07/9/16

Kaddish for the Unarmed

On Yom Kippur, my former synagogue would substitute for the traditional Martyrology a Kaddish for the victims of the Holocaust. The words of the Kaddish were interspersed with the names and places of the victims of extermination. Today, I am interspersing its words with the names of unarmed black people killed by U.S. police in 2015. My source for this information is http://mappingpoliceviolence.org/unarmed/.

Yit’gadal

Keith Childress

v’yit’kadash

Bettie Jones

sh’mei raba

Kevin Matthews

b’al’ma

Leroy Browning

di v’ra khir’utei

Roy Nelson

v ‘yam’likh mal’khutei

Miguel Espinal

b’chayeikhon

Nathaniel Pickett

uv’yomeikhon

Tiara Thomas

uv’chayei d’khol beit yis’ra’eil

Cornelius Brown

Ba’agalah

Zamiel Crawford

u-viz’man kariv

Jermaine Benjamin

v’imru: Amen

Chandra Weaver

Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varakh

l’alam ul’al’mei al’maya

Jamar Clark

Yit’barakh

Richard Perkins

v’yish’tabach

Stephen Tooson

v’yit’pa’ar

Michael Lee Marshall

v’yit’romam

Alonzo Smith

v’yit’nasei

Yvens Seide

v’yit’hadar

Anthony Ashford

v’yit’aleh

Lamontey Jones

v’yit’halal

Rayshawn Cole

sh’mei d’kud’sha

Patterson Brown

B’rikh hu.

Christopher Kimball

toosh’b’chatah

Junior Prosper

v’nechematah,

Keith McLeod

da’ameeran b’al’mah,

Wayne Wheeler

v’imru: Amen

India Kager

Y’hei

Tyree Crawford

sh’lama

James Karney, III

raba

Feliz Kumi

min sh’maya

Wendell Hall

v’chayim aleinu

Asshams Manley

v’al kol yis’ra’eil

Christian Taylor

v’im’ru: Amen

Troy Robinson

Oseh shalom

Brian Day

bim’romav

Michael Sabbie

hu ya’aseh shalom

Billy Ray Davis

aleinu

Samuel Dubose

v’al kol Yisrael

Darrius Stewart

v’al yoshvei

Albert Davis

teiveil

Sandra Bland

v’imru: Amen.

May the One who dwells on high make peace for us, all Israel, and all who dwell on earth.

And let us say, Amen.

 

07/7/16

Said I to Olga

“The fall of the Roman Empire created a power vacuum that we’re still dealing with today.”

07/5/16

Inflation Prophets

Around 2008– that is, for the non-USAns, two presidential election cycles ago– I remember a lot of dark muttering around various dinner tables about the “messianism” of Obama supporters. People on the left, that is, and some of the most philosophically and historically alert ones, were afraid that the expectations lifting the candidacy of the previously little-known senator from Illinois were going to swerve into something sinister. As it happened, nothing less messianic than Obama’s presidency could be imagined. Obama has governed within the limits of the law, not even testing those limits; far from that, he has failed to take a lot of opportunities that the law would have allowed him, and that would have made possible a deep change in our political culture (such as allowing war-crimes investigations to go ahead for the Bushocracy, before he got too deeply involved in the criminality of war himself). In Max Weber’s terms, he has let routine, not charisma, run the show. That’s the sign of a virtue. Maybe not the virtue we needed foregrounded for all of the last eight years. But a virtue nonetheless.

Messianism is certainly something to worry about. It is a symptom of an impatience that wants to throw off all legal restraints, the very restraints that make possible the “freedom” that Americans, those masters of paradox, trumpet loudest when they are trying to anoint someone as lord and master over them. For this we have historical parallels.

Countless “saviors of the twenties”… achieved a position of “great significance especially in the years of inflation from 1919 to 1923 and then again during the Depression of 1929 to 1933″… In 1922, a Berlin correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung described these “prophets of the street” as follows: “For the past one or two years, the advertising boards in Berlin have been covered with announcements of disciples of the future and prophets who are advertising their lectures (often at considerable admission prices). Catchwords and quotations from the Bible always play a role in the advertisements. The old constellation of ideas surrounding the apocalypse has gained new life, as it did in earlier times of crisis… The existence of such prophets is a dangerous symptom of the mental state prevalent in Germany today.” (Klaus Schreiner, “Messianism in the Weimar Republic,” 311-362 of Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen, eds., Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco [Leiden: Brill, 1998], 338-339.)

The important thing about these saviors is that they promise to suspend all existing laws, treaties, and institutions, and simply “emerge as the bearer[s] of divine powers of mercy and fate” (337). One enthusiastic student essayist wrote in 1920:

In our misery, we long for a Leader. He will show us the way… The true Leader surely has no selfish motivation, just one, regal motivation, that he must be the Leader because he is it by nature…. The Leader is not guided by the masses, but by his mission; he does not flatter the masses; he proceeds harshly, uprightly, and ruthlessly, in times of good and evil. The Leader is radical; he is wholly that which he is, and he does wholly that which he must. The Leader is responsible; that is, he does God’s will, which he embodies…. God grant us the Leader and help us to achieve true fealty. (Käthe Becker, “Führerschaft, eine Rede vor der Vereinigung ‘Deutsche Jugend,'” in Deutschlands Erneuerung, vol. 4 [1920]: 563, cited in Schreiber, “Messianism,” 336.)

I have replaced “Führer” in Schreiner’s translation with the more ordinary term “Leader” in order to downplay the connotation that the word “Führer” has acquired in English as applying to one moustachioed individual only, because the date of the quotation proves that it’s not a matter of a manipulative individual or an evil genius, but of the fervent passivity of a mass movement begging to be led, pleading to be dealt with “harshly and ruthlessly.” There was a demand for a Führer, a howling demand, already years before the author of Mein Kampf stepped upon the stage. A well-prepared stage. I blame the preparers: the ones in Versailles as well as the pamphleteers, flag-wavers and revanchards.

And if someone had dealt with the root causes of the frenzy in a timely manner, perhaps the hero cult would have subsided. Inflation prophets will arise. They aren’t the evil itself but “dangerous symptoms” thereof. It shouldn’t be impossible to tap the top tax bracket, employ a few million people in infrastructure repairs, have an honest discussion about race, immigration and exclusion.

I didn’t worry too much about messianism in 2008. Perhaps I should have worried about disappointed messianism. But I do worry about it in 2016.

07/4/16

Commemoration in Another Key

My father would have been 80 yesterday (that’s how far it is to July 3, 1936). We slipped out to a jazz club in the South Loop by way of celebration. Think of it: in July ’36 Fats Waller and Jelly Roll Morton were still in their prime, Miles Davis was ten years old. An unpredictable zigzag was born.

fts2-fts3

06/29/16

Quasi-Domestic Situation

I know these people– let’s call them B and E. For years now, B keeps threatening to leave E. Every time, E makes concessions and allows B to renegotiate the terms of the relationship, always in B’s favor. Finally, after a new installment of threats, B has departed– but is now trying to reestablish visiting rights on B’s own terms, presenting this as a favor done to E.

E’s friends are relieved that B is gone and are telling E to change the locks. A court order might be necessary.

06/25/16

Ha’nacker Mill

This poem expresses what I think of as the Leaver mindset—the pastoral nostalgia of fascists.

Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha’nacker Hill.
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly
And ever since then the clapper is still,
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha’nacker Mill.

Ha’nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation
Spirits that loved her calling aloud:
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.

Spirits that call and no one answers;
Ha’nacker’s down and England’s done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers
And never a ploughman under the Sun.
Never a ploughman. Never a one.

—Hilaire Belloc, 1923

06/23/16

The Play of Analogy

Republicans have dismissed as a “publicity stunt” a continuing sit-in protest over gun laws by Democrats in the US House of Representatives.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said the protesters were more interested in headlines than tackling gun violence. (BBC News, 23/6/2016)

Would you let a poisonous snake wander around your house while children and guests were there?

Although Goebbels, no stranger to killing, went around with a cyanide pill hidden on his person, and I suppose that was his right, he didn’t think to carry a dose sufficient to carry off another fifty or three hundred people, or to toss it in the water supply. We Americans are a generous people.

A theology professor in our neighborhood shot himself and his wife the other day. Why was he in such a hurry? Because convenience was right at hand, and we Americans love convenience. I am reminded of something about “seventy times seventy,” from a guy who must have lived in a more slow-moving era.

Rikki Garni said it best: “The dictionary is the only loaded gun we keep in the house.”

06/18/16

Branching History

In 1869-1870, the government of Ulysses Grant sent a confidential envoy to the Dominican Republic to talk about statehood. Yes, statehood: a treaty of mutual assistance and free trade was proposed, with the opportunity to join the other states of the American Republic (just recently sutured back together after the unpleasantness of 1861-65) in the adventures of liberty, manifest destiny, and the Monroe Doctrine.

Grant saw in San Domingo a few advantages. A safe harbor for our navy, in order to keep the Caribbean sea lanes open; a market for our manufactured goods; even a country in need of the development that thousands of recently liberated black Americans could provide, if they could be induced to move there. (This was the moment of the Ku Klux Klan’s rise; by opening a new channel of emigration, Grant may have thought he would deprive the Klan of its target and raise the price of labor in the South.) The United States was casting about for an empire, and this would have been the first stage of an imperial expansion on the same basis as that whereby the West was won (or lost, if you think about it from the Mexican point of view). That is, influx of population, building of republican institutions, and finally integration into the fold as a new state, with full protection of constitutional rights as they were then understood.

Consider what in the end happened. Occupation of Cuba and the Philippines (1898). The Panama Canal Treaty. The ambiguous status of Puerto Rico. Purchase, under war conditions, of the Virgin Islands. Interference in Haiti, the DR, Venezuela, and on and on. All activities that earned us the resentment of most people in those areas, who experienced the US not as a space of freedom and security, but as a gun butt. History could have branched a different way, whereby we would have enlarged our selves, not stomped on our others.

Which is not to say that assimilation would have been easy or inevitable. The embrace of the Inviting Gringo might have been as little acceptable as the bayonet of the Demanding Gringo. But think about it. What would be the national character of a United States that had accepted its Spanish-English bilingual destiny already in 1870?

It was not to be. Grant had neglected to bring the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on board– indeed, he hadn’t even briefed them about his secret initiative. They were not happy about it. Charles Sumner, usually a loyal party man, bristled. Speeches were made decrying the chaotic and violent character of the Dominicans’ government, which rendered them unsuited to statehood (curiously, inasmuch as the Wild West was shooting and brawling its way to statehood during these same decades). Worst of all was the prospect of mixed-race people becoming citizens of the United States. Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri torpedoed the initiative with these words:

Fancy the Senators and Representatives of ten or twelve millions of tropical people, people of the Latin race mixed with Indian and African blood; people who have neither language, nor traditions, nor habits, nor political institutions, nor morals in common with us; fancy them sitting in the Halls of Congress, throwing the weight of their intelligence, their morality, their political institutions and habits, their prejudices and passions, into the scale of the destinies of this Republic.
(cited in Robert S. Levine, _Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism_ [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009], p. 209)

I can fancy it. So could Frederick Douglass. And if more people had been able to imagine it in 1870, we would have a different set of problems to deal with today, but white supremacy might not be one of them. What would be (indeed, what is) the point of building a wall between two groups of US citizens?

06/4/16

Rat Productivity

The earliest recorded behavioral experiment with rats took place around 250 BC.

            Li Si was a native of Shangcai in Chu. In his youth he served as a petty clerk in the province. In the privy of the clerks’ quarters he saw how the rats ate the filth and how, when people or dogs came near, they were frequently alarmed and terrified. And when he entered the storehouse he saw how the rats in the storehouse ate the heaps of grain and lived under a big roof, never having to worry about people or dogs. Li Si sighed and said, ‘Whether a man turns out to be worthy or good-for-nothing is like the rats—it all depends on the surroundings he chooses for himself!’ (Sima Qian, Shi ji, translated by Burton Watson as Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 1, Qin Dynasty [New York: Columbia University Press, 2002], p. 179.)

We who teach in colleges are generally lucky rats in Li Si’s terms, especially if tenured. But measures of well-being do not correlate with an absolute or static level of comfort; beyond a certain level, the marginal utility of increased income tapers off. What makes academics happy is engagement, participation in discovery, and a sense of control.

In a global health organization I work with, we have found in many resource-poor settings that the effect of salary raises on the subjective well-being of clinicians is negligible compared to the effect of giving doctors and nurses the tools they need to do their work well. And doctors and nurses who are satisfied with their work conditions are better at helping their patients. This strategy of enhancing effectiveness has been notably useful in counteracting brain drain among medical personnel in poor countries.

Li Si forgot to compare the productivity of the two groups of rats (in his defense, it’s hard to see what a measure of rat productivity would be). But any academic behaviorist can. The best times in my career have been when I’ve had a strong posse of like-minded people working with me to expand a frontier of knowledge or teaching; the worst have been years when colleagues wasted each other’s time with bickering, squabbling over shrinking resources, defending positions or undercutting each other. And when I think back over the causes, I note that the main factors creating a negative climate for the “life of the mind” have been, ultimately, administrative. If someone wanted to “disrupt” (in the old sense of the word) teaching and research in a certain sector, there is no easier way than to institute a competition for shrinking resources. That will hinder new projects from developing, reward non-cooperative behavior by actors who are less affected by the diminished resources, and reduce commitment by those who have other outlets for their energies, not to mention distracting attention from the things that brought us here in the first place. And if the resources are shrunk in an abrupt, startling, non-transparent way, without discussion of alternative scenarios or opportunities to cooperate in managing scarcity, you’ll have some disturbed rats.

05/22/16

And So I Sat Down to Write my Academic Memoir

I am privileged to have spent much of my adult life in the company of people for whom fat-shaming is a more grievous injustice than starvation.

(With an opening line like that, it will have to be a posthumous memoir. I couldn’t stand to read the reviews.)

05/22/16

Liberal Education as Radical Proposition in the Late Ming

(A talk for the 2016 Weissbourd conference, “Does Liberal Education Need Saving?”)

Just at the moment when the liberal arts are under attack in America as being a merely ornamental excrescence, Chinese university administrators are trying to reform the curriculum in order to include more general education and more seminar-style teaching. Cao Li 曹莉, a professor and dean at Tsinghua University, finds this risky. “Many universities,” she says,

are rushing to join in the adventure of internationalizing higher education with foreign capital. All these shifts and transformations pose severe challenges to the Chinese university, one of which is the problem of how the identity of a Chinese university can be defined and upheld. In this regard, liberal education cannot ignore the strategic importance of maintaining national identity and cultural self-consciousness…. [T]he model of the American university is being invoked to rationalize and standardize university of education. We will have to realize that one of the most disturbing results of globalization is the standardization and homogenization of cultures, which threatens to deconstruct nationality and dismantle national consciousness as well as cultural confidence…. To break out of such a globalizing paradigm both culturally and intellectually is a challenge to all nations and their educational enterprises.[1]

Continue reading →

05/15/16

Lying About Sex

“We demand that sex speak the truth… and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness,” you’ll remember that Foucault said. He also insisted that that “truth” was a scam, the more so the more it became obligatory.

I guess it’s usual to lie about sex– the sex one is having or not having (or used to have or not have). But lying about the kinds, occasions and purposes of sex that other people are having, or have had, touches my fiber of moral disgust. It happens in all sorts of places and ways. Let’s do less of this.

 

04/20/16

Results

After a year of my working with my Basic Literacy student, the program did an official evaluation of her progress. The main gain was in reading, on which I had focused pretty relentlessly. She’d gone up three reading levels; given the wide tranches of the evaluation system, this means that she started at about a third-grade reading level and ended up at a high school level. Other gains were less obvious, and there were a few goals we’d never gotten to, but on two hours a week for a year, I think she did well.

I mention this not to apply for a medal, but because it validates something I have believed since I started tutoring back in 2010: one-on-one tutoring is by far the most effective means of moving students ahead. It is one of those things where the apparent high cost of extending individual services is mitigated by the high cost of traditional remediation and the increasing penalties imposed by governing and certifying agencies for student failure and non-completion of degree. Tutoring puts a human face on a college or organization, and gives the student the idea that someone cares about him or her. There is no better way of giving a student confidence.

I am not a great motivator; I cannot make someone who doesn’t want to be there suddenly care. But give me someone who knows that they’re in trouble, and that reading and writing are barriers to what they hope to achieve, and I am good to go.

I am under no illusions about administrators’ search for a zero-ongoing-costs solution. There will eventually be robots in the tutor role, and that’s all students are going to get, because it’s easier for a bureaucrat to have a one-time-expense of $150,000 for a robot than to keep paying a few people what’s now $15 an hour year after year. But I’ll keep doing this as long as I can.

04/1/16

Coughka

I don’t have the time to research this right now, but it seems to me that the set of features known as “the Kafkaesque” owe at least as much to the experience of being a tuberculosis patient in the 1920s as they do to to Jewishness, Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy, minority language status, the Oedipus complex or other factors that have been put forward.

It’s all there. The dream quality of not being able to distinguish the most trivial things, or fantasies, from mortal danger:

[1922] March 16. The attacks, my fear, rats that tear at me and whom my eyes multiply.

March 24. How it lies in wait for me! On the way to the doctor, for example, so often there.

May 26. The severe ‘attacks’ during the evening walk (resulting from four tiny vexations during the day: the dog in the summer resort; Mars’ book; enlistment as a soldier; lending the money through Z.); momentary confusion, helplessness, hopelessness, unfathomable abyss, nothing but abyss; only when I turned in at the front door did a thought come to my assistance… [The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923, ed. Max Brod, tr. Martin Greenberg (New York: Shocken Books, 1949), 225, 230]

The paranoiac feeling:

[1923] June 12…. More and more fearful as I write. It is understandable. Every word, twisted in the hands of the spirits– this twist of the hand is their characteristic gesture–becomes a spear turned against the speaker. Most especially a remark like this. And so ad infinitum. The only consolation would be: it happens whether you like or no. And what you like is of infinitesimally little help. More than consolation is: You too have weapons. [Diaries, 232-233]

But Franz K. didn’t have all the weapons he needed: that was the last entry in the diary. (He lived for almost another year past writing those words.)

Most of all, a description of tuberculosis that makes it sound like what much later would be classified as an auto-immune disease:

[1922] March 7. Yesterday the worst night I have had, as if everything were at an end.

March 9. But that was only weariness; today a fresh attack, wringing the sweat from my brow. How would it be if one were to choke to death on oneself? If the pressure of introspection were to diminish, or close off entirely, the opening through which one flows forth into the world. I am not far from it at times. A river flowing upstream. For a long time now, that is what for the most part has been going on. [Diaries, 223]

What’s so special about the 1920s? Since Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus in 1882 and development of the sputum test in 1890, it had been possible to know with certainty that you were doomed, yet be unable to do anything conclusive about it (that would become possible only with antibiotics). Does this sound like the judgment or what? Yes, Susan Sontag, I am aware of the danger of romanticizing illness. But don’t you see the analytic mind of Kafka at work, trying to understand the process of his own obliteration? That’s the castle, that’s the trial, that’s Amerika (or: The One Who Disappeared).

04/1/16

Longer Views

There is (this will be no news to anyone who’s been awake for the last forty years) a debate about whether state-provided social services are too expensive to be continued, whether they’re actually beneficial to their recipients or reduce them to the status of helpless dependents, whether they’re more or less efficient than some hypothetical market mechanism– in sum, whether they should exist at all. At least as presented in the relatively highbrow newspapers and magazines that cross my threshold, the matter of cost is always framed in relation to current expenditures: health and education as a fraction of GDP, or as compared to defense, etc.

That way of framing the math, however, renders invisible many dimensions of benefit and cost that become perceptible only when we look at matters in a longer view (say over a lifetime) and dice more finely the categories of payers and recipients. It turns out that for the overwhelming majority of British rate-payers, and by overwhelming I mean 93%, the amount paid in over a lifetime exceeds the amount received in benefits. So you can forget about the welfare queens, the “culture of dependency,” and all that stuff. Who knew, you may ask, that the public was always stepping up to the plate and giving a little more than necessary to help the less fortunate?

In another way, social services such as education, healthcare, and unemployment insurance act as a collective savings account to get people through the hard times. The number of people who will at one point or another need to call on these collective savings is large. Only a few people never experience need over their lifetimes. The few lucky standouts shouldn’t begrudge the majority whom social investments kept from going broke at one point or another: if the unlucky folks really had to eat garbage or steal on a regular basis in order to survive, surely the lucky ones would be sleeping less well at night. And need is not a lifetime thing; it happens in moments or cycles and, once again, the impact can be cushioned by the whole society’s willingness to think and pay ahead.

Admittedly, these results are from Great Britain, where some 70 years of Labour-inflected policy have created a long enough statistical run to give useful data. But surely in the US, even without a National Health Service and despite our patchwork of state governments, some more provident than others, the numbers exist to show what entitlements really do and don’t do, under a variety of conditions, over a lifetime. I’d be glad to read a factual comparative study. In the meantime, here’s the report on lifetime outcomes from the Nuffield Foundation’s Institute for Fiscal Studies:

 

03/16/16

Filling Out the Record

“The person who proposes that cowboy poetry is poetry composed by cowboys has not begun to theorize. ” Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies, p. 15.  But now see Carson Vaughan, “My Cousin, the Cowboy Poet.” Not especially theoretical, but has a range.

03/4/16

Version française

For some reason I couldn’t help writing up a French-language digest of my book The Ethnography of Rhythm, just out from Fordham University Press.

 

L’ETHNOGRAPHIE DU RYTHME

Écriture, oralité, technologies

Haun Saussy

 

Préface par Olga Solovieva

 

Introduction: Le poids d’une parole ailée

Le sujet de ce livre est la perturbation causée par la littérature orale. Ce qu’on entend par littérature orale; comment on en rend compte (approche théorique, approche ostensive)—insuffisamment. La nécessité d’une histoire du concept, car ni l’oralité ni l’écriture n’existent en tant que telles: définitions en miroir et par défaut. Jules César et les druides, Flavius Josèphe et les aèdes. Les Anciens vs. les Modernes, et Homère, auteur de “chansons du Pont-Neuf.” Vico, Ossian, Wolf, les folkloristes du XIXe siècle. Quand a-t-on pensé pour la première fois que les textes oraux avaient une structure spécifique?

Chapitre I. Une poésie sans poèmes ni poètes

  1. “Deux ou trois cents phrases rythmées”

Jean Paulhan (1913), collectionneur des hain-teny. Une poésie de dispute. Le bien communal poétique. Les proverbes, les formules: composition par tous et par aucun. Un langage superposé au langage ordinaire.

  1. Des festivals du rythme

Marcel Granet (1919), lecteur de Paulhan. La poésie chinoise ancienne, définie par ses déficits en personnalité et en invention. “Le rythme était tout.” Les formes élémentaires de la vie poétique.

  1. Le style oral

Marcel Jousse (1925) prend fait et cause pour une civilisation de transmission orale, gestuelle, du savoir. Les verbo-moteurs. Les Formules, les Balancements. La disparition de l’auteur au profit de la Récitation. Homère, Jésus, porte-paroles de la mémoire collective. Les grands laboratoires du Style oral.

  1. La formule comme système

Milman Parry (1928), ou la mise en ordre rythmique d’un apparent chaos sémantique. Les formules nom-épithète chez Homère et leur différenciation fonctionnelle. Langage poétique, langage d’une poésie orale. Les débuts des “oral poetry studies.”

  1. Langue, parole, censure

Jakobson et Bogatyrev (1929) proposent une théorie du folklore oral centrée sur l’oubli (censure) de ce qui viole les normes. La récitation d’une œuvre orale est la parole d’une langue collective. La futilité de la censure dans une civilisation de l’écrit prouvée par l’histoire.

Chapitre II. L’écriture comme moyen de notation

  1. Le cyborg épique

La théorie de la composition collective orale: le robot poète. Peur du mécanisme, d’où : dénégation, mauvaise foi. Un déterminisme technique par antiphrase. Critique de l’ethnographie tacite des “oral poetry studies,” trop dépendante d’une valorisation d’une différence oral/écrit qui ne correspond pas aux données rapportées du terrain.

  1. “Mot à mot”

Comment transcrit-on? Sait-on ce qu’on fait en notant un texte oral? Le mot, artéfact d’une technologie. La théorie linguistique des aèdes. Les unités de composition; l’identité et la différence considérées au point de vue d’une autre technologie de la reproduction des textes. Comment faire mieux que l’écriture: rappels, liens, tabulations.

  1. Au fil du temps: sutures

La rencontre du texte oral et de l’imprimé. Henri Estienne, Ludolf Küster: qui sont les rhapsodes? Le texte homérique et l’ennui du typographe: pourquoi tant de formules? Naissance du cliché, de la propriété littéraire, de la parodie. Les médias et les technologies selon les commentaires pindariques.

Chapitre III. Autographie

  1. L’oreille inscriptrice

Léon Scott (1858): invention d’un mécanisme pour transcrire la parole sans passer par l’alphabet. Marey. Les choses parlent d’eux-mêmes.

  1. “La parole est un mouvement”

Pierre-Jean Rousselot (1882), disciple de Marey. La dialectologie, science des différences infimes. La parole, au sens de Saussure, captée par une écriture sans mots et sans playback. Le corps, la matière, le temps, l’inscription.

  1. Le patois de Parnasse

L’alexandrin existe-t-il en dehors d’une fiction normative? La phonétique expérimentale au secours du vers libre. Le vers traditionnel n’a pas vraiment douze pieds, et le vers libre comporte symétries et césures.

  1. Une différence de quinze cycles

Le corps humain, instrument de réception et de production de vibrations. Une esthétique physiologique, une psychologie musculaire.

Chapitre IV. Le gramophone humain

  1. “Errores Modernistarum”

L’arrivée tardive de la philologie biblique allemande en France. La philologie contre la foi. Le Vatican contre les “modernistes.” La condamnation (1907) de Loisy.

  1. L’évangile du mouvement

La récitation orale selon Jousse, une réponse à la philologie iconoclaste de Renan et de Loisy. L’évangile ne résiderait pas dans les textes écrits, mais dans un registre aujourd’hui perdu de gestes et de mouvements. “Nous avons les paroles mêmes de Jésus.” Les moyens de mémorisation plus forts que la mort.

  1. Une galerie de squelettes

La Psychologie de la Récitation au temple de l’anthropologie physique. L’ambition: faire du mimétisme une loi physique de l’organisme humain, tout comme l’inscription d’un contenu dans une série de gestes lui donnerait corps et un moyen de propagation.

  1. “Quatre juifs obscurs”

La valorisation de l’oralité contre la glorification maurrassien de Rome. Un certain philo-sémitisme rencontre le renouveau juif ; déchristianisation de l’évangile.

  1. La civilisation gallo-galiléenne

Dans la France occupée, une lecture de l’histoire à contre-pied. Le front uni des Druides et des Mères. Le retour de l’oralité.

Chapitre V. L’inscription corporelle

  1. La science des matériaux

Le corps humain, support d’inscriptions. L’esprit humain comme surface écrite. Quelques “lois” de l’écriture sur cerveaux vivants.

  1. Des techniques du corps

Mauss (1934): le corps, premier outil. Transmissions des savoirs par et sur le corps. Merleau-Ponty et l’homme sans projets. Le projet, unité d’inscription de la technique mémorielle qu’est la littérature orale. Perspective de reconstitution d’un paysage mnémonique pour la récitation épique. Bricolage, Traumarbeit. Le corps du récitant, le corps du texte. La littérature orale aura été le lieu d’expérimentation pour tant d’avant-gardes artistiques ou théoriques du XXe siècle parce qu’elle a le pouvoir de dissoudre et de reformer les unités mêmes dont dépendent les autres médias de notre modernité.

Bibliographie

Illustrations et légendes

 

01/23/16

When My Number Comes Up

What do you say I write an application to the XXXX Foundation, the YYY Trust, or the ZZZZ Institute for the following purposes:

— Cataloguing my library. I can’t find books I’m looking for. I would save a lot of time if I knew where so-and-so’s book about Lamartine as epistemologist was stored, or even what color the jacket was. (Higher-ticket item: digitize my whole library so I can carry it around on a 2TB telephone attachment.)

— Organize my xerox collection, with many items dating back to 1974. (As above.)

— Get time to read books. The list of things I’ve started but not finished is embarrassingly long. Save me, XXXX Foundation, from my lifelong embarrassment.

Or of course I could retire, with a generous enough pension, and do all this without ever bothering anybody again about it.

 

01/17/16

A Sheep In Wolf’s Clothing

From 1993 until last week, I interviewed high school students for admission to Yale, under the aegis of a branch of the Admissions department called the Alumni Schools Committee (ASC). For the first twenty years, it was a rewarding experience, one where I saw immense possibilities for some students and hoped that Yale could help make those possibilities happen. I worked hard in my interview reports to convey who and what the students were. About five or six years ago, I got a Lucite paperweight and a certificate from the ASC, indicating that I had done better than expected.

In the year or two after, the students took on a different character. There were many fewer given to me, and those were most often students who had been programmed with activities and spurred to excel by well-meaning but desperate parents. I saw only one student from that time who actually seemed capable of changing the world. The competitive world of college admissions meant that many were now provisionally admitted, through a little bit of legalistic chicanery, before an interviewer ever came on the scene, rendering my role almost superfluous. And I had a shock when, after many years, I was put into the same room as my fellow interviewers and discovered that all the stereotypes of Yalies had instantly come true. Representative was one jowly man, slightly older than me, wearing a tailored navy-blue Brioni suit, who worked for UBS, and who was very concerned lest he and his colleagues be held responsible for the financial collapse of the country. “She’s going after our people!” he said of Elizabeth Warren, with no small outrage. As the prophet Hosea put it, “You are not my people.”

The final thing that made me think about leaving interviewing was that, due to new rules, quite sensible, I could not interview in my home. I am an independent contractor, and have no office of my own. The ASC local director was kind enough to ask a fellow interviewer, a very high-powered lawyer in an international firm, whether I could use some of the lawyer’s office space. It was palatial, taking up the top floor of a skyscraper. There were huge, marble walls, enormous volumes of space, marble topped conference tables, and a conference room looking out fifty miles to the mountains to the east. The office manager offered me food, soda, and water whenever I came in. I felt like an imposter whenever, at home, I put on my one acceptable suit, knotted my bulldog tie, and, a half hour later, ushered a student into the panoramic conference room. I felt as though I was conveying a rather Mephistophelean message: cast your lot with Yale, and all earthly success shall be yours. Given that I was a glaring example of that not happening, I felt completely out of place, especially given how deferential the students were after they gaped at the panoramic conference room.

Last year, I had to do something I had never had to do before: ask ASC to reassign a student. Foolishly, I had forgotten that the AAAS conference was at the same time as the crunch interviewing week. I was upset about it, but that turned to relief in a very short time. This year, I had one student reassigned due to my being sick, and realized I didn’t want to interview anymore. I got a nice note from the ASC director, but now I am free.

I am not sure how to give back to Yale anymore—I surely cannot do so financially. The Yale of today seems fundamentally different from 25 years ago. Perhaps Yale needs more interviewers from younger generations. Perhaps Admissions will rely more on computers to home in on the precise data that determine a successful applicant, and fewer interviews will be needed. For now, I can take off the wolf’s mantle of “success,” and try to be more consistently who I am.