Matthew T Grant

At the end of Stanley Fish’s review of Naomi Schaefer’s “The Faculty Lounges: and Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For,” he agrees with her critique of tenure and the principle of academic freedom by disagreeing with her.

According to Fish, Schaefer claims that tenure and academic freedom are anachronistic in an academic environment in which research and teaching are beholden either to vocational or to political goals. Her conclusion is that we should do away with these anachronisms for said reason. His conclusion is that the academy needs to go “back to a future in which academic inquiry is its own justification,” thus simultaneously justifying tenure and the notion of academic freedom (understood as the freedom to pursue the truth on its own terms rather than in the service of a particular practical or political goal) and aiding the academic resistance to “monitoring by external constituencies.”

My question is: Does Fish’s argument make any sense?

On the one hand, the utopian vision of an academy that can ignore external constituencies, while appealing, seems absolutely ridiculous. Setting aside the problems that would thereby arise for academics interested in studying “external constituencies” (I’m thinking of economists, linguists, humanists, sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, zoologists, etc.), wouldn’t this in essence be an academy without students (since, before and after there time within its hallowed halls, they would be externally constituated) and, frankly, faculty?

On the other hand, while inquiry may be able to justify itself (though I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean), justification is always for an other. In the case of academia, researchers need to justify their inquiry to a host of others if they want to get an academic appointment, get published, or simply get funding. In fact, it is this latter reality which Schaefer explicitly references in the title of her book.

As long as someone is paying you to pursue research, your research will have at least some relationship (in this case, monetary) with an “external constituency” and cannot be “its own justification.” Right?

In general, the guitarists I’ve liked the best tend to be kind of raggedy. Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix are perfect examples of this. Their playing was kind of sloppy, kind of slurry, and, at the edges, out of control. For some reason, to my ears, that has always sounded better than the textbook, super-fluid shredder (the best example of that being somebody like Al DiMeola).

I was thinking about this when I attended a bar mitzvah the other week. It was a very intimate and, as far as bar mitzvah’s go, very restrained and modest affair. The service was conducted in someone’s home by an Israeli rabbi with the assistance of a cantor lady.

My wife thought the cantor had a beautiful voice, and I guess it was in its way, but it was too perfect, too trained, really. I like to hear the human in a singing voice, and not simply pure notes generated by a disciplined vocal apparatus. It’s why I’ve tended to admire singers like Frank Sinatra or Scott Walker or, more recently, Karen Dalton.

It’s also why I prefer early sixties Coltrane (1960 European tour with Miles, 1961 Village Vanguard sets with Dolphy)—where he starts overblowing and veering into the noise—to the immediate, post-heroin sheets of sound you hear on Soultrane or the stuff with Monk at Carnegie Hall (recorded in ’57, discovered in 2005) or even Giant Steps.

It’s also why I’ve always preferred John McLaughlin (Inner Mounting Flame, Birds of Fire, Love Devotion Surrender, Emergency!, etc.) to DiMeola and Slayer to Metallica.

What do you prefer?

Photo Credit: Jungle_Boy

Yesterday, in a class on “Blogging” that she was teaching as part of a course my company produced, Erika Napoletano said something to the effect that, “Nobody blogs just for the hell of it.”

My first response was: “Actually, I blog just for the hell of it.”

“This blog—an ill-organized assortment of essays, reviews, aphorisms and ephemera—serves no purpose,” I wanted to say.

But then, as I thought about it, I knew that this was mere posturing. My blog serves a very specific and, for me, crucial purpose as a space that I “own,” one where I can post and publish my views, my thoughts, and my philosophy.

In fact, I frequently motivate myself to add to this collection new thoughts, or at least newly formed revisions of old thoughts, by saying to myself, “If you really have something to say, something to teach the world, some wisdom to impart, comfort or guidance for the lost or wounded, aid and counsel to the youth, a truth that must be spoken and known, etc., you’d better put it somewhere where it might endure and, from time to time, be discovered.”

That somewhere is here.

For the Hell of it.

Years ago I became obsessed with Ezra Pound, the fascist poet, and so I was reading a magazine article about his stay in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and there was a fuzzy photo of Pound in there and the caption read something like, “Paranoia: An Occupational Hazard of Sinologists.”

I was trained as a Germanist, so I speak from experience when hastening to add that a prolonged fixation on the Germans and their culture poses similar hazards.

That latter thought occurred to me as I considered the web not as a platform for free expression—even enabler of revolutions—but as a decentralized, massively intelligent surveillance device. A hybrid panopticon confessional.

We tend to think of the web as an amalgam of information. What if we saw it instead as an accumulation of evidence?

This is what happens when your communication system grows a universal memory. Anything that can exist as an electronic file can be connected to every other electronic file. And every communication across the network becomes/produces electronic files. Imagine a total catalog of an entire sphere of human communication, a sphere actually enclosing/encompassing it.

And speaking of the evolution of the human psyche and the impact of environmental factors thereupon, with every experience we are building a sense of what can possibly happen. So, what is the proper pace for world-building?

The internet exposes us to an insanely broad world of experiential possibility—indeed, it offers the greatest wealth of possibility individual human beings have ever encountered in the long lifetime of our species. These possibilities can, in their extremity, be shocking and disturbing to people, though not so much due to their graphic content, but rather because exposure to them accelerates, and in a painfully unidimensional manner, the intra-psychological process of world-building, producing, ultimately, a painful, homeostatic disruption.

Never fear. We still have lives, the vast bulk of which will never leave a trace in this world wide web. Or, rather, only leave traces, nothing more. What is captured by the web is often only circumstantial evidence, after all, merely the trace.

Our actual lived experience, phenomenologically speaking, never crosses the threshold except as description, depiction or expression. In other words, never as the thing itself.

And, in this way, Kant’s uncrackable kernel (the echo of Leibniz’s) becomes our last, inscrutable refuge.

Image Credit: dirtybronson.

In my post about Odd Future, I said that music today—”mainstream” music, pop, country, “urban,” etc.—was devoid of message; it goes without saying that I was referring to a “political” message.

The messages of today’s music, on the contrary, from Rihanna and Katy Perry to the Kings of Leon, Coldplay and the Arctic Monkeys, are entirely “personal” (in the impersonal sense of anything produced for mass consumption, not “personal”in the sense of “uniquely idiosyncratic” or “obscurely private” — and especially not “personal” in the political sense).

This was not always so. Indeed, there was a time when the mainstream had its “political” hits:  “99 Luftballons,” “London Calling,” and the incredibly incomparable, “We Are the World,” to name but a few. (If you haven’t seen the video for the latter song in a while, I urge you to check it out again. It has withstood the test of time and emerged, if possible, stranger. It’s particularly striking how the humanistic idealism of the song is drastically relativized by the fact that many of the people singing it are (or have become) millionaires, some in the “multi”-range. This fact makes the line, “We’re saving our own lives,” coming from certain lips, especially incongruous and even a little jarring.)

This complaint about popular music, however, does not mean that you can’t find tendentious and engaged music out there. It just means that, if you want music with a message, contemporary or vintage, you just have to look for it.

To take one example (albeit from 2001!), consider, “The Sickness,” recorded by the RZA (as “Bobby Digital”), with its impassioned (Nation of Gods and Earths) fundamentalist ethos (“Bless the seeds who praise the Most High without asking why”) and archaically militant refrain: “So praise the Lord/ and raise your sword/ against this wicked society/Society.” Read the rest of this entry »

• The amount of money one makes is the clearest indicator of one’s value to society.
• Success or failure is solely determined by an individual’s intelligence and strength.
• Suffering results directly from one’s own personal choices.
• There are no accidents, only instances of weakness, ignorance and indiscipline.
• The purpose of the state, society and culture is to serve the interests of the powerful the most valuable individuals.

“In 12 years, there have been 6 million dead men and women in Congo and 1.4 million people displaced. Hundreds and thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured. Babies as young as 6 months, women as old as 80, their insides torn apart. What I witnessed in Congo has shattered and changed me forever. I will never be the same. None of us should ever be the same.” – Eve Ensler, May 2009

The World We Live In

The situation Ensler describes above has only gotten worse and its “intractable” nature, documented by yet another report on the extent of sexual violence in Congo, led her to declare last week, “Here’s what I Am Over/400 thousand women getting raped a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo/48 women getting raped an hour/1,100 raped a day.”

As she rightly points out, we live in a world that “… has allowed, continues to allow 400 thousand women, 23,00 women, or one woman to be raped anywhere, anytime of any day in the Congo.”

Of course, we also live in a world in which Odd Future can release a song (“Swag Me Out,” from the Radical mixtape) containing the line (picked more or less at random), “”Nigga we/take a girl/rape her in the back/of the fucking jeep,” followed soon by, “Chop a bitch head off/Then get a pleasant nut off/Bitch!” In fact, in this world, the band can appear on Jimmy Fallon’s show and even have an interesting article written about them in the New Yorker. Read the rest of this entry »