The Trouble with Diversifying the Faculty

This article presents the problem of politics of difference realized within the American educational system, with a special emphasis on higher education. This politics is according to the author based on putting in the center of all educational actions the idea of diversity, as well in creating academic institutions. This key idea becomes in the American context a special significance, regarding the fact that the American society is based on ideology that celebrates multiculturalism and diversity as such. This article presents also an important for the contemporary situation in the United States problem of combining cultural and ethnic diversity on the economical category of difference between various classes. Furthermore, it seems to be more significant in the light of the economic crisis in recent years that affected also American education in the same extent

Using a Firearm, Using a Word: What Interpretation Just Is

My response to these hypotheticals is going to be useless, although, I hope, in a useful way. It’s going to be useless because I’m an English teacher, not a lawyer, and I have no idea what Mary or the judge should do. But, of course, Larry Alexander and Steve Smith already knew this when they asked me to contribute. Presumably, it’s in my capacity as a theorist of interpretation and in particular (since the hypotheticals might be understood to raise particular difficulties for intentionalists) as an intentionalist theorist that they asked for my views. But, as an intentionalist theorist, I not only don’t have anything to say about what Mary and the Judge should do, I don’t even have anything to say about what the texts mean. Why? Because nothing in intentionalism is of any particular use in figuring out the meaning of any text. Why not? Because intentionalism has no normative or methodological value. It tells you what the object of interpretation is, not what it ought to be or how to find it. By contrast, the various theories of legal interpretation (my main example here will be “original public meaning”) do exactly the opposite. So this is what I hope will be the useful part. No doubt, the attractions of the therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein are overstated but if ever there were a theoretical practice that made you see the value of making “philosophical problems” “completely disappear” (italics his) the theory of legal interpretation would be it. I won’t even try to say what Mary should do but I would like to help make the philosophical problem of the theory of interpretation completely disappear (italics mine)

Not a Matter of Interpretation

This Article explores the basic question of statutory interpretation. The disagreement among scholars is a theoretical one - it is a dispute about what the proper object of interpretation should be, about whether it should be what Scalia calls the objective indication of the words (what the authors said), or whether it should be the intent of the legislature (what the authors meant)

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism, Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular

Renouncing the Single Image: Photography and the Realism of Abstraction

This essay addresses the issue of the relationship between abstraction and realism that it argues is at stake in the rejection of any primacy accorded to the single image, in favour of a sequencing of photographs according to certain, often novelistic and epic ideas of narrative form. Setting out from the opening text of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story, the article explores the competing tendencies towards what Georg Lukács termed ‘narration’ and ‘description’ as these are traced throughout Sekula's project (in part through a comparison with the contrasting works of Andreas Gursky). The essay concludes by suggesting the ways in which it is the irreducible actuality of abstraction within the concrete everydayness of capitalism's social world that means that all photographic ‘realism’ is intrinsically ‘haunted’ by a certain spectre of that ‘self-moving substance in the ‘shape of money’, as Marx calls it, or of the abstract form of capital itself

Picturing the Whole: Form, Reform, Revolution

Talking about the political ‘Uses of Photography,’ John Berger says ‘most photographs … are about suffering, and most of that suffering is man-made’. The political potential not only of photography but of art more generally depends, Susan Sontag thinks, on its ‘responsiveness to suffering’. Here the danger of sentimentality (especially for the art of photography) is even more pronounced. For if the identificatory effect on the viewer – the sympathy produced by feeling something of what the victim feels – is desirable, it is also dangerous, since our sense that we in some sense share the victim’s pain may function to repress the recognition that we may in some sense also be responsible for that pain; that ‘our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering and may – in ways we prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others’. If art photography holds out the promise of producing in the viewer a response to the actual suffering a photograph can depict, it also runs the risk that what the viewer will respond to will be the photograph itself and not the photograph’s subject; the art instead of the suffering.On this model, a model that essentially takes the photographs of the suffering victims as its model, the challenge political photography faces is how to insist on suffering without either aestheticizing or sentimentalizing it. But is this model the right one? I want to suggest that it isn’t and, looking at one book by the young American photographer Daniel Shea, I want to argue instead that the point of political photography today cannot be to try to achieve either the right relation with the suffering victim (honoring his dignity, etc.) or the right effect on the compassionate beholder (cutting her just enough to move her in the right way or to the right degree). In fact, I want to say that this interest in the ethical problem of the relations between the photographer and the viewer and the subject of the photograph is itself a kind of sentimentality, and its politics are those of a left neoliberalism: of human rights, diversity, NGOs. By contrast, Shea’s commitment is to the aesthetic instead of the ethical, and his understanding of what it means to make art out of photography requires a certain indifference to both his subjects and his audience. It’s that aesthetic of indifference that makes possible, I will argue, a certain politics of indifference – a politics that instead, say, of just seeking justice for those who have been treated unfairly by the labour market, seeks to alter the conditions under which that market functions; that instead of focusing on the victims of abuses in what Berger calls ‘a class-divided society’, focuses on the abuse of class division itself; a politics that, in other words, is not left neoliberal but left

The gold standard and the logic of naturalism: American literature at the turn of the century

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism

Kłopoty ze zróznicowaniem wydziału

This article presents the problem of politics of difference realized within the American educational system, with a special emphasis on higher education. This politics is according to the author based on putting in the center of all educational actions the idea of diversity, as well in creating academic institutions. This key idea becomes in the American context a special significance, regarding the fact that the American society is based on ideology that celebrates multiculturalism and diversity as such. This article presents also an important for the contemporary situation in the United States problem of combining cultural and ethnic diversity on the economical category of difference between various classes. Furthermore, it seems to be more significant in the light of the economic crisis in recent years that affected also American education in the same extent