Adam K. and I have been having a good old-fashioned Zizek brawl in comments. As Adam R. notes:"Ah, just like old times.”

But one of the fun things about Zizek brawls is learning stuff about Kierkegaard. So let’s reflect on Fear and Trembling. Adam K. doubts my claim that Kierkegaard’s concept of faith and the essence of true religion hinges on his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The obvious counter-argument: Fear and Trembling is about Abraham, obviously a pre-Christian figure whose story is related in the Old, rather than New, Testament. Adam K writes: “Isn’t it interesting, then, that Fear and Trembling doesn’t deal with the Incarnation at all?” But this is, I think, a misreading, albeit one that is quite understandable. In fact, Fear and Trembling is very centrally, but only implicitly, concerned with the Incarnation, and it is rather hard really to get what it is about until you see this. 

It’s that time of year again--you know, the time for “paying bills without money,” for “finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer,” and, of course, for re-reading A Christmas Carol. But wait: we all know (or think we know) A Christmas Carol. What about Dickens’s other Christmas stories? I’ve actually never read them, and I’d like to. I thought I’d start with “The Chimes,” which is short and appears, promisingly, to involve goblins. It’s easily available in electronic editions (here and here, for instance); some contextual information and the illustrations are available here. What about a miniature version of the Adam Bede project we did in the summer? I’m thinking I’ll post a reminder here in a week or so, and then somewhere around December 19 or 20, post a few comments and/or questions and see who comes to the party. If you think the story will go down easier with a little “Smoking Bishop,” here’s the recipe.

Claude Lévi-Strauss is 100; France honors him:

On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”

Meanwhile, The New Republic goes after Zizek:

Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but “in a curious inversion,” he characteristically observes, “religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.” And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek’s recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. “Everything is to be endorsed here,” he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, “up to and including religious ‘fanaticism.’”

Friends and I have been thinking of setting up an Adorno tribute band, to be called The Doornos.  Signature track: ‘Come on Baby, Dialectic of Enlight my Fire’.  Also on the playlist: ‘‘Riders on the Sturm und Drang’’, ‘(Horkheim) So Lonely I Could Cry’, ‘You Kant Always Get What You Want’, ‘(Frankfurt) School’s Out for Summer’, ‘Fromm Me to You’. ‘Polly Wanna Krakauer’ and, for the encore, ‘ I Just Wanna Be Your Teddy Bear’.  Conceivably we might cover Boney M’s ‘Ma-ma-ma-ma-Marcuse’.  Thank you, we’re here all week.  Try the veal.  Also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Turkey at the top is always intensely competitive. This year’s contenders included first runner-up Robert Felner, the U of Louisville dean indicted for conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in what the feds allege are repeated acts of embezzlement of grant monies amounting to over $2 million.  Not content with these escapades, Felner racked up 31 grievances and complaints in his 5 years at the “U of L” but was consistently backed against the faculty by upper administration, especially Provost Shirley Willihnganz and President James Ramsey, who spent extravagantly on lawyers and consultants to prop up his administration despite what numerous accounts (including this one and others that I’ve privately confirmed) termed an “onslaught” of complaints from faculty, staff and students alleging “unsavory behavior, ranging from sexual harassment to workplace intimidation.” This pair continued the authoritarian regime of wall-to-wall administrative solidarity and secrecy established by their high-living predecessors, former provost Carol Garrison and former president John Shumaker--later found sharing lavish hotel rooms and limousines at public expense, while jetting to trysts in the University of Tennessee’s private plane.

But every year only one can win. This year’s award goes to the chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, Charlie Manning, for his new business model for higher ed in his Appalachian state. Over the past couple of decades, the great state of Tennessee has burned millions of education dollars on executive compensation, sports facilities, and miles of orange carpet--while leading the country in squeezing its faculty.

Of course the “new” business model isn’t new at all--it’s just Chuck Manning refusing to let a good crisis go to waste.  It’s the same tired Toyota-management theory from the 80s, with wide-eyed managers and credulous politicians swapping bromides (crisis=danger + opportunity) of doubtful validity, linguistic or otherwise.

In the big picture of capital, Chuck Manning is just a low-level squeezer--the higher-ed equivalent of a regional manager for PepsiCo. The first half of the “opportunity” for higher-level squeezers and shareholders has already been realized, in the stabilization of finance-industry holdings and incomes. Chuck’s job is to realize the other half of the opportunity--squeezing a few more nickels and dimes out of his already-on-food-stamps faculty, and further watering down the thin gruel he passes off as “higher education.”

In the business curriculum, squeezing nickels and dimes until your workers are living on food stamps, loans, or gifts from relatives is called “long term productivity enhancement.” Manning’s ideas for good squeezing include:

+ Requiring students to take a certain number of online courses en route to their bachelor’s and associate’s degrees.

+ Turning online learning into an entirely automated experience “with no direct support from a faculty member except oversight of testing and grading,” and providing financial incentives for students to voluntarily accept teacherless education-as-testing.

+ Use even more adjuncts and convert the remaining tenure-stream faculty into their direct supervisors, “formalizing” that arrangement. (Can you hear me screaming “I told you so”?)

+Use “advanced students” to teach “beginning students” and build that requirement into curriculum and financial aid packages. (Again, I’m screaming. You should be screaming too.)

+Increase faculty workload, initiating a “students-taught” metric to supersede courseload, and “revise” summer compensation.

+Austerity for the poor--cutting athletics at community colleges, eg--but rewards for privatization and revenue-producing programs, etc etc. 

[Below is a modified version of a wrap-up lecture I used in an undergraduate class last week, closing out our unit on Ulysses. The class is titled “James Joyce and Modern Ireland,” and it is aimed at senior English majors.]

When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I took a class on Ulysses with a senior Joyce scholar who, in a pretty egregious example of a pedagogical faux pas, “required” us to buy two of his own books on Joyce and modernism from the bookstore. He also told us, via the course description, that he expected us to read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before the beginning of the term, which none of us ended up doing. I bought both of the professor’s books and never read them (recently, I finally threw them out). I also didn’t read Portrait of the Artist until around the time of my Ph.D exams several years later; my loss, for waiting so long.

Though my reading of Joyce was a revelatory and entrancing experience that fall, the class itself was somewhat of a disaster. For one thing, the in-class dynamic was quite tense, particularly around questions of gender in Joyce’s novel. As a rather radicalized, “politically correct” college student of the early 1990s, I was offended by Stephen Dedalus’ tortured relationship to women, a problem my professor wasn’t interested in (I didn’t have the tools to see that Joyce disagreed with Stephen as well). I was also bored by Joyce’s “mythic method,” and didn’t really know what to make of the dense grid of literary allusions and parodies in the novel. Early on, I got into some heated arguments with the professor in class, and then retreated into defiant (Stephen Dedalus-like) silence as the semester continued. By the end of the term, I had silently vowed that Ulysses was not going to be my “thing”; I ended up writing my senior thesis the following year on Salman Rushdie, and worked with another professor, who had taught me, brilliantly and engagingly, Borges, Barthes, and Octavia Butler.

Fifteen years later, the roles are reversed. Is it possible to do Ulysses with undergraduates, and get it right? That is to say, without boring them and overwhelming them with an endless proliferation of mythology, religion, and authorial hagiography? (The people who come to heap praise on James Joyce may not realize that they are in fact unwittingly burying him: Death of the Author by deification. Or should I say, deifecation?)
(Continued below the fold.)

Over there (or is it back here around the corner?) at ScienceBlogs John Wilkins, philosopher of biology, argues that the science in most SF is worthless:

...the sole virtue that SF might now have is that it introduces one generation after another to the value of science. So, does it?

Almost never. Few novels are accurate, but even fewer show science in a good light. Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. Arthur Clarke, despite the woodenness of his characters and dialogues, at least stood out in that respect - scientists were the good guys for him (and for a number of Eastern Bloc SF writers like Lem). But most SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.

He goes on to observe:

In fact, if SF led me to anything, it led me to religion, through the loss of which I entered philosophy. Mysticism in SF is widespread (Dune anyone?), and rational thinking is mostly honoured in the breach. But the dystopias of 1984, Brave New World, and the epic traditions Wells began, these are of lasting value, mostly for the reason that they do not involve science except as a deus ex machina (or should that be, as a McGuffin?) to get the story going. They are about class, political control, censorship, interference, freedom, and the classic concerns of literature.

(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)

Lil’ Wayne’s success has reached such a phenomenal peak that at one point, as I was about to turn the radio to a hip-hop station coming out of Boston, my friend could say “How about some Lil’ Wayne?” and be absolutely right. I can’t remember if the station was playing one of his songs or if it was a guest spot, and it doesn’t matter. Between guesting for everyone who makes anything even related to hip-hop or R&B and making a huge score with Tha Carter III, Wayne’s voice is everywhere, and it’s so distinctively hoarse that it seizes for itself—and also flattens—whatever sound is behind it.

That flattening effect is part of the reason Wayne has so completely overshadowed every other rapper around him. He doesn’t sing on top of beats. He eats them, makes them irrelevant.

After he was done being President, Teddy Roosevelt decided to unwind by going on safari in East Africa and blasting the living bejeezus out of everything he could find. Ostensibly, he was there to get natural history specimens for the Smithsonian, but his heart was really in the simpler pleasures of hunt. Whatever else TR was, he was a man who like to shoot things. A lot.

He also took his son Kermit with him, but other than dedicating African Game Trails to “My Side-Partner,” he’s interestingly reluctant to frame the trip as the big father-son picnic it was. Instead, he displaces the problem of the father-son relationship (which is a problem for him for various reasons) onto the African landscape itself. Teddy’s epigram kind of says it all: “He loved the great game as if he were their father.” Because nothing says paternal love like a bullet to the brainpan.

Anyway, I find this photograph of the pair incredibly great:

Scanning through the critical literature on Kafka—the dissertation finished, I’m free to pursue old ideas—I run into an essay which uses Theory’s Empire in the very manner the anthology’s critics assumed everyone would.  I will, however, Google-proof my exasperation by replacing all mentions of Derrida and things Derridean with cognates of the word carrot.  The essay begins:

The 2005 volume includes major reassessments of poststructuralist theory, notably [The Carrot’s] . . . . The emphasis on “undecidability” in Kafka can be viewed as symptomatic of the influence of [Carrot] Theory embraced by the American literary academy in the 1970s and 1980s . . . . But [lowercase-c carrot’s] skeptical effect undermined the certitude that Kafka was a politically important novelist. For its detractors, the [carrotist] view that there is “nothing outside of the text” ignores that texts like Kafka’s have shaped human lives and human history.

Reductive enough for you?  No?  How about this?

Wellek, who helped to introduce [Carrot] theory to American literature departments, now asserts that [carrots] have destroyed literary studies, while Frederick Crews argues that “[the Carrot’s] judgment that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ automatically precludes recourse to evidence.” In Crews’s view, “both [the Carrot] and his myriad followers think nothing of appropriating and denaturing propositions from systems of thought whose premises they have already rejected.” Thomas Nagel goes further in condemning “post-modern relativism” as a “quick fix” which puts reason to sleep. In Theory’s Empire, [the Carrot]’s language is described as a “maze,” a “prison house of language,” a “limbo of combined attention and nonassertion."

These assessments appeal to raw authority.  Crews and Nagel hate on [the Carrot] and rightly so.  Why?  Because [the Carrot’s] language is as empty and invidious as that of Kafka’s bureaucrats:

[T]o what degree do [the Carrot’s] rhetorical devices and ingenious language games resemble the language of the Courtiers who torture Joseph K.?

Care to guess what conclusion the author draws?  I take comfort in the thought that everyone will admit this is an awful appropriation of the thought forwarded in Theory’s Empire—that it is to academic argument what posts on Kos are to nuanced political thought—but remember that this sort of anti-intellectual response is exactly what the anthology’s detractors warned would follow if it ever gained traction.  While I think this falls under “the abuses” instead of “the uses” of the collection, I still feel the queasy creep of wrongness starting to settle in . . . .

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Colbert: “Let’s just classify belief in the free market as a religion.”

Hint: drag cursor to 4:40

I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for help with dislodging the market fetish, whether I’m talking to undergraduates or economists.  Some regular contributors at one of my other places have all been expending a ton of energy on recent posts like this one and this one trying to get finance prof “James” to loosen a white-knuckled grip on his Ronald Reagan prayer shawl. Without much success. 

So this one’s for Lucky Jim, drj50, Unemployed Academic, Joe Erwin, George Karnezis, Maria, “me,” “k,” angry, Annie, Henry C. Frick, Amanda Huggenkiss, David Yamada, and the rest. You know who you are.

Tonight we’ll let Colbert take a shot at explaining the relationship between voodoo and the business curriculum.

Teh Typealyzer is one of those interweb thingies that classifies things when you feed it some this or that. In this case, you feed it a URL and it tells you what kind of blog lives there. I fed it The Valve’s URL and it deduced that we are Thinkers: “The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.” I especially like that “far-reaching implications” part. Further, we “enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality.” OK.

Teh Typealizer also coughs up a diagram of the brain that’s shaded to indicate which parts we use when thinking Valvish thoughts. Color it worthless.

As for how it does what it does, David Beaver at Language Log guesses:

The Typalyzer [sic] seems to use a standard machine classification technique. Presumably the creators have created a little database consisting of example websites with classifications that they think are appropriate, then trained the classifier with these examples. Now the classifier gives instant classifications of sites it’s never seen before based, broadly, on how similar the new sites are to the old ones. It’s likely that the classifier is primarily using what’s called a “bag of words” technique. That is, similarity of one site to another is based on the relative frequencies of words used on the sites. Then based on the classification, the machine chooses which misleading picture to take from a vast database of misleading pictures. All well and good. If you’ve any faith at all in the psychological categories they use, then this is neat way to do cheap psychology.]

Seems reasonable to me.

Millions of photographs from the LIFE archive are now online through Google. It’s an astounding resource. Some searches on literary figures: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pearl Buck, James Michener, Mary McCarthy.

So submits Roberto Bolaño, in the universally praised 2666, about scholars like me.  He falls prey here to the Robertson Davies’ romance of academic life, in which even minor disagreements are elevated to shrieks against creed as red in claw as they are long in the tooth.  Scholars like myself and Bolaño’s “insignificant Serbian critic” argue passionately but ultimately purposelessly, for the “ideas, assertions, denials, [and] doubts” we don’t have are

free of any intent to serve as guide, [are] neither pro nor con, just an eye seeking out the tangible elements, not judging them but simply displaying them coldly, archaeology of the facsimile, and, by the same token, of the photocopier. (55)

That Bolaño flips Benjamin the finger here is obvious enough.  A work of art emancipated from “its parasitical dependence on ritual“ bobs on the restless and relentless tide of technological progress, degraded first by facsimile, later by photocopier, today by scanner, by email, tomorrow by technologies of reproduction yet to be invented. 

His academics drift aimlessly, a cult without a leader, dependent upon the ritual of reading Benno von Archimboldi (the author whose biography is as mysterious as his novels are spectacular) but incomplete without personal, unmediated contact with the him.

They coagulate into a cult and embrace its trappings, its curdled factions, apostasies, anathemas, the evidences of intellectual combat in extremis.   Their soft solid masses attend conferences devoted to German literature, chair panels in which their opponents counter their “festive, Dionysian vision of ultimate carnival” by “[speaking] of suffering . . . civic duty . . . [and] humor” (12). 

They do this often, eleven times by my count, across a Europe overteeming with conferences devoted to high modernist literature about which Bolaño only speaks of obliquely through a critical language emptied of everything but the academic clichés, brood references to solitary men and their signal women. 

When this sullen lot “[meets] their Moses” (23), a Swabbian journalist who once spoke directly to their absent father, Archimboldi, they discombobulate like jealous underlings: Pelletier (male) and Espinoza (male) bed Norton (female), ignore Morini (cripple), contemplate polyamory and redirect their incestuous agresssion away from their totemized father and toward the hapless Pakistani cabbie disgusted by the frankness of the conversation.  The cabbie confessed

that London was such a labyrinth, he really had lost his bearings. 

Had but the cabbie been aware that these well-dressed gentlemen were Freudian primitives he might have been prepared for the violence of their ugly surprise,

the hail of Iberian kicks that proceeded to rain down on him, kicks delivered at first by Espinoza [male] alone, but then by Pelletier [male] too, when Espinoza flagged, despite Norton’s [female] shouts at them to stop, despite Norton’s objections that that violence didn’t solve anything, that in fact after this beating the Pakistani would hate the English even more, something that apparently mattered little to Pelletier, who wasn’t English, and even less to Espinoza, both of whom nevertheless insulted the Pakistani in English as they kicked him, without caring in the least that he was down, curled into a ball on the ground, as they delivered kick after kick, shove Islam up your ass, which is where it belongs, this one is for Salman Rushdie (an author neither of them happened to think was much good but whose mentioned seemed pertinent), this one is for the feminists of Paris (will you fucking stop, Norton was shouting), this one is for the feminists of New York (you’re going to kill him, shouted Norton), this one is for the ghost of Valerie Solanas, you son of a bitch, and on and on, until he was unconscious and bleeding from every orafice in the head, except the eyes. (74)

Here my sad parody collapses before the force of Bolaño’s prose.  The slack parenthetical screams would sound forced or tinny were they deployed inexpertly or paced differently or not so damn distanced from the bloodied, beating immigrant body sprawled dumbly before character and reader alike. 

Not that Bolaño nails acadmic life, what with his hammer being fixated on imaginary prey, and what with his romantic obsession with authenticity and unmeddled communion of artist and critic, but a complaint about how he depicts the chill aftermath of Espinoza and Pelletier’s outburst must be lodged by actual academics, the ones whose breath is caught and heart broken with every blow, because if I beat some ignorant fuck near to death I tell you now it wouldn’t matter how ignorant or much of a fuck he was, it would take two  hands and a foot to count the decades before I could return to my “labors as fresh as daisies” or begin “writing and attending conferences again with uncommon energy” (85).  

P.S.  Not every post will fall to the thrall Bolaño’s prose quite so deep or earnestly.  I have a problem, I admit it, a desire to emulate clumsily what I read, but if I have any ear for tone, and I’m not saying that I do, it owes a blood debt to this compulsion.

(x-posted.)

Observing that James Bond is misogynist is like observing that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves: it’s such an important fact that it can be easy to forget how spectacularly obvious it is. I’m not going to say that the new Bond film isn’t misogynist—that’s a sucker’s game—but I want to start by observing something interesting about this new Daniel Craig version. Since Bond’s narrative arc now defines his character by the trauma of a particular loss/betrayal in Casino Royale*, the inherent misogyny of the character gets re-framed less as a natural attitude towards women (and thus a masculinity which implies an anti-feminine attitude) and more as a defensive, individual, and contingent response to that personal trauma. These two movies are, in other words, prequels in the most extraverted sense, for by providing a specific explanation for what has otherwise been taken for granted (and thus naturalized), they transform the misogyny of all the other movies. Or at least they do to the extent that we buy the fiction and let Daniel Craig function as a prequel for past Bonds.

In any case, Quantum of Solace is an interesting and strange Bond movie whether or not we let it retroactively re-narrate the franchise. After all, the franchise’s main misogynist institution is the “Bond girl,” the conceit that being a secret agent naturally implies having a lot of sex with a series of women defined by their replaceable uniqueness. To put it one way, this plurality is necessary to dis-imply any measure of personal attachment on the part of Bond himself, and to put it another, it’s a seriality that commodifies difference, transforming the “individuality” of each girl into the difference between flavors, like blonde flavored ice cream. More ominously, however, seduction in the Bond film has often suggested rape—especially when it involved “turning” enemy agents by overpowering them with sex—and the number of times it resulted in the women’s deaths is part of that logic**. The Pierce Brosnan Bond not only embraced this paradigm, it perfected it; I found it deeply disturbing when Pierce Brosnan killed Sophie Morceau in The World is Not Enough, and while you can partially rescue that film by emphasizing the extent to which it makes plain what is usually mystified, you can’t really argue that there is any alternative in the universe of those films. Women are a threat, increasingly the threat.

Quantum, on the other hand, adheres to this convention in a pointedly agonistic way. After all, there are two living Bond girls in this film, one who he doesn’t sleep with (and who is essentially his narrative double), and another who he kills by sleeping with, a guilt he both addresses as such and suffers from. In other words, both serve precisely the opposite function as we have been taught to expect of them: instead of using guilt-free sex as an expression of masculine power over women (and an expression of “free world” supremacy in the cold war), the main relationship of the film is a celibate one, and the other only illustrates Bond’s impotent inability to use sex in a constructive way.

Bond’s character arc within the film is therefore a progression from a position of hatred towards the woman he loved and who betrayed him towards a position of what the movie narrates as understanding, catharsis, and transcendence. At the start of the movie, he is a homicidal maniac who has displaced his rage onto the a series of similarly different bad guys—making every kill an expression of sexualized rage. By the end of the film, however, his choice not to kill the man who is most directly responsible, at the same time as he “forgives” the woman that this bad guy is in the act of seducing out of her duty, is an indication of narrative closure. Perhaps more importantly, a classic Bond movie ending involves having sex with the good Bond girl while headquarters tries (in vain) to locate him, yet this movie ends with Craig and Kurylenko having parted ways, and with (something like) this exchange between M and Bond:

Dench as M: “I need you back”

Craig as Bond: “I never left"

If the classic Bond ending emphasizes the simultaneity of sexual power and duty—and even subordinateds the latter to the former—then Quantum explicitly places sex in opposition to duty, and Craig sacrifices the former for the latter. And while so much of the Bond movie is a touristic fantasy of never-ending summer vacation in exotica, Quantum’s Bond chooses to “come home,” and go back to work.

It’s worth noting, then, that the ending is made possible by this willingness to be brought home, by M’s decision to trust him, and finally by his proving to be worthy of that trust. M is a mother figure—it even sounds like “mum”—and while his earlier response a threat on her life had been psychotic homicidal rage, the ending is a “happy” one only because his response has changed: instead of expressing the problem of attachment to a female by displacing it onto an object of violence, he embraces her. In this sense, M is by far the most important Bond girl in this film, or she would be if it were possible to call Dame Judi Dench a “girl,” which it is not. And this is the thing I dig most about the film: the most important female character in the film, occupying the space where the Bond girl usually goes, is a person who really explodes the series’ most cherished fantasy. While the Bond girl represents guilt-free sex, power, the fantasy of freedom from attachment, and an infantilized femininity, Judi Dench’s asexual M voices his guilty conscience as a powerful (and deeply respected) maternal figure he cannot disavow, and he denies ever trying to do so. What makes the Bond franchise most questionable, in my mind, is the thing this movie works the hardest to stand on its head. and that’s something.

Yet, all that said, I want to push the argument a little harder. After all, where is home? Who is M really? And what kind of work is it their duty to do?

Since I wrote my Shirley Temple post, I think I understand better what bothered me about The Littlest Rebel: not merely that the movie is racist, sexist, and pedophilic (again, importance makes us overlook obviousness), but that its address to these characteristics is explicit, and that it tries to exploit them. The Littlest Rebel is not a movie that hides what it is; instead, it takes pleasure in being what it is, and by mounting an argument that this pleasure is legitimate, it invites the viewer to take part, even moralizing on its behalf. The fact that this film becomes a source of affective pleasure in ways novels traditionally aren’t thought to be—with the key exception of, for example, the sentimental novel tradition—makes the particularly passivity of the movie-viewer an even more significant site of meaning; not only are we urged to sit back and enjoy the spectacle, but that very “sitting backness” of it is the thing itself. This is something I’m thinking about after reading the late great David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and I wonder if the general point he makes about TV and fiction doesn’t translate nicely into why I distrust Shirley Temple’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: filmic/televisual media have the power to affect us in exactly the ways Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted her novel to do, but which novels are less good at doing. Reading brings pleasure, but it’s an active one and you have to work at it (at least by comparison with film). What makes me so suspicious of a film like The Littlest Rebel, then, is that its medium and message converge: it doesn’t just teach you to how to be enjoy being passive, it does so as you enjoy it passively.

Quantum of Solace is not as different from The Littlest Rebel as one might expect. While The Littlest Rebel works to transform guilt into pleasure, Quantum is a movie that urges us to take pleasure in guilt. Or perhaps it’s the reverse? After all, The Littlest Rebel transforms the spectacle of the civil war and southern guilt into a kind of joyous subjection, but the more I think about it, the more I find myself disturbed by the analogous pleasure Quantum teaches us to derive from Bond’s guilt. A friend called this the most “Christian” of Bond movies, in a largely pejorative way, and I think he’s at least partially right: this is a movie in which there can be no pleasure without guilt, and the sprezzetura and panache of the franchise has disappeared (if you’ll pardon the expression) into a Bourne from which no traveler returns. As in the Bourne franchise, the special service suddenly stands revealed as an agent of disorder and tyranny, less the fun-loving defender of the free world than an economic hit man, a sin which Craig can only seem to expiate by (improbably) fighting against American hegemony on behalf of Evo Morales and Bolivian peasants.

Part of me both welcomes the change and sees why it was inevitable. During the cold war, the pleasure loving Bond always stood in implicit contrast with a pleasure-less totalitarianism, and even the Brosnan Bond managed to burden the character with an imperial “free world” hubris. No more. As Juan Cole points out, this Bond is a radical departure from those older Bonds in both ideological context and intervention; the “lurking presence” of George W. Bush “appears to have almost single-handedly pushed Bond into championing the indigenous peasants against the white-tie global elite,” and “Craig’s Bond is an intimation of the sort of Britain that could have been if Tony Blair had stood up to Bush and refused to be dragged into an illegal war of choice.”

Yet the many critics and fans who have complained about how un-fun this new Bond might have a more serious point; however ideological the Bond-as-jouissance fiction may have been, it’s a powerful one precisely because it only champions “The Free World” as the free world, less the Anglo-American axis as it was than as it was imagined to be, thereby positioning the better Angels of our nature against a totalitarian command to enjoy as little as possible.” Put ins such terms, I’ll take the better angels. And while I think we should be careful about how the Bond films naturalize a misogynist performance of masculinity, as Lauren Berlant pointed out some time ago, sometimes attacking hypocrisy has the effect of damaging the ideals in question; after all, does rejecting misogyny have to imply rejecting love as well?

This, I think, is the danger in taking the movie on its own terms, for while it explicitly attacks the pleasures of the old Bond films, it also revels in the darkness of this very vision, transforming the very guilt by which its sins are remembered into a pleasurable aesthetics of ascetic denial and righteous denunciation. And if the movie’s politics are anti-right, they aren’t exactly left either; as a commenter at Juan Cole’s blog rightly pointed out, it is a massive exaggeration to say that Kurylenko is “so organically a figure of the left that no distinction can be made between her private quest for vengeance on Medrano and the salvation of the pro-peasantry government of Bolivia.” In fact, she is the daughter of a good soldier within a dictatorial junta, “a cruel man” whose death has left her with no option but a pleasure-less revenge, nothing to fight for but self-denial followed by self-destruction (from which Bond saves her).

But Bond is in the same predicament, and it would be just as much of an exaggeration to make Craig’s Bond into an organic anything. While it’s true that he fights (at one remove) both against the CIA and in defense of a nameless Bolivian president, that president is less an Evo Morales who nationalizes industry and redistributes income than simply a bugbear used to frighten right wing children of all ages. As a figure of revolution and opposition to US hegemony, he has been emptied of his content, less a Che Guevara than a Che Guevara t-shirt. And a re-investment in M as embodiment of maternal virtue only helps obscure that Bond is still working for the same slime balls he’s supposedly fighting against, a valorization of an empty “duty” that will endlessly defer the problem of why. And this, I think, gives a new meaning of Bond’s lost love: “Vesper Lynd” is a pun on “West Berlin,” a signifier of the lost cold war, when things made sense. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bond’s jouissance no longer works in those old terms. “That Bush’s America now appears in a Bond film in rather the same light as Brezhnev’s Soviet Union used to,” as Cole puts it, is a loss that he can mourn but which he can never, quite, let himself understand. The same is true for his audience: we can enjoy denying ourselves the pleasure of empire, but only as long as we forget to think about the cipher that comes to replace it.

* As Erich Kuersten puts it, “One of the many things which makes Daniel Craig the best Bond since Connery is his pain. He’s aware of the lost sense of intimacy that came with having license to both kill and “be a sexual heel.” In that vein, you can find an interesting “Bond Blogathon” over here.

** As Lance Mannion puts it in his “Dame Judi Dench as the ultimate Bond Girl", “Bond Girls are eye candy, pure and simple.  Their role in a Bond film is to get naked, as naked as a PG-13 rating allows anyway, get laid, and then get dead.  They manage all three tasks efficiently by the single method of setting out to get Bond killed.  Either they are bait dangled by his would-be assassins or they are would-be assassins themselves.”

Many administrators are underpaid, but the faculty underpayment is ten times worse—and more consequential for student learning.

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In connection with the Chronicle’s Executive Compensation supplement, Sandy Ungar of Goucher College and I just appeared on NPR--and we agreed on most things. Sandy for instance described faculty compensation as “appalling,” and concurred regarding our over-reliance on contingent appointments. I argued that we needed to rebuild our crumbling faculty infrastructure, and that presidents should be held responsible for staffing arrangements that lead to scandalously low graduation rates.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now you can listen to the interview and read our commentary. 

Over at my other place I do a regular series of posts on my teaching. There are some explanations over there about why I started doing this and what I’ve gotten out of it so far. One thing that I particularly appreciate is the opportunity to write about the part of my job I like the best, and that takes up by far the majority of my time and thought at least eight months of the year. This past week was a particularly fulfilling one for me because in both of my classes I was teaching books I am really passionate about, so I thought I’d bring a little of that experience over here. In my first-year class, Introduction to Prose and Fiction, we started Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and in my upper-level class on 19th-Century Fiction, we were finishing up Bleak House. It’s hard to imagine books more stylistically different: Dickens offers a teeming overabundance of words, characters, and plots, while Ishiguro at once models and thematizes restraint and understatement. Yet both are immensely moving and humane; their artistry is both intellectually and emotionally demanding, and their beauties are at once aesthetic and ethical. If, as Leslie Stephen said, we “measure the worth of a book by the worth of the friend it reveals to [us],” both offer us companionship of an inspiring kind. Wayne Booth proposes we consider what “kind of desirer“ we become if we cooperate with the implied author of a text: “Is the pattern of life that this would-be friend offers one that friends might well pursue together?” The best literary “friends” are identified by “the irresistable invitation they extend to live during these moments a richer and fuller life than I could manage on my own.” (These quotations are from Booth’s The Company We Keep: an Ethics of Fiction, the only critical work I’ve read in a decade or more that I know has had a profound impact on how I imagine and articulate the task of criticism.) By these standards, I think both The Remains of the Day and Bleak House are among the very best.

More specifically, here’s what we’ve been working on in class.

I want to second Joe’s endorsement of Andrew Seal’s excellent Biographia Literaria blog: definitely worth your time.  But more specifically I want to pick up on Seal’s recent post ‘Some Advice on Reviewing From John Leonard’.  In the iterative down-the-rabbit-hole mode of blog links, this is to direct you to Seal’s link to Leonard’s review of Dale Peck’s collection of reviews (Seal calls the volume ‘execrable’) Hatchet Jobs.  Leonard mislikes Peck’s ‘smashmouth’ approach to reviewing, picking fights, calling authors who are trying their best ‘the worst author of their generation’ and so on.  Leonard wants more respect in reviewing, and Biographia Literaria agrees, quoting Leonard’s mild peroration:

First, as in Hippocrates, do no harm. Second, never stoop to score a point or bite an ankle. Third, always understand that in this symbiosis, you are the parasite. Fourth, look with an open heart and mind at every different kind of book with every change of emotional weather because we are reading for our lives and that could be love gone out the window or a horseman on the roof. Fifth, use theory only as a periscope or a trampoline, never a panopticon, a crib sheet or a license to kill. Sixth, let a hundred Harolds Bloom.

Seal: ‘I’m not sure what all of these mean, to be honest (horsemen on the roof?), but I understand the sentiment, and it is a corrective one, a valuable one, and an honest one.’ Is it, though?

(x-posted to The Kugelmass Epsiodes)

I utterly recommend the blog Blographia Literaria, if you aren’t reading it already. I just discovered it, courtesy of an interesting and kind (though ultimately critical) response to my previous post on summarizing theory.

Via that post, I found Andrew’s reflections on the television shows Mad Men and The Office, which, by incredible coincidence, I am watching concurrently while reading Andrew’s post on why one might watch them concurrently.

(More below the fold.)

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

College tuition is free; and executive salaries capped at 15 times the minimum wage.

The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of the New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.

It captures the gap between what is needed--what we hope and long for--and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.

The lead story narrates our exit from Iraq and inquiries into war crimes. Other stories note the passage of universal health coverage, not Obama’s fake plan, and Adolph Reed’s proposals for free higher education, which I’ve discussed in this space before, including a great video interview with Reed, recorded about a year ago.

Of additional interest to Chronicle of Higher Ed readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all executive salaries at 15 times the minimum wage. This means that in a society paying a floor of $10/hour, executives could still earn $300,000. 

As I point out in my forthcoming column in the compensation issue, though, public interest pay grades (military and civil service, eg) tend to keep the pay maximum closer to a multiple of 5.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and most state governors earn only about 5 times of the lowest-paid college graduate in their service, generally not more than 8 times more the lowest-paid 18-year old without any college at all.

In Reality, However
Meanwhile the real NY Times pimps one of the sleaziest Sophie’s Choice deals ever concocted by quality management (you know, the same people who have sold you the idea that you’re “participating” in management by getting to decide whether to take on more work or accept less pay).

Obama’s favorite schools superintendent, Michelle Rhee, is trying to break the union and teacher tenure in the public schools by offering a $40,000 raise to any teacher who will give up tenure. What they’re proposing is a dual compensation scheme:  a $40,000 raise for those on the new “green” track, and squat for those on the tenured “red” track.