A large skein of pelicans high in the sky lifts
petal-shedding plum trees from their pebble moorings.
Human figures speak scriptured echoes of linguistic laws:
swiss january signs that
the cawing of ravens will soon silence.
An infinity of blooms and specks of sun
are jealously guarded in my miqraot gdolot text,
pressing against the dark ink.

Sur la science moderne: un cosmologiste du MIT pousse l’idée sage et peut-être johannique que les mathématiques ne décrivent pas l’univers, elles sont l’univers même (ou la phrase devrait être inversée?). Prendre cette idée au sérieux est envisager des mathématiques infinies. Mais cela ne contredirait pas Augustin par exemple qui pensait que l’espace-temps, attribut de cette existence, était né avec l’univers: donc peut-être aussi leur mathématisation, ou être même? Belle citation prise à Stephen Hawking: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” (A brief history of time). Mais on voit aussi un étrange nominalisme pointer, par exemple lorsque Sean Carroll, cosmologue (?) à Caltech dit: “A law of physics is a pattern that nature obeys without exception”. Mais qu’est-ce que cette nature qui obéit à des lois: seraient-elles donc étrangères à cette nature?

which is the title of a talk by Paul Bové, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh: Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory: Fri Jan 29, 2010, 2–3pm, at UCSC, Humanities Bldg 1, Room 520.

Paul Bové has published such books as: Destructive poetics: Heidegger and modern American poetry (Columbia University Press, New York, 1980); Intellectuals in power: a genealogy of critical humanism (Columbia University Press, New York, 1986); In the wake of theory (Wesleyan University Press, 1992); Mastering discourse: the politics of intellectual culture (Duke University Press, Durham, 1992); Early postmodernism: foundational essays (Duke University Press, Durham, 1995); Edward Said and the work of the critic: speaking truth to power (Duke University Press, Durham, 2000); Poetry against torture: criticism, history, and the human (Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2008).

The last title brings me to Czeslaw Milosz,

In Warsaw
….
I did not want to love so.
That was not my design.
I did not want to pity so.
That was not my design.
My pen is lighter
Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden
Is too much for it to bear.
How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?
I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot
Write anything: five hands
Seize my pen and order me to write
The story of their lives and deaths.
Was I born to become
a ritual mourner?
I want to sing of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.

It’s madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.

(Warsaw, 1945, from New and collected poems, 1931–2001 [Harpercollins, 2001])

Well, well. Perhaps I talked too soon this morning, in the course on the gospel of John, about the assumptions made in economics and psychology:

Daniel Friedman, Professor of Economics, will be giving the 44th annual lecture sponsored by the Santa Cruz Division of the Academic Senate: Beyond Fear and Greed: The Moral Roots of Financial Crises. Drawing on his 2008 book, Morals and Markets, tracing financial markets all the way back to our human origins, Professor Friedman shows why these markets have become so powerful, how they grew out of the imperative to expand trust from family and friends to wider and wider circles, how instabilities arise, and suggests some ways to mitigate future financial disasters.

This will be Monday, February 1, 2010, at 8:00 pm, in the Music Recital Hall at Performing Arts (UCSC).

Twenty people arrested yesterday in east Jerusalem, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, where Jerusalem Arab families have been evicted from their homes recently. See the Jerusalem Post article. For maps of East Jerusalem and historical background, see the wiki article.

It starts with a quote of Lévinas in the chapter “Sans nom” de Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 144:

Quand les temples sont debout, quand les drapeaux flottent sur les palais et que les magistrats ceignent leur écharpe—les tempêtes sous les crânes ne menacent d’aucun naufrage. Ce ne sont peut-être que les remous qui provoquent, autour des âmes bien ancrées dans leur havre, les brises du monde. La vraie vie intérieure n’est pas une pensée pieuse ou révolutionnaire qui nous vient dans un monde bien assis, mais l’obligation d’abriter toute l’humanité de l’homme dans la cabane, ouverte à tous les vents, de la conscience. Et certes, il est fou de rechercher la tempête pour elle-même, comme si “dans la tempête résidait le repos” (Lermontov).

Mais peut-on risquer que la “morale … tout entière” de l’humanité tienne dans un “for intérieur”, un piètre havre où on ne peut s’amarrer qu’à une pauvre bosse, une petite voix intérieure subjective? C’est “le risque dont dépend l’honneur de l’homme”, dit Lévinas page 145. Et il continue: “C’est peut-être ce risque que signifie le fait même que dans l’humanité se constitue la condition juive” (souligné par Lévinas).

Il me semble qu’à la suite du judaïsme, avec le christianisme, et également dans son sillage, l’humanité est en effet “au bord de la morale sans institutions.” Depuis plusieurs siècles, surtout depuis le XVIIIème à un rythme toujours plus accéléré, le monde est en état (ou voie) de désenchantement pour parler comme Weber (et Marcel Gauchet après lui). Mais ce désenchantement ou “pealing away” d’un sentiment de sacré qui auréolait un certain nombre d’objets: institutions, personnes choisies, lieux et temps, mène peut-être—c’est un espoir—à un réenchantement plus profond, subtil et universel.

The report of the UCSC Humanities Task Force was out Friday, prefaced by a grim
letter from the dean: apocalypse on the horizon, i.e. returning all open
provisions still remaining under Humanities control, and beginning to fire
staff and lecturers, while not hiring replacements for retiring faculty. The
division took care of the 2009-10 budget cut with furloughs (about 80%), and
cuts to research, graduate support, and lecturers (mostly in language, it
seems). The impending cut, for 2010–11, will be at least as large, perhaps
almost twice as large (from 975K to 1,950K), no matter what the state’s
governor does. He is currently gesturing towards the future, with incantations
regarding a constitutional amendment—another automatism—that would return
total funding of higher education in California to above 10%. Good luck.

The Task Force’s recommendations are:

• Rearrange the desk chairs (or try) and combine History of Consciousness, American Studies, and Feminist Studies in such a way that all tenured faculty are able to participate in graduate instruction;
• move the writing program under other auspices than the colleges (either VPDUE or the division), and offer greater use of GSIs. Another reshuffling.
• *and*, the meat of this report, seriously cut the language program (option a, page 2, i.e. “eliminating language offerings that support small or marginal curricular programs while focusing resources on languages that support major programmatic initiatives;” the other three options are impractical or simply incantations). Much ink, surprisingly, was devoted to the Language Program: reduce or cut Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian; reduce the number of courses in other languages; trim the series (can’t afford to have two years of language instruction now); maintain Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese (translation of “languages that help prepare a professional work force that serves the state of California and the Pacific Rim.”?). Strangely enough, while proposing cuts, the report wants to encourage the greater use of grads in language instruction. It speaks of departments in the plural that would identify graduate students who have the skills to teach foreign languages: I think we are talking about one department, Literature. This “would be an important element of their graduate study and essential for them to compete in the academic job market.” Yes, especially now: brilliant forecast on a market that is shutting down even on lecturers.

Welcome, incoming grad students: we have work for you in core courses, writing,
and even languages (no matter your level in a foreign language). So one can
maintain graduate programs that provide part-timers across the nation. The dance must continue. How delicately put, page 3:

Increasing the use of GSIs in the curricula of these programs offers a significant, as yet untapped opportunity to support graduate students in all disciplines with an interest in second-language pedagogy and/or pedagogy in college-level composition.

The Language Program at UCSC may lose forty courses in the coming two years, and several Language Lecturers their jobs. Retiring faculty in the Humanities won’t be replaced for at least two years. Staff will continue to be under tremendous pressure to work more and get paid less (and get fired). Salary reductions may stay in effect. Students’ tuition is dramatically up. Is this the only way to make up for the loss of state support at UCSC?

One area that could be cut is top administration, or at least that is what numbers suggest. If one tabulates the number of students (student headcount) at UCSC year by year from 1993 to 2008, and divides it by the number of executives (SMG and MSP) during the same years, one finds that while there were 134 students per executive in 1993, there were only 51 (50.8) students per executive in 2008. In 1993, there was a total of 76 (75.88) FTEs in the executive ranks, for a population of 10,173 students, but the number had jumped to 327 in 2008, for a population of 16,615 students. There may have been a number of reclassifications—especially of senior professional management—in the process. Still. The same kind of tabulation shows that the ratios for other categories of personnel have remained flat during the same period.

If UCSC in Fall 2008 had the same ratio of students per executive it had in 1993, it would have 124 executives, which is 203 fewer than it did have. Two hundred and three executives at, say, 125,000 dollars for salary and benefits represent an investment of 25 million dollars per year. Real money. How good is the investment? That is something worthy of analysis, and a question deserving of some good answers. One percent of this investment, about 250,000 dollars per year, that is near the cost of the number of language courses mentioned above.

This dramatic increase in senior management has been going on throughout UC, but the increase at UCSC is particularly steep. See the numbers, based on UCOP statistics.

The email program at UCSC gives the score of 3.84 (medium spam) to my incoming messages, because it considers “the date is grossly in the future.” As in La jetée, a favorite movie. And would we ever reach the future if bridges to it were not built by politicians and image-makers. Thank god Clinton had the forethought to build one to the twenty-first century. Bloavez mat d’an holl. Happy new year.

Now, to think with Babylon about the crisis we are in: financial, political, moral. At all levels, not only “them”. Where, against what and whom, how, have we (they, but not only they) sinned? To frame it in Babylonian terms: the gods are angry, but which and why? Marduk seems firmly in charge and the order the kings of Babylonia represent through their epics and temples (I am thinking of presidents, political bodies, institutional bodies, think tanks with their omens and oracles, etc.), all of this asserts it is functioning properly and orderly, that is, it is following divine order, the order of celestial bodies, as its own epics have it: economic and political theories (note: theories are visions), it is worshipping at the altars of freedom (as a reified good, out there to be worshipped with blood offerings, but no history of salvation) and democracy (people’s power, but for whom?). It is even quite ready to bring the full force of the “law” (the likes of the Hammurabi code, and its successors, nomos et lex, constitutions, law codes) to bear on the rebellious and impious, those who would tell stories of redemption from divine (and other) debt. Its justification for that? The sacredness of the holy order(s) needs to be maintained, and see, the proper sacrifices are being offered: the tuning of the financial machinery is being accomplished, and incense offered. Prophetic oracles are telling us an inexorable progress and an inexhaustibly upwards market, except for short divine bursts of anger, are here and there, hidden perhaps, obscured (by the incense?), but nonetheless of the “essence”. The gods can be propitiated, if only order is maintained: the divine order in the realm of ideas depends on our maintaining physical order hic et nunc. Are we to believe our high and low priests, our paid prophets and oniromancers, necromancers, providers of apotropaic baubles and trinkets, tea-leaf readers et al? They have been quiet recently, since last year actually, when they realized Marduk could get really mad and perhaps they themselves could be swallowed up by monsters. But whew, the storm and judgment seem to have been avoided for now, enormous holocausts have been offered, and the cult can resume for a while….