Letter to International Herald Tribune

Edward G. Nilges
Lamma Island
Hong Kong
11 Jan 2011

To whom it may concern:

In David Brooks’ “The Politicized Mind” (IHT 11 Jan 2011), Brooks writes that Jared Loughner, the accused mass murderer in Tucson, was less a right-wing political “actor” and more a violent schizophrenic. It’s certainly clear that Loughner was not a political actor, any more than Lee Harvey Oswald was an agent of the right-wing culture of the John Birch Society that conducted venomous campaigns against JFK eerily similar to those of the Tea Bag against Obama.

Oswald (according to Vincent Bugliosi, who’s written a magisterial study on the JFK assassination, Reclaiming History) acted alone and narrated his life using first pro-Soviet and then pro-Castro themes. Nonetheless Oswald acted in a culture in which the right was sending, not only specific right-wing messages (the Federal government was ridden with Communists) but also specific meta-messages (if you believe something, it is your American right and duty to take up arms in defense of freedom). Meanwhile, the liberals and left wingers of that day were all committed to peaceful means for change, from Adlai Stevenson to the original “Port Huron Statement” SDS.

Obama talks dialogue: even centrist Republicans refuse to dialogue, and Republicans farther to the right, most infamously Sarah Palin, use gunsights on Web pages.

But neither Oswald nor Loughner were political actors in any grown-up sense. Oswald’s handlers in the Soviet Union soon realized he was useless, which caused him to look to Cuba’s variant of socialism for friends, of which he seems to have been in need. Loughner’s isolation and chaos are a cry for help that went ignored in an Arizona which has contempt for “losers”.

But the real problem is sociological and political, not a matter of individual psychology as Brooks seems to believe. It is that politicians are not in the habit of refusing votes.

Barry Goldwater made a serious run for the Presidency in which his “base” included extremists of the right. Today’s Republicans, including its “responsible” insiders and not just Palin, need a base at least partly composed of toxic people, just as bankers securitized toxic bonds in the mortgage crisis. And the ravings of their more toxic leaders (and followers as amplified on the Web) have an even wider effect.

They send the message to the Oswalds, the McVeighs, the Loughners that it’s quite all right to use violence to get what you want. They send the message to the crazies that “liberals” (by whom they seem to mean people with high SAT scores that do not beat their wives), the glamorous people, can and should be mown down by unknown men.

The bankers sought to make a fortune by selling mortgages to unknown people and the toxic mess exploded. One hopes that one, and only one, positive outcome of the Tucson tragedy might be the implosion of the Tea Bag movement.

Brooks’ cure is Orwellian, for in practice it would involve the (mostly automated) surveillance of people who read books often assigned in high school after dropping out and who wonder online if words mean anything. I read great whacking books and I believe that there is a link between politics and grammar. Cops and psychiatrists of the sort who work for the cops aren’t qualified to make distinctions between a Jared Loughner and a Stanley Fish.

Of course, in our legal system, disruptive or disturbing words posted online must in all cases be accompanied by disruptive or disturbing behavior. But this is also in the eye of the beholder, specifically the overworked and stressed out cop that’s had it up to here at the end of his shift.

JFK’s assassination was in fact followed by no sociological self-examination. Even in the more benign context of the times, to do so would have been to question America’s sacred egotism. The result was fifty years of these repeated shocks.

Sincerely
Edward G. Nilges

Boris Artzybasheff, “The Big Mouth and the Big Ears”

Preliminary Notes on Jared Loughner, the assassin of Congresswoman Giffords et al.

Ever since Oswald, analysis of these cases has been psychological, with sociological explanation being a no-fly zone, since that would imply that American society is less than perfect (wow).

But:

1. Loughner’s writings give evidence of what happens to an intelligent kid in a school system so dedicated to eradicating precisely the sort of teacher able to guide him that he has no mentoring. I was pretty screwy when I was 17, but was lucky to take a Philosophy 101 and Logic from a prof who wouldn’t get a job today from your typical latter-day academic thugs.

An older male showing a young fellow a skill is magic since it’s not about “emotion”. The older male instead shows the young fellow a way to get some control and power in a world where men must have their quantum of control.

2. Psychologists today are unqualified to assess whether writings are truly rambling as opposed to being complex, since psychologists educated since the 1960s are often themselves deficient at English. They are apt to use “rambling” as are managers in companies, to refer to grammar that is “too” correct.

3. Psychologists avoid the “enabling” model of addiction theory. But clearly, irresponsible right wing politicians such as Palin “enable” this violence by excluding any compromise.

4. The Right will be on Loughner’s juvenile flirtation with Left politics like a fly on shit. But in fact, we know (cf Bugliosi’s study) that Oswald “was” pro-Castro because one exclusively psychological feature of “the lone gun man” is his attempt to relieve his isolation by alternate flirtations with far left and far right politics. The Right enabled Oswald with attacks on Adlai Stevenson and the power, in Dallas, of the John Birch society, which called for no compromise as do the Tea Bags today.

5. Most people certified as psychologists especially MD level have been so corrupted as to be incompetent to treat guys like Loughner. Like Adorno’s scientist as narrated in Minima Moralia, they know their own inadequacy but are relieved to hear that it can be renarrated as scientific asceticism (of the sort that finds complex texts to be “rambling” in all and not some cases).

6. Alienation? Alienation!? Hey, if Marx is even partly right, we’re ALL alienated. Cities like Tucson, blasted by thirty years of sunbelt attacks on public goods, are ground zeroes of alienation. And if you can’t provide health insurance, you sure as hell cannot help mental cases. And if you don’t treat the victims then you get perps.

People say we don’t know details about Loughner. This is correct. But it is a lie to say that we haven’t endured assassination and mass murder as participant observers, and part of the general ban on social thought of any sort lest we see society for what it is.

Like Elwood says in the Blues Brothers, I knows all about exploitation, I been exploited all my life. I knows all about assassination, I been symbolically assassinated over and over again since Father Gilgallen got up and told us high school freshmen to zip it, “the President has been shot in Dallas”.

Oswald was pro-Castro. But he sure made sure that a grand total of one Catholic has been President of the United States.

Didn’t he.

Adorno’s Sociology of Music

Below, in a non-italic typeface, is a wikipedia edit which will probably get hosed.

I keep returning to Adorno’s experience at the Princeton Radio Research project because it is a social experience that is never talked about but continuously experienced. A person is hired as a “knowledge worker” because he or she seems to be very intelligent and well-informed, and to have the ability and desire to create a disruptive technology or analysis.

The interview is a love-feast.

But on the first day of the job, the knowledge worker is given a ration of shit about reusing with excessive respect what turns out to be a pile of crap as opposed to theorizing What Is To Be Done.

“Don’t make me think!”

Ideas disappear and become a clash of personalities and bodies as in grade school: thus it was more important that Adorno was a funny sounding little schlemeil (where Yiddish evolved rapidly in the USA to sort strangers into creeps/not creeps, kosher or tref, etc. as a genuine survival mechanism) than the fact that he had perfect pitch and could annotate his output with musical bars written accurately in musical notation.

We’re not supposed to say this, but the Holocaust was not metaphysically unique. If you lose all chance at a university appointment after being first in the class because you’re a Jew (or today a Palestinian or Palestinian sympathiser) you’re not supposed to interpret your experience in the emigre job market in the same light, as a second derivative so to speak of the Holocaust.

This I find on reflection a curious logic, akin to my experience in families, both my family of origin and my marriage. It is the emotional “logic” of “my pain is metaphysically unique because I’m a woman, or your son, or whatever, therefore it may not be compared, nor even spoken of”. “The Palestinians may not use the word ‘Holocaust’ to describe Gaza”.

Adorno was in the playbook supposed to be eternally grateful to the USA for giving him a way to escape Hitler. But the USA systematically excluded ordinary and less educated Jews during the Holocaust: Edwin Black, in his study IBM and the Holocaust, reproduces a tragic letter from a mere IBM data processing technician and Jew to Thomas Watson Sr., IBM’s founder, begging him for any sort of job out of Germany: the letter went unanswered.

[Herb Grosch, the IBMer who had a beard when beards were suspect, said of IBM “nobody who wants an international assignment will get one”. This was humorous but in my experience true, and tragically true in the case of the IBM employee in 1939.]

In view of this fact, and in view of the fact that the USA forced Britain to abandon the Palestinians rather than admit more Jews or anger Truman’s constituency, “gratitude” and celebration of the sort seen from other emigres would have been misplaced.

Rather than a Shoah, a unique event to be senselessly interpreted metaphysically as Divine intervention (for what?) in the history of the Jews, a tectonic (ecological) interpretation of the Holocaust would make it an explosion of an underlying global pressure which was found in the over-eagerness of Paul Lazarsfeld to please David Sarnoff by keeping “costs” down…such as the cost of a funny looking guy doing “nothing” but “write stuff”.

In the corporation, which Lazarsfeld was operating in spirit, any human activity can be analyzed as a waste of time from a preselected point of view, with one signal exception: making pure money. This is the reason for the savage, barbaric, Gadarene-swinish stampede that started in the Eighties into pure finance, the consequences of which have been horrendous: anything but making pure money might be a waste of time.

In 1986, I was enthusiastically hired by Princeton University because in the interview I breezily connected by humanities knowledge with technology. But on the job I was non-promotable: because I was constantly connecting my humanities knowledge with technology, and this irritated some of the more burned-out employees.

Oops.

The experience is modal. I just met a journalist. She found working on a newspaper horrifying and now freelances because everyone’s supposed to sing the praises of a free press while never filing anything but malarkey, with enough bonehead errors in grammar and spelling to make editors feel important.

We drink about it. We cry about it. We beat our spouses about it and neglect our children about it. But we cannot talk about what it is to live inside a contradiction.

I have nothing much to say at parties since usually the music is so loud that a complete sentence is unheard, and as to “picking up girls”, well, been there, done that, and like Pistol, “old do I wax”. So, I put on cutoffs which are inappropriately short in the heat of the jungle in which I live, go to parties and dance to whatever music is playing.

One is self-conscious at first but it passes. I like to move, and took some dance training. It is art, including the anguish of thinking, “why am I moving this way? Is this movement authentic? How will it be interpreted? Why is there something rather than nothing?” But then you are one with the music and the questions die down. “We can only say, there the dance is: we cannot say where” (TS Eliot).

I’m not exactly the life of the party but I behave myself otherwise, and one bloke dancing by himself reassures the other blokes, who are in American and British culture dance-averse, that it is OK if they dance with or without their sweetie pie assuming they have one. Deejays and musicians are males permitted to move but in white, Western culture, almost unique in a global sense, one’s not “supposed” to participate in the social reproduction of music by moving one’s body, under the iron (Western: British-American) law of “cool” which has become the new “character armor” in Fromm’s sense: something that keeps us from love and enables us to work.

When I first came to Lamma Island, we had a rave that lasted six or more hours and I danced throughout, waking up the next morning feeling rather creaky but refreshed.

Would Adorno approve? Who cares!

OK, here is my wikipedia submission.

One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno’s methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American (and Americanized) sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler. As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in ”The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories and Political Significance” (MIT 1995) and Stefan Müller-Doohm confirms in his recent biography of Adorno (Polity 2005), Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of [[RCA]]), to discover both the sort of music that listeners of radio liked and ways to improve their “taste”, so that RCA could profitably air more classical music…Sarnoff was, it appears, genuinely concerned with the low level of taste in this era of “Especially for You” and other forgotten hits, but needed assurance that RCA could viably air classical music.

Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with the prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld thought was Adorno’s habit of “jumping to conclusions” without being willing to do the scut work of collecting data. He was also troubled by the density of Adorno’s prose. The perception seems to have been in modern terms that Adorno wasn’t a “team player”. Stefan Müller-Doohm writes (p 246): “right from the start, however, the collaboration between the two-one a social researcher, the other an intellectual-was anything but plain sailing”.

Adorno was interested in what today’s sociologists would consider a “thick” description of radio listening that would take music theory of the most advanced sort into account, whereas Lazarsfeld wanted to simplify the musical aspect by taking into account “what people actually like”. In a collection of papers recently published, “Current of Music” (Polity 2008), it’s clear that Adorno felt that the questionnaire responses “I like”, “I do not like”, or “I give it four out of five stars” and so on neglected what the actual interviewee knows or does not know about music and how she likes music.

His fundamental insight was that “liking a piece of music” is not a simple, unanalyzable predicate. Some listeners at a classical concert might drift off into reveries having little to do with the music when it reminds them of erotic or what Adorno called “culinary” experience, and during this detour and frolic, they cannot be said to be listening to new developments in the music, such as occur unpredictably in Mahler, or following classical forms. Other listeners may be admiring the good fortune which has brought them to the private box and their refined taste, like Al Capone at the opera in the movie the Untouchables, or Reynhardt Heydrich (the architect of the Holocaust) listening to Schubert.

In “Current of Music” Adorno refused to spare the new “big band” music of the late 1930s and 1940s from this pitiless analysis of attention and preference. Before Frank Zappa (way before), Adorno pointed out that listeners to what he called jitterbug music didn’t seem to be genuinely enjoying the sounds, and were more careful to be seen as being “cool”, as rejecting the immediately preceding “sweet” sounds with rigidity, like the Showroom Dummies in Kraftwerk.

The Princeton Radio Research project occured at a critical juncture. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in his editor’s introduction to Current of Music, reveals that in the 1920s, most radio music in the USA was classical music, strangely enough. Sarnoff was dismayed, perhaps, by the growth in radio jazz, which was a form always assumed to be “popular” in American culture owing to racism despite the fact that the proto-jazz ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, considered himself an African-American classical musician.

Adorno unwittingly (given his well-known dislike of jazz, based less on racism and more on his ignorance of non-European cultures, a common failing of the German scholar at the time) threw a monkey wrench into this plan by pointing out that was considered “high class” listening to “high class” music was in fact inattention to and ignorance of form. He showed simple ways of teaching the actual structure of well-known pieces such as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that could probably have been understood by Sarnoff’s audience.

However, according to Müller-Doohm, Lazarsfeld’s plan was to exploit RCA in order to become an intellectual “tycoon”, and minimize “costs”. Despite the fact that when Adorno, who himself was a good entrepreneur of necessity, formed with Horkheimer the Institute for Social Research, Adorno proved willing to use questionnaires and empirical research (having dreams about IBM punched cards), Lazarsfeld, who’d wanted to import a first-rate European scholar, discovered that first-rate European scholarship was an open-ended cost center. The result was that Adorno was essentially fired.

Instead, lightweight musical journalists such as Deems Taylor and assimilated composers including Aaron Copland and George Gershwin spread the meme (through films including Disney’s Fantasia) that it was simple to be a high-class listener to classical music: that no training in performance or theory would be necessary: and that the best way to listen to a symphony was to wait patiently for familiar themes (such as the “heigh-ho Silver” theme from William Tell) and then evoke hopefully an idea (freedom from the bad guy capitalist) or failing that an image (the Lone Ranger) whilst staying more or less awake.

The result was the gradual collapse between 1940 and today of a mass audience for classical music, precisely the reverse of Lazarsfeld’s intention. Adorno never reconciled himself to this, returning to the subject of pop music in the 1960s to use the Beatles and “protest” music as examples of music that created mass conservatism in spite of the overt message.

Of course, Adorno’s early essay “On Jazz” makes it clear that he was literally unable to listen to popular music because the crudity of mass market sound reproduction and musical performance probably caused him that sort of physical pain which musically trained people evince today when played music on You Tube.

Adorno did make friends in the USA with popular entertainers and musicians in Hollywood, according to Müller-Doohm but there is no record of him ever connecting with popular American music in any significant way. In the category of “light” music, and with the caveat that Adorno refused to make any distinction between the light and the serious that would give light music an independent right to exist, he appears, like most German emigres, to have preferred operetta and the march form, which he credits as having a clear structure.

Since Adorno died in 1970, it is only a thought experiment to reflect whether he would have “liked” (connected with) Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen, or the Clash. Unavoidable is the fact that Adorno as a Marxist was never reconciled with the predetermination of the length of a song imposed by the needs of the market, not only to sell individual tracks on Amazon today, or assemble several tracks into a 45 rpm or long-playing format for sale in the past, but also with savagery to separate music-that-sells from music-that-doesn’t-sell.

He would instead point out that the machine takes away the product from the maker, whereupon Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, a worker’s anthem, becomes a patriotic tune, and today’s military gradually replaces the 19th century march with rock tunes.

However, Adorno might have been happy to have a drink with Frank Zappa.

In the matter of Loretta Capeheart

In my response to “Professor” Fish’s attack on his straw man Denis Rancourt, I mentioned a real-life encounter between Douglas Giles, who was fired by Roosevelt University (my undergraduate alma mater) for the “crime”…of allowing discussion of Zionism…in a class in World Religion, of all things.

For somewhat the same reason Fish refuses to speak to people, to my knowledge, about C. S. Lewis but gives them, to my knowledge, the electronic variant of the cold shoulder or pitying smirk, Fish has or displays no feel for the lifeworld of academia, especially its bottom-feeding depths, although he was perfectly willing to wet his tootsies at Chicago Circle for the big bucks.

Plunge with me into the depths then, a murky world of students majoring mostly in pre-wealth studies, faculty teaching the same crap for forty years, adjuncts fleeing the parking lot who’ve forgotten that they put fifty student essays on their car’s roof, poorly written essays all over Diversey or Touhy or the Dan Ryan, computer science, demands for relevance from people who spell it revelance, a place of wrath and tears and gnashing of teeth.

Loretta Capeheart teaches Justice Studies at Northeastern in Chicago, no not in Boston, Northeastern Illinois, a working-class school. She’s the only faculty member in that department to bother posting a resume on that department’s Web site.

The other members can’t be bothered, or, perhaps, they are part-time, or maybe they are afraid. This last because they voted Prof Capeheart in as chair by a super-majority…only to have their vote overridden by a university provost.

Click the link on “overridden” to read the news article. Yes it’s from the Socialist Worker. However, this Trotskyist journal, based in Chicago, has always shared Leon Trotsky’s belief in objective truth, a belief that Trotsky in fact died for. Trotsky has no chops with high class thugs today: they in a way prefer Stalin, he was one of them. Turd calls to turd: and if non-turd replies, turd is speechless, as Aldous Huxley wrote some time ago.

But, what gives? The department apparently followed a collegial and democratic procedure: Professor Capeheart was recognized by a 2/3 majority of her peers, and this means at least some were able to separate any disagreements over teaching style or politics from formal, academic qualifications.

Her qualifications are top-notch, objectively.

However, as in the case of both Chile in 1973, and Gaza today, elections can and will be overridden in case they displease the top people. Capeheart’s election has not only been placed on hold, the university’s administrators have made a wild and unprovable (but highly ligitable and most stickable toable in the sense of a destroyed reputation) charge that Capeheart’s a “stalker”…although statistically, women don’t “stalk”.

Stanley Fish’s crap about “save the world on your own time”, the title of his latest nonbook, is the source for this statement by NEIU, as reported:

“The university’s argument against Capeheart is that, as an employee of NEIU, she may not sue the university or its officials, contravene their positions, question their conduct or speak as a faculty member on matters of public concern–in other words, an attack on the right of workers to freedom of speech. ‘It’s very Middle Ages,’ said Capeheart, ‘like the lord vs. the serf.'”

No-one, in other words, expects the Spanish Inquisition. But it’s not only Middle Ages, it’s Fish’s highly inappropriate application of 19th century employment law to the college professor, since to the modernizer, exceptions to a general re-enserfment are unenlightened: it’s not in other words the middle ages of ancient liberties: it’s the “modernization” of Phillip II, Roi d’Espagne in the 16th century, who as a go-ahead modernizer wanted to purify Spain…and return it to the good old days, which were, for Phillip, the Dark Ages before those pesky Moors, when men were men, the sheep were nervous, and Christianised Visigoths kept a lid on things, more or less.

It’s a complicated dialectic. But: Fish insists that this is what NEIU can do to a person who paid dues to be recognized as a scholar. They can destroy her career.

Fish justifies this with a strange reified idea that universities should teach pure Theory: that, in his field of English studies, it’s “really” all about a self-referential world of theme, motif, iamb, and strophe, and that these things have “naught to do with Mistress Shore”:

BRAKENBURY
With this, my lord, myself have nought to do.

GLOUCESTER
Naught to do with mistress Shore! I tell thee, fellow,
He that doth naught with her, excepting one,
Were best he do it secretly, alone.

(Shakespeare, Richard III).

Since politics is conducted in language, Fish is I think hard put to maintain that English studies might not be used for good or ill in the political realm. He’s on in fact a razor’s edge: for if we’re not going to save the world on his dime with our little progressive program, then we must it seem go back to the mission of the American university circa 1890, which was to produce muscular Christian men who could quote the Chanson de Roland while whacking the paynim at a latter-day Roncesvalles such as San Juan Hill or Belleau Wood.

My own “academic discipline” was computer science. However, I found that coding software for digital computers had political meaning. Basically, a lot of it has served to make the rich richer and the poor, poorer; for example, IBM programmers at IBM’s Waterbury (CT) center for internal data processing had to modify IBM’s proprietary software to ensure that they themselves got screwed at retirement, as part of Lou Gerstner’s “reforms”.

Dr Capeheart’s discipline is sociology, which is kinda hard to do from other than a progressive, activist, non-theoretical standpoint. Doing sociology requires an ideological committment to an ontology which includes “society”.

But the mad woman Margaret Thatcher, who wasn’t stupid, said it best. From where she sat (to the right of most sensible people), “there is no such thing as society”:

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Baroness Thatcher deserves some respect for putting things so well and so honestly: but her ontology clearly says that people are so different and so separate that to do sociology on them is immoral.

This is why “progressive politics” is to sociology as “evolution” is to biology: you cannot do sociology without being at least a little progressive and without trying to save the world on your employer’s dime. Certain anthropologists indeed “studied” tribes that were rife with disease and slaughter without doing anything about them, and the anthro/sociologist Stanley Milgram devised an experiment, that cannot be today repeated without violating professional ethics which seemed to reinforce conservative notions of innate authoritarianism; but Dr. Capeheart’s field work was necessarily and with decency about helping the least well off.

If you help Mexicana women unionize, you’re a sociologist in the College of Arts and Sciences. If you help a corporation destroy their union, you’re a business professor in the William E. McSwine Memorial Skewl of Biziness. You can’t make elephants speak French, and you might as well close sociology down. Its pure theory is called “statistics”, and the math boys do a fine job teaching “statistics”. Its practice is either figuring out how we can help the least well off, or figuring out how to control people short of busting heads. But: figuring out how to control people short of busting heads is taught in the Management and the Marketing departments of the William E. McPork Skewl of Bidness, and busting heads is taught at the community college as police science.

But surely, you say, coppers have to take sociology, and surely the rozzers get input from the nice ladies in the sociology department!

Yes they do: even Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus were sociologists. But insofar as they were they were proto-progressives for their times, because short of Hitler’s twisted sociology, sociology has a moral committment to the preservation and flourishing of society and its members, and this is a progressive programme all the way down.

Now, it is true that my fat pal Theodore Adorno (yes, here he comes again, like Hamlet’s dad) separated his concerns as a musicologist, philosopher and sociologist from the demands of New Left students, and tried to teach a class in Baroque aesthetics which the students, Denis Rancourt’s forebears, disrupted famously: wouldn’t I sympathize with Fish’s philosophy because of Adorno’s experience, which may have caused his death?

Well, no. According to Stefan Muller-Doohm’s magisterial biography of Adorno, the disruptive students were madcaps, Stalinists and more like Denis Rancourt, Fish’s carefully selected monstrum horrendum, than a woman who, instead of disrupting her colleague’s work, instead of refusing to do anything her university asked, selectively and apparently with decency and dignity spoke truth to power.

There’s a big difference between criticising an administration on one issue, as did Professor Capeheart as regards the hiring of black and Latina faculty, and Rancourt’s infantile Bartlebyism, in which Rancourt prefers not to do anything asked of him.

Fish is part of an enormous Kulturkampf. Its goal is to create a divide between “real” universities such as Princeton, in which faculty will continue to enjoy a collegial environment, and ersatz-hochschules such as Northeastern Illinois and Roosevelt University. Graduates of the latter will be clearly marked as wogs, as westernized oriental gentlemen. They won’t be able to spell (I note at the Justice Studies web site at Northeastern, that they could not be bothered to use a Web master who could spel gude: cf. “Univerity”). They won’t know much about biology, they will think that Zionism is some sort of Christian sect, and they will not be able to speak truth to power, since they learned to save the world on their own time, and then realized that after working two jobs to pay to go to evening school, they have no time.

But the “credit crisis”, with its blind data processing (its pointers inside of pointers to pointers to loans) shows us what happens when you create a post-Enlightened class of Trogdolytes trained to see what you want them to see, to deny the existence of society, and to transform “justice studies” to a community college department of police science. Men seek to use other men as a blind force, men want Myrmidions to teach survey classes with no back talk. But let’s go out with a bang. Let’s go out with Lev Davidovitch Trotsky:

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself.

Northeastern University, in seeking to destroy Loretta Capeheart, seeks to transform Justice Studies to police science, and to deny us any power over society in the form of sociology as activism. Ultimately, we are to confront society as Adorno said the unemployed confront it: a second nature red in tooth in claw, ready in fact to destroy us in a heartbeat.