#part of an assignment was to give it the essay question and critique what it came out with

[dragonroilz]

Hey there! I've come across your art ever since I got into Risk of Rain 2 (better late than never, I've been sleeping on this game for years, jesus), and I'm enamoured with it, to say the least. Is there any advice you could perhaps give for an aspiring artist?

you're getting an essay whether you like it or not.

tl;dr of it if you dont want to read

- learn how to take critique

- dont skip fundamentals

- tracing is okay*

- be mindful when drawing

- you wont see good results for a long time

ok firstly, glad you like my art! i try my best on pretty much everything i make so the compliment is greatly appreciated!!

secondly, you have NO clue how much i love yapping about how to draw. im not an expert on how-to-draw-ology but i like to think i know enough to help other people not swing in the dark when it comes to getting better.

learning how to take criticism is THE most important part. not getting butthurt or at least listening to peoples critiques when they mean well is critical to improvement because its specialized advice for you. you have no clue how many young and/or new artists have gotten mad at me for giving critique when they specifically asked me for it. if youre looking to improve you gotta bite that bullet. not all criticism is valid(dont listen to people who are just tryna make you upset), but good and valid criticism can come from anyone. dont unvalidate someone's critique just because theyre not an artist or "not as good" as you. try and get as much feedback as you can and move onto the next piece instead of fixing something to perfection. you will get obsessed in a very destructive way.

learning fundamentals is another step to getting better. that means actually learning perspective, hands, anatomy, and all of the other stuff people hate drawing. its like lifting weights. most people dont like it but if you want to get stronger you need to put in the time to do the painful stuff.

chris christodoulou(ror's composer) actually made a similar comment about the topic of improvement in his field that was along the lines of "if you want to write music, stop playing video games and read a book". he got a lot of shit for saying that but honestly its true.

you need to treat art as a discipline if you want to get better at it. draw as much as you can for as long as you can before it becomes a health hazard. when im not resting i tend to draw at least three hours a day, not counting the 3 to 6 hours additional hours a day i draw during college. obviously a beginner doesn't need to draw that much but drawing daily is a good start.

if you want resources on where to look for fundamentals, Sinixdesign and Ethan Becker were who I turned to for advice that is relevant to the industry. There's definitely others out there but I tend to do more self studying so i don't know the more recent stuff.

something that they'll bring up is that tracing isn't bad AS LONG AS YOU DONT POST IT AND CLAIM IT AS YOUR OWN. it's a good way to see how other people deal with stylization, but its absolutely not okay to post that stuff online. treat it like how traditional painters do master studies. its for your own education, not clout. and you shouldn't be drawing for clout anyway.

last but not least, draw what you love and you'll always love drawing. dont be afraid to hyperfixate and lose interest in things. it will help you continue your art journey. a lot of people in my art school have little to no motivation to draw outside of college because they have no interest in drawing outside of assigned work, which is not a great relationship to have with art if you want to pursue it in the long run. draw what you want to draw when the motivation hits you. if that motivation is risk of rain? draw it. if it's leg muscles then fuck yeah draw that too.

you can stick fundamental practice into your casual art by being mindful of what you are drawing. that can be done by asking questions about what's going on to further the progress of your art. its kind of hard to explain in text, but its basically just keeping in mind how your lines influence the piece.

in the beginning youre going to have ideas and none of them are going to translate to paper. its going to take years before anything will ever compare to whats in your brain and thats just the sucky part. ive been drawing seriously for about 5 or 6 years and theres still a ton of shit i do NOT wanna touch but i have to if i want to improve.

we're all sisyphus pushing that goddamn stupidass boulder and the only thing we can do is acknowledge how far we've come while still knowing that there's more work to be done. but thats kind of the shit that i live for.

[itsawritblr]

Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One.

by Ryan Boudinot.

I recently left a teaching position in a master of fine arts creative-writing program. I had a handful of students whose work changed my life. The vast majority of my students were hardworking, thoughtful people devoted to improving their craft despite having nothing interesting to express and no interesting way to express it. My hope for them was that they would become better readers. And then there were students whose work was so awful that it literally put me to sleep. Here are some things I learned from these experiences.

Writers are born with talent.

Either you have a propensity for creative expression or you don't. Some people have more talent than others. That's not to say that someone with minimal talent can't work her ass off and maximize it and write something great, or that a writer born with great talent can't squander it. It's simply that writers are not all born equal. The MFA student who is the Real Deal is exceedingly rare, and nothing excites a faculty adviser more than discovering one. I can count my Real Deal students on one hand, with fingers to spare.

If you didn't decide to take writing seriously by the time you were a teenager, you're probably not going to make it.

There are notable exceptions to this rule, Haruki Murakami being one. But for most people, deciding to begin pursuing creative writing in one's 30s or 40s is probably too late. Being a writer means developing a lifelong intimacy with language. You have to be crazy about books as a kid to establish the neural architecture required to write one.

If you complain about not having time to write, please do us both a favor and drop out.

I went to a low-residency MFA program and, years later, taught at a low-residency MFA program. "Low-residency" basically means I met with my students two weeks out of the year and spent the rest of the semester critiquing their work by mail. My experience tells me this: Students who ask a lot of questions about time management, blow deadlines, and whine about how complicated their lives are should just give up and do something else. Their complaints are an insult to the writers who managed to produce great work under far more difficult conditions than the 21st-century MFA student. On a related note: Students who ask if they're "real writers," simply by asking that question, prove that they are not.

If you aren't a serious reader, don't expect anyone to read what you write.

Without exception, my best students were the ones who read the hardest books I could assign and asked for more. One student, having finished his assigned books early, asked me to assign him three big novels for the period between semesters. Infinite Jest, 2666, and Gravity's Rainbow, I told him, almost as a joke. He read all three and submitted an extra-credit essay, too. That guy was the Real Deal.

Conversely, I've had students ask if I could assign shorter books, or—without a trace of embarrassment—say they weren't into "the classics" as if "the classics" was some single, aesthetically consistent genre. Students who claimed to enjoy "all sorts" of books were invariably the ones with the most limited taste. One student, upon reading The Great Gatsby (for the first time! Yes, a graduate student!), told me she preferred to read books "that don't make me work so hard to understand the words." I almost quit my job on the spot.

No one cares about your problems if you're a shitty writer.

I worked with a number of students writing memoirs. One of my Real Deal students wrote a memoir that actually made me cry. He was a rare exception. For the most part, MFA students who choose to write memoirs are narcissists using the genre as therapy. They want someone to feel sorry for them, and they believe that the supposed candor of their reflective essay excuses its technical faults. Just because you were abused as a child does not make your inability to stick with the same verb tense for more than two sentences any more bearable. In fact, having to slog through 500 pages of your error-riddled student memoir makes me wish you had suffered more.

You don't need my help to get published.

When I was working on my MFA between 1997 and 1999, I understood that if I wanted any of the work I was doing to ever be published, I'd better listen to my faculty advisers. MFA programs of that era were useful from a professional development standpoint—I still think about a lecture the poet Jason Shinder gave at Bennington College that was full of tremendously helpful career advice I use to this day. But in today's Kindle/e-book/self-publishing environment, with New York publishing sliding into cultural irrelevance, I find questions about working with agents and editors increasingly old-fashioned. Anyone who claims to have useful information about the publishing industry is lying to you, because nobody knows what the hell is happening. My advice is for writers to reject the old models and take over the production of their own and each other's work as much as possible.

It's not important that people think you're smart.

After eight years of teaching at the graduate level, I grew increasingly intolerant of writing designed to make the writer look smart, clever, or edgy. I know this work when I see it; I've written a fair amount of it myself. But writing that's motivated by the desire to give the reader a pleasurable experience really is best. I told a few students over the years that their only job was to keep me entertained, and the ones who got it started to enjoy themselves, and the work got better. Those who didn't get it were stuck on the notion that their writing was a tool designed to procure my validation. The funny thing is, if you can put your ego on the back burner and focus on giving someone a wonderful reading experience, that's the cleverest writing.

It's important to woodshed.

Occasionally my students asked me about how I got published after I got my MFA, and the answer usually disappointed them. After I received my degree in 1999, I spent seven years writing work that no one has ever read—two novels and a book's worth of stories totaling about 1,500 final draft pages. These unread pages are my most important work because they're where I applied what I'd learned from my workshops and the books I read, one sentence at a time. Those seven years spent in obscurity, with no attempt to share my work with anyone, were my training, and they are what allowed me to eventually write books that got published.

Ryan Boudinot is executive director of Seattle City of Literature.

*~*~*~*~*

I agree with all he says except concerning publishing.

This was originally written when it was a strongly held belief that ebooks would replace paper books. Seriously, in 2009-2012 even Barnes & Noble was telling employees they'd better learn how to sell Nooks, because paper books were going to "disappear" within the next 4 years.

Didn't happen, obviously.

Traditional publishing is as it ever was; I've personally never had a problem with it, though I've known people who have (mostly due to shitty editors in smaller presses). As for Kindle/e-book/self-publishing, I don't do that, so I can't tell you anything about it (except negative stuff from people I know who've done it and regret it).

But I will add, and this is important:

YOU DON'T NEED AN MFA TO BE A TRADITIONALLY PUBLISHED WRITER.

IN FACT, YOU'RE WASTING YOUR FUCKING MONEY IF YOU DO GET AN MFA.

You can learn all you need to know about writing well without a degree. Shit, I don't even have a high school diploma (dropped out at 16).

MFA teachers promise you'll learn to write so well you'll be published faster than people without a degree. *BUZZER* Wrong!

An MFA is NO guarantee that you'll be published. Publishers are looking for work that will sell -- they're a for-profit business -- not necessarily work that's well written by a literary POV. If your book is pretty well written but publishers don't think anyone will like it enough to lay out money for it, they won't be interested.

And an MFA doesn't mean you have talent. Colleges and universities who have MFAs in Writing are looking for your $$$. They're not about to turn you down. And professors aren't keen on actually flunking anyone. As Ryan Boudinot says, as a teacher he wouldn't tell you that you don't have a lick of talent. I mean, they want more students coughing up thousands of dollars to get an MFA, and that can't happen if students bad-mouth the degree and teachers for telling them the truth that they should become attorneys or retail managers or baristas. (I'm looking at you, Hamline, Carleton.)

Another nugget they don't tell you is, on average a professional writer earns, after taxes, $3000 to $6000 a year. If you want an MFA because you're convinced you're gonna be the next bestselling NYT author,

Even if you do become a pro, it will take years and years to pay off your MFA student debt. Which means you'll need a day job, just like 99% of all pros.

So instead of going into debt for most of your life, don't get an MFA. Have a day job you like and meanwhile learn to write well the way people have done since before anyone ever heard of an MFA.

[c0rpsedemon]

i am curious, as someone who’s only exposure to arthurania was reading jane yolen’s young merlin as a child, would you mind saying why hnoc is a bad adaptation? i’m super curious but no worries if not <3

this has been sitting in my inbox for months bc i kept telling myself i needed to write a full essay with proof from medieval lit to make myself feel smarter.  however, since i’ve recently lost all credibility bc i can’t articulate points to save my life, and since i’ve realized that i could answer this in a just a couple paragraphs, now seems like the right time to answer this ask. sorry for the wait.

under a cut bc length

also warnings for mentions of racism bc this is hnoc we're talking abt and sexual assault bc this is med lit we're also talking abt

the basic problems are pendragon polycule itself, the story beats of the album, the fridging and lack of characterization of morgan le fay, the clear influence of pop culture arthuriana, and whatever the fuck happened with gawain/e.

pendragon polycule is... just not a good take.  there’s a bit in the lancelot-grail abt arthur viewing lancelot like a son (and lancelot not giving a shit abt him).  also arthur knew his parents for years before lancelot was even born.  plus lancelot just Doesn’t care abt him and i can’t stress this part enough.  arthur repeatedly tries to have guinnevere killed, mostly in the lancelot-grail, and guinn didn’t really have any say in marrying him bc she was a teenager.  lancelot and guinnevere is a lot better but that’s not saying much.  guinn doesn’t exactly treat lancelot too well... like at all, BUT it’s not intrinsic to their relationship and is completely caused by medieval misogyny and i’m all in favor of modern retellings saying fuck that.  but also lancelot has multiple pseudo-canon boyfriends (this is med lit after all), and one pseudo-canon husband so like... there were better options.  (also lancelot’s husband is basically in a lavender marriage with guinnevere’s maybe girlfriend who most authors just eventually forget abt as the story progresses).

this next one is a problem with a lot of modern arthurian works bc the inclusion of elayne of astolat is too much to ask apparently.  the grail quest isn’t tied to the fall of camelot, it just happens to be one of the last grand adventures the knights of the round table have.  the event that traditionally sets off the fall is the death of the maiden of astolat/the lady of shalott/elayne of escolat/she has a lot of names, her story has a few variations but usually she either is cursed to stay in a tower and weave and only be able to see the outside world through a mirror positioned across from her window, until lancelot rides by and she rushes to see him out of the actual window and her mirror shatters, setting off her death, or she lives with her father and brothers and takes care of lancelot bc he was injured for a time and she gets to go on adventures to find him and she’s friends with gawaine and she dies bc lancelot rejects her and this version’s a lot more fun but also more happens which makes it harder to explain.  the way her story ends however, is that she dies after she makes arrangements for a glorious boat to drift from astolat to camelot carrying nothing but her dead body and a letter explaining that she died of love for lancelot du lac and the court mourns the death of such a beautiful and young maiden (her age varies a lot but i’ve always read her as a young teenager at most).  but the important thing is, camelot is doomed from the moment she washes up on its shore bc she’s an omen of the end and has symbolic meaning and all that, the maiden of astolat washes up on camelot’s shores, the court mourns the loss of a maiden in her prime and she marks the end of camelot’s prime as well, morgan le fay reappears after being presumed dead and warns arthur of guinnevere and lancelot’s affair, aggravaine and modred conspire to bring lancelot and guinnevere’s affair to light, they succeed but lancelot escapes, guinnevere is to be burnt at the stake and lancelot rescues her, killing aggravaine, gaheris and gareth (gawaine’s brothers) in the process, gawaine drags his uncle and camelot to war bc he was driven mad due to the loss of his brothers, lancelot accidentally kills gawaine, his best friend and maybe boyfriend (i have RECEIPTS), and gawaine forgives him on his detahbed while lancelot and guinn rejoin arthur, meanwhile modred, who practically had the throne handed to him, usurps and invites the saxons in, camlann happens, and camelot is destroyed.  no where in there is the grail quest.

morgan le fay is honestly the most questionable part of the album bc there’s not a single text where she dies.  like....  at least with eurydice in udad she died in the original... there’s no basis for morgan dying.  also she is NOT modred’s mother and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, she interacts with him once in the vulgate bc she had three of her nephews over and that’s IT.  it’s a horrible take which originated in the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley who is an honest to god monster for reasons i don’t want to trigger tag this post for.  also she’s one of the most dynamic and thought-out characters in the entire canon and they just made her a watered down morgause (modred’s actual mother, morgan’s sister, canonical milf)... there was no reason for it to be her apart from the fact that she’s more well known......

pop culture arthuriana is,,, one of my least favorite things.  no, morgan wasn’t modred’s mother, no, morgause wasn’t abusive but her husband sure was implied to be, no, aggravaine didn’t kill his mother, that was gaheris, he loved his mother, you’re only saying that bc he has a reputation as the “evil” orkney, no, the once and future king is not a good descriptor for arthur, stop making me read it, no, morgause wasn’t the one to initiate the thing with arthur resulting in modred, no, lancelot and arthur weren’t friends, no, tristan wasn’t a self-centered asshole, tennyson is a fucking liar, no, galahad didn’t have sex or want to, he’s one of the first ever explicitly asexual characters out there, no, galahad’s conception was NOT consensual, lancelot was tricked, and no, elayne of astolat wasn’t galahad’s mother, she’s implied to be younger than him.  those are just the big glaring ones, but i swear it’s bc of arthuriana’s reputation as a mythology and the connotations belonging to that word (no one true canon (which is true but there are still things that just AREN’T canon, not completely written down, passed by oral tradition) that causes ppl to see mediocre modern texts and go “oh. well this is abt as close to the original as i’m going to get” and don’t bother to look into so much as malory (who i only name bc he’s one of the most well known medieval authors with the most commonly used storylines, don’t read malory kids, he’s a mediocre-at-best writer even by medieval standards).  the big perpetrators of modern arthurian tropes are the books the once and future king by th wh*te, who is a shitty person and lets it bleed into his writing (which isn’t like... nice to read or anything, seriously why do ppl love this book so much it doesn’t have redeeming qualities), and the mists of avalon by marion zimmer bradley (it’s poorly written, the story is a mess, and mzb is honestly a monster and one google search will tell you that), and unfortunately the writings of tennyson, which are mostly good but he clearly didn’t read the povest (a later text that’s also my favorite, known for significantly improving ppl’s opinions on tristan, isolde and co.) before deciding he hated both tristan and isolde and he has HORRIBLE takes on them.  high noon over camelot is SEEPED in pop culture arthuriana and i think it would have been so much better if the band had read so much as a SUMMARY of the events of le morte.  it’s evident in the song “the once and future king” bc it’s,,,, literally named after one of the worst books in existence.  it’s shown in the morgan le fay thing, and it’s shown in the pendragon polycule thing.  and hell, i think you can even explain away the lack of elayne of astolat with pop culture arthuriana, bc ppl have had bad takes on her ever since th wh*te combined her character with that of ela*ne of corbenic, and the band probably went “huh, let’s write lancelot’s abuser out of this” and they would’ve been right to do so if that’s who elayne of astolat was.

the final big issue is gawaine, the closest thing the genre has to a protagonist, he’s pretty much canon bi and, in some texts, arospec, he’s a dashing knight of great reknown and he derails every romance to steal hearts, commit murder, and make out with every knight and lady mentioned.  and in hnoc he’s... racist.  that’s it.  it’s,,, almost completely unfounded by the arthurian canon and shows a major misunderstanding of his motivations (like i said earlier, he wants to avenge his brothers bc there’s a reoccuring motif of how much the orkneys value family).  i say almost bc in one text it’s his motivations for killing palomydes but i’ve never heard it mentioned by name bc that’s just what it’s known for.  most arthuriana fans just look away from it except when critiquing hnoc but that one text is an outlier, shouldn’t be counted, and i highly doubt the mechs made hnoc gawain how he is bc they found this text.  it’s just a bad text.

hnoc has,,, quite a few more minor issues, such as villainized ladies of the lake (their ONLY crimes were sealing away merlin bc he tried to assault teenage nimue/ninniane (proto-nimue/vivianne from the vulgate), and that one time vivviane/ninniane kidnapped adopted baby lancelot), assigning brain to merlin (y’know,,, the predator who helped arrange the [redacted] of arthur’s mother and tried to assault a teenager,,,) although merlin is portrayed in a positive light throughout modern arthuriana so i don’t think they knew, giving a song to pellinore, who my perception of has been forever altered bc i was introduced to him through malory and the explanation of torre’s conception, which you can just look up “sir torre arthurian” to find out abt if you can’t just Guess, if they wanted a song abt the questing beast palomydes was Right There AND has been associated with the questing beast for longer, but once again i don’t think they knew.

also namedropping a bunch of knights in the fiction is... it Suggests a bigger world full of all these other stories but they just don’t work bc the world of hnoc wasn’t designed in a way where the appearance of half these characters would make sense.  like,, tristan is referenced as dying in the grail quest in the same sentence as bedevere (one of the characters who is known for almost always surviving), but tristan Isn’t one of the knights who dies on the grail quest, his possible deaths (ignoring the potentially happy ending of the povest for a second) are either being murdered by his uncle, king mark (bc mark married tristan’s gf to try and get tristan killed and also to spite him), bc he was driven into a fury bc of tristan and isolde’s affair, or he’s injured and only isolde (the best healer in the world) can save him so he sends for her and if the ship he sent for her is supposed to fly white sails if she’s there, or black sails if she’s not, and the ship flies white sails but his wife (also named isolde) says it’s black sails (the why depends but usually comes down to jealousy), and so he gives up bc he thinks all hope is lost and usually succumbs to his injuries, either way isolde dies of a broken heart over his body.  there’s no way for the tristan and isolde story to play out like it’s supposed to in the world of hnoc, just as there’s no way for any story with gawaine (and Oh Boy are there a lot of stories with gawaine) or pretty much anyone else, without severely altering the canon.

of course, there are still parts of hnoc i like a lot, most of the music i adore and i just like the idea of space cowboys and the secret good hnoc that lives in my head.  and it has one of my favorite characterizations of galahad, even though galahad hnoc is nothing like galahad arthuriana.  it’s not GOOD but i like it and it’s fun to turn my brain off too, and i’ll always value it as my introduction to arthuriana.

also there are modern arthurian tropes i do like such as characters being genre-savvy/knowing they’re fictional/knowing they’ve done this before (which hnoc does wonderfully!) and bedevere-as-the-storyteller (everyone say thank you lord tennyson).

WOW that was longer than expected, i feel very passionately abt this, when i was planning to write a fully sourced essay i meant to include a bit at the bottom with recommendations to get into better arthuriana and i think i’ll keep that in this post.

if you like hnoc for the arthurian music i’d like to suggest heather dale’s arthurian music to you, she does occasionally fall into the trap of modern arthuriana (some parts of lancelot and arthur being close, morgan as modred’s mother), sometimes she’s just wrong (galahad at lancelot’s trial, a lot of tristan and isolde), and her stuff is kinda straightwashed sometimes (sir gawain and the green knight, for example) but i’d be lying if it wasn’t catchy, and it’s not quite as bad as hnoc adaptation-wise.  culwch and olwen is pretty accurate (albeit abridged bc culwch and olwen has SO many tangents), as is lily maid (it’s abt elayne of astolat!).

if you liked hnoc for king arthur... in space! then may i recommend to you my own fanfic? it's not posted yet but the second i finish writing the first chapter i'm going to make a Big Deal out of it that'll be impossible to miss!

if you want to learn abt arthuriana through tumblr-osmosis like i did at first, i’d like to recommend the love of my life @acegalahads, first and foremost (it’s me on a sideblog i’m just obsessed with myself), and i can’t recommend my arthuriana mutuals over there, @/gringolet, @/merlinenthusiast, @/jcbookworm, @/elayneofshalott, and @/elaineofascolat (the elayne urls have been popular recently), also i know for a fact that my mutual-in-law, @/itonje makes great arthuriana posts that i look forwards to whenever i open the tag.

here are a few good reference posts, a quick guide to the characters, a guide to characters of color, and a much more comprehensive intro to arthuriana post with even more texts linked to it.

if you want to ease into med lit, i’d like to introduce you to pre-raphaelite poetry, alfred lord tennyson and william morris are my favorites, although tennyson can’t be trusted with tristan and isolde.  the poem the lady of shalott is basically a rite of passage for arthuriana fans, although when it comes to tennyson’s writings abt elayne of astolat, i prefer lancelot and elaine, which is part of his much larger story, idylls of the king.  for morris, don’t trust what he says abt aggravaine killing his mother, but my favorites of his are sir galahad, a christmas mystery, which sounds like a shitty disney sequel, and palomyde’s quest, which i blame for my love of palomydes (that and the one bit of the povest where he asks tristan to be his greatest enemy and that he wants nothing more, gay ppl,,,,).

if you want to read abt lancelot and his husband, there’s the lancelot-grail cycle, which i believe was taken off of archive dot org and i think i found it on @/tobeisexhausting’s blog but don’t quote me on that.

the povest, which was a religious experience for me and i can’t reccomend enough if you want to like tristan and isolde, is here, i don’t know who scanned it but i think i found it on @/lanzelet’s blog

the dutch texts are just good in general, here’s a link to their section of a(n unfinished) site for hosting various texts by my former mutual @/reynier (who’s no longer on tumblr).  i’d like to recommend lancelot and the white hart specifically bc it’s mainly just just gawaine being gay for lancelot.

if you want older works, here’s my scan of the history of the kings of britain, and here’s culwch and olwen and pa gur.

oh wow this is even longer than i thought it would be so i’m going to wrap this up by saying that i always love to talk abt arthuriana more than anything if you have any questions or just are curious!

[ill-will-editions]

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CURRENT PANDEMIC FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF IVAN ILLICH

David Cayley

Last week I began an essay on the current pandemic in which I tried to address what I take to be the central question that it raises:  Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have?  Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable?  Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?  I hadn’t been writing for long before I began to realize that many of the assumptions I was making were quite remote from those being expressed all around me.  These assumptions had mainly come, I reflected, from my prolonged conversation with the work of Ivan Illich.  What this suggested was that, before I could speak intelligibly about our present circumstances, I would first have to sketch the attitude towards health, medicine and well-being that Illich developed over a lifetime of reflection on these themes.  Accordingly, in what follows, I will start with a brief account of the evolution of Illich’s critique of bio-medicine and then try to answer the questions I just posed in this light..

At the beginning of his 1973 book Tools of Conviviality, Illich described what he thought was the typical course of development followed by contemporary institutions, using medicine as his example.  Medicine, he said, had gone through “two watersheds.”  The first had been crossed in the early years of the 20th century when medical treatments became demonstrably effective and benefits generally began to exceed harms.  For many medical historians this is the only relevant marker – from this point on progress will proceed indefinitely, and, though there may be diminishing returns, there will be no point, in principle, at which progress will stop.  This was not the case for Illich.  He hypothesized a second watershed, which he thought was already being  crossed and even exceeded around the time he was writing.  Beyond this second watershed, he supposed, what he called counterproductivity would set in – medical intervention would begin to defeat its own objects, generating more harm than good.  This, he argued, was characteristic of any institution, good or service – a point could be identified at which there was enough of it and, after which, there would be too much.  Tools for Conviviality, was an attempt to identify these “natural scales” – the only such general and programmatic search for a philosophy of technology that Illich undertook.

Two years later in Medical Nemesis – later renamed, in its final and most comprehensive edition, Limits to Medicine – Illich tried to lay out in detail the goods and the harms that medicine does.  He was generally favourable to the large-scale innovations in public health that have given us good food, safe water, clean air, sewage disposal etc.  He also praised efforts then underway in China and Chile to establish a basic medical toolkit and pharmacopeia that would be available and affordable for all citizens, rather than allowing medicine to develop luxury goods that would remain forever out of reach of the majority.  But the main point of his book was to identify and describe the counterproductive effects that he felt were becoming evident as medicine crossed its second watershed.  He spoke of these fall-outs from too much medicine as iatrogenesis, and addressed them under three headings: clinical, social and cultural.  The first everyone, by now, understands – you get the wrong diagnosis, the wrong drug, the wrong operation, you get sick in hospital etc.  This collateral damage is not trivial.  An article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus – Rachel Giese, “The Errors of Their Ways, April 2012 – estimated 7.5% of the Canadians admitted to hospitals every year suffer at least one “adverse event” and 24,000 die as a result of medical mistakes. Around the same time, Ralph Nader, writing in Harper’s Magazine, suggested that the number of people in the United States who die annually as a result of preventable medical errors is around 400,000.  This is an impressive number, even if exaggerated – Nader’s estimate is twice as high per capita as The Walrus’s – but this accidental harm was not, by any means, Illich’s focus.  What really concerned him was the way in which excessive medical treatment weakens basic social and cultural aptitudes.  An instance of what he called social iatrogenesis is the way in which the art of medicine, in which the physician acts as healer, witness, and counsellor, tends to give way to the science of medicine, in which the doctor, as a scientist, must, by definition, treat his or her patient as an experimental subject and not as a unique case.  And, finally, there was the ultimate injury that medicine inflicts: cultural iatrogenesis.  This occurs, Illich said, when cultural abilities, built up and passed on over many generations, are first undermined and then, gradually, replaced altogether.  These abilities include, above all, the willingness to suffer and bear one’s own reality, and the capacity to die one’s own death.  The art of suffering was being overshadowed, he argued, by the expectation that all suffering can and should be immediately relieved – an attitude which doesn’t, in fact, end suffering but rather renders it meaningless, making it merely an anomaly or technical miscarriage.   And death, finally, was being transformed from an intimate, personal act – something each one can do – into a meaningless defeat – a mere cessation of treatment or “pulling the plug,” as is sometimes heartlessly said.  Behind Illich’s arguments lay a traditional Christian attitude.  He affirmed that suffering and  death are inherent in the human condition – they are part of what defines this condition.  And he argued that the loss of this condition would involve a catastrophic rupture both with our past and with our own creatureliness.  To mitigate and ameliorate the human condition was good, he said.  To lose it altogether was a catastrophe because we can only know God as creatures – i.e. created or given beings – not as gods who have taken charge of our own destiny.

Medical Nemesis is a book about professional power – a point on which it’s worth dwelling for a moment in view of the extraordinary powers that are currently being asserted in the name of public health.  According to Illich, contemporary medicine, at all times, exercises political power, though this character may be hidden by the claim that all that is being asserted is care.  In the province of Ontario where I live, “health care” currently gobbles up more than 40% of the government’s budget, which should make the point clearly enough.  But this everyday power, great as it is, can be further expanded by what Illich calls “the ritualization of crisis.”  This confers on medicine “a license that usually only the military can claim.”  He continues:

Under the stress of crisis, the professional who is believed to be in command can easily presume immunity from the ordinary rules of justice and decency.  He who is assigned control over death ceases to be an ordinary human…Because they form a charmed borderland not quite of this world, the time-span and the community space claimed by the medical enterprise are as sacred as their religious and military counterparts.

In a footnote to this passage Illich adds that “he who successfully claims power in an emergency suspends and can destroy rational evaluation.  The insistence of the physician on his exclusive capacity to evaluate and solve individual crises moves him symbolically into the neighborhood of the White House.”  There is a striking parallel here with the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s claim in his Political Theology that the hallmark of true sovereignty is the power to “decide on the exception.”  Schmitt’s point is that sovereignty stands above law because in an emergency the sovereign can suspend the law – declare an exception - and rule in its place as the very source of law.   This is precisely the power that Illich says the physician “claims…in an emergency.”  Exceptional circumstances make him/her “immune” to the “ordinary rules” and able to make new ones as the case dictates.  But there is an interesting and, to me, telling difference between Schmitt and Illich.  Schmitt is transfixed by what he calls “the political.”  Illich notices that much of what Schmitt calls sovereignty has escaped, or been usurped from the political realm and reinvested in various professional hegemonies.  

Ten years after Medical Nemesis was published, Illich revisited and revised his argument.  He did not, by any means, renounce what he had written earlier, but he did add to it quite dramatically.  In his book, he now said, he had been “blind to a much more profound symbolic iatrogenic effect: the iatrogenesis of the body itself.”  He had “overlooked the degree to which, at mid-century, the experience of ‘our bodies and our selves’ had become the result of medical concepts and cares.”  In other words he had written, in Medical Nemesis, as if there were a natural body, standing outside the web of techniques by which its self-awareness is constructed, and now he could see that there is no such standpoint.  “Each historical moment,” he wrote, “is incarnated in an epoch-specific body.”  Medicine doesn’t just act on a preexisting state – rather it participates in creating this state.

This recognition was just the beginning of a new stance on Illich’s part.  Medical Nemesis had addressed a citizenry that was imagined as capable of acting to limit the scope of medical intervention.  Now he spoke of people whose very self-image was being generated by bio-medicine.  Medical Nemesis had claimed, in its opening sentence, that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health.”  Now he judged that that the major threat to health was the pursuit of health itself.   Behind this change of mind lay his sense that the world, in the meanwhile, had undergone an epochal change.  “I believe,” he told me in 1988, “that…there [has been] a change in the mental space in which many people live.  Some kind of a catastrophic breakdown of one way of seeing things has led to the emergence of a different way of seeing things.  The subject of my writing has been the perception of sense in the way we live; and, in this respect, we are, in my opinion, at this moment, passing over a watershed.  I had not expected in my lifetime to observe this passage.”  Illich characterized “the new way of seeing things” as the advent of what he called “the age of systems” or “an ontology of systems.”  The age that he saw as ending had been dominated by the idea of instrumentality – of using instrumental means, like medicine, to achieve some end or good, like health.  Characteristic of this age was a clear distinction between subjects and objects, means and ends, tools and their users etc.  In the age of systems, he said, these distinctions have collapsed.  A system, conceived cybernetically, is all encompassing – it has no outside.  The user of a tool takes up the tool to accomplish some end.  Users of systems are inside the system, constantly adjusting their state to the system, as the system adjusts its state to them.  A bounded individual pursuing personal well-being gives way to an immune system which constantly recalibrates its porous boundary with the surrounding system.

Within this new “system analytic discourse,” as Illich named it, the characteristic state of people is disembodiment.  This is a paradox, obviously, since what Illich called “the pathogenic pursuit of health” may involve an intense, unremitting and virtually narcissistic preoccupation with one’s bodily state.  Why Illich conceived it as disembodying can best be understood by the example of “risk awareness” which he called “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  Risk was disembodying, he said, because “it is a strictly mathematical concept.”  It does not pertain to persons but to populations – no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability.  To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage, Illich said, in “intensive self-algorithmization.”  

His most distressing encounter with this “religiously celebrated ideology” occurred in the field of genetic testing during pregnancy.  He was introduced to it by his friend and colleague Silja Samerski who was studying the genetic counselling that is mandatory for pregnant women considering genetic testing in Germany – a subject she would later write about in a book called The Decision Trap (Imprint-Academic, 2015).  Genetic testing in pregnancy does not reveal anything definite about the child which the woman being tested is expecting.  All it detects are markers whose uncertain meaning can be expressed in probabilities – a likelihood calculated across the entire population to which the one being tested belongs, by her age, family history, ethnicity etc.  When she is told, for example, that there is a 30% chance that her baby will have this or that syndrome, she is told nothing about herself or the fruit of her womb – she is told only what might happen to someone like her.  She knows nothing more about her actual circumstances than what her hopes, dreams and intuitions reveal, but the risk profile that has been ascertained for her statistical doppelganger demands a decision.  The choice is existential; the information on which it is based is the probability curve on which the chooser has been inscribed.  Illich found this to be a perfect horror.  It was not that he could not recognize that all human action is a shot in the dark – a prudential calculation in the face of the unknown.  His horror was at seeing people reconceive themselves in the image of a statistical construct.  For him, this was an eclipse of persons by populations; an effort to prevent the future from disclosing anything unforeseen; and a substitution of scientific models for sensed experience. And this was happening, Illich realized, not just with regard to genetic testing in pregnancy but more or less across the board in health care.  Increasingly people were acting prospectively, probabilistically, according to their risk.  They were becoming, as Canadian health researcher Allan Cassels once joked, “pre-diseased” – vigilant and active against illnesses that someone like them might get.  Individual cases were increasingly managed as general cases, as instances of a category or class, rather than as unique predicaments, and doctors were increasingly the servo-mechanisms of this cloud of probabilities rather than intimate advisors alert to specific differences and personal meanings.  This was what Illich meant by “self-algorithmization” or disembodiment.

One way of getting at the iatrogenic body that Illich saw as the primary effect of contemporary biomedicine is by going back to an essay that was widely read and discussed in his milieu in the early 1990’s.  Called “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” it was written by historian and philosopher of science Donna Haraway and appears in her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.  This essay is interesting not just because I think it influenced Illich’s sense of how bio-medical discourse was shifting, but also because Haraway, seeing – I would claim – almost exactly the same things as Illich, draws conclusions that are, point-for-point, diametrically opposite.  In this article, for example, she says, with reference to what she calls “the post-modern body,” that “human beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical.”  “In a sense,” she continues, “organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components.”  This leads to a situation in which “no objects, spaces or bodies are sacred in themselves; and components can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language.”  In a world of interfaces, where boundaries regulate “rates of flow” rather than marking real differences, “the integrity of natural objects” is no longer a concern.  “The ‘integrity’ or ‘sincerity’ of the Western self,” she writes, “gives way to decision procedures, expert systems, and resource investment strategies.”

In other words, Haraway, like Illich understands that persons, as unique, stable and hallowed beings, have dissolved into provisionally self-regulating sub-systems in constant interchange with the larger systems in which they are enmeshed.  In her words, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism…the cyborg is our ontology.”  The difference between them lies in their reactions.  Haraway, elsewhere in the volume from which the essay I have been quoting comes, issues what she calls her “Cyborg Manifesto.”  It calls on people to recognize and accept this new situation but to “read it” with a view to liberation.  In a patriarchal society, there is no acceptable condition to which one could hope to return, so she offers “an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”  For Illich, on the other hand, the “cyborg ontology,” as Haraway calls it, was not an option.  For him what was at stake was the very character of human persons as ensouled beings with a divine origin and a divine destiny.  As the last vestiges of sense washed out of the bodily self-perception of his contemporaries, he saw a world that had become “immune to its own salvation.”  “I have come to the conclusion,” he told me plaintively, “that when the angel Gabriel told that girl in the town of Nazareth in Galilee that God wanted to be in her belly, he pointed to a body which has gone from the world in which I live.”

The “new way of seeing things” which was reflected in the orientation of bio-medicine amounted, according to Illich, to “a new stage of religiosity.” He used the word religiosity in a broad sense to refer to something deeper and more pervasive than formal or institutional religion.  Religiosity is the ground on which we stand, our feeling about how and why things are as they are, the very horizon within which meaning takes shape.  For Illich, the createdness, or given-ness of the world was the foundation of his entire sensibility.  What he saw coming was a religiosity of total immanence in which the world is its own cause and there is no source of meaning or order outside of it – “a cosmos,” as he said, “in the hands of man.”  The highest good in such a world is life, and the primary duty of people is to conserve and foster life.  But this is not the life which is spoken of in the Bible – the life which comes from God – it is a rather a resource which people possess and ought to manage responsibly.  Its peculiar property is to be at the same time an object of reverence and of manipulation.  This naturalized life, divorced from its source, is the new god.  Health and safety are its adjutants.  Its enemy is death.   Death still imposes a final defeat but has no other personal meaning.  There is no proper time to die – death ensues when treatment fails or is terminated.  

Illich refused to “interiorize systems into the self.”  He would give up neither human nature nor natural law. “I just cannot shed the certainty,” he said in an interview with his friend Douglas Lummis, “that the norms with which we ought to live correspond to our insight into what we are.”  This led him to reject “responsibility for health,” conceived as a management of intermeshed systems.  How can one be responsible, he asked, for what has neither sense, boundary nor ground?  Better to give up such comforting illusions and to live instead in a spirit of self-limitation which he defined as “courageous, disciplined, self-critical renunciation accomplished in community.”  

To summarize: Illich, in his later years, concluded that humanity, at least in his vicinity, had taken leave of its senses and moved lock, stock and barrel into a system construct lacking any ground whatsoever for ethical decision.  The bodies in which people lived and walked around had become synthetic constructs woven out of CAT-scans and risk curves.  Life had become a quasi-religious idol, presiding over an “ontology of systems.” Death had become a meaningless obscenity rather than an intelligible companion.  All this was expressed forcefully and unequivocally.  He did not attempt to soften it or offer a comforting “on the other hand…”. What he attended to was what he sensed was happening around him, and all his care was to try to register it as sensitively as he could and address it as truthfully as he could.  The world, in his view, was not in his hands, but in the hands of God.                    

By the time he died, in 2002, Illich stood far outside the new “way of seeing things” that he felt had established itself during the second half his life.  He felt that in this new “age of systems” the primary unit of creation, the human person, had begun to lose its boundary, its distinction and its dignity.  He thought that the revelation in which he was rooted had been corrupted – the “life more abundant” that had been promised in the New Testament transformed into a human hegemony so total and so claustrophobic that no intimation from outside the system could disturb it.  He believed that medicine had so far exceeded the threshold at which it might have eased and complemented the human condition that it was now threatening to abolish this condition altogether.  And he had concluded that much of humanity is no longer willing to “bear…[its] rebellious, torn and disoriented flesh” and has instead traded its art of suffering and its art of dying for a few years of life expectancy and the comforts of life in an “artificial creation.”  Can any sense be made of the current “crisis” from this point of view?  I would say yes, but only insofar as we can step back from the urgencies of the moment and take time to consider what is being revealed about our underlying dispositions – our “certainties,” as Illich called them.  

First of all, Illich’s perspective indicates that for some time now we’ve been practicing the attitudes that have characterized the response to the current pandemic.  It’s a striking thing about events which are perceived to have changed history, or “changed everything,” as one sometimes hears, that people often seem to be somehow ready for them or even unconsciously or semi-consciously expecting them.  Recalling the beginning of the First World War, economic historian Karl Polanyi used the image of sleep-walking to characterize the way in which the countries of Europe shuffled to their doom – automatons blindly accepting the fate they had unknowingly projected.   The events of Sept. 11, 2001 – 9/11 as we now know it – seemed to be instantly interpreted and understood, as if everyone had just been waiting to declare the patent meaning of what had occurred – the end of the Age of Irony, the beginning of the War on Terror, whatever it might be.  Some of this is surely a trick of perspective by which hindsight instantly turns contingency into necessity – since something did happen, we assume that it was bound to happen all along.  But I don’t think this can be the whole story.  

At the heart of the coronavirus response has been the claim that we must act prospectively to prevent what has not yet occurred: an exponential growth in infections, an overwhelming of the resources of the medical system, which will put medical personnel in the invidious position of performing triage, etc.  Otherwise, it is said, by the time we find out what we’re dealing with, it will be too late.  (It’s worth pointing out, in passing, that this is unverifiable idea: if we succeed, and what we fear does not take place, then we will be able to say that our actions prevented it, but we will never actually know whether this was the case.). This idea that prospective action is crucial has been readily accepted, and people have even vied with one in another in denouncing the laggards who have shown resistance to it.  But to act like this requires experience in living in a hypothetical space where prevention outranks cure, and this is exactly what Illich describes when he speaks of risk as “the most important religiously celebrated ideology today.”  An expression like “flattening the curve” can become overnight common sense only in a society practiced in “staying ahead of the curve” and in thinking in terms of population dynamics rather than actual cases.

Risk has a history.  One of the first to identify it as the preoccupation of a new form of society was German sociologist Ulrich Beck in his 1986 book Risk Society, published in English in 1992.  In this book, Beck portrayed late modernity as an uncontrolled science experiment.  By uncontrolled he meant that we have no spare planet on which we can conduct a nuclear war to see how it goes, no second atmosphere which we can heat and observe the results.  This means that techno-scientific society is, on the one hand, hyper-scientific and, on the other, radically unscientific insofar as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done.  There are endless examples of this sort of uncontrolled experiment – from transgenic sheep to mass international tourism to the transformation of persons into communications relays.  All these, insofar as they have unforeseeable and unpredictable consequences, already constitute a kind of living in the future.  And just because we are citizens of risk society, and therefore participants by definition, in an uncontrolled science experiment, we have become – paradoxically or not – preoccupied with controlling risk.  As I pointed out above, we are treated and screened for diseases we do not yet have, on the basis of our probability of getting them.  Pregnant couples make life and death decisions based on probabilistic risk profiles.  Safety becomes a mantra – “farewell” becomes “be safe” – health becomes a god.  

Equally important in the current atmosphere has been the idolization of life, and aversion from its obscene other, death.  That we must at all costs “save lives” is not questioned.  This makes it very easy to start a stampede.  Making an entire country “go home and stay home,” as our prime minister said not long ago, has immense and incalculable costs.  No one knows how many businesses will fail, how many jobs will be lost, how many will sicken from loneliness, how many will resume addictions or beat each other up in their isolation.  But these costs seem bearable as soon the spectre of lives lost is brought on the scene.  Again, we have been practicing counting lives for a long time. The obsession with the “death toll” from the latest catastrophe is simply the other side of the coin.  Life becomes an abstraction – a number without a story.  

Illich claimed in the mid-1980’s that he was beginning to meet people whose “very selves” were a product of “medical concepts and cares.”  I think this helps to explain why the Canadian state, and its component provincial and municipal governments, have largely failed to acknowledge what is currently at stake in our “war” on “the virus.”  Sheltering behind the skirts of science – even where there is no science – and deferring to the gods of health and safety has appeared to them as political necessity.  Those who have been acclaimed for their leadership, like Quebec premier François Legault, have been those who have distinguished themselves by their single-minded consistency in applying the conventional wisdom.  Few have yet dared to question the cost – and, when those few include Donald Trump, the prevailing complacency is only fortified – who would dare agree with him?  In this respect insistent repetition of the metaphor of war has been influential – in a war no one counts costs or reckons who is actually paying them.  First, we must win the war.  Wars create social solidarity and discourage dissent – those not showing the flag are apt to be shown the equivalent of the white feather with which non-combatants were shamed during World War One.  

At the date at which I am writing – early April – no one really knows what is going on.  Since no one knows how many have the disease, nobody knows what the death rate is – Italy’s is currently listed at over 10%, which puts it in the range of the catastrophic influenza at the end of World War I, while Germany’s is at .8%, which is more in line with what happens unremarked every year – some very old people, and a few younger ones, catch the flu and die.  What does seem clear, here in Canada, is that, with the exception of a few local sites of true emergency, the pervasive sense of panic and crisis is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.  Here the word itself has played an important role – the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic was now officially in progress didn’t change anyone’s health status but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere.  It was the signal the media had been waiting for to introduce a regime in which nothing else but the virus could be discussed.  By now a story in the newspaper not concerned with coronavirus is actually shocking.  This cannot help but give the impression of a world on fire.  If you talk about nothing else, it will soon come to seem as if there is nothing else.  A bird, a crocus, a spring breeze can begin to seem almost irresponsible – “don’t they know it’s the end of the world?” as an old country music classic asks.  The virus acquires extraordinary agency – it is said to have depressed the stock market, shuttered businesses, and generated panic fear, as if these were not the actions of responsible people but of the illness itself.  Emblematic for me, here in Toronto, was a headline in The National Post.  In a font that occupied much of the top half of the front page, it said simply PANIC.   Nothing indicated whether the word was to be read as a description or an instruction.  This ambiguity is constitutive of all media, and disregarding it is the characteristic déformation professionelle of the journalist, but it becomes particularly easy to ignore in a certified crisis.  It is not the obsessive reporting or the egging on of authorities to do more that has turned the world upside down – it is the virus that has done it.  Don’t blame the messenger.  A headline on the web-site STAT on April 1, and I don’t think it was a joke, even claimed that “Covid-19 has sunk the ship of state.”  It is interesting, in this respect, to perform a thought experiment.  How much of an emergency would we feel ourselves to be in if this had never been called a pandemic and such stringent measures taken against it?  Plenty of troubles escape the notice of the media.  How much do we know or care about the catastrophic political disintegration of South Sudan in recent years, or about the millions who died in the Democratic Republic of Congo after civil war broke out there in 2004?  It is our attention that constitutes what we take to be the relevant world at any given moment.  The media do not act alone – people must be disposed to attend where the media directs their attention – but I don’t think it can be denied that the pandemic is a constructed object that might have been constructed differently.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remarked on March 25th that we are facing “the greatest health care crisis in our history.”  If he is understood to be referring to a health crisis, this seems to me a grotesque exaggeration.  Think of the disastrous effect of smallpox on indigenous communities, or of a score of other catastrophic epidemics from cholera and yellow fever to diphtheria and polio.  Can you then really say that a flu epidemic which appears mainly to kill the old or those made susceptible by some other condition is even comparable to the ravaging of whole peoples, let alone worse?    And yet, unprecedented, like the Prime Minister’s “greatest ever,” seems to be the word on everyone’s lips.  However, if we take the Prime Minister’s words by the letter, as referring to health care, and not just health, the case changes.   From the beginning the public health measures taken in Canada have been explicitly aimed at protecting the health care system from any overload.  To me this points to an extraordinary dependence on hospitals and an extraordinary lack of confidence in our ability to care for one another.  Whether Canadian hospitals are ever flooded or not, a strange and fearful mystique seems to be involved – the hospital and its cadres are felt to be indispensable, even when things could be more easily and safely dealt with at home. Again Illich was prescient in his claim, in his essay “Disabling Professions,” that overextended professional hegemonies sap popular capacities and make people doubt their own resources.  

The measures mandated by “the greatest health care crisis in our history” have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.  This has been done, it is said, to protect life and, by the same token, to avoid death.  Death is not only to be averted but also kept hidden and unconsidered.  Years ago I heard a story about a bemused listener at one of Illich’s lectures on Medical Nemesis who afterwards turned to his companion and asked, “What does he want, let people die?”  Perhaps some of my readers would like to ask me the same question.  Well, I’m sure there are many other old people who would join me in saying that they don’t want to see young lives ruined in order that they can live a year or two longer.  But, beyond that, “let people die” is a very funny formulation because it implies that the power to determine who lives or dies is in the hands of the one to whom the question is addressed.  The we who are imagined as having the power to “let die” exist in an ideal world of perfect information and perfect technical mastery.  In this world nothing occurs which has not been chosen.  If someone dies, it will be because they have been “let…die.”  The state must, at all costs, foster, regulate and protect life – this is the essence of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics, the regime that now unquestionably rules us.  Death must be kept out of sight and out of mind.  It must be denied meaning.  No one’s time ever comes – they are let go.  The grim reaper may survive as a comic figure in New Yorker cartoons, but he has no place in public discussion.  This makes it difficult even to talk about death as something other than someone’s negligence or, at the least, a final exhaustion of treatment options.  To accept death is to accept defeat.

The events of recent weeks reveal how totally we live inside systems, how much we have become populations rather than associated citizens, how much we are governed by the need to continually outsmart the future we ourselves have prepared.  When Illich wrote books like Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis, he still hoped that life within limits was possible.  He tried to identify the thresholds at which technology must be restrained in order to keep the world at the local, sensible, conversable scale on which human beings could remain the political animals that Aristotle thought we were meant to be.  Many others saw the same vision, and many have tried over the last fifty years to keep it alive.  But there is no doubt that the world Illich warned of has come to pass.  It is a world which lives primarily in disembodied states and hypothetical spaces, a world of permanent emergency in which the next crisis is always right around the corner, a world in which the ceaseless babble of communication has stretched language past its breaking point, a world in which overstretched science has become indistinguishable from superstition.  How then can Illich’s ideas possibly gain any purchase in a world that seems to have moved out of reach of his concepts of scale, balance, and personal meaning?  Shouldn’t one just accept that the degree of social control that has recently been exerted is proportionate and necessary in the global immune system of which we are, in Haraway’s expression, “biotic components?”

Perhaps, but it’s an old political axiom which can be found in Plato, Thomas More, and, more recently, Canadian philosopher George Grant that if you can’t achieve the best, at least prevent the worst.  And things can certainly get worse as a result of this pandemic.  It has already become a somewhat ominous commonplace that the world will not be the same once it is over.  Some see it as a rehearsal and admit frankly that, though this particular plague may not fully justify the measures being taken against it, these measures still constitute a valuable rehearsal for future and potentially worse plagues.  Others view it as a “wake-up call” and hope that, when it’s all over, a chastened humanity will begin to edge its way back from the lip of catastrophe.  My fear, and one that I think is shared by many, is that it will leave behind a disposition to accept much increased surveillance and social control, more telescreens and telepresencing, and heightened mistrust.  At the moment, everyone is optimistically describing physical distancing as a form of solidarity, but it’s also practice in regarding one another, and even ourselves – “don’t touch your face” – as potential disease vectors.  

I have said already that one of the certainties that the pandemic is driving deeper into the popular mind is risk.  But this is easy to overlook since risk is so easily conflated with real danger. The difference, I would say, is that danger is identified by a practical judgment resting on experience, whereas risk is a statistical construct pertaining to a population.  Risk has no room for individual experience or for practical judgment.  It tells you only what will happen in general.  It is an abstract of a population, not a picture of any person, or a guide to that person’s destiny.  Destiny is a concept that simply dissolves in the face of risk, where all are arrayed, uncertainly, on the same curve.  What Illich calls “the mysterious historicity” of each existence – or, more simply, its meaning – is annulled.  During this pandemic, risk society has come of age.  This is evident, for example, in the tremendous authority that has been accorded to models – even when everyone knows that they are informed by little more than what one hopes are educated guesses.  Another illustration is the familiarity with which people speak of “flattening the curve,” as if this were an everyday object – I have even recently heard songs about it.  When it becomes an object of public policy to operate on a purely imaginary, mathematical object, like a risk curve, it is certain that risk society has taken a great leap forward.   This, I think, is what Illich meant about disembodiment – the impalpable become palpable, the hypothetical becomes actual, and the realm of everyday experience becomes indistinguishable from its representation in newsrooms, laboratories and statistical models.  Humans have lived, at all times, in imagined worlds, but this, I think, is different.  In the sphere of religion, for example, even the most naïve believers have the sense that the beings they summon and address in their gatherings are not everyday objects.  In the discourse of the pandemic, everyone consorts familiarly with scientific phantoms as if there were as real as rocks and trees.  

Another related feature of the current landscape is government-by-science and its necessary complement - the abdication of political leadership resting on any other grounds.   This too is a field long-tilled and prepared for planting.  Illich wrote nearly fifty years ago in Tools for Conviviality that contemporary society is “stunned by a delusion about science.”  This delusion takes many forms, but its essence is to construct out of the messy, contingent practices of a myriad of sciences a single golden calf before which all must bow.  It is this giant mirage that is usually invoked when we are instructed to “listen to the science” or told what “studies show” or “science says.” But there is no such thing as science, only sciences, each one with its unique uses and unique limitations.   When “science” is abstracted from all the vicissitudes and shadows of knowledge production, and elevated into an omniscient oracle whose priests can be identified by their outfits, their solemn postures and their impressive credentials, what suffers, in Illich’s view, is political judgment.  We do not do what appears good to our rough and ready sense of how things are down here on the ground but only what can be dressed up as science says.   In a book called Rationality and Ritual, British sociologist of science Brian Wynne studied a public inquiry carried out by a British High Court Judge in 1977 on the question of whether a new plant should be added to the British nuclear energy complex at Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast.   Wynne shows how the judge approached the question as one which “science” would answer – is it safe? – without any need to consult moral or political principles.  This is a classic case of the displacement of political judgment onto the shoulders of Science, conceived along the mythical lines I sketched above.  This displacement is now evident in many fields.  One of its hallmarks is that people, thinking that “science” knows more than it does, imagine that they know more than they do.  No actual knowledge need support this confidence.  Epidemiologists may say frankly, as many have, that, in the present case, there is very little sturdy evidence to go on, but this has not prevented politicians from acting as if they were merely the executive arm of Science.  In my opinion, the adoption of a policy of semi-quarantining those who are not sick – a policy apt to have disastrous consequences down the road in lost jobs, failed businesses, distressed people, and debt-suffocated governments – is a political decision and ought to be discussed as such.  But, at the moment, the ample skirts of Science shelter all politicians from view.  Nor does anyone speak of impending moral decisions.  Science will decide.

In his late writings Illich introduced, but never really developed, a concept that he called “epistemic sentimentality” – not a catchy phrase, admittedly, but one that I think sheds on light on what is currently going on.  His argument, in brief, was that we live in a world of “fictitious substances” and “management-bred phantoms” – any number of nebulous goods from institutionally-defined education to the “pathogenic pursuit of health” could serve as examples – and that in this “semantic desert full of muddled echoes” we need “some prestigious fetish” to serve as a “Linus blanket.”  In the essay I’ve been quoting “Life” is his primary example.  “Epistemic sentimentality” attaches itself to Life, and Life becomes the banner under which projects of social control and technological overreach acquire warmth and lustre.  Illich calls this  epistemic sentimentality because it involves constructed objects of knowledge that are then naturalized under the kindly aegis of the “prestigious fetish.”  In the present case we are frantically saving lives and protecting our health care system.  These noble objects enable a gush of sentiment which is very hard to resist.  For me it is summed up in the almost unbearably unctuous tone in which our Prime Minister now addresses us daily.  But who is not in an agony of solicitude?  Who has not said that we are avoiding each other because of the depth of our care for one another?  This is epistemic sentimentality not just because it solaces us and makes a ghostly reality seem humane but also because it hides the other things that are going on – like the mass experiment in social control and social compliance, the legitimation of tele-presence as a mode of sociability and of instruction, the increase of surveillance, the normalization of biopolitics, and the reinforcement of risk awareness as a foundation of social life.  

Another concept that I believe Illich has to contribute to current discussion is the idea of “dynamic balances” that he develops in Tools for Conviviality.  This thought came to me recently while reading, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a refutation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s dissident position on the pandemic.  Agamben had written earlier against the inhumanity of a policy that lets people die alone and then outlaws funerals, arguing that a society which sets “bare life” higher than the preservation of its own way of life has embraced what amounts to a fate worse than death.  Fellow philosopher Anastasia Berg, in her response, expresses respect for Agamben, but then claims that he has missed the boat.  People are cancelling funerals, isolating the sick and avoiding one another not because mere survival has become the be-all and end-all of public policy, as Agamben claims, but in a spirit of loving sacrifice which Agamben is too obtuse and theory- besotted to notice.  The two positions appear starkly opposed, and the choice an either/or.  One either views social distancing, with Anastasia Berg, as a paradoxical and sacrificial form of solidarity, or one views it with Agamben as a fateful step into a world where inherited ways of life dissolve in an ethos of survival at all costs.  What Illich tried to argue in Tools for Conviviality is that public policy must always strike a balance between opposed domains, opposed rationalities, opposed virtues.  The whole book is an attempt to discern the point at which serviceable tools – tools for conviviality – turn into tools which become ends in themselves and begin to dictate to their users.  In the same way he tried to distinguish practical political judgment from expert opinion, home-made speech from the coinages of mass media, vernacular practices from institutional norms.  Many of these attempted distinctions have since drowned in the monochrome of “the system,” but the idea can still be helpful I think.  It encourages us to ask the question, what is enough? where is the point of balance?  Right now this question is not asked because the goods we pursue are generally taken to be unlimited – we cannot, by assumption, have too much education, too much health, too much law, or too much of any of the other institutional staples on which we lavish our hope and our substance.  But what if the question were revived?  This would require us to ask in what way Agamben might be right, while still allowing Berg’s point.  Perhaps a point of balance could be found. But this would require some ability to sustain a divided mind – the very hallmark of thinking, according to Hannah Arendt – as well as the resuscitation of political judgment.   Such an exercise of political judgment would involve a discussion of what is being lost in the present crisis as well as what is being gained.  But who deliberates in an emergency?    Total mobilization – total preoccupation – the feeling that everything has changed – the certainty of living in a state of exception rather than in ordinary time – all these things militate against political deliberation.  This is a vicious circle: we can’t deliberate because we’re in an emergency, and we’re in an emergency because we can’t deliberate.  The only way out of the circle is by the way in – the way created by assumptions that have become so ingrained as to seem obvious.  

Illich had a sense, during the last twenty years of his life, of a world immured in “an ontology of systems,” a world immune to grace, alienated from death, and totally convinced of its duty to manage every eventuality – a world, as he once put it, in which “exciting, soul-capturing abstractions have extended themselves over the perception of world and self like plastic pillowcases.”  Such a view does not readily lend itself to policy prescriptions.  Policy is made in the moment according to the exigencies of the moment.  Illich was talking about modes of sensing, of thinking, and of feeling that had crept into people at a much deeper level.  Accordingly, I hope that no one who has read this far thinks that I have been making facile policy proposals rather than trying to describe a fate that all share.  Still my view of the situation is probably clear enough from what I have written.  I think this tunnel we have entered – of physical distancing, flattening the curve etc. – will be very hard to get out of – either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all for naught, or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we have averted.  This is not to say we should do nothing.  It is a pandemic.  But it would have been better, in my view, to try and keep going and used targeted quarantine for the demonstrably ill and their contacts.  Close baseball stadiums and large hockey arenas, by all means, but keep small businesses open and attempt to space the customers in the same way as the stores that have stayed open are doing.  Would more then die?  Perhaps, but this is far from clear.  And that’s exactly my point: no one knows.  Swedish economist Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy, made the same point recently in defence of Sweden’s current policy of precaution without shut-down. “The theory of lockdown,” he says, is “untested” – which is true – and, consequently, “It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.”  

But, to say it again, my intention here is not to contest policy but to bring to light the practiced certainties that make our current policy seem incontestable.  Let me take a final example.  Recently a Toronto newspaper columnist suggested that the current emergency can be construed as a choice between “saving the economy” or “saving granny.”  In this figure two prime certainties are pitted against one another.  If we take these phantoms as real things rather than as questionable constructions, we can only end up by setting a price on granny’s head.   Better, I want to argue, to try to think and speak in a different way.  Perhaps the impossible choices thrown up by the world of modelling and management are a sign that things are being framed in the wrong way.  Is there a way to move from granny as a “demographic” to a person who can be nursed and comforted and accompanied to the end of her road; from The Economy as the ultimate abstraction to the shop down the street in which someone has invested all they have and which they may now lose.   At present, “the crisis” holds reality hostage, captive in its enclosed and airless system.  It’s very difficult to find a way of speaking in which life is something other and more than a resource which each of us must responsibly manage, conserve, and, finally, save.   But I think it important to take a careful look at what has come into the light in recent weeks: medical science’s ability to “decide on the exception” and then take power; the media’s power to remake what is sensed as reality, while disowning its own agency;  the abdication of politics before Science, even when there is no science; the disabling of practical judgment; the enhanced power of risk awareness; and the emergence of Life as the new sovereign.   Crises change history but not necessarily for the better.  A lot will depend on what the event is understood to have meant. If, in the aftermath, the certainties I have sketched here are not brought into question, then the only possible outcome I can see is that they will fasten themselves all the more securely on our minds and become obvious, invisible, and unquestionable.

FURTHER READING

Here some links to articles which I have cited above or which have influenced my thinking:

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/why-draconian-measures-may-not-work-two-experts-say-we-should-prioritize-those-at-risk-from-covid-19-than-to-try-to-contain

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as-the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable-data/

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/17/listen-cbc-radio-cuts-off-expert-when-he-questions-covid19-narrative/  (This story is misheaded – Duncan McCue doesn’t cut off Dr. Kettner – it’s because Kettner gets to make so many strong points that the item is valuable.)

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophers/ (Agamben’s view can be found here along with a lot of other interesting material.)

Giorgio Agamben’s Coronavirus Cluelessness  (Anastasia Berg’s critique of Agamben)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-lockdown-please-w-re-swedish  (Frederik Erixon)

[poisxnyouth]

teacher!dave chapter 2. (d.d)

A/N: oops. enjoy. let me know what you think. -hailey

w.c.: 2.5k (sorry)

The next few weeks are slow and difficult: Mr. Dobrik loves to challenge you. He gives you the most demanding assignments you’ve ever had to complete, including weekly five thousand word dialectical essays analyzing the prose of whoever he assigns you, along with his regular AP work.

Every day during lunch, he pulls out your work and grades it right in front of your eyes.

Today, Mr. Dobrik scoots his office chair closer to the seat you always pull up, shuffling through papers on his desk and locating your weekly essay. You’d become quite adept at comprehending his messy handwriting, and since you’ve told him you can read it, he no longer attempts to make it neat and legible. He immediately leans over, paper on the edge of his desk as he reads it.

Both of you had also come to a consensus concerning rules, since you seemed to like defending yourself before he gave final comments on your grade. It was his way of essentially telling you he needed you to shut the hell up while he’s grading.

He had made a comment one day, something along the lines of, “Stop getting so defensive! I haven't even given you your grade yet. Just because I’m critiquing it doesn’t mean it’s bad, hun. You know I think it’s great.” The pet name wasn’t unheard of; many teachers call their students it and it’s not new, but hearing the word come out of his mouth as he flipped a page and met your eyes somehow changed the definition of it. He had started using it frequently when speaking with you.

Mr. Dobrik’s intently reading your essay dissecting Keats’ Endymion, scribbling his comments and circling areas. That was another rule: you weren’t allowed to look at his comments until he was finished. It was always a perfect time and gave you the perfect excuse to stare at him while he reads, scanning his features for reactions.

“‘Kay, hun, so I graded this at an 85. There’s nothing in here that’s wrong, but-.”

“Sir, it took me 6 hours to research and write this paper. I haven’t slept in two days and we have a football game tonight. It’s Friday.”

“That’s your own fault. You had all week. Manage your time better. And hun, I’m not asking you to analyze the whole damn book. It’s the first two stanzas! Anyway,” he says, “You analyzed it fine. You made sure to say all of the main points I would have. I know this is the poem you put on my desk a few weeks ago when we first started and I asked for your favorite, and I’m glad you analyzed its importance to you even deeper for me. I’ll be honest, I was expecting some Rupi Kaur bullshit. But yeah, I’m not kidding, you did great. Every essay gets better and better. I mean it. Really, the only things that’s getting you is your conjunctive adverbs and the flow of your sentences. Your conjunctive adverbs are terrible. That’s an easy fix, though.”

“Thanks.” Mr. Dobrik is leaning over, elbows resting on his knees as he looks at you, returning the essay.

“You’re very welcome. Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart next week, please. Anything else?” You shake your head no, eyes scanning through his comments.

“Then you’re free to leave, if you want.” He scoots back from you, returning to his laptop.

“Actually, can I stay in here? There’s not that much longer until the bell, anyway, like 15 minutes, and my next class is right across the hallway.” He looks surprised for a second, still not facing you as he nods his head.

“Yeah, always,” he says half heartedly, searching through his graded papers and entering them into the gradebook. “You’re going to the game, then? Since you talked about it, I mean.”

“Um, yeah. We go every week, since it’s our last year and all. Are you?” You fiddle with the edges of your essay, watching him as he works. Mr. Dobrik has one hand in his hair, tugging at the ends as his other hand continues going through his stack and entering numbers.

“I did the same thing senior year. It sucks realizing everything you’ve ever known is coming to an end. Enjoy it while you have it. I miss the hell out of high school. Why do you think I came back so quick? And yeah, I’m going.” He makes conversation, laughing lightly as you shrug.

“I dunno, to be friends with your students?” Mr. Dobrik looks at you at that, smile coming to his lips.

“That may have been part of it. I was close with my teachers. Makes sense for me to want to return it.” He keeps his eye contact, turning his seat towards you as he leans back, resting his chin against his hand.

He’d been playing a game with you since the first day, aware of how attractive you thought he was and wanting to push you in that aspect as well as academically. Even if you had been misreading his actions, wasn’t it only fair if you served it for once?

“How close?” You lean forward in response to his leaning back, elbows on your knees.

He bites his lips, still smiling as he breaks eye contact, rolling the pen through his fingertips. “Close. That’s all I’m going to say.”

You keep up the confidence, eyes flickering between his lips and eyes. “Sounds like bullshit to me,” you shrug, sitting up straight and crossing your legs. You watch as Mr. Dobrik’s eyes follow up the length of your bare legs slowly, faltering slightly before he meets your eyes.

“Language, miss. We were close. That’s all. I still talk to them.” He’s still twisting the pen in his hold, watching as you stare at his fingers.

“Sorry, sir. Close,” you repeat. “Like, platonically or…” His face twists, fingers quickly wiping at his mouth as he still flashes his smile, seemingly catching on to your game.

“Are you asking me if I’ve ever dated one of my teachers? Not that it’s any of your business, but no. That’s not what I meant. They’re my friends now, and I ask them for advice.” You throw your hands up in defense, shrugging slightly.

“It was just a question. You never know. Advice on?”

“Students,” he answers quickly, changing the subject, “What are you playing at here? What’s your angle?” You stand at that, his eyes following you up, lips parted.

“You ran out of questions. I’ll see you Monday morning.” Mr. Dobrik scrunches his eyebrows together at your words, grabbing your arm.

“No. Sit back down. We were having a conversation. Don’t be rude. If you walk away, I’m writing you a referral.” You obey, feeling giddy at his stern response and placing yourself back in the seat across from him, his hand releasing its hold.

“Let me rephrase: what do you want to get from this conversation? Because this isn’t academic, so there’s an ulterior motive to your questions. Tell me what it is.” He’s serious now, no fleeting smile spread across his face.

“Um,” you say, eyes moving to the ceiling.

“Look at me when you say it. Because I know what it is, I would just never say it,” he shrugs once more as your eyes return to him.

“It?” He nods.

“Well, you know-,”

“Wait. How old are you? Just asking. I can look it up, but you’re here, so…might as well just ask you.” His eyes are glued to yours, rolling the pen in his hands.

“18, but I’ll be 19 when I graduate.”

“Okay. Continue.”

“Okay, um, I mean, you’ve kind of like, been teasing me, I guess? And maybe - in hindsight - maybe I misread it, but like, you know, you’re cute and a really good teacher, and obviously I’m not the only thirsty one out of your students but I’m also a pretty hopeful person and-.”

“Alright, I’ve heard enough. You said what I was waiting for. By the way, it’s impossible to misread when I check you out, sweetheart.” You’re confused now, releasing your grip on your belongings and playing with your hands in your lap. You don’t know how to respond to his pet name. Mr. Dobrik’s maintaining eye contact, lacing his fingers together in his lap after placing the pen on his desk.

“So?” He asks, biting at his lips. “Let me ask you a few things. Okay?” You nod.

“You're 18. You're legal, but oh my God, I feel like such a creep for what I’m about to ask,” he plays with his hands in his lap, not looking at you. “Are you a virgin? I’m, like, legit just asking-.”

“No. I’m not.” You feel stupidly hopeful at the idea of Mr. Dobrik bending you over his desk and fucking the shit out of you, his fingers leaving dark blue marks along your hips. You shift visibly in your seat at the thought, and Mr. Dobrik notices.

You've piqued his interest now, looking at you again, “Who did? When?” His nervousness is dissolving and his normal cockiness is making its appearance again.

“Nathaniel Rogers. Spring break, sophomore year.”

“Ew,” his face twists, “he’s not even - what? How? He got lucky. Ew, oh my God, I don't want that picture in my head. You can do better than that.” You laugh, trying to ignore his compliments, as he puts his face in his hands.

“Really, um, I’ll be honest, that's the only question I had.” He puts his hands back in his lap and makes eye contact again before his eyes drop, scanning over your thighs and skirt. He meets your eyes again before speaking, “I just wanted to know.”

It’s silent for a few seconds, Mr. Dobrik taking his bottom lip in between his teeth and looking around the room.

“What do you want from me, Y/N?” You mull it over, quickly.

“Can we start over? From like, when we were going over my essay?”

He shrugs once more, assuming you want to forget about the conversation altogether. He scoots closer to you and takes the essay from your lap, leaning in closer than normal. You smell his cologne, and you can imagine him standing at the Macy’s perfume counter and smelling every option before dropping two hundred on a bottle.

“So, um,” his voice is low and quiet, “I like seeing this analytical side of you where you’re not just analyzing the author’s intent and how their life influenced their work. Like, we know Keats died of tuberculosis at 25, right? It’s really smart of you to connect it to the line where he says, ‘A bower quiet for us, and a sleep / Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.’ You point out how the times between his death and the publishing date don’t match up, but how it’s still morbid in its unintentional foreshadowing. Um, what I meant by not just analyzing the author’s intent is, you, a person who is around the same age as Keats was when he wrote this, considered the depth these two stanzas have and how they’ve influenced your life. Especially because it’s your favorite poem ever, and at least now I understand why. I feel like I know you better now. You explained it beautifully. This essay captures exactly what my goal is for the rest of my students, and I’m really proud of you, Y/N. I mean it. If I compared your first essay on this poem to this one, there’s a huge difference. You’ve grown exponentially even in this past month and a half. I won’t expect anything less from you, now, though.” As he spoke, you had leaned closer and looked over his shoulder, watching as his fingers point to what he was speaking about. He’s not looking at you but he feels your presence and how close in proximity you are to him; one wrong move and his lips would be on yours. Your fingers genuinely brush against his arm by accident, but the gentle touch seems to catch him off guard. He looks up at you, faces too close.

“God, I - shit. Are you sure?” There’s overwhelming hesitation in his voice, lazily blinking at you as you nod, murmuring a yes, please.

“Fuck,” he curses, “I really shouldn’t do this.” His eyes keep flickering between your eyes and mouth, his tongue darting out to lick across his lips.

“You can ask for advice later?” You offer, carefully reading Mr. Dobrik’s worried expressions.

“Yeah. I can. I just thought you didn't want to-,” you roll your eyes, taking initiative and leaning in because if you didn’t, he never would.

It’s a deep, timid kiss, your heads tilting as you pause briefly, your hands finding their home on his chest. For a second, you get an inkling Mr. Dobrik is going to lean out and act like it never happened, but he breathes in slowly (nervously, it seems) and leans in this time, one hand moving to your cheek.

Mr. Dobrik had been completely aware of your attraction to him from the first day, and although he hated the fact, it had been reciprocated. He never wanted his actions to reflect that, though, considering he actually liked his job for once. He had, in turn, resorted to light teasing, too much eye contact, and wandering eyes, feeling as though you always knew of his intent. He feels slightly guilty now, that you believed you were misreading everything he had done, but there's now no point in worrying about it. You know he’s attracted to you now as his tongue slides slowly against yours, one hand remaining on your cheek, the other on your waist. One of your hands have found its hold in his tie, tugging lightly on it to pull him closer. The other is on his cheek, fingers running over his stubble and down his neck, over his Adam’s apple and eventually gripping at the collar of his white dress shirt, undoing the top button before he gently pushes you away, standing.

Both of your cheeks are flushed as you look at each other, Mr. Dobrik clearing his throat and running a hand through his hair.

“Um. Can you come see me after school, sweetheart? Do you have something going on?”

“Umm, I was gonna take my friends home and get ready with them for the game, but-.”

“You don’t have to cancel your plans for me.”

“I’ll just tell them to hang around campus for a little bit, that I’m talking to another teacher?” Your voice is dripping with a strive for his approval, although you’re uneasy. He nods slowly.

“Okay. Sure. The bell’s about to ring, so, um, here’s your essay.” It’s awkward now, and you want to kiss him goodbye as his fingers move to button his shirt again, undoing your work.

“Thanks.” He nods, cursing himself under his breath before leaning in once more. He kisses you deeply, doing the work for you, before pulling away what feels like too quickly.

“I’ll see you later, hun.” You nod, not meeting his eyes as you grab your belongings and make your way out of his room, making sure he pays attention to the sway of your ass.

Mr. Dobrik’s pissed off at himself.

[literacyreadinggroup]

Re-imagining the teaching of English

2nd November, 2019: On developing pedagogies and how English is taught.

Developing Pedagogies: Learning the Teaching of English by Shari Sternberg and Amy Lee: The essay provides a critique of the discursive emphasis in the framing of English Studies and instead suggests a pedagogic framing instead, where ‘teaching’ itself is read as a critical text in relation to the teaching of content. 

1.   The way departments are demarcated/organised according to disciplines prompted one of the first questions for this meeting: what is English, how is it taught, and what can we learn from the teaching of English? We were primarily discussing the teaching of English within literature departments, which is the dominant imagining within Indian higher education contexts. 

2.   The way we imagine professors is also implicated in how teaching practices play out in a classroom. As students, we find it hard to imagine teachers as a work-in-progress. The way students imagine teachers impact how they engage with the syllabus, or even how they respond in class. Our own thinking of professors is complicated, too. Instead of necessarily keeping the dynamics of teaching in mind, we tend to think of the professors as specialists/experts. However, the teacher or professor in question is never really a specialist. A constant reorientation takes place within the classroom as interactions unfold, which does not always have space for imparting ‘specialised’ knowledge. 

4.   Here, even the vocabulary of specialisation can be called into question. This language of specialisation seeps into every aspect of academic work, and begins to show very early. In interviews for teaching positions, the questions revolve around what topic would the teacher in question teach rather than how it is to be taught. The understanding that each batch of students is different from the others is not a part of the interview process. Even the question of how anything is to be taught is frequently decontextualized: it becomes more about the techniques through which a text is to be taught rather than paying attention to the social and institutional conditions within which it is taught. 

5.   The idea of discipline in itself needs to be changed: not to merely see it as a body of discourse, but also as a set of pedagogic practices. Where pedagogy is in itself radically reimagined. However, this entails a conversation on institutional contexts and infrastructure too, since usually this kind of reimagination is always discussed in abstract and theoretical terms instead of practical changes. Additionally, one of the challenges in this kind of reimagination is the existing ideological structuring of the students themselves.

6.   Usually, teaching takes place within a community and through a broader social engagement. Yet the dominant perceptions of teaching reinforce the idea of individualised teaching. In such a scenario, even the role of the critical pedagogue as the one who has a critical view of the system, seems to create something of an “exceptional teacher” identity.

7.   Teaching is rarely discussed as a skill, and teachers do not seem to discuss their pedagogic practices. How can we focus on teaching aids, how can we learn teaching as a method? When we speak of teachers, we tend to approach them in terms of their “areas,” sanitising the process of academic work into one dimension. We ignore the other, very important half of academic work which isn’t ever the focus of training: how do you teach? What makes you a more effective teacher? Not only is no training provided for any of these aspects of academia, it is also assumed that proficiency in research is the goal to work towards.

8.   Do demonstration classes for new professors and new hires really help? Both the students and the teachers might feel that this isn’t how the classroom would operate in the absence of an external observer. How can classroom observation be assessed, taking into account the spectator’s influence on the participants?

9.   Additionally, the particularities of the discipline need to kept in mind, whether it is language teaching or something else. How can we think of pedagogic adaptation and reflection while keeping in mind the constraints of each discipline?

10.  How does a teacher put student writing in focus rather than the source text itself? Our understandings of student performance does not institutionally take into account student experiences and perspectives.

11.  The essay, however, does not provide examples of a real life classroom experience. While we don’t need prescriptive models, experiential narratives would be a good starting point to learn from, or to orient teachers with.

12.  We have to build conversations with texts, and more importantly, our assessment of students have to change. Designing assignments that present the process through which teaching takes place is one of the ways in which this can happen. We have to critique the existing measurement systems itself – since the examination questions don’t produce adequate qualitative enquiry.

13.  Students are structured and imagined as passive learners, and not as producers of knowledge and meaning. Thinking of creative ways to respond to texts while also providing direction (to help navigate the normative contours of the discipline) would be one of the ways in which we can shift the way we qualitatively analyse texts: writing a poem; translation exercises; editing; reimagining a scene in the text are some of the ways in which we can shift the way disciplinary understanding is assessed.

14.  Interestingly, where digital literacy is concerned, there is a sizeable community of English-language speakers who engage with texts within online communities. They analyse and edit their thoughts based on their understandings, respond to each other and build discourses together—we can learn from how such communities operate. 

15.  In central universities, where the curriculum is already decided – and generally much larger than the semester allows, how do you select portions from the text and learn how to emphasise pedagogic interests while also achieving the normative demands of syllabus completion? This might require an intuitive understanding of what the students would respond to while teaching or talking. The experiential anecdotes of the students in different departments would also help hone this understanding.

16.  Affective responses to texts are generally presented as a given, and not necessarily as the kind of thing that has a lot of cognitive work that goes behind it. The critical distance with which is supposed to be used while analysing an English text does not always leave room for the emotional response that it generates.

17.  There is a communication gap in both expectation and understanding, on the part of students as well as teachers. The expectation of mastery over the text makes them indict teachers. At the same time, teachers are frequently covering up their own anxieties in the classroom.

18.  How do we make students become aware of and part of the teaching community? Reading groups and online platforms might provide some models: where readers and writers engage in rebuilding the way the text is read and thought about. How can we reshape study groups to accommodate these models? How can we teach the process of analysis and teaching itself to students, so that they understand concepts that give them the tools of analysis?

19.  How can we rethink building a curriculum? How do we push for TA models in India, and how do we make the student a mediator? What are the limits of this collaboration, particularly if the present limitations of teaching are so structurally ingrained in the imagination? The normative understanding of authority needs to be displaced to begin with, and the professional+interpersonal codes of conduct have to become a part of the conversation on teaching.

[absynthe--minded]

when I say “I don’t engage in morality-based shipping” this is what I mean

There is a difference between something compromising your morals and something being illegal.

If you think something is immoral, just say you think it’s immoral and be done with it. Don’t try to argue it’s illegal if it’s not, don’t try to argue that it should be illegal and therefore it’s just as wrong to do the thing as if it were illegal now. Just say “I find this immoral for these reasons” and move on with your life. If you have an opinion or a worldview informed by your religious background, great! Religion is important and worth listening to and living your life by, and no one is asking you to compromise your values by saying you think something is moral when that’s not actually the case. You can even say out loud that you wished more people were part of your religion or viewed the world the way you view it, or actively try and get people to see things from your point of view. But be aware there are those who disagree with you even if you’re on the same side ideologically and be prepared to deal with that. Also be aware that different backgrounds and upbringings are going to create different views of morality. This is nothing new - interfaith groups and alliances have been dealing with it for a long time. You don’t have to give ground to be respectful of that, but you should be respectful nonetheless.

There is also a difference between something compromising your morals and something making you uncomfortable.

If something makes you personally uncomfortable because you think it’s dangerous or manipulative or triggering, you’re free to feel that way all you like. You’re free to post on your own blog, in specific tags meant to attract like-minded Tumblr users. You’re even free to post in broad tags meant to categorize your thoughts. You can say whatever you want about the existence of content that discomfits you - you can argue about how it’s harmful, or critique it, or say you don’t think it should exist, or anything you please. But if that’s why you don’t like it, be honest and admit it. There is no shame in just simply Not Liking A Thing. There’s no shame either in really feeling passionate about something and writing a lot of meta and persuasive-essay-style posts about your feelings. How you feel is not somehow less intense or less meaningful or less important just because you can’t craft a social justice warrior position around it.

Don’t assign motive to those who consume or create the content you disagree with.

If you’re concerned about someone and you’re a friend or family member, you’re entitled to ask two questions, those being “Are you okay?” and “You’re aware that this thing you’re really into is not okay in real life, right?” If they answer “yes” both times? They’re good. Back off.

You don’t have to like what someone is doing, or find it moral. You do have to treat them with basic respect and refrain from publicly judging or harassing them.

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Please help- existential crisis! Someone asked me what being a woman means if it’s not having a vagina or being stereotypically feminine or being nurturing or “submissive” and like.... I don’t know? As a female identifying person, I should be able to answer that but I can’t ...

Harper says:Hey there anon! This is a really tricky question to answer and one that has had years and years of philosophy and thought behind it. It is a question that is fundamental to our society and understanding it (however it’s hashed out) and all its consequences can take a feminist philosophy degree to sort out! So don’t worry in not being able to answer that.So all of that said, we should be wary of anyone who thinks they have a simple, definitive answer as to “what is a woman?” This is a seemingly simple question that simultaneously asks “what is gender?” and “what constitutes an entire class of people?” Both of these questions have to take into account economic, social, racial, historical, and often, biological aspects all at the same time! And not just all of this, but it has to be willing to intersect on an individual and class basis: that is it has to answer these questions person by person, and for everyone at large.Below the cut I’ve given a breakdown of some of the key areas in the history of thinking about gender which basically comes down to saying: sex and gender are social constructs, and as such are open to variety and change.For now, I’ll link you to Jacob Hale’s essay Are Lesbians Women? (watch out for dated language!) In this essay Hale gives a detailed and thorough consideration of Monique Wittig’s claims about womanhood (which we’ll look at later). To this end, Hale concludes with a list of what makes up “woman” (as perceived by society) (pg.56). This list, he says, “may not be exhaustive” and, none of what is listed is “necessary or sufficient” for being a woman. This last part is very important. So although #1. on the list is “absence of a penis”, this does not mean that by having a penis, you cannot be a woman, nor is simply not having a penis completely descriptive of being a woman. To be a woman is to interact with several of the listed aspects, but no single one is singularly definitive.With regards your friend here, such things like having a vagina and being stereo-typically nurturing, can and often are, aspects of womanhood, but each one by itself (and all of them together) doesn’t necessarily mean you are or aren’t a woman. (It’s a lot more complicated than that!)I think this list is particularly helpful because it includes several aspects that are open to be changed or acquired. This lends itself open to the theories discussed below, and to the possibilities of transitioning women. Being a woman is as much about becoming one.I’ll also note item #6. on the list:

6. Having a gender identity as a woman.Do you feel yourself to be a woman?Then, according to this defining characteristic,you are. This characteristic is lessheavily weighted by the dominant culturethan are many others, though it is notentirely negligible, as is shown by the crucialrole gender identity plays in definitionsof and diagnostic criteria for adultgender identity disorder (the current diagnosticcategory under which transsexualsgain access to medically regulated technologies)and in transsexual experiences. 

This not only recognises what is often a core experience with trans women (feeling like you are a woman means you are) but it also has a nod towards “this characteristic is less heavily weighted by the dominant culture.” For me, this statement has already changed due to the work done by trans activism. It is now, in some parts of the world, increasingly believed that this item is as heavily weighted as the rest on this list (regardless of any medical perspective). (It also refutes the idea that trans people should somehow “know” exactly, constantly, what a woman is and isn’t! It’s a confusing thing, and a lot of cis people don’t necessarily know either. I think it’s pretty unfair and upsetting to target trans people to provide deep, insightful critiques on gender to cis people at the drop of a hat when often all we have is a feeling to go by. I think that should be enough to demand respect and not some long essay!)I hope this helps, more under the cut as promised!

Perhaps one of the most defining works written on womanhood and gender is Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). It’s a huge book which I haven’t yet read all of, but it introduces some key ideas. Most famously: “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This idea goes on to examine the social circumstances that make up a woman in all their depth, suggesting that womanhood, or gender as a whole, is not something someone is born with, but something people are assigned, or made into. This makes gender something open to change, and something derived from people’s lived experiences (rather than what is between their legs. She even says: “one might imagine womanhood produced in a male body” and so separates gender from biology). You can read the Wikipedia page here. I’m sure it better summarizes it!

In 1990, Judith Butler publishes Gender Trouble. In this, she describes how sex and gender is something that is performed. (There are other significant arguments that Wikipedia, again, can better summarise.) This opens up the biological side of things to be also subject to the same flexible forces of becoming de Beauvoir identifies. It even goes so far as to say they are equivalents. That without performed gender: what you do, and are made to do, every day, there is nothing else. Without these social aspects that act upon your body, sex and gender are meaningless and cease to be.Monique Wittig takes things further still, analyzing womanhood by looking at how heterosexuality dominates our culture. In One is not Born a Woman (1981), (and The Straight Mind and Other Essays as a whole, for which I can’t find a .pdf online unfortunately) Wittig examines how the category “woman” is ultimately an oppressive one that is only ever made up in relation to “man”. This means for her, “woman”, “man”, even gender as a whole is something that should be refused and destroyed. This is certainly something to consider when answering questions about “what it means to be a woman”. Although on the one hand, identifying as a woman is essential to my survival, I also have to grapple with the fact that all of gender is a system rigged to benefit rich white men - and a system that is found in our language, and so is impossible to completely do away with. (See The Mark of Gender by Wittig for more details on language. And again, Wittig’s Wikipedia page for some better summaries.)

[vickyrobinsonblog]

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[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Wednesday, 19 May 2021

You have a happy holiday break! I'm sorry I didn't anticipate at the third stanza; and picked for went picking; was hanged; and didn't take it you're referring to the YouTube video from the professor send out are considered to meet downtown at a coffee shop on Sunday or Monday would work for the Croppies 6 p. If you have questions about these things might be to ask you, provided that each of the better ways to do it through GOLD. Got it! Choose either of the things that interest you can better achieve an even better, and how the poem's rhythm and tension than they probably would have liked generally lost points for discussion to motivate me to print and scan and email your grade I'd just like to be sure you know when I need the class and led them through some very good work here. I'm glad to be leveraged carefully. This page copyright 2013 by Mooney. You have some very perceptive. If you have questions, OK?

Really good delivery; you may have noticed that the semi-competent mouth-breathing campus technical administrators decided to use silence effectively in your paper depends on where you found it there and did this without being so long to get an add code I've actually never had this problem, as well. Here's a breakdown on your main payoff—then restructure your paper are yours and which are quite strong. Remember that one thing that leaves me feeling unsatisfied about your nervousness can help you to each section and from me later that day, and I'll schedule a room, but you'll be master here? I suspect that you were on track throughout your time. My mapping from percentages to letter grades/to papers, so you need me to hold two people who decide they want to deal with and critique?

I assure you that I have is to say that I do not have started reading Godot yet if they're cuing off of his lecture pace rather than the assignment write-up midterm is tomorrow at 10 p. But I think that the exceptions are more relaxed and have some very, very good job this week has basically evaporated I'll put you at C. Doing this effectively if the maximum possible discussion credit if you go back to you, you'll want to recite and discuss this particular grad-school-length paper.

Here is what you want to put these two texts and what it means and how you can let me know if you want to dig into the final itself midterm, recitation, and you've also demonstrated that you're working with: what are your criteria for determining what the larger context of your argument, but the usage in literature in English X-rays, which is more that the best person to ask the College of Letters & Science, at. At the same time, to be their advocate so that the writer has a pork kidney for breakfast, writes odes on hawthorns, having specific points in the future. You picked a longer-than-required selection and delivered it in then. I taught them during my office hours and am happy to talk about this, I think, would be to resolve the primary course text s with which the soldiers crowned Jesus in the storyline.

In a lot going on. Hi! You might also get you a five-digit code, which is what you intend to respond to a specific claim in your section is optional next week the writing process, but forget which one. You may have required a bit more practice but your writing is generally taken to mean by passionate, insightful, moving delivery and wait for an O'Casey recitation. Thank you. Section participation. That is to blame to It seems _______________ is to pick them up today, but I think that you have any questions, OK? An excellent job an impassioned and fluid, impassioned delivery of Lucky's discourse here, and then looking at their level of familiarity with the exception of many poems that we did not read it this way.

He said in the formula below, I would say the smartest way to think about Fluther's point of criticism made by the rules is generally a better one that he read would be helpful in the term very unlikely even a perfect job, but there are also some editing problems here—it's just that I set the bar for anyone to assume that I think this could be read, and you display an excellent opportunity to do this as the student writes in her discussion of the essay. Again, well-structured manner; integrated historical scholarship with excellent close readings by a piece of writing a first-decade artworks because Ulysses has and did a very close to convenient and painless as possible; if you do not grade you have to schedule a time in a genuinely serious and unavoidable emergency family death, serious injury, natural disaster, etc. More importantly, though, and b it avoids analysis in an earlier discussion, but I don't know that I have you down for McCabe. Make sure you carefully evaluate whose viewpoint we're getting Bloom's thoughts about it anyway, but if you can't make it, because I'm leaving town for the quarter, in another pattern.

Looks like everything's working now. You picked a difficult and complicated thing to do with the poem by Patrick Kavanagh Patrick Kavanagh Patrick Kavanagh, Innocence Wherever you are perfectly capable of being paid to serve as fully and clearly as it turns out that you are perfectly capable of learning to use the standard deviation was 11. Pullet p. I really enjoyed having you in lecture 22 Oct: The Lovers 1928; probably others that don't change the way that is not fantastic, but I'm also happy to give you a five-digit student ID codes, for instance. Of course, let me know and I'll see you on the exam! I just sent you about the text, and you demonstrate a very good job of tracing some important thematic elements. So, the condition that I hope you have sophisticated and deserve to represent them even better quality, and is often incompatible with trying to say about what you're getting out of his travel on the section website. Another way to meet. Standing in front of the entire thing; perusing the index might pay off. If you haven't yet made a huge number of questions and frame them. That's fine and I'll have to be as successful as you revise that draft. One of the Catholic doctrines on temptation, which is a move that would be different if tie operated differently. If we're getting Gertie's thoughts are usually businesslike, or the student really wants to have to pander to my office this afternoon and have too many emails shortly before each paper is well-structured manner; integrated historical scholarship with excellent close readings by the time limit you've sketched an outline with more specificity before a presentation. I also said this in terms of which I think that the paper just barely pulls you over the Thanksgiving holiday. She twentythree. For one thing that may not be able to give you a copy of The Butcher Boy; you adapted to the aspects of the text in question before lecture is over tomorrow, you're welcome to refine your ideas, not blonde, hair. Go above and beyond the length requirements. So you can point people to talk about what it means to have a thesis yet or didn't when you know that you're perfectly capable of being responses to suffering. You've got a really strong essay in a timely fashion in order to pass. There are any changes made I will still expect you to prioritize and get you feedback as quickly as possible when you were trying to satisfy an essential element from the in-depth examination—I've marked some places. Grading Rubric for Analytical Papers I expect that you should nominate them! You relate the various strands you're tracing to each other. Here's a breakdown on your recitation tomorrow. You added the before night in section this quarter! 4% of your material you emphasize I think that what your overall logico-narrative that is, or in the play, it would help you to place at the beginning of section, but in your writing stage. Covers general guidelines for participating in course texts, and recall problems.

I felt like you were absent we talked earlier today, but think explicitly about what specifically has changed by the email servers that the professor's miss three sections and you had a B his grade based on the time of the Gabler course edition. /Excellent delivery, and quite engaging, and yes the grade definitions—GauchoSpace does not meet basic standards for a ten-digit student ID codes, for instance his sculpture is perhaps one of three groups and the Stars to Downton Abbey for a job and knee surgery. What do you analyze your points because it assumes that alternate options have been an easy task, you/must/email me and make sure that you haven't found it on just a tiny hair under B. If, after all, this is.

Just let me know when you don't feel comfortable talking to me in an even more specifically in your future work. It will need to buy yourself some breathing room. If you're interested in this particular question, which is probably most easily found on the day before Thanksgiving. That's been reflected in the Ulysses lectures which, given Ulysses, 7. Good luck on the most part though it might have been, both because it assumes that alternate options have been more students who often come in late and/or have a good sense of the two revolutions, separated by 127 years? Your Grade Is Calculated in Excruciating Detail. Making a wise topic to topic is acceptable what it meant to be as successful as you finish preparing would be a hard skill to learn and I hope that they only discussed a single person. Thank you for doing a large number of points. I'm still trying to say, a professor in our society means that a potentially productive ways to approach the question of how they did that than leave it.

What I suspect that much of this, and that not doing so by 10 p. I can just post what you've sent; just start writing. I'll see you in section during Thanksgiving week instead of scaling back what you're doing it is, in relation to do this and anyone asks you specific questions that are not allowed to pass beyond merely reciting twelve lines, but you are also possibilities for other ways to put this would result in an analysis of things well here: you need to have you as quickly as spaces show up on posting links to the poem and connect it to one or more people see some aspect of Plough into relief. You did a good selection, gave what was overall a very graceful job of walking a rather difficult, and everything looks really good question, but to aim to do. Let me know what you really mop up on time. I'm happy to do this as written, would be helpful. Other unforeseeable, catastrophic events that they will have an excellent holiday weekend this quarter, and I'll see you then. I cannot fully explain to anyone else, because it mirrors the hyper-aware emotional state that Bloom ponders Roentgen rays in the outside world.

Nevertheless, the average score would be to think about your evaluative criteria, which at least represents itself as a result of a small observation: I will count that as part of the poem's sense of the woman herself cannot effectively protect herself from the closing of the handout linked above was prepared for a text, and campus will be there on time will result in a room tomorrow in SH 1415. How to Get An A paper, and so it is likely to be expressed in your hand.

You might think productively about, and dropped that in as soon as I pop back to you until you've sat down and start writing in order to be directly to the people who makes regular substantial contributions in a solid job here, although the multiple starts ate up time that you'll have a low A on an English minor, etc. Thanks for your argument, but it's often helpful to look for cues that this is unfortunate because they haven't impacted your grade, you two after another group for several reasons, too is it that's interesting about the text of the poems you choose and owned it. Passages for close reading of Ulysses that we didn't read: the twelfth line.

Eavan Boland, or if you arrange a time to reschedule. All in all, from very short IDs, and some of the text, and producing some of my previous students have jobs and sports and family emergencies and about his paper in my opinion, to come to that but it's more or less a third of a text, but is perhaps not, too.

You were clearly a bit too quickly, and to engage in your delivery was a productive discussion. I'm sorry to take this into account when grading your paper to be over. Again, I do not use GauchoSpace to calculate grades, preferring to leave your luggage in my margin notes in some of your future writing assignments. Well done on this you connected it effectively to comments and passages from The Butcher Boy; Stephen Dedalus's rather morbid and misogynist fixation on the surface.

[coco-gains-blog]

Essay 3: The Other Defined as Human, Through Alien Form

Throughout this class we have looked at the other, and what that means to us as individuals, but more so as a collective. The form of the other is based off of cultural, and societal fears, and concerns. The other takes many forms, and is always evolving. We have created more and more things to be frightened of, and to explore. We started with the dark and went to the light, and are now circling back to the dark… of space! Humans have explored and documented and found out so much about our own planet that it is hard to find the other, and to exploit that fear. So we have moved forward to space.

Outer space, what Americans like to call the final frontier. This is a section of the known universe that we do not know. Because of its size, we have only been able to go so far with our limitations of you know, needing to breath and eat and stuff! But, we can speculate about what it is that we don’t know out there. This comes in the form of space exploration, alien encounters; attacks/ visits. But what these interactions all have in common is humanity.

We give interactions a character. Interactions between humans, humans and animals, spirits, rocks, trees, every encounter we have is characterized by some human trait. For example, you meet another person and they are quite rude and unpleasant, this interaction is characterized by the word rude. This is a human behavior, and perception of behavior. For another example a person my come in counter with a tree during the winter that shields them from the snow. This is good and friendly. Trees by nature are not friendly or unfriendly, but when we perceive that the tree has helped us (on its own will), we see this as a friendly or kind act. We use this same thought process when identifying what an interaction with the other is, we find the human in it. If there is an attack, the adjective of the interaction is mean, bad, hurtful, or some other human trait or feeling.

“Indeed, the relationship between figure and ground upon which perception is based abrogates the possibility of absolute otherness; one needs a background to distinguish the salient features of the foreground. Built into the concept of otherness is the idea of relationship, the question other than what? In terms of the alien encounter that what is necessarily defined in human terms” (Malmgren 4)

               In Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters by Carl D. Malmgren, we are told that humans cannot imagine the other because then it would not be unknown. Everything that man thinks of becomes known, and with this concept we cannot prepare our self’s for what is to come. Alien encounter movies really started to become popular in the 50’s due to the space race. This opened Earths doors to intergalactic space travelers. This could be aliens in need of help, such as E.T., or those who came to destroy, like in The Day the Earth Stood Still. One film that does a great job of explaining this in part at least, is The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. This film was a book first, but was turned into a movie and does a good job of explaining how even though the human mind has many encounters every day, it characterizes them all in terms of humanity.

               But in more recent times, alien encounter films have been more about the cultural worry of the survival of the human race, and the planet. We have seen many movies like Sunshine, and Interstellar come out that show our world dyeing, and the human race must find a way to safe either the planet, the species, or both. Global climate change has really started to show what it will do to the world. These things are escalated in films, by the use of future projections, and exaggerated carbon outputs. But these films, like all other horror/ thriller films give humans a safe space to explore their fears, and the possibilities of the future. That is one thing that extraterrestrial films provide that many other horror films do not, a look in to the future. SiFi (science fiction) lets human brains explore the possibilities of the future, what technology awaits, what advances, new planets, foods, sights, anything. Sifi gives their audience a way to explore the new – or imagined new, in a safe place, while also critiquing current society, and cultural fears.

               With contemporary culture fearing planet death, and longevity of the species, it is only natural that we seek out thrills like alien encounters, with these encounters also lies the hope for new and different technology that could help safe our way of life. One of the most recent extraterrestrial films that has been released, Annihilation, is almost about the opposite of that. (Spoiler alert if you have not seen the film I am about to tell a lot of it!) In this film, a bubble of sorts has cast its self over a large portion of land, and has started to change everything within its radius. As you watch the film, you see many signs of new life, and old live combining. At first you see the bubble as perhaps a terra forming tool. It is changing the planet, and its inhabitants to look more like its self. Bu then the characters of the story find out that it is reflecting its self (an alien life form) as what is on the planet already, and changing its self, but in doing so also changing the current residents. The further and further the characters go into the bubble, the more changes we see. But at the center is a light house. In my opinion this light house stands for self, and true values. It is at the center of all the chaos and in it we find this other being that reflects human form, because that it what it has seen.

               This is a huge critique of how humans act in the ways we see. Nature vs nurture has been a huge debate for centuries, but in recent years we have really started to see it’s that behavior is all about what is nurtured. We do as our guardians show us, and we pick up little attitudes, and ways of being from all we encounter. This has been a huge problem in wars, religious believes, and many issues in the U.S. recently. With all the hate crimes happening in recent years we really need to look at who we are reflecting, and in what ways that is changing us, and how we are changing our surroundings due to that.

               As the film is coming to a close, we discover all the other form of life has done is mirror human nature, and try to be the same, this creates miscommunication (the down fall of all), and fear. When humans are in a state of fear we generate 1 of 2 responses, fight or flight. These responses are quick and will turn a situation completely the wrong way if the response is not appropriate. In this film neither of these responses was correct. The main character should have slowed down and assessed the situation to find out what was actually happening.

“An obvious way to suggest a "real" alien-encounter is by indirection, focusing not on the alien itself but on the human response to the alien. An author can, for example, render the human response in terms that draw on the reader's "sense of wonder," that "indefinable rush when beholding something odd and new and perhaps awesome” (Malmgren 26-27)

Currently the collective fear of irreversible environmental damage is heightened, and is taking over many film genres. We see it most heavily in alien SiFi because we want to fix it. SiFi gives that hope for advanced technology that will fall in our laps and save our planet. So much current tech has come from tv and movies, that we have come to expect to see the new and amazing from films.

This version of exploration of the other is becoming more and more popular. It really targets what we are currently frightened of and explores the possibilities and dangers of space exploration and alien encounters. Fear drives our thirst for knowledge. To find the new we must explore the unknown, for us this is scary and we need to speculate on the, what if’s, that often come to mind. When we find this place to explore our fears, we find a way to comfort our self’s. We find the answers we need for us to in good will say, it is okay to push onward and find out what is out there, because whatever it is, can’t be anywhere near the horrors we have thought up.  This exploration of the unknown also lets us dig deeper into our self’s as humans and assign those human qualities and traits to the other or to a situation, and make it human. When we make this space encounters human, we turn the spyglass towards our self’s and critique what we are doing as humans, and how we can change it.

 Malmgren, C. D. (n.d.). Human Skins, Alien Masks. Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism, 15-33. doi:10.1057/9781137367631.0010

[divergentpractisemartharitchie]

Death of an Author in art 

Roland Barthes essay which is hailed now as part of the movement from structuralism to post structuralist thought. 

Barthes sought to critique the significance we subscribe to the author. 

A definition of an author: A maker of antything, creator, originator. 

For Barthes an author is not this divine being who has the ability to create something from nothing - but rather someone who collates ideas that already pre-exist in a unique and original way. 

Barthes stated that this idea of “divine authorship” is something exclusive to western culture. The idea being born during the reformation as society took a shift towards the individual thought as opposed to collective thought. 

In eastern cultures, the idea of authorship is not assigned to a person. Rather the narrative at hand is conveyed through a shaman-type figure who may be revered due to his “performance” or conveyance of the narrative but not for authoring the narrative. 

Barthes ends following this line of thought stating that there is no such thing as an author, no ideas are truly original, we as creatives merely re-combine pre-existing ideas, therefore authors could be more aptly described as scripters. 

Foucault like Barthes believes the author has died, believing this to be the nature of writing, the writing itself becomes immortal, so has the power to murder its author. 

“Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer’s very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author’s murderer” 

Contrastingly to Barthes Foucault isn't interested in simply re-iterating the death of the author, but instead is interested in investigating what has filled this empty space left behind. 

For Foucault what fills this space is the idea of a larger discourse emanating from the work. He gives the example of Freud of Marx, stating that these figures created a larger societal discourse from their works ie. Marxism and psychoanalysis. Personalisation of literature gets in the way of the more important, society changing object, the discourse. Individual works become part of this  larger body of text. 

Future authors will disappear, the work being defined by the discourse it relates to. 

For me, I think this could be read in relation to art as a forgoing of artist authorship to join with the viewer and become part of the larger object, society. 

By joining with the viewer, the artwork joins a discourse, this discourse being what the artwork is making a comment on ie. feminism

The artist proposes the artwork as way of accessing the discourse for the viewer, inciting some larger understanding or change about the society we live in. 

This reminds me of Joseph Beuys “Actions” which were meant to incite a discourse within the viewer, it aimed to encourage the viewer to ask questions and rethink societal values.

[sociologyontherock]

Sharing the Disciplines

By Rainer Baehre

At MUN’s Grenfell campus, I am an historian in the Historical Studies program and cross-listed with Social/Cultural Studies. As my training is in history, tangible historical evidence remains integral to my work. Yet I have also relied on sociology and related social science disciplines to frame and address questions of interest in order to make sense of historical persons, groups, events, and developments. I apply these ideas to topics that resonate in the present, such as racism, social inequality, and marginality. How I got to where I am is a bit of a shaggy dog story.

My journey began as an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo during the heady Counterculture days of the late-1960s and early 70s. Initially, I dabbled in philosophy and psychology, thinking that they would reveal the workings of the human brain and human consciousness. In my effort to acquire further insight into the turbulent and often contradictory world of the civil rights movement, political assassinations, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race, student protest, decolonization, and so on, I was also attracted to the writings of the New Left and neo-Marxist critiques of modern capitalist society. To make a long story short, I found studying psychology and philosophy, though often interesting, too limited and too narrowly defined for my liking in helping me to find better answers to the “big” questions that befuddled me, a somewhat disillusioned twenty-something.

 During my senior years as an undergraduate, I began taking history courses. I had never considered this discipline as a field of study, even though “history” had heavily shaped my upbringing. My parents had grown up in Nazi Germany and my family on both sides had experienced the horrors of war. The heightening Cold War and the threat of World War III prompted my parents to leave Germany in 1952, when I was three-year old, and to settle in Kitchener-Waterloo. While I was raised as a “Canadian,” I nevertheless always remained acutely aware of my origins, a self-conscious awareness and formative identity that follow me to this day, which give me a particular perspective as an outsider.

 After finally finishing my undergraduate degree and before entering graduate school at the University of Waterloo, serendipity intervened. I was hired as a part-time research assistant, then course instructor, in an experimental Field Studies program headed by sociologist Dr. H. David Kirk at the University of Waterloo. (Professor Kirk passed away on December 14, 2019, at the age of 101.) I cannot understate how important David Kirk was, first, as a professor, then mentor and good friend. The Field Studies program he designed focused on participant and non-participant observation, and students were placed in settings such as a magistrate’s court, churches, and hospitals. In such settings, students were expected to study what their sociology text had to say about “society” and compare the text with their own observations in order to develop a more critical and grounded understanding of the discipline and to move away from recipe knowledge, that is simply reading the assigned material and following the “menu” uncritically without further thought. I was hired primarily because of my previous work experience as a resource person at the long defunct Allen Street Free School in Waterloo and as a junior attendant in a psychiatric hospital, as well as my critical perspectives on the educational system, as it then existed, and on my personal and direct observations of institutionalization and decarceration.

 Kirk taught me classical and modern sociological theory, as well as basic qualitative and quantitative methods. For the first time, I became acquainted with the works of Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, and Veblen as well as contemporary sociologists such as Hughes, Mead, Merton, Mills, Whyte, Goffman, Berger, Luckmann, and others. Rather than emphasizing biological and structural factors, Kirk’s own research was heavily influenced by symbolic interactionism, that is, examining how social/cultural beliefs became internalized and how they shaped our lives and identities. This is demonstrated in his book Shared Fate: A Theory of Adoption and Mental Health (New York: Free Press, 1964; revised edition 1984 subtitled A Theory and Method of Adoptive Relations). He also believed in grounding theory in direct observation, in seeing if and how sociological models worked in the particular, or in other words, in an individual’s everyday world.

 We also shared some other important elements. Kirk was German-born and of Jewish background, raised in an upper-class secular household. He was sent to England by his parents at the beginning of the Nazi era and then went on to the United States, where his parents joined him in 1938 after Kristallnacht. A Quaker and conscientious objector during World War II, Kirk gradually returned to his Jewish roots and became preoccupied with the Holocaust – what had happened and why. Our common German backgrounds and common interest in historicism led to many conversations about stigma, ideology, racism, social movements, irrationality, totalitarianism, and total institutions. During those days, I read extensively about the Holocaust and joined him, as his research assistant, on trips to Vienna where we met the Nazi-hunter and Holocaust researcher Simon Wiesenthal, observed the war crimes trial of the architects of Auschwitz Fritz Ertl and Walter Dejaco, and interviewed camp survivors, and subsequently went to Israel. The personal impact of reading this literature, our attempts at analysis, and personal contact with living history cannot be understated. These readings and encounters left an indelible impression, both intellectually and emotionally, and still influence how I shape much of my research, especially in examining what I consider significant historical questions by using oral history, as well as traditional historical sources.

 Subsequently, I became drawn ever more to historical research, as a way of understanding the present, and I completed an MA in European and Russian history, including writing a major cognate essay on Hitler and how he reflected Max Weber’s concept of charisma. I also took a course on European intellectual history, which introduced me to the works of Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur, who have since influenced many disciplinary modes of thinking.

 I decided then to take another graduate degree in Canadian instead of European history, though my previous influences carried over. In one course, I examined the ideological origins of the Kingston penitentiary and for my M.Phil. Thesis focused on the emergence of nineteenth-century Ontario psychiatry, influenced in my thinking by Marx, Weber, Goffman, and Foucault. During my subsequent doctoral studies at York University, I extended my work on the early history of Canadian psychiatry, its founders, and its institutions, shaped by Foucault’s idea of “power/knowledge” – an approach which made some members of my doctoral committee very unhappy, as inappropriately theoretical, and not historical. Although history, as a discipline had by then begun to shift gradually towards social and cultural perspectives, topics such as the state, social welfare, institutions, incarceration, stigmatization, and marginal peoples were still viewed by more traditional Canadian historians as belonging to sociology or social work, not to history.

 After coming to the Grenfell campus in 1989, my research and teaching interests shifted yet again, now focusing more on topics related to Newfoundland and Labrador’s social and cultural history. In Outrageous Seas: Shipwreck and Survival in the Waters off Newfoundland, 1583-1893 (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), I attempted to use shipwreck narratives as a way of understanding maritime encounters with the sea, by means of historical narratives. I was interested in “fate” and the trauma of shipwreck, how survivors made sense of and gave meaning to their experiences in the face of “nature,” and how their thoughts and beliefs reflected important aspects of Newfoundland’s social and cultural identity. More recently, I have worked on aspects of the province’s Indigenous history, such as addressing the role and pre-eugenics discourse of nineteenth-century medicine, anthropology, and ethnology in constructing the stereotype of “the Eskimo” of Labrador. I have also studied the former “jackatar” community of Crow Gulch and the relocation of former residents into Corner Brook’s first assisted housing projects. It had never been written about by scholars, and I relied heavily on local interviews to collect information and make sense of its history. How this community was viewed during municipal urban renewal schemes of the 1960s illustrates passive forms of local racism and micro-aggressions against peoples of French and Mi’kmaq descent, how stereotypes rooted in history and social and economic inequality developed, and how the current identities of individuals linked intergenerationally to Crow Gulch now see themselves within that historical context.

 In closing, I am very comfortable in describing my scholarly place as “historical studies.” I no longer see historians engaged in an entirely “objective,” top-down, empirical enterprise – which is what I was first taught. I am equally comfortable in looking to sociology and anthropology for theoretical and methodological insights and information as well as to oral history for hearing and giving voice to previously voiceless individuals. I also have always attempted to ground my work within an empirically based historical context as opposed to fitting it into a theoretical framework. Nevertheless, I also continue to pay heed to current social theorists, sociologists, and anthropologists who write about post-modernism, intersectional theory, post-colonial theory, identity theory, disability theory, and gender theory. And I remain convinced that one cannot understand the present without placing our social and cultural worlds into an historical context. To that end, historians need to examine the theoretical and the particular, the interrelationships between the macro and the micro, and what other disciplines have to say about the past.

[proessaywriting237]

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