In discussing the possesion of those aforementioned euphemistic eggs, it never ceases to amaze me that philosophers and theologians can get so much milage out of the concept of monstrosity (I can too, check out the latest issue of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts).  And though they are often excellent scholars, I just have a hard time taking them seriously.  Take, for instance, this article on the Chronicle website by Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, Stephen T. Asma.  Asma argues, and quite effectively, that monsters help teach us about our own humanity by capturing our moral imagination.  I don’t disagree that the issue of monstrosity lies at the heart of  humanism, even in the twentieth century.  I cannot follow how Professor Asma gets to this conclusion, though, as it feels like begging the question.  Isn’t it our moral imagination that creates monsters?

I should clarify my objection.  Asma acknowledges some of the history of this concept, and for this I applaud him, as most scholars tend to gloss over epistemology here.  As he tells us at one point:

In our liberal culture, we dramatize the rage of the monstrous creature—and Frankenstein’s is a good example—then scold ourselves and our “intolerant society” for alienating the outcast in the first place. The liberal lesson of monsters is one of tolerance: We must overcome our innate scapegoating, our xenophobic tendencies. Of course, this is by no means the only interpretation of monster stories. The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity.

Again, this acknowledgement from a philosophy professor seems great in comparison to the scant history that most offer, and in this I would cite Timothy Beal’s Religion and its Monsters as a possible exception.  More on him in a moment.  First, we must recognize that the word monster itself IS Roman (at least a derivative of the infinitive monere, to warn).  However, I also think we need to acknowledge that our conception of monstrosity is also still medieval.  The number of Americans that believe in a literal Satan is staggering.

I object far more, however, when Asma tells us that his “own view is that the concept of monster cannot be erased from our language and thinking.”   “Monster” cannot be replaced by other more polite terms and concepts, because it still refers to something that has no satisfactory semantic substitute or refinement. The term’s imprecision, within parameters, is part of its usefulness.”  This argument sounds suspiciously like the overwhelming positive response that John Horgan gets when he asks students if they think war is inevitable.  It seems wrong both to resign us to a continued existence with monsters and also to gloss over part of the reason for our difficulty with getting rid of it.  First of all, the reason we cannot replace the term monstrosity with another, euphemistic term is that (much like a shark) it is already so evolved.  Asma is right to point out the long history of the term, but he leaves out details like how the Church apologists over the years have adapted the meaning of terms such as “pagan,” “savage,” or “monster.”  Talk about intelligent design, this term has been employed meticulously over the past 2000 years to draw careful lines between the pious and outsider.  And this religious residue is not confined to linguistics.  Look at any paintings of Jews or Arabs from 15th, 16th, or even 17th century Spain–they often look like very otherworldly creatures, because their monstrosity had captured the moral imagination of Catholic Spain and the Church’s inquisitors.  So, when someone cites the terms usefulness, I find myself asking, “Useful for whom?”

What I find even more interesting in the article, though, is his reference to cognitive psychology.  As he states his thesis:

A crucial but often-ignored aspect of monsterology is the role those beasties play in our moral imaginations. Recent experimental moral psychology has given us useful tools for looking at the way people actually do their moral thinking. Brain imaging, together with hypothetical ethical dilemmas about runaway trolley cars, can teach us a lot about our real value systems and actions. But another way to get at this subterranean territory is by looking at our imaginative lives.

Why did this make me chuckle?  Because I am a contrary and pedantic jerk?  Perhaps, but I simply don’t understand how one cites various science fiction and techno-horror stories in an article on monstrosity, and then gives evidence from “brain imaging.”  As Timothy Beal’s book points out, partly in a lengthy discussion of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, science or rationalism IS often the monster in a figurative sense.  And this position of science becomes evident in science fiction novels, beginning with Frankenstein and  continuing well into our present age.   Bombs, chemical and biological weapons, artificial intelligence, or whatever will be the downfall of humanity.  As Stephen King tells us, “at the end of all rationalism, the mass grave.”  Hence why Barry Malzberg boasts that sf is the “beast born in the era of the Enlightenment, to snarl at the heart” of science.  In the context of Asma’s argument, though, he seems to use science and denounce it at once.

Finally, he may be correct when he says that comparing the torture at the hands of the Taliban to American soldiers at Abu Ghraib does not “prove that monsters don’t exist.”  However, he also errs when he calls this unnamed interlocutor a “relativist.”  It is Asma, in this case, who is the relativist.  In claiming that “The meaning of ‘monster’ is found in its context, in its use,” he places it in a aporia in which its meaning depends on its situation.  If he were only pointing out, as I think he is honestly trying to do, that the word is still dangerous when we use it today, that would be fine.  But in doing so, he forgets a very real history of the term, divorcing it from its very religious origins and that, I think, is wrong.  I for one will be celebrating my own monstrosity this Saturday, knowing full well that somewhere, some group is passing out fliers denouncing Halloween as the pagan, monstrous holiday that it is…

First of all, if the “issue” is burning then you want to see a doctor immediately for a round of antibiotics and use a condom in the future (unless you’re at a Catholic university, then just pray reeeeeaaallllyyy hard that you don’t get an STD).  And shouldn’t that idea of “regulating” sex, frighten us?  For a university to extend their power into their students’ sex lives seems like a bad idea.  Come on!  These are adult students we are talking about!  And I mean to criticize the roommates that complained a bit too–are they letting five year-olds into Tufts?  Grow up a bit and learn to deal with other adults in a somewhat adult manner–adult (I can fit “adult” in one more time if I put it in parentheses and quotes).  Is Tufts teaching their students to deal with the big scary real world by tattling on the people with whom they share space?  How is this going to fly in the office world?  If I were a parent of a Tufts student, I would be far more concerned with the debilitating effects of regulating my adult child’s love life (Norman Bates comes to mind), than with the mating habits of the freshman roommate.

And isn’t this “taking action” at best an administrative nightmare and at worst invasive on the administrator’s part?  Here’s a very sci-fi-like prediction.  2012 will see a wave of new administrative positions titled something like Dean of Student Bootknocking.  The DSB’s will be in charge of ensuring that every student at a university like Tufts will have a bar code tattooed on their genitals, to be scanned by a rent-a-cop every time they enter and exit a room. The tattoo will be applied on the first day of classes, just between morning nap and milk time (…adult!). Thus the problem of “unregulated sex” will be solved much as City and Regional Planners have solved the problem of traffic congestion in Metro areas.  At the same time, Tufts’s “burning issue” will resolve itself as each student caught having “unregulated sex” (and that includes with anyone possessing an STD of any kind) will be summarily drawn and quartered.  Now that will be “taking action” with some tough love.

A parting thought–Air Supply makes the Baby [insert deity here] cry.

Okay, enough of that analogy.  Yes, I’ve moved, but I’m still teaching writing and now a bit of freshman science studies.  And I still read the same old blogs: Berube, Horgan,  and the Chronicle blogs are my favorites, though the political blogosphere is sometimes interesting too.  Just the other day I saw a Michael Berube article on the Chronicle website, and I knew it was time for my triumphant (ahem ahem) return to blogging.  The article concerns the apparent impact of cultural studies on the Academy and the world at large, Berube taking the position that it has not had the anticipated effect of revolutionizing the university as it promised–that it has not (yet, anyway) been effective overall.  He is, however, hopeful that it might.

First, I must applaud Berube’s humility.  He cites many important thinkers from cultural studies–among them Stuart Hall, whose work had a tremendous impact on me as an undergraduate–and yet he does not include himself.  I would enthusiastically add Professor Berube to the list of notables in the article.  Yet I must take issue with Berube’s overall negativism.  Cultural studies has accomplished some things.  It has convinced most of the university that language is not an important component of “culture” (excluding most actual foreign language departments of course).  Why?  Because it initially had to compete with the related discipline of comparative literature, my own field, for university resources.  Comp lit insisted since it was founded after WWII that learning a culture’s primary language was vital to understanding that culture, avoiding world wars, etc.  Cultural studies positioned itself against comp lit.  Since the so-called cultural linguistic turn (a rather deceiving name!), culture itself has largely been reduced to the politics and economics of a given State and language is unimportant because unreliable (langue, parole, sign, signifier/ied, sleepy, dopey, and doc could, after all, mean just about anything).  Though Berube admits that cult studies is perhaps too enamored with postmodernism, we must also realize that cult studies held the day in this competition.  As such, we might also suggest that cult studies accomplished other things– it killed the author and comparative literature in one fell swoop.

Now this may simply sound like sour grapes, since I am a comparatist (you just can’t say that word without sounding pedantic).  But to build on the effect of the cultural turn and consider the reduction of culture to political and economic components, we might re-read Berube’s article.  To what aspect of culture do his examples speak?  To politics?  To economics?  Certainly to models of the dissemination of information, especially as they concern…politics and economics.  Even Americans, who one might suppose do nothing but read the Times or the Wall Street Journal and discuss politics all day, occasionally engage in conversations, write songs or poems or novels, construct buildings, cook dinner, unanimously declare to repress their future generations with religious guilt, etc.  Is this not culture?  Berube is partially correct to accuse cult studies of focusing  too much on pop culture, but is focusing on politics not equally egregious?

Read the article a third time.  Not only is culture not defined beyond politics, but the vast majority of examples offered come from British or American authors and universities and engage with primarily anglocentric issues.  So, the third and most important thing that cult studies has done is turn cultural studies into studies of THE culture.  We might hereafter even rename it to the Study of Cultural Leveling.  But I really don’t mean to criticize cult studies (I am, after all, one of those people that “does Cult studies” sometimes) or Berube.  Merely to point out that should it wish to find its bearings, as Berube wants for it, it may have to engage with other disciplines, perspectives, etc. (And I do NOT mean this!), including those that still see some value in other components of culture like language and literature.

But enough for today, I’m babbling–what an American activity!  Someone should do a study…

The humanities, meanwhile, are undergoing their own struggle for survival within the academic ecosystem. Budgets are shrinking, students are disappearing, faculty positions are being lost, institutional prestige has all but evaporated. As the Darwinists are quick to point out, a lot of this suffering is self-inflicted. In literary studies in particular, the last several decades have witnessed the baleful reign of “Theory,” a mash-up of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian social theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis and other assorted abstrusiosities, the overall tendency of which has been to cut the field off from society at large and from the main currents of academic thought, not to mention the common reader and common sense. Theory, which tends toward dogmatism, hermeticism, hero worship and the suppression of doctrinal deviation—not exactly the highest of mental virtues—rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural “difference,” is dead set against the notion of human universals. Theory has led literary studies into an intellectual and institutional cul-de-sac, and now that its own energies have been exhausted (the last major developments date to the early ‘90s), it has left it there.

I should say that he disagrees with it only in part (citing John McGowan to agree that there is some “groupthink” in humanistic theory circles). But one particular point of contention for Berube is problematic in my opinion, especially as this point itself seems to unite a majority of humanists right now into one massive Childhood’s End-like groupthink session. He says:

when Deresiewicz charges that Theory “rejects the possibility of objective knowledge and, in its commitment to the absolute nature of cultural ‘difference,’ is dead set against the notion of human universals,” again, there’s a grain of truth there. Those of us in the humanities who know something about human biology—and this group would include Richard Powers, whose most recent novel Deresiewicz disdained for telling us too much about human biology—tend to agree that the Theory wing reaches for its guns when it hears the term “human universals.” But as for “objective knowledge”—my stars! What is this thing called “objective knowledge”? Can you explain it for me? Can you give me an example of it? (And don’t give me an example of a brute fact, like “carbon is the sixth element in the periodic table.” Give me an example of something that humans know objectively, independently of their sense impressions, beliefs, etc.) And then, when you’ve done all that, can you give me an explanation of what this appeal to “objective knowledge” is doing in an essay that insists that criticism “will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid”? Because I could use an objective explanation of what’s going on here.

Yes, okay, it is a fait accompli that “objectivity” is an impossibility so long as our world is structured by language. Granted. Does the accomplishment of that fact devalue objectivity as a goal for which to strive? In whatever discipline? Isn’t universally denying objectivity somewhat ironic? Can you really prove to me that it isn’t attainable?

More than that, though, the picking on “objective knowledge” that Berube does is dangerous ground–though so many in the humanities do it–and doubly dangerous for “human”ists (meaning those in the humanities, you know those folks in the older buildings on campus, built on the tenets of Humanism, a secular artistic project that gave the individual back some autonomy after the dark ages). Speaking of theory, postmodernists working across disciplinary boundaries (which is how Berube says theory has succeeded, by creating a vernacular for humanists across disciplines) often speak of “negative theology.” The idea developed in theology and philosophy (ironically in concert with scientists), and roughly says that we are only capable of describing what God is not, rather than what he/she/it is. Likewise, humanists continually talk about the impossibility of achieving objective knowledge, but… to talk at length about the devil, but about God in fetters…

Anyway, couldn’t we flip that idea around on itself and apply a sort of “negative theory”? I think we might need to, because repeating that objectivity is impossible is only productive or tasteful up to a certain point. Go ahead diehard detractors of objectivity, suggest in a public forum that the holocaust never happened (because, after all, objective knowledge is impossible). See how quickly your funding is cut. Or better yet, drink a fifth of scotch and drive your Prius through the front doors of a police station (please don’t actually do that!). Tell them that due to conflicting accounts of what happened, namely yours and theirs, it is impossible to “determine” that your car “cause”d the “effect” of their front door shattering. I wish you luck.

Okay, enough ranting. I could also point out that Berube grants the possibility of cause and effect later in his post, but my beef is not with Berube. It is simply that, just as it was wrong for years to take the possibility of objectivity for granted, so it is wrong to take its impossibility for granted. Some of this objectivity hating seems to me to be the unification of the lesser-paid, under-appreciated humanists (and as one myself, I would grant that we are often under-appreciated) against their wealthier scientific colleagues. Boo frickin hoo! Of course, if you disagree with this post what are you selling? it’s okay because I didn’t actually write it–at least, you can’t prove objectively that I did!

PS. your own herrprofessorblogmeister is going out of town for a few weeks, so hopefully this is some food for thought for a while