I Am NOT the Beastmaster

Comics Scholar Denied Entry into USA

Ernesto Priego, a doctoral candidate at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College, London, and a scheduled presenter at this year's International Comic Arts Forum, has been denied entry into the United States of America.  The United States government declined to renew Mr. Priego's visa and has not given any explanation why he will not be allowed in the country.

Mr. Priego's exclusion is part of a recent and disturbing practice of denying entry to foreign scholars, and an infringement on academic freedom in the United States.

I have included Mr. Priego's paper abstract and biography below.

“The Tell-Tale Smell of Burning Paper: ‘Logic of Form’ and the Origin of Comics”

Inspired by Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, this paper discusses the origin of comics through a study of the “logic of form” in comic artists from the 1870s to the 1930s: the departure point being the recognition of a series of formal aspects that could be agreed as essential or definitive of the comics language. Different technological and artistic factors were involved in its development, resulting from the convergence of industrial development in the form of a transformation of printing and distribution techniques, artistic trends, and significative codes employed at the time.

Ernesto Priego, a poet, essayist, translator, and PhD candidate at the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies, University College, London, has taught English literature and critical theory at major Mexican universities and published a translation of Jessica Abel's award-winning graphic novel, La Perdida (Astiberri Editores, Spain, 2007) and a first book of poetry, Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, 2006).

Readers may judge for themselves what sort of security or immigration risk he poses to the American people.

Update:  Tom Spurgeon, Heidi MacDonald, Mike Rhode, Chris Mautner, and the Chronicle of Higher Education cover the story on their blogs.

Poetry Slam

Good news from Chicago: Thomas Frank's journalThe Baffler has returned after a long absence.  The latest issue features strong essays on online poker, the ongoing destruction of our legal system, and a Thomas Frank column on centrism that, among other valuable services, demolishes the "doctrine of symmetry" that pretends to balance every far-right offense with an injudicious Michael Moore aphorism.

I have a much more ambivalent reaction to "Free (Market) Verse," in which Steve Evans chronicles the efforts of a group of businessmen and bureaucrats to "deny, disrupt, and discredit existing networks of poetry production" and replace them with vapid, affirmational kitsch on the assumption that kitsch speaks more directly to some hypothetical average reader.  (You can read an online version of Evans' essay here.) I want to like any essay that dismantles the reactionary populism of energy executives, pharmaceutical companies, and Bush appointees, and I really want to like any essay that connects these ideologies to cultural production.  But on the other hand, I can't get behind an essay that defends MFA programs as bastions of creativity, artistic diversity, and democratization.  When Evans scornfully cites an executive's criticisms of the "hothouse" environment of contemporary poetry, I find myself agreeing with the wrong side. 

The essay has a tendency to invert and recycle the very logic it rails against.  Evans says poetry magazines "irrevocably decentralized the world of poetry by taking the power of publication out of the hands of a few authoritative editors and giving it directly to poets themselves"--this is the language of market radicalism that The Baffler has been deflating for nearly two decades, the language of decentralization that drives the privatizers and deregulators Evans despises.  Maybe that language is more appropriate here--maybe art should be decentralized and utilities shouldn't--but Evans doesn't make that distinction.  Instead he serves up market-pop platitudes to the most skeptical audience possible.

Evans also commits a curious and persistent ad hominem where he criticizes Poetry Foundation president John Barr, NEA Chair Dana Gioia, and former U. S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser by listing their credentials as an investment banker, marketing writer, and insurance underwriter, respectively.  These past occupations are meant to suggest that the unholy trinity is bringing the market logic and debased aesthetic of the corporation to the world of poetry--which, it appears, they are--but they also insinuate that the trio is just too square for a niche that is by divine right the province of pierced baristas, trust fund babies, and brittle neurasthenic suicides.  If every white-collar professional were disqualified from poetry we wouldn't have Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, or William Carlos Williams.  Worst of all, Evans doesn't need to flagellate the trinity with their resumés:   Kooser's experience as an underwriter could not possibly be as relevant as his plodding sense of what constitutes good poetry.

For that, we need no further evidence than Barr and Kooser's American Life in Poetry project, which plants short poems in rural newspapers across the country as a means of reaching out to the common man, the flyover poetry reader who's been unjustly neglected by the bicoastal poetry elite.   Evans eviscerates the project simply by summarizing the first sixteen poems, laying their mundanity bare for all to see.  But couldn't he be cheating?  Doesn't any poem sound banal if you reduce it to a one-sentence summary?  ("A speaker leaves a note to his wife apologizing for eating the plums in the refrigerator.")  I decided to go to the American Life in Poetry website and see for myself.

Oh, how I wish I had listened to Steve Evans.  Here's one of the poems Evans summarily dismisses, "Turning Forty":

At times it's like there is a small planet
inside me. And on this planet,
there are many small wars, yet none
big enough to make a real difference.
The major countries—mind and heart—have
called a truce for now. If this planet had a ruler,
no one remembers him well.

The hollow but relentless simile, the child's diction (small, many small, big enough, real difference--suddenly I long for Sophie Crumb)--this poem should not be read anywhere outside of a high school notebook, the margins decorated with rockets and tanks.  Evans' summary ("A tamed speaker recalls his youthful virility on the eve of his fortieth birthday") is better written, though the point it distills is still yawn-inducing--everyone already knows it, even if they haven't themselves turned forty, and the war on Planet Me won't show them anything new.

But Ted Kooser, like most practitioners of market populism, doesn't seem to think that highly of the salt of the earth readers he celebrates.  Every one of the American Life in Poetry columns is preceded by a brief introduction that reduces the poem to the most basic and trite message.  Kooser's glosses are so artless they make Evans' summaries look like Fabergé eggs.   ("The speaker feels a sense of peace at forty, but recalls a more powerful, more confident time in his life.")  Even a halfway interesting piece like this one--I confess I only clicked on the link to make fun of it, and was surprised--gets saddled with a commentary that explains, and obviates, the entire poem:

Of taking long walks it has been said that a person can walk off anything. Here David Mason hikes a mountain in his home state, Colorado, and steps away from an undisclosed personal loss into another state, one of healing.

This is the final result of Kooser's, Gioia's, and Barr's self-righteous didacticism:  poetry so obvious you don't actually need to read it.  When a rare poem does slip through the screening process and threatens to invite further contemplation, culture warriors like Kooser will be there to make sure the good, simple readers of the plains don't have to think too hard.

But Kooser is most revealing when he eschews the obvious for the trivial.  Here's his introduction to the latest column:

Those of us who have hunted morel mushrooms in the early spring have hunted indeed!

Indeed!  The poem in question is a tepid William Carlos Williams imitation (Williams seems to be a favorite model for Kooser's poets; maybe we should purge the good doctor from the canon after all) that mistakes a short line for a style and builds up to this surprising realization:

By the slumping log,
by the dappled aspen,
they grow alone.

A dumb eloquence
seems their trade.
Like hooded monks

in a sacred wood
they say:
Tomorrow we are gone.

The poem lays bare the fundamental mistake made by both Evans and Kooser, Barr, and Gioia:  the folly of opposing the poetry establishment of corporate donors and the Bush administration with the poetry establishment of the universities and literary magazines.

It's a petty epiphany poem, no different from the ones MFA programs are churning out by the thesis.  A little less au courant, maybe a little less technically proficient--maybe--but no less invested in the belief that art should be made from mundane observations of quotidian moments.  The American Life in Poetry project promotes that belief with a monotony that would humble even the most formulaic workshop.  And while the academic and literary poets produce more sophisticated work, their careers are supported by the ranks of graduate students enrolling in workshops that encourage them to craft the kind of muted observations that would delight our mushroom-loving former poet laureate.

Evans offers an astute, scathing analysis of the reactionary ideology and patronizing aesthetic of the "MBA poets," and, to be honest, they probably land some solid hits on the MFA programs.  But when it comes to evaluating their own side they're both mouthing the same pseudo-radical rhetoric, circling each other warily, unaware that they're shackled together at the ankles.

Blog to Print 2

Just received the latest issue of the International Journal of Comic Art, which contains my article "'A Serious House on Serious Earth': Rehabilitating Arkham Asylum."  It's a discussion of Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition, the latest step in an evolving argument that started here.  It's one of the most fun pieces I've written in a while (I have a rather odd definition of "fun") and I'm excited to see it in print.

Except that apparently Slavoj Zizek's last name has become unrepresentable, the Zs-with-carrots converted into little circles every damn time his name pops up.  I suppose one of the Jones boys will be amused; so, for that matter, might Zizek.  Somebody ought to be.

Bookshelf

In honor of the start of a new school year, I thought I'd share the contents of my small bookshelf of comics scholarship:

Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked
Jeffrey A. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans
Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity
The Comics Journal Library: Jack Kirby
Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes
Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics
Gary Groth and Greg Sadowski, eds., Will Elder: The Mad Playboy of Art
R. C. Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book
Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature
Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones, The Comic Book Heroes
Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow
Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why
Anne Magnussen and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds., Comics & Culture
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics
Lance Parkin, The Pocket Essential Alan Moore
Matthew J. Pustz, Comic Book Culture
Dan Raviv, Comic Wars
William W. Savage, Jr., Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens
Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man
Robin Varnum and Christina T. Gibbons, eds., The Language of Comics
and, of course, a complete run of IJOCA

Books I consult often enough that I really should have my own copies:

Roberta E. Pearson and William Urrichio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman (out of print!)
Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology
Joseph Witek, Comic Books as History

And I'm looking forward to reading Pete Coogan's Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre as soon as I get the chance.

Blog to Print

After blogging about it for nearly two and a half years, I've finally gotten an article on metaphor in comics and comic book novels accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed academic journal.  The article, which looks at Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, Rick Moody's The Ice Storm, and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, argues that the visual representation of comics offers writers a means of bypassing the symbolic order of language and potentially erasing the divisions of signifier and signified that preoccupied so much critical theory in the twentieth century.

The article went through two rejections and multiple rounds of revision, putting all previous estimations of dinosaur time to shame.  It always was neither fish nor fowl--too invested in linguistics and psychoanalytic criticism for some pop-culture journals, too invested in comics for some journals of lit-crit.  It was also too damn long and it needed some major work before it was ready for publication.  Thanks to some patient editors, it's finally one step closer.

And I'm still not done riding this hobby horse.  In the last round of revisions I cut the material on Morrison and Moore, confident that I'll come back to them later in the future book.  My first draft was really an introductory chapter trying to pass itself off as an article; I think I'll let it breathe back into a chapter again.  The next ones should be a lot more fun to write...

So hopefully one day you'll read me announcing that the book on Lethem, Cantor, Moody, Chabon, Moore, Morrison, DeLillo, Auster, Karasik, Mazzuchelli, and hell, for all I know David B. is done.  (No guesses when; I've learned my lesson.)  And it all started here.  My thanks to everyone who responded and offered feedback on those early posts, or just quietly put up with them and didn't say anything when I started going off about hypostasis again.  Couldn't have done it without you.

Multiplicity and the Multiverse

So Jim Roeg and I had this great back and forth going on about the politics of interpretation, multiplicity, and DC comics crossover events. (I thought it was great, anyway. Your mileage will vary to the extent you’re interested in cultural studies, critical theory, postmodernism, and political rhetoric.) I promised Jim a reply to his latest essay in “a couple of days.” That was back in November. More than a little embarrassing, especially since I’d just praised him for prompting the kind of exchange of ideas that motivated me to start blogging in the first place. In the interest of keeping up my end of the exchange, here are some belated comments on multiple interpretations and multiple Earths.

Since Jim and I agree much more often than we disagree there’s no need to mount some tedious blow-by-blow response to his last essay (I think the part about comics’ true ideological tensions existing within the characters and genre conventions is particularly spot-on), except to clarify one point. Jim draws a useful distinction between “strong” and “weak” formulations of the relationship between culture and politics. But my objection to Will Brooker’s Batman Unmasked isn’t against “strong” formulations per se, so much as critical accounts that appear to confuse the “weak” formulation, or formulations with no appreciable attention to politics at all, with the “strong” one.

Distinguishing his argument from Brooker’s (or, more accurately, from my very fragmentary representation of Brooker’s), Jim writes:

I’m asserting only a “weak” formulation of the culture-politics relation on the grounds that, with the possible exception of pure propaganda from either the left or the right, most forms of popular culture are ideologically uneven and contradictory, containing both reactionary and subversive political messages and that this ideological unevenness is especially visible in popular forms like superhero comic books—mass market yet strangely subcultural fantasies which do not simply mythologize but also interrogate the cultural/political contexts in which they are produced.

Actually, this is fairly close to Brooker’s positioning of Batman as a polysemic character who can sustain a number of contradictory readings (and cannot, in fact, be reduced to a single meaning). I don’t disagree with it, since it’s also pretty close to my own approach to interpreting popular culture. I only part company in my objections to two consequent (if implicit) arguments in Brooker’s text:

1. Polysemic texts and multiple interpretations are critically, aesthetically, and perhaps even politically preferable to singular ones.

2. The qualities of polysemy or multiplicity are sufficient to label a work postmodern—regardless of any other qualities of production, content, historical context, ideology, etc.

The first I could chalk up to a matter of personal preference and leave it at that, if part of Brooker’s case for valorizing the empty, gestural pluralism of publishing frameworks like Hypertime didn’t rest on the second claim. Equating the plural with the postmodern, Brooker implies that these metanarrative publishing events are not just notable or even laudable, but politically progressive.

The money quote comes when Brooker suggests The Kingdom

offers an interpretive pluralism in the face of the restrictive grand narrative. Instead of attempting to force continuity on the character and ruling that earlier, incompatible versions ‘never happened,’ The Kingdom approach seeks to reconcile difference […] with the unity implied by the character’s consistent ‘template’ and the need for a recognisable brand. As such it implies a new flexibility on the part of the producers which could in turn be read as a bending to the demands of fans, particularly those vocal Internet campaigners who bemoaned the Crisis and longed for the return of the ‘infinite earths.’ (323)

(And so we come full circle.) Brooker casts continuity, and particularly continuity custodianship of the Crisis on Infinite Earths variety, as a hegemonic, restrictive, coercive grand narrative. Against it is arrayed the multiplicity of The Kingdom (or Infinite Crisis), which “reconciles difference”—albeit it reconciles it with corporate imperatives to maintain brand identity, a point Brooker doesn’t pursue nearly enough—and “implies flexibility” and maybe, just maybe, distributes authorial power among the fans as well as the authors, editors, and corporate owners. This is the language of political liberation, stripped of politics and applied to comics that admit the existence of Ace the Bat-Hound. Brooker never argues for more than the “weak” formulation, if that, between these interpretively pluralistic, authorially decentered narratives and any larger cultural politics; but his language implies an equivalent political project, the one Jim explicitly connects to narrative multiplicity in his posts.

However, Brooker’s representation of the postmodern aesthetic studiously ignores any political or economic factors that might shape that aesthetic. To take his concluding chapter at face value, a work needs only to be nostalgic and polysemic to be postmodern—an argument I suspect Brooker himself would not make, although that’s the one he leaves on the page. He doesn’t acknowledge the economic transformations that shaped the emergence of postmodernism, described so well by Jameson or David Harvey, even though he name-drops Jameson. He doesn’t acknowledge that the postmodern moment—in fact, there’s no sense that there is a postmodern moment, that postmodernism consists of a particular set of responses to modernity and not just a set of aesthetic preferences, but that’s another matter—he doesn’t acknowledge that the postmodern moment incorporates a number of ideological positions quite opposed to the interpretive pluralism and reconciliation of difference that he exalts. There’s no concession that some postmodern ideologies neutralize difference by reducing all texts to pastiches or objects of pastiche (to oversimplify Jameson’s argument), or that a leveling of all interpretations can in fact provide ideological cover for some of the most reductive and insupportable ones (to reference Fish’s more recent points, mentioned in my last post). Simply being pluralistic is enough reason for a text to merit the praise of this parodic revolutionary language. Far from being a “strong” formulation of the politics of popular culture, this isn’t nearly strong enough.

Instead, I’m afraid, it’s yet another manifestation of the “populist reflex” too common in cultural studies, which celebrates the revolutionary potential of popular culture without paying attention to any conflicting political implications in its production, context, or content. (Consider the irony of Brooker finding a counterhegemonic narrative in a spin-off of the reactionary, anti-multiculturalist Kingdom Come.) Thomas Frank eviscerates this critical impulse in the brilliant One Market Under God, where he finds this pseudo-revolutionary populism runs in a direct line from cult-stud academics to Rush Limbaugh, with frighteningly little variation in between.

Towards the end of his second essay Jim states that we shouldn’t reduce postmodernism to the “shorthand caricature” of nihilistic relativism, and he’s absolutely right. Similarly, neither should we reduce it to the caricature of the revolutionary carnival, the strictly ideal movement that liberates through its own interpretive multiplicity, even if that caricature is beloved of some of the term’s greatest proponents.

(Incidentally, the best counterargument to my position might be that I’m welding Brooker’s rather shallow account of postmodern pluralism to Jim’s discussion of narrative multiplicity and political ideology, debunking an argument that neither person makes in its entirety. But I see each of the halves tending towards the other, and Jim’s first post is especially explicit in connecting aesthetic and political pluralisms—although his sense of postmodernism is both more nuanced and more pragmatic than Brooker’s.)

(I should also add that, as much time as I have spent inveighing against a couple of pages out of Brooker’s book, I appreciate Batman Unmasked a great deal and find it one of the more provocative works of recent, theoretically-driven comics scholarship. In fact, I think the book serves as its own best illustration that characters like Batman merit sustained academic attention, because a) after 350 pages it clearly hasn’t exhausted the topic, and b) it continually sparks this kind of discussion, in which questions about how to interpret a superhero comic lead to serious debates about culture, politics, and hermeneutics.)

Back to Jim, who writes:

My main point is simply that in the context of the current depressing ascendancy of strong ideologies like nationalism, imperialism, and religious fundamentalism (both within “the West” and outside it), I’ll take my multiplicity where I can get it.

To reiterate my position from the last go-round, we shouldn’t kid ourselves by thinking that interpretive multiplicity offers an anodyne against any of those ideologies, as Fish’s example of intelligent design so readily demonstrates. In fact, the degree to which religious fundamentalism and intelligent design, like claims of “liberal bias” and calls for right-wing “balance” in the media, have already co-opted the valorization of multiplicity to argue for their own propagation shows why multiplicity isn’t innately progressive and why blank multiplicity—which is the only kind offered by The Kingdom—is just as easily used to promote monolithic, reactionary, sinister ideologies as diverse, progressive, saintly ones.

As the last sentence hopefully indicates, one reason I’m skeptical about the Brooker-style exaltation of interpretive multiplicity for its own sake is that it degenerates so easily into polarized clichés like those I just listed. Jim doesn’t offer that kind of naïve celebration of multiplicity, although the arguments deployed in his first post can and often have tended in that direction. Anyway, to sum up my main point (as cogently, I hope) as Jim did his: in the context of all those current depressing ascendancies, to fight those current depressing ascendancies, I need more than blank multiplicity.

And I certainly need more than the blank multiplicity of DC universe comic book continuity. I’d like to leaven these political and theoretical ruminations with a little textual contemplation, i.e. talking about comic books. One of the reasons I’m so skeptical of Jim’s celebration of the DC multiverse as a site for ideological pluralism is because the comics have almost never supported such a connection. In an astute comment on Jim’s original post, Mark Fossen writes:

It seems that the old multiverse was, in fact, highly representative of colonial thought. It acknowledged diversity, but only as it served the Superpower (Britain, USA, or Earth-1). Only a multiverse where all realities have equal weight in the narrative would be truly postcolonial.

Casting the old multiverse as “colonial” or imperialistic is about as much of an overrreading as Jim’s claim that a new one could be postcolonial, but it swings back in the direction of skepticism and so serves as a useful corrective. And more importantly, the texts back it up. The worlds of the DC multiverse generally served two functions:

1. As spaces to house characters who had fallen out of publication (Earth-2) or characters from other companies DC had acquired (Earth-X, Earth-4, Earth-S), allowing the company to resuscitate them within its modern narrative diegesis (Earth-1).

2. As simple reflections of that primary diegesis (Earth-3).

The multiverse evolved other functions over the years—for example, the creation by editors and fans of additional universes that existed only to house impossible Bob Haney stories or DC-Marvel crossovers that couldn’t be reconciled with the primary continuity. Some of these universes existed only as suffixes in fanzines and “Answer Man” columns but they still did the job, leaving Earth-1 unsullied by continuity gaffes while still investing some feigned ontological value in the misfit stories. The multiverse was never really about narrative multiplicity, which was a kind of happy accident (as in some excellent Alan Brennert Earth-2 stories from the early 1980s), but about maintaining the primacy of the main publishing line.

And, following my earlier criticisms of Brooker, let’s consider the political economy of some of this multiplicity. Earth-S, for example, home to the Marvel Family, was only part of DC’s cosmogeny because National Comics pursued and won a twelve-year lawsuit against Fawcett Magazines claiming that Captain Marvel infringed on their Superman copyright. They forced Fawcett to stop publishing as part of the settlement and picked up the Marvel Family license twenty years later. Whether you consider this an example of a company marshalling its financial resources to squelch a more popular competitor or a case of intercompany plagiarism brought back into the fold, the old DC multiverse was a product of monopolistic business practices and a site for endless replications of the same basic character templates, sometimes capitalizing on the potential for telling varied and incompatible stories with them, most often not.

I hate to see comics scholars, or any cultural studies critics, confuse interpretive multiplicity with political liberation. (I don’t think Jim does, especially in his clarifying post.) While culture unquestionably bears an important relation to politics, not simply reflecting it but opening up a space to model or interrogate it, I distrust accounts like Brooker’s that flatly equate textual interpretation with political transformation. With the best intentions in the world, their celebrations of interpretive pluralism reduce politics to nothing but culture and suggest that a more equitable distribution of power is just one resistant reading away.  The typical occlusion of political economy in most such celebrations provides a pretty good indication of just how radical they really are.

Multiple Articulation

Jim Roeg has an interesting essay on Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis up over at Double Articulation.  It takes an especially provocative turn after the post-Pieta break, where he uses the pre-1985 multiplicity of narrative worlds in DC Comics as a trope for a real-world multiplicity of ideologies and suggests that writing one might promote or reflect the other.  In Jim's reading, DC's possible reopening of its old story universes is a chance to build (or rebuild) a network of stories founded on principles of multiplicity and difference; he fashions the DC multiverse itself into a symbol or hypostasis of cultural and ideological diversity.

It would be easy to sneer at the source material that sparks these thoughts--"You got all that from the comic where Bizarro kills Uncle Sam?"--but as a scholar of popular culture I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.  Nor do I want to; I find enough to trouble me in Jim's arguments just by taking them at face value.  They remind me, in fact, of  a familiar passage in Will Brooker's Batman Unmasked (2000) wherein Brooker celebrates the "radical implications," the "fluidity and play," the "interpretive pluralism" of that most revolutionary of comic books--The Kingdom.

Let me explain briefly for those of you who can't name the full line-up of the Justice Battalion or the Inferior Five.  The Kingdom was a short 1998 miniseries that existed to plug in one of four quarterly holes in DC Comics' publishing schedule and to cash in on the popularity of Mark Waid and Alex Ross's smash hit Kingdom Come by tying its possible future into the normal DC continuity.  The end result was the creation of Hypertime, a Grant Morrison concept never actually written by Grant Morrison, which conceded that all of DC's editorially-annihilated stories, characters, and parallel universes still existed somewhere, somehow.  Brooker exalts Hypertime as "a textbook example of postmodernism, following Fredric Jameson's influential definitions," although he never gets around to mentioning that those influential definitions are highly critical of postmodernism for its institution of exactly this sort of empty pastiche--or, as Jim calls it in his comments thread, a purely "gestural multiplicity."  (Incidentally, I'm paraphrasing comments I've already made in a review of Brooker's book for IJOCA--pardon the repetition.)

The Kingdom acknowledged only what comics readers--the sort of aging, nostalgic, lifelong comics readers likely to buy The Kingdom, anyway--already knew:  that DC had published a bunch of crazy stories over its sixty- (now seventy-) year history, that its erstwhile managers preferred not to talk about them anymore, but that they had all happened anyway, as much as any story ever does.  Since it didn't lead to any changes in the way DC Comics actually presented its characters or acknowledged their histories, the "interpretive pluralism" of The Kingdom amounted to little more than an attempt to reassure readers of the ontological value of a bunch of old comics that, depending on how you look at it, were either no more real than they were before, or no less.

It was a multiplicity without any practical effects, in other words--even in the hothouse atmosphere of DC Comics continuity--and an ontological argument that only mattered if you willed yourself into committing the most basic category error, the one Alan Moore tried to warn us about so long ago:  "This is an imaginary story... Aren't they all?"

Infinite Crisis could go the same way, I suppose.  Or it might not; Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, and company might reinstitute the multiverse, or create some other framework that allows creators to tell stories about different versions of characters within different histories that are no longer bound by a single overarching narrative continuity.  To the extent that this fosters good comics it'll be worth doing, although past experience (The Kingdom included) teaches that a grand concept is nothing when it's implemented by the same old suspects who wrecked the toyshop the last time around.

But it's a pretty big leap from that kind of publishing implement to a politics of multiplicity.  As Jim himself acknowledges, there's no guarantee that a new multiverse is going to lead to a postmodern "critique of unity and identity."  Maybe it's just going to lead to more stories where Wildcat meets the Creeper.

That's okay.  I like Wildcat and I like the Creeper.  I wouldn't mistake a crossover that exists only to enact a minor reframing of the kind of stories we can read about Wildcat and the Creeper--correction:  a crossover that has, in its first two issues, existed only to explain itself--for a political manifesto and, to his credit, neither does Jim. 

My more serious qualms with his essay come with its celebration of multiplicity for its own sake.  That argument reminds me--and I will say right here at the outset that this is a completely unfair comparison--of a short essay on intelligent design by Stanley Fish in the December 2005 Harper's.  Fish notes that the argument that all viewpoints deserve an equal hearing just for being viewpoints, and particularly the arguments that intelligent design should be taught because it represents a minority viewpoint that has been suppressed by an "elitist" scientific establishment, have been appropriated from the multiculturalist movement's own celebration of multiplicity and difference.

Fish is almost as hard on the multiculturalists as he is on the intelligent design movement--too hard, I think, as he doesn't acknowledge that the authority the multiculturalists challenged (a canon that only acknowledged the artworks and histories of western European peoples) was based on arbitrary, indefensible principles of exclusion, while the one the IDers disparage is founded on an entirely defensible scientific method of observation and evidence and falsifiability.  But he makes a point that too many left-wingers and academics ignore:  openness and diversity are not always worthwhile goals in themselves, and certainly not the only worthwhile goals.  They don't automatically guarantee a progressive politics, or even a diverse politics; the ease with which IDers (or, Fish notes, Holocaust deniers) cloak themselves in the mantle of tolerance for alternative viewpoints as a means of promoting their own exclusionary or intolerant views demonstrates the danger of mistaking a perfectly inoffensive principle for an end in itself.

I say this comparison is unfair because Jim knows there's nothing inherently radical about the multiverse, as indicated by his comments on its "abstract multiplicity."  In fact, the first couple of issues of Infinite Crisis imply there could be something awfully conservative, at least in a generic sense, about a comic that tries to restore DC to its state of grace of twenty years ago.  I'm with Jog in my hope that Infinite Crisis renounces that kind of idealization while providing us with something new.  And it would be interesting if the Golden Age Superman were effectively the villain of the piece, although I doubt it will end with all of the angry, neurotic, brainwashing, murderous heroes of the present-day DC universe standing over his unconscious body and asking, "Who was that asshole?"  But whatever course the crossover takes, I'm extremely skeptical that any particular narrative framework guarantees any particular type of politics.

Enlighten Me

A little post about a certain ungainly catch-phrase has, wonderfully, turned into something else entirely, a thread about the role and value of different kinds of criticism.  I couldn't let a statement like this pass by without comment:

The linguist Jackendoff has noted that our ("iour" meaning the "West's") usage of terms like "irrational", "emotional", and "expressive" to characterize music and dance just underscores the West's prejudice against non-linguistic thought. Academic Scholarship seems to subtley reinforce that bias.

Or statements like this (in response to J.W. Hastings' earlier comments on theories of "false consciousness," which strike me as being a separate matter from the kinds of criticism Steven Berg and David Fiore advocate anyway):

I called that the The Critic-Hero comes to the defense of the Idiots-in-distress syndrome. And really, it's just the apogee of Western Enlightenment anyway, eh?

I won't object to this description of a certain style of criticism; it's the implied attitude that bothers me (and ultimately these comments boil down to little else), the sinking feeling that, in this context, to link something to the Enlightenment is to damn it with guilt by association.

Yet these critiques are possible because they follow the models of inquiry and analysis promoted by the Enlightenment - just as the criticisms of academic scholarship quoted above are made through a mishmash of the very critical terms coined and circulated by that scholarship.  Does anyone else in the world criticize rationality and logocentrism and the Western Enlightenment as much as a certain stripe of Western, post-Enlightenment artists and critics?  Does anyone else criticize academic theory as much as academic theorists?

The comment thread to my last post is rapidly becoming a handy illustration of how the anti-academic right and the academic left or quasi-left can and often do find common cause.  Both groups are engaged in a cultural offensive against various kinds of authority, and both tend to set academic authority in their sights - one group because they're going after their traditional opponents and the other because they get merit badges for going after that person who's just that little bit less radical than they.

Guess which group has prospered more?  Guess which translates its cultural offensive into material, political gain?

In a world of violent and expansionist fundamentalisms, of assaults and retrenchments on civil and human rights, the Enlightenment could offer us a set of valuable principles:  a model of inquiry we won't surrender and a standard of human dignity from which we won't retreat.  Instead, it's become a sneering put-down for academics to launch at other academics.

How unutterably sad.

More Job Insecurity

Last week I wrote a response to this column by Professor Irvin Winsboro, taking issue with his argument that the uncertain academic job market should be driving more Ph.Ds to take positions without job security (like his university's untenured "continuing multiyear appointments") – and that graduates have their priorities wrong if they don't.

But there are other kinds of insecurity at play in his column. As I mentioned to Jess Nevins in the comments to the last post, Winsboro expresses dismay that his university didn't receive more applicants, yet he also mentions – parenthetically – that they didn't place an advertisement in Perspectives, the central clearinghouse for jobs in history. I've seen this same phenomenon at my university, and it boggles the mind: if you don't place ads in the largest and most prestigious job forum, how many applicants should you expect to get?

The insecurity reaches its most perfect (and typical) manifestation as Winsboro engages in that classic academic practice of turning his institution's structural flaws into virtues. (Nobody can rationalize better than an intelligent person stuck doing a rotten job.) He makes frequent reference to the business-model university's "teaching-centered mission" and its interest in candidates with "demonstrable teaching and interpersonal skills" – all good things, essential things for this profession, but also academic codespeak for universities that prioritize heavy course loads and ballooning class sizes to process the maximum number of students for a minimal cost.

Florida Gulf Coast University, Winsboro's institution, would seem to be a stark example. He writes that its "student enrollment now stands at 6,400, and is expected to grow to 15,000 within the next six years." But a check of the FGCU website lists only three history faculty members for this growing campus of 6,400. Either this campus is wholly dependent on adjunct labor, or on class overcrowding, or on teacher overload, or it doesn't require much in the way of humanities courses for its students; or, I suspect, some combination of the four. When Winsboro writes that graduate students and their faculty should focus on developing teaching skills, he also means they should expect to do nothing else with their careers.

It's difficult even to write these paragraphs; how do you attack the teaching mill without sounding like you're attacking teaching itself? This is the fundamental genius of the rationalizers. They pass off the business-model university's exploitation, of teacher labor and student tuition alike, as their own dedication to the higher calling of educating young minds. And the more young minds you try to educate – say, 6,400 divided by three – the more virtuous you are.

The rationalizers rarely consider, or at least rarely mention, that under this model the students get short-changed as much as the teachers do. Are they going to learn as much when their teachers have 150 students, as opposed to 100 or 70, and consequently only have enough grading-hours to assign and comment on two-thirds or half as much work? Are they going to learn as much from a faculty comprised of that self-selecting set of scholars willing to work longer hours for lower pay and no job security?

Winsboro's answer to the latter is that the job crisis ought to be a windfall for exploitative universities because it means they should attract more applicants who would disdain to take such jobs in fatter years. And he says applicants ought to get on the bandwagon now:

Given the propensity of legislatures and new or reconstituted boards of trustees to embrace the "business" model of education, it is fair to assume that the non-tenure cohort of history hires will rise demonstrably in future years. […] Job seekers need to more seriously consider continuing MYA openings in their searches for employment. Not only do MYAs receive fewer applications, as the FGCU example shows, making one's chances of being hired better, but they can also be expected to become even more common as schools continue to shy away from new tenure-track appointments.

This, finally, is why I find Winsboro's argument so repugnant. His answer to the academic job crisis and the erosion of job security is to lie back and take it. Make it worse, in fact, by feeding the business model that's hurting both teachers and students by deprofessionalizing college education. I hope graduates continue to reject such exciting new career opportunities.

Job Insecurity

In the current issue of Perspectives, the professional magazine of the American Historical Association, Professor Irvin Winsboro of Florida Gulf Coast University writes a column entitled "Is There a Job Crisis? A Reality Check."

As readers of my last column on academia will know, it's a name guaranteed to irritate me. The title is doubly obnoxious because Winsboro doesn't actually deny the existence of an academic job crisis – no one in academia could.

Instead, he doubts the mentality of Ph.Ds seeking jobs in the crisis, because when his department held a job search in U.S. history they received only forty applicants. (To provide you with some perspective, Winsboro says that "faculty positions in North America have averaged between 83 and 109 applicants for each opening" in history, and U.S. history is the most glutted field. In English, a research university like Maryland could expect at least 100 applications for each opening, with fields like American literature potentially receiving as many as 400.) This raises a legitimate question. Why, if jobs are so scarce, aren't more Ph.Ds seeking refuge at institutions like Winsboro's?

He answers that question while listing the "attractions" of FGCU.

With the exception of 18 faculty members who have tenure (having transferred to FGCU from another Florida state institution), the majority of faculty at the university are on a system of "continuing multiyear appointments" (MYA). In essence, career longevity at FGCU is linked to performance, as in other academic settings.

Written like a man who knows he's pedding snake oil. "Career longevity" may indeed be "linked to performance" at "other academic settings," but they have tenure and FGCU doesn't, making FGCU, in essence, a long-term temporary job. Maybe it will be there for you in the future and maybe it won't, and if it's not the university won't need any reason to fire you; in fact, they won't even need to fire you at all, just decline to rehire you. Should Winsboro really be surprised that more scholars weren't jumping at this opportunity? The simple fact that FGCU had forty applicants who wanted to teach a heavy course load for no job security is probably the best evidence that there is a job crisis.

But Winsboro suggests there's something wrong with job-seekers who don't follow his "any port in a storm" reasoning and line up for these posts:

A number of candidates who applied for the position seemed reluctant to accept an MYA line during our telephone interviews, and an equal number communicated to me in private discussions and in e-mail exchanges that they would only consider an appointment for a "temporary" job at FGCU as a last resort.

Future job seekers take note: anybody who tells the hiring committee that they're only considering the job as a last resort probably won't be landing that position. On the other hand, I respect these candidates for knowing what they're worth and asking for it; presumably at least some of them were trying to negotiate for a tenure-track line and were letting the search committee know they wouldn't settle for less. But Winsboro insists that FGCU was offering "reasonable job security" and that these arrogant, tenure-greedy Ph.Ds "were not inclined to process (nor even to hear) the message I conveyed."

Incidentally, you remember those 18 FGCU faculty members who have tenure? Winsboro is one of them. One wonders why he wouldn't settle for the "reasonable" job security of the "continuing multiyear appointment" himself.

While everybody hears about the abuses of tenure - the loss of new job lines to senior scholars who refuse to retire poses a particular challenge - it offers structural benefits that universities should not lightly discard. First of all, tenure is the strongest guarantee of academic freedom, of professors' rights to research and publish what they will. Secondly, and of equal importance, it also guarantees institutional freedom. The most vocal and conscientious critics of my university's policies are tenured professors. Without the protection of tenure, such gadflies will fade away - or be forced out - and university faculties will come more and more to resemble the many junior professors on my campus who routinely line up in support of corrupt administrators and a comic-opera faculty senate. Finally, tenure benefits a school's instruction and intellectual climate, providing students with a continuity of experienced professors familiar with the campus, not a revolving door of part-time and temporary labor.

Professor Winsboro doesn't address any of that. Instead he believes that job-seekers who insist on tenure-track positions are ruling out jobs (bad jobs) and setting unrealistic expectations for their careers. Or maybe worse:

Schools like FGCU, with recently created or revised teaching-centered missions, are becoming increasingly common across the educational landscape. The candidate who looks askance at the MYA in favor of the venerable tenure line may be better served in the present market by casting a broader application net.

The most troubling aspect of Winsboro's column is that his response to the widespread structural problems of the academic job market is not to fix the problems, but to blame job-seekers for not lowering their expectations enough. "The venerable tenure line." Job security is so fucking elitist, isn't it?

I have quite a bit more to say on this subject, particularly on the self-conscious valorization of teaching as an excuse for academic labor exploitation, but this will do for today.