As seen on TV

May I admit that there are times when I think I don't understand religion at all? This is Jan Crouch, one of the founders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, a prosperity gospel outfit recently in the news. (Behind her is one of the actors ordained to play Jesus at her Orlando theme park, The Holy Land Experience.) Like other prosperity preachers TBN justifies its lavish sets and the luxurious perks of its leaders as celebrations of God's abundant bounty - a bit of a challenge to many Christians and perhaps to the tax code too. What I don't get is the hair (there's much more in the video). Jesus might want you in diamonds and pearls, villas and Bentleys and private planes, but the hair? Even Mary of Magdala's hair wasn't pink. What's it supposed to show, to say of God's love? Is God's blessing a frivolity, a front, a fake?

Coming attractions

Summer's fast approaching: a mere five weeks from today I head off for China. After a day in Hong Kong I'll fly to Kunming (A above), spend a day or two there, then take the train to Lijiang (B), a UNESCO World Heritage site, then take a bus or car on to Shangrila (C), a sinophilic Tibetan city, where the next Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalaya meeting's taking place. So soon!!

Damned if you do...

Belief Systems: A Pamphlet Discussing Fashion and Religion, the small newspaper-sized product of our fashion-religion seminars, went to the printer today. My Swedish fashion theorist colleague O found a way to include every collage and every piece of speculative text we generated - it fills thirty-six pages! A lot of fashion images found their way into the collages, which might be an issue. As a precaution, O has procured a Swedish ISBN for the pamphlet, as Swedish law is gentler on copyright questions. I wonder how it sees the creative use of religious images?

At the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA, which confirms her prodigious artistic gifts, intelligence and imagination, I also found something I was somehow not expecting: compassion.

Coming unstuck

Our last session of New School Century! - well the last one we are in charge of. Next week's session is a town hall meeting to which the whole university is invited, and it will be students speaking, not us. This was by design, of course. We didn't want to claim to be giving a final reckoning, to corral the squirmy polymorphousness of our school into a new master narrative. So what did we say? Just that.

The first part of the class was about archives. Some student journalists who'd written a well-researched story about The New School's shocking lack of archives discussed their work - it's lovely to hear from students enthralled by the school's past and wondering why we didn't hold on to everything. Then the head of the Kellen Archive talked about her archive and the work of an archivist. The takeaway: an appreciation that in the natural course of things, stuff disappears and is forgotten - unless you do something. (I think this melancholy fact of life is less obvious to today's students, since so much of what we do is archived whether we want it to be or not, most of it by Google.) But archiving is a serious business, a significant investment of expertise and resources, especially if it does what a good archive does - holding on to more than the materials for a single narrative. Still, no archive is perfect. There will always be gaps and some things, especially those relating more powerful people, are more likely to survive than others.

The New School's failure to commit to an archives may not just be a matter of negligence or disorganization. As a cash-strapped institution, you can see why it might not have devoted resources this way. Indeed, an institution not originally granting degrees has little need to keep track of students, credits and curriculum. More fundamentally, The New School didn't understand itself to be building something. Its purpose was to remain current, alive to the needs of the day and agile in responding to them, and its founders saw that universities are made conservative by institutional inertia. Keep track of a curriculum or of alumni/ae, and people will start asking thinking about traditions. The original 1918 proposal mandated that the New School do without administration and trustees and also (this seems to have been Emily James Putnam's idea:) without a tenured faculty. It's almost as if we were designed not to have a memory, so we wouldn't be held back by it.

Still, even this is a story we're telling, and J and I clearly thought it enough of a story worth telling that we spent a semester guiding students through it! So we reprised a few themes that have helped us tell our story:
• the New History (a usable past instead of disabling traditionalism)
• arts as social research (broader than common understandings of both social science and art)
• Gestalt thinking (wholes other than the sum of their parts, and the related hermeneutics and responsibilities), and
• the ethos of self-directed adult education, Dewey's education as growth, and the adventure of offering it to traditional-age college students.
We're less sure how to tell the story of the last decades, and asked the students - each of whom has conducted an interview with someone with a long-standing relationship with the university - what they had found: we heard of lots of growing pains, as programs are more and less comfortably integrated into "the university," and also, not surprisingly, of interviewees saying things "off the record." Another challenge for archiving! We look forward to the students' reports next week.

For the remainder of the class we discussed an essay by our colleague Ann Snitow which raises profound questions about memory, especially for anti-institutional movements. In the essay Ann reflects on a project she helped put together, Feminist Memoir Project, a project designed to remedy the way the women's movement seemed already by the 1990s to be on the way to being forgotten. Ann moves beyond the usual (not untrue) observations that mainstream history marginalizes women as agents to wonder if there's anything else about the history of the women's movement that makes it slip from memory. She finds several things. Unlike the civil rights movement and aware of the way women have been objectified in the past, the women's movement avoided taking pictures. Consciously different from many movements it had no designated spokespersons. Cognizant of the way master narratives inevitably marginalize it tried not to tell one but to open a space for the excluded to speak. It didn't promise closure, a happy ending, but autonomy for all women to craft their own lives as they saw fit. Finally and in a way most painfully, women of one generation seem not to remember the struggles of their mothers' generation, something both analyzed but perhaps also mandated by psychoanalytic theories about the tensions in the relationships between mothers and daughters.

All of this seemed to add up to a story (a congeries of stories) which lacked the "stickiness" of those things which find their way into collective memories. "Sticky" is a term Ann got from our colleague Bill Hirst, a specialist in the psychology of memory. "Sticky" stories have clear beginnings and endings, heroes and morals; feminism was rejecting this kind of storytelling and the world it makes! (Recall the feminist critiques of the myth of autonomy, bad for individuals, bad for society.) But what was one to do about this? The absence of clear leaders, images, teleologies is of the essence of the movement. Another, or a more aware, kind of memory-work is required, part archive, part narrative, part act of faith that your work is important - deserves to be remembered, and so deserves to be available if as and when someone wants to remember it.

 

This might well remind you of the difficulties of the Occupy movement, which was reconstituting itself as we spoke. (Our class starts at 4, the time protesters convened at Union Square after picketing and exploring "horizontal pedagogy" at the Free University of New York at Madison Square Park, for the march downtown which encountered police and ended in arrests.) We explored the parallels with The New School, from its resistance to archiving to its experimental curricula and student-designed trajectories through them. So it was a perfect non-ending ending for us to flash through some recent attempts to corral it into a single story (Rutkoff & Scott's 1986 book New School, Sanjay Kothari's 75th anniversary Bulletin cover, and Parts & Labor's 2009 project "By any name" (another astonished reaction at the awful state of our archive, from which the images in this post derive), and then conclude that the university remains something which must be remade by each generation of students, indeed by each student: over to you!

Wise beyond his years

Getting ready to see "The Makropoulos Case" at the Met tomorrow, I can't resist posting this picture which someone found recently. 1983?

Bright Spring day on the west side

Extended family

Last Religious Studies party of the year! All constituencies were represented: current students (including one senior), alumni (one of whom founded a spiritual performance experiment company), faculty members (two of whom are moving on to new jobs, A Tibetanist moving with his research center to Cambridge, a Jewish historian moving to Baltimore), partners from our program's fabulous activities of the semester (Queer Christianities, and the Religion-Fashion seminars), and the program assistant who actually makes everything happen. A blessed little world!

Up and away!

Wow! This is one of a stash of long unseen images of New York - nearly a million! - just released by the Department of Records. (A selection.) These are painters on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1914.

Loose fit

Remember the fashion-religion seminars? Well, we move swiftly toward a product, thanks to the indefatigable work of my colleague O. My main contribution has become an essay, inspired by this brilliant product of our collage workshop. I think it's O's work. It made me remember that

 

Weber's "iron cage" (actually stahlhartes Gehäuse) developed from a piece of religious clothing, Puritan Richard Baxter's "cloak" (Mantel). "Keep [external] things loose about thee like thy upper garments," Baxter wrote in the XIIth part of The Saints' Everlasting Rest, "that thou mayest lay them by whenever there is need; but let God and glory be to next thy heart." I won't tire you with my cute but convoluted argument, such as it is, but here's the rather oracular conclusion:

In the secular age, an age in which fashion can seem to promise salvation, people wear their religions loose about them, like an upper garment that they can lay by whenever the need arises. They are not the less religiously serious for committing to their beliefs and practices in this way. They are aware, as few in history have been, of the contingency of their religious wardrobes, appreciating classic styles as well as the novel, the exotic, even the playful; aware of the dangers of the steely shell, they mix and match among them. And they are grateful for religious couture which can serve as a sign of true seeking.

Superstition or common sense?

Another religious studies discovery from the New School Scrapbooks, this from 1933 (#9/3, page 3). What can we make of this quite amazing list of speakers? Who planned it, who came to hear? One thing at least is clear: a lecture series on Friday nights excludes observant Jews.

Update 27/4: It appears to have been not in 1933 but in Spring 1932:
"Factual rather than propagandistic"! Our first guess is that it was the brainchild of Arthur L. Swift, a theologian and sociologist at Union Theological Seminary, who herewith started a long-standing relationship with The New School which would include teaching (I should check what courses he taught), heading an important self-study in 1953, becoming Vice President some years later, and receiving an Honarary Degree at the end of his career in 1961. The only surprise is that Horace Kallen, who had been teaching about religion since 1920 and whose course "Dominant Ideals of Western Civilization" appears as course #6 in this same Spring 1932 catalog, had no part in it.

Cloud of witnesses

A slide from the talk J and I gave today in the university civic engagement series, accompanying a description of the biographies we had students do. How many can you name? You've met most of them, if you've been following this blog, but they may be hard to recognize. I've tried to find images from the time these various luminaries were involved with The New School - in many cases before they became luminaries! - so even the recognizable ones might not be so immediately.

(Clockwise from lower left: composer John Cage, choreographer Martha Graham, fashion designer Claire McCardell, political philosopher Leo Strauss, actor Marlon Brando, urbanist Jane Jacobs, economist Thorstein Veblen, anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, feminist philosopher Sara Ruddick, political theorist Hannah Arendt, muralist José Clemente Orozco, director Erwin Piscator; middle row: psychologist Max Wertheimer, photographer Berenice Abbott, writer James Baldwin, editor-in-chief Alvin Johnson.)

Fred!

A wise woman I met in Wolfenbüttel half an age ago told me that the secret to scholarly success was being able to return with enthusiasm to something you did a decade before: that's the minimum time it takes for some research you've proposed to get done, written up, accepted for publication, actually published, read, and then finally translated into an invitation. (Needless to say, each of these hurdles is a winnow.) Even in the highly unlikely case where everything works, your work will - like the light from a distant star - seem to your inviter contemporary! And your best chance as a contemporary is to play along. So welcome back, Leibnizian Mark! In the Fall of this year I'll be giving two invited papers on my old flame (my dissertation flame, no less), one reviving an old question - Lessing's "Leibniz von den ewigen Strafen" - and one trying to connect to my current interests - Leibniz as a metaphysics for lived religion.

Hudson!

 

Views yesterday at Croton Point Park, looking up at trees, down at the Hudson shore, and south toward NYC.

China calling

Went up for the day to Ossining, about an hour north of the city on the Hudson (it changed its original name when a prison was build there: Sing Sing), and another world! One remarkable place they introduced me to was Maryknoll, home of an order of Catholic missionaries. Their first mission went to China, and their ongoing commitments there - reflected in the very architecture of the place - make this like a Sino-Hogwarts.

The site is a monument to mid-century Catholic arts, with many striking stained glass windows, here are two, reflected (looking in different directions) in the holy water font at the entrance of a side chapel, the 12-year-old Jesus teaching in the synagogue ("in my father's house"), and a woman with Christ as he bears the cross to Golgotha.

 

Spring ridiculousness

The judas tree on Vanderbilt.

Wiener Klassik

At the 92nd Street Y last night, I had the great pleasure of hearing Quatuor Mosaïques, a Vienna-based original-instruments string quartet - they play on gut, and haven't been in the US in ten years, and it was very heaven. The program was three full quartets - Haydn Op. 20, No. 3 in g minor (1772), Mozart K 458 in B-flat major, "The Hunt" (1784) and Beethoven Op. 135 in F major (1826). Had one any doubts about the capacity and the sublimity of this genre Haydn established, they were dispelled, and dispelled again, deliciously. Am I reporting doubts of my own? It's true, I don't usually go to concerts of the 18th century Vienna all-stars, though I'll go for quartets by Janacek or Bartok or Shostakovich  and I always enjoy the earlier works paired with them (often Haydn). But this was perfect all by itself, complete, not in need of 20th century amplification, contrast or consummation. It's why they call it classical music, I thought to myself - a pure kind of beauty formal rather than narrative or descriptive or even just expressive, but (so!) still full of drama, and humor too.

It took me back to the chamber concerts I got to hear in Vienna when we lived there 1976-78. And guess what: Quatuor Mosaïques was in San Diego on Monday. My parents were in the audience (and we didn't coordinate!). That's classic, too!

Self-fashioning

My brilliant fashion theorist colleague O has been working on the pamphlet the Religion-Fashion sessions a couple of weeks ago were supposed to lead to. Just in case he changes his mind about using my collage for the cover, here it is on the first draft of the cover. I'm also contributing a short essay inspired by a reference to Weber's "iron cage," tentatively (and unforgivably) titled "The unwearable lightness of being: Baxter's cloak in 2012" (!). Wish me luck!

Alvin meets Parsonzilla

Today's New School Century class was about the New School's merger with the Parsons School of Design - something which happened 42 years ago, but with which the institution and many of its members still have not come to terms. (Michael Walzer, recalling the Exodus, might note that these kinds of changes take 40 years to process.) Just recently our new president has argued that the entrepreneurial thinking of designers is vital to the "creative economy: it is time for design to become the fourth pillar of university learning. But at the time nobody was thinking in terms like these. What were they thinking? I've been reading the transcripts of some interviews the dean of Parsons conducted in 1977 with various people involved in the merger, and it's interesting stuff.

New School was interested in "diversifying" its offerings, but had not thought of a school of design. It was Parsons which contacted them, a phone call in January 1970 starting What would you say if I were to tell you that Parsons is going out of business? Indeed, respected but financially mismanaged Parsons was about to close shop, unless it found a commitment of support from some other institution in just two weeks. We don't know who else they contacted, but it was clear that nobody was in a position to make so big a decision so quickly. Except New School which, the interviewees recalled smugly, was "administratively" run and could make such a decision without consulting faculty (!). Awareness of Parsons at New School was close to nil. Allen Austill, the enterprising Dean of the Adult Division sent to check out the educational culture of the place (he was impressed), reported he knew "Nothing" of Parsons before that, beyond the Parsons table. There's a tape recording of the meeting where the merger was announced to the stunned Parsons faculty; it sounds like the press conference after a coup d'etat. The New School's Graduate Faculty was evidently none too happy either, and an old Alvin Johnson loyalist on the board of trustees thought the founder's vision of an intellectual, not a professional, place had been betrayed. This image of "Parsonzilla" from the Parsons 1973-4catalog seems a good depiction of the situation: A second-year class in illustration is given the assignment to “go home and draw a piece of a dragon – any piece.” At the following class session, the random parts are assembled to form an extraordinary mascot… In any case, Parsons soon moved out of its leased quarters on East 54th Street and into the 66 Fifth Ave. building New School had taken over from another failing institution, the Mills College of Education. It raised tuition (New School president Everett thought that a higher price tag suggested higher quality) and was able to offer a BFA. It added night and summer classes, doubled the number of programs, acquired a dormitory for its students. Where it used to send out 2000 catalogs it was now included in the New School catalog, 130,000 of which went out each season. And soon, as enrollments in New School's other divisions fell (the end of the Vietnam war reduced MA enrollments at the Graduate Faculty, and the culture of adult ed changed), it was Parsons keeping the New school afloat!

A great success story, no? Still, the cultures of whatever The New School was and a design school were and are quite different. We asked the class to debate the benefits and challenges of the merger, and all the important and enduring issues quickly surfaced, and the same quandaries: should there be more synergy between design and liberal arts curricula or less, between academic and professional? To inspire them I put up the concoction above, based on one of the pieces from More Furniture in 24 Hours by "Spiros Zakas and his students at the Parsons School of Design" (1978). We remain very much a work in progress, brilliant and unconventional, like the W Chair, which supports one sitter because it accommodates two. The photo in my starting slide, by the way (another concoction by yours truly), was taken by famed American industrial designer Charles Eames when he and his wife Ray traveled to India to make recommendations for a National Institute of Design in 1958. (One of our Parsons colleagues recommended the Eames Report as still compelling, especially in our own India-Chinaward moment.) The Eames' India Report starts with an ode to the lota, the brass water container the woman is carrying in the photo, and with the sorts of questions you'd want to ask to learn from the tradition which generated it while also rooting in it an edgy modern creativity. I imagine Austill was asking himself kindred questions about Parsons when he went up to see it... And we've been doing the same in our course as we study the New School's component visions and divisions.