Immanent Domain

Hubris & Hybris

“The common use of hubris in English to suggest pride, over-confidence, or any behaviour which may offend divine powers, rests, it is now generally held, on misunderstanding of ancient texts, and concomitant and over-simplified views of Greek attitudes to the gods have lent support to many doubtful, and often over-Christianizing, interpretations, above all of Greek tragedy.”

  The Oxford Classical Dictionary , Third Edition,  (1996): 732.

When I came across this a few years ago, it prompted the following realizations:

1. I had been teaching the term ”hubris” incorrectly for years.
2. I was in good company. Especially in the humanities, I still hear it used in the first, incorrect sense all the time.
3. That it was unusual that the classical scholarship about the term had not been more widely disseminated across other humanities, correcting the misperceptions summarized above.
4. That the current, incorrect use of the term, must be doing a lot of work. The incorrect sense must be useful in the humanities today.
5. That one of the attractions of using “hubris” at all is that it dignifies current attitudes with a snazzy genealogy (even if, as it turns out, that genealogy is false).
6. That the “over-Christianizing” interpretation of “hubris” reveals a lot about the residual religious roots that undergird much of the inter-presonal culture (though not the spiritual beliefs) in the academic humanities.

I wanted to write about hubris (in the incorrect sense), because it strikes me as the height of arrogance to assume that we as professors are somehow more ethical, or even more ethically circumspect, than our students.  My students face ethical situations I wouldn’t begin to know how to deal with, like the mother who informed me that she couldn’t make it to class “because my son’s been shot.”

But there is an older, more accurate use of hubris (which I, following some scholars’ practice, will refer to as “hybris”) that does apply. To cite the same entry from The Oxford Classical Dictionary: “it primarily denotes gratuitous dishonouring by those who are, or think they are, powerful and superior.” While it can also mean insolence from inferiors who "don't know their place," it more often denotes those who are determined to put or keep a perceived inferior in a subordinate position, "to put them in their place."

Is this not a more accurate description of what disturbs me? I have insight into my course's topic that students may lack. I am older than some of my students, though a pleasure of teaching at SOU is that this is often not the case. I have often thought about a topic in a more sustained and systematic way than many students.  I, to quote Gilles Deleuze on the value of studying philosophy, can call ideas by their proper name. But to assume that any of these make me some kind of ethical model for my students, an exemplar whom they should imitate to somehow become a better and more ethically-informed person, would be the height of, well, hybris. 

It's part of my job to challenge my students' beliefs, but if that's going to be more than some sort of theatrics where I've read the script in advance, I also have to respect that their beliefs have been functional for them. Certainly there are clear-cut exceptions where ideas (such as personal attacks on other students or their backgrounds) don't have a place in an academic setting. But I find those are precisely that, exceptions, and not part of some larger pattern where I am somehow ethically enlightened and students are benighted. The less we're putting things in their accepted places, the more enlightening things are likely to be.

House Pessimism

Lately I’ve been thinking about Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. “ Not Gramsci’s use, so much as how it functions in some circles as a kind of slogan or shorthand. Specifically, I’ve been asking when does this maxim cease to be a consolation and become an excuse, something which claims to preserve possibilities, to keep hope alive, but in practice forecloses both?

 I think Nietzsche is correct in identifying nihilism as, in part, the despair we can fall into when our hopes, and the worldview which supported them, turn out not to be true. If so, some left academic circles promote a nihilism that is no less bitter for its staid eloquences. 

The failure (and yes I will call it that) is neither one of intellect or of will, but of desire. Pessimism of the Intellect as the House Style of Leftism has always struck me as a strategy to keep desire at arm’s length. If desires are imbricated in larger structures of oppression, so the reasoning might go, best to renounce them entirely, or at least deny they have any hold upon you or your motives, or spend an enormous amount of time reflecting on their imbrications. Delay your gratifications, Bodhisattva -like, until the last injustice is righted and the last soul enlightened. 

Is this the best way to change the world, or simply something that epitomizes the very privilege that it seeks to renounce? The alternative for me, predictably enough, is in a different genealogy: one that runs from Spinoza through Deleuze and Guattari, right on to Hardt and Negri, who begin their book Labor of Dionysius: A Critique of the State Form thus: “This book is aimed toward the proposition of a practice of joy—joy in the sense of the increasing power of an expansive social subject.” 

Hardt and Negri have their debts to Gramsci, but they are light years away from how his quote is most often deployed. If culture is indeed a structure of feeling, shouldn’t we have more to offer than depression and obligation, however heroic we imagine that nasty combination to be?

The Ad Bombinem Argument

An old grad school trick. Instead of bothering to read an unfamiliar thinker's work, find out a single, supposedly damning objection to it. Then if the person comes up in conversation, say "yes, but" and jump straight to dropping the objection/bomb. 

This fosters the illusion that you are not only familiar with the thinker in question, but in fact more informed than someone who has read their work and finds it useful.

Schadenmoide /scha-den-moi-de/

Self-congratulatory bitterness, usually accompanied by a belief that one's misfortune and/or alienation must surely be evidence of moral integrity. Arguably an indulgent form of ressentimentality.

Cinema as a Sub-Genre of Painting

It's part of a careful argument, but here's the paragraph where Lev Manovich swings for the bleachers:

"the manual construction of images in digital cinema represents a return to nineteenth-century pre-cinematic practices, when images were hand-painted and hand-animated. At the turn of the twentieth century, cinema was to delegate these manual techniques to animation and define itself as a recording medium. As cinema enters the digital age, these techniques are again becoming commonplace in the filmmaking process. Consequently, cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting." 

"What is Digital Cinema?" (175) in the collection The Digital Dialectic edited by Peter Lunenfeld

I'm enjoying the details and qualifications in Manovich's argument, but the paragraph above already gives me a lot to work with. Because even if the statement isn't completely defensible (though it may well be), it can still illuminate a lot about contemporary film. 

One of my favorite moves I learned from Eve Sedgwick is to play "what if": What if we read the Scarlet Letter as an exploration of Chillingworth's hard-on for Dimmesdale? What if we think about Oscar Wilde primarily as a (racialized) Irishman? What if we think about a fag hag as a complex of desire and identification like any other identity, and not in terms of pathology or deviance from a norm? 

Make a move like this and you get right down to exploring interesting issues without getting gummed up defending whether or not its the only or the most plausible reading. Instead you conduct a kind of thought experiment. So what if we consider film as a sub-genre of painting? What properties of filmmaking today does that bring to light?

Getting Faculty Out of Advising

I was at a faculty meeting the other day where several of my peers found out that they would be expected to assume additional advising responsibilities. As I listened to the comments and complaints, I found myself reflecting on an issue that wasn't being raised, or even on the table: that they were being asked to assume additional responsibilities without additional pay.

Most academic discourse takes place within assumptions about education being an altruistic calling akin to being a missionary. Almost everything is discussed in terms of how it might benefit or harm students, and rarely in terms of teachers' quality of life or their rights as laborers. 

On top of this, there is often a cultural split between hourly wage earners and salaried white collar workers that discourages white collar workers from thinking of themselves as laborers. Perhaps this is especially the case in academia, where manual labor (and embodiment, especially teachers' bodies)  is traditionally viewed as being less important than the life of the mind. I suppose it's all in Plato.

There's a lot to unpack here, but what I'd like to concentrate on is advising, specifically the notion that it's a good use of faculty time and resources. Most full time faculty members complain about it, but I have heard few of them actually propose alternatives.

Well, here are a couple:

• Before the major, have well-trained and supervised work-study students do the advising. When it comes to specific general ed areas, have workshops where one faculty member from each area speaks to many students at a time and answers their questions.
• After the major in a school with graduate degrees. Train some graduate students to do the bulk of the advising. It will be a financial lifeline for the struggling grad students and look good on their CV when they apply for jobs. They can demonstrate that they understand how a whole curriculum fits together and what getting a degree in the field is like for an undergraduate.

This would take all the tedious book-keeping, the shuffling catalogs to figure out requirements and class schedules to figure out availability out of the hands of faculty members whose time would be better spent elsewhere. It would leave these tasks in the hands of people who do it far more often, better understand the problems and bottlenecks, and (if they are the right person for the job) don't resent it.

This would leave faculty members with more time to do what we're good at: advising students motivated enough to make an appointment. Advising them about the significance of the classes they might take, about the material we're covering, about what they want to do with their lives. Anything but book keeping.

This also would involve abandoning a key notion about faculty self-governance: the idea that as educators we best understand all aspects of the educational process. What kind of narcissistic grandiosity could sustain that illusion? There are aspects we understand with an unparalleled depth and commitment, and aspects we don't have the time, energy, stamina, or officiousness to meddle in. We should focus on our strengths, even if it means giving up an illusion of importance or control.

Analytic Arrogance

Judging by the web sites of many philosophy graduate programs, where the preponderance of students are working in "Continental" or even non-Western philosophy, this is may be a moot point. But looking back on Analytic Philosophy's long hegemony in the English-speaking world, it's hard not to notice a parallel with the arrogance of the English-speaking world in general.

Analytic philosophy erected a narrow set of rules as to what constituted "real" philosophy, and then huffily dismissed all philosophical traditions that did not follow those rules. Push an analytic philosopher on those (supposedly settled or self-evident) parameters themselves, and it calls forth all manner of ad hominem arguments, damnation by association, reliance on bluffer's guides instead of sustained readings of primary sources, and circular arguments.

The French sociologist Bruno LaTour summed up the gist of many reactions by noting that "among other things, I have been accused of being French." In other words, in typical English-speaking fashion, "being French" (at least after Sartre) was enough to disqualify a thinker from serious consideration. And the centuries long celebration of plain-speaking, beef-eating, English common sense as opposed to image-worshiping French foppery marches on. Might just as well rent "Henry V," since the tropes and insults are pretty much the same.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith does a fine job of dissecting these embarrassing moves by academic, analytic philosophers in her books Belief & Resistance and Scandalous Knowledge. But for me it's sadly reminiscent of the reactions many English professors trained in New Criticism had when they were first exposed to Continental literary theories, initially by way of comparative literature programs, forty years ago. Because different critical traditions didn't share the New Critics deeply-held but narrowly-defined and historically circumscribed assumptions, New Critics vehemently maintained those traditions were not engaged in "real" criticism. Two decades of petty malice and stupidity ensued until, quite simply, the New Critics hit retirement.

So as a disciplinary bystander who occasionally encounters those trained in the analytic tradition, it's a little surreal for me, like watching Civil War reenactors, and as if I happen to be standing not far from the Confederate lines, complete with sadly implausible heroic self-conceptions and desperate posturing. Adherents to the great lost cause, feeling that they've been unjustly deprived of what was their indisputable birthright.

Foster or Debunk?

"Why not hang up the academic hat of critical self-seriousness, set aside the intemperate arrogance of debunking--and enjoy? If you don't enjoy concepts and writing and don't feel that when you write you are adding something to the world, if only the enjoyment itself, and that by adding that ounce of positive experience to the world you are affirming it, celebrating its potential, tending its growth, in however small a way, however really abstractly--well, just hang it up.

It is not that critique is wrong. As usual, it is not a question of right and wrong--nothing important ever is. Rather, it is a question of dosage. It is simply that when you are busy critiquing you are less busy augmenting. You are that much less fostering.

There are times when debunking is necessary. But, if applied in a blanket manner, adopted as a general operating principle, it is counterproductive. Foster or debunk. It's a strategic question. Like all strategic questions, it is basically a question of timing and proportion. Nothing to do with morals or moralizing. Just pragmatic."

Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (13).

There's a whole philosophical undergirding beneath this: avoiding the resentimentality Nietzsche describes, a specifically Spinozan notion of joy and the politics that go along with it, a relentless critique of Hegel, etc. But I like the passage well just for itself.

So Many Colleagues, So Few Comrades

The other day, I jotted this down on a post-it: "most professionals wouldn't recognize their collective interest if it hit them on the head with a hammer & sickle."

The occasion was the thought of how hard it would be to get even a unionized faculty like SOU's to join the SEIU. That thought was occasioned by thinking about how much more professors (and other professionals like doctors and lawyers) increasingly have in common with blue collar (or in this case, adjunct) workers.  Don't have any sense of a way out of it, but describing the situation in new terms might be a start. Here's an excerpt from an older piece describing the trend:

Increasingly humanities professors are divided between a few stars with decent salaries and low workloads, tenured professors with large workloads, and adjuncts with little security at all. This arrangement is not uncommon in downsizing industries: celebrity CEOs, mid-level managers expected to increase productivity as there are fewer of them to do the work, and regular workers with less and less job security. A dismal job market makes it harder to complain because workers feel lucky to have a job at all and paranoid about losing the job they have.

The dilemma faced by most professors mirrors that of mid-level managers whose white-color status is at odds with an economic situation increasingly closer to blue-color workers. In the case of tenure-line professors, culturally they are encouraged to model themselves on academic celebrities, while economically their experience is shifting closer to adjuncts, especially in terms of underpayment for their workloads.

More on the Attention Economy

Here's a presentation I gave to my Digital Media students.