon.

Consider then, the following story:

Martha Reyes walked in the employee entrance of the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency to the sound of her male colleagues laughing. She believed they were laughing at her. It was “Housekeeping Appreciation Week” at the Hyatt and to celebrate, a digitally altered photo collage of Hyatt Housekeepers’ faces — including Martha’s and her sister Lorena’s — superimposed on bikini-clad cartoon-bodies was posted on a bulletin board at work. She felt humiliated and embarrassed. But she knew her sister Lorena — also a housekeeper at Hyatt — would be even more so. Martha tore the posters of her and her sister down.Then, with management present, a coworker told Martha she needed to return the photos. She refused and said if they wanted it back, they’d have to take her to court. Hyatt management fired Martha and Lorena just a few weeks later.

Martha and Lorena worked at that hotel as housekeepers for 7 and 24 years respectively….On the day she was fired, the HR Director told Martha she was an “excellent worker” and that there hadn’t been any complaints about her. Before the day Lorena was fired, she had never in her 24 years been written up for a single break violation….What happened to the Reyes sisters is just another example of Hyatt’s culture of disrespect for its workers: Hyatt housekeepers have high rates of injury, and in 2011 various state and federal agencies issued 18 citations against Hyatt for alleged safety violations. Hyatt has even lobbied against new laws that would make housekeeping work safer, and has made it a pattern  of firing housekeepers only to hire subcontractors everywhere from Manilla [sic] to Boston.

 If this story sounds all too familiar, consider signing the petition available at the link above.

The Fallacious Knowing-How, Knowing-That Distinction

Over at the Stone, Jason Stanley offers some thoughtful remarks on the fallacious distinction between the practical and the theoretical, or rather, between practical and theoretical knowledge. Stanley examines the case to be made for the dichotomy between reflection–‘guided by our knowledge of truths about the world’–and action–‘guided by our knowledge of how to perform various actions’:

If these are distinct cognitive capacities, then knowing how to do something is not knowledge of a fact — that is, there is a distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.

Stanley dismisses this distinction by way of considering and rejecting different ways in which a ‘bright line’ could be drawn between practical and theoretical knowledge (for instance ‘talking’) and concludes with:

The plumber’s or electrician’s activities are a manifestation of the same kind of intelligence as the scientist’s or historian’s latest articles — knowledge of truths….The distinction between the practical and the theoretical is used to warehouse society into groups. It alienates and divides. It is fortunate, then, that it is nothing more than a fiction.

I find Stanley’s analysis congenial, though I would collapse the distinction from the other direction. That is, I consider ascriptions of knowledge to be recognitions of practical abilities: to know a ‘truth’ is to bear a particular practical relation to the world, of being capable of interacting with the world in particular ways; of making some kinds of judgments and not others; knowing-that is a species of knowing-how.  To ascribe knowledge is not to recognize a special mental state, distinguished by some peculiar, yet-to-be-specified relationship with a proposition. Knowers are doers first and foremost. To know something is to be either doing or to be capable of doing (like making certain utterances and not others, for instance). A knower is distinguished from a non-knower by his actions, by his placement within a nexus of active relationships.

There are some advantages to thinking of knowledge in these terms. It makes more continuous the relationship between humans, animals, and other entities in the world such as sophisticated machines; animals can ‘know’ too, even if they cannot be understood as knowing propositions. To confine ourselves to propositional accounts of knowledge is to make human knowledge a singularity in the natural world; it means we cannot meaningfully make claims like ‘My cat knows the mouse is behind the door’ (or at least when we do it is by making a distinction between ‘animal’ and ‘reflective’ knowledge); it fails to acknowledge the cat’s particular interactions with its environment. It prompts meaningless questions like  ‘Who does the knowing?’ when it comes to ascribing knowledge to sophisticated systems such as robotic currency traders.

The long, protracted disputes in epistemology bear adequate testimony to the futility of trying to think of knowledge in excessively mentalistic and semantic terms. Thinking of knowledge as a species of interaction, a description of an agent enmeshed in his world and distinguished from others that don’t know what it does by its actions, clears up many of the puzzles created by traditional epistemology. This understanding of knowledge has its own distinguished pedigree in the history of philosophy, of course, most notably in Wittgenstein, Dewey and Nietzsche. Hopefully, I’ll be able to spin those views out a bit more here in future posts.

The Quantity Problem with Peer Review in the Sciences

Jack Hitt’s recent article in the New York Times touting the virtues of crowdsourcing peer review, of public comments on to-be-published or just-published scientific research, prompts me to offer a few thoughts on the problems in traditional peer review in a discipline—computer science—that I have had some exposure to in the past. In this post, I will concentrate on the forum for publication provided by academic meetings such as conferences or workshops.

First and foremost, far too much material is submitted for publication. There are thousands of  computer science conferences and workshops held annually. (This is not an exaggeration.) The reviewing for these events is carried out by the program committee, a loosely organized group of academics brought together to organize the event. Some members of the program committee constitute the original brains trust for the conference; yet others are invited to serve to increase the star rating of the conference—a conference’s quality is often gauged by the pedigree visible in the program committee—and to aid in the reviewing of conference submissions.

When submissions arrive, they are parceled out to the program committee for reviewing. In some cases, to ensure a more nuanced review, papers are assigned to more than one member of the committee; sometimes, however, a paper might receive only one review. This stage of the reviewing is often one-way-blind; the name of the author is known, but the referee remains anonymous to the author. In larger conferences, the reviewing is double-blind.

Academic schedules mean, inevitably, that the program committee member is over-committed: he has signed up for many academic events, and accepted as many invitations as he can, all in a rush to add lines to the CV, to increase his visibility in the community, to network. But now, conference submissions are in the Inbox, demanding careful, sincere, and honest review.

Unsurprisingly, the committee member is late with his reviews. The program committee chair sends out reminder emails; the harried committee member rushes off to review the paper,  gives it a perfunctory reading, and writes a brief summary and critique. This review is almost invariably a superficial assessment. Unsurprisingly a great deal of garbage gets past gatekeepers. Sometimes, the committee member with outsource or sub-contract the reviewing to a PhD student or a colleague.  PhD students can either very harsh or very mild reviewers; the former type bristles with aggression, eager to show off his newly acquired knowledge; the latter, diffidently taking his first steps into the professional academic world, hesitates to make critical judgments.

Sometimes a workshop or a conference will not receive enough submissions. Panic sets in among the program committee; the conference’s viability is threatened. Instructions go out to committee members: ‘Accept papers if they will spark discussion; accept them if they show some promise; accept them even if many call-for-papers guidelines are not met’. The conference is held; the less said about the quality of the papers presented, the better.

In computer science, publications in the proceedings of ‘premier’ conferences confer considerable prestige and are valuable additions to CVs; paper acceptances are a desired commodity. Interestingly enough, at the premier conferences, attendance lists are often made up of the usual suspects. This is partially ensured by the quality of the papers and also by the established authority of  the authors. Double-blind reviewing isn’t really ‘blind’; it is quite easy to determine the identity of authors by an inspection of the writing style, the  subject matter i.e., favorite hobby horses, sometimes even the formatting of mathematical symbols. (One research group always uses MS-Word to format their papers, as opposed to Latex; yet other uses idiosyncratic symbols for mathematical operators.) A not-so-confident reviewer, confronted with a paper written by an ‘authority’, holds fire. The paper makes it through. Yet another, knowing that this is written by an ‘authority’, lets it go through, because ‘it must be good’; others support ‘friendly’ research groups.

That last point brings us to the ‘paradigm problem.’  Fields of research often feature paradigms jostling for preeminence. Thus, reviewers are sometimes disinclined to favorably assess papers cast in the frameworks of competing paradigms but only too happy to enthusiastically accept those that show their own favored paradigm in a good light. Stories abound of academics who have experienced great difficulty in suggesting alternative frameworks to established paradigms that have cornered the market on conference committees and submissions.

Little can be done about the volume of research submitted for review. The modern academy has placed its members on the writing and publishing treadmill; like obedient children, confronted with the promotion and tenure process, academics comply.

But a great deal can be done about the reviewing process. More on that in a future post.

Note: This post is merely a cleaned up version of a post written on an older, now defunct blog (Decoding Liberation, named after the book.) I”m reposting it here because I wanted to reiterate my older worries, and to set up a preliminary to some soon-to-follow thoughts on crowd-sourcing peer review.

MCA Still Do What You Please

RIP Adam Yauch aka MCA.

I first heard the Beastie Boys in the late 1980s (via Licensed to Ill). Their sound was unfamiliar; their sensibility seemed to peg them as immature, loud, juvenile, trash-talking ‘wiggers‘ taking the piss out of rap. (What sorts of props did they have on tour? Girls in cages and a giant motorized inflatable penis. And yes, they wore giant clocks around their necks.) But their lyrics were still catchy:

Your pops caught you smokin’ and he said “NO WAY!”/That hypocrite smokes two packs a day/Man living at home is such a drag/Now your mom threw away your best porno mag

If Paul’s Boutique reinforced that sneak peek at their musical brilliance, then Check Your Head firmly established those credentials and made me into a fan for life. Easily one of the most innovative albums of all time, it conveyed an image antithetical in many ways to that of Licensed to Ill: sonically dense, endlessly varied, featuring a bewildering array of samples, vocal styles, instrumentations, and musical genres. Yauch is ever-present in the midst of that album-length display of technical and musical virtuosity. I played Check Your Head endlessly in my pickup truck while driving to Tennessee for Thanksgiving in 1992; by the time I returned from the trip, I had the track sequences memorized. I didn’t appreciate the follow-up–Ill Communication—any less.  I can’t think of any other trio of albums–Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head and Ill Communication–that quite so consistently coruscates. Hip-hop Heebs rule!

Yauch was one of those celebrities that I brushed up against more than once. In the summer of 1996, after returning from a hike to Point Reyes Seashore, I stopped off in San Francisco to meet a friend before catching my flight back to New York. We went to a Tibetan food restaurant to grab a quick meal and found ourselves sitting next to Yauch, clad in Tibetan garments and conversing with a monk. (My friend knew little about the Beastie Boys and was mystified by my reaction to Yauch’s presence.) Later, as I lived in Little Italy/Soho (Mulberry Street, between Prince and Spring Streets), I would often see him in a local Tibetan arts and crafts store, chatting with the owners. This sense of living in the Beastie Boys’ neighborhood was further reinforced by my finding out that the barbershop where I went to get my hair cut–just south of Canal Street on Lispenard–was featured in the photo montage on Check Your Head!

A year later, in 1997, when my brother visited the US, I took him to the Tibetan Freedom Concert that Yauch had been instrumental in organizing; we plonked down our money for a good cause; it was a siblings day out together, a chance to see a live concert, free of the scheduling worries of my brother’s vacation. Unfortunately, I had the dates wrong, and we missed seeing the Beastie Boys perform (we did see Sonic Youth though, some consolation). Little did I realize that it had been my best chance to see them live. I never did, a fact I regret bitterly to this day.

I hope the end came painlessly for MCA; thanks so much for all the good times.

Virginia Held on ‘An Ethics of Care’

Yesterday Professor Virginia Held delivered the annual Sprague and Taylor Lecture at the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College.

On a personal note, it gave me great pleasure to welcome Professor Held to Brooklyn College. My association with her goes back some twenty years, when I first began my graduate studies in philosophy as a non-matriculate student at the CUNY Graduate Center. My first class was ‘Social and Political Philosophy,’ taught by Professor Held. On her reading list, I saw four unfamiliar names: Carole Pateman, Susan Okin, Catherine MacKinnon and Patricia Smith. Who were these, I wondered, and what did they have to do with the ‘public-private distinction’ (the subtitle Virginia had added to ‘Social and Political Philosophy’)? As we were introduced to the syllabus, Professor Held skillfully handled some questions: Why were these readings on the list? Why not the usual suspects? I was impressed, of course, by her deft location of feminist philosophy in our canon and its importance in exploring the public-private distinction, but I was even more impressed by the grace and firmness that she displayed in dealing with contentious student interlocutors. During that semester, I had my intellectual horizons considerably expanded; after I had written my term paper on Marx and Feuerbach’s views on religion, Professor Held wrote a recommendation letter for me that secured my admission to the doctoral program. Thus was my professional career in philosophy launched. Twenty years on, now a professor at Brooklyn College, I was delighted to welcome the scholar that kicked it all off for me.

Virginia’s lecture was titled “Why Care”; it attempted to highlight the significance of developing frameworks for moral decision-making based on an ethics of care. The abstract for her recently released The Ethics of Care (Oxford University Press, 2005) notes:

Where…moral theories as Kantian morality and utilitarianism demand impartiality above all, the ethics of care understands the moral import of ties to families and groups. It evaluates such ties, differing from virtue ethics by focusing on caring relations rather than the virtues of individuals. [Held] proposes how values such as justice, equality, and individual rights can “fit together” with values such as care, trust, mutual consideration, and solidarity….[Held] shows how the ethics of care is more promising than other moral theories for advice on how limited or expansive markets should be, showing how values other than market ones should have priority in such activities as childcare, health care, education, and in cultural activities. Finally, [Held] connects the ethics of care with the rising interest in civil society, and with limits on what law and rights are thought able to accomplish.

In her talk, Virginia drew out some of the implications of such an ethics: for instance, the value it would ascribe to the maintenance of many significant personal relationships (such as mothering, which currently is paid a great deal of lip service by our politicians but is devalued by their actions and legislation) or more abstractly, the reconfiguration it might cause in our current notions of personhood, which consider persons to be highly individualistic, unitary, autonomous, rational entities, but which an ethics of care might understand as more relational objects.

This last part is of great intellectual interest to me; I intend to write on it in this space. Soon enough.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is Trolling For Hits

Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education Naomi Schaefer Riley launches a rather bizarre attack on black studies by way of ‘evaluating’ a handful of dissertations. This evaluation consists, not of reading the dissertations, as one might expect, but rather, by way of merely reading summaries/extracts/abstracts and then dismissing them out of hand. (‘Higher Education,’ I believe, has something to do with engaging with arguments and content.)

So, for instance,  Riley dismisses Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, ‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,’–which owes its provenance to Hayes noticing that ‘nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature’–by saying:

How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in “natural birth literature,” whatever the heck that is?

This, I must admit, is quite a spectacular effort. That sentence quoted is quite clear. Does Riley not know what “natural birth” is? In the surprising eventuality that she really does not know what ‘natural’ birth is, she could have looked it up; like, I mean, used the Internet or something like that. Perhaps a library? Indeed, had she gone to the Wikipedia entry for ‘natural childbirth’ she would even have noted some academic references listed at the end of the article. That, I’m inclined to think, is what the academic world terms ‘literature’; you know, the set of publications relevant to a research topic. (Note that Riley is not claiming that Hayes’ assessment of the attention paid to ‘nonwhite women’s experiences’ is mistaken by providing data, or pointing to articles that refute Hayes’ claim, or anything quite so cerebral. Rather, Riley just flat-out rejects the claim. I refute you thus, indeed.)

Riley then, who writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education, is grounding her critique of a dissertation by not reading it,  and by what appears to be a rather proud proclamation of her ignorance of a term used in its abstract/precis/description.

One’s immediate reaction is that this is like an audition for Dumb and Dumber, only it’s a little dumber than that, just because of the venue that she has chosen for her Olympian displays of knuckle-dragging.

But even as I write this post, I’m aware that Riley cannot possibly be so spectacularly stupid. She knows how to type; she has access to the Internet; she can spell. (I’m well aware that these conclusions might be contested but I think they are reasonable inferences to draw.) If that modicum of intelligence can be granted her, then there is an odd discordance with the line quoted above.

So, rather, I’m inclined to think that Riley, who as a blogger knows the Internet quite well, is trolling for hits. And I’ve fallen for it. She knows the rules of the ‘game’: you must be contentious; you must carve out a niche for yourself; you must throw red meat to the faithful who come to haunt your comments spaces; and correspondingly, you must seek to provoke those who would find your claims ludicrous.

Round 1 Riley. I won’t get fooled again. But The Chronicle of Higher Education? Is this what it’s come to? On current evidence, it would seem so.