Unscientific American

Being scientific is un-American. Read about it here Scientific American: We Give Up on Science.

It's more important to be American than to be Scientific -- therefore, I propose that as of April 1, 2005, the magazine change its name to American and drop scientific altogether!

Columbia under attack: the David Project.

One of the most important points this article makes about the current very vicious phase of the culture wars in The Mideast Comes to Columbia is this: hamstrung by his attempts to raise money for a historic expansion into Harlem, Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, has neither defended his faculty nor the First Amendment in either a forceful or meaningful manner.

Taiwan/China: Seeing Both Sides! Oy!

See Taipei Times for sympathetic coverage of the 3/26 march in Taiwan against the anti-secession law recently passed by the People's Assembly of the People's Republic of China.

Coverage of the March 26 March on CNN and BBC was blacked out in the PRC and dismissed by the government controlled press, the People's Daily as a money-wasting spectacle. The People's Daily focuses on the dissenters' or opposition party point of view in Taiwan -- the KMT sees the government as inflaming public emotion. Less partisan opponents of Taiwan's ruling party might say that the DPP, or Democratic Progressive Party as exploiting mass emotion ("love Taiwan"). But as the PRC uses Taiwanese dissent to bolster its own positions, it cracks down on its internal dissenters, giving us the impression that the Communists like the democratically guaranteed right to criticize one's own government everywhere else but HOME.

The official doctrine was "Peace and Democracy" and a sugary version of Bob Dylan's"Blowing in the Wind" was the official song, but the black and white banners that proclaimed "F**k China!" --( I'll blog pix I took very soon) were decidedly not so peaceful.

If Taiwan's ruling party, the DPP really cared about Taiwanese sovereignty, it might look a little more closely at the billions of dollars crossing the Straits. The increasing economic dependency of Taiwanese businessmen on their Mainland factories may decide the resolution of this conflict.

company loyalty

Career mobility for a few does not make for better working conditions for the majority, that is certain. How does one create loyalty in a profession in which the majority of academics feel, for better and for worse trapped because of lack of jobs? Loyalty becomes another word for "submission." And it certainly does have some rewards.

One always has better control over employees when people feel as if they had no choice but to submit to the conditions of labor and this has never been more true for humanities Ph.D.'s. Real autonomy of thinking is so rare because the domination of the humanities through shortage of resources has been so effective.

When the NY Times goes through its yearly ritual of making fun of MLA panels, they don't see the real tragedy of all the Queering Literature panels -- it is the desperation of those who are trying to produce themselves as "new" and "relevant" for the powers that be.

where the women are...

Here is a good intervention on the question of women and blogging.

No more syllabi!

This was published a while back in insidehighered.com, but it deserves more attention than it got!Against Syllabi

The syllabus as a "contract" between student and professor has become more and more legalistic in the time since I've been a student. Its present state reflects more than anything a certain kind of acquiescence to "soft" surveillance. First you have to give a copy of your syllabus to the department secretary, then you're putting it on line.

My former colleagues would scrutinize each other's syllabi during merit review time and try to discredit those whom they thought were snoozing on the job by using the syllabus as a sign of their commitment to teaching. In the feverish competition to see who was most meritorious, syllabi began expanding to five, six, ten pages with detailed bibliographies. And yet, it has never been proven that courses with a skeletal syllabus are innately inferior to courses taught with a monstrous one.

And then there were the students, each of whom was asked in the evaluation about the organization of the course. It was here they could express their discontent with the syllabus. I ended up learning how to adapt to the situation and offered as few surprises as possible in the course of the semester.

Here in Taiwan, due the difficulty of tracking down readings and films, we change course in the middle of the semester if I feel like it and no one freaks out. I am taking advantage of my students' flexibility, even as I anticipate writing the five to six page syllabus when I return stateside, although not thankfully, to the University of Minnesota.

Twisted Timber

OK, I've decided to stop reading Crooked Timbers discussions. Mainly because of the snarky weirdness of the commenters -- check out the following. Is Lecturing Dead?

It's not the bloggers on Crooked Timber, it's the fricking commenters. Pace John Quiggin, whose posts I find especially enlightening...

They're freaks! They're not even trolls. There may be some women on the authors' list (I believe there are two), but I'll be damned if I ever see a woman's name on their discussions.

Jesus Freaking whatever. That's it -- I've had it with that weird world, which at first I found so fascinating...

proud to be chinese

Here is the BBC coverage of "Changing China."

My favorite aspect of the NEw China is its nifty synthesis of old style Communism and go-go capitalism, which skips that awkward age -- with its backward bourgeois values -- Enlightenment humanism -- and its invention of the mother child bond.

Under Mao, mothers were encouraged to serve the Motherland by giving their children to communal boarding kindergartens and nursery schools. During the Cultural Revolution, moms could spend all night at self criticism sessions as well as at destroy your neighborhood revisionist party. Mao felt that the Chinese family was a remnant of the feudal past and should be replaced with communal investments and communal life.

But now, there are boarding kindergartens and nursery schools in Beijing and Shanghai for the go go capitalist mom who needs to spend more time at her start up. Your toddler or preschooler would come home on Friday nights, and are sent back with clean sheets and five changes of clothing to school Monday morning.

There are days when I threaten my own rambunctious four year old with boarding kindergarten, but he knows I am not serious. I'm too behind the times.

So watch the giant rise in the East, and you'll find yourself thinking that Mao prepared the Chinese for modernization in more ways than anyone could have predicted.

Taiwanese say: No Anschluss

The EU is choosing a very bad time to give up its arms embargo against the PRC -- will they prove themselves to be the new Chamberlains of our era? Hmm Poland, sure, you're short on space, of course, take it, be my guest! Ummm, Austria, well after all they do speak German!

Or should we throw out the WWII analogies???

What is most disturbing to me is the ostensible unanimity of Chinese on the Mainland with regard to the use of force against Taiwan. The intense militaristic nationalism of which this is a symptom demonstrates how authoritarianism with consumer goods has become the ideological legacy of the Jiang Zemin era.

BBC is doing a very interesting series on China. Will link to that later.

There is however a secret, but kind of absurd deadline for military action-- the Olympics. Beijing is holding out to be a host to the Games and Taiwanese here calculate that they can enjoy the status quo as long as Beijing thinks it has a chance to light the sacred flame.

Remember how much fun 1936 was in Berlin?

Taiwan, China's Symptom

The Chinese Government will pass "the anti-secession law" this week, basically making it legal for the People's Liberation Army to use force to keep Taiwan a part of China. If China attacks, military experts predict that the Taiwanese could hold out for a month before caving into the superior fire power of the Mainland. It's not bad considering that this is an island of 23 million, hanging like a subtropical appendix to Mainland's bulk. What will remain of the island after the month-long seige may not be very attractive to those hungry to maintain the Motherland's indivisibility at all costs.

Along with military threats, the Mainland has waged a battle for the diplomatic and political isolation of this island nation, which is not a member of the United Nations and only an observer at the WHO. The Communists are tenacious about Taiwan's international status, if only because of the bad hangover of Chiang Kai-shek's rule, when the US recognized the island as "China" and called the other part, "Red China" or a Communist aberration that would eventually have to be taken down. The Generalissimo handled himself like the arrogant puppet ruler dictator of a place he despised, even as he and his friends and family claimed the best chunks of Taiwanese real estate for themselvves -- and that is the rub for the Taiwanese. The Mainlander Kuomintang kept the reins of government tightly in their hands and fully expected to be back on the right side of the Straits with American military backing. Now that they've got self-rule, they are determined to retain their sovereignty at all costs.

After the fall of the military dictatorship here in 1987, there has been a growing sense of 'local' identity -- and the yearning for independence comes after nearly a century of Japanese occupation and the brutal and rather indifferent rule of the Kuomintang. It is certainly clumsy, and its intellectual by-product is the explosion of Taiwan Studies, but it has great populist appeal. But even as Taiwan has made a peaceful transition to democracy and is building fledgling democratic institutions, even as its middle class becomes more prosperous and more sophisticated, it is ignored by the EU, and sidestepped by other nations fearful of alienating its powerful and demanding neighbor.

The President of Taiwan, or the Republic of China Chen Shui-bian tried last year to change the official name of Taiwan from the Republic of China to Taiwan, causing an instant uproar at home and abroad. Not everyone here is willing to accept that change either -- the Communists claim that this is the de facto declaration of independence. And Taiwan cannot be a sovereign state. So strangely enough, as long as Taiwan calls itself the Republic of China, everything is copacetic, for the time being.

And so this sore spot in name and in fact continues to demand a resolution -- it's like an itch you can't scratch, but both sides refuse to negotiate -- for the Communists, negotiations would be tantamount to recognizing Taiwan's existence as a separate entity. Does Beijing negotiate with Anhui for instance?

Complicating matters, economic relations between the two sides of the straits have never been better. Taiwanese businessmen have driven the economic engine behind China's growth in recent years.

debt peons

Yes, it's all over the blogosphere. Krugman tells it like it is again. The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Debt-Peonage Society

Here is an economist who can identify a systemic problem and show at the time how the Republicans will frame economic issues in terms of morality (those bad debtors, charging their way to the Bahamas every year, exploiting those good credit card companies) while demonstrating the political significance of such strategies in the long run: a new society of sharecroppers...

Look at Crooked Timber for more discussion and notice their creeping crypto-Protestant attitudes as well -- something that Krugman rigorously avoids. Of course, I'm not saying all of the discussants are tsk tsking the debtors, I'm just particular sensitive to that problem myself since I count myself among the peons of this age, and not among its masters (except in matters of rhetoric, rant and rave).

Freud Wars: Fred Crews, Let's Call a Truce!

Fred Crews has just published YET another diatribe against psychoanalysis in the New York Review of Books !!! (It isn't available on line to those who are not subsrcibers to the NYRB, and since they insist upon publishing Crews, I discourage readers of this blog from giving them a dime. Read it at a newstand, at your in-laws' house, but for God's saked, don't give Jason Epstein a penny until he gives some one a little less phobic about Freud than Crews some air time).

Here's the rub -- Crews actually has valuable points to make in his article, and I found myself sympathetic to his criticism of a (secret) bête noir of my own -- the TRAUMA QUEENS (I'll rant about them some other time) who have abused Freud's concept of the inconsistency, the unreliability, the elasticity, the fungibility, the plasticity of the human experience called MEMORY in relation to SEXUALITY. In popular culture, as sexuality was turned into trauma -- in a Foucaulidan nightmare come true, we were compelled confess to stories of alien possession, molestation and childhood abuse during the late eighties and early nineties.

Yes, something was wrong -- but all of the narratives became individual stories of degradation and triumph. In a decade when exploitation became more and more abstract, people from Oprah on down sought to concretize and give a face to domination.

I give Crews credit for coming down hard on the trauma culture's false premises in both clinic and courtroom, but he is SO COMPLETELY wrong about its association with psychoanalysis that he should shut up and agree NEVER TO PUBLISH AN ARTICLE ON WHAT HE THINKS IS PSYCHOANALYSIS. In return, psychoanalytically sympathetic academics should give up something too...but I'll get to that later.

Crews should just shut up because his arguments against REPRESSION of trauma are stupid. He cites studies refuting repression of trauma by showing the most Holocaust survivors did not split into multiple personalities and repress their horrific experiences. In contrast, they remained well aware of their suffering.

Wake up Fred, according to your theory of memory, you should remember everything bad that ever happened to you, because well, it was so bad. What Freud insisted upon was an explanation of infantile amnesia and its relationship to infantile sexuality. Now do you remember the last time your momma changed your diaper or you wet your pants? I don't think so.

Probably because it was pretty traumatic.

Now that makes trauma a lot less SPECIAL than the Trauma Queens would like, but also a lot more theoretically significant than Crews' idiotic misreading of Freudianism would have it.

But here is really why Fred Crews should shut up -- the parts that he gets right are all the more easily dismissed by his enemies because of the egregiousness of his errors. He is muddying the waters as it were -- and it is not good for public discourse about academic psychoanalytic theory, which I would be the first to say is filled with errors, delusions of grandiosity, as well as an unconscious complicity with what is homogenizing about popular culture's absorption of trauma culture as another form of reified hyper-individualism.

In return, as academics, we should decree a temporary cease-fire and agree NOT TO PUBLISH ANOTHER ARTICLE using the following terms: "the uncanny," "the male gaze," "masculinity," "Nachtraeglichkeit," "agency panic" or of course, that shibboleth "trauma."

David Horowitz responds to Michael Bérubé Online

Horowitz was a black panther???? Wow!!! I guess I will have to reconsider his take on the Left. He talks back to Michael Berube:Michael Bérubé Online

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