Teaching Aid

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books.

I. The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.
II. Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.
III. Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.
IV. For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.
V. Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.
VI. Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.
VII. A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.
  The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue. But when shall we actually write books like catalogues? If the deficient content were thus to determine the outward form, an excellent piece of writing would result, in which the value of opinions would be marked without their being thereby put on sale.
  The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of commanding fingers.
  A period that, constructed metrically, afterward has its rhythm upset at a single point yields the finest prose sentence imaginable. In this way a ray of light falls through a chink in the wall of the alchemist's cell, to light up gleaming crystals, spheres, and triangles.

Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (1979: 63-64)

I can hear it in every word you say

"Yes, these ads are good for the culture and good for the country."
  Chip took a deep breath, because this hurt. "Great, OK," he said. "Thank you for your opinion."
  "As if you care about my opinion," Melissa said.
  "I beg your pardon?"
  "As if you care about any of our opinions unless they're the same as yours."
  "This is not about opinions," Chip said, "This is about learning to apply critical methods to textual artifacts. Which is what I'm here to teach you."
  "I don't think it is, though," Melissa said. "I think you're here to teach us to hate the same things you hate. I mean, you hate these ads, right? I can hear it in every word you say. You totally hate them."
  The other students were listening raptly now. Melissa's connection with Chad might have depressed Chad's stock more than it had raised her own, but she was attacking Chip like an angry equal, not a student, and the class ate it up.
  "I do hate these ads," Chip admitted. "But that's not—"
  "Yes it is," Melissa said.
  "Why do you hate them?" Chad called out.
  "Tell us why you hate them," the little Hilton yipped.
  Chip looked at the wall clock. There were six minutes left of the semester. He pushed a hand through his hair and cast his eyes around the room as if he might find an ally somewhere, but the students had him on the run now, and they knew it.
"The W------ Corporation," he said, "is currently defending three separate lawsuits for antitrust violations. Its revenues last year exceeded the gross domestic product of Italy. And now, to wring dollars out of the one demographic that it doesn't yet dominate, it's running a campaign that exploits a woman's fear of breast cancer and her sympathy with its victims. Yes, Melissa?"
  "It's not cynical."
  "What is it, if it's not cynical?"
  "It's celebrating women in the workplace," Melissa said. "It's raising money for cancer research. It's encouraging us to do our self-examinations and get the help we need. It's helping women feel like we own this technology, like it's not just a guy thing."
  "OK, good," Chip said. "But the question is not whether we care about breast cancer, it's what breast cancer has to do with selling office equipment."
  Chad took up the cudgels for Melissa. "That's the whole point of the ad, though. That if you have access to information, it can save your life."
  "So if Pizza Hut puts a little sign about testicular self-exams by the hot-pepper flakes, it can advertise itself as part of the glorious and courageous fight against cancer?"
  "Why not?" Chad said.
  "Does anybody see anything wrong with that?"
  Not one student did. Melissa was slouching with her arms crossed and unhappy amusement on her face. Unfairly or not, Chip felt as if she'd destroyed in five minutes a semester's worth of careful teaching.
  "Well, consider," he said, "that 'You Go, Girl' would not have been produced if W------ had not had a product to sell. And consider that the goal of the people who work at W------ is to exercise their stock options and retire at thirty-two, and that the goal of the people who own W------ stock" (Chip's brother and sister-in-law, Gary and Caroline, owned a great deal of W------ stock) "is to build bigger houses and buy bigger SUVs and consume even more of the world's finite resources."
  "What's wrong with making a living?" Melissa said. "Why is it inherently evil to make money?"
  "Baudrillard might argue," Chip said, "that the evil of a campaign like 'You Go, Girl' consists in the detachment of the signifier from the signified. That a woman weeping no longer just signifies sadness. It now also signifies 'Desire office equipment.' It signifies: 'Our bosses care about us deeply.'"
  The wall clock showed two-thirty. Chip paused and waited for the bell to ring and the semester to end.
  "Excuse me," Melissa said, "but that is just such bullshit."
  "What is bullshit?" Chip said.
  "This whole class," she said. "It's just bullshit every week. It's one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever quite say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They know 'corporate' is a dirty word. And if somebody's having fun or getting rich—disgusting! Evil! And it's always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they're free aren't 'really' free. And people who think they're happy aren't 'really' happy. And it's impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what's so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly. It is so typical and perfect that you hate those ads!" she said to Chip as, throughout Wroth Hall, bells finally rang. "Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open and all you can think about is some stupid, lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. Like, the only way you can make something bad out of an ad's that great for women—which you have to do, because there has to be something wrong with everything—is to say it's evil to be rich and evil to work for a corporation, and yes, I know the bell rang." She closed her notebook.
  "OK," Chip said. "On that note. You've now satisfied your Cultural Studies core requirement. Have a great summer."
  He was powerless to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He bent over the video player and gave his attention to rewinding and re-cuing "You Go, Girl" and touching buttons for the sake of touching buttons. He sensed a few students lingering behind him, as if they wanted to thank him for teaching his heart out or to tell him they'd enjoyed the class, but he didn't look up from the video player until the room was empty. Then he went home to Tilton Ledge and started drinking.
  Melissa's accusations had cut him to the quick. He'd never quite realized how seriously he'd taken his father's injunctions to do work that was "useful" to society. Criticizing a sick culture, even if the criticism accomplished nothing, had always felt like useful work. But if the supposed sickness wasn't a sickness at all—if the great Materialist Order of technology and consumer appetite and medical science really was improving the lives of the formerly oppressed; if it was only straight white males like Chip who had a problem with this order—then there was no longer even the most abstract utility to his criticism. It was all, in Melissa's word, bullshit.
  Lacking the spirit to work on his new book, as he'd planned to do all summer, Chip bought an overpriced ticket to London and hitchhiked to Edinburgh and overstayed his welcome with a Scottish performance artist who had lectured and performed at D----- the previous winter. Eventually the woman's boyfriend said, "Time to be off now, laddie," and Chip hit the road with a backpack full of Heidegger and Wittgenstein that he was too lonely to read. He hated to think of himself as a man who couldn't live without a woman, but he hadn't been laid since Ruthie dumped him. He was the only male professor in D----- history to have taught Theory of Feminism, and he understood how important it was for women not to equate "success" with "having a man" and "failure" with "lacking a man," but he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies:

¶ To feel as if he couldn't survive without a woman made a man feel week;

¶ And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (2001: 42-45)

an insufferable bore

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him—his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them, put them all on edge somehow with his acid way of peeling the flesh and blood off everything, he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries, they said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.
  ... "Lets go," he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let us go to the Circus." No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not? she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted to reply to; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a working-man; "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ramsay. He keeps a shop." He himself paid his own way since he was thirteen. He could never "return hospitality" (those were his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the old men did in the quays. He worked hard—seven hours a day; his subject was the influence of something upon somebody—they were walking on and Mrs Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there ... dissertation ... fellowship ... readership ... lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed, would have been to say how he had been to Ibsen with the Ramsays. He was an awful prig—oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working-men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her—but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, "Oh, how beautiful!" For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, is soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.
  That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973: 10-16)

from within

All performance comes from within, not from the outside. The pieces breathe through their own lungs; they carry their own bloodstream—even without being labeled with concepts and names, as laymen would like, who demand: "Where is it written?"

Heinrich Schenker, Art of Performance (2000:6)

If animals had a religion

Schleiermacher emphasized the function of "feeling" in religion and Hegel emphasized "thought", giving rise to ... tension between them. Hegel said that even dogs have feeling, but man has thought. This was based on an unintentional misunderstanding of what Schleiermacher meant by "feeling", one that we often find repeated even today. Yet it expresses the truth that man cannot be without thought. He must think even if he is a most pious Christian without any theological education. Even in religion we give names to special objects; we distinguish acts of the divine; we relate symbols to each other and explain their meanings. There is language in every religion, and where there is language there are universals or concepts that one must use even at the most primitive level of thought. It is interesting that this conflict between Hegel and Schleiermacher was anticipated already in the third century by Clement of Alexandria who said that if animals had a religion, it would be mute, without words.
  ... if the system is taken as a final answer, it becomes even worse than a prison. If we understand the system, however, as an attempt to bring theological concepts to a consistent form of expression in which there are no contradictions, then we cannot avoid it. Even if you think in fragments, as some philosophers and theologians (and some great ones) have done, then each fragment implicitly contains a system... So a system cannot be avoided unless you choose to make nonsensical or self-contradictory statements. Of course, this is sometimes done.
  The system has the danger not only of becoming a prison, but also of moving within itself. It may separate itself from reality and become something which is, so to speak, above the reality it is supposed to describe.

Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (1968: xxxvi-xxxvii)