What in the hell …

This weekend I picked up a copy of the book Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson. Thompson is a much storied former member of the IWW. The book is compiled from letters and writings into something like an autobiography. There’s an anecdote I like very much on page 19, from a time when Thompson was 18 or so. (more…)

No, for real. You in particular, dear occasional few readers. I’ve recently had call to wonder … umm, again. (A fellow worker introduced me to a drink he calls a Kentucky Bulldog - one shot bourbon, one shot kalouah [sp?], 1/2 shot heavy cream, and either cream soda or cola. Lots of ice. It’s good. One of those tasty drinks that guarantees trouble next day cuz you drink too many.)

A good friend of mine, for whom the hangover is something of an occupational (well, lifestyle) hazard insists that the miracle cure is ice cream. Milkshakes in particular. His explanation is that drinking overmuch messes up the lining of the stomach. Ice cream coats the stomach and makes up for some of that. He adds an additional (gross) bonus feature, which is that throwing up a milkshake doesn’t taste as bad as anything else.

The requisites for me are large quantities of water, and a few headache pills. And a nap if possible. Do others have any recommendations?

Only the best damn time to be had in the Twin Cities this weekend. The Pulse, a local alt-paper agrees, calling Wobfest a Hot Ticket event.

More detailed info see here. (more…)

Une autre chose que j’apprends de l’etude de le francais: les chiens n’ont pas le droit de monter dans le metro.

Notes for a talk I’m giving next month, on a topic I’ve recently gotten more confused and ambivalent about. If you wanna read it drop a comment below or email me. Comments welcome, though the stuff here’s pretty rough as of yet. I’ll keep expanding and revising the (notes into a) draft over time.

“Negativity’s too enchanting, Cuz the world seems so depressing (…) We all need inspiration.” A bit of it here, at least for me, in three short wobbly news stories. (more…)

A post at Charlotte Street reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to put down for a bit. The structurally absent third. It’s something I’ve noticed in my time in grad school.

It’s an utterance like this: “One can’t understand X text without a thorough grasp of Y text.” It happens in classrooms and similar settings. X is always a text everyone in the room has in common. Y is always one that only the speaker knows. Given that only the speaker has read Y, the speaker is presumed the sole authority on having a grasp of Y such that the speaker’s “grasp” of Y can’t be challenged.

Of course, the speaker can’t always know in advance what others have read. This means sometimes a text is proposed as a Y text which others in the room other than the speaker are familiar with. In that case one of a few things happen. One is a forging of an in-group: “We know Y together, such that we know X better, you all do not.” This is accomplished via phrases like “Then as you know …” and perhaps praise for knowing this obscure work. Another option is turning this imperfect Y text into an X text with another Y proposed which knowledge of the second X text depends upon, such that knowledge of the first X text depends upon a series of at least two additioanl texts, each subsequent one explicating the one before it in the series. Another option is to turn to another power play.

The structurally absent third accomplishes a transfer of authorization of classroom speech time. It says “I am worth speaking, you are worth listening.” Agreement upon this difference of worth is part of the meritocratic myth that much of academia has about itself. This is why the structurally absent third is not the same as “Shut up!” or “My turn to talk!”

The structurally absent third can be a type of appeal to authority, but the truth claim that makes it fallacious is somewhat hidden. (”You can’t understand X without Y” is less clearly fallacious than “Marx said it so it’s true.”) This is so in part because the authority appealed to is diffuse. It’s in part the authority of the Y text or it’s authory (akin to “It’s in the bible so it’s true”), and in part the authority of the speaker (akin to “Because I said so”). The two are related in that oftentimes the authority to the speaker is at least in part derived from the authority of the Y text (both directly - conveying a point found elsewhere - and indirectly - the quality of being able to read texts like the Y text and the quality of having read the actual Y text at hand, qualities of intelligence and erudition), not unlike the way that in some christian settings there’s a chain of authority: deity, worldly manifestation of deity’s will (book, icon, miracle), knower-and-interpreter of the worldly manifestation (ie, clergy).

One of the problems here I think is that things are fuzzy in the humanities. The wikipedia entry lists this under “Conditions for a legitimate argument from authority”:

“The authority must have competence in an area, not just glamour, prestige, rank or popularity.”

Determination of competence is precisely the difficulty, determining competence as distinct from glamour, prestige, rank or popularity. In some cases it’s not clear there’s distinction to be made, competence and rank mutually condition each other (”Q is a highly respected scholar of Z”), such that authority and celebrity become hard to tell apart (celebrity defined as being famous for being famous, being renowned for renown). Even more so when the competence to determine others’ competence is what is undetermined. (This is the teacher’s position some of the time, arbiter of who gets to claim understanding.) This is part of what Craig and I argued about re: Ranciere in a discussion a while back, and what was at stake in Thiago’s argument at Long Sunday that sparked my and Craig’s disagreement.

I think the structurally absent third is one of the ways that lexical rigidity is inculcated, I think. Lexical rigidity is what I call the habit on the part of academics to use roughly the same idiolect outside of work as in work. Idiolect here encompasses not just words and sentence structure but mannerisms and speech/communication habits generally. (My notes on the concept were written before I started graduate school. Now that I’ve completed one year much of them are confirmed to me. My wife has also observed a difference in my own idiolect. When I was working as an organizer I asked a lot more questions than I do now. In both cases work impacted/impacts me outside of work. A condition common to both, being relatively sociable jobs, is that I get home at night with the emotional equivalent to muscles being tired - specifically my hanging out and being around people muscles. I want low key individual or one on one downtime. I was a good organizer, particularly at doing housecalls. To be successful at housecalls means paying a lot of attention to another person and asking lots of question - good questions - and listening closely and asking good follow up questions based on/in response to what people said. Outside work when I was organizing I’d do the same a lot, exporting my discursive mode - lots of questions - to my nonwork life. I also had more idiolectical flexibility because that’s another part of sucess on the job. Now I’m a reasonably competent graduate student. I ask less questions and move between/across idiolects with other people less fluidly and less often. I don’t think it’s just a matter of my work, necessarily, but I think it’s safe to assume either a lack of incentive or an active disincentive for asking lots of question and idiolectical flexibility or an active incentive for the opposite behaviors.)

I think the structurally absent third is also one of the operations by which stultification happens (a category I got from reading Ranciere’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which was huge for me). Stultification is basically the fear to exercise one’s intellect, based on a judgment that it’s better not to talk than to risk talking and being wrong (or, it’s better to choose to be quiet than to have the conch shell that indicates whose turn it is to speak be taken from one).