Panic on the quad?

What panic? The NYT has just revealed that people who teach in the humanities are concerned that no one wants to major in the humanities. And this is more than one more round of paranoid academic turf-war: it is an existential crisis. The fields are "irrelevant," fears Delbanco of Columbia. The NYT itself says, "the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents."

I would love more insight into the threats facing the humanities, but I'm not going to get it from one paranoid academic and one reporter making things up. Is it possible that the humanities appear so easy to ax because the fruits of our labor are impossible to describe to our audience? What is it that you get from the Creative Writing MFA? Isn't cultural studies just an alloy of low-grade lit crit, art theory and 20th c. French philosophy? Seriously, these dudes look like Early Christianity.

It's not time for the humanities to rethink their relationship to the job sphere: that's my task. Employers clearly want excellent written and oral communication skills, which every English major had better have. Employers want an ability to reason, a capacity for drudgery, the ability to summarize discoveries, powers of analysis, etc. The humanities is where you get that.

What the disciplines have to reassess is whether what they're doing actually qualifies as humanities-work. Students in the humanities are leaving with no frame of reference beyond their own lifespans, no history of Europe, horrific, genuinely hilarious "communication skills." I've sat in on art classes that boiled down to nothing more than "I think that idea, it's interesting." We're at the dead end of interest; no accountant cares what you're interested in, unless you make it important to him that he be interested.

Or, you know, in other words, if you play the shit that they like, then the people would come, simple as that.
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First Art Post Ever. Beware.

A quick hit, Kevin, and I'll try to make you aware of how totally fucked up the appearance in town of Christian Tomaszewski was. He's a Pole who works in video and installation. His main body of work is cardboard constructions derived from scenes in cult movies. Devoid of human actors, spare and clean, they are meant to delineate the "cold space" of film, said the man himself.

CT is tall and blond, in typical gear, black pleather jacket, black pants, etc., with an annoying habit of sucking on his face as he watches his own work. I couldn't tell from a distance if this was a smile or an uncontrollable tic. His English is probably as good as mine, and the proof lay in that in his answers to questions he always took the last two words of what you said and just riffed on them, without regard for the meaning of the rest of the sentence. It's possible that that was a coping mechanism for not having functional English, but selah. In either case, it made getting an answer a labrynthine process, full of hedges and diversions.

The work is about the space of film made real; except by CT's own admission, the particularities of the films don't matter, the filmic qualities might as well come from YouTube, and I'm pretty sure he's never seen all of Blue Velvet because his "clip representative of his working material" was an iMovie-edited montage of song sequences from BV.

In the original release, that we all saw in high school, we don't flashback to the scene at "Pussy Heaven," we just watch Hopper beat the crap out of McLachlan. CT was like, "I watched this film 138 times when I was making this." Really. I'm confused: is there a cult investment here, or does he just pick shit up off of YouTube and install it somewhere? Will we soon see a Christian Tomaszewski "Nora, the Piano Playing Cat"?

So that's just one beef: laziness masquerading as intellectual investment. It's bad enough when you do all this work and yet have nothing to say. It's worse when you front like you did all this work, and still have nothing to say.

To continue, in Tomaszewski's words, the work is a lot of effort for no purpose (except the filmic purpose stated above). It is practically about narrative (except no one knows what you mean when you say that; it's a scare phrase). There are no humans in the work (except that there are always humans in the work). There is just nothing at the center of this whirlwind.

So for all you other rubes out there who, like me, heard the words "European" and "Design" and saw visions of an upper-middle-class future and a subscription to Dwell, there's always the very classy Indianapolis Museum of Art...with a fantastically bad flash animation...

Also, check out CT at the Sculpture Center. This was to a word what he said last night in Columbus.

How is the title "On Chapels, Caves and Erotic Misery" anything other than kitsch? This could be some meta-joke about the vaingloriousness of art-making, its empty pomposity, but I fear Tomaszewski is serious, and that "Erotic Misery" is an actual, meaningful phrase for him, not something plucked from a random text generator.

The most telling thing last night was when CT alluded to "different narratives" in the US and Eastern Europe. He couldn't or wouldn't clarify, though he made certain to say he wasn't judging. (Seriously, my people are killing Pakistanis with space robots, and you think I care what you think about American narratology? Please.) But clearly, the things he finds serious (footage of contortionists, cut with drip torture, cut with a guy screwing in a light-bulb, like first year film school) other people have found hilarious.

I'm pretty sure this rules out the meta-joke possibility. Which means he's essentially remaking another montage of pilfered classics, "L'artiste est morte" by Jay Sherman...



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Revenge Via GoogleEarth

(photo: Wally Herger (R-CA) with a local beauty, as it were.) All blessings upon GoogleEarth's Congressional Districts layer for making sweet the meet assignation of blame...

Here are all the House Republicans whose districts contain MSAs with unemployment higher than 10 percent. Note the multiple nominations for California's Herger and Radanovich, and for New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo:

Connie Mack IV, FL-14, Fort Myers FL, 10% unemployment

Fred Upton, MI-6, Benton Harbor MI, 10.1%

Cliff Stearns, FL-6, Ocala FL, 10.1%

Ken Calvert, CA-44, Riverside-San Bernardino CA, 10.1%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Chico CA, 10.3%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, Vineland NJ, 10.4%

Adam Putnam, FL-12, Bradley FL, 10.5%

Thaddeus McCotter, MI-11, Livonia MI, 10.6%

Patrick T. McHenry, NC-10, Lenoir NC, 10.9%

Nathan Deal, GA-9, Dalton GA, 11.2

Greg Walden, OR-2, Bend OR, 11.3

Peter Hoekstra, MI-2, Muskegon MI, 11.5%

Harry Brown, SC-1, Myrtle Beach SC, 11.5%

Jon Mica, FL-7, Palm Coast FL, 11.7%

Kevin McCarthy, CA-22, Bakersfield CA, 11.8%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Madera CA, 11.9%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Redding CA, 12.2%

Frank LoBiondo, NJ-2, OCean City NJ, 12.4%

Don Manzullo, IL-16, Rockford IL, 12.5%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Fresno CA, 13.2%

George Radanovich, CA-19, Modesto CA, 13.9%

Devin Nunes, CA-21, Visalia CA, 14.3%

Wally Herger, CA-2, Yuba City CA, 14.9%

You may, dear reader, assign asterisks, forgiving those Congressmen whose districts are historically depressed (Bakersfield), or which are beachfront communities during winter (Vineland, Ocean City, Myrtle Beach, Fort Myers), or which are economically OK until they get lumped into the MSA of a big derelict city (Livonia-Detroit-Warren).

I of course choose not to issue exceptions. The MSA is a great indicator of city fabric. To isolate statistically Narberth from Philadelphia would be to ignore the real economic ties between the poor city and its rich suburb. Also, as to beaches and other exceptionally depressed zones, you'd think apathy toward his constituents' employment prospects would get a guy fired, period.

Make the dream real...
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No Title, Just Revenge Via Mathematics

Quick backfill: the other day I wondered how Eric Cantor got House Republicans, some of whom must come from depressed districts, to vote in lockstep against the stimulus. I wondered, specifically, whose would be the heads to roll in 2010.

An Ohio blogger has a list of local 'Pubs who voted nay, along with the December 2008 county figures for each. So the Ohio Up Against the Wall List runs as follows, with a national average unemployment rate of 7.1, the winners are:

Robert Latta, 9.8

Steven LaTourette, 9.4

Jean Schmidt, 9.0

Jim Jordan, 8.5

...with special mention to the most outspoken Ohioan, Minority Leader John Boehner, whose district sports a national-average-beating 7.7 percent unemployment rate. Congratulations, Mr. Leader!

I'm slowly processing names and numbers for the National Up Against the Wall list, using the available numbers from BLS, broken down by MSA instead of county. By and large, it appears safe for Republicans to oppose the stimulus. Think for a second about the states conservative Republicans come from now. Utah, Idaho, Wyoming -- these places all have terrific employment rates, 97 or 98 percent.

But the numbers don't lie. And I don't care what your Cook PVI rating is. Come 2010, we will ice you. That means you:

Wally Herger, California-2, 14.9% unemployment.

Devin Nunes, California-21, 14.2%

George Radanovich, California-19, 13.6%,

et alia. You are Republicans from districts with higher unemployment than Detroit. You have something like 21 percent underemployment. To sit about like the Pasha in grand decline, while your people agitate, this is the peak of foolishness...

Just a warning. Republicans, don't be a statistic...

Hang on to Your Tenure, Stanley

Stanley Fish channels Brian Wilson in today's NYT, hanging on to his ego in the face of reason, public disapprobation and I can only presume his own conscience.

His original target was a University of Ottawa professor who is alleged to have turned his physics class into a primer on political activism. Apart from the usual complaints, which Fish caricatures but never really addresses (Fish takes one example of excess to damn a group; Fish doesn't believe in freedom of thought; Academics don't have normal, mortals' jobs), let's remind everyone first that this is Canada, where the whole point of going to college is to become politically active. Insisting that academics act in line with "professional norms and standards," is not only repressive, but totally beside the point. Whose norms? Applied how? Where will we hold the conclave, Stanley?

More to the point, it turns out there are no "academic excesses" present for Fish to complain about, nor any for proto-Romantic critics of Fish to defend. There is no titanic struggle between liberal idealists and revanchist conservatives. Freedom, it turns out, is about careful, diligent, daily work.

Denis Rancourt, tenured professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, and avowed gadfly to the Institution, asked to change one of his classes from A-F grading to Pass/Fail. There are entire universities that do this in the states, in part to treat the perceived ill of grade inflation, but also to disassemble the edifice of classification/tracking in education, whereby, as Jacques Ranciere has explained, everyone has someone to look down on, A thru F. "We are creating obedient employees, but not people who think," says the prof.

The University denied the request, whereupon Rancourt gave out straight A's. The University then banned him from campus. He broke the ban to host a film screening on campus about political organizing tactics (forgive me if this is an oversimplification) and was arrested. Here he is, in a show of solidarity with one of his students, arrested for trying to film the University Senate.

So, in short answer to Stanley Fish, the facts you start with greatly influence the conclusions you draw. Surely Mr. Pop-PoMo knows this. Denis Rancourt does not see his freedom as anything other than, and certainly not better than, ours. Grading is a form of stultification. Even the idea that professors exist to "create" better thinkers -- a phrase Rancourt, I hope, was using as shorthand -- is pretty orthodox. Rancourt's whole point is to guarantee that the University is a functioning democracy, which is what the University itself avows. Academic freedom is a misnomer. Freedom is indivisible; we all have it by nature.

Now can we talk about responsibility? Fish argues that employees of the University are duty-bound to adhere to its rules and regulations. Let's leave aside the frequently proffered saw about "higher obligations." All Rancourt has done is throw UofO's regulations back at it.

Professors, to take one example, have to be permitted to grade independently; for the institution to lean on a professor, for instance, by banning him from issuing all A's, to "grade appropriately" renders grading meaningless. The institution could just as easily pick out students in advance, look at the normal curve, and parcel out grades irrespective of coursework. This is, again, to say nothing of the rank hypocrisy of an institution devoted to creativity, independent thought, etc., enforcing outcomes from above.

Rancourt goes to speak to his union rep. Having done that UofO police escort him off campus. This, in the States, would be a violation of NLRA; you can't punish workers for any speech related to collective agreements. Rancourt merely links to the standards and norms ratified 50 years ago by the American Association of University Professors. Police escort is to protect professors from possible violence, not to protect the University from its professors.

Rancourt self-evidently respects the responsibility he owes the University better than the University does. Academe is a calling, as all the proto-Romantics on Stanley's blog have said; it is also, for most of us, contract work. Rancourt is the only person in this whole debacle upholding the terms of his contract.

Finally, it's easy for Fish to paint Rancourt as some Bolshevik banging down the gates of the University, bent on nationalizing the "A-plus." Fish is at the pinnacle of a system that distributes greater rewards for seniority than for brilliance; that forces young professors into a period of indentured servitude known as tenure-track; that forces everyone else into a frantic competition for wage-slave adjunct jobs; that reinforces the stultification we all receive from our decade-plus of grade school, bringing the dictatorial power of the Great Master that we've all internalized back out into the open.

The inequity of the system is in-built. Young ones know this. You can either be for us, or against us. Hang on to your tenure, Stanley...
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Cantor / Gingrich

NYT today has a profile of new minority whip Eric Cantor, flush from his first victory, i.e. convincing House Republicans in tight districts not to vote for middle-class tax cuts, rebuilding schools, refubishing dilapidated bridges, etc.

Leaving aside the false comparison (clearly meant to keep us liberals cautiously optimistic about Democratic power, ergo, to keep the dollars flowing next election cycle) of Cantor to Gingrich, in which no one but the NYT believes, since Cantor is "more demure," "an ideas man without ADD," etc., Cantor has a harder row to hoe that Newt did. BHO has 66% approval. More white people voted for him than did for Kerry, Gore, or Clinton. Newt, contrary to his automythopoesis, was never in the "extreme minority." Cantor is. And his solution is to lead the party further into the desert.

In 2010, we'll find out if that makes any sense, electorally. Politically, there's no reason why it shouldn't work, and this is what gives me the fear. Politics is not about meeting in the middle to get short-term work accomplished; it is about staking out the position you want, and drawing mainstream thought thither. The right has mastered the art, they've done it all my life. The tighter the quasar spins, the more gravity is gains, until it collapses on itself and starts sucking in everything...

Meanwhile, can we get a list of Republicans who voted nay on stimulus, ranked by the unemployment rate in each's district?
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Hand What Over, Exactly?

Gershom Gorenberg at Foreign Policy appeals for an end to new settlement construction in the West Bank, and an eventual evacuation. He theorizes a tipping point for the West Bank, where longtime failure to swiftly deal with the settlers dooms any future attempt.

The settlers’ growing power makes it harder for any Israeli leader to act. The head of the Shin Bet security agency recently described “very high willingness” among settlers “to use violence—not just stones, but live weapons—in order to prevent or halt a diplomatic process.” He was articulating a country’s half-spoken fears: Withdrawal involves more than the social and financial costs of moving hundreds of thousands of people. It poses the danger of civil conflict, of battles pitting Jews against Jews.

I appreciate the irony of creating Palestine in order to save Israel, but Gorenberg's piece, to me, only reiterates the impossibility of a two-state solution. How much of the West Bank are Israelis to evacuate? Having -- presumably -- moved the radicals behind the wall, but still over the Green Line, and therefore having risked and overcome civil war, what are the odds of moving these same people again, this time into Israel proper?

More to the point, what exactly will Israel hand over, and to whom? If two states were mandated today, they would be Israel-behind-the-fence and a West Bank run by the PA. Gaza would be a "protectorate." Would this new Palestine have a port? Free air space? Access to water and to the ground beneath it? Without water and a port, it's a shit country.

Given that, wouldn't Palestinians do well to nix nationhood and instead to agitate for Israeli citizenship? You want to dissolve the checkpoints, the dual roadways, the fence, the settlers' compounds? Take Avigdor Lieberman up on his offer: loyalty oaths for all!

And I'm sure the hero of the Russian Street would oblige, so long as the Arab vote was, say 3/5 of the Jewish vote, and so long as Arab demands for work were confined to date-picking and goat-milking. This is the RSA. This is Muammar's One-and-a-Half-State Solution.

Still, agitating for Israeli citizenship sounds like a far better deal than trying to obtain a doomed-from-the-start nation-state. What Palestinians get at the end of any peace process is de facto rule by Israel, an economy totally dependent on foreign aid, and the final entrenchment of the corrupt political caste that got them there in the first place: in other words, the best case scenario is The Now, minus a few roadblocks and checkpoints.

And this is the parallax gap in Israel//Palestine: the only way for Palestinians to have a state is to give up on having a Palestinian state.

Mad King George

I find this weird. George Voinovich voted against the stimulus in committee, then dropped feelers like he could get on board, at the same time as he was huffing out of the negotiating room.

He's not running in 2010, he has nothing to lose for being this sort of heedless obstructionist semi-literate revanchist principled pol...well, he could lose lobbying dollars.

(Also, his need for "shovel-ready" projects? Funny. Once again, dollars spent on anything but those guys with the orange signs evidently just vanish through a wormhole. We need a way to talk about research and design in "shovel-ready" terms. Or just start calling things like first human trials of Parkinson's drugs, exercises in new math, green design, etc. all "shovel-ready." "This here is a shovel-ready algorithm, Mr. Senator.")

So who is Voinovich going to work for after his waiting period? Firms change with the tide, and, in case no one told you, Mr. Senator, being a Democrat is in. A willingness to compromise for the General Welfare would probably get you a job. Being a cantankerous old prick, not so much.
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The Shocking Toolness of Ben Nelson

Conservative Democrats have misinterpreted Barry Hussein's call to post-partisanship as surrender to the right. They do so at their peril.

Particularly the 8 or 9 Senators who hijacked the stimulus package this week, stripped 40 billion in education funding out of it, and then crowed on the floor of the Senate, with Ben Nelson (D-NE): "We trimmed the fat, fried the bacon, and milked the sacred cows."

Memo: this is not 1992. Big government is not over; really really big government has hardly begun. Ben Nelson will get on board now, or he will watch the unemployment lines grow.

Here's Ben on C-SPAN no longer really crowing. I can only pray that Rahm Emmanuel beat his ass with a big staff, right there in the Oval. Seriously, any money spent is money spent. Doesn't matter if you pay highway construction workers or MD's. This is Steven Pearlstein talking to Nebraska's freshman Senator, Mike Johanns:

Where does the senator think the $800 billion will go? Down a rabbit hole? Even if the entire sum were to be stolen by federal employees and spent entirely on fast cars, fancy homes, gambling junkets and fancy clothes, it would still be an $800 billion increase in the demand for goods and services -- a pretty good working definition for economic stimulus.

Democrats, we're watching you. The less you sound like Steven Pearlstein, and the more you sound like Herbert Hoover, the more shock and awe you can expect come the next election cycle.

A nation of fourteen-year-old Obama-heads will all be 18 by 2012, when Ben Nelson is up for reelection. So enjoy your breakfast, Ben, because the kids who went to the shitty public schools you vouchsafed them are going to steal your lunch.
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I Don't Need Your Sympathy

...says Bilal Khbeiz in e-flux. His points, in sum and therefore in caricature, are:

Westerners sympathize with victims in Gaza and Beirut at a mediated remove; this depersonalizes the conflict, and occludes, for example, the feelings of superiority that survivors of the shelling feel;

Sorrow, like Nietzsche says, is the crocodile tears of the mighty thanking their stars that they were not born weak. Removed from the conflict, the Western Left's compassion is worthless.

The various forms of "courage" displayed in the conflict are something the victims of the conflict never asked for. Ditto the sympathy.

Offhand, this strikes me as the kind of abstract, hair-splitting, namby-pamby, criticality-for-its-own-sake that is bound to land you a spot curating the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But that's not really fair, and I like the piece...

To begin, false consciousness / white left guilt / "catastrophe tourism" is the least of Gaza's concerns, isn't it? In America, as Khbeiz surely knows, sympathizers -- even we false-hearted colonialist sympathizers -- are hard to come by. Would he prefer to deal with bloodthirsty backwoods reactionaries? Perhaps; perhaps he's on a "radical honesty" therapy regimen. So, imagine a world without Left guilt checking, via the media, America's insane preoccupation with the preservation of Israel. Imagine the New York Times rooting Israel on. Would we have had Nicolas Sarkozy in country negotiating a cease-fire? Would we see George Mitchell as special envoy? I hate to sound like these measures are cure-alls; I know they're not. But imagine nothing at all happening. You don't need white guilt; fine, we'll just spend our time and money liberating something else. Zimbabwe, for instance. Or Sri Lanka.

Also, I'm waiting to see what benefit "survivor's glee" has brought to Palestinians. What is the political role of selfishness and opportunism? The man who happily clears the rubble of his neighbor's house is the one to be bombed next. What stops that? Show me the next ten words, beginning with Selfishness and Opportunism.

The false-hearted Western sorrow that Khbeiz so laments -- and which is so omnipresent in the States, or plain ubiquitous outside of Paris -- is you know a problem insofar as it exists. Khbeiz' problem here is that he caricatures the entire West as a (what, slightly more muscular, and frumpier?) version of the international art-fair jet-set. This is the same kind of myopia that obscures real people's suffering/joy from our Western eyes, and that Khbeiz is so eager to denounce. The West does not sit in committee at Art Basel Miami Beach. A joke/sham version of it does perhaps.

Returning to the point above, there are plenty of different kinds of Westerners, and lots of them would permit a completion of the Palestinian naqba as surely as the sun rises in the East.

Again, I'd like to stress that I find it hard to argue with a man who is in theater right now (I assume; maybe he's in Geneva and has mooted his own argument thereby). And the "catastrophe tourism" of the West, our occluded understanding, the scandals (in the Greek sense, lit. "a stumbling block") to our intellect, the glee of survivors, the pompous "courage" of Hamas' leadership chilling in Syria...all true, too true.

But people asked for this. Palestinians put Hamas in charge via free and fair elections. Hamas withstood Fatah storm troopers busting down people's doors in the night and regrouped in Gaza, only to find all trade blockaded, fuel held to a trickle, etc. Someone asked for an end to the siege: Hamas built tunnels; Hamas opened the border with Egypt via sledgehammers; Hamas got itself some human bargaining chips. All these things demand temerity at least. American politicians in the same circumstances would get themselves a sweet bribe from Israel and haul ass to Marseilles, on some shit like "Stopping those missiles. That's worth a lot of fuckin' money." You know, like Arafat did.

Hamas is responding to its constituents' needs, as any political party must. Their constituents need not to be bombed -- thank you Mr. Khbeiz for stating the obvious as if it were a revelation; what I've heard called "flipping the script" -- this is true. But their constituents also need not to live in a permanent penal servitude, and if that sounds familiar, it's because it's Isaac Babel, describing, obliquely, what it's like to be a Jew under the Czar.
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