About Bill20Benzon
Bill Benzon is an independent scholar who has been working and publishing on the 'newer psychologies' and culture for three decades. He is also a trumpeter who has opened for Dizzy Gillespie, B.B. King, and Al Grey.
Email Address: bbenzon@mindspring.com
Website: http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/
Posts by Bill20Benzon
Thursday, December 04, 2008
The Cantankerous Two: Bauerlein & Gitlin
Have a discussion on the following topics (72 minutess worth):
Todd’s discontents and his sins in the sixties (13:43)
Mark on cowardly college professors (16:33)
Todd on corrupt intellectuals (04:50)
“David Brooks is a disgrace” (06:38)
The job insecurity of conservative intellectuals (05:23)
Why so few conservative profs? (12:10)
Why don’t grad students want to kill the father anymore? (12:37)
I found it all rather interesting, but the last segment was particularly interesting: Why hasn’t there been a rebellion against Derrida, Foucault & Co.? The presupposition here is that it is only “natural” that each successive intellectual generation rebel against the previous one. That doesn’t seem to have happened to the leading figures of Stanley Fish’s generation (Gitlin’s example).
Permanent link • (3) Comments
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Icons: Levi-Strauss and Zizek
Claude Lévi-Strauss is 100; France honors him:
On Tuesday there was a day-long colloquium at the Collège de France, where Mr. Lévi-Strauss once taught. Mr. Descola said that centenary celebrations were being held in at least 25 countries.
“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” he said in an interview. “His thought is among the most complex of the 20th century, and it’s hard to convey his prose and his thinking in English. But he gave a proper object to anthropology: not simply as a study of human nature, but a systematic study of how cultural practices vary, how cultural differences are systematically organized.”
Meanwhile, The New Republic goes after Zizek:
Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but “in a curious inversion,” he characteristically observes, “religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.” And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek’s recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. “Everything is to be endorsed here,” he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, “up to and including religious ‘fanaticism.’”
Permanent link • (59) Comments
Monday, November 24, 2008
Science vs. SF
Over there (or is it back here around the corner?) at ScienceBlogs John Wilkins, philosopher of biology, argues that the science in most SF is worthless:
...the sole virtue that SF might now have is that it introduces one generation after another to the value of science. So, does it?
Almost never. Few novels are accurate, but even fewer show science in a good light. Frankenstein is the model of the SF scientist, meddling where he (usually a he - SF was very masculine for a long time) had no right to meddle. Arthur Clarke, despite the woodenness of his characters and dialogues, at least stood out in that respect - scientists were the good guys for him (and for a number of Eastern Bloc SF writers like Lem). But most SF showed science in a very apocalyptic and dangerous aspect, as befitted the post A-bomb era.
He goes on to observe:
In fact, if SF led me to anything, it led me to religion, through the loss of which I entered philosophy. Mysticism in SF is widespread (Dune anyone?), and rational thinking is mostly honoured in the breach. But the dystopias of 1984, Brave New World, and the epic traditions Wells began, these are of lasting value, mostly for the reason that they do not involve science except as a deus ex machina (or should that be, as a McGuffin?) to get the story going. They are about class, political control, censorship, interference, freedom, and the classic concerns of literature.
Permanent link • (19) Comments
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Thinkers We
Teh Typealyzer is one of those interweb thingies that classifies things when you feed it some this or that. In this case, you feed it a URL and it tells you what kind of blog lives there. I fed it The Valve’s URL and it deduced that we are Thinkers: “The logical and analytical type. They are especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.” I especially like that “far-reaching implications” part. Further, we “enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality.” OK.
Teh Typealizer also coughs up a diagram of the brain that’s shaded to indicate which parts we use when thinking Valvish thoughts. Color it worthless.
As for how it does what it does, David Beaver at Language Log guesses:
The Typalyzer [sic] seems to use a standard machine classification technique. Presumably the creators have created a little database consisting of example websites with classifications that they think are appropriate, then trained the classifier with these examples. Now the classifier gives instant classifications of sites it’s never seen before based, broadly, on how similar the new sites are to the old ones. It’s likely that the classifier is primarily using what’s called a “bag of words” technique. That is, similarity of one site to another is based on the relative frequencies of words used on the sites. Then based on the classification, the machine chooses which misleading picture to take from a vast database of misleading pictures. All well and good. If you’ve any faith at all in the psychological categories they use, then this is neat way to do cheap psychology.]
Seems reasonable to me.
Permanent link • (2) Comments
A Century in Photos
Millions of photographs from the LIFE archive are now online through Google. It’s an astounding resource. Some searches on literary figures: Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pearl Buck, James Michener, Mary McCarthy.
Permanent link • (3) Comments
Monday, November 10, 2008
The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka’s Mighty Atom
The word “robot” is Czech and entered 20th Century discourse through R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a play by Karel Čapek that premiered in Prague in 1928. It was staged in London in 1923 in English, and in Tokyo in 1924 in Japanese (Frederik Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom, 1990, p. 29). A Japanese ten year old named Osamu Tezuka read the play in 1938 and thirteen years later he created the most famous robot in Japanese culture, Tetsuwan Atomu, Mighty Atom, aka Astro Boy in English. Čapek’s play was a response to industrialization; Tezuka’s manga was a response to the Allied Occupation of Japan. Čapek’s robots were not electro-mechanical devices; they were organic, but constructed, like Frankenstein. They were created to serve humans as workers, but they rebel and, in time, kill all humans save one. Tezuka’s conception is quite different; his robots are electro-mechanical, but many of his stories center on social tension between humans and robots.
Though Tezuka hated WWII, he was a patriotic Japanese and expected Japan to win the war. Near the end of the war he created an unpublished comic in which Japanese and American comic strip characters fought one another (Schodt, The Astro Boy Essays, 2007, p. 27). After the war he continued his medical training while beginning to publish manga; New Treasure Island appeared in 1947 and is reputed to have sold 400,000 copies. He experimented with science fiction in Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. He introduced Mighty Atom as a secondary character in 1951, and then gave him his own title in 1952.
While he had some misgivings about whether or not his primary audience, Japanese boys, would be able to identify with a robot, those misgivings were groundless. Mighty Atom was a success. Tezuka published Mighty Atom stories continuously from 1952 through 1968, and a few thereafter. In the 1960s he created an animated TV series that was almost immediately exported to the United States as Astro Boy. During the 1980s he created fifty-two anime episodes in color, most of them based on stories in the earlier anime series or in the manga.
Continue reading "The Robot as Subaltern: Tezuka’s Mighty Atom"Permanent link • (2) Comments
Monday, November 03, 2008
Critique of Social Construction
Tim Burke has an interesting 4-part critique of the notion of social construction. Here’s his third point:
My third objection follows on the second. The fact that for a long time scholars spent considerable effort to demonstrate that a given identity, institution, etc., simply was a social construction, tells you something about the intent of that argument. It was designed to undercut or demolish practices being described as such. The problem is that many scholars also recognized the “reality” of such constructions–that once constructed, they were social reality, that there wasn’t any ontological, Platonic human “real” being concealed by constructions. If you said something like “modern subjectivities built around liberal individualism, around rights-bearing sovereign selves are a construction”, you also had to say, “But no less real for that”. A lot of Foucauldian work (including by Foucault himself) had this sort of coy double-gesture: madness, sexuality, criminality, etc., were “constructed”, but also “real”–and thus if you said, “Well, so are you against those constructions as we have them?” you would hear “Oh, my no, there isn’t anything but these constructions, there is nothing outside, nothing more ‘real’ beyond them”.
Permanent link • (12) Comments
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Hillis Miller, the Long View
I’ve been browsing the archives of the ADE Bulletin, which is full of articles on the nature and state of the profession, more articles than I care to read. I recommend “Days of Future Past," by Michael Bérubé (2002) and “The Situation of the Humanities; or, How English Departments (and Their Chairs) Can Survive into the Twenty-First Century," by Annette Kolodny (2005). But I’d like to quote some passages from J. Hillis Miller, “My Fifty Years in the Profession" (2003).
Why Miller? Well, he is a prominent and honored member of the profession. That is one thing.
There is a more personal reason: his lectures captivated me when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. He was a model of wit and erudition, the very essence of a humanities professor. But also, when he talks about Hopkins, I know what he’s talking about because I was there.
And that sense of connection is important to me as I ponder these issues, the nature of and future of the discipline. The questions are important, but also abstract and remote. As accustomed as I am to abstraction, it also makes me antsy. This business of evaluative criticism, for example. The people who urge it are very earnest; but their talk seems very abstract, quote remote from the fact of doing such criticism time and again. Right now, the evaluative practice that is most meaningful to me concerns my photographs: which ones are worth processing and posting online, and just how do I tweak this or that one? I have some notion of how to talk about such things - after all, I really do make such decisions and I do have terms in which I think about them. Compared to that, a list of evaluative criteria strikes me as almost hopelessly remote.
Enough about my photos and judgments. Back to Hillis Miller. My other reason for singling out his essay is that he’s reflecting about his 50 years in the profession. And that’s what I’m concerned about. Concerning the early years:
The discipline of English studies was certainly well in place when I entered graduate school in 1948 and when I began full-time teaching in 1952. In those days we knew what we were doing. All sorts of disciplinary rules, boundaries, and taken-for-granted assumptions were firmly in place. We knew what the canon was, what were the main periods of English literary history, and what constituted good scholarship in the field.... In those days “we” were mostly men, all men in the English department at Hopkins, and all the works we studied, with some exceptions, were by men. American literature was pretty marginal. It all made perfect sense.
Not quite a paradise lost, but certainly a comfortable world and, perhaps, a comforting memory. Miller continues:
Continue reading "Hillis Miller, the Long View"Permanent link • (1) Comments
Nigel Beale’s Evaluation Criteria
Back in October Nigel Beale called on the Booker judges to reveal the criteria they used in arriving at their judgments. After some caveats, including the stricture that the judges be familiar with canonical works (as an implicit standard) Beale suggested the following criteria:
Critical evaluation will involve the measurement of among other things:
• The extent to which the reader is entertained and to which his/her attention and interest is held.
• The believability/plausibility/probability/of events which occur in the narrative, and activities and dialogue engaged in by the work’s characters, relative to the context of the world /environment created
• The unity, coherence, originality and complexity of the work’s structure, theme, story, characters and style. The presence of beauty, wisdom and humour in its phraseology
• The extent to which the reader is drawn into the story and the lives of its characters; the degree to which emotions are stirred, and the imagination filled and innervated
• Finally, the book’s power to change lives: its ability to instigate new heights of self knowledge, understanding of human nature and ‘life’, and transcendence in a significant number of readers.
These points, or ones like them, shouldn’t necessarily be used as a ‘checklist’ but rather as a guide by which judges could justify their decisions. Decisions that I think should be explained in some detail.
Hmmmm . . . those detailed explanations would, no doubt, be interesting in some way. Just what way, that’s where much of the interest lies. I think Beale’s preceding remark is shrewd, not a checklist, but simply terms of justification. For I do think that’s more or less how evaluation is done, intuitively, with post hoc rationalization if needed. So Beale’s stating, in broad strokes, the terms of rationalization. So why’d he talk of “measurement” in introducing the list? A hope, a slip?
Permanent link • (16) Comments
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Bailed Out
The people who live here (in the Erie Cut/Bergen Arches in Jersey City, two miles from Wall Street) don’t have mortgages. They’ve already bailed out.
28 October 2007
Permanent link • (0) Comments
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Evaluation: Pound’s Typology
Given various discussions about the need for evaluative criticism, I thought I’d post a little typology that Ezra Pound set out in The A B C of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960, pp. 39-40):
Continue reading "Evaluation: Pound’s Typology"When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons:
1 Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives us the first known example of a process.
2 The masters. Men who combined a number of such processes, and who used them as well as or better than the inventors.
3 The diluters. Men who came after the first two kinds of writer, and couldn’t do the job quite as well.
4 Good writers without salient qualities. Men who are fortunate enough to be born when the literature of a given country is in good working order, or when some particular branch of writing is ‘healthy’. ...
5 Writers of belles-lettres. That is, men who didn’t really invent anything, but who specialized in some particular part of writing, who couldn’t be considered as ‘great men’ or as authors who were trying to give a complete presentation of life, or of their epoch.
6 The starters of crazes.
Until the reader knows the first two categories he will never be able ‘to see the wood for the trees.’ He may know what he ‘likes’. He may be a ‘compleat book-lover’, with a large library ... but he will never be able to sort out what he knows or to estimate the value of one book in relation to others, and he will be more confused and even less able to make up his mind about a book where a new author is ‘breaking with convention’ than to form an opinion about a book eighty or a hundred years old.
Permanent link • (5) Comments
Friday, October 10, 2008
Manifesto: Literary Reading and Emotion
In mid-July of this year the Myrifield Institute for Cognition and the Arts hosted a conference of Literary Reading and Emotion. It was proposed by David S. Miall, Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, with the following in attendance: Jan Auracher (Language and Literature) and Willie van Peer (Intercultural Hermeneutics) from the University of Munich, Germany; Sally Banes, Emerita Professor in Theater and Dance, and Ellen Dissanayake (Music) from the University of Washington, USA; Noël Carroll (Philosophy) from Temple University, Philadelphia and CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA; Keith Oatley (Human Development and Applied Psychology) from the University of Toronto, Canada; Reuven Tsur (Hebrew Literature and Literary Theory) from the University of Tel Aviv, Israel; along with Donald and Margaret Freeman (MICA directors) and Evelina Simanonyte (Colby-Sawyer College, New Hampshire, USA).
The group has now issued a brief manifesto (available here, with commments, and here), which includes these two (of six) declarations:
2. We discern a need to shift focus from the interpretative preoccupation of current approaches to the experience of literature and the arts, which includes the need to study their emotional aspects.
3. We propose a new interdisciplinary approach that integrates the social and biological sciences with the humanities. This proposed integration implies the readiness to become actively involved with the methodology of non-humanistic disciplines, including the development of philosophical and empirical research methodologies.
Permanent link • (0) Comments
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
What and Where is the Text?
As David Bordwell has observed in Making Meaning, much of our thinking about literary texts (& movies & graphic novels, etc.) seems to derive from the metaphor of a container. Some things are inside the text while other things are outside of it. Further, some of the things inside the text are not obvious; they’re said to be hidden. One job of the critic is to reveal and explain what’s hidden.
For casual use, this is OK. But it disintegrates if you ask too much of it. We’ve augmented it in various ways, but as far as I know we haven’t arrived at a more satisfactory set of alternatives. My purpose here is simply to lay out a crude sketch of how we’ve worked at augmenting the container notion.
The basic problem, of course, is that “the work of literary art” cannot effectively be reduced to the physical text. The physical text is just a bunch of markings which are meaningless unless taken up by a human mind. How does one work that “taking-up” into a concept of the text?
Continue reading "What and Where is the Text?"Permanent link • (6) Comments
Sunday, September 28, 2008
THEORY’s Going Down
Gene Expression has a post presenting empirical evidence on the waning of THEORY. Agnostic searched JSTOR archives for the occurance of certain key words up to 2002: 1) social construction, 2) psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic, 3) postmodern or postmodernism, 4) postcolonialism, 5) orientalist or orientalism, 6) narratolog*, 7) marxist or marxism, 8) hegemony, 9) feminist or feminism, 10) deconstruction*. Each search is graphed, and there are commonts on the exercise as a whole. Eight of the ten graphs shows a rise from left to right, a peak, and then a decline on the right-hand side of the graph. That implies that THEORY’s going down.
Continue reading "THEORY’s Going Down"Permanent link • (17) Comments
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Sciences and the Humanities, Together At Last?
During 2006, 2007, and 2008 the National Humanities Center has be running a program designed to bring hummanists and scientists together in dialogue around questions about the human: Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity. One aspect of this program is a series of conferences in the Fall of each of those years. Video tapes of most of the presentations from 2006 and 2007 are now on the web. I’ve seen one session of 2006 and all but one of the sessions from 2007. I recommend them to you.
In particular, I recommend the Nussbaum & de Wall (on compassion), and de Wall & Bateson (on empathy) sessions from 2007. De Wall presents fascinating information about animal behavior in both sessions. If you’re interested in interrogating the boundary between humans and animals, these sessions are worth watching.
Permanent link • (0) Comments