POVs R Us

by Timothy Morton, professor of English

Think of a perspective painting: it has vanishing points that tell you how to look at it. In some sense, the attitude the painting wants you to assume is already “in” the painting. In the same way, all statements (ideas, images, whatever) come bundled with implicit attitudes.

That’s the trouble with ideas in general: they code for how to think about them. Getting rid of one is harder than people think, because the attitudes they convey are not “in” your head—they’re hardwired into stuff “over there” like the shape of a Coke bottle or a language proficiency test.

We humanists (see, I used a bad word already) are in the business of making explicit the attitudes that come bundled with statements.

Once you have made an attitude explicit, it becomes something you are thinking about—in short, an idea. This idea then codes for attitudes of its own. So it looks like we have a job for life.

You can call the business of explicating attitudes many things: ideology theory, dialectics, archaeology of knowledge, memetics—whatever you like. We can argue about whether it’s counter-revolutionary, progressive, contemplative, praxis … Each idea about making attitudes explicit also has its own set of implicit attitudes.

For my money, a good dissertation is as explicit as possible a rendering of the attitudes that come bundled with the ideas under investigation, as little subject to time and brainpower constraints as possible. This is why a dissertation isn’t a book. A book is a product that must perforce be shapelier, and thus somewhat more implicit, than a dissertation. A dissertation is like a well loved teddy bear, covered with old vomit and with the stuffing sticking out of its ears: a well used transitional object that turns you from a student into an expert. The product is you, not a nice shiny book-like thing.

No one likes it (including us) when you mention the unconscious, so we don’t get paid very well. And we sew together these nasty looking teddy bear things. And we ourselves (let alone talk radio hosts) have a lot of resentment about our job and our position. We are also likely to suffer from the side effects of explication, such as thinking that we have seen through everything and no longer suffer from any side effects. But we should be proud of what we do (“Who is this guy? Has he no shame, no sense of irony?”).

It’s a bit old fashioned of me to quote William Blake: “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake was on to this explication thing when he wrote Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul—or, in my terms, attitudes that come bundled with things we think. Blake’s “experience” isn’t about knowing more things—“experience” is an attitude of disillusionment and cynicism that might be even more troubling than any particular idea it’s thinking. That’s why I always tell my students to put Blake’s songs in quotation marks: it makes it easier to decipher the attitude implicit in the lyrics.

We are also constantly told—by Them, whoever They are (sometimes They are us), that what we do is insignificant, in particular because it isn’t like science. This statement is of course a vector for a certain attitude: scientism. We should be in the business of studying scientism, and rigorously distinguishing it from science as such. Science means being ready to admit that you might be wrong, so scientists are prone to be on our side more often than not, as David Simpson’s post argued in another way. Even science and scientists, however, can be afflicted by scientism.

Humanists should therefore immediately:

1) Receive remedial math and science lessons to get them up to speed with Einstein, quantum theory, evolution and genomics (and so on).

2) Propose research projects to scientists. Don’t just study science, start telling scientists what to do!

1) will enable 2) to be well formulated, and it’s jolly good fun—and amazingly like the most non-essentialist humanities stuff out there. Come on in, the water’s lovely. And it’s too good to leave to scientists who like all of us are prone to carrying implicit attitudes around.

Humanists would make ideal framers of science research projects, just like Columbo makes a great detective because he asks irritating questions. This is precisely because humanists appear not to have anything to do with things that science discovers—things about shiny little ping-pong balls that exist outside your mind, over yonder, right? Humanists are all about subjectivity and nonutilitarian things, no? Isn’t our reflex on hearing such tripe—“Wait! Who ever said empiricism and utilitarianism were hardwired into reality?”—isn’t that just the right one for formulating a really good science research project? Put it another way. If you know how to ask an exam question that will get undergraduates to talk interestingly about Beowulf, you already know how to formulate a science research question.

We are in the attitude explication business, remember. So our questions will be designed to do just that. Here’s the one at the top of my shortlist:

Is consciousness intentional?

If I get a crack at doing another post I’ll tell you why it’s number one—he said, not very explicitly …

Why I am a Humanist

By Blake Stimson, Professor of Art History

Understandably enough, it is sometimes said that we humanists could learn a thing or two from our friends in the sciences. After all, not only do they have greater access to public monies and private financial opportunities, they also enjoy the promise of relevance. The hard sciences can reasonably aim for the likes of a mapped genome or a worldwide web just as the soft sciences can realistically hope to redirect government policies and global business practices.

In our pursuit of significance we sometimes turn toward the ideal of the “public intellectual” and away from ivory-tower academicism. As well meaning and historically resonant as this turn is, at times it substitutes the principle of public access for that of public interest and, as a result, turns away from intellectuality instead. In this regard, we might take inspiration from our colleagues in the sciences when they buck their own institutional vertigo. With greater potential for relevance comes greater temptation and complicity, after all, so lessons of valor and determination can sometimes be had from scientists who take a stand.

There are many from the hard side that we might refer to in this way, of course: Cold War visionaries like Einstein or Oppenheimer—think of the latter’s 1953 Science and the Common Understanding, for example—or digital-era oracles like Tim Berners-Lee and Richard Stallman, or our own recent spate of environmentally-minded muses. “Every generation has its philosopher—a writer or an artist who captures the imagination of a time,” Lawrence Lessig once said writing about Stallman. “Our generation has a philosopher. He is not an artist, or a professional writer. He is a programmer” and founder of “a movement for freedom in a world increasingly defined by ‘code’.”

There are certainly more in the social sciences but we might limit ourselves to bad-boy sociologist Loïc Wacquant as our case in point. Leaning on his tenure as a military strategist in New Caledonia, his stint as an ethnographer-cum-boxer on the south side of Chicago, and, not least, his intellectual birthright as a Frenchman, Wacquant rails against American “public policy schools and private think tanks which serve as intellectual glacis or ‘shield’ that protects political decision-makers from critical thought” and, even more, against American “researchers who see themselves as academics rather than as intellectuals.” Latterday Dreyfusards who “smell of gunpowder and strike fear into the hearts of deans” fight the good fight on behalf of the public by levying their “J’accuse!” across the scholarly Atlantic at latterday Taylorists rejiggering the knowledge industry for an evermore privatized world.

As tawdry and predictable as this posture is, the gist may still serve us in our time of need. The distinction intellectual/academic performs a very different function than public/academic, of course, because its measure of relevance is intellectual. Intellectuality here is a moral category more than a technical one and its meaning is pretty simple: it does not concern itself directly with reaching beyond the insularity of the ivory tower to a lesser-educated public outside but instead with penetrating the hard façade of social and scientific rationalizations of all varieties to the soft, under-represented realm of the human and humane inside.

When it is done right, this sort of inquiry—humanist inquiry—is not the private indulgence it is sometimes accused of but instead is the greater measure of public intellectuality. The danger of accessibility as a governing criterion is that it instrumentalizes or Taylorizes knowledge by disaggregating and compartmentalizing inquiry and communication. This is often just a practical matter, of course, but when accessibility becomes a principle at the heart of scholarly inquiry the common humanity that exceeds the formulae, statistics, concepts, identities, and catchphrases we use as expedient shorthand is threatened.

“The public sphere has changed beyond recognition,” sociologist Zygmunt Bauman lamented recently in a bit of common reasoning, “It is now little more than a playground of private interests.” The freedom born of that bygone publicness was our relevance—our genome and worldwide web, it might be said, or our business model and government policy—and remembering so summons that which the sciences still draw from us. I am a humanist because I hope for an inkling of what that publicness might once have become.

A university is like a university

by Keith Watenpaugh, Assoicate Professor of Religious Studies

In a recent proposal to the Gould Commission, which is charged with “developing a new vision for the University,” Berkeley physics professor emeritus, Charles Schwartz, asked that this new vision “reject the corrupting language [of business] in the University: the Market rules; the Entrepreneurial professor; Competition.” and instead use  “a learning community; a calling for teachers and researchers; a public service.”

It took a physicist to point out that in this moment words, and the ideas behind those words matter and what we call ourselves and our university has a role in the defining the unique value of who we are and what we do — and not just for the public, but for ourselves, as well.

At the core of Schwartz’ proposal is that if we conceive of ourselves as a business, drawing from the corporate world words to define what we do when we teach and do research, that we will rightly be perceived by the public as a business.  His point that this has a corrosive and corrupting influence on members of an academic community and ill serves the nexus of the university and the communities it serves is well taken, but more importantly, if we are seen as a business, then we’ll be judged as a business.

I’d rather our university be judged as a university.  The university is unique. It fulfills a basic human need to make sense of the world around us, and the university embodies our collective confidence that we can indeed make that world knowable. We don’t produce a commodity to package and sell to customers.  We serve the ends of that collective need to know.  And that is a good in itself, the “public” to whom I don’t think we give enough credit in these discussions also understands this, especially in the case of the University of California.

I bristle when I hear our students called “consumers” and what we teach them “products,” and the importance of “customer service.” Students are much more than consumers, they are students.  Again, it is a unique and special category that has no analogy in the world of commerce, nor should it. I’ve always thought that the root  behind the Arabic word for student, talib (also the root for Taliban) captures it better: it means someone who seeks, in this case knowledge, with enthusiasm.

In the end, if we use the metaphysical language of the marketplace to explain what the UC is, we’ll lose and lose big.  Instead we need to confidently embrace the uniquely human and humane thing we do.

Docenting for UC

by Simon Sadler, professor of art history.

I took a tour of the New York Public Library a couple of weeks ago. The tour group was immediately delighted by the docent. It was as though this spritely, bow-tied, bookish and ageless New Yorker had been installed in 1911 to reaffirm the sublime mission of the institution in perpetuity.

The anecdotes about the building and the explanations for its purpose flowed freely for an hour with a confidence as abounding as the true marble structure (no fake fascias here) that contained it. And yes, the effect was relentlessly didactic and proselytizing, the Depression Era murals on the upper floor explaining the advance of knowledge from the discovery of fire to the daily press.

Twenty-first century arts and humanities tend to take a less mythic view of our techniques of enlightenment, and marble is in short supply at the UC these days. Yet the UC system too is a sort of sublime, probably the greatest public university in the world and so one of the exceptional experiments in human history. It’s part of the Californian Dream. What a puzzle it is, mused Dr. Hanna Gray, former President of the University of Chicago during her recent visit to UC Davis, that more Californians don’t treasure the UC.

Contributions to this DHI blog all ask the question, how do we explain what we’re striving to do? Indeed. As I watched that docent at New York Public Library, wandering the corridors of a structure whose classical assuredness naturalized an undertaking so audacious, so radical, so expensive, that it would be ridiculed and create outrage if undertaken today, I pondered how we at UC can rehearse our story.

“Why are we paying for the Mondavi,” a colleague reports a recently-overheard faculty conversation, “and why is the Mondavi advertising on NPR?” If we don’t know the answer, we’re not ready to “docent” for the UC. Many faculty and students are stepping up to the plate this year to explain the bottom line on why public education is vital for our economy and for social justice. Is there also a way we can talk unabashedly about the top line, the improbable ambition of the institution, its libraries and labs and gardens and concerts, its saved lives in its hospitals and classrooms, unafraid of sounding elitist because the top line too is testament to UC’s splendid publicness?

Let there be light: not a bad pitch. Abstract. Benign, but grand. Secular, yet still echoing with religious thunder. It doesn’t short-sell the purpose of the UC. We are, however, feeling pressured to invent more positivist missions with greater customer orientation and more directly measurable outcomes—more bottom lines, in short, and fewer top lines.

Just as at the UC, senior administrators for the New York Public Library are working with consultants toward “reinventing” their institutional role.  None of that, though, seemed to have got to our docent. He unhurriedly recounted the lessons the New York Public Library learned from the other great libraries since Alexandria, and stories of readers who’d come in off the street, read economics books, and gone from rags to riches, and he recalled tales of immigrants who’d been allowed to read books in their own languages denied them in the countries they had left, and he meditated on the depositing of materials for research not yet imagined. And through it all he was cannily reminding us that a choice had been made, and was still being made, between wonder and disenchantment.

The Humanities and the Crisis of Everything

by David Simpson, a Professor of English

Those who were at Andrew Delbanco’s talk on the ‘crisis in the humanities’ may recall him modeling a classroom exercise in which the ‘big questions’ about life, death and moral responsibility were addressed by way of a passage in Herman Melville’s novel White Jacket. It was a fine example of some of the best of what goes on in humanities classrooms, and when you see it you know what it is and why it is valuable. But how do you describe this experience to those who want a short answer to the question about why the humanities matter? Somehow it always sounds banal: “we teach critical engagement with the difficult but compulsive questions about what it means to be human, about how to think about one’s life while one is living it, how to participate fully in a public sphere where citizens are empowered with decision-making responsibilities (everything from jury service to raising children)”, and so on.  It seems so much easier to say, as some scientists might say: “I am working toward a vaccine for swine flu”, or “I am on a team hoping to eliminate structural failures from the Bay Bridge”. No one doubts the value of these; everyone knows what is at stake. Commuters coming down with the flu have a double stake!

So, when Andrew was asked how he would ‘package’ this classroom experience for someone who was not present, for instance a senior administrator or politician, his response was that they (we) should talk to our alumni, who would testify to the value of what happened to them in their humanities courses. Surely this is right, and can do no harm. It has often been said that the ‘outcome’ of a true college education reveals itself twenty years later, when the person who was once a student reflects on the ongoing, realized value of the arts and of a critical training in the understanding of culture and cultures, and imagines how much poorer life would be without that education. But this is a very long time-line, and we are in trouble now.

For we Californians are well beyond a mere crisis in the humanities: we are in a crisis of everything. Thus many scientists will readily point out the limitations of a purely goal-oriented funding structure, one where only the outcomes we can predict are taken seriously while those that result from sheer curiosity and risk-taking will remain forever undiscovered because they cannot be justified in immediately visible payback. So ‘pure’ science is itself in trouble, and has been for some time. It isn’t just us. Has the time come when we should be seeking alliances with science (and even technology) rather than casting ourselves as the proverbial sister said to be too pretty for our own good?

We may be right to fear that in a time of very (very) scarce resources, humanities disciplines are likely to come under more stress than usual. The problem may or may not be with the public; my hunch is that the public is often very receptive to the ‘big questions’ and social concerns debates as we stage them in our classrooms. Our problem is also with our own administrative culture. In the UC system there are very few humanists in top decision-making positions, so that we cannot assume any pre-existing understanding of what we do and why we do it. And we do not have the one-liners ready to hand on the occasions when we get to speak, because one-liners are not what we do. So, by way of compromise, my one-liners have more than one line, but not (with one exception) too many more.

1. We do scholarship, not simply ‘research’. The traditional vocabulary of research is wedded to clearly defined outcomes. Our work may (and does) have outcomes, but they are often not predictable or singly-focused. They may generate as many new questions as answers. Just like science.

2. Our scholarship and/or research are directly related to our competence in the classroom, as well as to whatever comes out of them in the way of books and articles. The best teaching comes from those who are excited about their intellectual agendas. Scientists are no different. Those who are cynical about the ‘drift’ to research are dead wrong; think of it rather as a commitment to scholarship.

3. And why that word? Because the nature of humanities inquiry is a necessary blend of conservation and innovation. One is worth very little without the other. Scholarship catches this sense of innovating while conserving. Every one of us likes to be thought of as an innovator, but almost all of us need the library or some equivalent body of gathered/stored information in order to know when and why we see something new. It isn’t one or the other, but both. Just like science. (So defend that library of ours!).

4. Accreditation is important– not just a rubber-stamping of the willing workforce but a judgment about who is most suited for what. An A is different from a C, and not just because it might get you into Law School. Giving careful grades is an outcome with consequences, not just a ritual. An A should indicate that certain skills of diligence, expression and analysis have been reached. The same is true for science majors.

5. Like the scientists, we teach difficult skills: writing, painting, speaking and understanding a language, theoretical and historical inquiry, the testing of hypotheses.

5. The big questions? Yes indeed, we do those, and so do scientists like those chasing the Higgs-boson particle: an analogue of the seemingly impossible for us might be something like “why do (some) people do or write or paint or compose what they do?” or “what is the moral sense made of?”. Both science and humanities traditions are interested in the kinds of patterns human subjects impose on or derive from the world, in what makes sense to us as we stumble around in the dark. But here we also part company a bit. Our big-picture questions start in the sphere of culture and trend toward nature; scientists move in the opposite direction. Whether we do or do not meet in the middle is one of the major questions of our generation (the sociobiologists made their pitch, then the adapted mind theorists, and so on). Ecology exists at this interface, which has yet to be defined, if it can be defined. We don’t know yet. The ways in which we humanities scholars ask our questions are indispensable in a culture whose responsibilities and affiliations are global and loaded with consequences. To learn how to save lives, you go to medical school. To think about how we decide (or how others decide for us) whether or which lives are “worth” saving (scare quotes are a humanities specialty, and for good reason) is best done in a humanities, arts and cultural studies environment. But we’re on the same team, and it is called Team University. One without the other makes for an impoverished life and arguably for a disaster to come. And then there is joy, pleasure and wonder, which I have not even mentioned. Scientists feel that too.

I know, that is a very long one-liner. But let us stop (at least) one of three, fix them with our glittering eyes, and give it a go, side by side with our science colleagues. It is no longer about a crisis in the humanities. Those, believe it or not, were the good old days.

Where is pleasure in the humanities crisis?

By Karl Zender, a Professor Emeritus of English

Professor de la Peña has asked me to expand on a question I posed for Andrew Delbanco at the October 22 Public Intellectuals Forum, about the challenges posed in recent years to the term “humanities” and about whether the term continues to designate a set of values and beliefs widely shared by scholars and teachers of language, literature, and the arts.

With apologies, I’m not going to do this. Instead, I’m going to ruminate for a moment about another question I would have liked to have asked. As an emeritus professor of English, I no longer teach. But when I did, at the beginning of the quarter I’d often put the phrase “Literature is a form of _________” on the blackboard and invite students to fill in the blank. I wasn’t looking for the “right” answer—I don’t think that there is a single right answer—but sooner or later I would let my students know that my own preferred completion is “pleasure.” (Sometimes, if I was lucky, this would lead to a discussion of the difference between intellectual and physical pleasure, between literary pleasure and entertainment, and of the fascination of what’s difficult.)

So this is the question I would have liked to have asked: What role does pleasure play in the “crisis” of the humanities? What role does it play in the distrust of the humanities evident in those sectors of American society (and of the academy) unsympathetic to non-utilitarian education? What opportunity—and what obligation—does it provide for the enrichment of our students’ lives and for a deepening of their understanding of the world in which they live?

In the current economic climate, with students desperately wanting to establish a foothold in a world of dwindling opportunities and resources, enhancing students’ ability to experience pleasure may seem a frivolous objective, something easily jettisoned in favor of pursuits more fundamental to the hierarchy of human needs.

I don’t believe it is. The professor who most profoundly shaped my life once said to me that he would not have become a teacher of literature had he not believed that the need for beauty is as central to human existence as is the need for food, shelter, or clothing. Even in the concentration camps, he said, people made art.

In my own experience, this has proven true. I once wrote a letter to Dateline in which I said that literature had saved my life, in the sense of giving me access to an understanding of my existence more capacious than the somewhat straitened circumstances of my childhood and adolescence had allowed. A child of working-class parents, neither of whom had gone past the eighth grade in school, growing up in the hills of southern Ohio, I remember vividly the transformative power of my first reading of William Faulkner’s fiction about poor southerners. “Oh,” I said to myself, “beauty doesn’t just belong to rich people.”

In a sense, the pleasure that this insight offered me, and the pleasure granted me by the following fifty years of reading, links back to the question Professor de la Peña asked me to discuss. A bookmark popular a few years ago featured a quotation from W.H. Auden: “Some books are unjustly forgotten; no book is unjustly remembered.” As instructors, we now greet a student body many of whose members arrive at Davis with backgrounds as straitened as my own, but far different geographically and with far different ethnic and cultural content.

Our opportunity (and our obligation) as instructors in the humanities, it seems to me, is to honor both halves of Auden’s observation: to bring into our curricula materials, often formerly ignored, that speak directly to our students’ lives; and to help them see the enduring relevance of materials seemingly alien in time and distance. When we succeed in achieving these goals, we make available to our students, and to ourselves, one of the finest pleasures that human life affords.

The Romance of Pure Research

by Claire Waters, an associate professor of English

“Time to cut the public funding of this circus. And all the ‘research’ supposedly provided by these academicians, where and what is it?” [Reader comment, Sacramento Bee, September 23, 2009]

Nobel Prize winner Carol Greider said today that “winning the Nobel prize was especially significant because it recognized the value of discoveries driven by pure curiosity.” ["US trio wins medicine Nobel for telomerase," Nicholas Vinocur for Reuters, October 5, 2009]

The initial debate and disagreement that led to our recent protests was over furloughs, or over, in essence, whether research is worth anything, should be publicly funded, is worth doing. I think most academics would say that research and teaching are intimately linked in all kinds of ways obvious and non-obvious, and that to talk about one apart from the other is in some ways to falsify what we do. But since teaching’s value is more immediately obvious (in both economic and non-economic terms), as the Bee comment above suggests, I’ve been trying to think about how to explain why research is so important, and how I might convey that to people who find it easy to dismiss.

I’m teaching medieval romance to undergraduates right now, which has provided a strange contrast with what’s going on around us. But it’s also helped me think about research, because in a sense the central event of a typical medieval romance, the quest, is a model for research. In going out on a quest, the knight doesn’t go knowing what he will find. He goes to find aventure, adventure—a word whose Latin root literally means “that which will come toward you.” The knight has to be prepared and worthy for that adventure to find him, but he can’t determine what it will be, or what it will tell him, or where it will lead him. Strange as it may sound, medieval chivalric adventure is quite a good model for research; if you know exactly what you’re going to find when you go out looking, then it’s not really research.

And the aventure is not just what comes toward you, but the story you tell about it; the quest is not done until the knight returns to court and tells his story. Whatever changes and development he has undergone, whatever he has learned about himself and the world he inhabits, has to be brought back and relayed to others, to contribute to the larger good.

To assimilate research, especially university research, to medieval knighthood is to invite ridicule; talk about an ivory tower. But every culture imagines its own model for exploration, and research is essentially exploration: and exploration is not the province of the few. Exploration of the world in its various aspects is something that should be available to everyone. The fact that some of us do versions of it as major parts of our paid labor does not mean that it is not available to others; instead, I would argue that the fact that some of us are doing this in a focused way much of the time expands the possibilities for others’ exploration. I’m certainly grateful for researchers every time I teach something for the first time, or read a good newspaper article, or watch an interesting television program about something I know nothing about. And we’re all grateful for the advances in science, medicine, agriculture and engineering that make our world more knowable and welcoming, and help to preserve it.

All of these undertakings are related. We study ourselves, the world that produced us and surrounds us, the things we ourselves have created, and the realm of ideas. All of those things are interconnected, as we are reminded more every day. If we study only one part of that system, if we value pure curiosity only in some areas, we’re missing important pieces of the picture; whole realms of understanding and research could die off if we decided it was important only to study things that had immediate practical application, and whole areas of discovery that come about by researchers following their noses might never be reached. Research is the work to understand tiny parts of a huge system, manifestations of intertwined complexities that we can’t even fully imagine.

It seems clear that one thing we are built for, as a species, is to be curious, to explore, to figure out new things, including new things that are not obviously useful. How to do that in a more focused and productive way is one of the major things we are here to teach our students, and maintaining the worth of doing research, even when it is not immediately productive, values the curiosity we all share and should foster in ourselves and each other. To do research in one context—medieval romance, crystallography, labor economics, fluid dynamics, cell biology—creates a skill that will carry over into contexts yet unknown, as we go out to explore the world, and enrich it, and take the adventure.