The Result of University Cost-Cutting Measures . . .

the Plausible Deniability Blog takes up where the PostModernVillage blog left off. While you'll see many of the same names here, PDB allows its writers and editors a space away from financial strum und drang that torpedoed the PMV blog.

Monday, May 28, 2018

On Reading the Long Novel

by Lael Ewy


When one references War and Peace, one does so in order to invoke a cliché. War and Peace is the quintessentially long novel. It is known for that and for nearly nothing else—certainly not as something anyone would actually read.

In fact, the cliché itself is really not about the length of the book; the cliché is about the impossibility of reading it, and the disdain the speaker has for long novels.

For these reasons, among others, I set out to actually read it.

I suppose people hear the call to engage in physical challenges such as running marathons to prove something to themselves (or others), or the call to climb mountains “because [they are] there,” but I set out to read War and Peace in order to try to restore reality to it. For at least one living member of the species, it would become a novel again.

Since you probably won’t read it, here’s what you need to know from someone who has:

1. It’s good. For the most part. It’s not the novel you’d think it should be at least in part because novels weren’t what you now think they are when Tolstoy wrote it. Hundreds of pages are devoted to the analysis of the individual’s place in history and the minutiae of the War of 1812. The latter was of great importance to his expected audience, and it might still be of interest to scholars of military history. The former should be of interest to anyone with a pulse. But

2. no doubt all that would annoy contemporary readers. I honestly have no idea what contemporary readers want out of a novel these days. Apparently, they want to be terrified by the prospect of a dystopian future. To me, this seems silly given that the prospect of a dystopian present is quite frightening enough. However,

3. it’s not a “hard” read. There’s merely a lot of it there. Tolstoy, as is typical of the great Russian writers, draws characters who are detailed and complex, so if you put the book down for a while, it’s easy to pick back up. Like with old friends, you may not recall every detail of their lives since you saw them last, but you’ll always remember who they are.

Few western European writers create characters who are this fully realized. Perhaps Dickens’ main characters, but he also populated his book with caricatures in a way that Tolstoy never would. Even soldiers we meet for only a few pages seem like real people we might know. In the US, maybe Hurston Henry James, or Melville (at his best) were capable of such things, as, perhaps, the greatest of the French. 

4. It’s a romance, historical novel, and philosophical treatise. And that’s probably why it’s so long. The historical figures, including Napoleon himself, as the other characters, come across as actual people. The book’s philosophy, while I disagree with it, must be defended, and the novel almost achieves that as well. To a degree, the characters themselves might contradict the philosophy it seems to promote, but perhaps Tolstoy intended that, pitting the lived experiences of the humans against the cynicism and determinism of the narrator.

At any rate, it’s ambitious. That’s in its favor overall, but it also means that there is a lot for the book to do.

5. Reading it is familiar if you’re used to 19h century novels and philosophy. Most people these days aren’t, I guess, and maybe that’s why they should read more 19th century novels and philosophy.

Reading War and Peace will change your orientation to time, people, and thought, and that’s a good thing. The thinking that most people are able to do is severely compromised by the media they have chosen to consume. We’re unable to think long thoughts because we seldom encounter them. We’re distracted because we surround ourselves with distractions. And consume media we do: popping tweets like we do Skittles and gnawing video games like endless bags of chips. This has reinforced our inability to think in a coherent way. We may have deep maps in our minds of a million virtual adventures, but if we’re unable to appreciate the lives of those we believe are not like us—the Russians of 200 years ago or a Black laundress in the Jim Crow South—maybe we’re wasting our time. Perhaps we’ve “escaped” during the time we’ve played, but we haven’t really prepared ourselves to make the world we inevitably re-enter a better place.

Sunday, May 20, 2018

The Arts and Humanities, Again and Always


By Lael Ewy, MFA, CPS


In some ways, the arts and humanities are the only endeavors in which “lived experience” has always been privileged. So it’s no wonder they’d be marginalized or actually argued against in an essentially technocratic age. But the arts and humanities are also what’s missing from the current “job oriented” educational realignment. These programs may prepare people for specific jobs (although that’s questionable), but they do not prepare people for work in a future in which the nature of specific jobs is constantly in flux.

That, however, is not why we should keep them around.

The argument against lived experience is also an argument for process over understanding, the idea that through research and evaluation processes alone we will be able to gather all of the data we need to make the decisions we need to make. This is ridiculous; without “real life” understanding of something, you can’t even create meaningful criteria for evaluation. In this sense, the movement away from lived experience is a power play by those in charge and their academic lackeys to replace what they cannot control, direct understanding, with what they can control, processes and policies—in terms Bakhtin might use, to replace the novel with the epic.

This is the same attitude that privileges supervisory structures and administrative processes over the work itself, the executive summary over the full report, the report over the voices from the field, the data over the principle—if, that is, the principle is even addressed at all. It’s the driving force behind dismissing all truly new thinking as “theoretical” and all real world information as “merely anecdotal.”

In this sense, both “street smarts” and “book larnin’” are being marginalized in favor of the kinds of evaluative processes that exist for the sake of controlling the terms in which ideas are discussed (again, if they’re discussed at all) and for the sake of reinforcing power by those who already have it. “And we have the numbers to show it,” or “researchers say” are statements that seem unassailable, and so few question where those numbers come from or the assumptions upon which their gathering and interpretation are based.

When we lose an art, we lose a way of understanding the world. Consider that for a minute. What other realm of human endeavor would allow itself to just die, to be told by wealthy and powerful and supremely ignorant and unimaginative people that it should simply go away, that there is no place in the future for how it knows and what it has discovered? Yet that is exactly what academic institutions and their rich donors are doing to the humanities and the arts.

When its critics level against the arts and humanities that they aren’t practical or don’t prepare people for “the real world” or “real jobs,” what these people are actually saying is “The only thing that’s important is what I believe I can immediately sell,” or “The only thing that has any value is what I believe the market wants.” Nobody ever asks these same people to back up what they’re saying or to defend the principles they’re using to make the claim. So the debate about the value of the arts and humanities isn’t even about practicality at all but about a very narrow view of what’s important to human beings, a view that almost all of us accept without question because it’s the view of rich and powerful people. When the actual pettiness and ignorance of their position is revealed, it’s easy, or at least easier, to see why it is wrong, yet because of the positions of those who share this view, we are still collectively afraid to confront it.

So we try to justify what we already do as preparing people for jobs, as having practical components. We repackage arts programs as graphic design, drop studio arts majors for career programs in video game design, shrink studies of poetry for badges in advanced tweeting. Some of this has merit: studying the arts and humanities will make you a better communicator, and it will improve your critical thinking skills. When you see, as I have, respected scientists making basic errors in logic, when you see tech company executives utterly unable to imagine the negative experiences of their users much less dystopias they are busy creating, when you see presidents unable to understand why calling immigrants “animals” is wrong, you can begin to see why these people might need a few more novels and poems and paintings in their lives.

But the value of the arts and humanities is inherent, and that’s not something those currently in power, who understand “value” only in the most basic of monetary terms, can even begin to understand.

When we look back at the great cultures of antiquity, we don’t marvel at their technology except in the most patronizing of ways, amazed at what such “primitive” people could accomplish. But when we read their literature, when we hear their stories, meditate on their holy writ, when we analyze their design and witness the world from the perspective of their visual art, we experience something that a patronizing attitude never could: recognition, an understanding of the experiences they, and we, live every day.

When we encounter their art, their literature, their philosophy, we recognize something that we can learn from: we learn more, and more deeply, about being human. And that is continually new.

Monday, January 1, 2018

Dispatches . . .


The primary source of violence in human affairs is when one’s existence comes up against another’s set of purposes.

The culture of stupidity of our leaders has been very carefully cultivated by their benefactors.

Be open to everything language has to offer.

We have more invested in the reiteration of our own sanctimony than in alleviating the suffering of other people.

As useful as it is, research can also be a form of numbing.

We try to keep the facts on our side, as if that will protect us, somehow, from all the deep hurt.

The facts are inadequate for our purposes however vital they may be for our self-confidence.

The fundamental problem of human progress is and always has been that those who already have the power to change society owe that power to the status quo.

The truth is that there is no end state, no outcome, only the temporary cessation of a task, the momentary manifestation of a phase.

The internet and the worship hall have this in common: they are where we go to have our assumptions reinforced.

When your sense of hope relies on another’s despair, you’re doing it wrong.

Education isn’t learning facts about things; it’s using ideas in order to learn what to do with facts about things.

A tradition is a bad idea that refuses to die.

You develop a taste for ideas the same way you do for art, music, literature, fine food. This taste can—and should—be cultivated as a matter of becoming an educated person. If not, you’re not really engaging in your education, formal or otherwise, no matter what you may call it.

Character isn’t about always doing the right thing; it’s about having the humility to learn and change from having done things wrong.

There is a certain type of professional who always takes care to move the experiences of those he serves out of the equation in order to make room for his own ego.

One reason we don’t change is that, while failure can garner sympathy, change can threaten identity.

Businesses are fine, and we may even need them. But they’re not enough. The main business of a democracy must always be equity.

Framing government as a business and the taxpayer as a customer is misleading: in order to achieve “the general welfare,” we must see government as a means to create a common good, and our duties as citizens as contributions to a society worth living in.

We’ve been taught that tears are punishment for being sad. They’re really what we’ve earned for the privilege of being human.

It’s possible that the idea of a comprehensible universe is an artifact of the human mind, a necessary folly, a reassuring delusion masking fretful, cosmological chaos.

Poetry is primary research into what’s most basic and irreducible about being alive.

Privilege is the power to give your personal fears the force of law.

Our very systems of sorting and ordering data create both insights and cognitive impairments. We tend to forget the filter is there and take to assuming the world really does align with the tools we use to study it.

We’ll recover from the lies, but we’ll never fully recover from all the lying.

It’s a strange quirk of Western thought that the past is seen as the child of the present and the future as the father of now. A more accurate picture would reverse this order. The past, rather than being “primitive” or “innocent,” creates the world we’re emerging into, frames what discovery means for us, and is the very vehicle of all our current explorations.

The thing is the thing; the system is cognitive.

Good literature makes you think and feel; great literature changes the manner in which you think and feel.

For the competitors, the purpose of competition within a market is not to innovate or create efficiencies—still less is it to create jobs. The purpose is to win market share. In other words, the purpose of competition, no matter its means, is to reduce competition by reducing the number of competitors.

There are two ways to experience change: go somewhere or stay put.

Maintaining an identity is more important than addressing an injustice that does us harm.

A successful system of hierarchical power succeeds by rendering evil banal.

I often hear people excuse not reading poetry by claiming that they do not understand it. Do they really think they’ll understand it better by not reading it?

Problematic are not the questions you can’t answer but the ones you can’t ask.

We should first admit that we can’t possibly understand another person’s pain. But then we should do all we can to make space for it.

It’s funny with madness: the sane will ask “why” not because they want to know but because they want to be seen as the sort of people who ask “why.” The mad ask expecting an answer.

Contemporary conservatism: society exists to produce goods for an economy. Classical liberalism: an economy exists to produce goods for a society.

An irony: we feel safe within our own spheres of fear.

The expert, the businessman, th evaluator, the executive are motivated by what they know. The scholar, the artist, the scientist, the philosopher are motivated by what they do not know. This is why our current rush toward business models and toward reliance on existing evidence bases is so pernicious to the university, to creativity, and to science. We have subjugated scholarship to service delivery, artistry to marketing, science to research and evaluation.

Analytical spellbinding: the idea that a clever analysis equates with a complete understanding.

Analytical hegemony: the projection of an analysis or analytical framework into the world as an intervention or the solution to a problem.

The point of ambition is power, but art is impossible without humbling oneself to the task at hand.

Our assumptions form the main barriers to our understanding. 




--Lael Ewy

Monday, December 25, 2017

The Unprintable, 1.0



I

We each are loved
according to our own aphasia:
the global disutility of Wernicke,
the deep emptiness of dasein,
the stuttering joy of Broca,
a dynastic legacy of neural
missed connection, a toolkit
of malaproposition, a jangling
orgy of wrong.


II

It’s all accident of touch--
a probe, slipped, a skull scissored
by the privilege of a pale ghost
whose every brutal oops
morphs easily into discovery:
your tragedy is my
glorious contribution
to science. Now shut up
and eat your peas.



--Lael Ewy

Sunday, December 24, 2017

On Ward C


Fiction by Doug G.



Again the click-clack and the doors open.

Voices down the hall and it don’t smell like pee.

It don’t smell so bad here as you might think, though sometimes it smells real bad.

Sometimes, I think I smell it—blood, dirt, gunpowder, what-have-you.

I can smell the bad coffee now, and my stomach goes whooom it wants it so bad, but a few more doors need to click-clack open before all that can happen.

A couple guys got a puzzle going, and maybe I’ll help them after breakfast and group. They got ladies here, too, and I see them sometimes when we do classes, like we have one on anger management and there’s some in there.

One day, the girl with the green hair was wearing a space kitten t-shirt—like it had on it a kitten in space with Saturns and stuff and glitter on it that I guess they let her keep.

Cracked me up, for sure, but I knew I had to raise my hand to say anything—them are the rules—and I didn’t want to get in trouble, so I hushed up.

Later on I had a laugh.

Sometimes, I think about Greengrass and how we used to have horses there we could keep and pet. The work wasn’t all that bad—I don’t mind working, like I keep sayin’—and the horses were always right there, waiting for us.

I turned a hitch at Greengrass, then on the street. Then here.

John, he’s my therapist, is not so bad as everyone says he is. And the psychiatrist sees me once a month or so and adjust my meds.

Which I guess I’m doing better now.

Once, they brought in some people from the outside for a class. All the people they brought said they were like us, but they didn’t look too much like it.

There was an older gentleman who didn’t say much, and a bigger lady with a pretty face and a black lady, and they talked about how they rebuilt their lives. And the old man said he was better now that he got his correct diagnosis and the black lady started to cry when the topic of hope came up.

And it hurt to see that. She seemed so nice.

She had nice clothes—real put together—and good hair and a badge on. Not just the visitor badge, but one from where she worked outside. I bet she smelled good too.

It’s the smells I miss: nice perfumes from the business ladies downtown or good coffee or even the street smells like the exhaust smells for the parking garage where I used to flop or the asphalt or bricks.

See, I got my hitch, and it’s time I got to to do, then John says involuntary for a while and then, John says, “Well, we’ll see.”

He says that a lot—doesn’t want to promise anything—and sometimes that gets under my skin a little and sometimes not.

Once, when we were all still kids—there were five of us kids—and we were living in that trailer outside Wamego, and we find a hole full of baby bunnies,and we pulled them out. We was just playing around with them, not hurting nothing. We was just kids, but I remember the little rabbits and how they felt just struggling against my hand and how soft.

Then Big Mike came out the back door and yelled at us and the bunnies just start jumping everywhere and we all ran back inside.

Next day, the hole was empty. The bunnies were gone, and Sam said they were dead or got eaten by coyotes ‘cause they smelled like people now, not bunnies, and their momma would never take them back.

Sam was a liar. A natural-born liar.

But he might of been right about that.

Next day, Big Mike was gone, too, and Catherine, too, but I could see she’d busted up her compact and dropped her lipstick in the toilet because if Big Mike was going to have her all to hisself, he was going to have her “warts and all.” Which is how she described herself when she was in curlers and her bathrobe in the IGA and had been crying all night.

I didn’t hear her say it that night, but I knew she would. I didn’t see she ever had any warts, neither, but she always tried real hard with us kids.

She left a note and everything, with the social services number on it, and I bet Big Mike beat her bad for that too, but it was all she could do, and I knew she wouldn’t just up and leave us and not do it.

We lost the note, but I hung on to the Bic pen laid next to that note for a long, long time.

John says I got PTSD, and he wants to do some eye thing with me, but the psych says I’m schizo, and he won’t ever budge.

Once I met a guy in here got TD real bad, been on Haldol so long he could barely talk, but he could tell you every Top 40 hit for every week from, I swear, 1956 to 2104, when he says his radio broke and nobody to fix it.

He could sing some of ‘em, too, but ‘cause of the TD, he’d sing it real bad. But, thing of it is, nobody here made fun of him. It’s like that in here, since we all know that in a few years, who knows? That could be us.

The other day, I heard one of the ladies had a baby in here. They had to rush her over to the clinic as if they couldn’t see it coming. But then, she wasn’t due for a long time yet, I guess, and they had her so wacked out on Risperdal that she couldn’t tell them she was havin’ contractions, then her water broke, and all hell broke loose.

She’d just cry anyway when anybody asked her anything at all.

So they rush her over, and a OBGYN from town rushes in in the middle of the night, and he gets in past security faster than anything, is what I heard.

But I never heard what happened to the kid.

What could happen to you when you’re born and your mom’s in a place like this?

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Freud, Fantasy, and the Art of Human Survival

Freud was maybe right (enough) about this: what ails us is an inability to square our lives with our deepest, most fugitive impulses.

We’re drawn to places like this: water flowing, calm, swift, predictable; trees we imagine wild; an outcropping of rock. We’re drawn here if, for no other reason, than the need to identify with something not shamed into being, not associated with the need to express gratitude for a box in a glass and steel cage, a new screen to stare at, the ever-nagging buzz of not-quite-enough.

Humans live lives of compelling fantasies, and our cultures provide the polish on these fantasies. Schools teach new ones every day, with the best of them merely providing more chances to live the most desirable of them out. We plunge into tee-vee and the internet and into our social media feeds for new ones.

I don’t discount the power: art comments constantly on the nature of these fantasies and often finds itself pulled into their service with the jingoistic, the predictable, the sentimental—dutiful soldiers of paint and pen.

We’ve survived in the short term in no small part by their ever-increasing sophistication. Faced with almost certain annihilation, we fail to freak out mainly because we’re too busy tweeting.

But fantasies they remain, and they won’t help us later, when the crops begin to fail.

The need to believe in wild places, and the human capacity to follow the irritations of wild hairs, remind us of the overpowering nature of that which is indifferent to us and our petty concerns.

The angst over what is or is not holy, pure, “politically correct” comes from this need, but it’s already entrapped in its own snare, bound by its own terminology into self-defeating pointlessness. What’s wild about us also isn’t “us”; it’s tapped deep into something we can’t so easily sum up with a few odd phrases.

Art treads here as well, wisely afraid, yet steadily reaching.    

--Lael Ewy

Sunday, August 27, 2017

On Free Speech and Responsibility in Troubled Times


by Lael Ewy


It seems that at this point in our nation’s history we’re bargaining one group’s right to free speech against many other groups’ right to simply exist.

The issues typically get boiled down to “tolerance” or “intolerance,” and they’re talked about primarily by people like me: white, middle-class folks who, after all, have nothing to lose in the matter and have the privilege of discussing such matters amongst themselves.

I can’t guarantee that I won’t do more of the same here. My purposes, for what they’re worth, are to reframe the ideas at play, and, by so doing, to perhaps bring some clarity, barring the possibility of actual resolution.

I’m working from a few basic ideas here. The first is that all speech has consequences. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it. You may be talking to yourself just to make yourself feel better or to keep yourself company, but those are desired consequences. Thus when a white supremacist takes part in a rally, he is foolish if he thinks that expressing such an extreme point of view won’t be met with extreme reactions. This is not to say that the person who lashes out violently at the white supremacist should be exonerated for her actions, but it does mean we should acknowledge a possible—in this case probable—response.

Speech, rather than being entirely counter to action, is itself also an action. In this way, speech can be seen as inter-related to other actions and reactions. The white supremacist cited above would think himself a failure if no counter-demonstration or media showed up to his rally. And while he is also foolish if he thinks his speech will lead a white homeland to be bestowed upon him the following morning, a white homeland is, among other things, one of the stated goals of his speech.

Speech, being an action, requires responsibility. A whole lot of ink has been spilt trying to put forth the idea that free speech is somehow rendered outside the normative realm of social responsibility. “It’s just an opinion,” or “Those who disagree are being politically correct,” or “I was only joking” are ways people try to duck responsibility for what they say or to avoid criticism. If you speak, particularly in a public forum, you must be prepared for reaction and criticism, hardened to it, able to meet it emotionally and intellectually. Of all of the things I’m going to say here, this cleaves most closely to the “it goes for both sides” idea.

Silence in the proper places can be powerful, but it can also be someone acting with discretion. Depending on the context, it might not be acquiescence to evil at all but refusing to take the bait. At any rate, speaking is not a way to avoid responsibility; it’s another situation that requires it. Criticism, in the case of free speech, is another word for accountability.

Choosing to act in a way that defies the law also has consequences, and it can also be a form of speech. As Dr. King put it, those involved in nonviolent direct action chose to break the law “openly” and “lovingly.” They did this in order to bring attention to laws that were unjust. And they willingly suffered the consequences of breaking the law. While an Antifa activist may not be trying to tell the world that laws against assault are unjust, she is trying to draw attention to the fact that fascism is an injustice. However, she would also be foolish to think that punching a fascist shouldn’t be met with legal sanction. If she does it, she should do it openly and with a willingness to suffer the legal consequences in order to make her point: violent force is worthwhile against fascists.

The white supremacist, of course, wishes to make injustice law, and therefore must be countered first by legal means, with speech acts, political resistance, and nonviolent direct action. And then, should his ideas become law, with open and expressive violations of those laws, and with a willingness to suffer the consequences.

I’m rationalist enough to believe that if we enter into troubled times with clarity of thought, we will spare ourselves the worst of troubles. But I’m realist enough to know that fascists and white supremacists won’t be defeated by our clarity of thought alone.