One of the cool things about hanging around UCSD is that it reminds me of the worlds of young Asian-Pacific Islander Americans. So for instance, thanks to a poster in the Price Center I learned about and was able to watch the first half of what may be the world's first internet-adapted play, David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" on the angry-funny YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family) channel. Part 2 tomorrow, so far so good!Saturday, June 08, 2013
API together
One of the cool things about hanging around UCSD is that it reminds me of the worlds of young Asian-Pacific Islander Americans. So for instance, thanks to a poster in the Price Center I learned about and was able to watch the first half of what may be the world's first internet-adapted play, David Henry Hwang's "Yellow Face" on the angry-funny YOMYOMF (You Offend Me, You Offend My Family) channel. Part 2 tomorrow, so far so good!
Friday, June 07, 2013
Tiny trek
How does one prep for a 52km trek in the High Himalaya? I'm starting slow, walking a few miles each day up and down hills in my new hiking boots - though of course we're near sea level here. Today, I did the roughly 5km from the Torrey Pines State Reserve lodge to the library at UCSD in about an hour.Thursday, June 06, 2013
Finishing the hat
What to do about "Theorizing Religion"? It's the course I've taught longest: I brought it with me from Princeton (where it's called "Approaches to the Study of Religion"), turned it from a lecture course to a seminar at Lang, tweaked and updated and tweaked some more. It's also the one course required of all our majors and minors, designed to initiate students in the practice of studying religion academically. For me this has always meant understanding the history and favored categories of our discipline (and other disciplines), and encountering some of the "classic texts" of our field. (Remember the religious studies hat, below?) But the discipline keeps changing, "classic texts" are not just contested in detail but a contested category as a whole, and postmodern/postcolonial/postsecularist perspectives and new media have changed everything. Our students, meanwhile, are mostly not interested in becoming scholars of religion. (A startling number of our recent majors have wound up in seminaries!) And there's always a contingent of students who have studied religion in any form...
So here's what I'm thinking. Alongside the reading responses and some writing assignments designed to let them demonstrate their mastery of the texts and issues, I'll have students do two new assignments which look neither towards the academy nor the glorious religious past. In the first, they'll have to write a brief essay about some current religious event, personality, community or controversy in New York City, building it around an article from a newspaper or magazine and supplementing it also with a little library research. The second will ask them to analyze and assess one of the internet sites which offer supposedly objective information about religion - beliefnet.com, faithology.com, religionfacts.com, etc. - focusing on a particular article or posting, and backing it up with two theorists from our class. That doesn't answer the question of which theorists to include, but I think it'll let us face and discuss the relationship between what scholars of religion do and other discourses and communities of religious inquiry - and let students explore some interests of their own. Act local, think global?
Bicoastal
Unexpected taste of Lower Manhattan, at Marshall's in Solana Beach!
Wonder why it didn't sell - the aesthetic is so California!
Wednesday, June 05, 2013
Letzter Rest vom Schützenfest
I have three weeks here in California to sort through all kinds of academic projects, from books (the Job book proofs have to be returned next week, and another press awaits our reactions to the generally positive reader's reports of the "queer Christianities" anthology) to courses (need to update my "Theorizing Religion" syllabus and submit book orders)... and then there's planning for the rest of the summer!
Had an enjoyable first foray into New School history to get started. (J and I are teaching that course again this coming semester, under the cuter name "Who New?"). Meet Alfred Schütz, the Viennese banker-phenomenologist famous for exploring the life world of the everyday and bridging philosophy and the social sciences, who was affiliated with The New School in various ways from his arrival in New York in 1939 until his death in 1959. He's someone I should really know better anyway, since some smart thinking on "lived religion" is based on his work.
We are thinking of using Schütz's essay "The Stranger" (American Journal of Sociology 49/6 [May 1944]: 499-507) in the class. We used his New School colleague Julie Meyer's "The Stranger and the City" (1951) last time, but its founding ideas are taken explicitly from Schütz' still influential piece, which uses a sympathetic phenomenology of the precarious achievement of "thinking as usual"
to account for the difficulties people have on leaving one culture or milieu for another, and for the reactions they often encounter. A cultural world is navigated in "habituality, automatism and half- consciousness," making use of "recipes" which provide "typical solutions for typical problems available for typical actors" (505). The stranger brings the "recipes" of one place to another and, trying to make sense of the new surroundings, mistaking individuals for types, and finding everything questionable because her own "natural attitude" has met shipwreck (507). Schütz' case-study is the "stranger," his paradigmatic case the immigrant, but he thinks similar processes at work in every encounter with the strange or new. Good stuff!
Today I happened on an another interesting angle. It turns out that Schütz had a long correspondence with fellow phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, who also wound up in the Philosophy Department at The New School (1959-71). (You can listen to Gurwitsch dictating an essay of Schütz's here.) They seem to have had only one major disagreement; it occasioned a year-long break in the correspondence - and was about "The Stranger." Gurwitsch wondered what a philosopher like Schütz was doing consorting with the semi-unconscious "natural attitude" of ordinary people, let alone explaining how people displaced from one society's "thinking as usual" had to lose themselves in another's.
We thought,—I appeal to the philosopher Schutz—that man must be responsible for the world. That is what we learned from our master Husserl .. . And now we learn that that is not the point at all, that the point is to have recipes which allow one to deal with things. We wanted to understand the world and now we learn that the only thing that matters is a smooth and effortless operation in which certain results can be produced.
Schütz had imbibed a lot of pragmatist ideas, quoting James and Dewey prominently in the essay. To Gurwitsch it seemed that he had turned his back on transcendental questions, on the questions only philosophers asked and which civilization needed philosophers to keep asking.
We don't want to forget, dear friend, that our genealogy as philosophers goes back to a fool and a martyr. Back to the martyr Socrates, who, as I learned, made a nuisance of himself becuase he continually contradicted everyone and asked questions about things which public opinion had long since dealt with, and was in addition very successless. But concerning the fool Thales they tell the story that, absorbed in deep reflection, he fell into a manure pit and was jeered at by a milkmaid, since he knew his way around with the stars but was incapable of finding his way on the street. (71)
I confess, as a recovering philosopher (and, in studying lived religion, a recovering philosopher of religion), to feeling the pinch of these questions. A similar indignation at pragmatism's low aspirations animates a tiff between our two mascots - Hannah Arendt's review of John Dewey's Problems of Men in 1946, "The Ivory Tower of Common Sense." Ira Katznelson has told the story of the New School in terms of just this clash of American pragmatist democrats and war-scarred European intellectuals. The issues are back in a new form in questions about the value of liberal arts in a university now dedicated primarily to design thinking and problem solving.
But still, Schütz was an emigré himself, wasn't he? His student Maurice Natanson gave a talk about the Gurwitsch-Schütz disagreement in 1995. He thought Gurwitsch misunderstood Schütz, who was ever the philosopher - he even dared to think there is a kind of ideal typical social science and a philosophical phenomenology in ordinary encounters with strangeness. But Gurwitsch knew this, too. Natanson concludes that Gurwitsch's negative reaction to "The Stranger" was really about something else - the absence in the piece, and in the world it described, of the experience of the exile.
This raises deep questions I shall have to ponder between now and our lecture on The New School of the 1940s and 1950s. Gurwitsch seems right to sense a kind of assimilationist fatalism in Schütz' account - it does not imagine that anyone might find herself a permanent stranger in a place, or even seek out such a status, even embrace it as an identity and a calling. At play, explicitly and implicitly, are weighty issues of the significance of exile, philosophy, civilization, culture, the everyday, the modern mass society typified by America, and - hidden in plain sight - the perhaps world-historic role of the Jewish outsider. Fun fun!
Since we've come as far as Natanson, I'll leave you with a reminiscence he offers of the New School in the early 1950s, when he was there.
Had an enjoyable first foray into New School history to get started. (J and I are teaching that course again this coming semester, under the cuter name "Who New?"). Meet Alfred Schütz, the Viennese banker-phenomenologist famous for exploring the life world of the everyday and bridging philosophy and the social sciences, who was affiliated with The New School in various ways from his arrival in New York in 1939 until his death in 1959. He's someone I should really know better anyway, since some smart thinking on "lived religion" is based on his work.We are thinking of using Schütz's essay "The Stranger" (American Journal of Sociology 49/6 [May 1944]: 499-507) in the class. We used his New School colleague Julie Meyer's "The Stranger and the City" (1951) last time, but its founding ideas are taken explicitly from Schütz' still influential piece, which uses a sympathetic phenomenology of the precarious achievement of "thinking as usual"
to account for the difficulties people have on leaving one culture or milieu for another, and for the reactions they often encounter. A cultural world is navigated in "habituality, automatism and half- consciousness," making use of "recipes" which provide "typical solutions for typical problems available for typical actors" (505). The stranger brings the "recipes" of one place to another and, trying to make sense of the new surroundings, mistaking individuals for types, and finding everything questionable because her own "natural attitude" has met shipwreck (507). Schütz' case-study is the "stranger," his paradigmatic case the immigrant, but he thinks similar processes at work in every encounter with the strange or new. Good stuff!Today I happened on an another interesting angle. It turns out that Schütz had a long correspondence with fellow phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch, who also wound up in the Philosophy Department at The New School (1959-71). (You can listen to Gurwitsch dictating an essay of Schütz's here.) They seem to have had only one major disagreement; it occasioned a year-long break in the correspondence - and was about "The Stranger." Gurwitsch wondered what a philosopher like Schütz was doing consorting with the semi-unconscious "natural attitude" of ordinary people, let alone explaining how people displaced from one society's "thinking as usual" had to lose themselves in another's.
We thought,—I appeal to the philosopher Schutz—that man must be responsible for the world. That is what we learned from our master Husserl .. . And now we learn that that is not the point at all, that the point is to have recipes which allow one to deal with things. We wanted to understand the world and now we learn that the only thing that matters is a smooth and effortless operation in which certain results can be produced.
Philosophers in Exile: The
Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939-1959, ed. Richard Grathoff,
trans. J. Claude Evans (Indiana UP, 1989), 70
Schütz had imbibed a lot of pragmatist ideas, quoting James and Dewey prominently in the essay. To Gurwitsch it seemed that he had turned his back on transcendental questions, on the questions only philosophers asked and which civilization needed philosophers to keep asking.
We don't want to forget, dear friend, that our genealogy as philosophers goes back to a fool and a martyr. Back to the martyr Socrates, who, as I learned, made a nuisance of himself becuase he continually contradicted everyone and asked questions about things which public opinion had long since dealt with, and was in addition very successless. But concerning the fool Thales they tell the story that, absorbed in deep reflection, he fell into a manure pit and was jeered at by a milkmaid, since he knew his way around with the stars but was incapable of finding his way on the street. (71)
I confess, as a recovering philosopher (and, in studying lived religion, a recovering philosopher of religion), to feeling the pinch of these questions. A similar indignation at pragmatism's low aspirations animates a tiff between our two mascots - Hannah Arendt's review of John Dewey's Problems of Men in 1946, "The Ivory Tower of Common Sense." Ira Katznelson has told the story of the New School in terms of just this clash of American pragmatist democrats and war-scarred European intellectuals. The issues are back in a new form in questions about the value of liberal arts in a university now dedicated primarily to design thinking and problem solving.
But still, Schütz was an emigré himself, wasn't he? His student Maurice Natanson gave a talk about the Gurwitsch-Schütz disagreement in 1995. He thought Gurwitsch misunderstood Schütz, who was ever the philosopher - he even dared to think there is a kind of ideal typical social science and a philosophical phenomenology in ordinary encounters with strangeness. But Gurwitsch knew this, too. Natanson concludes that Gurwitsch's negative reaction to "The Stranger" was really about something else - the absence in the piece, and in the world it described, of the experience of the exile.
This raises deep questions I shall have to ponder between now and our lecture on The New School of the 1940s and 1950s. Gurwitsch seems right to sense a kind of assimilationist fatalism in Schütz' account - it does not imagine that anyone might find herself a permanent stranger in a place, or even seek out such a status, even embrace it as an identity and a calling. At play, explicitly and implicitly, are weighty issues of the significance of exile, philosophy, civilization, culture, the everyday, the modern mass society typified by America, and - hidden in plain sight - the perhaps world-historic role of the Jewish outsider. Fun fun!
Since we've come as far as Natanson, I'll leave you with a reminiscence he offers of the New School in the early 1950s, when he was there.
“Alfred Schütz: Philosopher and Social Scientist,”
Human Studies 21/1 (Jan 1998): 1-12, 11
But this is only half his recollection. He's a phenomenologist, after all, in particular a student of Schütz's, one of whose great interests was time - the "inner time" of conscious experience (characterized by "recollections, retentions, protensions, and anticipations which interrelate the various elements") and the "outer time" of action, both coming together in what he called "growing older together" (Social Research 18:1/4 [1951], 88, 96).Human Studies 21/1 (Jan 1998): 1-12, 11
As described in his lovely essay "Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship" (from which I just quoted), Schütz thought that we were able sometimes to enter the stream of consciousness of others, present and past - and here all bets of "outer time" are off. Natanson suggests that there is a particular kind of "present of things imaginable" one might call "irreality" (11), and ends his essay with this sketch (12):
(von Mises and Weber were teachers Schütz studied with in Vienna; Dauber and Pine's was a vast used bookstore at 66 Fifth Ave., now one of the Parsons buildings; the student who mispronounces Schütz's name - perhaps a little understandable because it was published as Schütz, Schuetz and Schutz - had objected in a class to the idea that there could be anything like a philosophy of death, to which the teacher had responded, laughing, "You are joking, you are joking!")Was Schütz, then, a "stranger" on West 12th Street, or not?
Socialist worlds
Interesting column by Tina Rosenberg in the Times today called "It's Not Just Nice to Share, It's the Future." It's stimulated by discussions around the bikeshare which has finally arrived in New York, and discusses what people are calling "collaborative consumption" - a step up from, or beyond, an older category known as collective consumption.
Rosenberg mentions a bunch of reasons why people might embrace collaborative consumption over private ownership.
This is persuasive as far as it goes, but it doesn't name my main reason for being an instinctive collaborative consumer: our participation in the lives of objects. I think objects get lonely, bored and frustrated under exclusive ownership. Think of a novel, unlikely to be reread by a single owner. But this goes for other things, too, synchronically and diachronically as well. Things don't want to sit idle in a safe, a never-used music room, garage, etc. They want to move, circulate, interact! Indeed, these movements, circulations and interactions are one of the ways human sociability is stitched together. If I wanted to grind one of my axes I'd say that misunderstanding property as in principle or by default private and exclusive makes us misunderstand not only the social needs of objects, but also of human beings....
(This might be worth folding into my thoughts on "resources," huh!)
(Or is it just a cosmology for my "commitment issues"?!)
This is not exactly a fresh idea. In some fields, it’s been around for
millenniums — in the hospitality industry, for example. You can’t own a
house in all the places you need to travel to, so you rent a bed. Before
World War II, the shared economy was most of the economy. “It’s only
the last 75 years or so in the United States where the industrial
revolution, modern mechanization and access to credit have allowed us to
buy things for ourselves instead of checking with our neighbors,
friends and family first,” wrote Adam Werbach, the co-founder of the sharing platform Yerdle.
Rosenberg mentions a bunch of reasons why people might embrace collaborative consumption over private ownership.
Why is collaborative consumption exploding now?
— The green zeitgeist. For some people, it’s still desirable to own a
lot of stuff that sits idle 95 percent of the time. But more and more
people are coming to define this as waste....
— Recession. Sharing saves money....
— Increased longing for community. The same desire that is luring
people out of traditional suburbs into walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods
drives collaborative consumption....
— The march of technology. Every business benefits from better
information technology, but sharing businesses benefit more than others....
— Mobile technology and social networking.
This is persuasive as far as it goes, but it doesn't name my main reason for being an instinctive collaborative consumer: our participation in the lives of objects. I think objects get lonely, bored and frustrated under exclusive ownership. Think of a novel, unlikely to be reread by a single owner. But this goes for other things, too, synchronically and diachronically as well. Things don't want to sit idle in a safe, a never-used music room, garage, etc. They want to move, circulate, interact! Indeed, these movements, circulations and interactions are one of the ways human sociability is stitched together. If I wanted to grind one of my axes I'd say that misunderstanding property as in principle or by default private and exclusive makes us misunderstand not only the social needs of objects, but also of human beings....
(This might be worth folding into my thoughts on "resources," huh!)
(Or is it just a cosmology for my "commitment issues"?!)
Tuesday, June 04, 2013
Monday, June 03, 2013
Sunday, June 02, 2013
Saturday, June 01, 2013
California Shangri-La
The Shangri-La legend is based on belief in Himalayan beyul, hidden valleys of eternal bliss. One doesn't have to go so far. Yosemite - here in the breathtaking view from Inspiration Point - is a beyul if ever there was one. I've got lots of pics, of critters, flora, vistas and, perhaps most magical of all, waters of this magical place.
Airsoles
Did I mention that I was walking on air in Yosemite? I was - literally!
The foam soles of the old hiking boots I got in Europe a decade ago and have hardly used crumbled away the first day in the park (they were fine at the start of the day!), leaving this. Getting a new pair and breaking them in are top of the agenda on our return to Del Mar!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
