Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Ariel casts out Caliban

Published on April 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

C.W. Sharpe, "The Tempest"

By Eric Michael Johnson, Times Higher Education

“Nature never intends the generation of a monster.”

John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, in debate with Thomas Hobbes (1645)

In 1607, after being held captive by the Portuguese in West Africa’s Congo Basin for nearly 18 years, the English sailor Andrew Battell returned home with lurid tales of “ape monsters”. The larger of the two creatures Battell described, according to the edited volume later published by travel writer Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, “is in all proportion like a man”, but “more like a giant in stature…and has a man’s face, hollow-eyed, with long haire upon his browes”. These marauding beasts “goe many together, and kill many (villagers)…they are so strong, that ten men cannot hold one of them”. Battell’s narrative, much of which was received second hand and sure to be highly imaginative, was nevertheless one of Western society’s earliest introductions to our evolutionary cousins, the great apes.

Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis (“How similar the ape, this ugliest of beasts, is to ourselves”). What the Roman poet Ennius presented in the 2nd century BC was a refrain that could be heard repeatedly during the subsequent two millennia whenever Europeans encountered this being that so threatened the line separating human and animal. The common depiction of non-human primates in the West as representations of sin and the Devil, wickedness, frivolity, impulsivity and violence would ultimately say more about our own discomfort at being reminded of similar qualities in ourselves than their nature.

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Why Bother?

Published on April 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Image courtesy of sculpture-design.com

By Nicholas Dames, N+1

Last February, a professor of biology and Harvard PhD named Amy Bishop, having recently been denied tenure by the University of Alabama in Hunstville, released the contents of a nine-millimeter pistol on her colleagues during a departmental faculty meeting. She killed the department’s chair and two others. Three more were wounded. Startling as the homicides were, and though they ratcheted up the common, unglamorous tensions of the tenure process to something fit for a media spectacle, they were hard to read as an allegory for the Problems of Higher Education.

Unless, that is, you were unfortunate enough to peruse the reader comments on the New York Times’s online coverage of the killings and their aftermath. Among the helpless expressions of sadness was a large and growing strain of anger amounting to celebration. What was bizarre about the reaction was that, though Bishop worked in the Department of Biological Sciences, most of the commenters’ rage was directed toward the humanities. The dozens of hateful posts?—?however incoherent their stated reasons?—?were troubling moreover because they borrowed the rhetoric of neoliberal reform. Away with unjust privileges (like tenure), away with the guardians of unmonetizable knowledge (the humanities, the speculative sciences), away with any kind of refuge from the competitive market! Academics may not need to worry much about hostile gunfire, but they do need to worry, more than ever, about the more legal means by which hostility toward the academy gets expressed.

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Terry Castle. The Professor and Other Writings. Harper, 2010.

Louis Menand. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. Norton, 2010.

Martha Nussbaum. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, 2010.

Implicated and enraged: an interview with Judith Butler

Published on April 16, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Nathan Schneider, The Immanent Frame, Social Science Research Council

Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is among the leading social theorists alive today. Her most recent books are Frames of War (2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (2011), an SSRC volume that puts her in conversation with Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West. As we carried out our conversation by email between Brooklyn and Berkeley, uprisings were occurring across the Arab world, and a U.S.-led coalition had just begun conducting airstrikes in support of rebel forces in Libya. We had discussed some similar questions, and some different ones, a year earlier in an interview for Guernica magazine.

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NS: Some commentators have said that the uprisings now taking place are remarkable for being secular in nature. Do you think it’s helpful to speak of them that way?

JB: Well, I am not at all sure why they’re saying that. In Cairo, it was clearly the case that secular, Christian, and Muslim people were in the square, and that it was an impressive mixture. I would be interested to know who has access to the groups involved in Libya to know with certainty that they are secular. Perhaps some of us impose our ideological dreams on concrete situations that we either fail to investigate or have trouble finding out about.

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Goodbye to the Graphosphere

Published on April 4, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The Buccaneer Archipelago, off the coast of Western Australia. From AustralianTraveller.com.

By Benjamin Kunkel, N+1 Magazine

This essay appears in The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Soft Skull, March 2011.

For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century.

A few years ago, the French thinker Régis Debray published a brilliant and suggestive essay placing the rise and decline of socialist movements within this frame of ever-greater literacy. The question of socialism can be bracketed for now. More relevant, for the future of reading in general and novel-reading in particular, is Debray’s periodization scheme, in which an immemorial logosphere—the spoken-word realm of the great religions, whose holy texts had been pronounced by God, transcribed and commented on by a small caste of literate men, and received as gospel by an unlettered general population—was succeeded, starting in 1464, with the invention of Gutenberg’s press, by a spreading graphosphere, in which an oral relationship to words was supplemented, for mounting numbers of ordinary people, by a literate relationship to them. The demi-millenium of the graphosphere lasted, on Debray’s account, until 1968, dawn of the videosphere.

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