De File

I have always looked forward to Christmas and New Year's, no matter how stressful the holiday season can turn out in practice. But this anticipation has been powerfully enhanced in the past decade, because this is also the time when the former students I most like to see are likely to be in Tucson.

Even before Facebook came on the scene, I would stay in touch with them over e-mail or, in a few cases, Live Journal. A few of them would let me know they were coming each year and we would arrange to meet for coffee or drinks. And since I started actively participating on Facebook, the number of these former students I am in fairly regular contact with has increased significantly.

Quite a few of them have moved back to Arizona. Some are teaching middle school or high school now. Curiously, though, the ones I meet in person are usually the ones who live far away. Maybe it's the fact that the possibility of meeting any time makes it less of a priority to make arrangements. Or maybe it's just that seeing someone every other year or so and, what is more, someone who lives in a different place, makes such encounters more rewarding.

At any rate, I greatly look forward to these meetings, both because I am genuinely interested in how my former students are doing -- they matter to me as people -- and because I don't get much opportunity to spend time in stimulating conversations these days. The students I meet up with may not be the best I've ever taught when measured "objectively" in terms of GPA etc., but they are usually the ones that have the most interesting things to say.

Take today, for example. For a variety of reasons, I had only been able to meet up with elizabeg since the winter break began and for a shorter time than usual. But the fact that time was running out for several opportunities made me be more proactive in carving out time for the former students still in town. This afternoon I met with someone who in my class back in 2002, a former rock musician who is now in the first year of an English Ph.D. program, planning to be with a medievalist. And tonight I saw Marina, a woman who came to the United States from Russia with her parents as a teenager and, after entering and finishing college several years early, embarked on both graduate study and a quest to get to know her Georgian heritage -- meaning the sort from the Caucasus -- which has led her to since in a Georgian folk choir.

Both of these former students are wonderful people whose success brings me great joy. But the latter also has great stories to tell about a place that few Americans know anything about. Hearing her talk about everything from hiking to handling sexual harassment in the former Soviet Republic was riveting. And it was great to see how much more comfortable in her own skin she has become over the past five years. I left the pub where we met up with my spirits boosted greatly.

I was reading Sports Illustrated just now before bed, the Hunger Games soundtrack blasting in the background, when I came across this passage about former Arizona Wildcat Andre Iguodala in a story on this year's Philadelphia 76ers:

Iguodala grew up in Springfield, Ill., at the height of the Bulls dynasty, and patterned himself after Scottie Pippen. He was not the leading scorer at Lanphier High, where he deferred to a gunner named Richard McBride, or at Arizona, where he averaged 12.9 points and set up sniper Salim Stoudamire. "He likes being the guy who does everything else," says Lawrence Thomas, a coach in Springfield who has worked with Iguodala since ninth grade. His road roommate at Arizona was team manager Jack Murphy, and before Iguodala left after his sophomore year, Murphy gave him a copy of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. "I didn't want him to ever think he went unrecognized," says Murphy, now an assistant at Memphis. Iguodala, who churns through three books at a time, had already read it.

Jack was my student in the fall of 2000, but stayed in touch afterwards, stopping by to talk basketball on a regular basis. I treasured those conversations, which taught me a great deal about the game -- not to mention Jack, who was doing a remarkable job of turning personal adversity into the life he had long desired -- and also helped me feel more rooted in a community I was still reluctant to claim membership in.

Years later, after he had finished his undergraduate degree, Jack returned to me while enrolled in a graduate program to ask if I'd be willing to direct him in an independent study on African-American literature. I don't know that he needed much help from me -- Jack was always very inner-directed -- but I do remember talking to him at length about my love for Invisible Man and the excessive length of the chapter I devoted to the novel in my doctoral dissertation. It's a real treat, well over half a decade later, to see evidence of my legacy as a teacher in such an unlikely place.

I did something I've never done before for the New Media course that I'm teaching this semester. I gave them the option of making their final paper a critique of one of my pieces. Because there were more conventional options on the list of possible paper topics I handed out, I don't imagine that many students will take me up on the offer. But I somehow felt that it was appropriate in this particular class.

Many of our class discussions touched upon themes I've explored over the years in my writing for alternative publications. I let them go on a tour of my Facebook during the week we devoted to pondering the site. And this particular course holds a special place in my heart, both because I really came to love the Honors Students who comprised it and because it seems unlikely that I'll get to teach it again.

In order to make it easier on any students who do opt for the critique-your-teacher topic, I compiled a partial list of those pieces of mine especially well suited to thinking about New Media. Because it has been a long time since I shared links to my non-Live Journal writing here, I thought I'd let you all see what I sent my students. Besides, given the difficult task of rediscovering my self that I've recently embarked upon -- more on that in a later entry -- I figured it wouldn't hurt to publicly acknowledge work that I'd gone out of my way not to maintain a connection with. Here, then is the message I sent my students:

My writing for ZEEK magazine can be accessed in pages organized in reverse chronological order here -- the most recent pieces -- and here. FYI, some of the latter have formatting problems that emerged after a site upgrade.

Some of the pieces I wrote for Tikkun magazine, before I moved to ZEEK, can be found here.

And, if you want to travel far back in time, the work I did for Bad Subjects: Political Education Life is still accessible here.

Here is a partial list of the pieces of mine that seem best suited to discussions of New Media:

“The Trouble With Toys: Walter Benjamin, Pixar and the Search for Redemption”, from 2010, which is divided into Part I and Part II, shows how the Toy Story movies and Wall-E are perfect foils for Benjamin’s analysis of commodity culture, particularly as it pertains to the mass-production of children’s playthings.

“Days of Future Past: Iranian Garage Rock of the 1960s”, from 2009, which meditates on the “revival”, not of music that was once commercially successful or critically acclaimed, but which barely got heard upon its release.

“Copy Right, Copy Left, Copy Central” from 2009 is an essay review on the documentaries Copyright Criminals:This Is a Sampling Sport and Rip It: A Remix Manifesto, both of which focus on musical artists who make their own “new” material from bits and pieces of other people’s work. It mentions Walter Benjamin at the end.

“Prog Is Not a Four-Letter Word” from 2009 compares the experience of seeing the classic rock act Yes on a recent nostalgia tour with a then-new triple album by the indie-label band Oneida, with reflections on how the music industry has changed since the 1970s and, more specifically, in the wake of the crisis that developed in the wake of file-sharing.

“That Noise in the Background” from 2009 is a review essay on Dinosaur Jr.’s Farm that considers the way in which music has increasingly come to function as a distraction in this era of media oversaturation.

"The iPod's Moment in History", from 2006, which originally appeared in Tikkun and was then republished in AlterNet, ponders the famous technological device’s capacity to turn public space into a private world and speculates that having one’s music collection in such portable form seemed especially attractive in the wake of 9/11.

“List of Ingredients: Matthew Herbert’s Plat du Jour” , from 2006, is a review essay of a “found sound” record by the cutting edge DJ and producer that raises questions about what it means to copy the natural world with a recording device.

“Listmania!: Target Marketing, the Internet and the Consumer’s ‘Me’”, from 2002, interrogates the then-rapid expansion of “participatory consumption”, focusing on Amazon.com’s use of customer-generated lists as a marketing tool.

“Incredibly Strange Culture and the End of the World As We Know It”, from 1994, anticipates the cultural fragmentation made possible by the internet in the course of considering the fate of alternative ideas at a time when they were becoming more and more accessible.

There are quite a few more pieces that are at least somewhat pertinent to New Media, but some seemed too short for the assignment in question and others required a bit too much "metaphoric" thinking for me to feel comfortable making students tackle them.

As a result of being tagged by several overlapping memes over on Facebook, I've been thinking a lot about making lists that mean a lot to me, whether they be all-time favorites, current pleasure triggers or simply ones that changed my outlook on music or life to a significant degree.

At some point, I may put together a list I want to share. I might even, horror of horrors, try to get a meme going myself. For now, though, I'm going to start being a bit more voluble when it comes to music, as per the feedback I received from my poll. Because I'm feeling rather inarticulate today, I'll keep this short.

In revisiting much-traveled but slightly overgrown portions of my music collection, I've been paying special attention to those records that I turn to when I need to reinforce a state of mind or -- a more challenging task -- when I need to be transported to a different state of mind. Because we're deep into basketball season, I'm calling these records my "go-to" music, the ones I rely on in the proverbial crunch time.

Like many of you, I've been feeling particularly "crunched" of late, with visions of the trash compactor scene in Star Wars clouding my sight. In other words, I'm finding it therapeutic to go to my "go-to" records right now and also realizing again, as I have long said in jest, that this process of rediscovery is "cheaper than therapy" and pretty darned effective at mood management.

Sometimes an entire album, like The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street or Prince's Around the World in a Day, serves as a "go-to" record for me. Sometimes it's just a song, like Dusty Springfield's "Just a Little Lovin'", Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" or Curtis Mayfield's "Move on Up." And sometimes it's just one part of a song, like the opening guitar part to the Sex Pistols' "Holiday in the Sun" flurry of horns in Otis Redding's "Respect".

Although I love all of the song I'm sharing with you today, it's one that I listen to for a specific part, when the vocals return after a few bars of rhythmic emphasis. I'll leave the details a surprise, for those of you who don't know the song or perhaps even the band. You can download the track here. The moment I'm talking about comes at 1:31 in that album version or 1:13 in this faster, yet longer one from The Year Punk Broke, in which it is enhanced by incongruous shots of a happy Euro couple:

I've always liked J. Mascis's lyrics, although they lack the subtlety and sophistication of my favorite sonic wordsmiths. Even when they are self-absorbed or, to be more precise, despite the fact that they almost always come off as self-absorbed, they convey the sort of sincere detachment that aligns with my own way of apprehending the world. And their simplicity, together with the enormous force of the music, gives their most quotable moments special power.

The note on this CD case dates back to one of the first classes I taught as a graduate student. I used to give a presentation on the aesthetics of noise in which I tried to demonstrate, with the help of examples from popular music, how muddying the waters of experience with deliberate distortion can actually give it more impact than tidied-up presentation. I was fumbling towards explaining the sublime, I suppose, although I was most interested in sharing some of my favorite songs as a way of countering the uncomfortable feelings I would have in playing the role of an authority. And I also wanted, as a corollary to that inevitably flawed attempt to abdicate the master's throne, to make my students like me, not as a teacher, but as someone they wouldn't mind spending time with outside the classroom.

I recognize all too well the trouble to which this approach to pedagogy can lead. Hell, I used to critique it in many of my professors. But it is better to acknowledge our tendencies than to pretend that they have been consigned to the landfill of discarded traits. At least I can console myself, in part, with the fact that I was innocently pushing buttons when I first engaged in this sort of sharing. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable playing this song for undergraduates now, after years of teaching students who do seem to think they do everything, including sins of the flesh, for Christ.

I'm also struck, listening to the song in these troubled times, by the degree to which it can be bent to whatever circumstances the listener requires. I used to think it was a relationship song. I imagine that's what J. Mascis intended, since almost all his songs are either relationship songs or "non-relationship" songs. That said, my favorite line seems perfectly suited to sizing up the global financial crisis. Indeed, I have a hard time hearing it as anything other than a prophecy hurled into a present that, despite the pretty wrapping paper in which it arrived, has turned out to be more curse than gift.

The students in my first class today are presently working on an in-class writing assignment:

What are your cultural taste preferences? How have they changed over the years?

In discussing how they should respond to the second question, I told them, "Say you used to be really into unicorns." Then, after a long pause, I added, "And now you are into antelopes. That's something you need to tell me." I also gave the example of a hypothetical student who felt it was time to abandon a teenage fixation on the Jonas Brothers. And I made my gratuitous Hannah Montana reference for the day. As cpratt inspired me to declare, "Go me!"

From: "Charles L. Bertsch" <cbertsch@uclink.berkeley.edu>
Sender: cbertsch@uclink.berkeley.edu
To: badsubjects@uclink.berkeley.edu
Subject: Authority: a long, but not frivolous post

While coming back from a long, uphill hike in the desert-like heat on Mt.
Diablo (S.F. Bay Area) with my friend yesterday, I shared elements of the
recent debate on this list about _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ and
authority and we had a good conversation about it all.

One interesting thing my friend said was that STTNG is a very soothing,
comforting show to watch, but that there seemed to lurk something menacing
beneath the surface calm. She likened the experience to one she has working
with Yuppies (a favorite target of hers--she means people of the 35-45
year-old range who hold managerial/executive positions in her
service-industry company), who present a very therapeutic, concerned facade
on the level of superficial interpersonal communication, but who often act
in ways that contradict that facade. Her point was that these 'Yuppies'
shared with Picard a tendency to act autocratically in the end, but with a
therapeutic--if not happy--face.

I invoked Joe Sartelle's point about the need for a Utopian model of
"structure without domination", of good leadership. My friend replied that
though she is one of those people who, largely because of bad experiences
with parents and others in power over her, always chafes under authority,
she thinks that there is "something about the species" (the human one) that
demands hierarchy and leadership and that she could see the value of good
role models for leadership, but added that she still had problems with _Star
Trek_ and constructed an argument about what _Star Trek_ leaves out and/or
represses much like Richard Singer's well-thought-out and thought-provoking
negative/demystificatory reading of STTNG.

I had been planning to make a post about my own negative experiences of
people in power over me and others who act as if they aren't because they
shun hierarchical models of domination, so my friend's likening of STTNG's
main cast to Yuppie managers got me thinking. See, at UC-Berkeley there are
a lot of professors in the 30/35-45 year-old range, especially male ones,
who disavow their authority in the graduate-school classroom while still
retaining it in practice. In the service of a post-60's democratic
classroom, they tend not to speak from the position of authority very
often. Instead, they let most of the course be taken up by students oral
reports. The idea, I suppose, is that students will learn more by teaching
each other in a non-hierarchical setting than they would by being lectured
to. Sometimes this turns out to be the case. In my experience, however, what
usually ends up happening is that students become hyper-competitive in their
oral reports in order to impress the prof who really does, as they well
know, still have the power to make or break students with grades,
evaluations, recommendations, and gossip with other professors. Many profs,
on the other hand, seem to feel threatened by their own disavowal of
authority, by the fact that they don't have much time to speak as a teacher
to their students, and thus act out in various ways, usually by suddenly
interrupting the flow of class discussion to give mini-lectures proving that
they are smarter than their students and/or suddenly attacking some point
or comment in order to reestablish their critical authority.

The point I was going to make is that I think it's better to have models of
authority that recognizes itself as such than authority that pretends it's
something else. In other words, if you have authority in practice, it's
better to spend your time trying to do something good with it, something
that will benefit the people beneath you on the 'chain of command' than it
is to waste most of your time disavowing your authority, only to
periodically act out resentment over that disavowal. I was thus going to
choose Picard's type of authority over that of the Boomer profs I mentioned
above.

And I still would. My friend's sense that Picard and other officers on STTNG
were actually more like the post-60s anti-authoritarian authority I mapped
out above than they were different from it got me thinking, however. I'm no
expert on STTNG, but am pretty sure that at least Picard's authority is more
like the authority that knows itself than than the authority that disavows
itself/is blind to itself. Nonetheless, I am also able to understand why my
friend--who works in one of those hexagonal or octagonal (it's so postmodern
yyou can't map it in your head!) buildings with mirrored glass on the
outside that looks an awful lot like a spaceship, both inside and out--felt
that STTNG was somehow like her workplace.

It's because the sort of post-60s workplace reforms that have made
Post-Fordist service and high-tech industries very different from the
classic model of American business have, I think, proceeded from a
conception of the ideal workplace strikingly similar to the one in STTNG.
For example, these reforms have established the legitimacy of feelings/vibes
in the workplace and led to the creation of personnel management
positions, filled mostly by women (Counselor Troi, Dr. Crusher), where the
concerns of therapy--people 'acting out', needing acknowledgement,
etc.--can be discussed as deadly serious workplace issues; they have
apsired to create managerial positions for women, but have often ended up
creating new positions to be filled by women instead of putting women in the
older positions (some of which have been phased out); they have emphasized
an 'outsourcing' of micro-authority in which individual units within a
company are given more authority to make substantive decisions on issues
they know about, while transforming higher-executive positions from the
old-school hands-on/a-hand-in-most-decisions autocracy into a more distant,
less involved marco-authority more concerned with long-term strategy and
'steering' than daily decision-making (Picard could be read in this
light--he's pretty hands-on, but often delegates important everyday
decision-making to his officers); the list goes on.

My friend and I ended up talking about these sorts of workplace-reforms,
arguing over their good and bad sides. The S.F. Bay Area is full of
companies whose corporate headquarters are highly-touted examples of the
post-60's workplace at its best: Levi Strauss, The Gap, Apple Computer etc.
Within the white-collar confines of their headquarters, corporations like
these have implemented all kinds of indisputably progressive
programs--liberal counseling/therapy for employees in crisis, equal pay for
equal work regardless of gender/sexual preference, day-care for employees
with children, benefits for domestic partners regardless of sexual
orientation and marital status.

At the same time, however, the 'progressive' aspect of these corporations
almost always extends only to the white-collar (and largely white or
white-identified) jobs within corporate headquarters or regional offices. As
a recent expose in our Sunday paper's magazine pointed out, the
'progressive' post-60's workplace, with all its extra expenses, of clothing
companies like Esprit, Levi's, and The Gap is made possible by the
exploitation of mostly Asian, often immigrant, mostly female labor in the
San Francisco sweatshops where the clothes are actually made. Similarly,
there have been numerous exposes of the ways in which the Silicon Valley
high-tech industry adopts a double-standard for its employees: the
white-collar programmers and marketing personnel experience a progressive
post-60's workplace, while the people--mostly of color--who assemble circuit
boards in highly toxic environments are badly exploited.

How does all this relate to STTNG? As Richard Singer pointed out, we don't
really see the non-officers under the cast-members command very often,
except as background. I don't think it's fair to assume that they are as
exploited as the non-white-collar employees mentioned above, since we simply
don't know much about them. However, it's certainly worth thinking about
what STTNG doesn't talk about and/or represses in order to think about the
good and bad sides of the post-60's workplace I've been going on about. One
of the points Jonathan Sterne's post (I think it was his) seemed to be
getting at was the way in which Utopian visions need to be thought through
in terms of the practices of exclusion that make them possible (an argument
Fred Jameson makes beautifully in "Of Islands and Trenches" and some of his
articles on sci-fi). There *is* a limitation in STTNG's Utopian vision of
"structure without domination", even if it's one imposed by the financial
and narrative demands that keep regular casts small: it is a Utopian vision
of a managerial--what we would call white-collar--environment (and that
includes Starfleet, whose non-Enterprise representatives tend to be
high-ranking officers or high-ranking officers in training).

Now I agree completely with Joe that the limitations of this Utopian vision
do not render it unusable to us and that, indeed, those limitations *demand*
that we use our critical skills to extract--a la Jameson--the Utopian from
its narrative/structural cage. But I think we also need to bear in mind its
negative side, in order, for example, to understand the sort of blind-spots
that can plague good-intentioned workplace reform in the present.

I'm certain that many, perhaps most, of the people who have worked hard to
make the white-collar portion of companies like The Gap, Levi's, and Apple
Computer progressive were concerned only with their own local struggle.
Indeed, they probably had to have ideological blinders on to focus their
energies on reforming their own workplace. And what they achieved is
certainly a good thing for the people it affects--it has its Utopian side.
But it also represents a further severing of the white-collar managerial
class that benefits from their efforts and the post-blue-collar workers who
often quite literally pay the price for them. To rephrase and expand upon
Walter Benjamin's famous dictum, every post-60's workplace reform represents
the putting-into-practice of an aesthetic Utopian vision that is at one and
the same time a document of barbarism.


Well, I'm tapped out. My overall point is that the Utopian vision that STTNG
presents has similar blindpsots to the sort of Utopian vision that motivated
post-60's workplace reform and that, while I by no means think we should
discard either vision, these blindspots are symptomatic--and here's my
most unashamedly Jamesonian point--of the increasingly illegible nature of
global capital and that it is our duty as analysts of contemporary culture
to try to develop and sustain a critical vision capable of relating Utopian
visions to their blindpots, negative or demystificatory Dystopian visions to
whatever signs of hope, however 'micro', are out there.

Charlie, hoping that you read the whole thing and that you share comments to
extend the debate further.

Let me just state, for the record, how compromised I feel right now. I mean, until today I believed that I was working at an institution of higher learning the equal of Plato's Retreat. But now that ESPN has come to visit on a Thursday, my belief system has broken into tiny plastic pieces. I may never be able to teach again.

Yesterday I received the latest fundraising brochure from my alma mater UC Berkeley. This one unfolds to reveal information on a series of prominent alumni, including Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu and writer Joan Didion. And then, further down, the following:

To think that I wrote a letter of recommendation for the dude on the right and, what is more, repeatedly shared salami and ill-slivered pieces of Trader Joe's one-pound chocolate bars with him while discussing cultural theory in the English Lounge, the window overlooking the steps of Wheeler Hall propped open to permit illicit smoking. Maybe I should be getting a cut of that campaign's take.

I just stumbled upon my rating as a professor on MySpace. The statistical sample is a little small for anyone to take seriously. But it amuses me, just as it does when I read my course evaluations, that students consistently say, both that they learned a lot in my class and that it was easy. My not-so-humble response is that degree of difficulty has a lot to do with how well the professor teaches. The hardest courses I took as an undergraduate were the ones presided over by professors who had already checked out or never really checked in to begin with.