Posted By BillHeise on March 23, 2010

I could have been happy being an academic, but it was not to be. Initially my academic aspirations were stymied by my feeling that I had bitten off more than I could chew in my dissertation. (I have a scanned copy of my dissertation, which I will eventually put on the Internet so that everyone can see exactly how I failed, as well as what I was trying to do when I was writing it). But even if I had not been so stymied, there were only 13 jobs advertised in my specialty (medieval literature) in 1996. So I got a job and started working in the “secular” world.

The distinction between “secular” and academic worlds is not of my own making, but is founded in the academic world itself. One of my favorite professors used to constantly be talking about the difference between the “secular” world outside of academia and the (presumably “sacred”) world within the walls of the Ivory Tower. Her example is not particular to her experience. I heard this all the time when I was in graduate school.

The fact that I heard it does not mean that the distinction is an absolute. It is not. But the fact that it is not an absolute distinction doesn’t mean that there is no difference between the academic mindset and the “secular” mindset that governs the world of business. I make the case for dividing the academic world from the “secular” world of business, because it seems to me that there were lessons to be learned in the “real world” that I could never have learned had I stayed behind the Ivy curtain. In the words of the Moody Blues:

School taught I wanted to
But by now, that answer just ain’t true.

This fact was brought back to me again by a video I found on YouTube the other day.

In it, Neil Postman (remember him?) was being interviewed on PBS in 1995 and was being asked to comment on what he thought of the then-new Internet (keep in mind that the public use of the Internet, as inaugurated by the Gore Bill, was just a year old when the interview was conducted). Now I like Neil Postman. He has a deep understanding of things that the rest of us take for granted. But there limits to his vision, as well; entities to these limits they wish to address myself here.

Postman’s Continuing Attack on Metaphor

The interviewer asks him what he thinks of cyberspace, and his answer is instructive. “Cyberspace is a metaphorical idea,” he answers. What he means by this is an extension of this idea put forth in Amusing Ourselves to Death in which he said:

today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce had been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. (3-4)

In other words, “metaphor” breaks the rational world of reason and substitutes a world in which people can be fooled by the introduction of “false metaphors.” In such an environment, the culture has shifted away from Paris, the Enlightenment capital of reason–a city where Lautrec had painted the forgotten people and Degas had pictures of dancers–and settled instead on Las Vegas, a city which boasts thirty-foot high cardboard pictures of chorus girls. (The difference, it seems to me is negligible, relying on in the medium-cardboard over paints of the painters and a healthy dose of nostalgia for the long lost past-not the subject matter itself). In Amusing Ourselves To Death, Postman was trying to stop the slide away from reason, with its binary oppositional pairs that make it possible for men and women to make just and fair judgments of value, into ungovernable metaphor into which people can be (and are) being fooled by capitalist charlatans.

Postman laments this slide and is attempting to save it, much as Habermas was attempting to save Enlightenment reason from the onslaughts of the chaos of relativism.

A central issue in Habermas’s effort to sustain the Enlightenment project is the problem of relativism.

And a little later:

Just as this reason seems capable of discerning universal laws in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences (witness the success of the Copernican Revolution and Newton) – so reason, it is hoped, is capable of discerning universal laws and norms in the moral and political domains

The Problem of Knowledge

Just like Habermas, Postman is immediately confronted by the problem of knowledge after he declares that “Cyberspace is a metaphorical idea,” saying (I paraphrase) “It made me think about where one’s consciousness is.”

Postman is not the first person to confront the problem of knowledge. The Greeks had perhaps been the first. After their discovery of mathematics by Pythagoras, the Pythagoreans had to posit where the mathematical knowledge was in their universe. One can count two things, but one can also direct one’s attention to the number two, or a triangle without using the senses, so knowledge of number was not of the senses. And yet it was not in the heaven of the Greek gods, who lived on Mt. Olympus (and only mythically so). The Greeks never solved the problem once and for all (neither, I should add, have we in the modern world).

Wherever philosophical knowledge was, this sort of thought was thought to be higher than the thought of a lowly fisherman who uses his mind to bait a hook or weave a net. Therefore, since the time of Plato and Aristotle, the intellectual mind has been privileged over minds dedicated to the “lesser” arts and crafts (like fishing) dedicated only towards material gain. Both philosophers were able to give us an intellectual hierarchy of ideas. At the lowest end of the scale were those who engaged in “crafts.” Above those were intellectuals, who pondered more abstract tings/ideas like numbers and forms. At the top of this social hierarchy were those who were dedicated to pure contemplation. Plato decided that in a perfect world the world would be led by philosopher kings. Aristotle thought only the rich had the means to engage in pure contemplation. This was the basis for Western monarchies from Alexander the Great to the Sun King Louis XIV.

The Problem of Knowledge in Postman

Postman’s mind is driven to thinking about where his mind is when he is reading, as well as where his mind is when he is interacting with others in a social setting. He tends to think that human interaction is immediate when we are “present” in the same room as others, while those same interactions on the Internet come through a screen, which acts a veil between ourselves and others. And with the inauguration of this veil, he seems to think that we are discoursing only with ourselves and not with the “other” at all. The Internet breaks down the co-presence with another human being (1:48) and he “often wonders whether this does not signify the end of any meaningful community life” (2:50).

But Neil Postman is a reasonable man, and he knows that such technologies have come along before. He mentions some of them himself: writing and the printing press (2:20). “This is a new idea,” he declares. And yet this “new idea” is one that he cannot solve for.

Future and Past in Postman

The distinction between past and future is an important one in my estimation of Postman himself. As a thinker about the past, we can learn a lot from him. Consider his description about information technology in the 19th century at 5:30. He says, and I agree even as I paraphrase once again, that “in the 19th century we had a scarcity of information, and we solved that in spades, so now we have too much information.”

Postman seems (to me) to have taken his model of information dispersal from the Modern world in which characters like T.S. Eliot or CS Lewis could stand proxy for an otherwise ill-informed (and often completely ignorant) readership. He, Postman, is sure of himself when he is speaking of the 19th century, and anyone who wants to dispute him will probably be on shaky ground.

His interviewer is asking him for his view of the past, and he is able to perform that task well. But his interviewer is also asking him for his view of the future, because she does not have a clear view of it herself. She asked him, for instance, “What images come to your mind when you think about the world of cyberspace?” He smiles and his mind automatically goes to “the worst images” (5:00): people who are overloaded with information and do not have the skills to figure out the relevant information from the irrelevant. The question he fails to ask is who’s to say what is relevant. [This makes sense: the interviewer has asked him to the studio to comment on a phenomena she doesn’t herself understand.]

With his early 20th century trained mind, he might be tempted to say “Me” (Eliot and Lewis would have; they had training that distinguished them from the great “unwashed”). Fortunately, he has lived through the 60s, when the notion of professors as intermediaries of knowledge was breaking down in the face of the great unwashed being able to cleanse themselves with thought that they could think for themselves without the “old” ideas of “people over 30.”

So his answer to questions about the future tend to be non-committal, as when he answers interviewer’s question about the gradual assimilation and homogenization of culture as a result of the appearance of the new technologies with an evasion: “Here’s the puzzle about that” (7:25). (I paraphrase his answer once again.)

When talking about the global village, everyone seemed to think the world would become more homogeneous. We seem to be experiencing the opposite. All over the world, we seem to be experiencing a reversion to tribalism.

There’s no apparent feeling (at least that I can discern) that perhaps the whole experiment by McLuhan, who was influenced by Rousseau, was founded on bad information and we should start over (see my post on Amusing Ourselves to Death). No, the effects of the great transformation of society has gone wrong and he still feels that he (as a scholar in the Eliot/Lewis mode) is able to see things that the ignorant masses are not. This bit of information gives us some insight into the limits of Neil Postman’s knowledge.

Good and Bad in the Internet Age

A much more serious indicator of the limits of its knowledge comes when the interviewer asks him to speculate on whether the Internet and its attendant new technologies are good or bad. He answers in typical academic fashion. He has determined that technology represents a Faustian bargain (2:00): “It always gives you something important, but it also takes away something important.” And it is on this point that I have learned more from being out of academia than I learned when I was in it (and that’s not to say that I regret my time in academia; I don’t).

Derrida Static View of the Static Future

It is on account of my experience in the workplace that I have my most serious argument with thinkers like Postman and Derrida. I need to explain the difference between what I was taught in college about how to think and by what I learned in the “real world.” I’ll start with Derrida’s explication of reading.

I will use the words, not of Derrida himself, but of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Translator’s Preface to his Of Grammatology. Derrida believes that words are (or should be) read under erasure” (that’s sous rature for those of you reading along in the original French.). Spivak attempts to differentiate Derrida’s perception of Being from Heidegger’s.

Now we begin to see how Derrida’s notion of “sous rature” differs from that of Heidegger’s. Heidegger’s Being might point at an inarticulable presence. Derrida’s trace is the mark of the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, of the lack at the origin that is the condition of thought and experience. For somewhat different yet similar contingencies, both Heidegger and Derrida teach us to use language in terms of a trace-structure, effacing it even as it presents its legibility. We must remember this when we wish to attack Derrida or, for that matter, Heidegger, on certain sorts of straightforward logical grounds; for, one can always forget the invisible erasure, “act as though this makes no difference.”

What this means, for the casual reader who is following along at home is that both Heidegger and Derrida are attempting to balance the presence of an object with its absence. This makes a lot of sense in the tradition of Plato, for Plato cannot secure the being of an object without telling us what is being left out of its representation.

In particular, Derrida’s trace is an acknowledgment of the difference between the object, its boundaries, and what is outside its boundaries. Eventually, all things are born, live, and die. All objects in our perception rise up out of the base into a superstructure before collapsing back on themselves and dying again (Derrida is influenced by Marx’s discussions of base and superstructure here).

Derrida cannot be at peace with himself unless he has given a full description of an object under consideration (to do anything less would be to betray his mission as a critic). And since he seems to be able to find no bottom to the question of being, he believes, following Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and others, that he can undo the pillars of society and bring about a revolution based on raising up what has been suppressed.

The revolution will be completed when we have overturning the suppression of minorities by the dominant culture. The revolution will continue forever based on the fact that what is now dominant will become suppressed and will have to call forth its own revolution to correct the resulting imbalance, and so on forever.

The Rise of a New Skepticism

This was Derrida’s elegant answer to the problem that had overtaken the New Critics in the 60s. They thought of criticism in terms that isolated the production of an individual poem from the surrounding culture, and they urged an autotelic (that’s “self-contained” for you readers at home) response to any individual poem (see Brooks and Warren). This configuration could not last, since culture does influence the production of poetry. Soon skepticism about the notion of the individual as the only force involved in the production of poetry overcame the New Critics. Once critics got tired of reading poetry in isolation, criticism shifted to “intertextuality,” the relationship of one text to the many texts that went before it and to which the text reaches out to to stabilize itself. [Unfortunately, intertextuality is as real as the individual mind as the crucible in which poetry is mixed, but critics have not yet reached this realization. Remember the Greek confusion of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle when they had to think about where our ideas about numbers are located. We still don't have answers to this question.]

Derrida had solved the problem of skepticism (which asks how we know what we think we know and whether or not we in fact know what we think we know). His answer revolves around revolution. Only revolution is permanent in a world of constant change.

So in his answer, Postman is repeating the postmodern response to knowledge. His Faustian bargain that gives something as well as taking something away is a perfect deconstruction of meaning. And this is what I learned in school. Unfortunately, as the song says, “that answer just ain’t true.” Derrida’s response is not the only way of looking at the world of knowledge.

The Business World’s Response: Pareto and His Principle

When I got into business, I was 33 years old, and I had no business experience except for a brief foray in the banking world when I was 20. And not being very shy, I asked a lot of stupid questions, like “What is incremental revenue?” and “How are profits calculated?” And I read books, lots of books. My goal was to read 100 in a year (I succeeded; more on this in another post).

Some of the books that I read were total crap, but not all. Over time I learned to distinguish books that were useful to me from books that were not. The more I read, the more I knew; and the more I knew, the more I could target my reading towards effective business strategies.

One of the things I quickly learned was that those books that relied on history—books like Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun or If Aristotle Ran General Motors—were useless. At first (and for a long time) I thought they were merely shallow representations of a much deeper and much more satisfying intellectual experience that business people had missed out on in their pursuit of “material” goals, but I have slowly come to change my mind. The historical world in which academics operate is simply not germane to the business world. This insight, which took me a long time to arrive at, has some important lessons to teach, not only the business major, who the world thinks has his or her head set on money to the exclusion of “the care of the soul,” as my academic friends used to like to call it, but also to the academic.

Pareto

I can break my insight down for you by pointing to the influence of an economic thinker named Vilfredo Pareto (1848 –1923) and his Pareto Principle. Pareto discovered that 20% of the people owned 80% of the land in Italy, and this concerns the man who had been born in the pivotal year of 1848 (the year that Marx published his Communist Manifesto).

The odd distribution of land turns out to be a natural distribution. It is known as the 80/20 rule in economics, and it has a widespread application in business thought.

For instance, I learned from Frederick Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value the importance of “human assets” to the survival of a business:

Most managers simply don’t realize how much value the loyalty of human assets creates. They are used to husbanding more traditional types of inventory. What would a car dealer do, for example, if he discovered that a brand new stereo system was missing from his parts inventory? He would probably turn the dealership upside down. (4)

To my well-trained humanistic mind, the business mind’s reduction of human beings to “human assets” upset me. But what Fred was talking about made sense to me.

The key to decreasing inventory losses and growing profits is to manage a virtuous cycle of loyalty, learning, and value creation. As you will see in some detail the course of this book, each compounds the other two. (3-4)

And as I read, I could see that he was right, despite his unfortunate use of language. If I wanted to make myself useful in my company, I need to understand how to create value for my customers, and the key to doing that was to give them a reason to come back to me, rather than go elsewhere.

The Efficiency of Loyalty

So far, so good. I may not have liked Reichheld’s unfortunate use of language, but I could still see his point. However, when he started to talk about the distributions of resources, I got a little uneasy again. Reichheld started talking about segmenting customers by traffic. High-traffic customers accounted for 80% of sales, although they comprise only 20% of the customer base. Therefore, if you decided to let your high-paying customers have access to platinum cards, personalized customer service lines, etc., you could target your market dollars to those people who are spending the most money at your store.

In fact, Reichheld went so far as to question whether you should even have the lowest paying customers as customers at all, for 80% of your time would be spent catering to the needs of people who were not spending a lot of money in your stores. This seemed—and it still seems to me today—to be example of catering to the elites, while allowing the masses to “eat cake.”

Applying Reichheld’s Lessons to My Academic Experience

I repeat that I was a little wary the Reichheld cruelty by which he catered only to those whom businesses make money from. But then I thought of my self, not as a budding business person, but as a still-hopeful academic who had at that point some hope of publishing my academic work. I knew that my business colleagues were not interested in my academic work, but there were people who would be interested in what I had to say.

I knew that when I sent my workout for review by a publisher, I would send it to an academic publisher, not a major publishing like Random House. And when it came time for that academic publisher to sell my book, I hoped that they would target the audience using a process that I had learned was called “segmentation.” Segmentation is just a long word for dividing people into groups and targeting each group separately. This is a good idea in business, as it’s a good idea anywhere, for it allows you to reach deeper into the mind of your customer (keep in mind this is why Reichefeld had subtitled his book The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value). It would be futile to send my book on Medieval Allegory to physics journal. It would be pretty smart to send it to an academic journal dedicated to the dry topic of medieval allegory.

So even in the academic world, which prides itself on not having anything to with money, I could imagine why even an academic publisher, who had no interest in making money for money sake (as I still thought my business colleagues did), would send my manuscript indiscriminately. They, too, segmented their target audience. Ignoring this Law of Efficiency merely invites your competitors, who are not so shy, to shave costs and achieve greater profits than you, effectively putting you out of business. This is why everybody does it.

My Question

My question when I first got into business initially was how I could reconcile the competitive instinct to win with the democratic instinct for balance. In recent years, my question has turned to whether I could reconcile the competitive instinct with the democratic instinct, at all, and I have decided that the two approaches are separate and ultimately irreconcilable rational approaches to the same sensory evidence.

The academic approach is one that searches for equality of outcomes in the world governed by Pareto imparities. And this is why Postman thinks of the world in terms in which the world is ultimately in perfect balance. Only then can his mind be at rest. This is why Derrida can only be satisfied when he has deconstructed his own being back to the ground where it ultimately evaporates.

The academic deals with economics in terms laid out in the 19th century, particularly (but by no means exclusively) on the basis of the Karl Marx. Marx laid the basis for his “surplus theory of value” which relies on the material provided by nature (a bone) and the human effort required to change the raw materials into a manufactured product (a nose bone). (Okay, that’s an inside joke. To see the inside joke, buy my book, Writing for People Who Hate Writing: A Book for the Rest of Us and see the chapter on Why Fido Can’t Drive). He thought that the labor expended by workers was being exploited by capitalist exploiters of labor.

Now it’s no secret that this was the case, and the academic wants to remedy this imbalance, putting the skewed universe back into balance. Deconstruction is the method by which Derrida hoped to remedy the world: he would raise up what had been suppressed.

Of course, in the real world some things that have been suppressed should perhaps remain suppressed. Hitler gives us a test case for the remorseless application of Derrida’s ideas. Only a few morally questionable people would seriously think it was a good idea to raise up the ideas of Adolph Hitler, whose regime has been suppressed, back to its former power. But when Paul de Man turned out to have had a Nazi past, Derrida came to his defense. The de Man affair continued to haunt Derrida for the rest of his days, so much so that by the time of his death his impressive reputation had been irrevocably tarnished not only on the right but also on the left.

I don’t hold Derrida’s solution to the problem of de Man against him. I still think Derrida has given us the chief problem of our lifetime. But what Derrida hadn’t come to terms with at the time of his death was the morality of defending a man who defended a reich that shipped so many Jews off to the death camps because they were thought to be no more than inconvenient animals. It turns out that we need to acknowledge limits to Derrida’s work, or we can displace the notion of control of the human at the center of the humanistic equation, as Foucault does when he “decenters” the individual from the center of the human experience.

The Way We Live Now

Postman does not know what the future holds, but he is sure that it will resemble the past, which at least he is sure of, even if the cretins in red-state “flyover country” are not. So he forges ahead despite the contradictions that assail him. He doesn’t know what the future holds; he just thinks that he is better off than those thinkers who are only focused on money.

This is a vestige of the lost aristocratic mentality, which is common to Marx and Nietzsche. Both thinkers would restore balance to a world gone haywire. Both expressed their rejection of the means by which the world has become rich. While we in America are traveling the path of equity and rebalancing our 2%/98% economy (a version of the 80/20 rule), the Chinese have finally gotten the message that the way to prosperity is to allow a certain measure of capitalist entrepreneurship in their 19th century system.

In the classical view of Marx and Nietzsche, restoring balance in an unbalanced world means rejecting the values of the “bourgeois.” It makes the “bourgeois” culture the object of derision. That means that you don’t have to have answers to problems about the future; you just have to reject the “bourgeois” scheme of values by which the “bourgeois” scheme to defraud others of their hard-earned cash. This is why economics are not taught in school: the “bourgeois” system of values operate on completely different (and irreconcilable) principles than the classical system of humanistic values.

And rather than bending our academic mindset and doing the hard work of expanding our minds to cover new and unpalatable evidence—as so many of the heroes of humanism have done in the past—our academic “leaders” ignore the new evidence, collapse themselves and their view of the world into a new skepticism by which they can ignore what they don’t know. In this way, while defending the history of humanistic values, they become like those enemies of humanistic learning: Church thinkers who burned Galileo’s book and Bruno at the actual stake to keep what they already knew in perfect balance.

That’s not an optimal position to take.

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