Case Review Chapter, Update 1

The ethnic cleansing class at Antioch has but me in high gear. We start the first of the historical case studies, the Armenian genocide, this week. I still have to type up the blurbs for the Adalian piece and impose an outline on them. I forgot to handle that this week and must do this very soon.

I’ve started in on the Yugoslavia pieces. I’ve marked up the two Mann pieces and I’ve finished off the chapter from Stoessinger all the way through outline stage. We cover those readings in roughly twelve days. I gotta bust my ass. I may strategically not cover Bell-Fialkoff if I run short.

I need to devise a review table for the kids. The rows should be specific time periods in each case. The columns should be how the different theories do at dealing with each period. I’m probably just going to have them deal with “types of variable” rather than specific theorists, so maybe I should drop the theorist names altogether. The four variable types are: politician agency, psychological interpretive bias, larger socio-structural conditions and culturo-structural conditions. I think that’s how I ought to review the cases in the chapters as well, except I have integrate different theorists back in.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 3

I haven’t been keeping up on graphing, even though I’ve been working. First, I need a new kind of graph for rewriting theory. I’m still working on the proposal and yesterday I got a lot of progress. I’m hoping to have the document done sometime next week.

At the start of class, I assigned two chapters of Grossman, so those were blocked and outlined a while back.

I’ve blocked all the Armenian case reading that I’ve assigned for the case study. I may look at more material when it comes to the four genocide comparison in the dissertation, but I won’t touch anymore for a while. I have to type in the blurbs for Adalian and type in the outline and they grunt work will be done. I think I need to make a table with all the narrative’s details and compare each of the texts for coverage as my next step.

I’ll work on the proposal until it exhausts me. Then I’ll work on Adalian. Actual writing is by far the greatest burden. I need high quality focus for that, my most precious resource.

I also need to get more photocopying done. I need to find a way of coordinating the big picture using this blog. The more I can keep looking at the these tables, the better I coordinate the larger tasks of writing. I have to avoid falling off the wagon.

Theory Chapter Reading Update 2

Moving right along...

Theory Chapter Reading

I’m going to need some of the reading that I’m doing for the theory chapter blocked before teaching the Antioch class. Most of the book is already marked up, as you can see. I thought I would get a category going for that.

If I make tables for everything, maybe I can come up with a coordinating system that gives me the big picture. I feel that’s what I lack the most in life.

Text Acquisition Update 1

New idea. I need to make a table for everything that goes into the research process. I’m constantly becoming decontextualized and it causes me to lose time. Right now, I want to lower the number of library books I have taken out. Most of the pieces below are for the theory chapter and don’t have to be read immediately. That said, having the books out is a serious recall-war liability, an invitation to expensive fines.

Moreover, the more information I represent about the writing process visually, the less I have to hold it in my brain, the less likely I’ll forget and the less likely I am to fall off the damned horse every time I get distracted.

We’ll see if it works.

Proposal Update 8

Okay. I’ve gotten comments and I’m on to the second draft. I realized that I’d fallen off of the wagon in documenting progress. That’s always bad because I lose track of time between completed phases of what I’m doing. I lose time and focus. It’s already halfway through June. It is pivotal that I have the next draft by next week. I need to start making appointments with faculty to get reviews of the document. I need the second draft to be done prior to making those moves. I’m not confident enough to make the appointments and write against that deadline. But it is pivotal to have the document done this week. The Antioch course is from scratch this term. Of course, the Antioch class is two chapters from my dissertation, so it’s in no way in conflict with what Susan Whiting once called (and very optimistically, I might add) my research agenda. But I have to have a proposal document and must rewrite it to other specifications for other grantors. I need the next working document.

The current work chart is below.

The rest of this table is a little harder than the finished portions. I realized that I didn’t have enough about the concept of “framing” itself. I was wondering if I needed to add another section, but I’ve realized that I need to add a little to each of the section I haven’t finished. This complicates matters. I need to integrate key information into each part. 33I just finished reading a 2000 review article from the Annual Review of Sociology by Robert Benford et alia. It had useful goodies, but I have to do triage reading on the material to get the proposal done and then really read it in depth for my theory chapter. Moreover, the review article is old (so depressing to think that the year 2000 was a decade ago!). I don’t know what’s been happening with the idea of framing lately.

This table is the rewrite for the theory section. I need to do more to retrench the cases, too. That table can follow this one. Right now, let’s get the last theoretical considerations out of the way.

Wish me luck. I’ve got miles to go before I sleep.

Proposal Update 7

Well, my efforts today didn’t totally suck. The table is somewhat misleading. Nelly prudently suggested to me that I seemed to be getting repeated coverage in separating the lit review from causal model. Moreover, she pointed out that the SSRC would only give me one big “Relevance of the Research to Disciplinary Concerns and Other Fields” section to cover it in. So I rewrote the whole thing. I now have five, 1.5-spaced pages in Times New Roman 11-point font. The citations need work, but I’m saying that they’re edited anyway. Here’s the table for the rest of the proposal:

Proposal Update 6

This is a rough outline of the causal sequence. Writing it up took much of the morning and was exhausting. I hate how pathetic I am at sequencing.

* * *

While the present literature does not offer us definitive answers about the causes of ethnic cleansing, it provides myriad clues from which to synthesize a more coherent answer. The proposed model draws on several literatures from political science, sociology, psychology and history.

All Too Human: The Resistance to Killing as an Obstacle

1. There exists a reflex to abstain from killing within our own species

2. The reflex is tied to self-identity

3. The result of this violation of self-identity is trauma

Finding Your Inner Fascist: The Frame of Enemy Recognition

1. Our reflex of infrahumanization can allow for the objectification needed to kill

2. To facilitate planned killing, requires the imposition of a frame that allows for consistent objectification.

3. Definition derived from Schmitt

4. The enemy frame allows consistent objectification of the other, allowing for sustained violence.

If You Want to Make an Omelet—Politicians as Agents

1. Agents are important because ethnic cleansing is disciplined action undertaken by someone with the power to impose the discipline. This is the level of conscious choice.

2. Structural approaches tend to de-emphasize the importance of agency, but reveal clues about the difficulties agents face.

3. Current agent-based literature is wrongly focused on question of why—pointless question

Natural Born Killers? Hardly!—Training the Cleansers

1. Boot camp inculcates the identity of a killer and marries it to pro-social causes

2. Boot camp simulates actual killing rather than simple target practice

Manufacturing Consent: A Tipping Game

1. The Law of Few: The Importance of Opinion Leaders

2. Stickiness Factor: The experience of threat

3. Context: The Focus of Most Existing Structural Theory

Proposal Update 5

Okay. The section on manufacturing consent is done. I’m realizing that a key motivational technique is not to lose heart when solution to the organizational challenge of a given paragraph isn’t immediately forthcoming. It’s okay to have a few days where you have no visible forward progress. But I should journal and think about the problem actively for a little while each day and not feel like a failure because the paragraph didn’t emerge on demand. Organized complex paragraphs requiring large amounts of synthesis are simply not available on demand anymore. While this is an annoying and offensive problem, it is important to bear in mind that it is not an insuperable problem.

Time to stick the new section into the paragraph rewrite worksheet. Once that’s cleaned up, we’re in the first draft’s endgame. I have to organize the cases and the logistics. Wheeee!

UPDATE: I've just gotten through the fifth paragraph of the sequence using the paragraph rewrite worksheet. I'm already exhausted. I get it now. MS gives me lesions. The brain needs to shunt ideas the long way around. Re-routing is exhausting. I get tired, so I stop. Then I forget to go back. I get nowhere, then I get depressed. The trick is to learn (1) to do this in small bits and pieces (2) while remembering to keep going back and working on it consistently, (3) despite the fact that there's very little that's rewarding about each piece and (4) not to get depressed that what I used to do quickly in my head, I now have to do piecemeal over weeks. Yeah it sucks, but this is doable! I can't forget that.

Proposal Update 4

I’ve come to the most difficult section of the causal sequence. I clearly can’t exceed two paragraphs, given that we still haven’t talked about cases and methods yet. I'm having problems with synthesis. Perhaps I need a new arrow diagram.

Proposal Update 3

I think I may lay off Bourke and dig into Grossman. She’s a brutally disorganized writer. Blocking and outlining the first chapter was painful. If her first combined with Grossman provide enough fodder for the proposal, I’ll leave the rest for later.

Proposal Update 2

The first draft of the lit review is done. The intro to the essay comes in at about a page and a quarter and the lit review is coming in at just under three pages. The proposed model begins near the top of page 5. I’m using the length requirement for the SSRC as a guideline. Currently, the font is Times New Roman 11-point, but the spacing is still double-spaced instead of space-and-a-half. I feel that I’m on track for length. Now for the model.

I have two sections done and ready for editing. I got stuck a while back while free-writing when I realized that I needed more data. I spent all of January and a good part of February reading. I wanted to just “skim and get what I need quickly” for these sections—anything to avoid plodding and losing “writing momentum.” I’m coming to realize that for someone with lesions in his frontal lobes, there is no such thing! There is only “charting momentum” of the type you see on this blog. Writing cannot be experienced as a flow. I need to work section by section, toward a single draft. I can't just bash out a rough draft at a single shot. Baseball. Writing is baseball—162 games. It’s all about consistency. Instrumentally rational production. No charisma.

Here’s the reading that needs to be finished for the model:

Part of the trick is to stop being perfectionistic about efficiency. I need to focus on comparatively efficient but still withing the realm of the possible. It was always my goal to see it in my head and then make it happen. That led to fast, good drafts when I had working frontal lobes. Now I must embrace what under the old system was gross inefficiency. When reading, I must take in a gross oversample of information, rather than triage reading and distilling what I need from the text “on demand.” Next, I must write a rough paragraph that is likely to also be disorganized and contain to much information. This is simple “journaling.” Then I distill and reorganize by hand, using the paragraph rewrite exercise. No skipping steps and trying to do it in my head. It’s plodding, pure and simple. I do not fly. I plod. I’m the fucking turtle. I need to embrace it.

Proposal Update 1

Okay. I’ve been writing. I’m in the middle of the proposal’s rough draft. Here’s the progress chart for the intro and lit review:

And here’s the progress chart for the model:

I need to make a progress chart for the portion on testing the theory. I also need to get back to the lit review. There are several more pieces I need to read for this proposal.

I’m beginning to understand why I’ve choked on this for so long. I used to do incredible amounts of organization and distillation in my head. Making all these tables makes be very aware of just how daunting writing is for me now. I could never organize because my unconscious mind knew that if I saw how fucking hard everything was for me now, I’d fall apart. The planning needed to stay on focus is simply enormous.

The Violent Politics of the Lit Review

It's slowly dawning on me that the lit review of a grant proposal is counter-intuitive to a graduate student (or to this one, anyway) because it must maim and wound each item to make it fit into its appropriate bullet point. This violates every single principle we've learned about honest critical reading. A lit review is an act of intellectual violence—it is a putsch, a coup. Like all violence, its success is measured not by its erudition, but by whether or not you get away with it. It is utterly political.

Thank you, Nelly, for having me read Latour.

Lit Review Update 22

I need to develop a better “triage” reading system. I need to know how much of which book to read when. I’m focused on a new proposal. I think I have enough of Chirot & McCauley and of Bell-Fialkoff. I’ll pick up more prior to writing the review article. I need to get Rae and Bulutgil. Then I need to read Schmitt and start the proposal.

I need to erase the pencil marks the last reader made in Rae so I can photocopy her Turkish genocide of the Armenians chapter. My photocopying for the coming weeks should include creating a file on each genocide.

Lit Review Update 21

I had to add Chapter 3 of the Chirot & McCauley to the list. I strongly suspect a large chunk of their causal argument is there. Well, I knew the book would require considerable digestion. At least it's stylisitcally easy. I seem to manage a good ten pages an hour.

NOTE: Actually, leafing through Chapter 3, it doesn't look useful at all. That's quite a relief. Let's skip to Chapter 4.

NOTE: I may punt the rest of Chirot. The book is just an analysis of existing literature with very little that's original added. the "Solutions" chapter comes across as fairly insipid. I may go back, but I feel this book is slotted enough for this part of the project.

Lit Review Update 20

Wednesday and Thursday were occupied by class preparation. I was exhausted on Friday and had an afternoon nap. I hope to type up the blurbs and impose the outline this evening. We’ll see how it goes. I've mislabeled Chapter 4 in the chart above as Chapter 3. Worse, the way they write this, it suggests I need to add Chapter 3, as it may actually be critical to causality. I need to control my frustration with the slow pace of this project. There are days that I tend to despair, especially when I have to spend so much time on being a teaching assistant. I almost never get repeat jobs and that mean class preparation takes up a great deal of time.

Lit Review Update 19

I decided that I didn’t want to type up the blurbs from The Concept of the Political yet. Leafing through, I decided I wanted to give it another reading. It’s certainly short enough. So I stuck with the lit to be reviewed.

It’s a very short intro, but so far the Chirot and McCauley is, well, breezy. This is a wonderful trait in a novel, but I find it rarely works out in technical writing. It’s not that I object to good writing in the social sciences—perish the thought! It’s just that a good theory tends to tax the style of even the best writers. At any rate, I’m only ten pages in. We’ll see how the rest unfolds.

Lit Review Update 18

I’m getting a better estimate of my feelings about the future tasks associated with this literature review. What I’ve decided:

I Will Finish Bell-Fialkoff

The more I read the book, the more I understand why I hate it. Basically, a Myers-Briggs sort of framework, Bell-Fialkoff has very little intuitive capacity. He’s all sensing, all the way. Now, don’t get me wrong. Someone with a high proclivity for sensing can be an excellent researcher. But such a researcher must at least be able to draw on their intuition enough to determine the relative importance of each fact so as to guide his or her reporting. Bell-Fialkoff, poor man, doesn’t even have this to help him. As a result, the whole book reads like the research paper written by that undergrad with no experience who is simply guided by what he finds interesting. Fact follows fact, and most are non sequitur to his alleged topic. He creates mammoth typologies that may or may not have some later use. He is interested in using his imagination to a limited extent—he will, for example, share his feelings about the different types of identity he discusses and how they interact. That said, he never attempts to prove any of these impressions.

His theory chapter is the best example of this approach. It is called “Cleansing as a Metonym of Collective Identity.” Well, OED gives this definition for the term metonym:

a. Rhetoric. (A figure of speech characterized by) the action of substituting for a word or phrase denoting an object, action, institution, etc., a word or phrase denoting a property or something associated with it; an instance of this.

b. In extended use: a thing used or regarded as a substitute for or symbol of something else. Also (esp. in Linguistics and Literary Theory): the process of semantic association involved in producing and understanding a metonymy.

Because the association involved in metonymy is typically by contiguity rather than similarity, metonymy is often contrasted with metaphor.

Wikepedia’s definition is a little clearer, although I’m not sure that it’s better, which is worrisome:

Metonymy is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept. For instance, "London," as the capital of the United Kingdom, could be used as a metonym for its government.

So cleansing is supposed to be a shorthand method of referring to collective identity. But that, of course, makes no sense. So perhaps, annoying git that he is, Bell-Fialkoff is using the term “metonym” as a sort of metaphor. Perhaps his meaning is something along the lines of “We like to make references to groups as if they were monolithic blocks. We use the term ‘Arab’ for example, with reference to a place like Syria, Jordan or Egypt. But the truth is that all these societies contain far more than just Arabs. But we like the shorthand, so collective identity is, in a sense, a metonym for whole societies. Now, ethnic cleansing is supposed to end that state of the collective identity being a metonym. That is, if one weeds out all the individuals who do not meet the identity, then the collective identity is an objective reality and not a metonym anymore. That would at least be comprehensible. Of course, that doesn’t explain why ethnic cleansing is a metonym for collective identity. If you can think of a more literal explanation please do let me know. As is, this is the best I can do.

Titles aside, however, there is barely a reference to ethnic cleansing in the whole chapter, which appears to be nothing other than a typological survey of the different possible forms of identity ranging from ethnicity and religion to gender and sexuality. Occasionally he does discuss how politicized a form of identity can become. For example, he does not believe that feminism will become a basis for an independent state, where ethnicity can. But cleansing doesn’t seem to be in the chapter. This frustrates me greatly, because I feel that reading it is a waste of my time.

That said, he keeps getting cited. So I am going to assume that I need to know the book. Frustration has to be part of the process. So I need to avoid sitting down and doing the book at one time. That will drive me batty. If I spread it out and keep coming back to it as I do other tasks, I will be better able to digest the damn thing.

I’ll then ask Steve how to politely review the book. Yeah, I really hate the book, but I have no reason to hate this man. Sadly, the two are associated willy nilly. The problem is that I’ve found very little that is positive so far, and typically, one has to find something to praise in order to be civil in a book review. I can perhaps gesticulate at a few of the interesting thoughts he rambles about but never develops.

I’m Going to Draft a New Proposal after I’ve Read All the Theory Sections

I had initially thought I would do a complete lit review of both theories and cases and turn it into a 10,000 word review article and then distill that down as a smaller part of a theory chapter. Then I realized that I need a grant. So after I read the theory sections of all the books, I’m going to put a hold on the cleansing-by-cleansing overview of the cases. Instead, I’ll start the grant proposal.

I now despise grant writing because, of all documents, a grant proposal requires the most distillation of the most possible texts and must, ironically, be complete before the product that achieves that distillation. As “distilling in my head” is my greatest challenge as writer now, the genre of the grant proposal is my Achilles’ heel. I despise it above all others.

There is hazard here. I need a new causal model. That model requires a good distillation before I can spell it out. I had hoped to write a theory chapter before I wrote the grant proposal. I have to do the proposal first. This is genuinely frightening to me, as I have failed at this task so many times. But I need money. There’s no way around it.

My current model requires me to know at least two books by Carl Schmitt’s work inside and out. I read and marked up the text of The Concept of the Political several years ago. I still need to convert it into an outline. I need to read and mark-up Political Theology, which is at least already photocopied.

Reading Plan

So my planned reading for the term looks something like this:

Bell-Fialkoff

With all the whining about Bell-Fialkoff both here and on Facebook, you’d think I’d have gotten further. In a sense, I have. I’ve marked up Chapter 3 through p. 85, which means I’ve marked up about 29 pages out of 59. This puts me at roughly the halfway point for the chapter. But even worse than reading abstruse German theory like Hegel is reading someone who has no real idea behind his or her writing. If you suffer with Hegel, you will get something at the end of the day for having mastered the text. All I’ll get from mastering Bell-Fialkoff is the ability to say that I gave him a completely fair shake. That’s really awful motivation. I’d honestly prefer punting the book to being fair to him. That said, I will force myself to read it.

Kaufman

What irritates me about Kaufman is that I distilled him before, but probably didn’t keep the mark-up. So I know how the theory is supposed to “work” (whether it can be said to work is another matter entirely), but I don‘t have the notes for easy citation. Moreover, I distilled him down to what I judged to be the most generous possible reading—a reading that made his theory look as if it were a theory. At the time, I judged that to be rhetorically expedient. It probably still will be, but I don’t have the notes to be able to reconstruct the range of possible readings. Might as well get the homework nailed so I never have to hunt through the text again.

Rae

I discovered Rae at the library the other day. She calls ethnic cleansing “pathological homogenization,” which is why she didn’t show up on my first pass through the databases. I can’t recall how I stumbled across the book. It may have been while looking for reviews for Bell-Fialkoff to see if everyone else hates the book as much as I do. I haven’t read her argument yet, but the book looks interesting. Moreover, she provides case studies, so she gives me more historical fodder for the review of cleansings that will follow the writing of the proposal.

Bulutgil

Sadly, since she doesn’t employ case studies, I may have to read her whole dissertation at a shot, which will make this part of the theory review a bit of work. She’s a fairly clear writer, however, so at least it won’t be a great deal of suffering. I figure at this point, I’ll start with her introduction, her theory chapter and her conclusion and then make a judgment about whether I know enough to give her a place in the quick lit review that is needed for the proposal, the way I would with the case theory books, or whether I must read the whole thing at a single sitting. My guess is it’s going to look and feel a great deal like the famous Fearon and Laitin piece on civil war. It will have the same strengths and the same weaknesses.

Chirot and McCauley

This is the most difficult of the books to survey quickly. It looks as if Chirot and McCauley have engaged the literature thematically, but are not necessarily presenting any new evidence. This means that there is no “evidence” section to survey separately. If I’m to read it, I have to do the whole thing. This makes me wonder if I shouldn’t just start marking this one up now. As this piece seems to be much more of a large-scale critical survey of the literature, reading it in detail might do a great deal to contextualize me into this literature quickly. Still, it’s a whole book at a shot. Looking at it again, I see that there is a chapter that is about pre-modern mass murder. I could always slot that with the chapters from Mann, Bell-Fialkoff and Rae that are pre-modern. So maybe I don’t have to have the whole book at once. Just most of it.

Schmitt

For a German, Carl Schmitt is a very light read. He has a rare gift for being both direct and succinct. The marking up is already done for The Concept of The Political. That first box should already be gold, but I'm too lazy to fix it now. At any rate, The Concept of the Political is remarkably short and should only require a few days to convert into an outline. I’ve never read Political Theology. But there are several external clues in the critical literature that suggest that I’d find it useful.

Reading Sequence from Here

I might start with typing up the outline for The Concept of the Political, just to give myself a feeling of momentum again. Then I could do ten more pages of Bell-Fialkoff. Then do a chapter of Chirot, followed by ten more pages of Bell-Fialkoff, and work my way alternating chapters of Chirot with wretched snippers of Bell-Fialkoff. Hopefully I can then go and clean up through the smaller authors at the end and finally digest Political Theology. We’ll see how it goes.

Out of the Pocket

After having really taken apart the theory sections of Staub and Mann, I have an emotional barrier to overcome. My initial plan was to plod along methodically and review four more theory sections: (1) Bell-Fialkoff, (2) Kaufman, (3) Chirot and Macauley and (4) Bulutgil. My pace has been slower than I wanted. Yesterday, Ellis suggested that I should move beyond preparing and start writing. Staub and Mann are the two beefiest texts. I’ve done a précis of Kaufman before. This provides three representative samples of three different types of theoretical approach. Moreover, I feel as if my own model is crystallizing in my head after having gone through Staub and Mann, by far the most substantive books in the set.

This makes me wonder if it might not be prudent to consider diverting my attention to writing a new grant proposal. In favor of changing are the following:

1. I have three rival approaches and I know their theories well. A model is unfolding in my mind. I have the bare requisites.
   
   
2. My problem has been that I have started too late. January is an ideal time to start for the fall.
   
   
3. I seem to be doing better at step by step.
   
   
4. It’s hard to write and teach when you suffer from MS-induced chronic fatigue. With a grant, I could work full time in 2012-2012.
   
   
5. I want to show my committee a tangible item this term.

Drawbacks are:

1. I’ve been trying to avoid changing patterns when the going gets hard. Remember the whole “‘Institutionalization’ of the Lebanese Republic” paper. As I would encounter failure, I’d change courses, then get discouraged, then punt the project. I’m scared that I’m doing the same thing here.
   
   
2. Of all the actual cases, I’ve only read the Armenian case material. I really want to know a lot more history. On the other hand, at the rate I’m going, I will still blocking and outlining next June.

In the end, this is about trust. I’ve had to try to adapt and have subsequently failed so many times that I want to dig in and just follow the detailed plan as a perfectionist to the bitter end. I want to focus all my efforts on building my offensive line because I want to be safe. I don’t feel like someone who could be an Aaron Rodgers or a Steve Young anymore. Since MS, when that line goes down, I’ve gotten sacked. I don’t trust myself to dance. I like that pocket. I want to know the enemy completely before going in. I don’t trust myself. I used to believe that I could handle anything that got thrown at me. I don’t anymore.

But being a good quarterback requires a certain amount of scrambling. I think the reason I’ve decided to write the proposal is because I need to prove that I can adapt. There are two reasons why my last proposal failed. The first was being too weakly organized. But I’ve been working my ass off in learning how not to choke and to work slowly but steadily. The second is that I was attempting to determine the impact of an independent variable on a dependent variable (consociationalism), instead of trying to theorize the cause of the dependent variable (ethnic cleansing). No, I didn’t write the proposal to look that way, but clearly I wanted to show what consociationalism really did to a state in civil war. As long as I was obsessed with the independent variable, the project had no end of troubles. When I let go and just did a theory of ethnic cleansing, suddenly the project began to shape properly.

I guess what I am trying to tell myself is this time it will be different. Trust yourself. No, I’m not Aaron Rodgers anymore. I can’t be fast and supple. But that old man in Minnesota is still alive and at his age. I want into this game and that means I need a fucking grant. I’m going to do this. Reviewing the rest of the literature will wait.