tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59674769039912594702024-03-06T00:32:35.539-05:00Works CitedNatalia Cecire's blogNataliahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07898457401179147102noreply@blogger.comBlogger604125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-2829624697334985382014-08-25T12:18:00.002-04:002014-08-25T12:18:37.630-04:00Well, it's been a good seven years on this janky Blogger blog, but I've finally decided to move to a minimally less janky site. <a href="http://natalia.cecire.org/works-cited/">Here it is.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-9660550263818564532014-08-21T18:45:00.002-04:002014-08-21T18:45:19.849-04:00[Y'all, I was <a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2014/05/beyonces-second-skin-part-i.html">going</a> to write about "***Flawless," but then Beyoncé released a remix ft Nicki Minaj and you guys I'm just going to need a little more time.]Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-56217902312461454712014-08-14T12:15:00.001-04:002014-08-14T12:15:19.329-04:00International Modernisms 1840-present: Shock, Electricity, Invention<br />
<br />
MA seminar, autumn 2014<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixBm4UqjWPJPKZOukdDVMfS2y7aqMQjUMs5irt0p-7xNXW4aIvNEYWfPniTSnJnY_ibfZwCpt9PbrwDnfscJNu1dWMCOO6dWvEfY6ltgegYm2A9cOeOjSC3iwTljB1XYE2hTJPLzkeBI78/s1600/practical-electric-lamp-edisons-carbon-filament-light-bulb-presented-the-first-commercially-viable-electric-light-previous-versions-couldnt-match-the-durability-and-used-expensive-materials-such-as-platinum.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixBm4UqjWPJPKZOukdDVMfS2y7aqMQjUMs5irt0p-7xNXW4aIvNEYWfPniTSnJnY_ibfZwCpt9PbrwDnfscJNu1dWMCOO6dWvEfY6ltgegYm2A9cOeOjSC3iwTljB1XYE2hTJPLzkeBI78/s320/practical-electric-lamp-edisons-carbon-filament-light-bulb-presented-the-first-commercially-viable-electric-light-previous-versions-couldnt-match-the-durability-and-used-expensive-materials-such-as-platinum.jpg" /></a></div><br />
In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York ran an exhibition titled <em>Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925</em>. Illustrated by a large, international <a href="http://www.materialworldblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Figure-1.jpg">network diagram</a> covering an entire wall <a href="http://payload139.cargocollective.com/1/2/88527/5083319/01-InventingAbstraction_TitleWall-Entrance01b_800.jpg">at the exhibit entrance</a>, the show thematized invention, with its technoscientific resonances, as much as abstraction. The idea that the European and North American artists featured in the 2010 show had “invented” abstraction as an artistic principle would come as a particular surprise, however, to visitors familiar with an earlier, enormously influential MoMA show, <em>“Primitivism” in Twentieth-Century Art</em> (1984), which framed modernist abstraction in conversation with African and Oceanic art. This seminar will closely interrogate “invention” as an aesthetic desideratum across the long modernist moment, examining how its association with technological modernity relies in part on the production of a “tradition”-oriented “primitive” whose modernity is permanently deferred, yet whose art can be appropriated for modernism as a means of invigorating a declining civilization. This graduate seminar will investigate the workings of aesthetic modernism in relation to the modern ideologies of time, progress, and development on which “invention” relies, paying special attention to psychoanalysis and anthropology. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-10660876090670593092014-07-07T12:18:00.002-04:002014-07-08T13:48:58.418-04:00On the "neoliberal rhetoric of harm"I was disappointed to read <a href="http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/">Jack Halberstam's recent essay</a> on trigger warnings and the "neoliberal rhetoric of harm." I agree with Robin James's <a href="https://twitter.com/doctaj/status/485808488900087809">assessment</a>— that there's a real problem that JH is putting <del>her</del>^ his finger on, namely the potential for the language of trigger warnings (or, as second-wave feminists would have seen it, the language of "offense," as opposed to "oppression") to psychologize and individualize harm and render it unavailable to structural analysis. Moreover, such psychologization risks flattening all harm into the subjective <i>experience</i> of harm, making it difficult to distinguish between more and less crucial targets of critique. So far so good, and not so different from what many feminists already believe.<br />
<br />
Where it goes off the rails is the suggestion that people engaged in social justice work need to, so to speak, "man up":<br />
<br />
<blockquote>In a post-affirmative action society, where even recent histories of political violence like slavery and lynching are cast as a distant and irrelevant past, all claims to hardship have been cast as equal; and some students, accustomed to trotting out stories of painful events in their childhoods (dead pets/parrots, a bad injury in sports) in college applications and other such venues, have come to think of themselves as communities of naked, shivering, quaking little selves – too vulnerable to take a joke, too damaged to make one.</blockquote><br />
In short, an ostensibly feminist blog post about how feminists are humorless and need to lighten up is a little hard to take. No, having a pet parrot join the choir invisible is not as bad as lynching, but is that really what people are saying when they say they are sad about their parrot? Can we not have compassion for small griefs?<br />
<br />
I have two basic observations to make about this, one about feminist critiques of neoliberalism and one about generations.<br />
<br />
1. Neoliberalism and feminism<br />
<br />
As <a href="https://twitter.com/Keguro_/status/485811809954574336">Keguro Macharia pointed out</a>, Halberstam's polemic can easily be read as a call for resilience, the neoliberal virtue <i>par excellence</i>. Indeed, Halberstam literally "call[s] for accountability," that language of counting and accounting that, as <a href="http://jpleary.tumblr.com/post/89767836008/keywords-for-the-age-of-austerity-8-accountability">John Pat Leary has so brilliantly explained</a>, takes as its baseline the belief that everything that matters is accountable. Halberstam's polemic, with its belittlement of college students as "naked, shivering, quaking little selves," is plagued by a bigger problem: how to mount a feminist critique of neoliberalism when neoliberalism operates through hypertrophied forms of femininity? <br />
<br />
As misguided as <em>Tiqqun</em>'s <em>Theory of the Young-Girl</em> is, it is symptomatic of the gendered realization of neoliberalism: what Karen Gregory calls "<a href="http://digitallabor.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2013/11/17/hyperemployed-or-feminized-labor/">hyperemployment</a>," and what <a href="http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2014/06/06/the-financialized-girl-more-thoughts-on-hyperemployment-human-capital-and-lean-in-culture/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter">Robin James</a>, following <a href="http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/the-girl-mergers-of-feminism-and-finance-in-neoliberal-times/">Michelle Murphy</a>, calls the "financialized girl." Such critiques, as well as formulations like Jodi Dean's "communicative capitalism" and Corsani and Lazzarato's "feminization of labor," demonstrate that, often, neoliberal exploitation succeeds by ramping up and extending the ways that women have typically been exploited under earlier forms of capitalism: in care work, emotional labor, unpaid labor, collaborations ("teamwork"), etc. (I'm mentioning just a few sources, but there's an enormous literature on this.) Importantly, innovations that began as accommodations for working women—"flex time," telecommuting, teamwork— became normalized or hypertrophied (as e.g. freelancing) as ways of reducing overhead and making employees interchangeable (disposable), to the point that <a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/feminisms-tipping-point-who-wins-from-leaning-in">a paean to nonstop work like <em>Lean In</em> could be marketed as feminism</a>. <br />
<br />
The forms that Halberstam critiques—safe spaces and trigger warnings, specifically, but also psychologization and subjectivity—really are forms through which neoliberalism can operate; indeed, maybe they are <em>primarily</em> modes of individuating harm and defusing structural critique. But they are also deeply feminized, as Gayatri Spivak pointed out in a famous reading of Freud's line, "a child is being beaten," and have the double-edged power of interiorizing (rendering unavailable to structural critique) and acknowledging women's psychology as complex. When neoliberalism takes feminized forms, it is difficult to attack neoliberal forms (here, subjectivization, safe spaces) without being flatly sexist. And the form that Halberstam's critique takes seems to me to succumb to that difficulty.<br />
<br />
2. Generational relationships to history<br />
<br />
There's another strain to Halberstam's polemic that pits professors against students on generational terms. Here is one generation who fought hard for queer rights; who never had a Gay/Straight Alliance in high school or a way to grow up both queer and normal. Who made careers out of queer studies while they watched their administrations professionalize and their faculties casualize, who teach at universities that cost $44,000 a year to attend.<br />
<br />
A representative of this generation calls another a bunch of babies. (So they are: their infantilization has been enforced by the privatization of public goods, by debt, and by the destruction of good jobs. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/puberty-before-age-10-a-new-normal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">Reaching puberty earlier and earlier</a>, likely due to environmental factors, they achieve financial independence later and later, if ever. All their own fault, no doubt.)<br />
<br />
Halberstam kind of makes a big deal of this generational gap, pointing to the "friendly adults" who erroneously install "narratives of damage that they [the youth] themselves may or may not have actually experienced." It's as if young people are <em>stealing</em> an earlier generation's trauma, claiming it as their own when <em>really they have it so good</em>. In this bizarrely counterfactual linear temporality, the past is not only past but also dead, and you do not have the right to be traumatized by historical memory, only by things that have literally happened to you—even if you are eighteen and it's all—all—news to you. <em>We</em> (the older generation) were there, and are over it, and so you (the younger generation) should root yourselves entirely in the ameliorated present* and <em>get</em> over it, because it is over.<br />
<br />
The result is an odd polemic against coddled millenials and their too-sensitive feelings, <em>as if it were somehow ridiculous to be young and too sensitive, or for that matter, old and too sensitive.</em> This cross-generational call to "get over it" is an example of what Sara Ahmed has called <a href="http://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/">"overing"</a>: "In assuming that we are over certain kinds of critique, they create the impression that we are over what is being critiqued." It's particularly perverse to demand that young people be "over it," when they have perhaps only just left their parents' homes, and have perhaps only recently come to any political consciousness at all. There's a very good reason college students aren't "over it"; they just got there. Have you <em>met</em> a college student? It's all, all new. <br />
<br />
It is its own kind of shock to learn about how you have been <em>historically</em>, rather than personally, hated. It is not about "trauma" but about developing a political consciousness that is also historical, a fundamentally utopian impulse to exist in solidarity with the dead. There is, to be sure, a fine line between identifying with the past and appropriating it, but I think we can allow our students some leeway in figuring out where this line is, and not getting it right every time. Certainly grown-ups need the same leeway.<br />
<br />
And finally, it is particularly odd to issue a generational call to turn to environmental concerns <i>instead of</i> LGBT activism:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged?<br />
<br />
[...]<br />
<br />
Let’s not fiddle while Rome (or Paris) burns, trigger while the water rises, weep while trash piles up; let’s recognize these internal wars for the distraction they have become.<br />
</blockquote><br />
In the words of a famous owl: O RLY? <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXmkGokxomYmkFxTGUhtoNcIg1a26okrYB40i_x9loEUVVlrlT_pT4VgdpyAr_9cz5tnuWqc2iMkLqoEumuwXfIQQD5q1CqDRKVQYbgtIALm8JJrq1IFj5s73eT_Sn37DeHWbCJeAt8sCe/s1600/orly_owl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXmkGokxomYmkFxTGUhtoNcIg1a26okrYB40i_x9loEUVVlrlT_pT4VgdpyAr_9cz5tnuWqc2iMkLqoEumuwXfIQQD5q1CqDRKVQYbgtIALm8JJrq1IFj5s73eT_Sn37DeHWbCJeAt8sCe/s320/orly_owl.jpg" /></a></div><br />
"Don't worry about safe spaces because we 'friendly adults' already fixed that for you (whether you feel it or not); <em>do</em> worry about climate change because we really fucked that one up." <br />
<br />
Well, yes we did, but maybe it's therefore our job to do the heavy lifting on that one.<br />
<br />
I think reasonable people can disagree about trigger warning policies <em>per se</em>. But I don't know how any adult dares be intellectually ungenerous with the young, considering the world we've collectively brought them into. <em>My</em> students can take a joke, and make one. They're hilarious. And they also care about one another and try not to make those jokes at one another's expense. They're not "over" anything because they're just getting started. I'm glad they are. <br />
<br />
<br />
-----<br />
^Although I was not aware of a preferred pronoun and had been given to understand that Jack Halberstam does not explicitly prefer pronouns of either gender (<a href="http://www.jackhalberstam.com/on-pronouns/">source</a>), two commenters have suggested that masculine pronouns are preferred. Thanks to these commenters for the correction.<br />
<br />
*I'm granting for the sake of argument that the oppression of queer (whether "really gay" or not) youth is really the non-problem that Halberstam claims it is, but in reality this claim seems to me to be premature.<br />
<br />
Thanks to Robin James for a helpful <a href="https://twitter.com/doctaj/status/485808488900087809">discussion</a> of this piece.<br />
<br />
Your regularly scheduled Beyoncé posts will return soon.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-14081202725980820752014-05-23T12:46:00.001-04:002014-05-23T13:07:40.931-04:00Beyoncé's Second Skin (Part I)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSACdIvhsyrExl5PmP-UhGwCOdTO17n1gt4axh9zEibHqQXWhPYi_RKVhlgGTNjBIpdLOTPmVWXW6MiFE8rouCY4MFvNWTkoNfAyU4_3EOqD3aMXFavYbX-L6pVVRGBjsNK97mkNsFfRRJ/s320/beyonce-01-vaseline.png" height="171" width="320" /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSACdIvhsyrExl5PmP-UhGwCOdTO17n1gt4axh9zEibHqQXWhPYi_RKVhlgGTNjBIpdLOTPmVWXW6MiFE8rouCY4MFvNWTkoNfAyU4_3EOqD3aMXFavYbX-L6pVVRGBjsNK97mkNsFfRRJ/s1600/beyonce-01-vaseline.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></div></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxKycBu6XDoCi9QjW1vEeGFZ55MAJMtcePx2Y9mblySDRoLdUQL25VnO7XzC76ui2ZO-9Ql7zrOoFFidzLZTITdLYIYEHHrBZxcrpkqhPngWAN1jKU9taUP114hkpfeox-C1ctfw_HNxVv/s1600/beyonce-01-hairspray.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxKycBu6XDoCi9QjW1vEeGFZ55MAJMtcePx2Y9mblySDRoLdUQL25VnO7XzC76ui2ZO-9Ql7zrOoFFidzLZTITdLYIYEHHrBZxcrpkqhPngWAN1jKU9taUP114hkpfeox-C1ctfw_HNxVv/s320/beyonce-01-hairspray.png" /></a></div><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSRTG6y8aKkIt9xMfuBzM21x9FYIp_sBmhLPzaUjtPuxmMYrIKBzXLceLBvN4x5tgpK8iS-nJNORTxgbHlERg7thPh1b93qob04i7d3F-ualuPmH8vJxLSo6wgflAgAQ3yTmVNA8ima_P0/s1600/beyonce-01-upperlip.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSRTG6y8aKkIt9xMfuBzM21x9FYIp_sBmhLPzaUjtPuxmMYrIKBzXLceLBvN4x5tgpK8iS-nJNORTxgbHlERg7thPh1b93qob04i7d3F-ualuPmH8vJxLSo6wgflAgAQ3yTmVNA8ima_P0/s320/beyonce-01-upperlip.png" height="178" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stills from "Pretty Hurts."</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
In an interview with Tavi Gevinson, Lorde <a href="http://www.rookiemag.com/2014/01/lorde-interview/2/">remarked</a> of <i>BEYONCE: The Visual Album</i> (2013), "I would cry if I had to make that much visual content for an album!" <br />
<br />
Yup, that's the point. <i>BEYONCE: The Visual Album</i> is a massive spectacle of occluded labor, an album that was released as a surprise, for which the question "How did she <i>do</i> all that?" was superseded only by "<a href="http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2013/12/how-beyonce-did-it-surprise-album/">and how did she keep it a <i>secret?</i></a>" This is the narrative of perfection: all this work, made to look easy.<br />
<br />
It seems telling that these are the refrains with which female labor, especially that of the "working mom," is greeted. Here are my top results for a Google Image search on "working mom":<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjSMZmUP5hWV4d_dDlGK2he2GHz1KtY-GuqoEMZVCfCUTdMZQ5FoprH7CSYEpqkNQMyKYDzAXfySTEK1ReSD6Rz_vh9-Igl4mxHybFft1a3EDlKvCqHKqI4dc-Y4sWr1QgLcc1Pg_Sl8rL/s1600/google-images-workingmom.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjSMZmUP5hWV4d_dDlGK2he2GHz1KtY-GuqoEMZVCfCUTdMZQ5FoprH7CSYEpqkNQMyKYDzAXfySTEK1ReSD6Rz_vh9-Igl4mxHybFft1a3EDlKvCqHKqI4dc-Y4sWr1QgLcc1Pg_Sl8rL/s400/google-images-workingmom.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Top Google Image search results for "working mom."</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
How does she do it? She makes it look effortless, and all the more so because we know it isn't. Repeatedly, Beyoncé trains the camera on her own beauty and the making of that beauty, and the effect is not to demystify (as in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYhCn0jf46U">the infamous Dove ad</a> of nearly a decade ago) so much as to centralize Beyoncé's accomplishment. The always-loaded-in-advance <i>can women have it all?</i> undertone to the question of <i>can Beyoncé do it all?</i> offers much of the album's driving tension. Clearly, as the album's success attests, Beyoncé <i>can</i> do it all, and yet the relentlessness of the question taps into a current of pain that seems to be female success's necessary concomitant.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeDYIqIaZe4ojBw2D1n-roVWSDgTonb8TZ-uIDdlMroIuH33icustpVbGMeM-UqvEFHVP-2Q9jOswDwXlfdL-9LZTNAUQZ1Q51TyCx-l8_KsGPnuwxeN6Ui8QpPmXf-oLiTl0eU09o_3AV/s1600/beyonce-05b-tellmehowitslooking.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeDYIqIaZe4ojBw2D1n-roVWSDgTonb8TZ-uIDdlMroIuH33icustpVbGMeM-UqvEFHVP-2Q9jOswDwXlfdL-9LZTNAUQZ1Q51TyCx-l8_KsGPnuwxeN6Ui8QpPmXf-oLiTl0eU09o_3AV/s320/beyonce-05b-tellmehowitslooking.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Yoncé": "Tell me how I'm looking, babe."</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
[I guess now is the time to observe that if you want a truly educated take on this album, it is <a href="http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2013/12/beyonces-boundaries-by-emily-j-lordi.html">this excellent review by Emily Lordi</a>.]<br />
<br />
In "Pretty Hurts," the album's first track, instead of the passive model in the Dove video whose image is altered by countless unseen agents' hands, we see a young woman deploying all the more or less painful tricks of the trade—curlers, ripping out upper lip hairs, Vaseline on the teeth (what), and, inexplicably, apparently Lysoling herself in the face (this part I truly don't understand—is it hairspray? Glade??). Although she's sometimes aided by others (at one point a woman in what looks like a HazMat suit spray-tans (?) her), mostly she has learned these techniques herself and applies them to her own body. <br />
<br />
The video continuously cuts between before, during, and after the fictive pageant: the hours of self-crafting, the show itself, during which a losing Beyoncé has to smile and clap convincingly as another woman is crowned, the bitter aftermath. The cuts show that this is not a simple sequence of before, during, and after; preparation is always ongoing, evaluation is always ongoing, self-loathing is always ongoing. This is nowhere clearer than in the "backstage," supposedly nonperforming scenes in which Beyoncé's face snaps in and out of obligatory smiles:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz1FMbwYY9WmbfE0ds9Ngg99cTPJaUWxrivHrHeJnOABbhP-GKigQCgUuQSX5Jdeb5nh9682BwTa-IXR8nb9Ine_JtHElS1MlMNg_ktPhgOpWPqkHODhACHCjGFhHhhYw_YA_YK1hdjyM/s1600/beyonce-01-smile1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz1FMbwYY9WmbfE0ds9Ngg99cTPJaUWxrivHrHeJnOABbhP-GKigQCgUuQSX5Jdeb5nh9682BwTa-IXR8nb9Ine_JtHElS1MlMNg_ktPhgOpWPqkHODhACHCjGFhHhhYw_YA_YK1hdjyM/s400/beyonce-01-smile1.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xSNmomE2grZGgMHTYS7yumh0GD9RSkFlqPAAxttTY_LN0ythSroRCrmpBjQcOK2M-cIkaUoYlDT3_yjhvSkReNIcY8HrcpMl04AHqUNxd_61h72U9ea4TH7QbRHxDebgrjeGDCzpVWiY/s1600/beyonce-01-smile2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xSNmomE2grZGgMHTYS7yumh0GD9RSkFlqPAAxttTY_LN0ythSroRCrmpBjQcOK2M-cIkaUoYlDT3_yjhvSkReNIcY8HrcpMl04AHqUNxd_61h72U9ea4TH7QbRHxDebgrjeGDCzpVWiY/s400/beyonce-01-smile2.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4A6SMXbN4V_zxWclXJ40WS82JtxCJ7knu6je9Kj20vcAwN_uoHXmk0aL1VhGVot0qs9wn_kok8DcoHNsC-uWl7vMxrZNmjpy8DJTpunuCOrezKHQeuDwlmaDMgQTvwEBzvQa0lJL5Yh6r/s1600/beyonce-01-smile3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4A6SMXbN4V_zxWclXJ40WS82JtxCJ7knu6je9Kj20vcAwN_uoHXmk0aL1VhGVot0qs9wn_kok8DcoHNsC-uWl7vMxrZNmjpy8DJTpunuCOrezKHQeuDwlmaDMgQTvwEBzvQa0lJL5Yh6r/s400/beyonce-01-smile3.png" /></a></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbv-PErCwKaiXVb1xasPOzRSVHFQU3bBP44-a2-JASwuoLyWWVSj8nzT8ljsigzdBBOFyMWYZnjjWmkIfwSpkw-wgx4Pj3y6Uy2sLmd-5F6ggBVYW4G_yMiHjLS-aZdh460ggppqXJhXNU/s1600/beyonce-01-smile4.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbv-PErCwKaiXVb1xasPOzRSVHFQU3bBP44-a2-JASwuoLyWWVSj8nzT8ljsigzdBBOFyMWYZnjjWmkIfwSpkw-wgx4Pj3y6Uy2sLmd-5F6ggBVYW4G_yMiHjLS-aZdh460ggppqXJhXNU/s400/beyonce-01-smile4.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I want to point out that these screen shots were very hard to capture, because the transitions in and out of smiling happen so quickly.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
In fact, at one point she pulls on a smile as a man is in the process of yelling at her:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5sQpH6bAbDdWqU7XUfmyGbpePue4XEUiLOpF-zqDgmBQq6pYaXWq26iOm0Gqe67fl1Z9SkfwlKJwaIZkFytzAGLv-TtLlnm3Hx9MvbY9oyEiQvFlZ9IWshQqPFm4TOVgJobuNSokignL6/s1600/beyonce-01-smile5.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5sQpH6bAbDdWqU7XUfmyGbpePue4XEUiLOpF-zqDgmBQq6pYaXWq26iOm0Gqe67fl1Z9SkfwlKJwaIZkFytzAGLv-TtLlnm3Hx9MvbY9oyEiQvFlZ9IWshQqPFm4TOVgJobuNSokignL6/s400/beyonce-01-smile5.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilY2ucepfFcT_USXY6nQqDOH7tXEUGrM-Guk3pYX9iIs5kgTbkuPNEFdytV_kvjFuoTFE9_DsW260I0Z5MS1TX4MML1wVX9vG1CnEQgwUd7yyhY1FxTHexAtn7qoyWJ7HWNWRIctE_anIE/s1600/beyonce-01-smile6.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilY2ucepfFcT_USXY6nQqDOH7tXEUGrM-Guk3pYX9iIs5kgTbkuPNEFdytV_kvjFuoTFE9_DsW260I0Z5MS1TX4MML1wVX9vG1CnEQgwUd7yyhY1FxTHexAtn7qoyWJ7HWNWRIctE_anIE/s400/beyonce-01-smile6.png" /></a></div><br />
Pretty "hurts," but more than that, it's work, all kinds of work, and years of it, as we learn from the video's grainy final footage of an infantine Beyoncé Knowles, her name mispronounced by the announcer, winning a contest. "I love you, Houston," says the well-trained child, who has done what was asked of her and won.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXqJU7XrHTaOpR52x2Rtb-2gieIGcmXxhneV2cNfXJ9HLQC2pUlke-hLAsbpiBZRlHgZBFsr8rdiNCiIM4Jo_19gqdn9xDYH8-BFzFSTodDexybj_Etin4yt7oR4lxgjPH_3b84nvj22T/s1600/beyonce-01-iloveyouhouston.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyXqJU7XrHTaOpR52x2Rtb-2gieIGcmXxhneV2cNfXJ9HLQC2pUlke-hLAsbpiBZRlHgZBFsr8rdiNCiIM4Jo_19gqdn9xDYH8-BFzFSTodDexybj_Etin4yt7oR4lxgjPH_3b84nvj22T/s320/beyonce-01-iloveyouhouston.png" /></a></div><br />
"Pretty Hurts" announces what emerges as the whole album's preoccupation: Bildung, the making of Beyoncé and <i>BEYONCE</i>, the labor of performance, and not just performance as a single punctual event, but rather as a process of self-making that begins in childhood and warps time. "I do it like it's my profession," she murmurs in "Rocket," in one of the album's many unnerving invocations of sex work—unnerving because, even though she is talking about sex, it's something that could be said of almost anything Beyoncé does. What could be more professional than shooting seventeen music videos in secret while also on tour? When the song tacks on, "By the way, if you need a personal trainer or a therapist, I can be a piece of sunshine, inner peace, entertainer...," it's gratuitous; we already know—<i>got</i> it, Beyoncé, you can do it all! But the listing of professions in the midst of this supposedly romantic sex ballad, visualized mainly through shots of Beyoncé in lingerie, also calls attention to the professionalism that runs through everything. She can be a singer and a sexual fantasy—also a personal trainer, a therapist, a certified public accountant, a skip tracer, whatever. It's just one more thing when intimacy itself is a job.<br />
<br />
The invocation of sex work also appears in "Partition," which opens with the infamous napkin-drop:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8-GClxNLPBIPzIBvFazFB2Nnaz59OncByQVJqZtmQAMFg1fgCVKXIhBLGJ9fpJRqtkmvmRFEoz2KNAn9kvrVNv-FL6XOyEWq3qumvReVovN2bSzkF9UkLw3togFSvnC20JCeejG8dQnq_/s1600/beyonce-06-napkin.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8-GClxNLPBIPzIBvFazFB2Nnaz59OncByQVJqZtmQAMFg1fgCVKXIhBLGJ9fpJRqtkmvmRFEoz2KNAn9kvrVNv-FL6XOyEWq3qumvReVovN2bSzkF9UkLw3togFSvnC20JCeejG8dQnq_/s320/beyonce-06-napkin.gif" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">[<a href="http://www.thewire.com/culture/2013/12/wire-gif-guide-beyonces-new-visual-album/356130/">source</a>]</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
There's a way that this video is all over the place, and another way in which it isn't. The video frames the song's lyrics as the fantasy of a neglected wife, so unseen by her husband—whose point of view the camera eye offers us—that his newspaper covers up her face at the breakfast table. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyToBDQDDYK6bb2L-7nZ6XUQDuX-t_Fz1vEmqOxfwIbDy12TRzZhpPD1Nbyr3dYJbW21JlAyyT3GoR_FtG6OiwRWFtsPdJtNA5jmARaDLjMDIPqaqWIKre99VZ2FlCfME0AcJEzog-REGt/s1600/beyonce-06-newspaper.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyToBDQDDYK6bb2L-7nZ6XUQDuX-t_Fz1vEmqOxfwIbDy12TRzZhpPD1Nbyr3dYJbW21JlAyyT3GoR_FtG6OiwRWFtsPdJtNA5jmARaDLjMDIPqaqWIKre99VZ2FlCfME0AcJEzog-REGt/s320/beyonce-06-newspaper.png" /></a></div><br />
But while we are ostensibly in the neglectful husband's visual position, we are disallowed from adopting it: the newspaper is blurry, whereas the edge of Beyoncé's hair is in focus. The video proposes a contrast between Neglected Beyoncé and Sex-in-a-Limo Beyoncé as if these were mutually exclusive roles, but only to undermine that contrast. "Partition," even more than "Rocket," insists on the labor of being a Hot Wife. Mia McKenzie <a href="http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2013/12/defending-beyonce-black-feminists-white-feminists-line-sand/">reads the Napkin Drop playfully</a>:<br />
<blockquote>One of my favorite scenes in all of Beyonce’s new videos is in “Partition” when she drops that napkin just so that white woman has to pick it up. I read it as an incredible moment wherein a powerful black woman flips the script on white women who are constantly trying to put her in “her place” and in one subtle movement puts them in theirs.</blockquote>This reading is appealing on its face, but I think it also gets at one of the many tensions through which "Partition" operates: the ostentatious dropping of the napkin performs Beyoncé's status as mistress, <i>not</i> servant, but only "flips the script" because the racial politics are obvious, because we know <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454029/?ref_=nv_sr_1">how typically the reverse dynamic holds</a>. We can enjoy the flipped script, but not without knowing that it's flipped, not without marking the threat that the black woman will always somehow be pulled into a role of servitude. It's the same threat that emerges in Jay-Z's infamous quotation in "Drunk in Love"—"Eat the cake, Anna Mae," a citation and apparent embrace of Ike Turner's violence against Tina Turner. Wait, more violence against black women? Again? Are we supposed to be okay with this? But it's the script (literally—from <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DadlLq2yrBw">What's Love Got to Do With It</a></i>) that most of "Drunk in Love" is flipping. Don't get too giddy about flipped scripts, Beyoncé seems to say. They can flip back.<br />
<br />
A brief detour on black women flipping things around. <br />
<br />
Consider the "topsy-turvy doll," a popular nineteenth-century toy depicting a white doll who, when her skirt was flipped over her head, revealed a black doll on the other side, and vice-versa, supposedly first made by enslaved women for the white children for whom they cared. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGQ8wba6wM8k1ZFv8CDU_pvWBEHYm9CWzi1WIAv9iZipHs2NWAwl6pyazZV4DkQ4uASxAjkZqXvKU0ysQoM3a3xcVvPH_f3RPlGZTTWRAK7P-koQK1AoLpejvkLM1EWHYh4dMUWiSXBXVL/s1600/bernstein-topsy-turvy-doll.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGQ8wba6wM8k1ZFv8CDU_pvWBEHYm9CWzi1WIAv9iZipHs2NWAwl6pyazZV4DkQ4uASxAjkZqXvKU0ysQoM3a3xcVvPH_f3RPlGZTTWRAK7P-koQK1AoLpejvkLM1EWHYh4dMUWiSXBXVL/s400/bernstein-topsy-turvy-doll.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Robin Bernstein discusses these dolls in <i>Racial Innocence</i>, especially pp. 81-91.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
As Robin Bernstein puts it in in <i>Racial Innocence</i>, <br />
<blockquote>A child who minimally followed the implied script by incorporating the skirt-flip into play felt the balance of the doll, the fact that the poles weighed equally in the hands as the doll rotated. The thing scripted its user to position neither black nor white permanently on top; the competent user received the thing's message that the hierarchy could—and should—flip. With this thing, enslaved African American women scripted racial flip-flops, a perfomance of black and white in endless oscillation rather than permanent ranks of dominant and oppressed. (88)</blockquote><br />
The history of literal racial flipping scripted into African American women's artistic production looks different from the vantage point of 2013's "Queen Bey." As cleverly subversive as it is for an enslaved black woman to give her five-year-old white mistress a doll that performs hierarchy-reversal before her eyes, its proposed legacy in a rich black woman's deliberate napkin-drop has more ambiguous resonances. Script-flipping can feel wearisome—oh, that's <i>still</i> the script? The topsy-turvy inconsistencies of the album's positions, which have launched endless "Is Beyoncé feminist?" wars, mark the instability of hierarchy even for a black woman who has ostensibly made it.* <br />
<br />
This instability is all the more precarious for its location at the sites of intimacy and sex; as the topsy-turvy doll also demonstrates, the flipping of scripts often occurs in the flipping of skirts, through the sexual violence with which black women are historically disproportionately targeted. "[T]he African American dollmaker sent that [white] child to bed with a sign of systematic rapes committed by members of that child's race, if not that child's immediate family," Bernstein notes. "She tucked beneath the child's blankets...a sign of the child's enslaved half-sibling, either literal or symbolic." (89) The multiple ironies of the skirt-flipping topsy-turvy doll prefigure the difficulty of pinning down a political read on a spectacle of occluded labor, a black woman whose success is so bound up in the spectacularization of her nearly-nude body.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYyMyZxidbA1sRY5_F33RQ3szipJzCXZhE7SIibGnWNOdgohQQYz_wRtf-H8n8fuTqXdLNJ18QRKN_PyLoxALpo1DdYfwxGdhgFQ7J2soy6x_AXzAk6MR3CksP3m5GtpGn7bNs9JbmFnIE/s1600/josephine_baker_13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYyMyZxidbA1sRY5_F33RQ3szipJzCXZhE7SIibGnWNOdgohQQYz_wRtf-H8n8fuTqXdLNJ18QRKN_PyLoxALpo1DdYfwxGdhgFQ7J2soy6x_AXzAk6MR3CksP3m5GtpGn7bNs9JbmFnIE/s400/josephine_baker_13.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Josephine Baker</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
Servitude is always at issue in "Partition," which is why the song's primary addressee is not the lover (as in "Rocket") but the limo's "driver." Seconds after establishing her difference from a servant with the napkin-drop, she sings, "Driver, roll up the partition, please;/ I don't need you seeing Yoncé on her knees." The partition, with its ability to be rolled up or down, signifies the instability of this character's place in the household. Maintaining her position as "mistress" involves not being seen "on her knees" by the servants. For whom is she performing?<br />
<br />
Rolling up the barrier between driver and speaker, in other words, again marks the class difference between them but also the threat of that difference's flimsiness. The element of performance and of professionalism recurs with each repetition of the song's refrain: "Forty-five minutes to get all dressed up,/ And we ain't even gonna make it to this club." Getting dressed up was work, we keep being reminded. Forty-five minutes of work, 0.75 hours. This is the complaint of someone mindful of the clock.<br />
<br />
This is why the B theme, addressed to the lover, makes so much sense. Beyoncé sings "Take all of me; I just wanna be the girl you like, the kind of girl you like" across shots of her almost hilariously spectacularized body, first just writhing in some sort of beaded wig, but quickly multiplied as what Siegfried Kracauer called the "mass ornament." Multiplied in avant-gardist seriality, the spectacle of Beyoncé's body is rendered generic and, at the same time, sublime in its sheer repeatability.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZJPeeOpbpSudUiF7yYigPTcf14S6m0Ql-AkcNh4S6RX224tZZQia_amGcuTXhPWEFe4Jc6YPSPgirws9JmZpZBbAayu3PkydM_BFUIvd98KblOYjnrwDiwt5-SMuRkTOOD66f4LMbHZj/s1600/leger-ballet-mecanique.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZJPeeOpbpSudUiF7yYigPTcf14S6m0Ql-AkcNh4S6RX224tZZQia_amGcuTXhPWEFe4Jc6YPSPgirws9JmZpZBbAayu3PkydM_BFUIvd98KblOYjnrwDiwt5-SMuRkTOOD66f4LMbHZj/s320/leger-ballet-mecanique.jpg" /></a></div><br />
Oh, whoops, that's from Fernand Léger's <i>Ballet mécanique</i> (1924). Here's Beyoncé and some extra appendages:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cVIYwH4uC4_aWM1EwldJ4mZZ5KRVi8pRHoOZpXd5vC_K40jrjFPOcHC1oP02Ju198w5KONCGP1ZkMrnoa_j4qcvNeHiREDflTqq3LdoXWgwQ8NoCVpt1TlI0jb-vNOGUVMaBL96IMDiA/s1600/beyonce-06-legs.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2cVIYwH4uC4_aWM1EwldJ4mZZ5KRVi8pRHoOZpXd5vC_K40jrjFPOcHC1oP02Ju198w5KONCGP1ZkMrnoa_j4qcvNeHiREDflTqq3LdoXWgwQ8NoCVpt1TlI0jb-vNOGUVMaBL96IMDiA/s320/beyonce-06-legs.png" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdyYhyMiPPkguEx_MvOzt2GZ5D4p54bqXcIDCeDZ2796ujjhzPZhzfdGxE_p0dnZtgRind3JsQmx0-jv2bvdSLhxnMI0NPcESBGnhVzD-nKuZVt8Z3IvMzM57ZIj573gfuxn8yl5k0716D/s1600/beyonce-06-legs2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdyYhyMiPPkguEx_MvOzt2GZ5D4p54bqXcIDCeDZ2796ujjhzPZhzfdGxE_p0dnZtgRind3JsQmx0-jv2bvdSLhxnMI0NPcESBGnhVzD-nKuZVt8Z3IvMzM57ZIj573gfuxn8yl5k0716D/s320/beyonce-06-legs2.png" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvAsE399dnz-yLP0tdSPD8aMPQW_Q3DSU6ODrK6u3B3GvwNVsSow09lv4c6feFAVTuxb2sxZsC8fIyUAta9lqLH3APNQvdQ4GAXc5UZvBHj293D32_-u15pb3p1yRO3BBSQQyEfDZq5bb/s1600/beyonce-06-legs3.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhvAsE399dnz-yLP0tdSPD8aMPQW_Q3DSU6ODrK6u3B3GvwNVsSow09lv4c6feFAVTuxb2sxZsC8fIyUAta9lqLH3APNQvdQ4GAXc5UZvBHj293D32_-u15pb3p1yRO3BBSQQyEfDZq5bb/s320/beyonce-06-legs3.png" /></a></div><br />
The boundary between "the girl you like" and "the <i>kind of</i> girl you like" is as permeable as a limo partition (with the "chauffeur <del>listening in</del> eavesdropping, trying not to crash"), which is why the already commodified Beyoncé and Beyoncé-bits multiply until the video winds up full of professional exotic dancers from the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazy_Horse_%28cabaret%29">Wikipedia</a>: "The dancers are deliberately chosen to be indistinguishable on stage in height and in breast size and shape") and a...I'm going to go with chaise-not-very-longue?...that is allegedly "famous." (Here, as in the breakfast scene, the video plays with the superficial signifiers of respectability. I heard "feministe"; what's that French voiceover? Beauvoir? Nope. In case we thought we could take this video straight, it is, hilariously, from <i><a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/12/13/beyonc_french_lyrics_on_partition_did_beyonc_sample_the_big_lebowski.html">The Big Lebowski</a></i>.)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLR0Y9AJ_0kx7UwDI91uP0nHUr-HEf60ApaX0AZd5eYauDGnNKcShaf02IhU2rIqGJ7z4K7iTJ-4UEt-chMbOknyuXa9OjkU_rLejktV5DtQtpbO0k9Y9E9YjHA_4qu0n6TzvbGO8XNdKv/s1600/beyonce-06-dancers.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLR0Y9AJ_0kx7UwDI91uP0nHUr-HEf60ApaX0AZd5eYauDGnNKcShaf02IhU2rIqGJ7z4K7iTJ-4UEt-chMbOknyuXa9OjkU_rLejktV5DtQtpbO0k9Y9E9YjHA_4qu0n6TzvbGO8XNdKv/s320/beyonce-06-dancers.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBye5L_2qJfytDmZKZjwxBLAIFK-yDkQ2DXA3qyR9hZmlofy5tpQ18VzTv8smyQDX617NmBMeJba_kDC7BomvH239soSrQHc4MNzgfvwJJF1Ruz4BFYfcgIFGRLFivONeRTPExsn0Llyuo/s1600/beyonce-06-est-ce-que-tu-aimes.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBye5L_2qJfytDmZKZjwxBLAIFK-yDkQ2DXA3qyR9hZmlofy5tpQ18VzTv8smyQDX617NmBMeJba_kDC7BomvH239soSrQHc4MNzgfvwJJF1Ruz4BFYfcgIFGRLFivONeRTPExsn0Llyuo/s320/beyonce-06-est-ce-que-tu-aimes.png" /></a></div><br />
It's not a big hop from there to Beyoncé in a cage with leopard spots, Jay-Z creepily looking on while smoking a cigar, in a move that Charing Ball quite reasonably called "<a href="http://madamenoire.com/333140/beyonce-feminism/">groan-inducing</a>." <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhphs_PgiQO0gfhBsZTmmBSbreVeF3nmLAX0Jfaj-27VWPK3rlE13JK4gwTxzNefOsxtP9tbQRuLLyS-dl4fRDHI_M5lJ8dEIvk6OFR6dNtJPj6C_FU02FvqwUmhkE2cf2HQ5L3KAhYLx8e/s1600/beyonce-06-jayz.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhphs_PgiQO0gfhBsZTmmBSbreVeF3nmLAX0Jfaj-27VWPK3rlE13JK4gwTxzNefOsxtP9tbQRuLLyS-dl4fRDHI_M5lJ8dEIvk6OFR6dNtJPj6C_FU02FvqwUmhkE2cf2HQ5L3KAhYLx8e/s320/beyonce-06-jayz.png" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDWHn-O27Djj5VHl5lKjLxdcC9P1-jK-K9IFiPxBA4aNiKd_809eRT-YAFT9s9hGwVCAujZpwL4eAPBiEurZnBwG7S6cwItMWm6ogFCSKW7wCHlpL5oSQfrViWZ1Pc1mWSW-3vmkiIcc64/s1600/beyonce-06-leopardprint.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDWHn-O27Djj5VHl5lKjLxdcC9P1-jK-K9IFiPxBA4aNiKd_809eRT-YAFT9s9hGwVCAujZpwL4eAPBiEurZnBwG7S6cwItMWm6ogFCSKW7wCHlpL5oSQfrViWZ1Pc1mWSW-3vmkiIcc64/s320/beyonce-06-leopardprint.png" /></a></div><br />
Groan-inducing because it's the script, not the flip. The partition is down. And as with Josephine Baker, we can't decide if she's exploited, self-exploiting, or winning.<br />
<br />
"I do it like it's my profession" indeed: there's a fine line between being professional and being a servant, especially if your fame and fortune rest on the commodification of your beauty and (feminine hetero-)sexuality. Sex is performance; being sexy is performance. The "Partition" video precisely cashes in on what it also critiques.<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
Part II, if/when I get around to it, will deal with Baker's and Beyoncé's glittering surfaces and the glinting conundrum that is "***Flawless."<br />
<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<small><br />
*I think it's fair to say that the album does not meaningfully explore any alternative to hierarchy, which is why oscillatory scripting and script-flipping seems to mark the richest sites of its political imagination.<br />
<br />
Thanks to @SpringaldJack for the "Partition" lyrics correction.<br />
<br />
Bernstein, Robin. <i>Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights.</i> America and the Long 19th Century. New York: New York University Press, 2011.<br />
<br />
Cheng, Anne Anlin. <i>Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface</i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.<br />
<br />
Kracauer, Siegfried. <i>The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays.</i> Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995.<br />
</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-72773719521931036232014-05-19T10:59:00.000-04:002014-05-19T11:02:08.633-04:00I don't want to say sappy things ... um.. ever.Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:03<br />
guess what?<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:18<br />
i still have more to write for my diss<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:24<br />
the acknowledgment<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:25<br />
s<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:33<br />
and i am terrified at the genre<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:42<br />
having read several in other dissertations<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:39:47<br />
they are horrifying<br />
nacecire: 15:40:37<br />
well, the first person you are going to want to thank is obviously marjorie perloff<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:40:49<br />
they remind me of those dreadful wedding vows that people write themselves "I'll always be your pooky; I vow to save you a bite of every chocolate chip cookie I eat and to snuggle you under the blanket." Retch.<br />
nacecire: 15:41:37<br />
what REALLY annoys me is when people thank their therapist/yoga instructor/pet.<br />
Hillary Gravendyk: 15:41:41<br />
i mean, i totally have people to thank, and I want to, but I don't want to say sappy things ... um.. ever.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQTDry2ddANSPTVL64B7me_nvGrLvYuyR_An1u3TDc00uzN7SqzG6V1RLyEABRazGhUrrQ7iarvN8EkMPsz2mqusnlWUG__Jzl8mJdlzZABLwNp_Rx1uemNuOQWf6ou1k9Q86KlCIoiSAd/s1600/dissacknowledgments.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQTDry2ddANSPTVL64B7me_nvGrLvYuyR_An1u3TDc00uzN7SqzG6V1RLyEABRazGhUrrQ7iarvN8EkMPsz2mqusnlWUG__Jzl8mJdlzZABLwNp_Rx1uemNuOQWf6ou1k9Q86KlCIoiSAd/s640/dissacknowledgments.png" /></a></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-47634395576588508892014-03-18T11:56:00.000-04:002014-03-18T12:12:38.198-04:00Elementarity and Precocity in Lorde(Standard disclaimer: I Am Not A Musician.)<br />
<br />
Lorde's "brand" is her precocity, and I must say that I am a sucker for it. I'm basically in total agreement with <a href="http://www.annehelenpetersen.com/?p=3365">Anne Helen Peterson</a> when she observes that Lorde's public image is both highly constructed and highly appealing. <blockquote>It’s clear that Lorde is precocious. She’s smart, she’s uber-literate. But she’s not just reading the classics, and she’s not checked out of popular culture. ... Many of her teen fans may not know who Laura Mulvey is, but whooo boy does a certain swath of her adult fans.</blockquote>GUILTY.<br />
<br />
I'm rarely able to listen to music I actually want to listen to unless I'm driving. I'm easily distracted by music and work better without it.* So, like the elderly person that I am, I listen to actual CDs straight through in my car. Driving to Philly this week I was listening to Lorde's album <em>Pure Heroine</em> again and thought again about something that struck me the first time I heard it: the album's relentlessly moderate tempos. Quick things happen in these songs, but always within a heavily emphasized temporal grid that, to my ear, cannot possibly be more than 120 bpm and is usually closer to 90. I looked at my watch for ten bars of "Royals" and came up with 86 bpm, although that's admittedly not the fastest song on the album. (On the other hand, it is the album's biggest single.) I am comfortable saying that moderate tempo is a Lorde tic. Not slow, but not too fast.<br />
<br />
And I started thinking about what this might have to tell us about her precocity (acknowledging that this precocity, as we know it, is constructed). What are some other Lorde tics? Arpeggios. Parallel thirds. Simple, repetitive melodies, not just simple and repetitive in accordance the conventions of pop music, but in a way that is almost studiously elementary. If we are honest, we will notice that the refrain of "Royals" sounds approximately like what a group of six-year-olds gets up to at their Suzuki violin recital. (<em>Even the F sharp.</em>) <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkkhB-YrsGzLrv0jVaTGL9t34tXk15VG0poqB4uQ_3qk5Yo0O2qkjdHki3sdwBl06qoI-Y0AOvioaJGexCSjvYkgeX9efe7b7m00k0Vjqpb41nEPSziLc1-G55z034mvVXsr8g4DnkQHGB/s1600/royals.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkkhB-YrsGzLrv0jVaTGL9t34tXk15VG0poqB4uQ_3qk5Yo0O2qkjdHki3sdwBl06qoI-Y0AOvioaJGexCSjvYkgeX9efe7b7m00k0Vjqpb41nEPSziLc1-G55z034mvVXsr8g4DnkQHGB/s320/royals.jpg" /></a></div><br />
It's not just simplicity of the melody, an inverted D major triad, but also the rhythm: unsyncopated, square, neat subdivisions of time into eighth and sixteenth notes, like an exercise, announcing practice, announcing studenthood. I think Lorde's moderato is part of this elementarity, as are the self-conscious lyrical allusions to Mom and Dad, school, riding the bus, and "my first plane." As the complexity of some moments attests (I think especially of "Buzzcut Season"), Lorde does not <em>have</em> to be simple. But there's a formal insistence on simplicity that speaks not only to the image of authenticity that Annie points out, but also to precocity: you cannot be prococious just by being good; you have to be too young to be that good, too.<br />
<br />
<small>*I started playing the album when I started writing this post, then realized I needed to turn it off if I was going to write words. Argh.</small>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-14906436685409435062014-03-02T14:07:00.000-05:002014-03-02T14:07:01.513-05:00<blockquote>All sorts of asses ‘love’ poetry. Why not? It confirms them in the assininity of their deepest beliefs. It underlies the racial laziness, the unwillingness to think, the satisfaction of feeling oneself part of the race and of having all posterity behind one in proneness and stupidity. This is what is inherent in most ‘love’ of poetry.<br />
<br />
A smooth, lying meter that nostalgically carries them back to sleep is what they want. That’s why for a living, changing people only the new poetry is truly safe, truly worth reading. And that is why it is opposed by the best people—the intellectually deepest bogged—as if it were the devil himself.<br />
<br />
—William Carlos Williams, “Note: The American Language and the New Poetry, so called” (1931?)<br />
</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-57859231068733403282014-01-20T14:06:00.001-05:002014-01-20T14:06:38.671-05:00<blockquote>By what process of logical accretion was this slight 'personality.' the mere slim shade of an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed with the high attributes of a Subject?—and indeed by what thinness, at the best, would such a subject not be vitiated? Millions of presumptuous girls, intelligent or not inteligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open to their destiny to <em>be</em>, at the most, that we should make an ado about it?<br />
<br />
—Henry James, preface to <em>The Portrait of a Lady</em>, 1907</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-4433370956521753742014-01-08T09:48:00.001-05:002014-02-02T22:13:43.619-05:00FootnotesMy essay "A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" is out today in <em>The New Inquiry</em>'s issue 24, "Bloodsport." Since <em>The New Inquiry</em> doesn't take footnotes, I am putting my footnotes here, sans context. Gotta cite those works.<br />
<br />
Update 1/31/2014: My attention was recently brought to Daniel Goldberg's useful article <a href="https://www.academia.edu/2037875/Mild_Traumatic_Brain_Injury_the_U.S._National_Football_League_and_the_Manufacture_of_Doubt_An_Ethical_Legal_and_Historical_Analysis">"Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, the U. S. National Football League, and the Manufacture of Doubt: An Ethical, Legal, and Historical Analysis,"</a> which also uses a Geertzian framework for understanding the NFL's management of evidence.<br />
Lindsey adds <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/super-bowl-confetti-made-entirely-from-shredded-co,35146/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=SocialMarketing&utm_campaign=LinkPreview%3A1%3ADefault">this</a>.<br />
<br />
1. Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, <i>League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions, and the Battle for Truth</i> (New York: Crown Books, 2013), 13.<br />
<br />
2. Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” <i>Daedalus</i> 101, no. 1 (January 1, 1972): 1–37.<br />
<br />
3. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 27-8.<br />
<br />
4. Ernest Hemingway, <i>The Sun Also Rises</i> (Simon and Schuster, 1926), 136.<br />
<br />
5. Geertz, “Deep Play,” 5.<br />
<br />
6. Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, <i>League of Denial</i>, 13–4.<br />
<br />
7. The joke’s on us if we compare football to war. In Stephen Crane’s iconic tale of scrambling toward masculinity, “[h]e ducked his head low like a football player.” Setting aside that the comparison is already anachronistic—American football was a post-Reconstruction Era phenomenon—as Bill Brown, like Geertz, suggests, play is conventionally a structuring metaphor for war rather than the reverse. In 2011, Bennet Omalu would connect CTE, the condition he diagnosed in former Steeler Mike Webster, to post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans. Stephen Crane, <i>The Red Badge of Courage, and Other Stories</i>, ed. Pascal Covici (New York: Penguin, 1991), 110; Bill Brown, <i>The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economies of Play</i> (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1996), 2; Bennet Omalu et al., “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in an Iraqi War Veteran with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Who Committed Suicide,” <i>Neurosurgical Focus</i> 31, no. 5 (November 2011): E3, doi:10.3171/2011.9.FOCUS11178.<br />
<br />
8. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, <i>Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life</i> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); cf. Donna Jeanne Haraway, <i>Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience</i> (New York: Routledge, 1997).<br />
<br />
9. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 66.<br />
<br />
10. Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (Baillière, 1865).<br />
<br />
11. Ira R. Casson, Elliot J. Pellman, and David C. Viano, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player (letter),” <i>Neurosurgery</i> 58, no. 5 (May 2006): E1003, doi:10.1227/01.NEY.0000217313.15590.C5.<br />
<br />
12. See e.g. Robert Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger, eds., <i>Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance</i> (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2008). See especially Part II: Lost Knowledge, Lost Worlds.<br />
<br />
13. In the book, Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru make a strong distinction between Omalu’s reception and McKee’s; indeed, “BU’s researchers [McKee among them] literally kept a file on what they alleged were Omalu’s exaggerations”; in the book, Omalu is widely characterized as prone to overinterpretation (epistemological immodesty). Yet the distinction is also strongly associated with Omalu’s lack of social fit—his “inappropriate” inability or unwillingness to modify his academic presentation style for a room full of football players and family members, his lack of investment in football as a cultural phenomenon, and, indeed, his foreignness. “I think [his swift sidelining from scientific discourse was] because he’s a black man, I honestly believe that,” the former linebacker Harry Carson states. “And he’s not an American black man; he’s from Africa.” McKee, in contrast, is represented as a nearly ideal figure, “with blond hair and blue eyes, a Green Bay Packers nut from Appleton, Wisconsin, with a girlish giggle and a knack for making the brain accessible and fun.” Fainaru-Wada and Fainaru, <i>League of Denial</i>, 290–3; 255.<br />
<br />
14. Gregg Rosenthal, “Michael Vick: I Lied to My Mom About Dogfighting,” NFL.com, July 18, 2012, http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82aa29a5/article/michael-vick-i-lied-to-my-mom-about-dogfighting.<br />
<br />
15. It doesn’t end there. Vick is unpopular with “casual” fans, due to his dogfighting scandal, according to polling, but he is appreciated by “hardcore fans”—those, we might say, who “love the game.” Tom Van Riper, “The NFL’s Most-Disliked Players,” <i>Forbes</i>, October 21, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomvanriper/2013/10/21/the-nfls-most-disliked-players-2/.<br />
<br />
16. Rosenthal, “Michael Vick”; Dan Hanzus, “Michael Vick’s Book Reveals QB’s Dogfighting Mindset,” NFL.com, July 16, 2012, http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d82a99b17/article/michael-vicks-book-reveals-qbs-dogfighting-mindset.<br />
<br />
17. Perfetto’s occupation is mentioned in neither the documentary nor the book. Alan Schwarz, “Ralph Wenzel, Whose Dementia Led to Debate on Football Safety, Dies at 69,” <i>The New York Times</i>, June 22, 2012, sec. Sports / Pro Football, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/23/sports/football/ralph-wenzel-whose-dementia-led-to-debate-on-football-safety-dies-at-69.html; Alan Schwarz, “Wives United by Husbands’ Post-N.F.L. Trauma,” The <i>New York Times</i>, March 14, 2007, sec. Sports / Pro Football, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/14/sports/football/14wives.html.<br />
<br />
18. As Perfetto notes, this dementia is often characterized by violent episodes, which are especially dangerous coming from exceptionally large men who are not yet old or even necessarily middle-aged. See Schwarz, “Wives United by Husbands’ Post-N.F.L. Trauma.”<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-26813888747516309062014-01-04T13:40:00.000-05:002014-01-04T19:14:46.074-05:00Humanities scholarship is incredibly relevant, and that makes people sad.Man, <em>two</em> of them today, <a href="http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/cura-te-ipsum/">one in <em>3am Magazine</em></a> (h/t <a href="http://its-her-factory.blogspot.com/">Robin James</a>) and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702304858104579264321265378790-lMyQjAxMTA0MDAwNDEwNDQyWj">one in the relentlessly regressive <em>WSJ</em></a> (remember <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/home/2013/12/21/3098361/wall-street-journal-bemoans-end-white-rule-united-states/">this guy</a>, whose <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903999904576468011530847064">cranky pan of the <em>Cambridge History of the American Novel</em></a> is a classic of this genre?), h/t <a href="http://noelbjackson.wordpress.com/">Noel Jackson</a>.<br />
<br />
Don't bother clicking; you've already read it a hundred times. It's the article titled "The Humanities Are Relevant and I Hate That."<br />
<br />
The humanities are often represented as an irrelevant, moribund, and merely preservationist field, passing on old knowledge of old things without producing anything new. That's why it keeps having to be "defended" by people saying, "no! old shit matters too!" (It does—witness one chapter from Washington Irving's 1819-20 <em>Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.</em> getting rebooted yet again, this time as a <a href="http://www.fox.com/sleepy-hollow/">goofy paranormal procedural</a>—but this already accepts a basic misrepresentation of humanities scholarship.) <br />
<br />
Yet it’s precisely the production of new knowledge in the humanities that powerfully influences the everyday lives of Americans, and which leads to pearl-clutching by those who insist on the humanities’ irrelevance. David Brooks, for example, is very sad that the humanities have failed to be stagnant. He claims that humanities enrollments have substantially declined (<a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/11/princeton-grad-student-takes-humanities-crisis-decidedly-gendered-perspective">factually untrue</a>) since the rise of critical theory and its concurrent attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability in the 1980s. But the humanities didn’t just turn to these categories for kicks (still less because it was “fashionable,” as culture-wars critics like Alan Sokal have claimed); turning to them was the result of research. Through research, scholars <i>found out</i> that these categories were complicated, powerful, and important for understanding culture. Brooks seems to suppose that doing research that has a broad impact makes your field irrelevant. This is deranged.*<br />
<br />
Do you know a black child who grew up knowing about America’s great traditions in African American literature, visual art, music, and film? Are you glad <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Their-Eyes-Were-Watching-God/dp/0061120065/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388860262&sr=1-1&keywords=their+eyes+were+watching+god">Their Eyes Were Watching God</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cane-New-Jean-Toomer/dp/0871402106/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1388860275&sr=1-1&keywords=cane+toomer">Cane</a></em> are in print? Then thank the scholars, artists, and activists who have recovered that work—often obscured by a racist publishing culture and by an academy that didn’t think it was important at the time. There’s a reason that students protested and sat in to fight for the establishment of ethnic studies and women’s studies departments in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t a fashion statement: serious formal engagement with the cultural contributions of women and ethnic minorities was urgently needed. No one can credibly say in public that women cannot be great authors anymore, for example, and when the writer V.S. Naipaul tried in 2011 (and <a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/01/emily-keeler-and-david-gilmour">David Gilmour in 2013</a>), <a href="http://www.salon.com/2011/06/02/naipaul_slams_jane_austen_women_writers/">everybody knew how ridiculously wrong he was</a>. How did they know? Thank the humanities. Thank those horrible feminist critics from the '80s who allegedly ruined literary scholarship. They worked like hell to change the language, and most of them never got famous.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=17594">Why does my cousin complain about her high heels as a way of bonding with other women?</a>** <a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookid=5773#.UeG0Z1OE5Xc">Why does the criminal justice system so routinely view black minors not only as criminal but also as non-children?</a> <a href="http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/WARN_PUB.html">Why do gender and sexual categories like “male,” “female,” “gay,” “straight,” or “trans” have such an outsized effect on the way that you and I experience public space?</a> The humanities address the questions, big and small, that we urgently want answered. Answers often lie in the history of the way that we’ve mediated these problems, in cultural artifacts like novels, poems, newspapers, visual art, music, and film. Sorting through, analyzing, and theorizing those artifacts is the business of the humanities. <br />
<br />
Academic humanities scholars do this very well, but non-university-affiliated people engage in humanistic work all the time. (Let's NOT give all the credit for the above to academics—many of whom are <em>still</em> firmly in the crankypan/ts camp and hold great influence. A great deal of this work was led by activists and non-academics—but that's my point: the academic humanities are not hermetically sealed off from the rest of the world in the way that some believe, or that David Brooks and Heather Mac Donald would like.) If you're a "completist" who has to watch every Eric Rohmer film you can, you’re doing humanities. When you decide you need to watch every single episode of every single <i>Star Trek </i>franchise, and when you decide to write about it on a blog or in a forum, you’re still doing humanities. You’re doing humanities if you write <i>Harry Potter</i> fanfiction to reinterpret the world of Hogwarts as a place where gay romances can flourish, or where characters of color aren’t relegated to supporting roles. (<a href="http://nyupress.org/books/book-details.aspx?bookId=9874#.UeG3OVOE5Xc">Humanities scholars study fanfiction, too</a>. Cue the pearl-clutching about the decline of Standards.) Sometimes books by academics are difficult to read, because they’re specialized and technical and reference a lot of things you haven’t read. That’s fine; it’s harder to read an academic science journal than it is to read <i>National Geographic</i>, too. We may not always notice the ways that academic concepts are circulated and reinterpreted in popular culture, but <em>that's because we live and breathe it every day</em>. Just like scientific research, humanities research constantly crosses in and out of the academy, and it’s so much a part of everyday life that most of the time we don’t even bother to think of it as “humanities.”<br />
<br />
The interpretation of culture and of cultural artifacts is everywhere, whether we’re deciding whether a book or television show is appropriate for a child, parsing an ambiguous email from someone we love, or trying to understand out a falling out among friends. The academic humanities are the serious, formal study of such interpretation. And that interpretation <i>fundamentally</i>—not incidentally—involves the conceptual categories that shape everyday life, including race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. Interpretation is social. It's political.<br />
<br />
My hunch is that some people would rather that the humanities weren’t as relevant as they are, and have projected a distorted image of a self-involved, isolated profession in order to justify defunding the very research that makes the humanities so important. “Pay no attention to the research that’s going on here! It’s irrelevant!,” they insist. They wish that instead of doing new research on under-studied archives, bringing public attention to hidden histories, or offering new and challenging ways to think about the categories that most shape politics and everyday life, that we’d pipe down and eternally reproduce old, unchanging narratives about the usual suspects. They wish not only that we’d keep teaching about Thomas Jefferson (which we do, happily), but also that we’d keep teaching him the same way, forever, never bringing to light new historical evidence (<a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-06477-3/">Sally Hemings, anyone?</a>***) or reinterpreting his writing through <a href="http://americanliterature.dukejournals.org/content/85/4/661.full.pdf+html">theoretical frameworks that bring new insight</a> [Duke journals paywall]. They wish it were mere faddishness causing the humanities to do this kind of work. Sorry, guys: it’s evidence.<br />
<br />
They stereotype us as standing up in front of a classroom and teaching the same old syllabus in the form of lectures that remain the same from year to year. But they only wish that were true. In reality, humanities scholars continually rethink their syllabi, taking into account recent research in the field, new approaches in our own research, and successes and failures in our previous teaching, which rarely takes the form of lectures. That’s because at the university level, the humanities, like every other field, is a field in the making. New knowledge is being created all the time, and that’s a good thing.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that when pundits deride the humanities as irrelevant, it’s because we aren’t, and that poses a threat. Yes, studies in the humanities <i>do</i> raise uncomfortable questions, like when <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/01/AR2010100104457.html?hpid=topnews">Susan Reverby, a women’s studies professor at Wellesley, documented a series of horrific unethical medical experiments that the U.S. Government performed on Guatemalan prisoners in the 1940s</a>. They do make you change your textbooks. They challenge firmly held beliefs about culture, and offer evidence to back it up. People who want humanities research to be "timeless" do not believe that it can or should be timely. They are wrong.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<small><br />
<br />
Many thanks to <a href="http://tressiemc.com/">Tressie McMillan Cottom</a> for comments on an earlier version of this post.<br />
<br />
*Yes, I violated my #neverclick rule. For you, dear readers.<br />
**Not a real cousin.<br />
***Historical research on Sally Hemings actually comes up in the aforementioned goofy paranormal procedural <em>yes I admit I have watched it</em>. It was all the tweets about the show using Middle English that drew me in. (By the way: Middle English in the 1590s? Wtf?) The point is: time-traveling eighteenth-century Ichabod (yeah, <em>very</em> loose adaptation) doesn't know about Sally Hemings but EVERYBODY in the present day does. THANK YOU, ANNETTE GORDON-REED.<br />
<br />
I wish I could have a "<em>BEYONCE</em> as Bildung" symposium with all my students from last semester. I know they would rock it.<br />
</small> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-33120482158688907962014-01-01T22:57:00.003-05:002014-01-01T22:57:56.287-05:00<blockquote>Why is it that at the “same time” capital grows more virtual and abstract in its daily operations, cultural critique grows increasingly positivistic and empirical, veering away from the methods best suited for the analysis of its proliferation? (300)<br />
<br />
—Sianne Ngai, <em>Ugly Feelings</em></blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-19929944503362470082014-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:002014-01-01T00:00:04.063-05:002014Hello, new year.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-5032781705980750302013-10-10T11:43:00.000-04:002013-10-10T11:43:10.022-04:00Won't somebody let this child into the cage?Cross-posted to the course blog for my junior seminar Modernism and Childhood.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
Another one for the "government and cuteness" theme:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Via <a href="https://twitter.com/reddit">@Reddit</a>, the absolute saddest <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23shutdown&src=hash">#shutdown</a> photo you will see <a href="http://t.co/6KhLdZeBOs">pic.twitter.com/6KhLdZeBOs</a></p>— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) <a href="https://twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/statuses/388310922005336064">October 10, 2013</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> <br />
<br />
Think about this photo again when we read <em>Curious George</em>.<br />
<br />
What does the tweeter—journalist Alex Fitzpatrick—seem to think is the rhetorical force of this photo?<br />
<br />
It's "sad"; the toddler is sad; the toddler loves animals, as evidenced by her or his indeterminate animal-ears hood, and wants into the zoo; the toddler can't go in because of the government shutdown.<br />
<br />
Of course, it's completely plausible to think that a toddler loves animals. You should see my niece looking at a turtle; she could not be more psyched.<br />
<br />
But back up. Why would wearing an animal-ear hood translate into evidence of loving animals? After all, the toddler didn't wobble down to Baby Gap and pick it out him- or herself. <a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2011/12/children-dressed-as-animals-dressed-as.html">It was an adult who decided that this child's love of animals should be manifested as an <em>identification</em> with the animal</a>. <br />
<br />
The child is trying to get into the zoo. To see animals? Or to be an animal? <br />
<br />
The striking iconography of metal bars here makes the child look caged, citing what we know a zoo to be: a place where animals are kept in cages. The cages are carefully designed and controlled environments meant to emulate the animals' natural habitats and keep them happy, but they are cages all the same. The child is dressed as an animal. The child wants in, and the bars are keeping her or him out. The child cannot read the sign, prominent on the right, that explains why. For that matter, the child cannot vote for members of Congress.<br />
<br />
The sadness of this image is the same as its cuteness: the child's desire is frustrated by the same adult forces that iconographically stage her helplessness and her kinship with the animals she is trying to see.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-84236890638232985772013-09-20T01:03:00.000-04:002013-09-20T01:03:36.707-04:00This is a far too long response to <a href="http://www.adelinekoh.org/blog/2013/09/19/survey-is-creating-an-online-journal-a-digital-humanities-project/">a post by Adeline Koh.</a><br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
I agree with Ted's point that DH is a social category more than anything else, but, as he acknowledges, such social categories are consequential. I've argued <a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2013/03/still-further-beyond-cave.html">before</a> that the search for "the most digital digital" is basically intellectually doomed. But I don't think that's the question Adeline was asking—I think she was already asking the social question. (<a href="https://twitter.com/mkirschenbaum/status/380715951315894272">Matt Kirschenbaum gave a social answer</a>.) <br />
<br />
In most cases in the humanities, there isn't that much disciplinary boundary-policing; people usually care more about whether the work is good (for what it is) than whether it's "modernist" or "eighteenth century" (a century reputed to be quite long!) or, to use Ted's examples, Marxist or New-Critical. Thus <a href="https://www.mla.org/pmla_submitting">"[t]he ideal <em>PMLA</em> essay exemplifies the best of its kind, whatever the kind."</a> To the question of "what kind of scholarship is this?" <em>PMLA</em> literally says "whatever"!* <br />
<br />
Weirdly, though, when it comes to digital humanities, the digitalness (<em>how</em> digital?) matters a lot. In some quite consequential institutional settings (hiring, fellowships and grants, tenure), <em>what kind?</em> matters for things marked "digital" where, for other things, the operative question would be <em>how good?</em> (for widely varying definitions of "good," of course).** It's nice to say, "focus on the scholarship, not on whether it's DH" (#4 above). But there's a reason people focus on whether it's DH: largely through the urging of <a href="http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/11">digital</a> <a href="http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-4/evaluating-multimodal-work-revisited-by-shannon-mattern/">humanists</a> <a href="http://codespeak.scholarslab.org/">themselves</a>, digital work has come to be seen as warranting an entirely different evaluative system from "traditional" scholarship, so that the question of <em>how good?</em> depends on the question of <em>what kind?</em> in the first place. So in practical terms, "how digital?"—philosophically incoherent as the question is—often serves as a proxy for "how good?," and even if we think it shouldn't matter we've set it up so that it does (<a href="http://quintessenceofham.org/2013/02/07/a-digital-humanities-tenure-case-part-2-letters-and-committees/">and not entirely without reason</a>). <br />
<br />
Matt's social answer to the "how digital?" question—tautological or recursive, depending on how we prefer to read it—is that "It is DH if it assumes value within a community of practice that 'does' DH." <br />
<br />
But Adeline's question was posed in the specific context of putting together an introduction to DH for people who need one—who have heard of this "digital humanities" thing, do not [think they] do it, and would like to. If they're in "a community of practice that 'does' DH," they're not aware of it. Adeline's task is to inform them of how they might create or join such a community of practice. Under what circumstances would creating an online journal constitute such a thing?<br />
<br />
So I think Ted's right; it's a social question. But it's a social question that matters for social reasons that can't, I think, be disavowed without abdicating responsibility for the institutionalization that was so ardently fought for (resulting in an "<a href="http://nowviskie.org/2010/eternal-september-of-the-digital-humanities/">eternal September</a>" or "<a href="http://stephenramsay.us/2013/05/03/dh-one-and-two/">DH II</a>" that long-time practitioners are now <a href="http://philomousos.blogspot.com/2013/09/outside-tent.html">declaring uncomfortable</a>—y'all, what did you think was going to happen?).<br />
<br />
Is an online journal "DH"?<br />
<br />
I think Matt's social answer to this social question probably comes closest to the mark. But I also think what he's describing is unfortunate. It would be better, I think, to examine why the social question—<em>how digital?</em>—keeps mattering, so we can figure out how to make it matter less.<br />
<br />
--<br />
* But: as far as I know, <em>PMLA</em> is not set up to publish a database.<br />
<br />
** I'm glossing over some local circumstances of boundary-policing—like, we all know that C19 has a vision of American lit scholarship that's different from ASA's or ALA's. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-2204043837656818012013-09-17T14:55:00.001-04:002013-09-17T17:30:32.133-04:00Wasting time on the internet: a syllabusThis is a syllabus in progress, imagined as part writing workshop, part American studies course on aesthetics. Comments and suggestions are welcome.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>What I Did For Love: Taste, Evaluation, and Aesthetics in American Culture</b><br />
<br />
“I don’t know art, but I know what I like,” goes the disclaimer. In this writing-intensive part-workshop, part-seminar, we will seek to unpack the relationship between “art” and “what I like” by examining a variety of cultural objects together with accounts of “taste.” What are the uses of an art that nobody likes? Could “annoyance” be an aesthetic principle? What is the role of money in taste? What are the ethics of aesthetics? Under what circumstances is an aesthetic pleasure “guilty”? When should the appreciation of art works be a matter of disinterested judgment, and when a matter of passionate engagement? Does “love” blind? What is the difference between a “fan” and a “critic”? What are the affordances and limits of the “formulaic” and the “generic”? <br />
<br />
Four weeks of this course will be devoted to workshopping students’ critical writing, examining the roles of description, praise, blame, analysis, and enthusiasm in writing about culture. Students will also maintain a course blog. For the final assignment, students are encouraged to pitch their writing to an appropriately chosen publication.<br />
<br />
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="MsoTableGrid" style="border-collapse: collapse; border: none; mso-border-insideh: none; mso-border-insidev: none; mso-padding-alt: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;"><tbody>
<tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 1 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"><br />
<b>Introduction: Aesthetics</b><br />
John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”<br />
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” <br />
Peter Coviello, <a href="http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/talk-talk/">“Talk, Talk”</a> <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 1;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 2 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Beauty and the sublime</b> <br />
Immanuel Kant, from <i>Critique of the Power of Judgment</i> <br />
Thomas Nagel, from <i>The View from Nowhere</i> <br />
<b >Short exercise</b>: choose a cultural object to describe as plainly as possible. About 500 words. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 2;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 3 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>Taste and class</b> <br />
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” <br />
Pierre Bourdieu, from <i>Distinction</i> <br />
Thorstein Veblen, from <i>The Theory of the Leisure Class</i> <br />
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, from <i>Contingencies of Value</i> <br />
T. S. Eliot, <i>The Waste Land</i>; selections from <i>Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats</i> <br />
Andrew Lloyd Webber et al., selections from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CATS</i> <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 3;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 4 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Essay 1</b>: Describe some piece of culture (novel, film, painting, poem, music video, etc.) that you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">love</i>, and that you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">also think is good</i>. (These are two different things.) Explain why it is that you love the piece, what it is that makes it good, and how you can tell the difference (and under what circumstances you can’t). Be sure to explain what it is that makes art good in general—you don’t need to advance a fully developed theory of aesthetics, but you do need to unpack your assumptions as much as you can. <i>Have an argument</i>. This should be around 3000 words. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 4;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 5 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Difficulty</b> <br />
William Butler Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult” <br />
Josef Albers, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.lacma.org/beyondgeometry/artworks0.html">Homage to the Square: Dissolving/vanishing</a></i> (1951) <br />
Marianne Moore, “An Octopus” <br />
Sianne Ngai, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/592544">“Merely Interesting”</a> <br />
Leonard Diepeveen, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Difficulties of Modernism</i> <br />
Lawrence Levine, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America</i> <br />
Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 5;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 6 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >“Guilty pleasures,” pop culture, and authenticity</b> <br />
Céline Dion, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Talk About Love </i>(1997) <br />
Carl Wilson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste</i> <br />
Sarah Blackwood, <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/dance-dance-revelation-on-so-you-think-you-can-dance">“Dance Dance Revelation: On <i>So You Think You Can Dance</i>”</a> <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w536Alnon24">“I'm Not Here To Make Friends” supercut</a> [YouTube video] <br />
Mallory Ortberg, <a href="http://the-toast.net/2013/09/17/oscar-wilde-and-walt-whitman-did-it/">“Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman Probably Had Sex Once”</a> <br />
Abigail De Kosnik, “Fandom as Free Labor,” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Internet as Playground and Factory</i>, ed. Scholz</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 6;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 7 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>Popular culture, popular criticism</b> <br />
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” <br />
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry” <br />
Caleb Smith, <a href="http://www.avidly.org/2013/07/17/say-hello-to-my-little-friend/">“Say Hello to My Little Friend”</a> <br />
Mary Oliver, selected poems <br />
<b >Short exercise</b>: write a piece of fanfiction, about 1000 words, in the setting of your choice. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 7;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 8 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Gender and “the popular”</b> <br />
Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman” <br />
Rebecca Black, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0">“Friday”</a> [YouTube video] <br />
Dana Vachon, <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2011/03/arms-so-freezy-rebecca-blacks-friday-as-radical-text">“Arms So Freezy: Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ as Radical Text”</a> <br />
Rae Armantrout, “Why Don’t Women Write Language-Centered Poetry?” <br />
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now”; "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" <br />
Eve Kosofsky, <a href="http://www.theawl.com/2012/09/when-we-were-seventeen/2">“Curl Up and Read”</a> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Seventeen</i>, 1964) <br />
<br />
<b>Short exercise</b>: Make the case that some cultural object is a “remake” of another, earlier one (for example, that Pixar’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Toy Story</i> is a remake of Disney’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pinocchio</i>). Be honest about the ways in which the claim does not hold up. In addition to noting similarities or lines of influence, you should explain what we gain from understanding the later object as a remake of the earlier one. 500–1,000 words. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 8;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 9 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>“Formulaic”</b> <br />
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition”; “The Raven” <br />
Mark Twain, <a href="http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html">“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”</a> <br />
Janice Radway, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reading the Romance</i> <br />
<i>Smart Bitches, Trashy Books</i> reviews: <a href="http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/monroe_therealdeal/">"<i>The RealDeal</i> by Lucy Monroe”</a>; <a href="http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/tell_me_lies_by_jennifer_crusie/">“<i>Tell Me Lies</i> by Jennifer Crusie”</a>; <a href="http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/blog/skies-of-gold-by-zoe-archer">“<i>Skies of Gold</i> by Zoe Archer”</a> <br />
<i>Tvtropes.org</i>, <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElvesVersusDwarves">“Elves versus Dwarves”</a>; <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsYouKnow">“As You Know”</a> <br />
Lili Loofbourow, <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/just-another-princess-movie/">“Just Another Princess Movie”</a> [rev of <i>Brave</i>] <br />
Christian Bök, <em>Eunoia</em><br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 9;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 10 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Essay 2</b>: Choose a piece of art and viciously pan it. Your critique should be utterly devastating, which is to say that you should be able to persuade your reader that this piece is a blight on humanity, and not merely that you are a mean-spirited person. This will be more effective if you resist choosing an easy target. 2,000–3,000 words. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 10;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 11 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Cuteness and commodification</b> <br />
Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde” <br />
Gary Cross, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Cute and the Cool</i> <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XID_W4neJo">“Many too small boxes and Maru”</a> [YouTube video] <br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4">“Nyan Cat [original]”</a> [YouTube video] <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 11;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 12 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>Essay 3</b>: Review some piece of culture that was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">recently produced</i>—say, since January 2012. Give your reader a fairly thickly textured sense of what this piece is like, and explain what its successes and failures are. Once again, be sure to unpack what it means for something to “succeed” (in any register). What is the historical, cultural, or aesthetic milieu in which this piece is ideally legible? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Make a point</i>. This should be around 3,000 words. <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 12;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 13 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>Cool</b> <br />
William Gibson, <i>Pattern Recognition</i> <br />
Alan Liu, from <i>The Laws of Cool</i> <br />
Michael Szalay, from <i>Hip Figures</i> <br />
Janelle Monáe, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnefUaKCbc">“Tightrope”</a> [YouTube video] <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 13;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 14 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b>Inappropriate/appropriative</b> <br />
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heart of Darkness</i>” <br />
Justine Larbalestier, <a href="http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/07/23/aint-that-a-shame/">“Ain’t That a Shame”</a> <br />
Fanlore Wiki: <a href="http://fanlore.org/wiki/Race_and_Fandom">“Race and Fandom”</a> <br />
Mitali Perkins, “<a href="http://www.slj.com/2009/04/books-media/collection-development/straight-talk-on-race-challenging-the-stereotypes-in-kids-books/">Straight Talk on Race: Challenging the Stereotypes in Kids’ Books</a>” <br />
Malcolm Harris, <a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-white-market/">“The White Market”</a> <br />
Nancy Sommers, <a href="http://www.jstor.org/stable/356588">“Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers”</a> <br />
</td> </tr>
<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 14; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;"> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 62.5pt;" valign="top" width="63"> <br />
Week 15 <br />
</td> <td style="padding: .1in 5.75pt .1in 5.75pt; width: 345.0pt;" valign="top" width="345"> <br />
<b >Conclusions </b> <br />
<br />
<b>Essay 4</b>: Revise your review for publication in a venue of your choice. It may be print or online. When you submit this assignment to me, you should also submit a copy of the submission guidelines for this venue (to which your revised review should adhere) and a rationale (about 500 words) for choosing this publication. You are encouraged to actually submit the review to the publication you have chosen. (You might be interested in <a href="http://whopays.tumblr.com/">this</a>.) <br />
</td> </tr>
</tbody></table>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-43608277920843449632013-09-10T20:44:00.001-04:002013-09-10T20:45:23.537-04:00On DHThis and critiques thereofThis was turning into The Infinite Comment, so I am posting here instead of on <a href="http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com/2013/09/a-gentle-critique-of-dhthis.html">Whitney Trettien's post</a> on <a href="http://dhthis.org/">DHThis</a>, which is very worth reading. The bulk of this post ends up being about what "self-promotion" means under neoliberalism's compulsory self-commodification, which is a complete tangent, so I guess that's another reason not to dump it at Whitney's.<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
I am in general agreement with Whitney's main point that a reddit-like system has the potential for serious problems, and that reliance on "the community" to self-regulate has not worked out terribly well in the past. Stephen Ramsay and Trevor Owens asked on Twitter why DHThis didn't just use the existing DH subreddit. The obvious answer is that reddit is a terrifying cesspool of misogyny, racism, and assholery, and that is a <i>very good reason</i>. <br />
<br />
But the obvious question that raises is: what <i>structural</i> safeguards will prevent DHthis from becoming a terrifying cesspool of misogyny, racism, and assholery? I have great faith in Adeline and Roopsi and the DHthis team as stewards of the project, but it's an important question. When I had my own dismaying <a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2012/04/jdh-11-minimal-reflections-on-ongoing.html">interaction with <i>JDH</i></a> (which was also, to be clear, in many ways also a very <i>good</i> interaction), the problem was precisely an overreliance on crowdsourcing. As Matthew Ciszek recently <a href="https://twitter.com/mciszek/status/377158326498652161">tweeted</a>, "Crowdsourcing selection kills diversity. More diverse materials typically less popular." I'll look forward to seeing what procedures DHthis implements to maintain a safe, productive, and genuinely diverse space. It's early days, and there's time for this project to develop.<br />
<br />
I would offer a few points of disagreement as well. <br />
<br />
First, I disagree with the suggestion that recent debates have been "petty quarrels." They have stakes for someone, and deciding which quarrel is petty and which is substantive depends on one's sense of security vis-à-vis the point of contention. <br />
<br />
And second, I question the "self promotion" description, for three reasons. <br />
<br />
1. I really don't see how this project is any more self-promoting than any other project rollout—say, One Week One Tool. Even the inclusion of a DHPoco category doesn't seem heavily self-promoting to me. Maybe it should have been called "Postcolonialism" instead?<br />
<br />
2. Supposing we were to grant that the style of rollout was self-promoting (rather than project-promoting), what bearing would that have on the quality of the project? This, to me, is unclear. As a general rule, I think the question of intentions hinders evaluating effects.<br />
<br />
3. There are a lot of mixed messages about self-promotion under neoliberalism, and women and people of color get them most of all. Like makeup ads that urge you to cover your face in <del>allergens</del> foundation to get that "natural glow," social media—which I think many people will agree have been central to recent DH formations—<a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/promotional-culture-on-facebook/">exhort an engagement</a> that is "genuine," but which will also "get your voice out there"; ideally your internet presence will promote you through the effacement of its own promotional aspect. Merely having an internet presence is a form of "self-promotion"; yet it is also, importantly, a place of genuine (not just "genuine") engagement, a part of people's lives, and in many cases, not optional. <br />
<br />
This critique has precisely been leveled at DH in recent years: that its webcentricity renders it "cliquish," even though blogs and Twitter are (mostly) public. Even for practitioners at the center of DH, <a href="http://tanyaclement.org/2012/03/27/i-am-a-woman-and-i-am-a-mother-and-i-do-dh/">the "second shift" of social media</a> can be burdensome. The counterargument—not an empty one—is that these media offer a horizontal means of (genuine, not "genuine") engagement that cuts across existing hierarchies. Blogs and social media are currently central to DH, in part for the very good reason that digital publishing and pedagogy, through precisely some of these media (Tumblr and Twitter, but also Omeka and CommentPress) are a brave new terrain for DH (<a href="http://stephenramsay.us/2013/05/03/dh-one-and-two/">Stephen Ramsay's</a> and <a href="http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=203">David Golumbia's</a> "DH II"), and have facilitated its recent expansion in all manner of ways. <em>JDH</em> and <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/">DHNow</a> rely centrally on blogs and social media, which is why it never caught wind of <a href="http://transformdh.tumblr.com/">#transformdh</a>'s important ASA panel on embodiment.<br />
<br />
So who is "self-promoting"? Everyone probably remembers how, every time VIDA issues its <a href="http://www.vidaweb.org/the-count">count</a>, editors from mainstream pubs wring their hands and say that women just don't pitch to them often enough; what can they <i>doooo?</i> Famously, the editors at Seal Press, a small feminist press, performed the same shopworn handwringing ritual about authors of color a few years ago. It was not impressive. Women and people of color are constantly admonished for failing to "put themselves out there" often enough. But when they do, all too often they are told that they are unbecomingly "self-promoting," and nobody should reward that! You kind of can't win.<br />
<br />
I don't at all want to suggest that Whitney is proposing a double standard here, or singling the DHThis team out—I think most of us are turned off by what seems to be obvious self-promotion, wherever our thresholds for detecting it may lie. <a href="http://arcade.stanford.edu/editors/how-public-frog#comment-2075">I myself have been known to zing people on the self-promotion front</a>. But I do think that the question of self-promotion, in addition to being a language of intention that tends to confuse the issue (see 2 above), is a constantly moving target. For that reason, I don't think it's nearly as important a criterion as the central objection Whitney raised about the redditlike voting structure of DHThis.<br />
<br />
I recognize the irony of spending an outsize amount of space on one of Whitney's avowedly lesser points, only to conclude that it is a lesser point! In a way, it's completely derailing of me to even bring it up. And yet, I also wanted to unpack the substance of my reservations about "self-promotion." Somehow its unimportance seems important.<br />
<br />
I look forward to seeing how DHThis works, and how it will be shaped in the future by concerns like the ones Whitney raised.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-15120492682188206622013-08-10T16:42:00.000-04:002013-08-10T16:42:38.275-04:00TacitOne thing I wish to observe about the UVa Scholars' Lab's upcoming <a href="http://codespeak.scholarslab.org/#">"Speaking in Code" symposium</a> is this.<br />
<br />
A <a href="http://codespeak.scholarslab.org/#inclusivity">call for diverse participation</a> rings hollow when the lineup of invited speakers is 100% white and cis male. I can think of some things besides "impostor syndrome" that might keep a developer from an underrepresented group from applying.<br />
<br />
It is doubly problematic when "tacit knowledge" has been used in DH (idiosyncratically; see Collins and Polanyi) to represent software development as a minority culture imperiled by "<a href="http://nowviskie.org/2013/resistance-in-the-materials/">dominant, extravagantly vocal and individualist verbal expressions</a>." This is an ideological reversal of the fact that software development is a prestige domain both within DH and in contemporary U.S. culture at large and that, far from being a marginalized culture, it is marginalizing, insofar as it is structurally exclusionary of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.<br />
<br />
Saying "you are welcome here" (as a student or participant but not as a leader or invited speaker) may ameliorate this structural exclusion, but not <em>much</em>.<br />
<br />
I see the demystification of "tacit knowledge" as a salutary project, and I wish this symposium all success. But this is not a model for <a href="https://twitter.com/ByzCapp/status/365535407900852224">inclusivity</a>. We can and should do better.<br />
<br />
<br />
-----<br />
<br />
Collins, Harry M. <em>Tacit and Explicit Knowledge</em>. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.<br />
<br />
Polanyi, Michael. <em>Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.<br />
<br />
———. <em>The Tacit Dimension</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-43223538118228466312013-06-21T17:05:00.002-04:002013-06-21T17:08:38.972-04:00What I know about Sis WillnerI'd never heard of Sis Willner (a.k.a. S. W. Philbin, a.k.a. Dorothy Dearborn), a Chicago poet, lyricist, socialite, and gossip columnist until yesterday when Paul Gehl gave me and a bunch of other C20ers a whirlwind tour of the modern print collection at the Newberry Library. <br />
<br />
Paul put Willner's first two books, <i>A Lady Thinks</i> (Black Archer, 1930) and <i>A Gentleman Decides</i> (Black Archer, 1931), out for us as examples of early C20 Chicago small press printing. Or rather, <i>A Gentleman Decides</i>, was placed in a series of Sandburgiana for its (very weird) preface by Carl Sandburg. (He calls her "a hard-boiled virgin." What?) Paul intimated that Willner was "justly forgotten," and I can see a way that that's true (in the sense that any account of the period will leave people out, and better Sis Willner than, say, Langston Hughes). But paging through the books left me snorting with laughter—it's funny, sarcastic, sometimes embarrassing middlebrow light verse. Despite not caring for the comparison, Willner writes in a breezy Dorothyparkeresque vein, often about gender and romance.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtO-2mcxRjOAD2_ZliNnzfphX5WaIKT9x-mm_wuUp6WrJMbW-craSNUc74p9o4fdtWC-wJEF3oH65sEZDhhJjwWtfcUWIJRxMIjVzIsu1fFtiiJTCcBFVsl80JRGhOkBzuCB-lUOnbmLVE/s1600/willner-a-lady-thinks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtO-2mcxRjOAD2_ZliNnzfphX5WaIKT9x-mm_wuUp6WrJMbW-craSNUc74p9o4fdtWC-wJEF3oH65sEZDhhJjwWtfcUWIJRxMIjVzIsu1fFtiiJTCcBFVsl80JRGhOkBzuCB-lUOnbmLVE/s400/willner-a-lady-thinks.jpg" /></a></div><br />
This is the kind of encounter that would leave anyone a-googling.<br />
<br />
In his memoir <i>The Right Time, the Right Place</i>, random meeter of famous people Charles Wohlstetter describes Willner thus: <br />
<blockquote>During the [Second World] war, whenever people traveled from coast to coast, there was a seven-hour stopover when the Twentieth Century Limited arrived in Chicago. While waiting for the Super Chief to take them the rest of the way to Los Angeles, regular tripsters would meet in the Pump Room of the Ambassador West Hotel. The doyenne of that table was Sis Willner, a breezy society columnist and a dear friend of mine; she wrote under the <i>nom de plume</i> Dorothy Dearborn. The attendees at her table included famous directors and producers, playwrights and novelists. (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=I3ivkfkLcFgC&lpg=PA122&dq=sis%20willner&pg=PA122#v=onepage&q=sis%20willner&f=false">122</a>)</blockquote><br />
Wohlstetter goes on to describe her marriage to an apparently pretty flaky financier named Phil Philbin, who, briefly jailed for crossing the SEC, got in the habit of cheerfully greeting new acquaintances with, "Hello, I'm Phil Philbin. I've been in the can" (Wohlstetter 123). After their marriage they moved from Chicago to Beverly Hills.<br />
<br />
I also cheated a little and looked on the online Newspaper Archive (thanks, library VPN!). My Firefox was being fussy, so I didn't check very thoroughly, but Willner definitely had a fan in Jefferson, MO journalist Margaret Morris Pinet, who wrote about her first two books of poems in the <i>Daily Capital News and Post-Tribune</i>.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4VjXdIB0MHpvJwfqGAslT77koi51FFKJ-qkEQHM1a1XLPJvrurEszJaKXSsKUStkQ3d9K-ThRKLHeCHjnHCT2_JtTvCAey2fAlQA2_uz0WRJEMTdNpE4Bitrn2TWdnLHoeNwleVwXJkL/s1600/1931-Pinet.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEji4VjXdIB0MHpvJwfqGAslT77koi51FFKJ-qkEQHM1a1XLPJvrurEszJaKXSsKUStkQ3d9K-ThRKLHeCHjnHCT2_JtTvCAey2fAlQA2_uz0WRJEMTdNpE4Bitrn2TWdnLHoeNwleVwXJkL/s400/1931-Pinet.png" /></a></div><br />
In a November 22, 1931 article, Pinet describes the "Middlewest Society Girl Noted as Modernist Poet": <br />
<blockquote>A daughter of a well known and wealthy Chicago family, undoubtedly one of the youthful sophisticates that have distressed an older generation, Sis Willner scrutinizes life of the present day and cpatures [<i>sic</i>] its laughter, tears, and purpose. <br />
<br />
Those who read the poetry from her facile pen will agree that "this girl who writes vividly" [quoting Carl Sandburg —<i>N.C.</i>] indeed faces a future as one of the "best light verse queens of the U.S. A." With more honors to the great middlewest which claims her as a daughter!</blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYwpYBsf5IKd1ajfMatQrPEKuLgrZLfFornlVgWjjt69iGH5Sdq6pzW0fh97-NfzofGv1un3zW2Ew76ADMLAlXJgYioLL_WIFGNyOTGRIaRhJriePjqkHU9BnsPMKUtgoKI_DgTjCUf4G/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-06-21+at+3.38.59+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHYwpYBsf5IKd1ajfMatQrPEKuLgrZLfFornlVgWjjt69iGH5Sdq6pzW0fh97-NfzofGv1un3zW2Ew76ADMLAlXJgYioLL_WIFGNyOTGRIaRhJriePjqkHU9BnsPMKUtgoKI_DgTjCUf4G/s400/Screen+Shot+2013-06-21+at+3.38.59+PM.png" /></a></div>An earlier, July 5, 1931 notice, in a Pinet column on various Chicago doings, reveals some further personal information: <br />
<blockquote>Sis is a person of charm and many ideas that are her own. She loves the colors of turquoise and black. And she wears the combination almost exclusively. Her apartment at the Shoreland is done throughout in this blue[.] Furnishings are black and the effect is startling. A young modernist whose verses show great promise. Sis may look to a future filled with literary success.</blockquote>If the Shoreland Pinet alludes to is the building I'm thinking of (and I imagine it is), then Sis Willner lived at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreland_Hotel">Shoreland Hotel</a> back in its fancy hotel days (it has subsequently been a pretty crusty/weird University of Chicago dorm and, most recently, an apartment complex).<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQCfm_rasZJucEAAYawVJi9fuVsXIyx3CCPG49BalhNCdZREo2O2mRq1R5op18rksYRtvHCYCoI7pOBltJvbZgyzQVifxjIzQ9OJPNKwn8E0QAdpD30rMAxmstpoNXwrpB8jSciIDTSIfO/s1600/postcard-chicago-shoreland-hotel-55th-and-the-lake-fantasy-aerial-view-1920s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQCfm_rasZJucEAAYawVJi9fuVsXIyx3CCPG49BalhNCdZREo2O2mRq1R5op18rksYRtvHCYCoI7pOBltJvbZgyzQVifxjIzQ9OJPNKwn8E0QAdpD30rMAxmstpoNXwrpB8jSciIDTSIfO/s400/postcard-chicago-shoreland-hotel-55th-and-the-lake-fantasy-aerial-view-1920s.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The final Sis Willner fact my cursory investigation turned up is that she wrote the lyrics for a song sung by Frank Sinatra and (wait for it) the Modernaires, titled "Why Remind Me."<br />
<br />
WorldCat locates copies of the sheet music at the University of North Texas and... the British Library. Go figure.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Select Bibliography<br />
<br />
Pinet, Margaret Morris. “Margaret Morris Pinet Writes About Chicago.” <em>Daily Capital News and Post-Tribune.</em> July 5, 1931.<br />
———. “Middlewest Society Girl Noted as Modernist Poet.” <em>Daily Capital News and Post-Tribune</em>. November 22, 1931.<br />
Sinatra, Frank, and Modernaires (Musical group). "Why Remind Me." U.S.A.: Columbia, 1949.<br />
Willner, Sis. <em>A Gentleman Decides</em>. Chicago: Black archer Press, 1931.<br />
———. <em>A Lady Thinks</em>. Chicago: The Black Archer Press, 1930.<br />
———. <em>The Morning After</em>. Chicago: Black Archer Press, 1933.<br />
Wohlstetter, Charles. <em>The Right Time, the Right Place</em>. Hal Leonard Corporation, 1997.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-75563505250051756112013-04-26T19:27:00.000-04:002013-04-27T10:53:50.544-04:00GoldminesOne of the really wonderful things about the Beinecke Library's Beyond the Text symposium this weekend is the way in which it weaves together archival and poetic concerns. Tara McPherson was here earlier this week to give a talk in WGSS, and I found it so refreshing when she talked about the great students in the practice-based Ph.D. program at USC: "we cheat a little," she said, "because most of them come in with MFAs, so they have certain skills." It's so rare to hear that kind of training spoken of as a <em>good</em> thing. But it is a good thing. This morning Lori Emerson cited studying the Emily Dickinson archive with Susan Howe as her primary training for the media archaeology work she now does at Boulder.<br />
<br />
In the second panel, on sound archives (Al Filreis, Jason Camlot, and Steve Evans), some conversation emerged—some spoken, <a href="http://storify.com/ncecire/beyond-the-text">some in the Twitter backchannel</a>—around labor. It began with Jason Camlot and Al Filreis's discussions of workflows, which were largely "DIY" (I get the feeling Al spends a lot of time digitizin' away) and/or supplemented by grad or staff labor. (Steve Evans ribbed Al: "You guys aren't <em>purely</em> DIY—come on!")<br />
<br />
These issues emerged more explicitly in the Q&A. One librarian noted that libraries' slowness often has to do with the cost of digitization, not in terms of equipment but of labor (because unlike the less formal structures Al had in place, libraries pay for this work). Lori noted that "DIY" often meant there was no one to whom to pass the torch when one person needed to step down, and that had much to do with the fact that this labor was uncompensated. As Jason rightly observed, this is a sustainability problem. Clearly this work is a labor of love for many people (in Al's case, visibly and wonderfully), but that does not then render it <em>not labor</em>.<br />
<br />
<br />
The general consensus seemed to be that poetry and sound archives necessarily run on uncompensated labor, and that the basic question is how to get more of it. (Crowdsourcing came up a number of times.)<br />
<br />
Jason Scott of the Internet Archive pointed out the incredible archival resource that the Internet Archive has been for a long time and continues to be, including for poetry materials (such as Naropa's archives). But this bounty was also framed in terms of volunteer labor, and in particular, the volunteer labor of young people.<br />
<br />
This seemed to me to be a very problematic premise, especially the assumption that it's not only fine but a good idea to have young people do unpaid work—that unpaid work is somehow the natural province of youth. It's true that young people are often enthusiastic, want to learn, and have time to contribute. They may very well like doing the work. At the same time, the naturalization of unpaid or underpaid youth labor should be resisted ("it's mostly high school students": the {false} rationalization of a low minimum wage), as should the naturalization of not paying for cultural preservation work. Jason's responses to me are in the <a href="http://storify.com/ncecire/beyond-the-text">Storify</a>, but one of them struck me as particularly interesting.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p>@<a href="https://twitter.com/anarchivist">anarchivist</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/elotroalex">elotroalex</a> @<a href="https://twitter.com/ncecire">ncecire</a> I like the idea of asking people to run a .wav digitizer on a record is like making children mine gold</p>— Jason Scott (@textfiles) <a href="https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/327841064469815296">April 26, 2013</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br />
<br />
Can we take a moment to talk about mining?<br />
<br />
Mining is perhaps now thought of as the quintessential poorly paid, dangerous, exploitative labor. There's a long history of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miners%27_strikes">labor conflict</a> around mining. Getting the stuff out of the ground is a really unsavory process, but then, we also really want the stuff.<br />
<br />
Mining is also the go-to metaphor for another often unsavory yet much-desired practice, the transmutation of "data" into usable "information." Mainly we have algorithms, overseen by humans, do the labor. Sometimes that's too hard, and you'd be better off having a human inside that machine; in that case you use <a href="http://ayhanaytes.wordpress.com/2010/02/02/crowdsourcing-mechanical-turk-and-cultural-history-of-cognitive-labour/">Mechanical Turk</a>. And sometimes the only thing of value that you need is labor, in which case we "crowdsource," mining the laborers themselves. The crowd's a goldmine. "So the hunter becomes the hunted, migrating from a situation in which users farm for gold, to a situation in which users are being farmed" (Galloway 137).<br />
<br />
Is crowdsourcing "like" mining? As always with likeness: in some ways yes, in some ways no. This is less a matter of "exact resemblance to exact resemblance" than of the difference spreading. Is volunteering to digitize poetry sound recordings "like" mining? Not intrinsically—but if neither is paid, or paid sufficiently, then they are "like" in that sense, which is the only relevant sense for the comparison.<br />
<br />
The canonical scene of mining strikes is actually not gold mining. The famous labor strikes repressed by Thatcher's government were mounted by coal miners. But gold mining looms large in the digital imagination for another reason: the phenomenon of simulacral primitive accumulation known as "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming">gold farming</a>." In the game <i>World of Warcraft</i>, the low-skill, time-intensive acquisition of "gold," which can then be sold for real currency to wealthier players, is famously associated with exploited Chinese workers, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/25/china-prisoners-internet-gaming-scam">including prisoners</a>.<br />
<br />
As Alex Galloway observes in <em>The Interface Effect</em>, the figure of the Chinese gold farmer—and its installation as a racial other in ways that, as Lisa Nakamura has shown, conduce to deeply racialized social formations within the world of the game—is as powerful as ideology as it is problematic as a labor form. It serves to fashion exploitative digital labor as not-us.<br />
<br />
And I would suggest that the eager twenty-year-old with a laptop functions similarly; in that way, too, digitizing sound archives is "like" gold mining, or rather "gold farming." Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for "fun," the youthful volunteer, <em>who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work</em>, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. "I can get you a twenty-year-old!" is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.<br />
<br />
<br />
<small><br />
Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2012. Print.<br />
<br />
See also Galloway, "Does the Whatever Speak?" In <i>Race After the Internet</i>. Ed. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White. New York: Routledge, 2012. 111-27. Print.<br />
<br />
Nakamura, Lisa. "Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft." In <em>Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory</em>. Ed. Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.<br />
</small><br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-13115395416698242122013-04-10T08:57:00.000-04:002013-04-10T08:57:17.856-04:00"Increasingly large classes"It is never really worth the time to point out something egregious the <em>New York Times</em> is doing, but it's rainy out and I'm a bit ranty this morning, so.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-grading-essays-at-college-level.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&smid=tw-share&">The recentish <em>NYT</em> article on machine-grading essays</a> ends thus:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Mark D. Shermis, a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, supervised the Hewlett Foundation’s contest on automated essay scoring and wrote a paper about the experiment. In his view, the technology — though imperfect — has a place in educational settings.<br />
<br />
With increasingly large classes, it is impossible for most teachers to give students meaningful feedback on writing assignments, he said. Plus, he noted, critics of the technology have tended to come from the nation’s best universities, where the level of pedagogy is much better than at most schools.<br />
<br />
“Often they come from very prestigious institutions where, in fact, they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could,” Dr. Shermis said. “There seems to be a lack of appreciation of what is actually going on in the real world.” </blockquote><br />
Three things going on there.<br />
<br />
1. "With increasingly large classes." Oh, what is causing those classes to grow? Nature? The seasons? <em>The moon and tides?</em> Or the failure to hire enough professors to meet the size of the student body in the first place? Shermis suggests that "increasingly large classes" are a fact of nature, not a personnel decision. The author of the article, John Markoff, does not correct.<br />
<br />
2. Shermis notes that critics often come from "very prestigious" institutions, by which he actually seems to mean "good" ones, because "they do a much better job of providing feedback than a machine ever could." I highly doubt the software gives more useful feedback than do humans at "less prestigious" institutions. (Don't get me started on the offensiveness of his insinuation about faculty at "less prestigious" institutions.) There is a disgusting and invidious ranking implicit in Shermis's remarks that imply that "the nation's best universities" are "best" purely through Merit and Talent, and that we have no responsibility to try to get <em>all</em> the nation's college students a commensurately high-quality education. That used to be what the University of California was for, but I guess that's gone. <br />
<br />
3. In a neat twist, Shermis decides that qualitatively rich teaching and helpful feedback on essays are not real. The actually existing, documentedly and admittedly better solution of <em>hiring enough faculty to teach your students</em> is placed outside "the real world," in a zone of unreality that makes it unemulable, and certainly not a model for broader educational policy. Whereas having software grade your students' essays is <em>totally</em> realistic and a great idea.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-33661990903752421762013-04-09T21:08:00.001-04:002013-04-09T21:08:24.118-04:00<blockquote>In fact, when I asked at yesterday’s conference what the university would like without its current adjuncts, I received this reply: MOOCs coupled with a new student body of global elite students.</blockquote><br />
<a href="http://karengregory.tumblr.com/post/47581772365/when-there-is-no-one-what-will-take-care-of-you#_=_">A wonderful post about moving beyond the "repressive hypothesis" of the corporate university, by Karen Gregory.</a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-24531205587515840112013-04-02T16:25:00.001-04:002013-04-02T16:59:45.279-04:00Dear Professor James, #YOLO :)Any Stein scholar would be struck by <a href="http://gawker.com/5993322/school-suspends-student-for-writing-yolo-on-test-tweeting-it-to-school-officials">this story</a> about a Texas high school student, Kyron Birdine, who wrote "YOLO :)" ["you only live once"]* on his standardized test paper and tweeted the photo to school officials. Birdine was punished with four days of in-school suspension. <br />
<br />
The first thing this made me think of was this famous story about Gertrude Stein:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>It was a very lovely spring day, Gertrude Stein had been going to the opera every night and going also to the opera in the afternoon and had been otherwise engrossed and it was the period of the final examinations, and there was the examination in William James's course. She sat down with the examination paper before her and she just could not. YOLO :) ** she wrote at the top of her paper, and left. <br />
<br />
The next day she had a postal card from William James saying, Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel I often feel like that myself. And underneath it he gave her work the highest mark in his course. (Stein, <em>The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas</em> 740)</blockquote><br />
The story is often quoted as evidence of Stein's whimsy, of James's good will, or both. Last semester I told the story to my American Lit students, who <em>immediately</em> asked me (as students <em>always</em> do when you tell this story) whether the same trick would avail in my class. ("Ha, ha, you can try." Never let it be said that I am not a loving teacher.) <br />
<br />
But of course, nothing will happen to a Yale undergrad who doesn't take a final exam, except that they'll fail the exam (which, in my course, only counted for perhaps 15% of the grade, and so would have by no means have kept the student from passing the course—<a href="https://twitter.com/BigColt_145/status/319164220438609920">and you know where a C average at Yale can get you</a>).<br />
<br />
Nothing was going to happen to Gertrude Stein, either. She didn't even plan on taking a degree at Radcliffe until the very end, when James persuaded her to try medical school. "There were no difficulties except that Gertrude Stein had never passed more than half of her entrance examinations for Radcliffe, having never intended to take a degree. However with considerable struggle and enough tutoring that was accomplished [<em>yes—she accomplished getting into the college she was already attending, which by the way was Harvard</em>] and Gertrude Stein entered Johns Hopkins Medical School" (740). She later flunked out of same and went to Paris and that was that. <br />
<br />
Contrast this charming tale of the 1890s with the artisanal home-canned pickle we are now in. Gertrude Stein took an exam when she absolutely had to, and sometimes not even then; that she could even attend Radcliffe was a mark of her privilege. Kids These Days, in contrast, are constantly subjected to high-stakes tests, consequential for them as individuals and <a href="http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/04/01/atlanta-cheating-scandal-puts-national-education-policy-on-trial/">for their school districts</a>. Contrast Stein's story with the myriad gymnastics (figurative and, if literal, often Olympic-grade) students now go through to get into Harvard (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_university#Students">7.9% admission rate</a>) or into medical school anywhere (we all have our pre-med stories).<br />
<br />
To refuse to take a standardized test is to practically refuse both present and future—even if the test doesn't really mean anything. By all accounts standardized testing is even more constant and more emphasized than it was when I was in high school (I was pre-NCLB), and even I remember how frequent the tests were, how arbitrary-seeming, and above all, how <em>boring</em>—the SSATs, the PSATs, the (and oh, did we laugh about it) Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs). <br />
<br />
Kyron Birdine's exceedingly mild rebellion and its consequences suggest, too, that if anything they are even more rigidly policed than they were in the 90s. I remember how each student was interpellated into the role of a potential cheater, a potential violator. Make sure you have the right kind of pencils, make sure you have extra, eyes on your own paper, also <em>cover</em> your paper in case someone else might look over because if someone else cheats off your paper you are then a cheater too. I don't know about cell phones; in Virginia in the 90s they were considered evidence of dealing drugs and banned from public schools.<br />
<br />
But the testing is also as arbitrary as it is compulsory. From the <em>Gawker</em> article linked above: <br />
<blockquote>As the Dallas Observer notes, Kyron are being forced to take both the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) test and the old Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test, even though only the TAKS will count.<br />
<br />
"He and any other Texas students who entered ninth grade before the 2011-12 school year are still evaluated on the TAKS test," the Observer explains. "They're still required to take the STAAR, but mainly so the state can get data they can use to tweak the test before it really matters."<br />
<br />
"It wasn't for a grade," Kyron told WFAA's News 8. "Colleges don't see it. It didn't benefit my personal life at all."</blockquote><br />
Students in Birdine's year were, in other words, being used as a data source to help calibrate the new test. I know I had to do this too, on the SAT--I took an analytical reasoning section, but the scores didn't count for anything because it was new; they just collected the data and used it to calibrate the scoring. I'm sure that's a standard procedure now as in the 90s. It disturbs me a little, though, that it's never occurred to me before that standardized testing companies shouldn't get to waste students' time and collect their data for free—let alone compulsorily.<br />
<br />
Kyron Birdine staged his mild protest with good humor, as his self-deprecating "#freeKyron" tweets indicate. And although in the grander scheme of things the punishment seems unjust, the four days of suspension probably won't have much impact on his life. Yet he seems aware of the power dynamic surrounding him, and the ease with which school conduces to criminalization.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/BigColt_145/status/319156410489401345" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgU9JXqICaoKpEs9AMyPMQTivcOqC5lVVy0CKOk8Jmzp0xfoEPoqwjBWrmhwSA5Ywm5A-6W4E3TwobdAW4h3sBdZ45hafVkOuOfoDSri8KHYaBEtIihevoWcPMDCq0Are23veek_lnAbnOU/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+3.58.31+PM.png" /></a><br />
<br />
"Some people are acting like I tweeted nuclear launch codes. I expressed my opinion on red lines. No more, no less," Birdine writes. He's right; it's not a crime.<br />
<br />
A friend replies, with the brutal honesty for which we so prize teenagers, that Birdine's protest was used as a cautionary tale in a class called "MYF." <br />
<br />
"myf?"<br />
<br />
"'mapping your future you know... The fuck around class where we do nothing[.]"<br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzWSeyRB7oX2H5s-JSb7h5UaO6E5ub_UWHQXxGNlXdZIxM9JWJWzP2G5j_bx3cst-SOZpLMjXnlXztjD8bP88NHAb4hpKDNUkaWKzFdg0IQwOvVOdjuv8wG5YNf4T9cVtJJ36wtM0v2ou4/s1600/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+4.11.11+PM.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzWSeyRB7oX2H5s-JSb7h5UaO6E5ub_UWHQXxGNlXdZIxM9JWJWzP2G5j_bx3cst-SOZpLMjXnlXztjD8bP88NHAb4hpKDNUkaWKzFdg0IQwOvVOdjuv8wG5YNf4T9cVtJJ36wtM0v2ou4/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+4.11.11+PM.png" /></a><br />
<br />
Nothing could be as important for mapping your future as obediently taking whatever test is put in front of you, it's suggested. Follow the rules. Avoid criminalization.<br />
<br />
Another friend responds by joking about the danger that Birdine poses to the Arlington school district:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/BigColt_145/status/319160089619599360" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8h8cuJb9XYMUSBFBOmmJYrKa8wTokZiIWusy1v0z4toA28tNWVWkfJohaEz4w6i47XfeX8OQu0TdUsXifv7nm-aklcfU14e9vkSrWpO0XFuJ4EzPEr79Vwfg3A2fEnvhrWibNNCfxo3DL/s320/Screen+Shot+2013-04-02+at+3.58.13+PM.png" /></a><br />
<br />
Birdine jokes back, but the joke has an uneasy undertow. "don't say that. Haha. They might see that as a threat."<br />
<br />
Haha.<br />
<br />
I often feel like that myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
<br />
*It delights me to no end that Birdine not only uses an internet abbreviation but renders the smiley face on his paper as an emoticon, using punctuation, <em>then tweets a photograph of the analog message</em>. Somebody get this kid in a media theory class.<br />
<br />
**As given in the original, what Stein wrote on that paper was "Dear Professor James,...I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day."<br />
<br />
Stein, Gertrude. <em>The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.</em> In <em>Writings, 1903-1932: Q.E.D., Three Lives, Portraits and Other Short Works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. </em> Ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Scott Chessman. New York: Library of America, 1998. Print. The Library of America 99.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-8787325525979986382013-03-08T18:10:00.000-05:002013-03-08T18:47:40.062-05:00Still further beyond the caveSomehow the other day in the midst of tweeting the morning sessions of the <a href="http://digitalscholarship.commons.yale.edu/schedule/">New Directions in Digital Scholarship</a> symposium I found myself once again accidentally having the "coding/building" <a href="http://storify.com/ncecire/beyond-the-cave-again/">conversation</a>, this time with Jonathan Stray. Jonathan's an interesting interlocutor in this regard, since he doesn't come from an academic humanities discipline, but rather from computational journalism. But despite the sentiment <a href="https://twitter.com/patrick_mj/status/308317050680508416">expressed</a> by all-around upbeat, positive-thinking guy Patrick Murray-John (and bless him for his general good will), I can't say that I found the conversation especially intriguing. In fact, I feel like I've had and seen this conversation a zillion times before, and so has everyone else.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Everyone should learn t̶o̶ ̶c̶o̶d̶e̶to argue about whether everyone should learn to code. <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23fixedthatforyou">#fixedthatforyou</a></p>— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) <a href="https://twitter.com/Ted_Underwood/status/308589376835829760">March 4, 2013</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br />
<br />
To put it bluntly, I think the search for the digital essence of the digital humanities is a classic case of an unexamined and openly theological metaphysics of presence, whether described as "building," "craft," or, as Patrick put it, a "<a href="https://twitter.com/patrick_mj/status/308301786861686786">creative or experimental</a>" relation to the tools at hand. (Creative and experimental as opposed to what? Conventional and obedient? Do we only count the using of "tools" if the using is against the grain? If so, remind me why we're building these things in the first place? Or, in other words, is the "creative and experimental" distinction anything other than a tautological insistence on the goodness of the good?) <br />
<br />
So I really have nothing to offer in the way of furthering the conversation, feeling as I do that the conversation is in many ways a <em>mistake</em>. (The conversation we might have instead could involve looking at <a href="http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/">great</a> <a href="http://tedunderwood.com/2012/12/14/what-can-topic-models-of-pmla-teach-us-about-the-history-of-literary-scholarship/">work</a> <a href="http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/">that's</a> <a href="http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/">happening</a> <a href="http://www.uncomputing.org/?p=206">now</a> and talking about what makes it interesting.) <br />
<br />
Yet here I am, wittering on all the same. Why? <br />
<br />
Well, in the course of our conversation Jonathan said something that struck me as illuminating:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-conversation="none"><p>@<a href="https://twitter.com/ncecire">ncecire</a> I feel compelled to make such distinctions partially as a move to raise the bar -- some really shallow work calls itself "digital"</p>— jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanstray/status/308305525408407552">March 3, 2013</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br />
<br />
Yes. This is also why digital humanists keep having The Mistaken Conversation, especially in a moment of institutionalization in which identifying standards for evaluation is highly consequential. There is shallow work, and one wants to raise the bar.<br />
<br />
But here's the question: why does the desire to <em>evaluate</em> work—judge its quality—manifest as a desire to delimit the boundaries of the (self-consciously interdisciplinary) discipline? <br />
<br />
To make an analogy, there's a lot of shallow work done in literary criticism, too, but we don't call it <em>not literary criticism</em>. We call it bad.<br />
<br />
(We have our own metaphysics-of-presence hobbyhorses in litcrit too—I think work that fails to engage with literary form strikes many literary critics as "shallow," with all the resonances that a word like "shallow" entails.)<br />
<br />
There seems to me to be something particular about maintaining standards by delimiting boundaries, and there's one other place that we see it all the time: science. There are, of course, judgments about "bad science." But what really gets people up in arms is instances of what gets judged to be <em>pseudoscience</em>—the ultimate affront, pretending to be science <em>when you're not</em>. To name something a pseudoscience is to declare it out of bounds, as not even playing the same language game as science.<br />
<br />
There's a vast literature in the history of science establishing why the designation of "pseudoscience" is so thorny (Michael Gordin gives a nice rundown of this in the introduction to <em>The Pseudoscience Wars</em>, and there's a sketchy pulled-from-Zotero bibliography below).* And it's absolutely not for want of historians of science <em>trying</em> to find a boundary. For myself, I do not use the word "pseudoscience" at all, because I'm persuaded that when a theory is bad, what's bad about it isn't the fact that it's pretending to be science. I especially resist applying the term "pseudoscience" to the nineteenth-century scientific racism that I frequently encounter in my research. To endorse as <em>real science</em> only those results that we (a) currently accept and (b) find moral, even when this forces us to exclude concepts that were fully accepted by the scientific mainstream (it doesn't get more mainstream than Louis Agassiz), is presentist, and only functions to sentimentally preserve the purity of an idea of "science" that excises the disturbing vagaries of history and contingency that shape inquiry. Scientific racism <em>was science</em>. We don't get to expel it from the discipline(s) just because it makes science look bad, any more than we get to expel the Bohr model of the atom (which remains in high school chemistry textbooks as part of a teleological, progressive march toward the electron cloud model). Scientific racism structured its inquiries around premises that we now find indefensible—but all scientific inquiries are structured around premises of one sort or another, and we shouldn't expel scientific racism from the history of science in order to preserve the fantasy that they aren't. Louis Agassiz was (1) racist and (2) definitely a scientist, a very important one. We have to be able to hold both of these notions in our heads.<br />
<br />
Okay, so I've used a pretty contentious example to demonstrate why I find "pseudoscience" to be a problematic term. But why do we want it so, so much? Why does it seem to make so much sense to repudiate ideas not only on logical or methodological grounds but with a charge of <em>fraudulence</em>?—on, in other words, ethical grounds?<br />
<br />
And why do digital humanities and computational journalism, in a less charged but quite persistent way, seem to want to do the same thing?<br />
<br />
I think the gatekeeping impulse has a great deal to do with a desire to preserve the field (<a href="http://liu.english.ucsb.edu/is-digital-humanities-a-field-an-answer-from-the-point-of-view-of-language/"><em>is</em> it a field?</a>) as a site of virtue. This is what I meant when I wrote about "<a href="http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/introduction-theory-and-the-virtues-of-digital-humanities-by-natalia-cecire/">the virtues of digital humanities</a>" in <em>JDH</em>. The discourse of digital humanities is charged through and through with a language of ethics, which makes the language of ethical breach (pseudo, shallow) a logical concomitant. As I tried to show in the <em>JDH</em> piece, we inherit this frame from a long tradition of framing empiricist methods of knowledge-production as sites of virtue—as, indeed, dependent on virtue, or, as Lisa Spiro puts it, "<em>ethos</em>." <br />
<br />
Moreover, the ethical norms imputed to digital humanities (<a href="http://www.foundhistory.org/2010/05/26/why-digital-humanities-is-%E2%80%9Cnice%E2%80%9D/"><em>as a necessary concomitant of its praxes</em></a>, I wish to emphasize) are <a href="http://nataliacecire.blogspot.com/2011/09/its-not-job-market-its-profession-and.html">strongly associated with hopes (and fears) about the institutional change that digital humanities might bring about</a>—democratization of access, collaboration, shortened journal pipelines, dismantling of traditional academic hierarchies, more equitable (or magically invisible) labor models, just to name a few of the hopes pinned on this—what: field? methodology? cluster of projects? tendency? It's no wonder <a href="http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/08/whos-in-and-whos-out/">"who's in and who's out"</a> continues to feel like a terribly pressing question, even though its answer seems as elusive as the answer to the "who's in and who's out" question in science. <br />
<br />
Nothing I say here will much countervail the impulse to "separat[e] the pilgrims from the rakes," as Larry Laudan puts it. But I'd argue that we should stay conscious of why Laudan's tongue-in-cheek nomenclature actually applies with eerie accuracy—why deprecating "shallow work" is a matter of <i>delimiting boundaries</i>. Pilgrim's progress or <a href="http://ryan.cordells.us/crr/">celestial railroad</a>, the ethical discourses around digital humanities shape how work is done.<br />
<br />
<br />
* * * * *<br />
<br />
*Thanks to Scott Selisker for pointing me to the <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n21/steven-shapin/catastrophism">Steven Shapin review</a> that pointed me to this book. <br />
<br />
While I was writing this, Lindsay Thomas <a href="twitter.com/lindsaycthomas/status/310147319544832000">tweeted</a> a reference to Kristen Whissel's essay "Digital Multitudes" as one approach to the "what is digital?" question. In my laziness, I'm just going to <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cinema_journal/v049/49.4.whissel.html">link it</a> for now [Muse paywall].<br />
<br />
<br />
Bud, Robert. “‘Applied Science’: A Phrase in Search of a Meaning.” <i>Isis</i> 103.3 (2012): 537–545. JSTOR. Web. 16 Feb. 2013.<br />
<br />
Cooter, Roger. <i>The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain</i>. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Print. Cambridge History of Medicine.<br />
<br />
Cooter, Roger, and Stephen Pumphrey. “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture.” History of Science 32 (1994): 237–267. Print.<br />
<br />
Daum, Andreas W. “Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge: Some Historical Reflections.” <i>Isis</i> 100.2 (2009): 319–332. University of Chicago. Web. 8 July 2009.<br />
<br />
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. <i>Objectivity</i>. New York : Cambridge, Mass: Zone Books ; Distributed by the MIT Press, 2007. Print.<br />
<br />
Fyfe, Aileen, and Bernard V. Lightman, eds. <i>Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century Sites and Experiences</i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Print.<br />
<br />
Gordin, Michael D. <i>The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe</i>. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Print.<br />
<br />
Laudan, Larry. “Views of Progress: Separating the Pilgrims from the Rakes.” <i>Philosophy of the Social Sciences</i> 10.3 (1980): 273–286. pos.sagepub.com. Web. 4 Mar. 2013.<br />
<br />
Pennock, Robert T, and Michael Ruse, eds. <i>But Is It Science?: The Philosophical Question in the Creation/Evolution Controversy</i>. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2009. Print.<br />
<br />
Secord, James A. “Knowledge in Transit.” <i>Isis</i> 95.4 (2004): 654–672. JSTOR. Web. 11 Feb. 2013.<br />
<br />
Spiro, Lisa. " 'This Is Why We Fight': Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities," in <i>Debates in the Digital Humanities</i>, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012), 16-35. <br />
<br />
Wallis, Roy. “Science and Pseudo-science.” <i>Social Science Information</i> 24.3 (1985): 585–601. Sage Journals Online. Web. 6 Oct. 2009.<br />
<br />
Whissel, Kristen. “The Digital Multitude.” <i>Cinema Journal</i> 49.4 (2010): 90–110. Print.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5967476903991259470.post-13667576191939354002013-02-17T17:25:00.001-05:002013-02-17T17:25:49.870-05:00Race and the privilege of innocence<em>Cross-posted from the blog for my course on modernism and childhood.</em><br />
<br />
On Tuesday we'll be discussing a number of readings around the concepts of race and innocence, and lo and behold, here comes a news item that fits right in.<br />
<br />
You may have heard about the <a href="http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html">column</a> that Emory University President James Wagner wrote in the alumni magazine in praise of compromise.* <br />
<br />
And what is the key historical example he holds up as embodying the virtues of compromise? Uh-oh.<br />
<blockquote>One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.</blockquote><br />
After the whole entire internet, including <em><a href="http://gawker.com/5984796/emory-university-president-praises-three+fifths-compromise-as-great-pragmatic-solution">Gawker</a></em> and <em><a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/02/16/emory_president_holds_up_three_fifths_compromise_as_noble_honorable/">Salon</a></em>, exploded in a collective "<em>say what?</em>," Wagner prefixed the column with a semi-apology clarifying that he didn't mean to suggest that the 3/5 Compromise was <em>itself</em> a good compromise, just that compromise was good. (You'd think you'd want to illustrate that point with an example that doesn't radically call it into question, but okay.) As the tech journalist Tim Carmody observed, <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>You know Steven Spielberg made a whole movie about big union-saving legislative compromise that might've been useful Emory Pres, just sayin'</p>— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) <a href="https://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/303214980533202945">February 17, 2013</a></blockquote><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br />
<br />
Wagner apologizes for his "clumsiness and insensitivity," framing his column as a bumbling, stumbling <a href="http://roopikarisam.com/2013/02/17/call-a-spade-a-spade-not-a-gaffe/">error</a>, a sort of intellectual version of a lack of motor skills. He seems bewildered that anyone could take him to be suggesting that slavery was okay, because that wasn't his <em>point</em>. But the fact that it wasn't his point is the point. It only makes sense to view the 3/5 Compromise in a purely formal register—as an <em>example of compromise</em> rather than a famous historical instance of wealthy white men bartering with one another over the political value of black bodies—if you can only imagine yourself as one of the barterers and not as one of the bartered, if slave history is not your history. Wagner was thinking of "compromise" as such, from the point of view of the people in a position to compromise: the wealthy white male landowners who had a legal say in this country's founding; he is, as it were, innocent of blackness. Circulating in a universe in which enfranchised whiteness is the norm and disenfranchised blackness is not on the radar except as an abstract concept to be bartered over, Wagner demonstrates a basic unawareness, compounded by his after-the-fact bewilderment that others don't share it. <br />
<br />
In his apology, Wagner asks, "In retrospect we can fairly ask ourselves, would we have voted for the Constitution—for a new nation, for 'a more perfect union'—if it meant including the three fifths compromise?" Americans who would have been the bartered, not the barterers, might quote Tonto in <em>The Lone Ranger</em>: "What do you mean, 'we'?"<br />
<br />
Another term for Wagner's position of racial blinkering is "<a href="http://www.tolerance.org/supplement/racism-and-white-privilege">white privilege</a>." Because whiteness is a social "default" category, it allows for the possibility of not thinking about race. One is sheltered, as it were, from the necessity of thinking about race by belonging to the default racial category. In our reading of Stockton's <em>The Queer Child</em> for Thursday, we saw how weakness and ignorance are reconstituted as sites of privilege through the concept of innocence. The frame of "clumsiness and insensitivity" invokes an "innocence" that attempts to make ignoring the racial context of the 3/5 Compromise not only forgivable but requiring of protection. <br />
<br />
This is the logic underlying what sociologists call "<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=gV-NL8EJI7UC&dq=colorblind+racism&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s">colorblind racism</a>": protect my innocence (of race); don't make me know. But of course, the racialized subject never gets to inhabit that position of innocence, never gets to not know.<br />
<br />
In our reading for Tuesday, Anne Cheng quotes Kenneth Clark recounting how disturbed he was by the "doll tests": <blockquote>We were really disturbed by our findings, and we sat on them for a number of years. . . .Some of these children ... were reduced to crying when presented with the dolls and asked to identify with them. They looked at me as if I were the devil for putting them in this predicament. Let me tell you, it was a traumatic experience for me as well. (ix)</blockquote>What is so disturbing to Clark is precisely innocence outraged: the young child forced to admit to knowing about race—the young child's self-awareness.<br />
<br />
<em>The Melancholy of Race</em> is not a book about childhood; it's a book about race. Yet as Robin Bernstein has so powerfully shown in her book <em><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f_mgPpS-xXsC&dq=racial+innocence&source=gbs_navlinks_s">Racial Innocence</a></em> (2011), discussing race often brings us back to tropes of childhood and innocence, and especially innocence violated or destroyed. As we know from our readings so far, "innocence" is a much more complicated concept than it's often taken to be. What James Kincaid calls the "flatness" of innocence, which "signifies nothing" and "does not interfere with our projections," is also a mechanism for whitewashing a racial history, in a double sense (qtd. in Stockton 12). "I am sorry for the hurt caused by not communicating more my own beliefs," Emory President James Warner writes, invoking the blankness of innocence. <blockquote>We see these truths in hindsight. In retrospect we can fairly ask ourselves, would we have voted for the Constitution—for a new nation, for “a more perfect union”—if it meant including the three fifths compromise? Or would we have voted no—that is, voted not to undertake what I hope we see as a noble experiment, however flawed and imperfect it has been. Would the alternative have been a fractured continent, a portion of which might have continued far longer as an economy built on the enslavement of human beings? We don’t know; nor could our founders know.</blockquote><br />
"We" don't know; they didn't know; no one knows; don't make me know. Innocence is its own closed loop, its own tautological defense.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
<small>*Two notes: 1. I taught at Emory last year. 2. It's worth observing that Wagner's praise of compromise was in service of recent administrative decisions at Emory to cut funding to the liberal arts, including the journalism, visual arts, and education programs. Before its abrupt shutting down this year, Emory's education department produced the most black Ph.D.s of any program in the country.<br />
<br />
Cheng, Anne Anlin. <em>The Melancholy of Race.</em> New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print. Race and American Culture.<br />
<br />
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. <em>The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century</em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Print. Series Q.<br />
<br />
</small><br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3