"Disinterestedness"

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Abraham Maslow

One of the most controversial and most covered aspects of Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings had to do with the question of objectivity. The barrage of questions and comments that followed the review of Sotomayor's now infamous 2001 "wise Latina" comment surely reveals anxieties and assumptions about objectivity in United States culture. For one, it exposes the still existing influence of the Enlightenment on American politics (an influence that I believe a lot of people still hold dear). I would argue that the attention to the comment also reveals that there is a sort of default subject position in the United States. With assertions that Sotomayor's gender and ethnic identity will influence her decisions suggests, there seems to be an implication that she would be more objective, more neutral, were she not situated by those identity markers. The white male heterosexual subject is apparently one that does not need to be interrogated in confirmation hearings, and this likely explains why John Roberts was not asked how being a wealthy heterosexual white male will affect his decisions.

Questions of objectivity, situatedness, and attachment/detatchment are especially interesting to me recently. My discipline has in many ways abandoned notions of objectivity, critical detachment/disinterestedness in favor of theories that emphasize and seek to expose situatedness, power structures, social construction, metanarratives, etc. Though I very much subscribe to these postmodernist/poststructuralist theories, I do think that they have the effect of detaching the discipline from other fields in academia (the sciences and some aspects of the social sciences, especially) and from the general public. It is ironic that my field's insistence on situatedness makes us seem disconnected from the "real" world and too caught up in the theoretical realm.

It is exciting and interesting that there has recently been a resurgence of the idea of critical detachment and formalism in the humanities because I do think that it will force us to re-interrogate what detachment and objectivity mean and how they function, which will hopefully result in a more nuanced positioning towards them. Critics like Seyla Benhabib and Amanda Anderson have have recently articulated theories that put a more positive spin on detachment. Benhabib argues that effective social criticism almost always involves some sort of separation from a society and tradition (which, for her, are likely corrupt). Anderson relates detachment to cosmopolitanism and argues that new cosmopolitanism can be defined "as the capacious inclusion of multiple forms of affiliation, disaffiliation, and reaffiliation, simultaneously insisting on the need for informing principles of self-reflexivity, critique, and common humanity."

What I think is most important is to examine the critical, social, and rhetorical agency of these various theories on objectivity and detachment and see how they themselves are situating mechanisms. One of my biggest problems with opposing subjectivity to objectivity is that such an opposition fails to examine how the desire for objectivity is surely part of one's subjectivity. I prefer "situatedness" because one can be situated by their belief in disinterestedness, but that is just me at the moment.

Edit: Chelsea was smart and reminded me that my glorious friend and fellow blogger Matt recently had a post related to issues of subjective and objective criticism. I encourage you to read it over at Cinema without Organs

"Interesting"

One of my good friends once complained to me that "English majors don't say that something is 'good' or 'bad.' They don't say that they 'like' anything. They say that things are 'interesting.'" I recall laughing off his comment at the time and letting my mind quietly scroll through the millions of times I had said "interesting." I cannot say for sure if that there is any truth to my friend's assertion, as I doubt that there are statistics collected on adjective choice by major. I can say that I am guilty of the charge he leveled against my cohort, and I can say that many of my colleagues are guilty of the same charge.

It is an interesting (there is that word again) phenomenon, and I wonder if there is something to the discipline that would leave the English major predisposed to make a such an assertion that is more tentative, less judgmental than a more typical opinion statement. Thinking about it, I would argue that the word choice makes sense. Students today at most universities in the country are educated by a professoriate that has been so influenced by post-structuralist and postmodernist theorists. Because the theoretical grounding of most departments is based on a rejection of absolute value and meaning and often rejects good/bad or positive/negative value systems, it makes sense that students would adopt the communication and conceptual strategies of the discipline. What is perhaps more interesting (I seriously can't stop myself) is that this sort of positioning and/or aesthetic response would bother people like my friend.

Perhaps it is unfair for me, someone who is drinking the kool-aid, to try to defend the phrase. I don't have a problem with its sweet, ill-defined sensibility. Still, I feel to need to try to rationalize it for myself (and for others). The only way that I can at the moment is that I like how the term functions and opens up discussion in my own work, in my classroom, and in the work of my students. Behind the assertion that something is interesting, there is a reason that it is interesting, and that subtext is what opens up discussion and intellectual debate. Explaining that something is "interesting" is more open and can allow for more complex and nuanced discussions of a given textual phenomenon. It is different than defending a thesis structured on a binarily defined value system, and I like this. I like to see my students looking at how something is functioning and at all of that various components that make it up. They will surely make value judgments along the way, but starting from a position where something is "interesting" is much more open than starting from the position that something is "good."

This new blog will seek to explore things that I find interesting, and I look forward to writing it and hope that you enjoy reading it.