Jerkin'

Me and my brother were just rejectin' in the living room. Fantastic.

It's the end of baggy jeans!! That's a pretty big evolution in hip-hop. And it's definitely a vehicle for something bigger: tight jeans, glasses, and songs like "I'm a nerd." It's like a return of the repressed. These kids talk about the skinny jeans so much...there's definitely a sense of liberation.

“I never thought I’d be successful, I always used to get in trouble,” YG says, still slightly stunned. “My 15-year-old brother and his homies used to do badly in school. Then jerkin’ came along and kids could jerk at the parties and girls liked it. You didn’t need to fight when you could make YouTube videos. Kids that wore baggy pants with a rag hanging out began wearing skinny jeans and jerkin’ and having fun. It’s saved lives.”

“The West was stuck on the ’90s look of baggy jeans, khakis and Chucks,” says the unsigned but sought-after Tay. “The New West is skinny jeans, Vans, colorful shirts and jerkin’. We’re trying to bring a new vibe.”

Quickly

Just made and ate some pasta. Used crappy sauce. Note to self: never buy that sauce again.

I eat a lot of junk food, but I also work out a fair amount nowadays. I've found a delicious cookie: the mint chocolate "petite madeleines" by Lu. Gone through 3 boxes of them; each box lasts no more than 24 hours, except this last one still has a few in it. ("Come on, you couldn't be bothered to add a subject to that last sentence?" It's a style!)

Took the GRE yesterday, did as well as I could've asked for, and now on to the next. It's all very straightforward now, in decisional terms. Now there's just work. The good stuff, in theory. I like that I have nothing on my plate but this writing and applying. Of course I'll be paying for it later, when I have to find a job quickly in a nightmarish job market. But that's for later.

My life is strange; I live at home, don't see friends very often, and spend a lot of time in a single room. It's very hard to make me anxious. And I find anxiety very irritating. I guess what I mean is that I save up all my anxiety for one thing, so I find it irritating to have to be anxious about anything else. That one thing is - the future, basically.

I once read a hypothesis that good writers tend to be manic-depressive. The idea was that the mania compels you to pour yourself out, and the depressive aspect makes you say, "No, shit, that isn't right at all." You have to generate a lot of material, and then ruthlessly pare down and re-work that material. I think it's a good hypothesis. I've always known that I'm much more depressive than manic. My thoughts hardly make it out of my brain at all; my writing is always getting strangled in the cradle.

The urgency I used to feel about writing, the sense that there was always a lot that needed to be said if I could just get around to it, isn't the same anymore. I think that reflects the pragmatist theme that has been spreading like wildfire all over my brain. It also definitely has to do with leaving school, and the company of people who could at least be theoretically transformed into an audience.

Response to Torn Halves

Huh, interesting. You found mostly stuff on wellness blogs? I guess it makes sense: after all, her book has "therapy" in the title. There's an interesting line there, with Nussbaum. It's a tense situation: a woman in philosophy, a discipline trying to be as pure in its devotion to the rational, dispassionate side of the mind as possible, talking about desire, emotions, eroticism, etc. And at the same time Nussbaum is intimidatingly rational.

I guess the reason I mention that is that there's already a "soft/hard" dichotomy at work here, and Nussbaum is highly conscious of it - in fact she's written extensively about it. And it bears on your comments: "self-help therapy," "feeling bruised," "post-religious non-theology," "wise passiveness," "strangely warm," etc. - here you're intimating at something that's intellectually weak and "dubious" ("post-religious non-theology" in particular seems intended to connote the intellectual ungainliness and dubiety of the ideas), but that probably feels good.

There's a lot to unpack in your criticism.

In a sense your description of neo-Stoicism in the second paragraph is right. The critical bite of your description comes from its suggestion that Stoicism is about reconciling to a repulsive status quo. (As for the suggestion that it's a kind of theology, I'm willing to stick to: so what?)

Well, your criticism would apply to any attempt at ascertaining how one should live as an individual. Contrary to your implication, I think this is exactly where we are currently weakest. Take, for example, the glut of systemic critiques of the consumption-driven economy, our abuse of the environment, food systems, energy systems, etc. I doubt that progress will come from any further innovations in that department. I think we know what is wrong. What absolutely no one has come up with is a way for a person to live consistently with the principles that underlie those critiques. I think until that happens, nothing will change.

It requires changing habits and desires. Basically nothing on offer is up to the task. Critique is not up to the task. Theory just doesn't possess the motivating capacity. Virtually nobody changes their lives after reading "Minima Moralia" or whatever. The motivating power of theory is parasitic on an already achieved moralization. Theory can't make you care. It certainly can't make people care in the numbers necessary to achieve any meaningful social change. I accept the Aristotelian account of this. (On this topic, see Richard Posner's "Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory" and the responses by Nussbaum and Anthony Kronman in the Harvard Law Journal.)

Stoicism does not count as making peace with the system. Nothing could be less Stoic than the system we have. The Stoic idea is that blindly following your desires is a kind of slavery. The capitalist idea is that blindly following your desires is precisely freedom.

Think of how happy capitalists must be when they see rainbow-colored anti-globalization protesters doing cartwheels down the streets, right into a volley of non-lethal beanbags.

Gods

I am living stupidly. It took reading two pages of Nabokov to make me realize that. There's no excuse for this.

I can't think straight....I'm sick, fighting something off, and doing pretty well, but all the mental effects are there. I spent much of the last 3 or 4 days trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Taking the GREs in 4 days. There's something wrong about caring. I haven't been able to write anything I can live with because I am unfree, there's no doubt about it. But it matters how you do on mundane things; that's what it means to be in the lower middle class. I composed a whole eloquent thing on that in my head yesterday. Imagining eloquence is wholly unrelated to being eloquent, except in the way that your parents cheering for you on the sidelines is related to your winning a race. But it can bring consolation.

Stoicism: a way that slaves can also enjoy freedom. Some might say that that's an empty, false kind of freedom, an imaginary kind. You see, that's just what I'm not sure of. That's just the idea I've been flirting with.

Commonwealth

Ha ha. There is a somewhat nervous tone to this dismissive review of Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth. The first line of it says a great deal: "Astonishingly, given the ruin associated with his name, Karl Marx is back in fashion." The sense of astonishment continues throughout the review, which can be summarized as, "we're supposed to be over this, people." Conclusion: ""Commonwealth" is a dark, evil book."

Well, that's sort of exciting. Apparently this sort of hard-left stuff is now considered worth mention in outlets like the Wall Street Journal. You're only encouraging them!

On Being Aufgehoben

I'm reluctant to pick this topic up again, because it will feel like a rehash - although I don't actually say things as often as I think I do. But this will be the last time that this topic is relevant, because time only goes in one direction, and fast. In other words I've given myself one last chance to do this, to make good on my academic ambitions somehow, and this is it.

If I was to fulfill my intellectual identity in an uninhibited way, there's not much doubt about what I would do: I'd be a critical theorist, in the expansive post-Habermasian sense. These things can change quickly, though, and if they were to change my sense is that my major reference point would still be the post-Kantian German philosophical tradition. I would add to that a very strong historical interest in the Scottish and French Enlightenments. (I've never gotten to pluralize that before!).

Of course, there's a problem: I can't fulfill my interests in an uninhibited way, not nearly. But it makes sense to break this down further into two aspects: on one hand there are sheer institutional factors, the inertia of reality and my own patchy preparation. But there is also a problem with the very idea of pursuing one's interests in an "uninhibited" way, at least if you're talking about an activity that is supposed to aim at the truth, in contrast to, say, knitting. (Actually, knitting poses a related problem....) If these disciplines are the ones responsible for "making" the truth, and they don't look kindly on your theories or your methods, you can try to stage a revolution. But you will probably fail and be forgotten. Anyway, you have to respect the verdict of reality: a hypothesis that has failed to gain acceptance in the discourse has failed the only test we have. But perhaps that's going a little overboard, since all this could have been avoided by changing the arbitrary fact of my being an American rather than a German.

I've tried many things. First, I tried to see if I could give up on the whole thing, on the idea of myself as someone who would create theories. "Theory sux," I said. Also, ethics; ethics is worthless, nobody buys that nonsense, literally. In other words, I interpreted the obstacles in my path in too-radical of a way. That lasted a long time. Then I tried to act on the principle that thinking about morality is less important than acting morally. I tried to think of myself first of all as an agent, and to imagine how I would like to see the world change, and how I could contribute to bringing that about. Then I moved on to imagining how I would like to see my own life change, and decided that in some ways I would like to see it change back to the way that it was.

I also considered changing myself into something that would work; I figured it might be better to be an analytic philosopher than not a philosopher at all. After all, many of the people I admire have managed to come out of the overwhelmingly analytic departments we have: Bernard Williams, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, etc. Then I decided that this was not true, that I wouldn't want to do analytic philosophy under any circumstances, and that I shouldn't just submit: after all I'd be found out immediately and have no real chance of getting into an analytic program. Besides, I have no interest in spending my life trying to convince analytic philosophers that they shouldn't be analytic philosophers.

So, if there's some way of being a critical theorist or a student of Continental philosophy without yielding too much on the ambition to contribute, in however indirect a way, to making the world better, I'll do that. It's highly unlikely. But I've finally accepted that ideas are not precious, though it's taken me the better part of three years. What once seemed to me to be the most stable, most trustworthy thing in life has turned out to be the most fragile. Still, no matter what happens, I'll stay true to a Stoic view that I first discovered and embraced in high school. I only became aware of it in a formal sense when, in my first year of college, I read Lucretius, Epictetus, and Boethius. In their works I recognized a worldview I had already accepted in its rudimentary form. My encounter with the Stoics is far from complete: I have yet to seriously attack their works as an adult. But once these immediate problems are taken care of, that's the first thing I will do.

It was only around that time, when I first read the Stoics in college, that I began to think that my aspirations could be fulfilled in an academic form. So, if it really does turn out that what seemed to be the most stable thing was actually the most fragile, I must have been wrong to believe that. All the same, I will still believe, in Martha Nussbaum's words, that education is an expression of moral freedom. I will still believe in the "freedom that comes with understanding that one's own capabilities, and not social status, or fortune, or rumor, or accident, are in charge of what is most important. The procedures of Stoic argument model a kingdom of free beings - a kingdom of beings who are not bound to one another by external links of hierarchy and convention, but by the most profound respect and self-respect, and by their sense of the fundamental commonness in their ends....For the Stoic, reason stands apart, resisting all domination, the authentic and free core of one's life as an individual and as a social being. Argument shapes - and, eventually, is - a self, and is the self's way of fulfilling its role as a citizen of the universe." (Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, 354)

"Did you face any obstacles in importing Habermas's thought into an American context? In particular, did Habermas's Marxism present obstacles that may not have arisen in a European context?

"One of the main obstacles was disciplinary. Mainstream American philosophy was predominantly "analytic" - and that meant, to put it negatively, that very little European thought after Kant was being taught or written about in philosophy departments. There was almost no Hegel or Marx, Nietzsche or Heidegger, Weber or Durkheim, let alone Horkheimer or Adorno. So one usually had to begin at the beginning. And then it was not easy to find positions for our graduates in conventional departments. As you know, these aspects of institutional support or lack thereof play a big role in determining what gets taken seriously in American academic life. The political angle, the Marxist connection, only made that more difficult. But especially in the 1970s, a number of very talented, very committed young men and women chose to work in that track and succeeded in doing so largely by their own efforts.

"I can't say, however, that American philosophy has changed in these respects. It is still overwhelmingly analytic in orientation. And American political science and sociology were and have remained largely empirical in orientation. Theory of any sort still exists on the margins, let alone Marxist theory. So, all told, Habermas and contemporary theory generally have never achieved canonical status in any discipline as practices in the USA. They have been received on the whole by smaller groups - minorities - within a large number of different disciplines, so that while the community of those interested in working on such matters has grown, it has remained scattered across the academic archipelago. To my mind, an equally great obstacle has been the well-known American impatience with general theory. Very few people are willing or able to put in the considerable effort it requires to master a body of systematic thought of that range and complexity."

-Thomas McCarthy in Rehg and Bohman, Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn, "Critical Theory Today: An Interview with Thomas McCarthy."

Gessen and Company on Wallace

These people seem to have decided to deify David Wallace. That upsets me, because I really like Wallace, and this sort of takes the fun out of that. In their case, even to really like Wallace's work is equivalent to deifying him, since they've seen it all and there's world-weary knowingness pouring out of their every orifice ("note, please, that I despise all appeals to heartland "genuineness" and "decency""). That same writer, Tom Bissell, goes on to conveniently sum up what I mean by world-weary knowingness: he believes that "all approaches and presentations to the world, whether literary or personal, are in some sense affected." This belief that all life is an act that they see through really informs how they go about things, I think.

I realize that I'm just insulting people, and they can't come here to defend themselves, since they can't be expected to know or care about this blog. It feels wrong.

So I apologize. The thing is, this crew, the N+1 types, has really got me down. I guess it's that they make intellectuals look bad. Wallace was an honest man; he talked about being viscerally averse to the "literary intellectual" crowd at his college, and he was perpetually vigilant about the risk of pretentiousness. Gessen, Bissell, et al. are not exactly like that. And I suppose they get that, and it's part of why they deify him.

Someone else on that same page writes that DFW yearns "for something otherworldly, maybe even transcendent, but as if in terror of appearing sentimental or just plain wrong, [he is] obsessively indirect in [his] pursuit of this thing." Actually, in interviews Wallace addresses that pretty clearly: his audience was just too steeped in postmodern irony for any direct appeal to the transcendent to be viable, so he took a neurotically indirect route that he hoped would open up new possibilities later.

"Santayana cherished academic life for its freedom to pursue intellectual interests and curiosity, but he found that many aspects of being a professor infringed on that freedom. Faculty meetings and university committees seemed primarily partisan heat over false issues, so he rarely attended them. The general corporate and businesslike adaptation of universities was increasingly less conducive to intellectual development and growth. He expressed concern about the evolving Harvard goal of producing muscular intellectuals to lead America as statesmen in business and government. Were not delight and celebration also a central aspect of education? He wrote to a friend in 1892, expressing the hope that his academic life would be “resolutely unconventional” and noted that he could only be a professor per accidens, saying that “I would rather beg than be one essentially.”"

I feel that. But you know what makes my head hit the desk? Santayana wrote that in 1892. Nothing changes, ever. Except in 200-300 year spans, maybe. Also, things changing doesn't mean they won't change back.

Seneca

I was really taken aback by the praise lavished on Seneca by Amazon customer reviewers, which overwhelms what I've seen for any other book. Man, people really love this stuff.

Default Career Choice

"Posner thinks like a polymath. “I’m impatient and I’m restless,” he says, in a matter-of-fact way. “After I graduated from law school, I worked first in government for six years. I enjoyed it but I didn’t really want to make a career of that. I went into teaching without any great sense of commitment, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But gradually I lost int­erest, as the 1970s wore on, I became involved in consulting. So when the judgeship came along in 1981—quite out of the blue—I was happy to take that. I just kind of slid into law. It is sort of the default career choice in the United States.”"

"...“The specialist will always be able to nail the generalists by pointing out that they don’t use the vocabulary quite right and they make mistakes that an insider would never make. It’s a defence mechanism. They don’t like people invading their turf, especially outsiders criticising insiders. So if I make mistakes about this economic situation, it doesn’t really bother me tremendously. It’s not my field. I can make mistakes. On the other hand for me to be criticising someone whose whole career is committed to a particular outlook and method and so on, that is very painful.”"

So, I've got an idea. Increase cross-border attacks - and make them good, increasing the psychological costs of devoting your entire career to a random topic.