One of these images strikes me as far better than the other. Which one?

(It's a T-shirt)

Scott’s loss—though it’s now been found—had me thinking as I read through Annie Kilburn this weekend. During the pivotal delivery of Rev. Peck's sermon, he claims:

There is an evolution…in the moral as well as in the material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once best ceases to be in that which is better.

This is really quite extraordinary, as is Peck’s argument moments later, “There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it.” He finds no anxiety because in contrast to the hypocritical churchgoers who profit by their relation to “monopolies...founded upon ruin” and that “prophesy the end of competition,” at least the evolutionist—the religious “sceptic”—even if his “words perhaps deny Christ” “affirm Him” with his “works.” For Peck, monopoly is just one more step to be churned in the dialectical process (though of course he doesn’t use that taxonomy). This is what separates him from the capitalist—who sees monopoly (or the elimination of competition) as a sort of telos. (Note that this also separates him from Bellamy [or Leete]—albeit in a different way—who tells us that monopoly was the solution, if we could only have seen it—it just needed to be controlled by the state. State capitalism! Too bad Bellamy didn’t live to see the Soviet version…) And this is Peck's twist on the scripture, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” Evolution equals resurrection and more life.

I am a doctoral candidate in the University of Texas's Department of English, writing a dissertation on class, language-arts pedagogy, and realism in nineteenth-century America. I teach in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing.

Here's one abstract of my dissertation:
A recent unit of my Intermediate Expository Writing (RHE 310) course considered language variation. My students read extensively in scholarship about Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English, discovering, for instance, that the Linguistic Society of America regards Ebonics as “systematic and rule-governed,” “fundamentally regular,” and, linguistically speaking, not in any way inferior to what we typically call “Standard English.” The students were persuaded that popular beliefs equating Ebonics with “bad English” are misguided, and they recognized that teaching Standard English as “correct” English or even as more socially functional reproduces the unfortunate, exclusionary, and factitious distinction between the “standard” and the “bad.” Nevertheless, these students overwhelmingly concluded that the best thing to do for Ebonics speakers, if they want to succeed, is teach them Standard English.

When I observed that discovering some practice to be flawed and continuing to do it anyway is not the traditional goal of education, my students expressed a feeling of impotence to change longstanding assumptions and habits about Standard English. Not only undergraduate writing students feel this way, but that they do presents us most immediately with a dilemma in the language arts discipline: as a precondition of conventional economic and social success, Standard English must be made available to our students, and yet in fulfilling our pedagogical mission, we help sharpen the distinction and increase the distance between those with access to privilege and those without. Hence the need for our discipline not to ignore the power of language standards in our culture.

In the season one finale, with Deadwood's annexation imminent, Al Swearengen struggles to avoid an outstanding warrant charging him with murder. Coming under the jurisdiction of the US government, Al would be subject to federal laws, whereas to this point, Deadwood has operated under a peculiar structure of lawlessness, which is no doubt structured, but structured in such a way that its absence of law in large part determines the structure itself. The following conversation between Al and the US Magistrate takes place:

Al: Did young Adams deliver my message...[that] as to bribing you further with help with that warrant against me, beyond the $5,000 you've already pocketed, the gist was "Fuck yourself."
...
Clagett: That would be imprudent, Al. A failure to properly value your freedom in the promising days ahead.
Al: Maybe you don't value keeping your fucking guts inside your fucking belly enough.
Clagett: Those are the days behind us.
Al: No, those are the days to my fucking left. [points to Dan Dority, his henchman]
Clagett: I didn't generate the warrant. My disappearance won't quash it. You can't murder an order or the telegraph that transmitted it. Or those that are content to put food on their table by being the instruments. It can't be done.

Originally a bribe was to take care of the warrant, but after the first payment, the magistrate extended the demand to make it an ongoing blackmail. Which is to say that though murder won't quash a warrant, money will.

But the real difference between Agamben and Marx is that the former would, I take it, say that the magistrate is right because the law, having been constituted by an act of sovereignty, can't help but continue constituting its own sovereignty (the indistinguishability of constituted and constituting power). Hence, the order (a power constituted by the sovereign) can't be murdered because it constitutes its own orders (telegraph transmissions). But this is only to focus on half of the magistrate's claim. The other half needs a Marxist analysis: what ensures the transmission of orders is the people who work for "food on their table"; it is the economic relation that determines the purview of power and guarantees its effective expression.

James Aune. Rhetoric and Marxism. Boulder: Westview, 1994.

In the United States, of all countries, no party could intelligently expect to carry its point without first winning over to its ideas a majority of the nation...
* * *
It was not till a rearrangement of the industrial and social system on a higher ethical basis, and for the more efficient production of wealth, was recognized as the interest, not of one class, but equally of all classes, of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant, old and young, weak and strong, men and women, that there was any prospect that it would be achieved. (Looking Backward: 2000-1887, 193)

Although there's something bizarre about opening one's writing by citing one work and immediately quoting from another, there's a strange appropriateness to doing so in this post. Jim Aune's claim in Rhetoric and Marxism is that if we try to identify Marxism's own "nuclear contradiction" (Aune takes the term from Alvin Gouldner), we can see the absence of rhetoric – its understanding of audience, appeals, and persuasion – as the fundamental cause. This isn't a surprising absence, given Marxism's emergence in an antirhetorical historical moment, but its result was "an implicit theory of language and communication that was an unstable mixture of romantic expressionism and a positivist dream of perfectly transparent communication" (143). And thus if we want to learn something about Marxism's failures (note that the book is haunted by the events of 1989), we need to take note of its lacunae, specifically its traditional refusal to adequately theorize mediation. The problem of alienation thoroughly troubles Marxist theory – consider workers' separation from the product of their labor, the human alienation from her species being, the very denial of the centrality of this "humanist" element in the division between the early and late Marx (or between Marxism and Humanism), the gap between theory and praxis, and what Aune cleverly terms the contradiction between "struggle and structure" (i.e., where's the place for agency if history is more or less determined?). Mediation is thus the need – and rhetoric just the remedy.

Wai Chee Dimock. "Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy." Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations. Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore. New York: Columbia UP: 1994.

Dimock begins by historicizing Marx's "epistemology": deeming it tinged by an Enlightenment faith in metonymy, in the belief that if we can know a part, we can generalize to the whole. Thus, Marx's materialism draws on that posited by Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke, meaning it enjoys "epistemological certitude" because the material is perceptibly verifiable. What Marx really had was "corporealism," which explains why society or community was for him like a body whose members were like parts serving a specified purpose for the whole.

I hesitate at this point because it isn't clear to me that by calling the community a "body," Marx is being metonymical rather than metaphorical. Nor is it clear to me that my distinction matters, except that generalizability is not at issue in metaphor as Dimock demonstrates it to be in metonymy.

In any case, if the social is a generalized extrapolation from what could be known about the individual body (and if Dimock's right, she catches Marx(ism)'s flip side of liberal individualism's coin) and, thus, the social is a body with corresponding parts, classes are essentially identities because they are merely names for characteristics "in" the bodies of their members. Dimock sees, in this preposition, traces of metonymical thinking, and thus the historical contingency of Marx's theorization of classes.

It being Father's Day and me being directly asked (actually, it was anything other than direct, but that's as much a story for another day, as it is typical) to attend church with my parents, which I hadn't done in a few years, I agreed to go. Now there are all kinds of things to say about this church, but I'll bite my tongue. Except on this point: the sermon consisted of reasons fathers should provide support for their families. (In fact, the pastor is partial to alliteration and anagrams to help his listeners remember his points, so what a father should do is Love, Lead, and Lift his family.) But the point of my post is the story about how one father didn't, and disaster followed.

To wit: Many years ago a young man grew up in a small German town, a youth dedicated to his synagogue. His father, a merchant, moved the family to a larger town in a predominantly Christian region and joined a Christian church. When asked by his son why he had abandoned the religion of his past, the father answered that it was better for business. The boy gave up his commitment to Judaism and later moved to London and wrote Das Kapital [seriously, he said it in German]. He said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses. And my father showed me that true belief doesn't exist." The boy's name was Karl Marx, and he went on to found a philosophy that would grow to control half the world. It would lead to wars and oppression.

Now apart from the wildly inventive quote, there's some accuracy to this story that impressed me. What didn't impress me was (1) the all-too-easy conflation of Marxism with global war and destruction and (2) the attribution of weakness to a father who basically did lift and lead his family (not to mention [3] the careless slippery slope along which Heinrich Marx becomes responsible for global disaster--but that's just my rhetorical objection).

O'Hara, Daniel T. "Class," Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

This morning, I finally got around to reading Daniel O'Hara's contribution to this useful collection. O'Hara wants to offer two (or one-and-one-half) interventions in the ongoing discussion about class as an object of literary-critical studies. First, he thoughtfully suggests we analyze our own class positions as academics—that is, the classes within our field, as well as our field's relation to other classes. O'Hara's gesture of turning a critical eye back on ourselves isn't unique (Phil Barrish finishes his first book, American Literary Realism, Critical Theory, and Intellectual Prestige, 1880-1995, by applying the Bourdieuean mode of analysis, which he supplements throughout, to representative literary-critical discourse of the 20th century; hence, the "-1995"). But O'Hara's analysis does produce some interesting results, such as an explanation of why fads of critical models reproduce themselves—in bad faith since they operate to the detriment of the vast number of graduate students:

Some notes on Michaels's method and argument in The Gold Standard

I have been reading Michaels along side Slavoj Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology, and several things about this juxtaposition strike me as noteworthy. Initially, Michaels's use of William James's psycho-philosophizing of the self seems jejune--if only because of James's historical position near the beginning of psychology--next to Zizek's use of Lacan (whose greater "sophistication" is probably mostly explicable by his more arcane writing). But of course, Michaels has deliberately chosen a contemporary of naturalism to illustrate his points. (For the same reason, he will use Josiah Royce in chapter 6.) But he never says anything like "these ideas were in the air" or refers to a sense of zeitgeist, so we have to wonder just what are "his points" in using by now outdated intellects to articulate the "logic of naturalism." I think the best answer to this question is to see that not insisting upon any universal status for his claims is merely a way of qualifying his argument. Nevertheless, he is articulating a logic of naturalism, and clearly William James is more useful for this purpose than is Jacques Lacan. Michaels's project is, after all, historicist, and thinking through this difference in method (between Michaels and Zizek) has helped clarify what should have been an especially familiar notion to me by now: what distinguishes the project of new historicism.