Cages aren't the problem

The UK Telegraph posts about protestors at the Copenhagen climate talks, along with a front-page photo essay by the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Huffington Post breathlessly tries to interview "the violent segment" (unidentified, other than to say that they're anarchists, they're dressed in black, and they're throwing rocks).






You'll notice, in both videos, that the protesters are covering their faces.

There's good reason for this -- among the many last-minute provisions passed in Copenhagen was one that made ski masks illegal (as well as any other headgear that would cover your face and prevent identification). Leaving aside the staginess of both protestors and police preparations (two weeks ago, an article titled "Copenhagen Talks Tough" bragged about the three dozen steel cages assembled to house the rabble), shit like this is something to worry about. It's not tear gas and riot gear that are the problem --- it's the expansion of surveillance, with its incipient denial of the most basic form of self-defense, the ability to protect your own identity.



The Copenhagen talks have been deliberately staged in the language of street warfare -- police checkpoints, gated buildings, cages and detention centers -- which largely a demonstration (lighting a car on fire and dousing it, to show off) At the same time, it has prompted an alarming expansion of police power: a law authorizing preemptive arrest, the arrest of Tadzio Mueller, and the banning of face masks, with the implication that protesters (peaceful or non) should expect their participation to be documented.




Legitimate protest is often, by definition, unsanctioned --- that's part of the point, and legislation passed to prevent the most basic form of civil self-defense (the obvious utility of carrying shields when police show up in riot gear, to the very basic right to protect your identity) is a pretty basic violation of civil rights. Activist groups have decried the Copenhagen protests as a human rights issue (arbitrary arrest, home invasions, cages in prison detention centers) -- but banning ski masks by non-violent protestors is a much more more malevolent turn toward police state -- not least, because it was so quickly legitimized by a parliamentary vote. The fact that it's pageantry is kind of beside the point. It's worth worrying about.

Shoegazing

When we ask students to do revisions, we point them toward specific sections -- don't try to revise the whole thing in one go. pick a section. choose ONE thing to fix. the idea is that if you do this, you actually get substantive revisions --- whereas if you ask them to take the whole essay in one go, they get overwhelmed --- too much to process, and so you get conservative revisions (sentence level changes) against a backdrop that remains essentially the same. Revision is about time management -- you assume that the student is going to spend an hour, maybe two, focusing on this, and then redirecting attention elsewhere. The two major constraints are length and time -- each paper is usually 5-10 pages, they're writing 2-3 at any given time. There's only so much time you can spend focusing on one thing in order to get them all done -- so you do them all superficially.

How much time does it take to read and respond? I'm surprised at how much longer it takes me to read a novel when I don't have a deadline attached. Structuring your day around the work you're doing --- giving yourself a schedule. My new task for myself is to write a 5 page paper in response to everything interesting I read. Photographs in Austerlitz. The Weatherman bombing, and how the Thinker lost his legs. Not just measuring reading attention (this is pretty much cued to the length of time it takes to skim Metafilter's front page), but measuring the amount of time it's comfortable to spend thinking and working through a coherent thought. It's not that long! I keep forgetting to tell my students this. It's always just a little shorter than I would like.

When you are sad, everything becomes a vacuum, cold dead air pushing toward yourself. You register motion but can't focus on anything. Sounds register, but they are barely audible -- you hear conversation in the next room, and, in spite of being filled with a prescient desire to speak, you lie in bed, wondering where the voices are sitting, relative to the speaker, wondering what the room looks like. The room is filled with dead air --- there's so much space between you and them. It's important to keep the space clear to avoid contamination.

Yesterday: A thing I couldn't do. Sum up world systems analysis in two sentences or less. This was really frustrating.

I'm halfway through Richard Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." I have a lot of thoughts on this -- in lieu of editing, I'll lay them out.

1) One of the major claims of the book is to relate "intellectualism" with "university" and "schooling" -- and to oppose this to unschooled, salt-of-the-earth common sense. He goes through a number of iterations of this (Methodist universities, Unitarianism, Jefferson, Tocqueville and the Sorbonne, next to Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, circuit ministers, etc). The differences is always, invariably, class-based --- "high church" vs. "low church," "gentlemen" vs. "professionals," "aristocrats" vs. "politicians" -- with the former having the benefit of a robust system of higher education.

2) For Hofstadter, this doesn't start with Jacksonian democracy, but with Evangelicalism and the low church movement, circa 1700 (?). McCarthy aside, he seems to be looking forward to figures like Jerry Falwell as modern variants of this split. What's interesting, though, is that this breaks down over access to education --- the argument of the Reconstruction Democrats isn't (or isn't only) that academic qualification is insufficient for practical political work, but that over half the population lacks access to it. Which is a problem! Hofstadter credits this -- he also credits a fundamental meanspiritedness, whereby, in lieu of advocating for real educational reform, the highly educated are held up for ridicule and namecalling, and effectively exiled to the far corners of political life.

I have thoughts on this -- on whether "utility" and "ineffectiveness" is a valid critique (a tangential issue), and, more centrally, on where the role of schooling and education falls in here. The other major -- and really cool -- part of the book, of course, is the roots between evangelicalism and Anglo-American intellectual life, which is something I'd really like to look into. That's all I've got to say for the minute, though.

It's quarter of eleven on a Saturday morning.

Library time!

I've been thinking a lot about "what kind" of writing I want to be doing --- whether I want to get back into thinking about journalism, of various stripes, or whether I want to start writing my dissertation. This sounds like a really pat, facetious thing -- of COURSE you don't want to start writing your dissertation! -- but it's actually a hard thing to think about. For instance: whether I actually want to get better at doing interviews? What other kinds of things qualify as "research" -- and whether I want to include them in what ultimately constitutes my "writing"? (oral history, yeah or nay!)

With that, I've been thinking about what to do with this blog -- whether I want it to be a place for publishing (my thoughts, short essays in development, writing of friends?) or whether I want it to be what it essentially is now -- a place for bookmarking random thoughts on what I'm reading. The trash bin operation -- the idea that you read and think X thoughts (which you write down) and subsequently prune into Y manageable thoughts (which you dog-ear for future reference, and hope you don't forget about). It's been marginally useful as the latter -- it'd probably be a lot more useful, on my end, if I tried to work these up into cohesive thoughts.

The idea, more broadly, for me, is how I want to think about writing as a process, in line with running workshops to generate branch income for Parts and Crafts (an awesome kid's education project a friend of mine is running). It seems like Working Text is a good corollary project -- a place for me to think about teaching, and to try out some ideas for group projects, seminar work -- all an excuse to get together and talk about work around the dinner table! Because I think I can stand to get better at my own writing -- but also because it's hard to do alone? Thinking about how to make this blog serve that project, I guess, is something I want to work on.

Any ideas? Help me construct my next life project! This, of course, is called crowd-sourcing therapy. Best answers will be posted on next week's show!

The Doctrine and Duty of Self-Examination

It's been kind of a rough couple of weeks -- so self-examination is on my mind in a really pressing way, lately. I came across this on the world wide internet -- it clarifies a lot of the stuff I've been trying to make internally consistent, vis a vis mid-19th century Dissent and under what circumstances the Evangelical "relation" (a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ) becomes a really meaningful thing.

This doesn't really cover it, but it gets at some of the main questions:

Self-examination is not calculated to quiet the conscience, to banish slavish fear, or to

remove doubts and apprehensions of our being unbelievers. When the mind is apprehensive of

divine displeasure and its consequences, we have for our relief, the testimony of God, that the

blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin. We are invited to draw near to the throne of grace for

mercy, and are assured that Christ will in no wise cast out the most vile who come to Him. If this

does not relieve us, God has provided no other ground of comfort and we ought to beware of

seeking such, either for ourselves or others. If this does not give us peace, it must be because we

believe not the record of God, because we are not willing to be indebted to free and sovereign

mercy alone. And in such a state of mind we need to be excited to fear and jealousy of ourselves,

and to be called to repentance, not to be quieted in our unbelief and rebellion

remove doubts and apprehensions about our being unbelievers. When the mind is apprehensive of divine displeasure and its consequences, we have for our relief, the testimony of God, that Christ's blood cleanseth of all sin. We are invited to draw near to the throne of grace for mercy, and are assured that Christ will in no wise cast out the most vile among us.

If this does not relieve us, God has provided no other ground of comfort and we should beware of seeking such. If this does not give us peace, it is because we do not believe the record of God, because we are not willing to be indebted to free and sovereign mercy alone. And in such a state of mind we need to be excited to fear and jealousy and be called to repentance, not quieted in our unbelief and rebellion.

The contrast, then, would be a state of predestination: the Calvinist death march presumption of Hell, where good intentions or acts are irrelevant in light of God's sovereign power. Here, it is sovereign mercy that exerts the force on personal will. What it does (I think) is remove the primary condition of doubt -- you are already guaranteed forgiveness, and so to ask for it -- or to attempt to earn it -- is an option that's already off the table.

In this case, notably, the power dynamic is still alive and well. Note the conditions on self-examination - that we are indebted, the submission to a higher will. In this case, what reinforces it is the idea of mercy -- not that you have been chosen, but that you are always already forgiven -- and that this commands a certain respect.

is not calculated to quiet the conscience, t

David Foster Wallace's essays on tennis, television, and the Illinois State Fair: I'd forgotten that yeah, these things ARE actually as weird as they first appear ("These things" - rote sporting practice, fear of tornadoes, the pressing desire to come home and watch Buffy, and the Maryland Horse Expo). Reading the State Fair essay, especially, feels like having a slightly worried voice in my head, rephrasing things I think and believe, and being substantially more panicked than I was at the time.

Less talking, more reading!

Starbucks and fencing

I'm home for the holidays, which means "going to Timonium" (i.e. getting in the car and keeping my parents company) in the daily run of grocery shopping, music lessons, and team sporting events. The weirdness escalates if you have, like me, let your driver's license expire, and so rely on your parents anyway to drive you to where you need to be. Caffeine, under these circumstances, becomes a dire necessity.

What I learned is that that for all its faults, Starbucks, like any other coffee shop, is really delightful in the evening when there's nobody there. Kind of makes you want to crack open a book, order a triple grande chai latte with whipped cream, and settle in for the night.

Post on Ivan Ilich

So I finally got around to reading "Tools for Conviviality," after a good long bout of irritability with deschooling talk on Metafilter. As expected, it's kind of awesome? In that sad, anti-climactic "the revolution didn't actually happen" kind of way. 10 second recap below!

First things first: Reading through "Tools," I'm persuaded (enthusiastically) that highly specialized tools have replaced ends with means, and that this is categorically a bad thing. Yes. Check. That it doesn't matter where the bureaucratic / administrative machine comes from -- it's a bad thing, and we should all be riding bikes!

So that's all well and good. But I'm confused about some things. Point 1: whether it's OK to buy the argument, but disagree with the methodology? The weird thing, I guess, is that it's not an economic argument -- it's the sociological side of Marx, I guess, that's being redone here? (this is where I kind of fall apart, so bear with me). Here's a quick gloss, for instance, on medical specialization as it relates to degenerating care:

Costly prevention and costly treatment became increasingly the privilege of those individuals who through previous consumption of medical services had established a claim to it. Access to specialists, prestige hospitals, and life-machines goes preferentially to those who live in large cities, where the cost of basic disease prevention is already exceptionally high. .... The higher the per capita cost of prevention, the higher became the per capita cost of treatment. The prior consumption of costly prevention and treatment establishes a claim to ever more extraordinary care.

And, later, on the Vietnam War:

Self-defeating escalation of power becomes the core-ritual practiced in highly industrialized nations. In this context, the Vietnam War is both revealing and concealing. It makes this ritual visible for the entire world in a narrow theater of war, yet it also distracts attention from the same ritual being played out in many so-called peaceful arenas. The conduct of war proves that a convival army limited to bicycle speed is served by the opponent's escalation of anonymous power.

Overgrowth, escalation, organic development. I get this, but I'm also a little confused -- it seems essentially to be an argument about overproduction, but one that substitutes a discussion of labor and production for one of organization and administration. Which...I get? Or I think I get? But I don't actually get.

In the process of trying to get it, I discovered Wikipedia's great discussion (complete with reading group!) on Ilich, deschooling, anti-credentialism here. But without the requisite crash course in Marxism, the hard economics of this are kind of lost on me. (not lost? the irony of needing the "requisite crash course") That's OK. I'm comfortable with letting this slide for the moment.

What seems a little hyperbolic, I guess, is the idea that overproduction becomes a self-perpetuating system: it begins with efficiency (better tools for more efficient work) and moves into senseless escalation (better tools create specialized roles, which require their own managed systems). Again, I think MOST of the problem here is that the economic argument is shifting into sociology -- it'd be useful, I guess, to look at how Marx, and see how the discussion of overproduction extends from that original argument. Does it matter? I don't really know.

Where this book is awesome -- and where it really delivers -- is on two points: 1) every place where Ilich compares American corporatism with the Soviet state. The point is that when you start talking about tools, rather than labor, the ideological systems become virtually interchangeable: they both tend toward administration, and will invariably substitute technology with better technology (accelerating the "ends for means" problem, regulation, and more management). 2) How angry he is -- and how angry he gets, progressively, through the course of the essay. Page 63:

In New York people with less than twelve years of schooling are treated like cripples: they tend to be unemployable, and are controlled by social workers who decide for them how to live....Ford produces cars that can only be repaired by trained mechanics. Agriculture departments turn out high-yield crops that can be used only with the assistance of farm managers who have survived an expensive school race...

Catastrophic development tends toward frustrated dissidence. That, among other things, is how we get to where we're going.

That's my summary of Ivan Ilich. Time for bed!

A Novelist and a Gentleman

(This is half-baked, but we'll run with it)

George Eliot, on Fielding:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those intital chpaters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe (Middlemarch 132).

Ford, with usual aplomb, cuts right to the chase:

The besetting sin of almost all other English novelists from Fielding to George Meredith is that they seem to cut their characters out with hatchets and to colour them with brushes of house-painters and never, even at that, being able to leave them alone, they are perpetually pushing their own faces and winking at you over the shoulders of Young Blifil, Uncle Toby, the Widow Wadman, Dick Swiveller...and the rest (11). (Eliot's not mentioned here -- but it's still a jab)

Elsewhere, Ford hews to the notion of a kind of objectivity -- a distancing from the moralizing voice, which Eliot seems to embrace too (her goal is to reveal, not explain - which Fielding, she implies, does too much of already). OK, check. But for Ford, the emphasis moves entirely from narrator to character, with Eliot's sympathetic narrator entirely off the radar. With Eliot, too, the emphasis is on discernment (on seeing)-- for Ford, it's style and craft (on making characters, rather than finding the right lens).

What's interesting here, in part, is that while Ford lingers on Fielding, he pretty much glosses over Eliot entirely -- the English novel, by his account, stops with Richardson, then picks up and moves to France during the entire progression of Whig politics until Henry James comes along. Fielding and Thackeray he dismisses as "nuvvelists," who care relatively little about their characters, but who "would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a 'gentleman.'" But what's his beef with Eliot? "Gentlemen" (or ladies) don't craft, according to Ford. I wonder if he would also say they don't observe?

That's all I've got.

On Thomas Babington Macaulay

From the Dictionary of Literary Biography on Macaulay's writing for the Edinburgh Review:

The Edinburgh Review was the quasi-official organ of the Whig party, and the period from 1825 to 1834--during which Macaulay wrote most of his reviews--was a politically acrimonious time preceding and following the passage of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Arrogance and invective were characteristic of the Edinburgh's reviewers as a group. In these years, Macaulay wrote twenty-seven articles--ostensibly book reviews but in fact wide-ranging essays on topics suggested, sometimes rather loosely, by the book under scrutiny. They are not today his most impressive writings, but they were the ones that established him both as a political and a literary figure.

Specifically, on the relationship between Macaulay (writing for the Whigs) and J.S. Mill (writing for the Radical party) circa 1830.

It was because of an article in the Edinburgh Review that Macaulay came to the attention of Lord Lansdowne, who in 1830 helped secure him a seat in Parliament through his pocket borough of Calne in Wiltshire. The first essay (January 1825) was an abolitionist argument on the West Indies. This piece was followed by other purely political works, including a series of three attacks on James Mill and the Utilitarians in general. The general line of argument was that Mill was too theoretical and insufficiently pragmatic, that he reasoned from a priori notions rather than from observation of fact. These three essays are important in that they constituted one side of a debate between the Whig Edinburgh Review and the Westminster Review, the organ of the Benthamite Philosophical Radicals or Utilitarians. In his Autobiography (1873) John Stuart Mill recalls his own role in answering Macaulay's objections to his father's writings but also admits that the Edinburgh articles helped modify his faith in his father's views.

Brainstorming session

Thinking about mid-Victorian reform movements -- how to categorize them, how to relate them to literature:

• Owenites -- important as a variation of socialism that predates Marx
• Bentham / Mill - Utilitarianism -- focusing on institutional reform
• Socialism to Fabianism - post-Marx, precurser to the welfare state
• Moral reform -- including low church movements, temperance, education (in my head, all aligned with Unitarian activism)

Things I need to define more clearly in order to answer this question

• New Poor Law -- first major piece of Benthamite legislation
• Christian Socialism - Maurice, Ludlow, Kingsley
• Ten Hours Movement (1847)
• Anti-Corn Law League (1846)
• Chartism -- as a comparable bit of working-class activism?
  

Clearly there is more reading to be done here. What I need is a good solid history to get my facts straight. But right off the bat, the literary question being something about literature's relationship to institutions? As opposed to a more personalized "moral" approach?

These are my thoughts so far.