Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Corsair Affairs
by John Holbo | ns 69
"I hope that someone will soon write a fully documented history of the Corsair affair. All I know about it is that Kierkegaard challenged its proprietor, Meyer [sic] Goldschmidt, who had hitherto praised his writings, to attack him, which Goldschmidt thereupon proceeded to do," writes W. H. Auden in the New Yorker (25 May 1968) in a review of five volumes of Kierkegaard's journals and papers (141). He concedes he knows a bit more: something to do with Kierkegaard's trousers.
Auden's title was "A Knight of Doleful Countenance." There is something quixotic about the Corsair Affair. Also, the New Yorker cartoon on this page is perfect: open-faced, kindly housewife, answering balding, bespectacled door-to-door pollster, "Goodness, I don't know! Who do you like?" Kierkegaard, author of Judge For Yourself!, would have said the lady does not suit the Spirit of the Age.
The volume Auden lacked, The Corsair Affair, finally appeared in 1982. The editors' introduction boasts phrases you can really sink your sense of wonder into, such as "with little chance of getting an appointment in Denmark because of his Grundvigianism…" Footnoted bits like the following would have told Auden most of what he wanted to know about this small-town stew of passion, pedantry, and pseudonymity:
On January 16 [1846] appeared the first of the pieces identifying in a doubly brutal way Frater Taciturnus [pseudonymous author of the third section of Stages On Life's Way] with Crazy Nathanson, a well-known Copenhagen character. Victor Eremita [pseudonymous editor of Either/Or] and Frater Taciturnus are directly declared insane. On January 23 began the numerous references to and caricatures of Kierkegaard's external appearance, particularly his legs and trousers. (Hong and Hong xxi)
So it goes. As Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, "To be trampled to death by geese is a lingering death."
In 1968, making the most of limited data, Auden hypothesizes that the Corsair, whatever it was, "was clearly a social evil." Its editor, Meier Goldschmidt, "must have been a stupid man" not to realize a subtler line would have been to praise Kierkegaard to the skies. On the other hand, it was "distastefully egotistic" of Kierkegaard to invite attack rather than to do the sensible thing: denounce social evil as such.
This is half wrong, but Auden is shrewder than the Corsair volume editors, who take the implausibly straight line that "Kierkegaard initiated the battle because of the important issues at stake" (Hong and Hong xxxvii). It's enough to make a cat laugh. Kierkegaard got into this mess because part of him wanted to.
Kierkegaard has a Platonic metaphor for talking about this species of mess (which, inevitably, he failed to apply to his own case when the time came). Socrates tells young Phaedrus that he worries he is a charioteer with one black horse, all bad impulses, and a white horse, all good impulses. Kierkegaard's variation: imagine you are driving a cart pulled by Pegasus, winged horse who flies like the wind; pulled also by an old donkey. You need both. Spiritually, you limp (as did Kierkegaard, hence the trouser jokes).
What Goldschmidt noticed was that Kierkegaard declared war on his Corsair in part out of lofty motives, but inevitably in a (pardon, but there is no other word) half-assed way. Goldschmidt was a philosopher. The Corsair affair was a piece of complex irony, worked as a twist in the braided fuse of Kierkegaard's own concept of irony. (Echoing Auden: we still need a complete volume, fully documenting Goldschmidt's side.)
The most devastating attack on Kierkegaard's whole mode of "writing yourself in multiplicate" (as Nabokov calls this sort of thing) comes in a single line, in the context of a larger imagining of Frater Taciturnus meeting Coronato the Frightful (never you mind who that is): "Frater Taciturnus was delighted and said: 'I am so happy that I will imagine giving a poor man a dollar'" (qtd in Kirmmse 74). That gets at a lot that is wrong with, limited about, maybe even right about, Kierkegaard's philosophy. Goldschmidt also wrote the first Seinfeld episode (you remember Jerry's girlfriend and the pirate shirt?) with Kierkegaard cast as Cosmo Kramer:
I had ordered a winter coat at Fahrner's, the fashionable tailor of the day, and because I was uncertain about how it really ought to look, Fahrner said, "Would you do me the favor of leaving it to me? I will sew you the most beautiful coat in all of Copenhagen." I went along with that, and when it was finished it was indeed a very beautiful coat, of fine dark blue cloth with a fur collar, and instead of buttons with loops it had a luxuriant black braid on the breast. It pleased me, because it had a fine military touch that appealed to my fantasies about weaponry. But it was precisely this detail that frightened me about it as an article of clothing for the everyday world. If, as the tailor surely assumed, I had had a desire to arouse attention regarding my person, to be jaunty or a braggart, the coat would have been incomparable. Now, under the circumstances, it was not possible to criticize it because in its way it was a masterpiece, and Fahrner was very proud of it, and wanted me to put it on right away and walk down Østergade. I didn't want to, however, and was satisfied with a tentative walk down Købmagergade, where the "establishment" was located, and when people along the way apparently took no notice of me—because that is the way people are; you can't see by looking at them what they are going to say after they have passed by—I began to gain confidence in the coat. Then I came up Amagertorv and Vimmelskaftet, and there I met Kierkegaard. He turned around and walked with me, talking at first with an unmistakable expression of good will, "Don't walk around in a coat like that. You are not a riding instructor. One ought to dress like other people." I did not tell him that this was the first time I had worn the coat and with what feeling I had done so, but I went home, sent it back, and had the fur collar and braid removed. The only thing that caused me pain was that Kierkegaard had thought that I was really pleased with the coat. (qtd. in Kirmmse 68)
Kierkegaard was the greater mind, but, all the same, he was "a simple mortal who could err, who had in fact a strong streak of egoism or vanity" (qtd. in Kirmmse 82). Goldschmidt was a perceptive psychologist. He wrote reviews of Kierkegaard's books that their author found very penetrating. But Goldschmidt did repent the trouser jokes; he sold the Corsair and went abroad, "to be done with witticisms and to learn something" (qtd. in Kirmmse 76); he wrote a book, Nemesis, whose title expresses an idea, "which of course is at work in its own way in each person's existence." Nemesis in the ancient sense of "give what is due," especially as a corrective to fruits of pride. "In the light of the idea of Nemesis, one can no longer hate" (qtd. in Kirmmse 80). But there is also nemesis the usual sense.
The Present Age
Let's flip around in this old copy of the New Yorker, like patients in an ancient waiting room. The ads are great. As Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling, "Unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything…one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest," ads for gin, vodka, anti-aging creme (49). Here we go:
Computers that actually work.
If you think that's funny, talk to a man who has spent the last six months trying to get his new computer to do an honest day's work.
There are many men in this position right now. Their new computers are so complicated, so hard to program and run, it could be literally years before they're doing even the day-to-day work a computer should do.
Ad copy for Honeywell. Things have changed a lot since 1968.
But academic publishing still moves slowly. In perverse reversal of the history of money, intellectual currency is suspect if not backed by the solidity of paper. That's what I'm here to write about. I'm an academic blogger. I'm supposed to be bringing you the good news about the great promise of online writing and publishing in the academic humanities—antidotes for the publishing crisis, the tyranny of the monograph and so forth.
I have a few bullet points I hammer home.1 University presses in a bad way. Concerns about the future of academic book culture as counter-commercial bulwark, as anything. These anxieties flow together with fears for book culture generally. I've got a stack of Gutenberg elegies up to my elbows. I'll assume you are acquainted with the genre. Here's my advice: If you want to be of use, get out ahead and anticipate in what ways the new thing, coming whether you like it or not, can be optimized.
What are computers that "really work" good for? One of the easiest correct answers is for allowing experts to keep up with the news cycle by disseminating—and fast—analysis that could only creep slowly, if at all, through peer-reviewed, paper pipes or that couldn't be a standard sort of op-ed. This is so obvious I'm not going to argue for it.
Let's make the question tougher. Most academics—humanists, let's say—don't need to publish in haste. Wittgenstein: "This is how philosophers should greet each other: 'Take your time!'" (80). Philosophers should not, then, blog. The almost sufficient retort is that "take your time" is consistent with conversation. The likelihood is slim that you can sit, like some slow-ripening vegetable, until the moment you can speak perfection. The humanities should be a conversation; a Great Conversation, according to traditional formulations of the liberal arts ideal. Wittgenstein: "If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would get done" (50). So philosophers should blog, after all.
On the other hand, the problem with dispensing this sort of advice is that it amounts to telling you to do something you cannot, effectively, try to do. Because, although saying silly things is necessary, trying to say silly things is not the point. So philosophers should blog, but should not try to blog? (I confess this last point was slow to dawn on me, not so much because of the paradox, but because I tend to mistake silliness for wisdom.)
Let me square up against my subject a bit more explicitly, quoting from the "executive summary" of the recently-released Ithaka Report, "University Publishing in a Digital Age":
By publishing we mean simply the communication and broad dissemination of knowledge, a function that has become both more complex and more important with the introduction and rapid evolution of digital and networking technologies. There is a seeming limitless range of opportunities for a faculty member to distribute his or her work, from setting up a web page or blog, to posting an article to a working paper website or institutional repository, to including it in a peer-reviewed journal or book. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of "publishing." Yet universities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. Publishing generally receives little attention from senior leadership at universities and the result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.2
Let me poke at two problems. First, it is misleading to say universities don't take the "publishing function" seriously. The alternative to publishing is perishing—serious business. What is meant, clearly, is that universities do not adequately support publishing. This is true in two ways: They do not pay for certain things that are, admittedly, rather expensive. They do not "count" certain things that may be quite inexpensive (e.g. a professor who sets up a blog and chats with the world about her area of expertise).
Tight budgets are a tough nut to crack. But what about the second point? Now we get to the second problem. If "publishing" is defined as "disseminating knowledge" it is hardly self-evident blogging is publishing. Perhaps this off-the-cuff non-peer reviewed "expertise" is half-assed opinionation (however swiftly beat the World Wide Wings.)
If a lie can go halfway round the world while the truth gets its boots on; if the internet is, as it were, a two-horse cart—liar and truth-teller together in harness—why not say the point of academic publishing is give the truth time to get its boots on (except in exceptional cases where there is some unusual need for speed)?
The problem is that this line only half makes sense. It quickly gets two lines crossed. (Think of it as a two-horse cart, with the Pegasus of ivory tower purism pulling alongside the aforementioned impulse to sit, facing backward, weeping for the paper past.) Once upon a time, the bare fact of publication and (potentially) wide distribution was decent, heuristic evidence of quality, a more or less natural function of technological limits. But this is only a contingent, now-fading accident of history. Now any fool can build a webpage.
Past the point where the fool can do this, you can only prop up the fact of publication as a plausible hallmark of quality by enforcing an irrational bias in favor of technologically outmoded publishing forms. Of course, this bias against technology will present itself as a principled stand against vanity publishing. Why is self-publishing bad? Because, as Nietzsche writes, "The vain man wants not so much to predominate as to feel himself predominant; that is why he disdains no means of self-deception and self-outwitting. What he treasures is not the opinion of others but his own opinion of their opinion" (§ 545). But you can set up a webpage for better reasons than that.
Vanity publishing is typically defined as charging for publication of someone's work, then charging the author for copies. (One must distinguish copy-editing/book-making for a fee from feeding delusions of authorial grandeur for a fee.) In a strict sense, almost all academic publishing qualifies. Our institutions, as agents, pay for bits of themselves—us—to publish; then they buy the stuff back for their libraries. It hardly follows that academic publishing is just "vain"—though any such cycle is morally hazardous. (And potentially ruinous, once the dynamics of obligatory overproduction, for credentialing purposes, attain a certain volume. And that is all I will have to say about those budget issues.)
Let's turn Nietzsche's line into a better definition: vanity publishing is arranging for publication of your work in a form that is self-deceptive or self-outwitting, in that it effectively aims not at shaping the opinion of others, but at shaping the apparent shape of the opinion of others.
The great danger to academic publishing is that, out of fear of the dangers of vanity publishing, ill-defined, it will decline into vanity publishing, well-defined. Here is Lindsay Waters, of Harvard UP:
One of the things that makes the current situation intolerable for such publishers [those seeking to promote genuinely interesting, innovative work] is that in these circumstances an imprint functions in precisely the opposite way it is supposed to work. In a healthy situation an imprint wins a book readers. In this situation—where publication is subordinate to the tenure mill—a quality imprint means that no one needs to read the book because such an imprint means a book is of a certain meritoriousness and therefore does not need to be read. The emotional capital a publisher tries to win for his or her imprint is frustrated in our climate. (38)
Suppose, counterfactually, that the point had been to disseminate knowledge. Possibly you would have slapped up a pdf on some server and won more readers that way. (Not necessarily, but the possibility must be seriously considered.)
Let me just say it: I think the future lies in various forms, yet to emerge, of post-publication peer review. Blogging is not so much that as a placeholder, a rough feasibility study of the human and technological possibility of accumulating a critical mass of "emotional capital" and a critical mass of critical capital. It is possible, now as never before, for the value of things to be sorted out post-publication. The future of academic publishing is not a blog (wiki, or other Web 2.0 app), but looks more like that than a book, in certain ways.
What does this have to do with conversation? Suppose someone opted for the long, slow, silent model of "taking your time"? Suppose this individual disdained talking as "just a form of vanity publishing." (Well, he's right. Think about it.) Conversation is the original feasibility study for post-publication peer review. It can work great. What we need to figure out is how the Ivory Tower can talk to itself better, and talk to the public better, by encouraging the sort of large-scale conversation that really was not feasible in a paper economy.
Curses, My Nemesis Has Posted Again!
My proudest achievement, as an academic blogger, has been organizing—and participating in—more than a dozen book events, for two groupblogs I belong to: The Valve and Crooked Timber. These events are half book review, half round-table seminar. Readers meet authors; authors respond—all in the form of blog posts and comments to them. The results have been consistently high quality, admirably conversational, and they've garnered a lot of attention.
When a book can get a dozen considerate reviews, that is good. When those reviews can—what with there being so many of them—assume all sorts of unusual forms, even better. I am in the process of turning some of these book events into old-fashioned books (an experience that confirms me in the wisdom of F. Schlegel: "Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss"). No one is likely to murmur a bad word against our online book events qua publishing form. Let's make the problem tougher: blogging is often a rude affair, voices raised, verbal blows exchanged, silly pseudonyms. Isn't this inconsistent with ivory tower decorum and dignity? Isn't it true that blogfights are an unscholarly embarrassment, not edifying? Ergo, since blogging leads to blogfights, there is something inherently inappropriate about hinting that the university should start regarding these sprawling, brawling developments as "important, mission-centric endeavors"?
You've guessed my riddle: as a blogger, I personally feel I am driving a cart pulled by the likes of Kierkegaard on one side, Goldschmidt on the other. One reason I gravitated to blogging with fearful prolixity is that, as an academic, I sometimes wake with the night sweats, fearing I missed my true calling as a failed comic writer. I ought to have been someone who published a satiric journal, then threw it over in self-disgust. On the other hand, I have to watch it, lest my tendency to crack wise interfere with my other aspiration, to a form of philosophic seriousness—true to an idea I feel is somewhat falsified by the forms academia would force on me. (Well, you feel the same way.)
One of the dangers in blogging is feeling obliged to say something every day, whether you've got something or not. You end up a bad imitation of yourself. On the other hand, before I started blogging, I never found my voice. Nietzsche writes that you won't recognize the long, slow logic of the fruition of your thought until you say too much—including things you regret. You have to overshoot, conversationally, in order to revolve back and thereby plot the true orbit of your thinking.
Auden was right to suspect Volume XIII of Kierkegaard's collected works, The Corsair Affair, would be a key piece of the puzzle of his philosophical personality. I suspect many academics have a Corsair in them, waiting to burst forth, and that this sort of thing is not nearly so unhealthy, once in your life, as you might think.
Did I just answer the question of what should count as "knowledge," ergo "publication," by arguing everything should? Because, after all, even being trampled to death by geese can teach you important life lessons.
I hope my argument is more like this: laments about the crisis in publishing pretty much come down to a sense that the conversation is poor. It isn't just that the Ivory Tower can't contact the public sphere; it can barely contact the Ivory Tower. Paradoxically, this is due partly to the sheer size of Humanism, Inc., as we might call it. James Madison said standing armies are the greatest threat to liberty. Standing armies of professional humanists can be a threat to the liberal arts. It's hard to have a decent conversation. A pile of books with strikingly low circulations does not constitute an adequate circulatory system. The web, with its blooming, buzzing profusions of truly high-quality conversations, is a proof-by-example that, somehow, this academic failure must be unnecessary. You don't need to call it "knowledge," but conversation is a condition of the possibility of knowledge. Even if it is also the condition of the inevitability of a lot of disreputable verbal slinging. You have to take the bad with the good. (And—my Kierkegaard point—there is often a lot of good even in the bad.) Academic publishing is beleaguered yet hesitant to take what seems to me the only possible way out. Seek models of post-publication peer review—that is, as we used to call it, conversation. Don't let confusion about what is, and isn't, "vain" publication, block the way to acknowledgment of the real value of new forms. The new forms are open in a way that, frankly, promotes silliness. But silliness is only the nemesis of intelligence, not its enemy.
In case it isn't obvious, this isn't an argument against old-fashioned peer review. The old way isn't enough, so the "mission-centric" sense of what academics ought to be up to needs to expand until we academics get the conversation we desire. The Kierkegaard stuff is my personal route to these general thoughts. Presumably you, being a person yourself, can find your own.
Notes
1. For example, in my 2006 MLA paper, "Form Follows the Function of the Little Magazine."
2. http://scholarlypublishing.org/ithakareport/archives/7. The report, as a whole, is "a collaborative effort between Laura Brown, the former president of Oxford University Press USA, and Ithaka's Strategic Services Group. It was financially sponsored by Ithaka and JSTOR. Laura is JSTOR's Trustee, and I [Kevin Guthrie] serve as JSTOR's chairman, in addition to being Ithaka's president. Both Ithaka and JSTOR are keenly interested in the current state and future of scholarly publishing, and the Strategic Services Group of Ithaka specializes in gathering, analyzing and sharing information on topics at the intersection of higher education and technology."
Works Cited
Auden, W. H. "A Knight of Doleful Countenance." New Yorker (25 May 1968): 141-58.
Hong, Howard V., and Edna H. Hong, eds. The Corsair Affair, Kierkegaard's Writings, Volume XIII. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.
Kierkegaard, Soren. Fear and Trembling. Trans. A. Hannay. London: Penguin, 1985.
Kirmmse, Bruce H., ed. Encounters with Kierkegaard. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Waters, Lindsay. Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Trans. P. Winch. Ed. G. H. von Wright. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
|
