This post from Ray Carney's possibly-abandoned blog "Inside Boston University" was chainsawed in half at the demand of a Boston University administrator; the mutilated post is here. Carney has been fighting with the administration of the university (which is a private one) for years. We hope that Professor Carney will return to online writing.
Friday, May 8, 2020
Out of the mouths of babes....
The posting on the previous page ("Ray Carney's Commencement Address") elicited a truly overwhelming response. In the days after it appeared, I heard from colleagues at Boston University as well as professors and even a few administrators at other universities, who asked a variety of questions about the group plagiarism the Film Studies graduate students in my program were guilty of (events that I only allude to obliquely and in passing on that page), as well as from a stunning number of current and former students in the arts, the majority from other schools, who asked me to expand on my thoughts about arts criticism and commentary. I may well include some of their questions and my responses in future postings. But for the moment, pressed for time, I will limit myself to posting my response to a note I received this morning from one of my most brilliant former Ph.D. students who responded to my posting in a completely different way from anyone else. He and his wife are now engaged in raising a family and he wrote me about what the experience of spending so much time with a young child has taught him, and how it relates to my posting. A very lightly edited version of my somewhat hastily emailed reply to him, which quotes part of his email to me, follows.
Thanks for the kind and thoughtful reply. Since I still haven't yet turned my grades in, and am still going crazy with my three massive Bresson volumes, this shall be (mercifully?) brief. Only to note that your--
.... in my current state, I relate everything to [parenthood] but I could not help but think about the ways in which [my child] and I are helping to cultivate each other's inner worlds. I try so hard every day to create a space for him to learn what it is to be himself, and in so doing I run up against so many assumptions, cliches, inherited ideas that I didn't even know I still had. Seeing things through his eyes, I see so much that my "adult" brain has been trained to ignore, or categorize, explain, contain. All of this is to say that I am of course still building and revising and training my own eyes and ears and heart and soul, and god willing I'll never stop! ....
--is the shortest, most condensed statement of what is wrong with contemporary criticism and how to fix it that could possibly be articulated.... Original response is what a work (a genuine work) of art is, and what a critic must find a way of responding to... and what the race, class, gender, ideology, cultural studies critics fall flat on their behinds for NOT doing. Work for truth. In art and in commentary on it. We live in a world of lies, as much in criticism as in politics, both liberal and conservative.
I might add as an aside that the group of plagiarizing graduate students were, in effect, only compounding the intellectual felony. Critically trained to understand knowledge as something borrowed and derivative and part of a pre-established system of understanding and response, they have internalized the critical secondariness that has been inculcated (in the name of "research," where the so-called research consists of immersing themselves in everything except the artistic text at hand) in every course other than my own and turned borrowing and derivativeness into an operating principle. That's what Googling their responses is. They find out what they think by finding out what others think. Experience as a first-hand, threatening, dangerous, disorienting, confusing, vulnerable experiential (!) event disappears. They have forgotten what it is, in my correspondent's concept, to "be themselves," just as they have forgotten what it is for the text to be itself. Like the overwhelming majority of critics in American universities, they have manacled their minds to received systems and methods of understanding. The loss is incalculable.
* * *
Thanks for the kind and thoughtful reply. Since I still haven't yet turned my grades in, and am still going crazy with my three massive Bresson volumes, this shall be (mercifully?) brief. Only to note that your--
.... in my current state, I relate everything to [parenthood] but I could not help but think about the ways in which [my child] and I are helping to cultivate each other's inner worlds. I try so hard every day to create a space for him to learn what it is to be himself, and in so doing I run up against so many assumptions, cliches, inherited ideas that I didn't even know I still had. Seeing things through his eyes, I see so much that my "adult" brain has been trained to ignore, or categorize, explain, contain. All of this is to say that I am of course still building and revising and training my own eyes and ears and heart and soul, and god willing I'll never stop! ....
--is the shortest, most condensed statement of what is wrong with contemporary criticism and how to fix it that could possibly be articulated.... Original response is what a work (a genuine work) of art is, and what a critic must find a way of responding to... and what the race, class, gender, ideology, cultural studies critics fall flat on their behinds for NOT doing. Work for truth. In art and in commentary on it. We live in a world of lies, as much in criticism as in politics, both liberal and conservative.
* * *
I might add as an aside that the group of plagiarizing graduate students were, in effect, only compounding the intellectual felony. Critically trained to understand knowledge as something borrowed and derivative and part of a pre-established system of understanding and response, they have internalized the critical secondariness that has been inculcated (in the name of "research," where the so-called research consists of immersing themselves in everything except the artistic text at hand) in every course other than my own and turned borrowing and derivativeness into an operating principle. That's what Googling their responses is. They find out what they think by finding out what others think. Experience as a first-hand, threatening, dangerous, disorienting, confusing, vulnerable experiential (!) event disappears. They have forgotten what it is, in my correspondent's concept, to "be themselves," just as they have forgotten what it is for the text to be itself. Like the overwhelming majority of critics in American universities, they have manacled their minds to received systems and methods of understanding. The loss is incalculable.
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