Go to graduate school and learn how to write like this:
The linguistic construction of post-capitalist hegemony may be parsed as the invention of print culture.
The eroticization of normative value(s) functions as the conceptual frame for the historicization of the gendered body.
The epistemology of praxis recapitulates the fantasy of linguistic transparency.
...OR save $200,000 and just use this sentence generator.
If someone can spend a weekend with a box of Cliff’s Notes and have only a slightly less conversational knowledge of what you spent 4 years studying, you probably don’t have the most employer friendly degree.
We live in a "cut-paste" culture enabled by technology.
- Lawrence Lessig
The concept of "academic integrity" presupposes wholeness, oneness, "ownness," an identity between the writer and what she or he has written, but this value is not dominant among today's youth. Moral judgments of plagiarism, as we shall see, depend on even more fundamental views of personhood and the relations among selves.
Those motivated by the ethic of "authenticity" insist that their words are theirs alone and that all utterances derive from their own, their singular, their individual, integral truth. Nothing could make them pronounce what is not intended as an expression of their own thoughts and feelings. These authentic selves would never plagiarize because they believe to their core that all they say should be theirs and theirs alone. Their key concepts are own, genuine, essence, integral, means, undivided.
By contrast, those motivated by the ethic of what I call "performance" accept that their behavior is mutable, depending on circumstances. All that matters is the effect of their actions, including their speech and writing. Thus they are not wedded to the notion of a singular relationship between their inner feelings and thoughts and their outer expression. They will say what is expected, whatever suits the occasion, whether it is their personal truth or not. Performance selves say and write whatever works for their practical purposes; it need not belong to them alone. They don't feel a tight connection between their words and their inner being, so they don't sweat it if others use their words or if they use the words of others. For them the notion of "self" is multiple rather than singular and unified. Their key concepts are efficacy, nimbleness, comfort, circumstance, ends, goals.
Technology plays a role in the generational transformation that has occurred between the emphasis on authenticity and the emphasis on performance, but it is not an entirely causal one. The shift from authenticity to performance—with all the accompanying desires for play and so on—has in turn led to the development of certain technological innovations.
The authentic self celebrates uniqueness, individual contribution, essence, fixity, and authorship. It is inner-directed. Its words are its own, and are always meant and sincerely believed. The performance self celebrates collaboration, incorporation, fluidity, appearance. It is goal-oriented. Its words are derived from many different sources and may be spoken or written in earnest or in jest, with conviction or just to get along.
I think it's safe to say that movies have pushed the novel off into the margins of art. The critic Terry Teachout created quite a stir in 1999 when he wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal headlined "How We Get That Story" with the subhead: "Quick: Read a novel or watch a movie? The battle is over. Movies have won." He spoke of "far-reaching changes in the once-privileged place of the novel in American culture." "For Americans under the age of 30," he wrote, "film has largely replaced the novel as the dominant mode of artistic expression" when it comes to "serious storytelling." "It might even be that movies have superseded novels not because Americans have grown dumber but because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology." The Nobel-winning novelist Saul Bellow was sufficiently aroused to write an article for The New York Times going over Teachout's piece point by point. He adopted what has become the familiar fallback position of novelists today when they gather at writers' conferences and bring up the subject, as they, inevitably do, of how irrelevant the popularity of movies and television makes them feel as storytellers. Well, the argument goes, great novels have always had small, special (read: "charmingly aristocratic") audiences. Bellow cited Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby Dick, and, striking his own Twilight of the Gods note, the novels of Proust and Joyce, which "were written in a cultural twilight and were not intended to be read under the blaze and dazzle of popularity." What impressed "the great public" even in the nineteenth century, he argued, was a minor novel like Uncle Tom's Cabin. But if Uncle Tom's Cabin was a minor accomplishment in a literary sense (an eminently disputable proposition, to anyone—Tolstoy, for example, or Edmund Wilson—who has actually read it), our Gotterdammerungisch novelists must still face up to the fact that the same "great public" also adored Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Zola.
Today it is the movie directors and producers, not the novelists, who are themselves excited by the lurid carnival of American life at this moment, in the here and now, in all its varieties. It is the movie directors, and producers not the novelists, who can't wait to head out into that raucous rout, like the Dreisers, Lewises, and Steinbecks of the first half of the twentieth century, and see it for themselves. It is the movie directors and producers not the novelists, who today have the instincts of reporters, the curiosity, the vitality, the joie de vivre, the drive, the energy to tackle any subject, head out onto any terrain, no matter how far it may be removed from their own experience—often because it is so far removed from their own experience and they can't wait to see it for themselves. As a result, the movie, not the novel, became the great naturalistic storytelling medium of the late twentieth century. Movies can be other things, but they are inherently naturalistic—and I suggest that this is precisely what their audiences adore most about them: their intense realism.
Movies are team enterprises, the work of entire troupes of story creators, scene and wardrobe designers, technicians, and actors, most of them, even the actors, imbued with a reportorial zeal, an urge to get things right, and none of them daunted by their ignorance—this is entirely to their credit— of what they might be getting into. A producer at United Artists who knew nothing about the Nashville country music scene importuned a director, Robert Altman, to make a movie about it. He knew nothing about it, either, and wasn't interested at first, but undertook the project anyway, assembled a team, and got interested. The team apparently started with written sources such as William Price Fox's Ruby Red, headed for Nashville, took a look for themselves, talked to one and all, and produced Nashville. The director Oliver Stone's movie, Platoon, about the war in Vietnam, was based on his own experience but thereafter, without the slightest hesitation, he plunged into subject after subject about which he knew nothing, including, lately, the world of professional football, resulting in the extraordinary Any Given Sunday. The director Francis Ford Coppola knew nothing about war, let alone about the war in Vietnam, but was nonetheless determined to make what became Apocalypse Now. So he signed on a writer who did know about war, John Milius, assembled a team that spent a year doing the research and reporting to get it right, and the result was a masterpiece. The director Spike Lee, famous for his movies about black life in America, turned to Jimmy Breslin and other sources to document a largely white world to make Summer of Sam, a brilliant naturalistic movie capturing New York City's sweltering Zeitgeist of fear and pornoviolent excitement during the summer of 1977, when a publicity-crazed serial killer known as "Son of Sam" was on a rampage.
Terry Teachout argued that movies had won the battle for a story-hungry young public "because the novel is an obsolete artistic technology." Bellow chided Teachout for "this emphasis on technics that attract the scientific-minded young," since to treat the experience of reading a great novel in technological terms was to miss the point. But I personally find it highly instructive to treat the naturalistic novel as a piece of technology. After all, it was an invention—and a rather recent one, at that. Four specific devices give the naturalistic novel its "gripping," "absorbing" quality: (1) scene-by-scene construction, i.e., telling the story by moving from scene to scene rather than by resorting to sheer historical narrative; (2) the liberal use of realistic dialogue, which reveals character in the most immediate way and resonates more profoundly with the reader than any form of description; (3) interior point of view, i.e., putting the reader inside the head of a character and having him view the scene through his eyes; and (4) the notation of status details, the cues that tell people how they rank in the human pecking order, how they are doing in the struggle to maintain or improve their position in life or in an immediate situation, everything from clothing and furniture to accents, modes of treating superiors or inferiors, subtle gestures that show respect or disrespect— "dissing," to use a marvelous new piece of late-twentieth-century slang—the entire complex of signals that tell the human beast whether it is succeeding or failing and has or hasn't warded off that enemy of happiness that is more powerful than death: humiliation.
In using the first two of these devices, scene-by-scene construction and dialogue, movies have an obvious advantage; we actually see the scenes and hear the words. But when it comes to putting the viewer inside the head of a character or making him aware of life's complex array of status details, the movies have been stymied. In attempting to create the interior point of view, they have tried everything, from the use of a voice-over that speaks the character's thoughts, to subtitles that write them out, to the aside, in which the actor turns toward the camera in the midst of a scene and simply says what he's thinking. They have tried putting the camera on the shoulder of the actor (Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend), so that the audience sees him only when he looks in the mirror, and having him speak his thoughts in voice-over. But nothing works; nothing in all the motion-picture arts can put you inside the head, the skin, the central nervous system of another human being the way a realistic novel can. The movies are not much better with status details. When it comes time to deal with social gradations, they are immediately reduced to gross effects likely to lapse into caricature at any moment: the house that is too grand or too dreadful, the accent that is too snobbish or too crude.
Which brings us to another major shortcoming of the movies as a technology: they have a hard time explaining…anything, They are a time-driven medium compelled by their very nature to produce a constant flow of images. Three movies have been made from things I've written, and in each case I was struck by how helpless perfectly talented people were when it came time to explain…anything…in the midst of that vital flow, whether it be the mechanics and aerodynamics of a rocket-assisted airplane or the ins and outs of racial politics in the Bronx. When a moviegoer comes away saying, "It wasn't nearly as good as the novel," it is almost always because the movie failed in those three areas: failed to make him feel that he was inside the minds of the characters, failed to make him comprehend and feel the status pressures the novel had dealt with, failed to explain that and other complex matters the book had been able to illuminate without a moment's sacrifice of action or suspense. Why is it that movie versions of Anna Karenina are invariably disappointing? After all, Tolstoy put enough action, suspense, and melodrama into Anna Karenina. What is inevitably missing is the play of thoughts and feelings inside the central nervous systems of the novel's six main characters—and Tolstoy's incomparable symphony of status concerns, status competition, and class guilt within Russia's upper orders. Without those things, which even a writer far less gifted than Tolstoy can easily introduce, using the technology of print in a naturalistic novel, Anna Karenina becomes nothing more than soap opera.
The fact is that young people, very much including college students, were inveterate moviegoers during the first half of the twentieth century, too, during the very heyday of the American novel. I know, because I was one of them. We probably spent more time at movies than college students today, because we didn't have television and the Internet as other choices. And new movie directors? We followed them, too, ardently. I can remember the excitement at my university, Washington and Lee, in Lexington, Virginia, when a movie called Fear and Desire, directed by a young man named Stanley Kubrick (and produced by a man who still went by the name of S. P. Eagle instead of Sam Spiegel), arrived at the State Theater. But the Steinbecks, Hemingways, Farrells, and Faulkners were even more exciting. They had it all.
The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs…food. It needs novelists with huge appetites and mighty, unslaked thirsts for…America…as she is right now. It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye. If the ranks of such novelists swell, the world—even that effete corner which calls itself the literary world—will be amazed by how quickly the American novel comes to life. Food! Food! Feed me! is the cry of the twenty-first century in literature and all the so-called serious arts in America. The second half of the twentieth century was the period when, in a pathetic revolution, European formalism took over America's arts, or at least the non-electronic arts. The revolution in the twenty-first century, if the arts are to survive, will have a name to which no ism can be easily attached. It will be called "content." It will he called life, reality, the pulse of the human beast.
Recently, I came across a woman at one of our top universities who taught a course in Feminist theory and gave her students F's if they spelled the plural of the female of the species "women" on a test or in a paper. She insisted on "womyn," since the powers that be, at some point far back in the mists of history, had built male primacy into the very language itself by making "women" 60 percent "men." How did the students react? They shrugged. They have long since learned the futility of objecting to Rococo Marxism. They just write "womyn" and go about the business of grinding out a credit in the course.
The undisputed queen of feminist theory is Judith Butler, a forty four-year-old Hegel scholar with a Ph.D. from Yale, who is also known as the diva of Queer Studies. She is small and not very prepossessing, but graduate students all over the country say "diva" at the mere mention of her name. A group of them put out a fan magazine called Judy! devoted to chronicling the way she rams home her "performativity" theory of speech and sexual behavior as forms of anarchy.
"All gender roles are an imitation for which there is no original," runs her most famous paradox. She is even more famous for her convoluted Theoryese. In 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature named her winner of their Bad Writing Contest for a sentence that began "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation....—and went on for fifty-nine words more.
Her zine fans love the insouciant yet erudite way she dismisses such attacks. "Ponderousness," she says, referring to Hegel, "is part of the phenomenological challenge of the text."
Too much of the university today is caught up in the trendy leftist strain of feminism and Third Worldism. For example, some feminists will say we shouldn't read the classics because women didn't write them. Or a University of California committee on general education strongly objects to requiring that American History and democratic tradition be taught to undergraduates, but easily agrees to a proposal to teach all students "global interdependence." In the name of respecting pluralism, intellectuals are reluctant to support the idea of common human truths.
I have even heard people comment that Abraham Lincoln did not speak as an American, but as a white Protestant male; or that Martin Luther King Jr. spoke only as a black male. One student of Hispanic origin recently remarked, "I can't read Freud because its not my culture." Well, Freud's truths are about more than one culture; they're about how human beings operate. And Lincoln's and King's ideas are the very stuff of our civic tradition.
Radical individualism, reinforced by a university hostile to common human truth, results in young peole who have no ability to make relationships and connect to some broader social purpose. They are steeped in an ethical relativism which prevents them from looking to a standard outside their immediate lives and peer groups for guidance. This state of affairs, in turn, leads to anomie, apathy and even anarchy in our society, and a susceptibility to totalitarian solutions. If there are no standards that are worthwhile, if there are no traditions, if there is no wisdom of the past, that is cultural suicide.
Praise of the Great Books in no way discourages the study of other cultures which may indeed deserve even greater coverage than they now have. There have been great civilizations in China, India, Japan, Egypt, Persia, Turkey, in the Inca and Mayan civilizations of the Americas, etc. There is Buddism, Hinduism, and Islamic religion. These things all deserve to be part of a serious curriculum. And their study will teach the detractors of Western Civilization several valuable lessons. They will learn that all of the above believed in natural inequality, not "structural inequality." They will also learn that only within Western Civilization does one find the principles that attack and invalidate racism, sexism, and other injustices. That one finds injustice in the West is not an argument against the principles of Western Civilization but a sign that many individuals are slaves to their passions, emotions, and prejudices, and impervious to the liberating and emancipating influence of reason.
If its detractors return to Western Civilization with an open mind, they will even find an attack on sexism, classism and other injustices as early as Plato's Republic, an argument for complete equality of the sexes and the abolition of private property. The Republic also presents an argument that maintains that only Reason entitles one to rule, not race, sex or social class. Taking Western Civilization seriously will also demonstrate that in all non-Western civilizations there is substantial cultural homogeneity. This is precisely because non-Western cultures are "closed." Closure is what binds all culture not influenced by Greek thought and/or the Bible. Only a Westener would feel guilty about being told he or she was ethnocentric—another favorite buzz word along with such other popular "centrisms" as phono-, logo-, and phallo-. If we were to tell a Mayan, pigmy, or aborigine that he is ethnocentric we would be met with incomprehension; "our ways are the way of the universe." Even if one could explain the concept ethnocentrism, the response would be, of course we are ethnocentric, that is what it means to have a culture. However, closure is a vice if one happens to be a proponent of Western Civilization—then one is chided for being insufficiently "open." These are the issues to which the study of the Great Books will alert us.
“I’ve never been an advocate of people going back to school and incurring large amounts of educational debt just to have a degree. [...] I’m very interested in what the long term developments are going to be because I think that higher education has been resistant to really fundamental types of innovation and change for far too long. We’ve seen information technology sweep every other industry and raise productivity and raise the potential of what you can accomplish. I think that in higher ed, they’re still working off a 14th century model. It’s lecture classes and it’s seminars and it’s educational requirements that don’t necessarily match where the jobs are these days. So, I think that you’re going to see a lot more students and families re-evaluating the other options out there; whether that be online education, vocational programming, certification programs, or programs that are run by employers. I think it’s actually going to be a fantastic area of growth for the next decade and a half or so.”
“People are going to grad school for stuff that has no bearing on the workplace. It’s not like we have more critical thinking because somebody knows the history of the little War of the Roses, right? And so, who cares? I don’t see any corporation placing a premium on any kind of graduate degree, except a top 25 business school degree. I mean most MBAs are from shitty schools so they don’t place a premium on that. Most law schools are shitty and people have to go into some other profession besides law because their degree is so bad. If you get a Masters in French and then try to get a marketing position, you’re penalized. You’re actually penalized because you look like you don’t have a clue about how to manage your life because you just spent four years learning French and you’re not using it. To me that just screams obsessive with details, scared to go out into the job market, and purposeless. I mean, I just don’t think anyone is placing a premium on graduate degrees.”
The reasons not to go to grad school:
Here Anthony Kronman describes the value of treating higher education not as a tool for career advancement but to have the freedom and resources to think about how life should be lived and by what standards. To me, his argument can be applied to self-education after college as well and the importance of making the time to do it:
College is for many a time to prepare for their careers. It is, in fact, the first stage of their careers, a period of preliminary academic training to be followed by other forms of training or by work itself. For those who approach it with this goal in mind, their college education has a clear and measurable value. It contributes in a direct way to the achievement of an already-fixed objective. But its value depends upon the determinacy of the goal toward which it is directed. For others, who are less sure what they want to do or be, for whom the question of how they should spend their lives is a more open one, a college education can be of value for a different reason. It can help them meet the challenge of gaining a deeper insight into their own commitments, of refining for themselves the picture of a life that has purpose and value, of a life that is worth living and not just successful in the narrower sense of achievement in a career.
For undergraduates who approach their studies in a state of curiosity or confusion about these things, a college education can help them find their bearings. It can help them confront the question, which comes before all vocational training and goes beyond any answer that such training can supply, of what living itself is for.
And if it succeeds in doing this, even modestly and incompletely, their education has for them a value very different from the value it has for those who come to college with their expectations fixed. Indeed, it has a value of an opposite sort, for it is the very absence of those settled goals that give all vocational education its utility that makes the question of what living is for so important.
To have the freedom to pursue this question for a period of time in early adulthood is a great luxury. Many cannot afford it. The demands of life press too insistently for them to give the question its due. And some of those who have the time choose not to use it for this purpose. They are distracted or incurious. But for more than a few, who have both the freedom and the inclination, college is a time to explore the meaning of life with an openness that becomes harder to preserve the further one enters into the responsibilities of adulthood, with their many entanglements. College is a time for other things too, but it is also a time to survey, with as open a mind as one can manage, the horizons of the stirring and mysterious venture in which, by the age of eighteen or twenty, an attentive young person will have begun to grasp that he or she, like every human being, is fatefully engaged. For those who see the value of this survey, and have the time to make it, a college education affords an opportunity that may not come again. And however few they are in number or in proportion to the student population as a whole, it seems natural to regard this opportunity as a very great good that we would wish others to share and regret if they can’t for lack of money or time.
