Levi on orientalism

I’m sympathetic to Levi’s post QUESTIONING THE ORIENTALISM CHARGE. I’ve never really been on board with this movement (nor with the occasional digs at tourism), for the very basic reason that we ought to be happy when people are fascinated by foreign cultures, and not be so quick to charge them with imposing their own fantasies on what they find.

Naturally, there are in fact some really sicko orientalist texts out there (with Flaubert’s Letters from Egypt being the most despicable piece of work I have ever read by a major author).

But understanding of “the other” is possible to some extent. To deny this is to hold that all claims to understand are equally sophistry.

follow-up

And concerning this part of my previous post: “The real does more than just haunt human awareness as an ominous residue. The real has parts, and they interact with one another just as we interact with it.”

I’m often surprised by the extent to which people in continental philosophy circles, including those who are temperamentally inclined toward realism and materialism, seem to think that the only problem is the disembodied Cartesian subject. They assume that all we need to do is say that the subject is co-produced by the world, that it has a genesis, that it confronts the world as an opaque mystery that historically determines it, and then we’ll have overcome our philosophical biases.

I do not say this in a spirit of mockery; Heidegger does much the same thing. But none of these “overcomings” can overcome the true center of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which is what I called “A7” anti-realism in the Braver review. In other words: the assumption that the human-world relation is more basic than all other relations.

For the most part, this is denied only by:

(1) scientifically inclined naturalists

(2) Whitehead

But it often surprises me that even the newest of continental philosophies so often build the human-world privilege into their ontology without even reflecting on it.

Stated differently, how many people working in continental philosophy have anything clear to say about inanimate relations?

The list can perhaps literally be counted on one hand, or two hands at a maximum.

on Croatia

I didn’t realize that Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism was a text of such major concern for the Zagreb organizers, but will now try to work it into the talk. Lenin’s a fun read, actually, due to his crisp tone of conviction.

The title I finally settled on was “Realism Without Materialism.” There are several things that need to be discussed here, given that both terms are used in wildly different ways depending on who is using them. It will be relatively easy to say what I mean personally by realism, but will take a bit longer to address various forms of materialism one by one (I don’t like any of those forms, as many of you know).

But for me, realism isn’t realism unless it’s “R7” realism (to use the term I coined when reviewing Braver’s outstanding A Thing of This World). This means: the relations between any two things have to be on the same ontological footing as the human-world relation. You can’t just say “sure, there might be/is a real world; I’m not Berkeley” and call that realism. It’s far too weak a way in which to confront the real. The real does more than just haunt human awareness as an ominous residue. The real has parts, and they interact with one another just as we interact with it.

legal threat from Leiter

Leiter now seems to be threatening legal action against me in Egypt! Yes, I’m afraid that counts as “bullying.”

Speaking of “obsession”, read THIS LONG RANT from the man on another person he disliked. See especially the “March 2008 update” at the end.

Still no response on his cruel dig after Derrida’s death.

“Dear Mr. Harman,

I was sorry to discover that you can’t conduct yourself like a professional, or even a grown-up. I mean, really: posting e-mails from professional colleagues and then mocking them? How old are you?

Your obsession with inventing ‘bullies’ and then expressing ‘contempt’ for them is quite revealing.

I assure you I chose my original words carefully (maybe you should investigate the law of the country you live in on this subject).

In any case, given your penchant for juvenile posturing, you certainly won’t hear from me again via e-mail.

Very truly yours,
Brian Leiter
John P. Wilson Professor of Law
Director, Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values”

[ADDENDUM from a well-placed Egyptian contact: “lol tell him that according to Egyptian laws he needs to grow up…and you can also convey many many insults on my behalf…” No, I think I’ll just move on until the lawsuit begins.]

more on information transparency

Another thing I noticed last night is that I learned of two other departures of American faculty that I hadn’t heard of until now. Granted, there are hundred of faculty at this university, but a much smaller number of us are expat American/European faculty (as opposed to Egyptian faculty) and the expat American/Europeans tend to know more about each other’s business than we do about most of the Egyptians. (Who tend to be married with kids and well-integrated into Egyptian society, whereas the expats tend to hang out at expat parties and keep posted on one another’s news.)

So, even in a fairly small group of this size, information transparency is very low even about major news such as “I’m leaving Egypt forever.” Just this week I had to write two e-mails to people who are fairly well-known acquiantances saying “wow, you’re back in the States forever?! I had no idea you were even considering leaving!”

This leads me to one of my recent observations, which is that gossip always spreads more slowly than one might expect. Or rather, not slowly, but in more limited areas than one might expect. There are built-in firewalls to gossip… Some people just don’t like to hear it and so no one ever gives it to them. Others are in circles where other circles do not overlap. And still others simply happen not to hear things that would interest them through the laws of random chance, or because people assume that they must already have heard it, and thus decide not to tell them “again”.

This suggests that it’s generally a mistake, if you suspect that someone is bad-mouthing you, to try to pre-empt it by saying “you’ve probably heard X and Y about me. All lies!”, because then you may actually be giving further dissemination to stories that might otherwise simply be forgotten.

What made me think about this is a case where someone (who told me this story) once unwisely went to a university administrator and said you’ve probably heard X, Y, and Z about me. And in fact, X, Y, and Z are all completely true in this case, and may even already have been heard by the administrator in question. But it was still a clumsy move to try to pre-empt it. People have short memories, and over time much is forgiven and forgotten automatically, as long as you provide goods and services of value to the community.

on the sociology of parties

Note to self: parties in El Rehab must be taken in small doses. Either I have to take a very late-night taxi all the way back to Zamalek, or I crash at someone’s place out there, enjoy a nice breakfast, but then don’t get home until midafternoon and by then the day is irretrievable for anything but blog snacking.

However, in this case it was worth it. That was somehow just the right mix of people in just the right moods, and the result was a sort of party I’ve never seen before– academics aged 32 to 65 at their harmlessly wildest and most benevolent. I would never have predicted it.

Presumably someone has done some work on the sociology of parties. It would be an interesting subject.

Just before it ended, I was discussing the matter with Ryan (one of the departing guests of honor, a universally well-liked young topology specialist). We both agreed that the structure of a party of that size –17 people, 9 men and 8 women– is fragile enough that adding or subtracting even one person might completely shift the dynamics of it.

At a certain size, of course, the dynamics of a party become almost a single autonomous entity, with a tendency to overpower the individuals– you walk in and feel swept away by the spirit of it. But with 17, there’s still leeway for one additional person either to add an extra missing ingredient, to ruin it with sulky obstructiveness, or to overpower it.

To take an obvious example, if Barack Obama had somehow walked into the party alone last night, it would have been a magnificent and memorable occasion following his Cairo speech, but obviously it would have effectively ruined the other thing we all had going.

A slightly less overpowering example was the one that sparked my conversation with Ryan… Our wonderful Provost lives in the same neighborhood and was supposed to drop by, but as a political specialist she became entangled in a public Obama roundtable that went later than expected. Now, our Provost is extremely easygoing and “one of the gang,” and we all love and adore her on a social level no less than an academic one. But… she’s still the Provost of the University. Would people have settled down too much and feared showing their wild side? Would 45-year-olds have made fools of themselves moonwalking in front of the Provost as soon as the shuffler gave us Michael Jackson?

Even if we had just added a random additional faculty member to the mix, what if they were being just a little too exuberant, or were pouting a bit about something?

I think 17 party guests is right about at the number where individuals can still make too large an impact on the mood as a whole. 17 is an unstable number of guests.

Once in Chicago during dissertation days, Paul and I had a party with somewhere around 210 guests. This was probably illegal– the floor was actually sagging in a few places in the living room. But there’s little chance that anyone but a celebrity could have individually overpowered the mood of the night. There was even a confrontation over sexual harassment at that party between the reportedly guilty male and two male friends of the harassed woman, and almost no one even heard about it (even I, as co-host, only heard about it after all the involved persons had left the scene). With over 200 people, information transparency is not very high. [ADDENDUM: To give credit where it is due, I should say that only about 5 of the 210 people were invited by me. Those who remember Paul from Chicago days know that not only does he know lots of people, but knows lots of people who know lots of people, and those people in turn know lots of people. So I wouldn’t be surprised if something like 700 were indirectly invited to a two-bedroom apartment that was already much too small for 210 guests. Latour would like Paul Schafer: he’s at the central node of numerous different social networks simultaneously.]

WIth 4-person dinners, of course, individuals obviously have tremendous power for good or ill.

I suspect that certain sociologists/anthroplogists have identified exact critical numerical values where groups of people transform their behavior and their knowledge base in different ways.

p.s. forgot the major point

p.s. And I forgot to mention the major lesson I drew from this exercise…

I’ve concluded that I tend to overestimate student energy and enthusiasm as signals of how well a class is going.

That Spring ’07 Contemporary Philosophy course (which had a lot of Heidegger and Whitehead in it, but also some analytic materials) was a sedate bunch. They also suffered by comparison with the Spring ’03 version of the course, which contained a legendary assemblage of students of the later-became-friends-for-life variety.

But despite their sedate and relatively unresponsive nature, the Spring ’07 group seemed to get a lot out of the course, just like the Spring ’09 8:30 AM kids.

digging through the teaching archives

The subject matter of the last post got me interested in doing a more “systematic” brief study of the course evaluations, so I went back and looked at all of them that I could.

I’ve been at AUC since Fall 2000, but the system only stores the evaluations beginning in Spring 2004. I was on sabbatical for two semesters during this period, meaning that I have 9 semesters’ worth of evaluations from AUC to look at. (In some ways it’s nice to have been somewhere for awhile, and to have built up an institutional history and a deep fund of anecdotes and experiences with a specific student population.)

And I’m continuing, for the moment, with the experiment of assuming that the student evaluations are the absolute accurate truth about the quality of a given class, and using that as a control to see how my own impressions of the course were distorted.

*The two best courses, according to the students, were Contemporary Philosophy in Spring ’07 and a whole class on Freud in Fall ’04. I would definitely agree about that Freud class, one of my best-ever teaching jobs. But I seem to have a marked preference for teaching classes that fall outside the bounds of philosophy strictly speaking, which strongly suggests a St. John’s alumnus trapped in a philosophy professor’s body. (I would kill to teach a history of science course or a literature course or anything but philosophy for a couple of years.)

*The two lowest-rated courses… One was a definite disaster, the only *bad* teaching job I’ve ever done in my life (there were various reasons for this) and my own bad memories of that course match the numbers. I don’t even feel like mentioning the course title or otherwise remembering that class… The other was a merely average-rated Islamic Philosophy course. That one, however, was largely a matter of misplaced student expectations. I made major efforts after arriving in Cairo to become reasonably educated in Islamic philosophy, and the course was actually pretty well done. What happened is that a number of extremely religious students registered for that class, and what they seemed to be expecting was practical preaching and daily life guidance, which they obviously weren’t going to get from Dr. Harman lecturing on al-Farabi and Avicenna. (This becomes clear from the written comments portion of the evaluations.) For reasons unknown, some of them were expecting me to drill them in the basic tenets of Islam. The course is probably best left in the future to my outstanding Sufi colleague.

*The Intro courses all blend together in my mind. That’s the main reason our Department exists (since all AUC students must take a philosophy class to graduate) and hence that’s the major part of our load year in and year out. A few of those classes had especially memorable students, but otherwise I can’t honestly remember which class was which over the years.

All I’ve noticed, strangely enough, is that my best jobs teaching Intro courses were always in the semesters when I was unhappiest. I’m not sure what that means– does Intro teaching function as an “escape”, and does it then become tedious and unappealing when things are going especially well? Hard to guess. But in the worst-ever semester of my adult life, the Intro students rated me as a hero.

*Everyone’s teaching ratings dropped like a stone in Fall ’08. The students were obviously in a cranky mood because of new campus facilities and commuting problems.

I think the problem is less with the evaluations than with how easy they are to manipulate by friends and foes during tenure and promotion cases. There’s always something negative people can play up if they want to do so.

Another way in which “teaching” differs from “research” is that pretty much everyone claims to be a good teacher, and it’s also a fairly tough area in which to get an accurate picture. Sometimes student scuttlebutt is more useful than actual student evaluations… Students are generally too polite/afraid to just walk into your office and rate all of your colleagues, and of course it would be totally inappropriate to ask. But what often happens is that if you get to be on friendlier terms with a couple of the Majors, at some point they unloosen their tongues and you hear a rundown of their praise and complaints about the whole Department.

And of course, that’s often surprising… People who are valued and admired colleagues are sometimes hated by students, while completely unexpected people turn out to be student idols.

on student course evaluations

I wouldn’t say we should get rid of them, because students deserve a say. But strange things happen with evaluations. This semester, the seemingly mediocre 8:30 AM Intro class ended up with the same average rating as the atomic bomb class (which, I can unequivocally say, was the best course I ever taught at AUC, and was openly and vocally received as such by the best students in the class). The other class, a lunchtime Intro section, was a fairly standard pretty good experience, but ended up with a significantly lower rating than the other two.

Sometimes you can guess how these will turn out, sometimes not.

Part of it may be sampling error. But another part, perhaps more interestingly, may simply be that teachers think they know what is going on in any given class, but don’t.

That’s of interest to all humans, because just as Descartes ironically states that “good sense must be the best apportioned thing in the world,” we probably all overestimate our ability to know what is going on in the minds of students, friends, and others, based not just on words but on body language and the like. Yet we may be completely off the mark.

In May, I twice ran into a friend (with whom I had quarreled over something less than a year ago) in an unexpected place on campus, and was really delighted by the good luck both times. It seemed like a nice, lucky way to patch things up. For me, those were feel-good encounters. But later, I was told that I had seemed completely bored, cold, and uninterested both times, which was simply 100% false. How often do these things happen? Probably all the time.

Numerical student evaluations offer an interesting tool for testing this sort of thing, though perhaps not an accurate tool. The method would be this: assume that the student evaluations are 100% accurate as to which classes were better and which were worse. According to this result, my two classes were objectively equally well-taught, and the third one was slightly worse-taught. What modifications would have to be made to how I weigh various factors in order to being my own assessments into line with the “objectively true” student ratings?

Well, in the present case… I suppose I tend to judge whether a course is good both by a high energy level in the students, and by my own fascination with the subject matter.

But high energy level can also mean simple misbehavior. There was a certain brattiness to that lunchtime class that I may have been confusing with enthusiasm. The 8:30 AM class, by contrast, was a silent and lifeless bunch, and I may have mistaken that for cognitive inertia. But it may simply have been a result of the 8:30 start time, and also of the fact that more docile and well-behaved students are the ones who tend most often to register for the early-morning slots.

Meanwhile, the atomic bomb class was rated high, but not among my highest-rated classes ever. I may simply have projected my own interest in the subject matter onto the students as a whole (about 7 or 8 of the students were tremendously involved, but there was plenty of silence in the back as well).

Robert M. Parker

Cameron wrote in to say that Robert M. Parker might be a better comparison than Rush Limbaugh. I didn’t know who Parker was. He turns out to be a celebrity wine-taster.

But he seems to me to be a much more sympathetic figure than Limbaugh. And I love this paragraph in particular:

“Because of his powerful influence, his experiences have ranged from having two chateau owners offer him the sexual favours of their daughters to receiving death threats. On one occasion the manager of Château Cheval Blanc, Jacques Hebrard, was outraged at Parker’s evaluation and asked Parker to retaste. Upon arriving, Parker was attacked by Hebrard’s dog as the manager stood idly by and watched. When Parker asked for a bandage to stop the bleeding from his leg, Parker says Hebrard instead gave him a copy of the offending newsletter. Hebrard denies that Parker was bleeding.”

Not sure if Leiter is quite big enough for any of these experiences to come his way. “Yale was outraged at the evaluation of their philosophy of mind component, and asked Leiter to re-evaluate. Upon arriving in New Haven, Leiter was attacked by the dogs of the Department Chair as the Chair stood idly by and watched…” No, that’s hard to imagine.