EWR Revisited

Newark International Airport. Plane has been delayed, again—passengers present and accounted for, crew MIA. Curious situation. Flight to Columbus just left half an hour ago from the adjacent gate—could’ve stolen away and visited Pham, I suppose, true vagabond style, but then again, I don’t break nearly as many laws and conventions as I probably should.

Called Jessica while I was waiting; probably the last time I’ll talk to her (Internet notwithstanding) for the next couple of seasons or so. She’s going to Paris; I’ve never been to Paris, but I’ve wished to be there. She said she was going, along with 29 other students from various locations around the US, to study French critical theory in the vein of Foucalt. 1970s thought. Still, more modern than anything they offer at Johns Hopkins; the Frankfurt School course I took concerned German critical theorists from the WWII and immediately post-WWII period, and that was about as contemporary as our philosophy courses got last semester.

I don’t see how it’s excusable to lack courses that teach cutting-edge, concurrently relevant philosophical theory; I don’t even know what thinkers who are still alive are brewing up for our collective future right now, and that worries me. I have heard plenty about Richard Dawkins and the evangelical atheists, but they seem to be biased towards the (anti)theological, and I’m personally more interested in more sociologically relevant concepts; to me, the most disturbing phenomenon is that the age of revolutionary philosophy seems to be decades behind us, dead and buried with the last of the Marxists. I suppose our university is just too conservative. Probably should’ve gone to Brown or something. One reserves the right to what-if.

Here’s to hoping Jessica comes back and starts a Baltimore School of critical thought. I’d join. Probably under a pseudonym, so people don’t realize I’m actually a biophysicist phony trying to hack it as a philosophical writer. I regret not being able to speak German. I’d be a lot more persuasive if I could. And not only in philosophical discussions either.

I’ve been thinking about the necessity of critics. There’s always going to be the argument that intelligent people should be doing things instead of complaining. On the other hand, too much doing and not enough complaining gets people into trouble. Suppose an actor, in his dressing room, had all the makeup he needed, but no mirror; what kind of idiot would he look like when he finally came to the stage? Sure, it’s the soldier, as they say, who dies to allow the protestor to burn his flags; but without the protestors, without the critics, who’ll stop the administration when it tries to send the soldiers into increasingly absurd and unreasonable situations? Adorno and Horkheimer were right, I think, in saying that a non-self-reflective society ends lives.

One of the few things I disliked about Dr. Gold’s, thanks for the A-, critical theory class was, as I related to Jessica, that we (and he) always seemed to stick too dogmatically to the assigned texts; possible tangents and extrapolations were always killed before they could grow by inquiries of, “do you have a passage that relates to that?” The closest we ever got was during the Dialectic of Enlightenment discussions when we jumped the good professor using the present-day energy crisis as an example of a moment when the advancement of technology conflicted with the maintenance of the status quo, and was therefore held in stasis as a regressive move.

All the same, that class warped my life in certain ways, as this journal repeatedly testifies; for example, I was watching Accepted on the flight from Taipei (I watch shitty movies on airplanes so I don’t have to at any other time), and instead of thinking, “it would be nice if things were like this,” or even, “there’s a reason things aren’t like this,” I started thinking, “things should be like this, so why the hell aren’t they?”

Note to self: avoid romantic comedies, lest I spontaneously erupt into rants about the reconciliation of collectively-determined loneliness in public and inappropriate occasions.