One-Way Street

The Department

The MLA is coming to Chicago, and while I vowed to avoid it, last night I rashly promised my three-year-old son Ben that next week I'd take him on a train ride to downtown to see the "towers" (anything taller than three stories is a tower, and he loves them) and maybe the Shedd Aquarium to look at the clown fish and the sharks.  It's possible that I might bump into a Victorianist briskly confident that she knows exactly where the Arthur Hugh Clough panel is located or trip over a drunken comp lit grad student curled up in a little ball because he didn't get a job interview. So to remind myself of the world I used to inhabit, here's a dead-on satire of academic life in the form an Office episode, complete with a shaky video camera, awkward but meaningful pauses, and secret drinking. The setting is the poli-sci department at Harvard, but except for the matching chairs and better lighting, it could be any department in any research university in the country.

Now take away the shaggy hairstyles and that guy with the bow tie, and you're right back in the corporate world.

Eminent Postmodernists

The recent phenomenon of the starchitect has made the profession of architecture critic more interesting, and maybe a bit more glamorous, so it's little wonder that Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote a piece in last Sunday's New York Times Week in Review section defending the starchitect system. Ouroussoff argues that starchitects are, on balance, a good thing for architecture. Critics of the starchitect system complain that architects' shameless self promotion and Faustian bargains with large-scale commercial developers compromise the profession's artistic integrity and its connection to ordinary people. Ouroussoff reminds us that Renaissance artists knew how to hustle their skills, and commissions from major developers have allowed esoteric architects like Rem Koolhaas (photo above, taken by Robert Caplin for The New York Times) and Zaha Hadid to put aside their purely theoretical designs and actually build things.

Ouroussoff knows as well as anybody that overextended starchitects don't always produce sparkling wonders (see Frank Gehry's widely panned building at MIT), and he agrees to a certain extent with critics who charge that starchitects create buildings that exist primarily to call attention to themselves rather than serving humdrum needs like providing usable office space.  Ouroussoff provides his own example of Santiago Calatrava's "overblown" PATH station at the World Trade Center site, a curious position. When the design came out, I remember it being lavishly praised in the New York Times, among other places, as the only genuinely great design proposed for the site. (Speaking of which, where is the new World Trade Center? How's that Freedom Tower coming along?)

Except for his comment on the PATH station, I agree entirely with Ouroussoff. Architects don't have bigger egos than they used to; it's that the people who hire well-known architects have finally figured out that a famous name is an excellent marketing tool, something art gallery owners have known for a long time. However, reading Ouroussoff's description of the starchitect system I was reminded of the academic star system in cultural studies during the 80s and 90s. Theory, as it was generally referred to, consisted of the central trilogy of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, with a second tier of French thinkers: Barthes, de Man, Baudrillard, and Deleuze and a few others.  Radical in intention and formidably complex in expression, these thinkers inspired many imitators and exasperated a generation of graduate students. But once this generation of theorists died out--they were remarkably short-lived--a new generation of star theorists didn't take their places. This isn't to say there aren't a large number of highly intelligent and insightful academics working today, but they don't have the same star power as the great French theorists. The reasons for the decline of theory and its star system are complicated and still under debate. Maybe the humanities are leaning toward more democratic arrangements.

Many of the starchitects Ouroussoff mentions are men in their 60s and 70s. This group of architects won't be with us forever, and while there's no shortage of creative architects under age 60, one shouldn't assume that they will become starchitects with the international profile that Gehry, Nouvel, and Calatrava currently enjoy. Only one star system has lasted longer than a generation, and that's the Hollywood star system, which was in place by the 1920s. However, unless architecture as a profession is willing to commit itself to a star system to the extent the American film industry has, it's entirely possible that ten or twenty years from now starchitects will be remembered only in an elegiac tribute by a nostalgic critic. Call it Eminent Postmodernists.

On Reading Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson enjoyed a professional life many English professors would love to have lived, but he rarely, if ever, makes it on to History of Literary Criticism syllabi. Wilson wrote on anything he wanted to write on, in exactly the ways he wanted to write about them. He had the good fortune to come of age during the flowering of literary high modernism, and part of the pleasure offered by the new Library of America editions of Wilson's work is reading a first-hand account of American modernism as it unfolded. The first volume of the Library of America set opens with a remarkable essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1923. Fitzgerald had just published This Side of Paradise; The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were still ahead of him. Wilson begins his review with invective worthy of Dale Peck. Wilson comes close to calling his fellow Princetonian a functional illiterate and proclaims, "He has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without many ideas to express." Then, in a characteristic turn, Wilson tells us that Paradise "commits almost every sin that a novel can possibly commit; but it does not commit the unpardonable sin: it does not fail to live." That last assertion, "it does not fail to live," would be greeted with incredulous laughter in an MLA session, but Wilson's evaluation of Fitzgerald's prospects as a novelist was dead on.

Wilson also had prescient things to say about Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings, although he used a critical language closer to belle lettres than to post-structuralism. He's irritated by cummings's mannerisms (as I've always been), but his overall assessment of cummings's style is odd: Wilson says the broken lines and lack of punctuation appear "ugly" on the page. Wilson was an early champion of Ernest Hemingway--so early, in fact, that he's disappointed to discover that he wasn't the first American critic to review Hemingway's work. In his later life Wilson turned into a cranky misanthrope, but in the 1920's he was still susceptible to a celebrity worship. He pads his first writings on Hemingway with long quotes from letters Hemingway sent him thanking him for the early notices and promising to look him up the next time Hemingway was in New York. It's characteristic of Wilson to be star struck even before the novelist was a star.

We can't return to writing like Wilson did in the Twenties and Thirties. Only a person who had a nineteenth-century education in the classics written in dead languages would demand a novel have life. His highly opinionated and deeply felt responses to literary works have more in common with bloggers than professors--or newspaper book critics, for that matter. Reading the early Wilson is like an RSS feed from a blogger keenly attuned to an incomparably rich literary culture. He wrote with the blogger's freedom from institutional constraints with the man of letters' confidence he embodied a shared sense of aesthetic and ethical values. When literary modernism went into retreat after World War II, Wilson lost interest in contemporary writing, turning instead to the nineteenth-century literary culture of his youth. Consequently, his later writings failed to live.

Living the Digital Life

Remember the days before the iPhone? Some indispensable part of our culture arrives at the same pace Apple releases major updates to OSX. Google, YouTube, MySpace, blogs, and the iPhone all arrived very recently, and while it's easy for most people over the age of 12 to remember a time before they became fixtures in the culture, there's hardly any point in doing so.  Le mode retro, as the French called the vaguely historical style of the '80's and '90's, has itself gone out of style. Appearing immediately before the Internet became a ubiquitous force, le mode retro now seems to reflect a period in which we'd grown bored with the pace of technological change. Now that the pace has picked up considerably, people seem to be taking a more forward-looking stance. We're looking forward to the next upgrade in our culture's operating system.

But how do we define this moment, right now? Is Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism still of any help to us? Is this still a postmodern culture? Mark Poster's Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines isn't as ambitious as Jameson's landmark study, but Poster also attempts a symptomatic reading of contemporary culture in an attempt to identify exact what has changed since the days when we called information for phone numbers. Unfortunately, Poster is more comfortable reading Arjun Appadurai than he is surfing the Web, so he doesn't have many insights to offer about how life has changed now that we can watch The Office while sitting in our cubicles.

Poster's basic thesis about culture and politics in the age of digital machines is we're experiencing an intensification of the decentralization, deterritorialization, and flattening of the difference between high and low cultures that Jameson (and a whole lot of other people) identified as the salient qualities of postmodernist culture. His overall thesis isn't likely to send Cultural Studies students running back to the seminar rooms, but there are some useful insights in the book. Perhaps his most ground-breaking claim is that post-colonialism, as it's conventionally defined in the academy, is over with. The subaltern can now be found everywhere in the developed world, and she has a Gmail account. A claim with broader application is Poster's suggestion that culture is now "open source," which is a good way to think about how literary and film cultures are changing with the rise of the blogosphere.

Poster knows there's such a thing as blogs, but he gives no evidence that he's ever read one, or even done a Google search. His maladroit use of technical terminology is telling.  For instance, he insists on using the term "networked computer" to mean the Internet. While not every microprocessor is connected to the Internet, the networked/non-networked distinction isn't one that someone in e-commerce would make. Furthermore, Poster worries about things that aren't worth worrying about, such as private corporate networks. He warns darkly, "The massive flows of capital that course through the fiber-optic tentacles and radio waves are far more influential in undermining the power of the nation-state than the fledgling steps of netizen politics." Actually, the data that flows through extranets and other secure networks is the most regulated data on the Internet. It's your bank records and your medical files--the stuff you'd rather your fellow netizens didn't poke their noses into. The irony of launching into a discussion of identity theft only a few pages later is lost on Poster.

Granted, the academic publishing system (Poster's book is published by Duke University Press) is a hand-cranked press, and serious intellectual discussion about contemporary culture is tricky because insights can grow stale while waiting for peer reviews. The very few examples Poster cites from digital culture are actually pretty good, like the terrific Citibank ad campaign featuring ordinary people who appear to have made outrageously uncharacteristic purchases. Still, instead of devoting a chapter to identity theft, what about looking at a CEO's blog and comparing the identity constructed there with his identity constructed in the annual report?

What happens to us when we call up Firefox or open up Outlook? How can we describe the culture presented to us in a Google search? Is it fundamentally different than the one we watched on television when there were only three networks? Are our sentences still schizophrenic, our movies still made for glances, our music a collection of samples, our buildings citations of the past? Has YouTube changed anything important? These questions remain unanswered.

Virginia Tech and the Exhibition of Madness

The media coverage of the mass killings at Virginia Tech is following a depressingly familiar narrative. The first 24 hours were a mystery novel: who did it? Clues pointed to an Asian male around 19 years old. Someone who'd just arrived in the United States. From China, someone suggested. The solution to the whodunit mystery turned out to be more disturbing than the original speculation, which revolved around the image of a deranged foreigner. The accused killer is a 23-year-old senior named Cho Seung Hui. He'd come to the US as a grade schooler. He'd grown up in Virginia. On his arm he had scrawled the gnomic message "Ismail Ax."

And he was an English major. This shouldn't be so shocking, but it is to someone who still is, in a way, an English major. No discipline, of course, is any more or less prone to attracting psychopathic weirdos, but horrific nature of Cho's act is utterly contrary to the humanist tradition in which literary studies fits. This morning Matt Lauer interviewed Cho's poor creative writing professor, Lucinda Roy, on The Today Show. She had to read his deranged writings. She responded humanely but ineffectually. In keeping with The Today Show's lurid and mawkish approach to tragedies large and small, Lauer insisted on quoting from a play Cho had written--"Dick must die" and rantings along those lines--a passage that could have been pulled from a Mamet play. Naturally Cho isn't going to be rewriting The Sound of Music in his dorm room with a Glock in his desk drawer. I'm curious about what he read. What kind of literature speaks to a mind like Cho's? Had he read that great tome of madness and unreason, Mody-Dick?

Now that we know the identity of the purported killer, we're in the display of madness stage of the narrative. Today's edition of the Chicago Tribune carries the banner headline "A Monster Revealed." Two memes run through the accompanying story and most of the others I've seen so far in the press: implied rebukes of authorities for missing the warning signs and detailed recreations of Cho's physical appearance and his actions on April 16. Michel Foucault would have recognized both. In his newly retranslated (and newly controversial, judging from the reaction to my earlier post and commentaries from others) History of Reason Foucault discusses the exhibition of inmates European asylums, most famously Bedlam Hospital in London.  These exhibitions, Foucault wrote, "assigned to . . . madness a special sign: not that of sickness, but that of glorified scandal." In the eighteenth century "[m]adness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since suppressed."

According to Foucault the exhibition of madness was an attempt to control and ultimately banish unreason from civilization. He defines unreason as "reason dazzled," the experience of being overwhelmed by a contrary and repressed variety of reason. The Enlightenment banished unreason from everything but its art and literature--Moby-Dick, for instance. Not surprisingly, unreason can't remain repressed for long, and its reappearance still fascinates and horrifies us. That this violence broke out at a technical institution--in the engineer building, no less--is telling. The exhibition of madness allows us to locate the derangement of reason in other people. Otherwise, we might find it lurking within ourselves.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the Public Intellectual

Conservatives have been complaining for years that there aren't enough conservatives in the college teaching ranks. My immediate response: be careful what you wish for.  I've never really thought of conservatives as being actively excluded from the academy; rather, the academy seems like a natural place for liberals. To take literature seriously and hold the life of the mind in some esteem while growing up in the Midwest is to place oneself immediately in opposition to the smug anti-intellectualism of the American heartland. The irony of being a bookish liberal in the Midwest is reading canonical writers--reading pretty much any novels except Stephen  King's--marks one as one part dangerous subversive to nine parts ridiculous nerd. I can still remember the taunts from conservative business and economics majors, "After you graduate you can come work in our factories."

Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, says conservatives have been excluded from the academy because traditionally intellectuals have been distinterested, magisterially  removed from the economic and political interests of their times. To point out that this has never really been the case is to miss Bauerlein's point: conservatives have been successfully linked with power and money by liberal polemicists. Consequently, they've been excluded from teaching freshman composition for less than what a kindergarten teacher makes. Bauerlein's larger point is that conservative thought has a respectable intellectual pedigree that has nothing to do with the ranting of the Fox provocateurs.

Bauerlein is certainly right about the intellectual integrity of the conservative tradition. However, the disinterestedness part still needs some work. Bauerlein speaks in (mostly) admiring terms about Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. D'Souza starts his book off with Ann Coulter-like rhetorical fraudulence, blaming practically every Democrat who held office in the last 30 years for the terrorist attacks of  9/11. After this bit of red meat for the base, D'Souza moves on to what Bauerlein sees as the real value of the book. D'Souza claims that Muslims in the Middle East are offended by American popular culture and, as Bauerlein explains, "American culture is the expression of left-wing ethics, the prevailing whatever-floats-your-boat individualism." Of course, the prevailing whatever-fills-up-your-Tahoe economic individualism is OK, and certainly not to blame for anything that's going on in the Middle East. If D'Souza wants to ram through this hoary conservative tenet, then fine--he can be the one who tells News Corp they have to cancel American Idol.

It's interesting that Bauerlein choses to discuss D'Souza, a Hoover Institute fellow and known irritant to liberals, rather than a working conservative university professor quietly lecturing on de Tocqueville and Burke. Surely Bauerlein knows one. He takes Lewis Lapham--admittedly not the most balanced liberal commentator in the public sphere--to task for denouncing conservatives for setting up an alternative academy in think tanks and journals. Bauerlein's choice is interesting because Michael Bérubé, who Bauerlein cites as an example of a liberal with weak polemical skills, made his reputation as an advocate for a return of the public intellectual, that largely extinct figure who engaged in debate within the public sphere rather than the academy. Part of the defensiveness of liberal college professors is that conservatives dominate the public sphere. To a far more successful degree than liberal academics conservatives have reinvented the public intellectual. I could name a dozen professors wearily grading final exams right now who would trade their tenure for Dinesh D'Souza's book contract. Yes, more conservatives in the academy would balance out the political spectrum, but the academy shouldn't be the only forum for ideas.

The New New Brunswick

Rutgers University has named Enríque Norten of TEN Arquitectos as the winner of a competition to design an extensive renovation of the university's New Brunswick campus. Other entries in the competition came from Peter Eisenman, Thom Mayne, Jean Nouvel, and Antoine Predock. One would have thought Mayne would have been the winner considering his reputation for excelling at publicly-funded projects and working well with contractors, but the university chose Norten specifically for his willingness to realize his plans over time.

Although he's based in Mexico City, Norten is no stranger to the Mid-Atlantic coast. He teaches architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, and TEN Arquitectos maintains a New York office. He's currently working on the Brooklyn Library for the Visual and Performing Arts and a master plan for Long Island City. In a certain sense, Norten brings a heliotropic sensibility to the East Coast's post-industrial landscape, but it's more accurate to speak of his work as grounded in a global media acuity.

Herbert Muschamp once compared Norten to the Weimar German architect Erich Mendelsohn, with whom Norten shares a proclivity for sweeping lines and an interest in the impact of technology on aesthetic form. In his American work Norten's specialty has been weaving a new global space into the commercial jumble of postwar suburbs, which should offer a refreshing contrast to the standard collegiate architecture of neo-classical elements cut and pasted onto a suburban office complex body. Norten's buildings on College Avenue will have flowing forms enclosing hectic activity. Using the same metaphors of light for global media as Diller+Scofidio like to do, the translucent skins of Norten's structures will mimic the experience of information in the Internet age: rushing in all at once, construing ephemeral forms. It should be interesting to see how these effects work down the street from Old Queen’s.

Just Say No to the Student Bill of Rights

Uh oh! I should pay more attention to the alumni magazine. I see that in July 2006 Temple University adopted what it calls a "student bill of rights." When I was a doctoral student in the English Department in the 1990s Temple had a small but prickly band of conservatives in the student body. They were energetic enough on their own to push through this misguided resolution or policy or law or whenever it is. Nevertheless, David Horowitz, as vain and narcissistic as you would ever want a villain to be, has claimed credit for Temple's student bill of rights. "National awareness of the academic-freedom issue and the adoption by one university of a worthy student bill of rights bring to a close the first phase of my campaign," he writes. "I have achieved what I set out to accomplish."

What little persuasive power Horowitz enjoys rests on one truism: University faculties across America are dominated by liberals.  The reasons for this are too complicated to get into here, but they have nothing to do with any kind of conspiracy.  Even though the majority of university professors are liberal, there's an underlying conservativism to the profession.  After all, even the most militant far left liberals believe passionately in the life of the mind, the value of reading, and the importance of history--all convictions that conservatives also share.  No matter how much Foucault one reads or how many piercings one sports, there are standards to maintain, ancestors to pay tribute to. There's a little bit of Matthew Arnold in every professor.

As for the often-repeated claim that all these liberal professors are indoctrinating their students into some sort of Great Society groupthink . . .

The University of Chicago Arts Center

The University of Chicago is trying to shed its nerdy scientist image by building a new arts center on the Midway Plaisance. The arts center, which will be designed by a starchitect chosen by a competition, will pay tribute to the school's artists, who are themselves kind of nerdy: Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Philip Glass, Mike Nichols, and, um, well, some other people no one can remember right now. Northwestern University, U of C's rival on the other end of the city, is rolling its eyes.

"If someone said to me they were interested in being a theater major and asked me what I knew about the U. of C., I would say, `They don't have much,'" said Dominic Missimi, executive director of Northwestern University's American Music Theatre Project.

Nevertheless, the university has begun the alumni shakedown process to raise the $100 million needed for the center. (They've raised $1 million so far.) Last month a group of prospective architects toured campus. The group included Daniel Libeskind, whose Expressionist aesthetic is probably the closest to U of C's prim Neo-Gothic campus, Hans Hollein, Fumihiko Maki, Thom Mayne, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Considering the University of Chicago's geeky conservativism, it's safe to say that the final design won't be as pathbreaking--and image-changing--as Rem Koolhaas's McCormick Tribune Campus Center at the nearby Illinois Institute of Technology campus.

Love Lit or Study It, But Not Both

Thomas H. Benton has an interesting piece in which he argues that pursuing a Ph.D. in English requires that one give up the things that attracted one to the literature in the first place.

In a course I taught last spring, after three months of tracing the development of literary theory from humanism to structuralism to poststructuralism to the dilemmas of the present, I finally asked my students the question: "So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?" I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives: 

Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.

Feelings of alienation from one’s peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for a sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.

A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.

A "geeky" attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas....

This may all be true, but when I started graduate studies in English as a masters student, I was told the readers stopped with an MA and the scholars went on to get Ph.D.'s.