Author: Ophelia Benson

They’re getting closer…and closer…and closer.

They’ve reached Cleveland, for instance.

The Cleveland health education museum will open its doors to faith healer Dr. Issam Nemeh on July 10, creating an unusual venue for a purported miracle healing service. HealthSpace Cleveland waived the customary $5,000 rental fee for Nemeh, said Patricia Horvath, the executive director. “We decided not to charge them because a number of board members are supporters of Dr. Nemeh’s work,” Horvath said. “We see spiritual health in the holistic view of overall health,” she said.

The Cleveland what education museum? The Cleveland health what museum? The Cleveland health education what? Don’t you mean the Cleveland bide-a-wee home for bullshitters? The Cleveland theatre of wooerpgahwackawacka? The Cleveland we are all out of our minds and happy about it institute?

The Plain Dealer reported earlier this month that Nemeh’s method of acupuncture requires only a five-day training course and uses a device not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for clinical safety or effectiveness. The paper also reported that Nemeh had sued after being kicked out of a medical residency program at Fairview Hospital…Nemeh and his wife, Cathy, who lays hands on the sick with her husband, have declined to be interviewed.

Gee, I wonder why.

Well at least there’s a refuge, of sorts. Well not a refuge – because it’s a summer camp – and if you’ve ever been to a summer camp, especially the kind where you have to actually live there and don’t get to go home after half an hour or so, you’ll know that they’re not what you’d call refuges. More like hell on earth, is what they are. But anyway, if you have to go to summer camp (how ecstatically happy I am that that is one possibility that simply cannot arise in my life, not unless the zealots take over completely and send people like me off to be re-educated, in which case I have a plan to escape to the still-vex’d Bermoothes) then it’s better to go to one where the Christians won’t insist on telling you that you’re friends with the devil. That kind of thing palls after awhile.

Many of the two dozen campers who attended this year’s session last week recounted experiences of being called names and otherwise harassed. For instance, Travis Leepers, 17, from Louisiana, reported that just about everyone he knows has expressed concern to him about his soul and has tried to convert him. Sophia Riehemann, 14, from Bellevue, Ky., recalled how one of her schoolmates called her a devil-worshiper. “People get really confused sometimes,” Sophia said. “They think that if we don’t believe in God we believe in the devil.”

Even the New York Times seems to find the whole thing a little suspicious – and they’re not even in Kentucky or Louisiana.

Nearly two million American adults openly identify themselves as atheist or agnostic, according to a 2001 survey by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Openly! Right out there in the open! Where puppies and butterflies and little innocent children can hear them – they come right out and say they’re atheist or agnostic. You know, I really thought that kind of thing had been made illegal by this time.

Does the Times think people should only say that kind of thing behind closed doors with a hood over their heads and a note of deep shame in their voices, or what? Oh, never mind. I think I’ll amble over to the local science museum for some faith healing and attitude-adjustment.

What was that thing Hippocrates said? Something about first doing no harm, wasn’t it? Or am I misremembering – maybe it was first bend your arm, or first wear this charm, or first wind up that yarn. Must have been, because the ‘do no harm’ thing doesn’t always seem to be uppermost in the minds of certain kinds of ‘healers’ – but maybe that kind doesn’t take a Hippocratic oath anyway. Maybe that’s what ‘complementary and alternative’ means. There’s this Rath Foundation for instance.

And so to Africa, where there exist “complementary and alternative medicine” practitioners pursuing the fashionable attack on mainstream medicine, just like in the UK. Take Matthias Rath and the Rath Foundation vitamin empire. They have been running advertising campaigns in newspapers and poster campaigns near HIV/Aids treatment centres, telling people that anti-retroviral drugs undermine the body’s immune system, and that “micro-nutrients alone can promote the defence against Aids”.

That’s nice, isn’t it. Positively papal in its niceness. It’s not good enough to tell people to take vitamins in addition to anti-retroviral drugs – no – it’s necessary to tell them the drugs actually undermine their immune systems. (Figuring – what – that they’re mostly very poor so can’t afford to buy both so therefore they have to be made to buy the one that will put money in the pockets of the vitamin people rather than the pockets of the retroviral drug people? How do some people sleep at night, I always wonder. I mean really – I don’t know how the pope and his assistants manage it, and I don’t know how this crowd does.)

…the Rath Foundation makes paranoid accusations against anyone who disagrees with it, accusing them of being in the pocket of the multinational pharmaceutical companies with advert headlines such as “Stop Aids genocide by the drug cartel”…[I]t likes to adopt a mainstream scientific stance and push multivitamins for “treating” illnesses. Harvard researchers have accused Rath of misinterpreting their findings to argue against increased use of antiretroviral therapy, numerous countries’ advertising standards people have ordered Rath to withdraw unsubstantiated claims, and UNAids, WHO and Unicef have condemned his misrepresentations of their nutrition and health advice…South Africa has 5 million people infected with HIV, one person in nine. Fewer than 40,000 are taking proper medication.

That’s a pretty remarkable story.

This article by Carlin Romano raises a lot of very interesting issues. I don’t know nearly enough (by which I mean I know nothing at all) about the subject to judge how fair or accurate any of it is – but the issues raised are interesting in any case, and I propose to mumble over them, so there.

The desire to portray great thinkers as disembodied argument machines remains a powerful force in analytic philosophy. Think of it as a slice of amour-propre, part of the arrogant wish to be seen as timelessly, noncontingently right about everything. It can move acolytes to depict thinker-heroes as dynamos of pure intellect rather than peers: mere featherless bipeds whose thoughts bear clear markings from their beliefs, fears, and weaknesses.

See, that’s an interesting idea whether it’s true or not. The idea of people wanting to be seen as timelessly, noncontingently right about everything – there’s something fascinating about that (as well as very funny, of course). I suppose I’m interested in various forms of déformation professionelle, and especially in academic ones, so the thought of a special need or desire to be a disembodied argument machine makes me sit up and take notice.

It also interests me because it seems to me not altogether mistaken to want to separate the thoughts from the biography. I can think of other reasons philosophers (among other people) would want to do that that aren’t mere vanity – so Romano’s article partly goes against the grain of my thinking, which is to say it challenges some of my assumptions. I don’t always like having my assumptions challenged – when the students at Patrick Henry college (no, I’m not going to stop mentioning that place any time soon, why do you ask?) babble about the joys of subordinating women I don’t find it particularly interesting or thought-provoking – but sometimes I do.

It seems reasonable to want to try to do that, at least, for reasons to do with clarity. As part of an effort to strip away extraneous details in order to get at the thoughts as – in themselves they really are. That may be an absurd, hopeless, impossible, even risky wish, but still I can see why people would want to try – at least I think I can. But the idea that it’s pretty much just presentation of self is…interesting.

I keep thinking of Lydgate. In Middlemarch, you know. Eliot does a brilliant job on him: he’s the classic case of a would-be impersonal, dedicated, above it all scientist who in fact is riddled with unaware vanity.

Like many of his colleagues, Hart largely avoided anecdotes, biography, and detailed sociological evidence because it didn’t fit with proper Oxford philosophical method. Clear, precise, and commonsensical, he kept his personal life out of his books. Lacey’s study consequently hit the jurisprudence community like a Kitty Kelley exposé implanted in a Festschrift.

Not all bad, the keeping the personal life out business. One can get weary of the anecdotes about evenings wandering around Jakarta or Rangoon. I’m just saying.

But Lacey’s achievement triggered an attack on her this year by New York University philosophy professor Thomas Nagel, author of – unsurprisingly – The View From Nowhere. Complained Nagel in the London Review of Books, “I felt that I was learning too much that was none of my business…Nagel also maintains that despite Lacey’s distinguished academic position, she is “not equipped … to deal with the philosophical background. When she talks about the ‘paradox of analysis’ or about the differences between J.L. Austin and Wittgenstein, she is lost.” Upping the insult quotient, Nagel maintains that Lacey “seems to have a weak grasp of what philosophy is,” a claim he repeats several times. False in every respect. Lacey, far more industriously than Nagel, backs her statements throughout.

Now, that interests me because I happen to have read just a couple of days ago a letter from Simon Blackburn and Jeremy Waldron to the LRB protesting exactly the same thing.

We were puzzled and depressed to read Thomas Nagel’s patronising review of Nicola Lacey’s biography of Herbert Hart. In particular, his sweeping claim that the author is ‘lost’ when it comes to philosophical issues is both ungenerous and unsupported.

So the context and explanation Romano gives seems to make sense of something puzzling.

Indeed, Lacey utterly foresees Nagel’s line of insult. She specifically anticipates his assertion that Wittgenstein thought understanding “has to be pursued primarily by reasoning rather than by empirical observation,” noting “Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the embeddedness of language games within social practices.” In her view, Hart, like Nagel, never adopted an approach to reality as reportorial as Wittgenstein’s because it “undermines the pretensions of philosophy as the ‘master discipline’ which illuminates our access to knowledge about the world.”

Now that really interests me, because it’s something I’ve heard before, from people I know who have a somewhat disrespectful view of philosophy – who say it likes to see itself as ‘the queen of the sciences’ and that that self-vision can make philosophers a tad grandiose. I have no idea, myself. I don’t know any philosophers. I live in a tiny fishing village on the edge of an ice shelf in the far far north, and philosophers don’t get up here much. But I have heard people (who do know some philosophers) say so. Thus it’s interesting.

The sad upshot of this latest sighting of the disembodied thinker is that a champion of “philosophy” thinks truth matters less than keeping up appearances.

Ouch.

Err. I knew it had been awhile, but I didn’t think it had been as long a while as that. Thought it was more than a week, so maybe…ten days or so. No – three weeks. Blimey! How I do lose track sometimes (because I’m busy not losing track other times, or rather of other things – that’s what does it).

But I’m on it now. The book meme, which Norm tagged me with ten days I mean three weeks ago. (Really?! I bet it wasn’t. I bet he moved the post, just to rattle me.)

Total number of books I’ve owned:

What, I’m supposed to have counted them and kept track of the numbers? I don’t know! I have a couple of thousand now.

The last book I bought:

Haven’t bought a book in years – too penniless. I’ll substitute the last book I got out of the library – actually it was several – Philip Larkin’s letters, Mark Lilla’s Reckless Minds, Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault and a couple of others.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

On Liberty. A Fine Balance. The Secret Garden. Emma. From the Beast to the Blonde.

I’m supposed to tag five people, but I think I’d better not, because it’s been so long – it’s probably not etiquette to tag people, like, two years late.

Michael Bérubé has a post on that Judith Halberstam article about the putative death of English. Remember that article? The one I had so much innocent fun with last month? Actually (now I look) two sessions of innocent fun – because I wasn’t able to fit all my ridicule and venom into one comment of reasonable length.

Much of my venom was directed at the characterization of close reading as ‘elitist’ – remember that?

But, while Spivak’s investment in the “close reading” and formalism betrays the elitist investments of her proposals for reinvention, I urge a consideration of non-elitist forms of knowledge production upon the otherwise brilliant formulations of The Death of a Discipline. If the close reading represents a commitment to a set of interpretive skills associated with a very particular history of ideas and a very narrow set of literatures, the plot summary indicates a much wider commitments to knowledge production, high and low.

I frothed and gnashed at that – so I’m pleased (though, like the Elephant’s Child, not at all astonished) to see Michael disagreeing too.

When I first read this, I said softly to myself, “no no no no no no no no.” But since that’s not a sufficient argument, let me supplement it by saying that close reading is not, in fact, elitist. Although it was once applied to a particular history of ideas and a very narrow set of literatures, it is not forever tainted by that association. Hey, you can’t use that—don’t you know that Cleanth Brooks once used that on John Donne?

Snicker.

In the right hands (ours, naturally), close reading is a good thing, and we ought to keep on doing it, not least because it remains one of our best defenses against the lies and slander of our attackers. And we should make it clear—much clearer than we have to date—that close readings (or, if you like, skills in advanced literacy) are precisely what English departments have to offer. They’re our distinct product line; they’re what we sell people—and even better, they’re a product that just doesn’t wear out. Once you know how to do one, you can do more of ‘em. And you don’t have to confine yourself to literary works, either. You can go right ahead and do close readings of any kind of “text” whatsoever, in the most expansive sense of that most expansive word.

Exactly. Which is pretty much what N&C is for – close readings of various bits of wool and fluff and dancing around in The Meeja, books, and similar textual-type environments. That was the basic idea of N&C from the beginning: a place to do close readings. I could probably even find the email I sent to my colleague sometime in September 2002 when we were inventing the whole site, saying something along the lines of ‘How about a place to do close readings of whatever comes along?’ And that’s odd, because it happens that in the course of an, ahem, a discussion of a past conversation, PM provided a link to N&C for July 2004 which I read bits of with surprise and interest, as if I’d never seen any of it before (how I wish we had an archive for N&C, but it is Forbidden) – including this one, which is about, precisely, Close Reading – it’s even titled that. But I was going to do this post (this one, the one I’m doing now) talking about close reading, before I saw that one. Apparently there’s some kind of magnetic field shortly after the summer solstice that causes me to write a post about close reading and its connection to Notes and Comment. This is how I said it last year.

And that reminded me, in an almost nostalgic, sentimental way, of the beginning of N&C. In September or October 2002, when we were thinking about and discussing what to include on B&W, what features to add. It reminded me that we didn’t exactly think of N&C as a blog, at first, or even as a blog-like thing. The original idea was that we needed a place to do close readings of nonsense. Sort of Leavisite lit-crit examination of manipulative rhetoric, fancy footwork, evasive tactics, subject-changing, translation, that sort of thing. That was the first thought. I don’t even remember how we got from there to a bloggish sort of thing – whether we just realized, well, that sounds like a blog, or we actually decided, well let’s make it a bloggish sort of thing while we’re at it, since we might as well.

Then I got from there to a close (well, close-ish) reading of the term ‘race’ – which I mention by way of pointing out that close reading (as Michael also points out) is not some artsy-fartsy elitist snob’s night out, it’s a very damn useful and basic activity. If you don’t do it the Patrick Henry colleges and the Bill O’Reillys can just run roughshod all over you merely by throwing around words like ‘spiritual’ or ‘values’ or – listen closely, now – ‘elitist.’

Which of course raises the question, what’s the difference? What is a blog or a blog-like thing, and how does it or would it differ from a place to do close readings of other people’s rhetoric? That’s an interesting question, and I don’t know the answer. It’s not unlike the question ‘What does the word ‘race’ mean, and is it a word that refers to something real that exists in the world, or is it a word that refers to a human idea about or description of something that exists in the real world?’ Then again it’s not all that much like the question, since blogs are clearly a human invention, whereas the word ‘race’ purports to name something in the world, though whether it actually does that or only purports to has been much debated in human history. And then again, again, the question of what a blog is doesn’t matter much, whereas the question of what race means, if anything, has massive implications. People have been slaughtered in wholesale lots on the basis of the reality of that word, which seems unlikely in the case of blogs.

Michael closes with a promise of more fun in the future.

Hey! This post is already too damn long. I was going to proceed from here to do a close reading of Mark Bauerlein’s essay on “Theory’s Empire,” recently posted at Butterflies and Wheels, but I think I’ll give you all a break for once. Stay tuned for John McGowan’s Thursday Guest Post tomorrow, and I’ll be back on Friday with an arbitary but fun value judgment. The close reading of Bauerlein will just have to wait until after the weekend.

That’s the thing about close reading, once you get started it’s hard to stop, and posts get long and longer.

People have been commenting here and there on Mark Bauerlein’s “Theory’s Empire”, no doubt because of the links on Arts and Letters Daily and (cringe) National Review Online’s The Corner. There’s this colleague of Mark’s for example:

If the original impulse of theory was to shatter orthodoxies and challenge hierarchies (it wasn’t all that, but that’s the mythology), the current incarnation is tediously hegemonic…I’m sure deconstruction was really exciting back in the day, but, well, I don’t live back in the day, and I don’t care…the theory evolved into elaboration for its own sake, turning a corner of literature departments into Philosophy-Lite (“Just as much deep meaning, but a third less logical rigor”). You can see how theory for its own sake could take over…But in the end theory has alienated people from literature rather than drawing them in with all the cool new tools of analysis. Why? Because theory, as it is currently constituted, is no longer about finding things out but rather about obscuring them…Theory is dying a long, slow death because it has become boring and opaque. When it comes to praxis, it’s predictably pseudo-radical. When it comes to literature, it’s predictable. Theory won’t die out entirely because there is a quorum of young scholars who have staked their careers on it (I know someone who says “I am the person who does Lacanian analysis of female saints’ lives; That’s my niche” — and a tiny niche it is…).

Snicker, snerk. Lacanian analysis of female saints’ lives – I wish I’d known about that while we were doing the Dictionary. There’s nothing in there about Lacanian analysis of female saints’ lives, although Lacan is definitely there.

There’s another medievalist, this time one who doesn’t think much of B&W:

Sure, the article is a shameless plug, and it is found on the frequently disappointing Butterflies and Wheels site, but he still acknowledges the institutional nature of theory study.

Now see here – B&W may well be frequently disappointing (all depends what you were looking forward to, dunnit), but the article is not a plug, shameless or otherwise – I asked Mark to write it and he kindly consented; plug doesn’t come into it. Plug, indeed – given the kind of site B&W is, it features a lot of talk about books, doesn’t it! That doesn’t make it plugs. [mutter mutter]

Like a lot of cutting-edge work, theory has always had a strongly smug narcissistic quality about it, and to suggest that in the 90s “the institutional effects of Theory displaced its intellectual nature” ignores that theory has always been strongly institutional — else it would never have gained the slightest foothold in the Academy. The very nature of universities prevents them from ever studying (or observing) anything that is not institutionally oriented. French theorists gained prominence not because they were saying particularly smart or interesting things (though of course some were), but because academe happened to be institutionally headed by francophiles, in the same way that 19th-century German philologists ruled before two world wars made German politically suspect.

Eh? Academe happened to be institutionally headed by francophiles? That’s a bit question-begging, isn’t it? Why did it? Why wasn’t it institutionally headed by slavophiles or magyarophiles?

But no matter. I’m just quibbling (I need a break from plugging). Then there’s this site called, catchily, C8H10N4HO2O2.

Without literature, I’d put myself firmly in the camp of those (Ms. Benson, maybe? I don’t want to put words in her mouth) who mostly think that post-modern ideas about the significance of context to observations might be useful things to keep around, but anyone taking this so far as to suggest this implies there is either (a) no tractably knowable objective reality or (b) actually no objective reality is probably either (1) incredibly silly, (2) sadly deluded, (3) grinding an axe for a pseudoscience, or (4) all of the above…Beyond these goobs, of course, there’s the out and out apologists for unreason, hiding behind postmodernism’s flag. You can’t live long as an atheist without encountering at least one slackjawed evangelical preacher who insists his firm belief in an invisible sky fairy is somehow ‘post-modern’… or justified because post-modernism sez there’s no reality anyway, so he can believe whatever he durn well wants, thank you very much… Or somesuch rot. True story: one of these I met, attempting to answer my ridicule of his rhetoric, responded to me with the line: “You’re such an Enlightenment thinker”… as though, apparently, I was gonna take this as an insult or something.

Yup, I’ve encountered some of them too.

And there’s Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast who finds B&W helpful for dissertation writing.

I do, however, have a new weapon in my battle against such propensities for skillfully written perpetuation of nonsense: It’s my newest favorite blogrolled site, Butterflies and Wheels…The site’s entire mission appears to be an innoculation against poor academic writing, faulty scholarly thinking and reasoning, and ideological monarchs clothed in scientific clothes. It’s a good companion, in my mind, to the book Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Bricmont. One gradstudent-relevant point to take from these resources is the importance of not copying the mistakes of our elders in order to be accepted into the academic fold. It is possible to think clearly. It is possible to write well. It is possible to communicate complex scholarly ideas with clarity, honesty, and flair.

Yes – that is indeed our entire mission. And a dang good mission it is, too. (And not as small as it may sound – look how full it’s made these pages in the last almost three years.)

The sun is setting in its usual decorative fashion, and I must scamper off to admire its descent over the silvery waters of Puget Sound. Good night.