Babylon Is Burning

Several years ago I was invited to Jahrestagung der Locumer Initiative Kritischer WissenschaftlerInnen, an annual gathering of leftish German scholars and intellectuals in Hanover, Germany. In the days before the gathering, my German comrades kept repeating, with rising excitement, the phrase, “soon, we make seminar.” Indeed, after trundling out to a hostel in the heimat-saturated, Lower Saxony countryside, I realized that “making seminar” required a whole different environment and context than the classrooms and lecture halls of the nearby University of Hanover.  “Making seminar” was somehow connected to but also different from the kinds of things that went on in institutions.

I confess – – every time my German hosts invoked the excitement of “making seminar,” I kept flashing back to a couple of lines from a Flaco Jimenez foot stomper: “Yo tengo una esposa bonita, que linda/She makes good menudo/Seguro que hell yes!”  Odd as the association among German lefties, fiery debates about the Bologna process, neoliberalism, and Flaco’s boisterous celebration of la mezcla tex-mex might seem: we made damn good seminar in Hanover.

Since the Locumer gathering, “making seminar” now substitutes for “having class,” “class meeting,” “class scheduled for computer lab” (i.e. we will be “making seminar” in the computer lab). etc., every time I “teach” a graduate seminar.  I like the pedagogical and ethical implications behind the subject (“we”) and the verb (“make”) of “we make seminar.”  In fact, my borrowing from my German colleagues has become the object of much, generally sweet, student irony:  “I can’t make seminar tonight, professor, because I’m making germs” or “Can we make seminar in a bar for our last class?”.  (Seguro que hell definitely!)

This past semester, a group of undergraduates and I “made good textbook.”  (I’ve already outlined some of the rationale for DIY digital textbooks elsewhere.)  This is a kind of after-action report on Democratic Vistas: A Digital Anthology of American Literature.  E.g. what has the student-creation of a digital textbook taught me about teaching, learning, and technology.

Community.  The course in which we made our textbook was a pretty standard upper-division American literature survey – – about 45 students, about half were English majors, a curricular goal of introducing students to the breadth of late 19th century (1865 – 1914) American writing.  One major wrinkle: we met once a week for 150 minutes.  One of my great fears was that once-weekly meetings would discourage the kind of intimacy (among students, between students and texts, and between teacher and students) that more regular meetings can encourage.  So, one purpose behind the digital textbook was to create an on-going sense of connection and community within the class over the six days we wouldn’t be meeting.  To help buttress this community-building function, I also implemented a BuddyPress site as a kind of backstage venue for talking, planning, and organizing our MediaWiki site.

In fact, the “community machine” of wiki plus BuddyPress worked fantastically.  By the second or third week of the semester, as students began to master wiki markup and BuddyPress, I was able to surrender my more bureaucratic duties to the self-organizing activity of the students.  I would set general goals: “Let’s get the Whitman pages done by April 1.”  But, the students used BuddyPress, the talk pages of the wiki, and computer lab time to trade contact info (I watched one day in the lab as a group of students phoned a missing class member and cajoled him into finishing up his draft wiki page.), parcel out tasks, organize work flow, and comment on pages in process.  A month into class, and the wiki-induced community effects were achieving noticeable purchase within the classroom – – as students referred to other students’ work and often huddled together before and after class in their “wiki” groups.

Writing. Students in the class did a lot of writing, but very little “conventional” writing.  In other words, writing in the class shifted from the emetic five-page essay to continuous, formal and informal, writing.  Students drafted and re-drafted their wiki pages.  With some simple guidelines about where to find good information, they also began researching and experimenting with relations between context and text.  This is a tricky relation for students (and many professors).  Yet, because the wiki encouraged a more “processual” approach to writing, I was able to give pretty much constant feedback about how well or not so well I thought context and text were working together.

Two things seem important to me about the digital writing involved in Democratic Vistas.  First, by thinking of their writing as doing something real – – e.g. as creating a textbook that would endure after the class (a “bid for immortality,” as I told students), the students were able to really understand the authentic, heuristic nature of “purpose” in writing.  That is, rather than just pile on facts about America in 1855 as they wrote about Whitman, students gradually learned to think of facts within a purposeful frame:  e.g. “What kind of information about 1855 will help readers understand Whitman’s poem more deeply or fully?”  For me, this was a real breakthrough in understanding how to “teach” context: students can accumulate tons of information, but typically need much more time trying to understand and make this information relevant and insightful.  Encouraging students to see that information (research) is not an end but a means (to helping other readers better understand the text) unlocked a whole series of big ideas and discussions about understanding texts, making sense of context, and how readers read.

Second, the more continuous modes of writing involved in the wiki enabled me to shift my role from grader to something more like a coach or tutor.  By replacing the idea of final product with an ongoing process, the wiki diffused the traditional apocalyptic narrative of writing and evaluation – – in solitude, students produce and present a finished essay; teachers deliver a final judgement on this artifact, thus mystifying even as they supposedly elucidate the act of learning.  Instead, the wiki encouraged a kind of “versioning” model of writing: students drafted, I responded (as did other students), students drafted again, I responded, and so on.  To be honest, this felt so much better and more like real teaching than the conventional “terminator” role allotted to teacher evaluation.  Likewise, the versioning approach discouraged ideas of “bad” and “good” writing (and “bad” and “good” writers); this binary was replaced by writing, more writing, and the idea of “better” writing.

The ignorant schoolmaster. In his account of the schoolmaster, Jacotot’s, discovery of the “method of emancipation,” Jacques Ranciere describes how Jacotot had to first overcome the “myth of pedagogy”: “the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid.”  Jacotot amazed his 19th century colleagues by demonstrating that illiterate, working-class parents could “teach” their children how to read.  This achievement, according to Jacotot, depended not on schooling or knowledge but first on the political act of emancipation: learning required that “every common person might conceive his human dignity, take measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it.”  In short, “winning the future” demanded first a total embrace of radical egalitarianism.

The success of the digital anthology rested on a similar, if not so radical, gesture of egalitarianism.  I asked students not to think of their wiki work as “proving” something to me, nor as an opportunity for me to correct them.  Instead, I asked the students to think of the digital anthology as a place to cultivate their own expertise, as a place that served as a durable, public record (or trace) of their knowledge making.  It was important here, I thought, to erase myself from the dichotomy of ignorance and knowledge.  The students were accumulating and demonstrating their expertise for other readers – – for the vast, anonymous “audience” of the web.  My job was not to annotate, measure, and evaluate their ignorance (and so re-inscribe the gap between their “stupidity” and the teacher’s “intelligence”), but instead to collaborate with them on cultivating their novice expertise.

The chronotope of education.  The institutionalization of education within school constructs learning (and teaching) in irreversible, narrative time.  Syallbi unroll across semesters, fastening the temporality of learning to the empty, progressive time of days, weeks, and months.  There is no necessary logic to this basting together of learning and calendar time.  Learning unfolds within distinct, different, collaborative and singular temporalities.  Chaining these temporalities to the heteronomous time of the “semester” is a contrivance, an institutional convenience.

The ongoing engagement with texts, language, ideas, writing, and collaborators in our digital anthology disorganized the institutional chronotope of learning (and teaching).  Students kept working on their Whitman pages long after the syllabus had moved on to other texts; and, students began and continued working on their “author” and “text” pages well before they appeared on the syllabus.  Retrospect and prospect became confused, and the digital anthology seemed to create at least two different “classes” – – one that sauntered through the syllabus week by week and the other that floated above the syllabus and happened all the time, or at least whenever students, or myself, engaged with texts, contexts, and each other.

In a way, the digital anthology spatialized time.  It created an environment or platform for teaching and learning, rather than a “course” (especially in its basic meaning of a route, direction, or path).  This posed some very interesting logistical problems.  For instance, in what ways can (and should) the spatializing time of the wiki be coordinated with the irreversible time of the semester?  Can the syllabus be junked in favor of something more like a book club, where course time is organized by attention, interest, and engagement?  If the chronotope cultivated by the wiki works to encourage more authentic learning,  perhaps the classroom becomes less a means (or tool) to ensure progress through the syllabus and more a place to connect texts and textual meanings in different, shifting, and provisional constellations – – of theme, form, context, etc.  Perhaps, this is one place where the post-course era begins.

Accept no substitutes. Despite the inducements of the wiki, there is no substitute for the embodied, dynamic, physical space of the classroom.  The “no significant difference” school of distance learning would have us believe in the possibility of an either/or logic of the virtual: because there is no “difference,” either “online” education or “face-to-face” education can deliver effective “outcomes.”  The digital anthology project demonstrated the simple-mindedness of this rhetoric.  Our wiki enriched the classroom, and the classroom enriched the wiki.  Each was a necessary condition for the success of the other.  In fact, rather than undermining the classroom, the wiki’s tendency to liberate the classroom from the conventional chronotope of education opened up new possibilities and questions for the value of embodied experience.   And, it’s these possibilities and questions – – most centrally, how can the wiki “environment” reorganize and create new classroom chronotopes – – that will guide next semester’s re-versioning of Democratic Vistas. Seguro que hell yes!

Are we in the midst of a second tectonic shift in higher education?

The first, as most historians of higher ed agree, occurred during the latter decades of the 19th and early decades of the 20th century as the “old time” liberal arts college gave way to the research university.  The professionalization of academic labor, the rise of “scientific” research, the increasing demand for managerial workers, and the top-down imperative to subordinate higher learning to monopoly capitalism:  all of these spelled doom for a higher educational system organized around the ambition to cultivate “gentlemen” rather than experts.

The ongoing crisis of neoliberalism is clearly dis-organizing public higher education and its compact – – forged in the wake of World War II and centered on the value of mass higher education – – among State, Capital, and the people.   State funding over the past two decades has stumbled from one “recession” to the next:  funding in the late ’90s recovered from major budget cuts earlier in the decade only to run up against the dot com bust of 2000-2001; a brief recovery in public funding hit the fiscal wall in 2007-2008 with the onset of the “mortgage” crisis.  For two decades, the general trend has been pretty clear: rising student enrollments have been matched by declining state monies.  One major symptom of this contradiction: the cost of college attendance has been steadily shifting from state to consumer, as students and their families spend more income to complete their degrees.  Two graphs capture this dynamic.  First, the roller coaster of state appropriations (courtesy of NEA):

And second, the ratio of state appropriations versus student contributions to tuition (courtesy of SHEEO):

This “privatization” of public higher education is no big news to those who have followed the politics and economics of higher ed over the past couple of decades.  The bad news is that, despite modest burps of prosperity, the trend is definitely downward, i.e. the State is withdrawing, inch by inch, from public higher education.  And, given the highly-publicized cuts to higher ed in the U.K., it’s clear that the neoliberal triage of public post-secondary education is now a global phenomenon.

Within the U.S. university, one of the most significant effects of this triage has been the chronic re-organization of colleges and disciplines, most recently heralded as the “crisis of the humanities.”  Indeed, to paraphrase Alain Locke, the humanities now represent the “sick man of American [higher education].”  Sickness for some, however, can also mean health for others.  And in the increasingly zero sum game of university funding, humanities’ loss is STEM’s (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) gain.  If you’re a faculty member in humanities in almost every branch of higher education, you know the feeling:  in these times of “strategic decision-making” and “core mission,” STEM has to spend a lot less time justifying itself in budgetary and personnel terms than humanities.   In my own university, trying to start a new major or program in “polymer engineering” is a no-brainer; trying to start a new major or program in foreign languages is a non-starter.  President Obama recently awarded prizes in a White House Science Fair.  Any bets on when he’ll be awarding the next round of prizes in a White House Student Poetry Slam?

Some would argue that the humanities have been in “crisis” since the very beginning of the modern research university.   But given the recent torrent of lamentation by heavyweights like Stanley Fish, Marjorie Perloff, Terry Eagleton, and others, the viability of humanities within the university may have reached a critical phase.  Indeed, the recent launch of 4Humanities, a quasi-public advocacy group for the humanities, indicates perhaps the extent to which the humanities have now unabashedly entered the arena of interest group politics.  Disciplines founded on the idea of universal and transcendent values adopt the rough-and-tumble tactics of demand, recognition, and special-pleading.   As Gramsci summed up a different historical shift: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”  Humanities, welcome to the age of morbid symptoms!

The big question is this: is the crisis of humanities merely a temporary adjustment of the university to hard times? Or, does the crisis of humanities reflect a major change in the meaning and purpose of the university?  Like Terry Eagleton, I believe the latter, but for slightly different reasons and with possibly different effects.

In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter outlines a pretty straightforward, but powerful argument about how societies enter into crisis.  Societies develop complexity – – institutions, bureaucracies, legal codes, structures of internal and external control – -as a way to solve the problem of surpluses, particularly resource surpluses.  Complexity works, for a while.  According to Tainter, at a certain point and especially when confronted by novel stresses, the costs of expanding complexity begin to outweigh the benefits.  “The marginal return on investment in complexity accordingly deteriorates,” Tainter writes, “at first gradually, then with accelerated force.  At this point, a complex society reaches the phase where it becomes increasingly vulnerable to collapse.”  For Tainter, collapse, a return to simplicity, is merely the most cost-effective solution to the burdensome inefficiencies of complexity.

In a suggestive blog post, Clay Shirky has applied Tainter’s dynamic of complexity and collapse to new and old media economies.  Shirky’s main point is that so long as old media sticks to complexity (of production and organization), it will never be able to meet the challenges of new media.  “It’s tempting, at least for the people benefitting from the old complexity,” Shirky says,  “to imagine that if things used to be complex, and they’re going to be complex, then everything can just stay complex in the meantime. That’s not how it works, however.”   Complex business models just can’t compete with or incorporate the simple, DIY production and organization of viral blockbusters like “Charlie Bit My Finger” (now claiming 10 million plus viewers on YouTube).  And so, we witness the endless battles among Apple, Sony, cable companies, major newspapers, and all the others over how to “make the internet pay.”

It wouldn’t be too difficult to read the history of contemporary higher education through a narrative of “the collapse of complex institutions.”   The rise of the multiversity, with its  intricate organizational charts, bureaucracies, and other mechanisms of control, represented a real solution to the sudden infusion of students and money following World War II.  New stresses have appeared – – most importantly, in the form of reduced state funding.  Inevitably, if we follow Tainter, organizational stress induces further complexity, witness for instance the growth of the administrative cadre (from “enrollment managers” to “legislative staff” and development offices) and of organizational functions, for instance, the rise of academic technology offices or vice presidents and assistant vice presidents for evaluation and assessment.  (“War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne once proclaimed.  And, in academic terms, we might say: “Fiscal crisis is the health of administration.”)

The “crisis of the humanities,” then, is not just about the humanities.  It is also about the collapse of complex institutions.  Indeed, the gradual erosion of the humanities in colleges and universities around the globe may represent the first significant signs of encroaching simplicity.  More and more, universities are becoming vocational and technical schools, reducing their ambitions and organizational purpose to the goal of training “employable” white collar workers, limiting themselves to the job of funneling bright students into still-remunerative sectors of the STEM economy.  The political unconscious of higher education today may be summed up in this contradiction between increasing complexity, on the one hand, and accelerating simplification, on the other.  Yet, if we follow Tainter, the process of simplification is only a prelude to collapse.  Numerous reports and opinions, for and against, the new “competition” between established higher ed and for-profit institutions bear witness to the imminence of this collapse: the University of Phoenix can only really compete with the University of California once the playing field has been leveled, that is, only once the University of California simplifies away everything (from campus to full-time faculty to academic culture) that distinguishes it from the University of Phoenix.  This kind of competition can only be located on the horizon of collapse.

And so, fellow humanists, are we condemned to exodus from the university, ejected from the groves of academe and dispersed into the pages of history, to become the new “hedge scholars” of the STEM economy?  Perhaps.  But, perhaps, there are other alternative, and more convivial, paths through the collapse . . .

[This is a long post, and few people will probably read it.  But, I wanted to close off the zombie thread and at least commit some ideas to electronic print before moving on to other matters.  The post really began when I started noticing how zombie movies represent the “swarming” undead.  So, the real center of things here is the little video mashup I composed – – found about two-thirds of the way down the page.]

Zombies emerge within popular culture of the 1930s at the intersection of labor and imperialism.  Yet by the post-war period, zombies have largely been relegated to the margins of mass culture, seeking shelter from the cold war within the vivid pages of E.C. Comics and its variously delicious titles  – – Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear – – or lurking deep within the genre codes of science fiction, as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Last Man on Earth (1964), or The Thing from Another World (1951) .

It wouldn’t be until the 70s, especially after Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), that the zombie would once again shamble back into the pop culture spotlight.   While Americans struggled to make sense of Vietnam, an imperialist sequel to Haiti, and American workers struggled within and against the crisis of Fordist capitalism (at places like Lordstown and Detroit),  zombies exploded across drive-in movie screens.   Cheap offshore productions like Night of the Sorcerers (1971), The Swamp of the Ravens (1972), and The Devil’s Cross (1975) from Spain competed with Lucio Fulci’s Italian “zombi” oeuvre ((Zombi (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980), etc.).  American b-movie producers responded with Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things (1972), Garden of the Dead (1974), Shock Waves (1977), and Romero’s follow-up, Dawn of the Dead (1978).  All of this capped by Sam Raimi’s zombie parody, The Evil Dead, in 1981.

The next real fluorescence of the zombie would come in the wake of 9/11 – – 28 Days Later (2002), Resident Evil (2002, 2004, 2007, 2010), Shaun of the Dead (2004), the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), Max Brooks’ zombie books, a plethora of zombie-killing video games, and most recently, The Walking Dead  (2010).

It would be pretty easy to line up zombie-trend and historical-trend: e.g. zombie movies proliferate during periods of capitalist crisis – – whether the ugly breakup of Fordism in the 1970s into the 80s or today’s ongoing crisis.  And, there’s probably some truth here.  But, this kind of correspondence begs the question of: why zombies?  Even if base and superstructure are so tidily expressive, why is it that zombies seem a preferred mode of socially symbolic narrative?

There are plenty of ways of “reading” zombies, one of the most popular being zombie as consumer redux.  (Mark Dery presents a nice take on this idea; and, Lisa Wade offers a quick survey of the “sociological image” of the zombie.)  This strain of zombie-decoding is largely inspired by the mall setting for Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and so tends to read the zombie narrative through Romero’s pretty ham-fisted sociologism.

Another strain within zombie-decoding draws its inspiration from Marx’s various, gothic characterizations of capital, labor, and machinery.  For instance, from Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 10: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”  Alternatively, a la Marx, machinery or fixed capital also represents “dead labor,” e.g. living labor power materialized within the means of production.  Chris Harman borrows this idea for the title of his very readable and concise summary of neo-liberalism’s current crises: Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx.  Even “post-Marxists” like Negri find this connection (capital and gothic monster) strangely attractive.  Here’s Negri from one his best books/collections, Labor of Dionysus: “Why not, in any case, operate scientifically on this plane, reconstructing the dynamics of domination, the functioning of the State and law, as functions of the absurd and wretched machinations of that which is dead? Vampires and zombies seem more than ever the appropriate metaphors for the rule of capital.”

Given the origins of the pop cult zombie in the horror genres of the 1930s, this kind of “labor” reading makes sense.  It also makes sense existentially – – who hasn’t felt “like a zombie” after a hard work day?  Ironically, these two readings of the zombie focus on the two great poles of capitalist economics: production and consumption.  Zombies are either disfigured emblems of the masses as consumers or grotesque symbols of capitalist labor’s alienation and de-humanization.

Compelling as they are, what both readings tend to miss however is the engine that drives the contemporary zombie flick: the fear of engulfment.  Today’s zombies – – especially compared with the early Hollywood zombies – – pose no danger individually; fear comes when our protagonists – – be they hunkered down in shopping mall, skyscraper, or pub – – are confronted by wave after wave of zombies.  In today’s zombie movie, numerosity counts!  Zombies are the ultimate hydra-headed threat – – they multiply indiscriminately, they coalesce into angry swarms, and they keep on coming.

There is here, I think, a deep connection to the imperialist history of the zombie.  “Exterminate all the brutes,” Kurtz writes in his own epitaph in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  And, from machine-gun toting video gamers to ghurka-knife-wielding Milla Jovovich, the sheer mass of mindless, threatening undead in today’s zombie narrative elicits a similar sentiment and license.  From Haiti to

Vietnam and beyond, the imperialist machine translates cultural difference into not just the less human, but the anti-human.  The zombie genre’s meticulous attention to the means of extermination – – think of Max Brooks’ careful anatomy of anti-zombie weapons in The Zombie Survival Guide or the super-militarized “Dead Reckoning” vehicle in Romero’s Land of the Dead – – reflects the worst of imperialism’s ugly pleasures.

The historical connection between zombies and labor is, perhaps, even more important to the current boom in undead narratives.  In their infinitely pluralizing and massed bodies, as in “Flock of Zombies” above, we can see the zombie as one of today’s most popular avatars of the multitude – – from the streets of Cairo to Seattle and backward in time to San Francisco in 1934.  Today’s zombies flock, pullulate, horde, and swarm.  They are Legion: “Perhaps,” Negri writes of the multitude, “the real threat of this demonic multitude is more metaphysical: since it is at once singular and plural, it destroys numerical distinction itself.”  And, indeed, cross-cutting between the parody of Hitchcock’s Birds (1964) in Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), various zombie hordes, and contemporary street uprisings, we can see that each is fascinated by the image of emergence – – the process whereby complexity emerges from simple and singular behaviors.  The undead thirst for living flesh, and this desire animates, organizes, and creates the agency of the multitude.

This represents more than simply a fear of the crowd or the mob.  The mob’s danger lies in its chaos and irrationality; the zombie multitude’s danger lies in its purposiveness, its implacable ambition.  Mobs radiate and disperse; zombie hordes concentrate and enclose.  Mobs are contingent; zombie masses are inevitable.

The fatality of the zombie multitude implies an even more fundamental connection to capitalist labor.  John Holloway succinctly describes the central antagonism within capital’s relation to labor this way:  “Capital, by its very definition, flees from insubordinate labor power in pursuit of more wealth, but can never escape from its dependence on the subordination of labor.”   In other words, capital both fears and needs living labor.  Even as it produces alienated labor – – mindless, repetitive,  and meaningless, capital flees from the living labor it can never finally enclose and contain.  As in the original zombie flick, White Zombie (1932), capitalism’s ideal worker is the zombie, but zombification can never be complete.  And, so, capital is trapped in a dialectic of fight and flight, subordination and insubordination, that drives it across oceans and continents.

This is the central structure of feeling in today’s zombie narrative – –  the proliferation of zombies grinding against the desperation to escape.  Zombies are not symptoms of consumerism.  Zombie narratives are transcripts of capital’s nightmare of labor, the multitude in their most demonaic aspect.