For St. Augustine’s pure liar it is, on the contrary, a reason in favor of making it. For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’'s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.
- Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit
So I've just finished my first semester of teaching. It isn't much at all, as far as experience is concerned: I only had 11 students. But when I set this brief episode against two decades in which I was always on the other side of the classroom, the difference is surprisingly stark. Suddenly, I'm remembering moments in which I thought I was being an ideal student as having been in reality an embarrassing nuisance for the professor. The empathy that I so rarely felt for my classmates is now beginning belatedly to appear. If I were shown this point of view, Christmas Carol-style, when I was in high school, I am not sure it would have changed much except making me somewhat more tolerable to teach and learn next to. Ah well.
When I was a student, I had a finely worked-out hierarchy of paper-writing tricks--mainly ones designed to make the paper seem longer than it actually was. At the bottom were the especially stupid ones, never to be resorted to: cheap plagiarism, widening the margin, increasing the font size. (Why do the others think they're getting away with it?) Then came more subtle ones: invisibly increasing the size of each period, expanding the heading, using a slightly different font. I never used these except in moments of extreme duress. Around the summit, an even more refined and well-worn toolbox: making the paper longer by writing more characters. A "representation" used instead of an "image" could, in the right cases, net you a whole new line break, and several could make your seven pages look more like a respectable seven and a half. An extra adjective could do the same. Finally, the apex and cornerstone of my strategy was writing whole sentences to beef up points already made, conclusions already reached. At times I could work up hundreds of words of bullshit that fit so organically into my writing that I no longer remembered which sentences were which. My writing style, as you've probably observed, has become a permanent and unrecoverable casualty of these staple tactics.
Now, looking back on the final papers I've graded, what strikes me the most is how little the length, especially the page count, really matters. An already weak paper may have seemed especially weak because it wasn't long enough, but obvious attempts to lengthen a too-short weak paper--and they were all obvious, no matter where on my beloved pyramid they were--were an even bigger black mark. In fact, the most important thing I noticed and remembered about all the essays I graded was whether they had a real argument or not, and if so, how thoroughly they pursued it. Why did none of us students ever apply as much diligence and creativity to composing arguments as we did trying to satisfy an almost wholly imaginary word count god?
The best explanation I can come up with, though it may seem too cynical by half, is that for students producing papers is primarily an exercise in bullshit. I don't disagree with Harry Frankfurt, but he should have noted that in the collegiate context--where most of us are drilled most thoroughly in producing bullshit--its most salient feature is that it is measured by volume. When students talk and think about papers, they do it in terms of page count, because the content usually means so little to them. If a sweaty, panting New Historicist arrives and tells them that their reading of The Merchant of Venice is totally off-base in the play's context of reception, they will shrug their shoulders and pretend he does not exist. In most papers nothing is at stake, which is one reason plagiarism is so common.
I found it especially excruciating when teachers or professors responded to this kind of thinking by saying the paper "should be as long as it needs to be," as if the image of flowers in Shakespeare were a topic divinely ordained by some universal constant not to take up any more or less than ten double-spaced pages of twelve-point Times New Roman. The instinct was noble, the response fallacious. An assignment does not become meaningful and bullshit does not cease to be bullshit just because the volume requirement is obfuscated. My (mental) response to this was an angry (unspoken) accusation: "You and I both know that this is an elaborate game. I produce volume for you and you give me an A, I do a rote close-reading and you get to pretend I am learning to think critically. Why not cut the crap?"
I'm not sure I disagree with my jaded pimply teenage self even now. But what I have realized, as a beginning teacher, is that while I may recognize that something like this is right and possibly more right than the platitudes we are forced to absorb in our graduate "teaching practicum," that doesn't get me very far. I am not only not allowed to teach, assign, or grade on the assumption that the whole exercise is an elaborate piece of meta-bullshit, I can't even use that kind of thinking as an escape route. For one thing, I'd inevitably be letting down the students who do think they're doing something worthwhile, though it's hard for me to reliably tell how many of them there are. (One danger of being a cynic is that it encourages large-scale projection.) For another, I don't think I could stand to be in a classroom if I were as thoroughly convinced of the pointlessness of the exercise as I sometimes think I am, even with the justification that I'm getting paid. Moreover, as long as I'm not totally despicable I should see it as some kind of goal to transcend the bullshit, to create meaningful learning even in the context of a meaningless game.
But how? Is there a magical assignment that will overcome the will-to-bullshit of the whole system of mass education? I thought in terms of volume even when I was writing good papers for classes I passionately adored. Is hitting a page count just one of those creatively-constricting elements of writing, like the syllable count in haiku? I don't think so. This, like so many other things, is calibrated mainly for the convenience of the instructor. (Just how much of class design is based on this is another thing I've just begun learning.) There's nothing inherently good about a 10-12 page paper except that it takes a decent amount of work on the student's part and is relatively easy for the instructor to grade. What if I threw open the gates completely, letting them write one-page blurbs or three-hundred-page novels as they like? That won't work--the educational equity issues alone make my head hurt.
Bullshit is a problem I've never been able to solve. The only halfway-acceptable alternative is having students contribute to projects that will eventually, somehow, be useful to someone--like a wiki or an online exhibit. But students often hate those. And, however grudgingly, I do admit that I would be nowhere today if it wasn't for the bullshit I've been producing for the last two decades. Is this just something I have to live with?
When I was a student, I had a finely worked-out hierarchy of paper-writing tricks--mainly ones designed to make the paper seem longer than it actually was. At the bottom were the especially stupid ones, never to be resorted to: cheap plagiarism, widening the margin, increasing the font size. (Why do the others think they're getting away with it?) Then came more subtle ones: invisibly increasing the size of each period, expanding the heading, using a slightly different font. I never used these except in moments of extreme duress. Around the summit, an even more refined and well-worn toolbox: making the paper longer by writing more characters. A "representation" used instead of an "image" could, in the right cases, net you a whole new line break, and several could make your seven pages look more like a respectable seven and a half. An extra adjective could do the same. Finally, the apex and cornerstone of my strategy was writing whole sentences to beef up points already made, conclusions already reached. At times I could work up hundreds of words of bullshit that fit so organically into my writing that I no longer remembered which sentences were which. My writing style, as you've probably observed, has become a permanent and unrecoverable casualty of these staple tactics.
Now, looking back on the final papers I've graded, what strikes me the most is how little the length, especially the page count, really matters. An already weak paper may have seemed especially weak because it wasn't long enough, but obvious attempts to lengthen a too-short weak paper--and they were all obvious, no matter where on my beloved pyramid they were--were an even bigger black mark. In fact, the most important thing I noticed and remembered about all the essays I graded was whether they had a real argument or not, and if so, how thoroughly they pursued it. Why did none of us students ever apply as much diligence and creativity to composing arguments as we did trying to satisfy an almost wholly imaginary word count god?
The best explanation I can come up with, though it may seem too cynical by half, is that for students producing papers is primarily an exercise in bullshit. I don't disagree with Harry Frankfurt, but he should have noted that in the collegiate context--where most of us are drilled most thoroughly in producing bullshit--its most salient feature is that it is measured by volume. When students talk and think about papers, they do it in terms of page count, because the content usually means so little to them. If a sweaty, panting New Historicist arrives and tells them that their reading of The Merchant of Venice is totally off-base in the play's context of reception, they will shrug their shoulders and pretend he does not exist. In most papers nothing is at stake, which is one reason plagiarism is so common.
I found it especially excruciating when teachers or professors responded to this kind of thinking by saying the paper "should be as long as it needs to be," as if the image of flowers in Shakespeare were a topic divinely ordained by some universal constant not to take up any more or less than ten double-spaced pages of twelve-point Times New Roman. The instinct was noble, the response fallacious. An assignment does not become meaningful and bullshit does not cease to be bullshit just because the volume requirement is obfuscated. My (mental) response to this was an angry (unspoken) accusation: "You and I both know that this is an elaborate game. I produce volume for you and you give me an A, I do a rote close-reading and you get to pretend I am learning to think critically. Why not cut the crap?"
I'm not sure I disagree with my jaded pimply teenage self even now. But what I have realized, as a beginning teacher, is that while I may recognize that something like this is right and possibly more right than the platitudes we are forced to absorb in our graduate "teaching practicum," that doesn't get me very far. I am not only not allowed to teach, assign, or grade on the assumption that the whole exercise is an elaborate piece of meta-bullshit, I can't even use that kind of thinking as an escape route. For one thing, I'd inevitably be letting down the students who do think they're doing something worthwhile, though it's hard for me to reliably tell how many of them there are. (One danger of being a cynic is that it encourages large-scale projection.) For another, I don't think I could stand to be in a classroom if I were as thoroughly convinced of the pointlessness of the exercise as I sometimes think I am, even with the justification that I'm getting paid. Moreover, as long as I'm not totally despicable I should see it as some kind of goal to transcend the bullshit, to create meaningful learning even in the context of a meaningless game.
But how? Is there a magical assignment that will overcome the will-to-bullshit of the whole system of mass education? I thought in terms of volume even when I was writing good papers for classes I passionately adored. Is hitting a page count just one of those creatively-constricting elements of writing, like the syllable count in haiku? I don't think so. This, like so many other things, is calibrated mainly for the convenience of the instructor. (Just how much of class design is based on this is another thing I've just begun learning.) There's nothing inherently good about a 10-12 page paper except that it takes a decent amount of work on the student's part and is relatively easy for the instructor to grade. What if I threw open the gates completely, letting them write one-page blurbs or three-hundred-page novels as they like? That won't work--the educational equity issues alone make my head hurt.
Bullshit is a problem I've never been able to solve. The only halfway-acceptable alternative is having students contribute to projects that will eventually, somehow, be useful to someone--like a wiki or an online exhibit. But students often hate those. And, however grudgingly, I do admit that I would be nowhere today if it wasn't for the bullshit I've been producing for the last two decades. Is this just something I have to live with?
The central problem is, of course, that in academic (or secondary education) learning contexts students are to produce text about things they a) probably don't care about and 2) even if they would care, their first instinct proably would not be to write a paper about it - they may want to discuss it with other interested people, join or form a club or an activity group, do a video project, or whatever. How often does one have the wish to write about something, not regarding people with a journalistic, literary or academic background for whom writing about things has become a habit (and who chose these careers probably at least partially because they like to spill words)? Right now, I haven't updated my blog for about a year, partly because of time issues, but also because there hasn't been anything I really wanted to write about. But there you are, in school or at university, having to write about something that may or may not interest you and about which you may or may not have anything to say, and not a clue what would make a good or at least sufficient discussion of the topic at hand... So while it may encourage bullshitting or plain page-filling, the word- or page count at least gives you a goal to work up to. In any case, I assume you're grading papers on style and content as well? Why don't create your own system, where good style and good argument can substitute for word count? Or aren't you allowed to?
ReplyDeleteThank you for the observant and kind words. Practice, practice, practice, practice -- there is no replacement for putting thousands of hours into something when it comes to self-improvement.
ReplyDeleteSorry to come to this late, but I was wrestling with just these sort of conundra out in meatworld. And as usual you've put your finger right on some stuff. As you know these are common themes over at my place; I share both your irony about the little games we play and sense that if that's all it is, I might as well quit and go glue shells on boxes for the tourists in Tahiti.
ReplyDeleteI think it's really, really, actually important to think hard about what's essential and what's contingent in what we do. What is it exactly we want students to get, at various scales? The exercises we put them through have to make them stronger in some valuable way, not just be busywork or the habitus mindlessly reproducing itself. In this sense the page count matters like the number on a weight you're lifting or the mileage on a track you're running - it's a raw quantification of the scale of competencing you're working toward. But then the next question is, what kind of competence? Writing ten page papers about shit no one cares about can't be the answer, although it may be part of the answer.
The relationship acknowledges a pregnant correspondent. The country slopes any reverse goodbye before a stone. Will Sew Kind Of Wonderful toast our fooling dragon? Sew Kind Of Wonderful dips the fellow outside its household paste
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite profs gave all of his assignments without length requirements but rather with length limits — he'd give three assignments of no more than three pages per semester, and two of no more than twelve pages. Sometimes, some of his questions warranted the whole length, other times they didn't. But at least it saved him — and us — the need to spew bullshit for page count. (I did have one class where he had a floor, but that was a class where we wrote one 30 to 60 page paper for the whole semester).
ReplyDeleteYou were one of the first (and few) on Metafilter to give me a favorite for a comment. I have since been kicked out for railing against their narcissism. My handle was Student of Man...I too, am now a beginning teacher. And I agree with your post. :)
ReplyDelete