A stretch of river LX: Inaugural dispatch from the Stretch of River School of the Dismal Science

Note: My computer still needs replacing, but at least it's no longer threatening to crash on me. So, maybe we can limp along here for a while yet.

My sole formal training in economics consists of a single Intro. to Macroeconomics class that I took in college (of which about all I remember are supply/demand curves). However, as you'll see, this isn't about economics per se except in the figurative sense of an intellectual economy--in particular, the one that exists at my place of employ. Yes, wiseacres, I do teach at a community college, but we do have an intellectual economy, even if we don't talk about it in any formal way. Which is part of the point of this post.

Some context first: The combination of Kansas' state budget having an estimated $500 million shortfall for this fiscal year and the state's electorate's having put into office an especially-conservative Republican governor, former U.S. senator Sam Brownback, means that public education will see some funding cuts. My school is better-situated financially than some and so should be okay, but neither are we about to go on a hiring binge, either, despite increasing enrollments.

All of which made my ears perk up the other day when I heard my colleague's outburst from his office: "It's gotta be a grant! It's gotta be!" I wandered over and asked him what was up; he said that the college had just posted job opening notices for not one but two full-time Economics instructors. Yes: Economics. When, from a strictly utilitarian point of view, we could really use a couple more English (or Mathematics or Biology or Chemistry or even (formally-trained) Philosophy or Religion) full-timers. My colleague knows all this; hence his exclamation.

I had class to go to just then, so I couldn't linger. The next day, though, I asked him if he'd found out any more about these mysterious positions; he said No but that he would right then. So, we go to the college's job openings list on the website, and here's what we found, excluding the less-exciting stuff like, you know, salary and such:

Economics Instructor (2 positions)

Full-time

Full-time Economics Instructor will be responsible to teach Economics courses. Knowledge of Austrian Economics expected and preferred. Prospective candidates must be willing to incorporate Austrian capital theory into their macroeconomic classes. Prospective candidates must be skilled in a variety of instructional techniques and technologies, with a demonstrated commitment to student engagement and learning outcomes assessment. May teach evenings and at multiple sites. Teaching experience and Master’s degree required.

(Here's a summation, and here's a detailed discussion of Austrian business-cycle theory (which incorporates capital theory).)

Now, my interest was really piqued.

Those of you who've followed this blog can probably guess that I'm not a fan of (what I understand of) the Austrian School. Not only is it not especially well-regarded as an economic theory, it meshes in distressing ways with other systems of thought (one in particular) that are either (take your pick) laughable or odious but which seem to be making inroads into mainstream conservative politics in this country. I would hope, though, that my eyebrows would raise if the position had specified the hiring of someone committed to Marxist or Chicago School economic theory or was a really big fan of Paul Krugman. It's the specificity of the call that is so odd, especially given that it's a call put out by a community college.

So here's a list of what's at issue for me as an instructor at a community college as regards these announced positions; as you'll see, they overlap, Venn diagram-like:

1) In all our talk as a faculty about assessment and incorporating technology into our teaching and the transferability of courses to in-state 4-year schools (a whole other blog post, I assure you) and all the rest, in my 11 years at my college we have never had a formal, faculty-wide discussion about our sense of ourselves (and I'm including our students here, too) as an intellectual community. Do these new positions signal that we now have such a vision, and will future hires reflect it? Or, will they lead to formal discussions of a vision?

2) If these positions are part of achieving a long-term goal of developing our faculty's intellectual diversity, I'm all for that. As the Wikipedia entry makes clear, the Austrian School has some powerful advocates even if most mainstream economists find their theories suspect; students need to know about these theories (the better to be able to discredit them, I would hope). But that does lead one to wonder whether, as my colleague fantasized, our next hire in Economics will be a Marxist--that is, given that as of right now we offer two courses in Economics, Principles of Microeconomics and Principles of Macroeconomics, how will achieving this intellectual diversity mesh with the larger goals of what are, after all, introductory-level courses?

3) If the answers to my questions are something along the lines of, "The Austrian School bit was just a string attached to some money we're after; no need to be concerned," well, that to my mind begs the question of why I or my colleagues wouldn't or shouldn't be concerned about our particular version of inculcating in our students some sense of what it's like to be engaged in intellectual work. Perhaps the fact that, as I mentioned before, we've not had that sort of discussion as a faculty indirectly answers that question. I would hope not, though; to say that that lack of discussion is its own answer reflects poorly on both our administration and our faculty.

4) Aaaand, I think I'd better stop here for now. As I have stated many times before on this blog, I have deep admiration and respect for my administrators and fellow faculty. To pursue things further here would be purely speculative and potentially unfair to them. But I'll conclude by saying this: I understand and accept and enjoy being part of the roles that community colleges play relative to 4-year schools and the regional economy. Speaking for myself, though, there's a danger in letting our vision of ourselves be determined too much by others (as embodied, for example, by the "student as customer" model of education) and not enough by our sense (not the state's, not would-be donors') of what it means to be educators and how best to model that for our students, no matter their particular ambitions. Part of that would seem to be not being beholden to any one particular ideology--not our own, and especially not that of someone outside the college.

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The "ideology of form" and Go Down, Moses

Hosam Aboul-Ela’s book, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, begins at the same place Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi does: that it might be useful to read Faulkner not as a Modernist or American writer, but as one whose region has much in common with those of other colonized places of the world, what Aboul-Ela calls the Other South. But whereas Glissant limits his discussion to Faulkner as a Caribbean (or Plantation) writer, Aboul-Ela’s range is more global and more overtly materialist in orientation. He uses the work of Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a progenitor of (economic) dependency theory as a starting point for articulating a theory of postcolonial experience that originates in those regions rather than in Europe or the United States. He devotes a little over half his book to laying out the resulting “Mariátegui Tradition” before moving on to reading Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) and Absalom, Absalom! through this critical lens.

Given the orientation of the intellectual tradition of the Other South that Aboul-Ela outlines, it’s understandable why he chooses these works to discuss at length: they are the Faulkner novels that lend themselves most readily to such readings, driven as the plots of each are by the arrival in Mississippi of outsiders and their getting and controlling of property and wealth and the attendant power to the benefit of the Few As Possible and the detriment of local folks. But a chapter section entitled “The Ideology of Faulkner’s Form,” his lead-in to his reading of Absalom, Absalom!, made me curious, in connection with some comments I made here, what Aboul-Ela might have to say about the ideology inherent in Go Down, Moses‘ form. So, I once again mount my GDM hobby-horse.

More here.

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"Ideology of form"

In what sense might one promote a politics when choosing to write, say, a sonnet rather than a blank-verse poem on the same subject, or when making decisions about diction in that poem? Or when a novelist chooses odd, a-chronological arrangements of material, or multiple narrators who speak on behalf of a character who never speaks directly to the reader on his/her own behalf, instead of a conventional, single-voiced narrator relating the story's action in chronological order? Or, for that matter, choosing to write a novel at all?

Reading Hosam Aboul-Ela's intriguing book Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition raises these questions for me--or, rather, reminds me of them--via his discussion of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Along the same lines as Edouard Glissant in his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (which I first posted about here), Aboul-Ela makes the case that Faulkner might be usefully read from what he calls an Other South (roughly, a Third-World) perspective, in that, following historian C. Vann Woodward's argument, the South during Reconstruction and, depending on one's politics, maybe even beyond 1964, was in essence colonized by the United States government, economically as well as politically. Thus, Aboul-Ela argues, perhaps Faulkner's interests and agendas diverge from those of the other "high Modernist" and, for that matter, other American writers he's commonly associated with. He specifically claims that Faulkner's tendency toward novels with multiple narrators seeking to retell, from different perspectives, tales that they themselves know only piecemeal or through hearsay, is at odds with the usual Modernist stance re History but seems to have caused real resonance in later writers of the Other South--not just the Latin American writers Faulkner is usually associated with, but also Arab writers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as writers from the Indian subcontinent. Further, some of these writers claim not to have read Faulkner before they produced their own works which seem, nevertheless, to bear certain resemblances; this presents us with the possibility that people growing up in different cultures that share broad similarities but who otherwise don't know each other may as a result of those similarities create similar sorts of (narrative) art.

Over at Domestic Issue I'll have up a wonkier post that heads in a different direction from the above; but it struck me, as I thought over that phrase "ideology of form" that most of us may wonder why a writer adopts the structure s/he does, but that we wonder, I'd assume, for broadly aesthetic reasons: What does the author gain with this approach? We're all comfortable with the idea that a work's content implies, however indirectly, some sort of politics, but I found myself wondering if those of you out there who are readers have ever wondered whether the form a work takes--the structure the writer gives it--reflects an ideology; that is, a choice of form made for a reasons other than the material presented in the work or for thematic reasons.

Some examples of what I mean:

In the early decades of the novel-as-genre's emergence in English, the cultural élite were extremely dismissive of novels. Who, after all, couldn't write prose narrative? Where was the skill in that? (Consider as well that then, as now, women soon became the primary writers and consumers of novels.) Poetry, because of its long respected tradition and elaborate rules (not just for the various closed forms but for things like the diction deemed appropriate for poetry), was regarded as the king of the literary arts.

During the Harlem Renaissance, writers had lengthy debates among themselves and in print about what form(s) African-American art should take so as to be most faithful to the experience of black people and attract and hold an audience (in those days, mostly white) without pandering to that audience. Some advocated adopting the forms and language of mainstream European poetic tradition; others argued in favor of adapting and inventing poetic forms and language to reflect African-American art forms such as the blues and jazz.

Georg Lukács, a Marxist critic, very much disliked modern novels' stylistic innovations because they represented to him the chief problem of the modern era generally: the dissolution of contemporary society and the growing isolation and even alienation of the individual from society--which, of course, Marxism sought in part to address. Lukács preferred so-called Realist novels, arguing that they adhere most closely to objective reality. On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin's critical writings celebrated precisely that multivoiced quality of the novel, and for the same reason Lukács disliked it: its faithful depiction of life lived in the Here and Now.

Anyway. Some stuff to chew on.

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