Issue #354: Fights, Physical and Intellectual
The expressions “the fight” or “the game” are funny. Today, I think they are primarily used ironically. Rarely does an event ascend to the level of the, deserving of a definite article that would convey what event one is referring to without ambiguity. While one might use these phrases in earnest among those when addressing another person with some shared element — a team or player both follow or a location both live — the fragmentation of culture into more narrow and niche subdivisions have fueled the ironic usage of the definite article being attached to an ambiguous description that could refer to any number of things.
Nonetheless, on Friday I watched the fight. There should be little uncertainty about what event I’m talking about: Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson. Netflix has made much about the record breaking viewership it projected and obtained. Their self-congratulation seems as fair as U2 counting among their album sales the copies of Songs of Innocence (2014) that were forcefully added to every iTunes user’s library. Songs of Innocence will be remembered best for the dubious mechanism by which it was disseminated to the masses. Paul vs. Tyson, by contrast, will be remembered as the highest profile and most profitable instance of elder abuse.
My boxing knowledge is limited to Malcolm X’s numerous references to Joe Louis and what I learned from shounen manga Hajime no Ippo (1989). But I have always found Tyson’s descriptions of his life and career thought provoking. In the March 12, 2015 episode of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, Tyson gave an uncompromising description of his mentality approaching each fight:
I’m from hell. I was born in hell. So, um, every time I win a fight and I do good, it’s one step out of hell and one step closer to immortal glory.
The idea of “immortal glory” as a motivating factor for Tyson is incongruous with his more recent statement that gained headlines. In conversation with some kind of child reporter on Tiktok, Tyson said:
I don’t believe in the word legacy. I think that’s another word for ego. That’s just some word everybody grabbed on to, now it’s used every five seconds. It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’mma die and it’s gonna be over. Who cares about legacy after that? … We’re nothing when we’re dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.
One way to bring these contrasting attitudes into alignment is simple: it accounts for a divide of time. Immortal glory is what the Tyson of the 1980s and 90s sought. He may have been wise to abandon those aspirations and recognize the inevitable dissolution of legacy. He has disgraced himself repeatedly, from his rape conviction in 1992 to, in a much less significant way, the fight.
At age 58, Tyson stepping into the ring to fight Jake Paul, a steroid fueled youtube celebrity, is as far from legitimate competition as one can imagine. No one’s “immortal glory” is at stake. It was a publicity stunt, a cash grab. And the fight itself proved this assertion, comical after two legitimately thrilling matches: Mario Barrios vs. Abel Ramos and Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano.
Though Tyson stopped short of saying “I’m doing this to make a ton of money,” his willingness to trade a semblance of legacy for a hefty payout is unquestionable. His comments made this outcome as obvious as the disparity between 27 years of age and 58. The outcome of the bout was certain, Tyson could only control how he would lose. And whether that was decided in the ring or in a pre-determined agreement with Paul, we’ll never know.
When writing Hajime no Ippo, Jōji Morikawa used Tyson’s biography as the inspiration for the soft-spoken protagonist, Makunouchi Ippo. Manga is commonly more cavalier than its anime counterpart when it comes to potential copyright infringement and representation of real-life individuals. The 2000 anime adaptation of Hajime no Ippo removed every mention of Tyson1. But Tyson’s “rebirth” into a professional fighter is a tremendous motivator for Ippo in the manga:
The contrast between the heroic and upstanding Ippo and the nihilistic Tyson is striking in retrospect. Tyson has done nothing but turn himself into an obscene spectacle without any concern for the ideals of competitive sport, driven by some mixture of childhood trauma and financial incentive. To admire him as a role model would be the same sort of mistake as the idolatry of any athlete, though a greater error than, say, admiring Amanda Serrano. While there are appealing, instructive modes of thought or behavior that one might glean from anyone who is successful at anything, success does not make someone a moral exemplar. Quite the contrary, success in many of the pursuits society values require moral fallibility and compromise.
A manga like Hajime no Ippo obscures the perverse incentives and public or private wrongdoings that often coincide with — or are stepping stones to — the kind of “success” that would make us talk about a person’s legacy. Ippo, after all, never debases himself as a public spectacle to make money or sexually assaults anyone2. Sports manga is appealing to me precisely because it presents an ideal of competition without compromise that is impossible on the biggest stages full of corruption and misconduct, known and unknown. The fantasy of competition is as interesting as the reality, and the disjunction between them is even more so.
Clickbait and Comprehension
The humanities are in crisis. Few who work in the field would disagree with this assertion. Most people who don’t work in the field have a sense of this, too. What underpins this problem may be the same cultural currents that fuel the last five years of book bannings or the flawed approach to reading education in primary school. But one cannot argue with the numbers, the greatest indicator of this as-yet undefined crisis. The number of undergraduate English degrees awarded has steadily declined since the 2005-06 academic year despite the number of overall degrees awarded going up. From the 2005-06 academic year to the 2021-22 academic year, the number of English degrees awarded have dropped by almost 40%, with the overall number of college degrees awarded increasing by about 36% in the same span of time. Despite more students matriculating than ever, fewer are seeking an English degree.
If the newsletter were my full-time job (subscribe today), I would have assembled compelling research that shows concretely how English and literature programs hemorrhaging enrollment corresponds to funding. Instead, I will just infer that departments with fewer students, and an overall smaller share of students relative to the entire student body, receive less funding. I also have anecdotal evidence to draw upon. Even after completing my PhD, seeking employment within the profession is profoundly difficult. I can only think of two colleagues who have secured a tenure track appointment. One of the two quit their university job to teach high school because the latter pays far more.
But today I’m more focused on some of the poor analysis of the causes of this crisis. Take, for instance, this Substack “Note”:
Pens and Poison author Liza Libes takes an excerpt from Reinaldo Laddaga’s “How Professors Killed Literature”, a Compact Mag article published last week. Here’s the paragraph she quotes:
Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures. The validity of the theories was decided in a cursory manner, often by way of a quasi-religious faith in the authority of theoretical texts.
It seems reasonable enough to conclude that an essay with a paragraph like this, wrong and naïve though it may be, is arguing that theory is responsible for the decline of literary studies enrollment and funding. I would be interested in reading an argument like that. But Laddaga’s article makes no such argument.
How Theory Underdeveloped Literature
Before getting to Laddaga’s actual argument, which is actually worse than the one Libes invents for him, it’s worth evaluating the claim “professors are swapping out literature for theory” as supported by Laddaga’s wistful reminiscence. One way to address this claim would be to provide a detailed account of a wide range of English course syllabi. How much “theory” is taught in these classes relative to how much “literature”? As far as what Libes and Laddaga think literature is, they seem to agree: written drama, poetry, short stories, or novels. Such quantitative research is outside of the newsletter’s current scope, but I can again retreat to the relatively flimsy anecdote. The majority of undergraduate classes do not use theory (non-fiction philosophical or literary critical essays) as anything but an occasional companion to a literary text or to establish critical questions the course will contend with. I’m not sure if Libes and Laddaga might find my teaching Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1988) too theoretical at the outset of my Black American Literature survey, but I’ve found it to work pretty well.
The idea that “literature” is or has undergone a great replacement, supplanted by “theory,” is ludicrous enough. But the substance of Laddaga’s assertion shows a profound misunderstanding of other academic disciplines and the use of so-called theory in English. I was really tickled by this bit:
Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.
Here, Laddaga defers to the supposedly to a different group of doctoral students (philosophy?) who would be better equipped than literature students to “adjudicate the complex debates” in which Derrida intervened. I wonder, then, from where has the great writing about Derrida and other continental philosophers come? Surely not literary studies and comparative literature. From my perspective, there has been a pretty productive intellectual apparatus that has emerged, courtesy of literary studies, intervening into debates among the motley crew of continental philosophers. Laddaga seems to underestimate the value of simply reading the text. Close reading is a no less sophisticated way to understand the value of a theory in relation to a work of literature, with or without a robust understanding of phenomenology. Is such a mode of thought “cursory”? I think not.
The Supply and Demand of Thought
Of course, I am the last guy you should talk to if you are trying to throw all the problems in the humanities at the feet of French and German philosophers. And while that might be the game of some, that’s not actually what Laddaga argues in his provocatively titled piece. In short, his claim is that professors have decided not to teach “literature” (written drama, poetry, short stories, and novels) in favor of other topics and mediums, of which “theory” is just one minor example. Laddaga writes of three solutions undertaken to overcome student disinterest in reading canonical works:
The first was to replace or supplement books with newer media—film, TV, popular music, computer games, visual art—to which it was assumed that, since our students were native to them … they would feel more attracted. The second was to reduce the amount of space in the curriculum previously held by the old novelists and poets (from the remote 19th century, for example) in favor of texts produced in very recent times. The third was to use cultural products of other periods and places as a way to discuss moral and political problems of our time.
From Laddaga’s perspective, these solutions are worse than the problem. They speak to a failing among the professorial class: the inability to appropriately convey to students the importance, meaning, and pleasure of the texts that have been supposedly set aside in favor of these others.
On this point, at least, Laddaga and I are in agreement. Instructors have not yet cracked the code to consistently endear students to the 19th century novel or early modern drama. But I believe this has more to do with the particularities of students and their interests. There is unlikely to be any catch-all solution to be found. One must simply keep teaching.
In Laddaga’s view, this is where the covenant with students has been broken. He writes, “Literature professors developed a curious apathy when confronted with the literary text they had previously valued above all, and moved from structural, historical, or rhetorical analysis of these texts to cultural, gender, or area studies applied to all kinds of objects.” One must concede, at least, that the forms of intellectual work that could be organized under “cultural or gender studies,” among other things, have gained a greater share of the total amount of scholarly activity undertaken within literature. I agree, also, that instructors teach more film, more contemporary literature, and more television more often. I wonder, though, how meaningful are the oppositions that Laddaga is establishing?
Cultural studies does not describe a theoretical approach devoid of structural, historical, or rhetorical analysis. Indeed, it requires them. And in literary studies it is most commonly done with a subject text that is slightly more likely to be a 19th century novel or work of early modern drama than it is a film — if you’re seeking an English degree. For those working toward other degrees, the opposite is true.
Laddaga’s facile argument makes one thing clear: the meager support one can muster for his literary taxonomy come from reactionary elitism, not a serious analysis of literary studies’ virtues and failings. He has defined literature in restrictive terms that certainly do not serve the goal of students leaving a classroom better able to make sense of written art. He fails to recognize the necessity of studying contemporary literature and film with the same rigor and theoretical frameworks as canonical texts. And that necessity comes not from the demands of the students or the desires of the instructors, but the discipline itself. Enriching the body of thought is, in my view, the ultimate duty of the literature professional.
The more curious angle about Laddaga’s critique is the counterfactual fantasy of a restrictive, canon-focused discipline. He seems to indicate that such a discipline would be more successful, less “in-crisis,” than the interdisciplinary and somewhat broader one — intertwined with film studies and continental philosophy to varying degrees — that we have now. He writes of professors’ “new interests,” as if they aren’t reflective of a zeitgeist that impacts both what teachers want to teach and what students want to learn. Such a zeitgeist has created a demand for tools to make sense of the wide range of work, in various mediums and from various periods in time, that a student might encounter. But the implication that professors have diluted the study of literature with their own intellectual hobbies is, frankly, ridiculous. Most of the developments in literary studies Laddaga finds fault with have sustained and enriched it rather than thrown it into crisis. The restrictive discipline Laddaga yearns for cannot meet the appetite or intellectual need of students, regardless of how hard professors would have worked to shove it down their throats.
Book Shelf, No Hierarchy
After reading Laddaga’s essay and Libes’ misrepresentation of it, I really only learned one thing: don’t get baited by grandiose claims on the internet. It’s something I should know already. But what can I say? Smarter people than me have been just as baited.
Neither theory nor film nor contemporary literature are the culprits for literary studies’ sorry state. There are broader trends in the cultural milieu that are far more threatening. Scholars can argue whether you should teach The Canterbury Tales (1392) or There There (2018), while another might claim you need to teach both. But the exigent debates that will determine the fate of literary studies are about whether texts with “objectionable” material can even be lawfully taught. Those questions, in the realm of the judiciary, have not emerged as a result of literary studies’ widened archive. A more convincing analysis of the challenges English departments face might avail itself of an invaluable tool — “theory.”
Weekly Reading List
https://www.mandiapple.com/snowblood/index2.htm — Last week I stumbled upon a robust archive of Japanese horror and sci-fi film reviews. It looks like these were written between 2002 and 2006, meaning just finding these films probably took considerable dedication on the part of these reviewers. I don’t recognize the authors’ names, but they include Tyler Robbins, Alex Apple, Mandi Apple, and Larry D. Burns. Shout out to them. I’ll be continuing to go through these to read about films I’ve seen and films I haven’t.
Talk about intellectual hobbies… this week Žižek offers an “analysis of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, which will undoubtedly be dismissed as an eccentric exercise by the majority of the half-educated public.” He veers into discussion of Eric Frank Russell’s “Sole Solution” (1956) and Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1972).
Someone on some podcast mis-attributed something Deleuze said about the Oedipus complex to Lacan. Instead of listening to a podcast I’m not going to mention, you could watch this.
American tokusatsu at a pretty high level for a “fan” film, though they have relative star power in the form of Ryan Potter who played Beast Boy in Titans (2018) and Roger Craig Smith reprising his role of Bruce Wayne from Batman: Arkham Origins (2013).
This looks like the best video game of all time? This looks like the best video game of all time.
If you would like to, for once, get ahead of my essay writing about relatively obscure films, you can watch Underworld U.S.A. (1961). You should watch it even without the incentive of actually knowing what the hell I am talking about next week. I’m planning to publish on it then, but you never know. If I do, don’t be surprised to see this very poster edited into a Paradox Newsletter header image. Got to love sinister line graphs. You can watch it on youtube or Tubi or though other means.
https://tubitv.com/movies/100004732/underworld-u-s-a
Murakami is dropping tomorrow (11/19). I have no idea what this novel is about, but I will be reading it.
Until next time.
Tyson’s legal troubles between 1989 and 2000 could have contributed to this decision, but anime is generally not tolerant of these kind of real world allusions when adapting manga. Kengan Ashura (2019) has some great examples of this, as does Yu-Gi-Oh! (1996).
For a work of fiction that more resembles the actual circumstances of Mike Tyson’s life, one could look to Izo Hashimoto’s Shamo (1998).