Adventures in Cultural Consumption

Bull Durham: I believe that there are people out there who never change their minds. At whatever young age, they determine their opinions on politics, religion, and art; from that point on, they only admit as useful or good those things which correspond with greater or lesser accuracy to the received opinion. Vita brevis ars longa: there's a lot out there to encounter, knowing all of it is impossible, and we all make do or satisfice from time to time. If you've hit on a vein of books or movies that provide some measure of contemplation and prefer them to the exclusion of others, it's not the worst cultural vice one might have.

Over the last few years, it's become obvious to me that there are some discontinuities in my thoughts and tastes: I think differently about a large number of topics. Sometimes those thoughts are in continuity with the previous ones, but sometimes they are the arrival of the new and unexpected. There has been no sharp turn in my reading habits comparable to being handed 2666 by my mother when I complained of having nothing that seemed worth reading. It wasn't just a different part of world literature that opened up--it was a different attitude to literature in general, what was worth reading and why. So also the reduction of T.S. Eliot--the poems that opened up possibilities when I was 16 now read mawkish and incomprehensible, with a few good lines.

As someone whose writing tends towards the pessimistic disapprobation of things I don't particularly like, but who recognizes this capacity to react to things differently, I try to make a point of periodically re-trying things I haven't liked in the past. Joseph Conrad is a novelist people seem to think highly of, though he's never done much for me. I can see and understand why he is respected, even if it doesn't speak to me. Every five years or so I make a point to read one of his novels, to see whether I've come around. What's a week every five years? Similarly, I have begun to think it's time to approach Tolstoy again, after 2002's War and Peace disaster: maybe Anna Karenina is as great as everyone says, and I've just been pigheaded. (I am convinced that the reason I didn't like Middlemarch is that I read it too young.)

There are cultural objects that are blocked off to the young, which is the sort of thing young people hate to hear. It's hard to imagine what being 30 is like when one is still a teenager, and by the time 30 comes around one judges failures quite differently. It happened with The Big Chill, which at 21 looked like a bunch of hippies being terrible people, and at 28 looked a lot like people trying to grapple in a rare moment of reflection over what their lives had become when they weren't paying much attention.

It happened also with Bull Durham: when I first saw it, there was the loose, meandering plot, the periodic attempts at humor, and the profanity and vulgarity that attempted to cover up the first two. Now, there's a really sad movie about the end of youth, learning to compromise on one's dreams, and the weariness of chasing something that's as much burden as dream. Nuke LaLoosh is a MacGuffin who gradually slides out of the movie's focus, leaving two characters who have to figure out how old they really are. One has to respect a movie that ends with a monologue about being tired.

Discipline and Punish:

Background: never read Foucault, not even for my prelim, where I (correctly) guessed that limited time and question space meant he was not going to be a subject of discussion. Lumped him into a category of 'postmodernism' or 'FoucaultandDerrida,' as though the two were one person. As an undergrad who first got his taste of the culture wars in academia from the conservative side, Foucault was something of a demon responsible for this thing called 'theory' that had somehow ruined English departments, the humanities, and the university more generally. I've come around on postmodernism--they write such good novels!--and similarly made my peace with critical theory, which is a useful corrective to much of what is wrong with international law--it's healthy to remember that international law is an example of social construction par excellence. He does seem to inspire a fervent distate on some parts of the right so, given my contrarian impulses, it seemed time to give him a read.

And I'm here to tell you: it's a completely typical work of social history. As an academic work, there's nothing objectionable about it.

That is to say: I find it to have the problems I find all social history to have, but it's not especially or particularly loaded with additional problems. To employ a metaphor re: my feelings on social history, a pile of bricks is not a building. Foucault assembles his argument from a large number of extensive quotations in which people say the things he claims people in that particular historical period were saying about various topics. The intellectual history critique is that he gives no real context for those quotations: were these texts important or influential? how were they read? why should we take them as representative? The political theory critique is that he divorces his quotations from their context within the works from which they are taken: how is the reader to know that the quotation is a representative sample of a primary argument? Without some sense of how the particular text was constructed, it's hard to know for sure.

To extent the metaphor further, if it's true that a pile of bricks does not make a building, it's especially true that a pile of bricks from 18th century France does not make a house today. That is to say: Foucault has a historical argument he believes relevant to the present day, but makes no particular argument to link the two. Instead, he relies on his reader's sense or feeling of a link. When it happens in conservative political theory (where I also dislike it) this move is done by the use of an adverb: 'properly,' 'rightly,' etc. (This is, I am told, a murky or cagey quality regarding the implications of Foucault's arguments that is present elsewhere in his work.)

The rest is a mix of the obvious and the uncontroversial. The obvious: hierarchies turn actions unrelated to anything into rituals to ensure power and submission; e.g. removing your shoes and belt at the airport without being told. The uncontroversial: punishment used to be public and gruesome, and is now private and focused on reforming (or punishing) the inner life of the convict through isolation.

So I'll read on in his work to see if there's anything else of interest, but it's nice to save some of that precious academic dislike for someone who actually deserves it.

When I attended IHS seminars with some regularity, the first lecture would usually be given over to a discussion of the history of libertarianism and classical liberalism. One of the upshots of the lecture was the idea that good academic research requires the willingness to periodically question all one's assumptions and arguments and discard those which do not bear scrutiny. It's certainly a rosy picture about academic life--who really ever changes their mind?--but as a general first principle, I find it compelling.

Along these lines, I've been following Ta-Nahisi Coates' thoughts on the Civil War, and the writing of histories of the Civil War, with some interest. Way back when I was but a tiny aspiring academic, I read my way through the major histories of the period, avidly watched Ken Burns' documentary, the whole nine yards (also: I was 10). Mostly I was unaware of the context in which the various major historians wrote, and so regarded Shelby Foote and James McPherson (among others) to be equivalent properties: I now recognize this to be wrong.

This exploration of Foote is of particular interest. Foote comes off as a scholar who came into the profession with certain ideas of how the Civil War worked, that slavery was not the main cause of the war, or the south's resistance was based around a system of honor which it is proper to romanticize. He seems to have come to understand in the interval that these positions are wrong--that slavery was a substantial moral evil, as was Jim Crow and the failure of Reconstruction, that the KKK (even the 19th century 'nonviolent' KKK) was bad--but still holds to all his old beliefs, and has never managed to reconcile them. The result is tragic and not a little sad. But admitting you're wrong is difficult even in the best of cases, and when it's something as foundational as this is for Foote, it causes all sorts of problems.

All this commends the virtue of periodically challenging one's assumptions. I recently had just such an opportunity: on the recommendation of a friend, I read Discipline and Punish, and found it both more interesting and less controversial than the conservative political theory hype would have one believe. But more of that in a later post.