facts

[NB: I offer no explanation for my lengthy absence from this space, or for my return.]

I tried, and mostly failed, to exercise my honors class this spring about the topic: what is a fact? (Every handful of years, a cohort passes through this class with little enthusiasm for the course. This was the year.)

There is, of course, a current semi-academic discourse about the issue. Many critics disparage “alternative facts” as cherry-picked, phony, or simply lies. More strategic critics counterattack campaigns that enlist alleged facts in the prosecution of ideological warfare. Still more sophisticated critics debate the meaning of facts in what some call a possibly “post-fact” political era.

On the whole, the discussion is premised on the notion that facts are patent, objective, knowable truths that exist in the world. According to this notion, facts are discovered, as though they were mineral deposits simply to be found. They are the antibody of fabrication—any artifice or production rules out a thing being a fact.

This positivism is found in fringes of the fact discussion, where it crosses the border into academic discourse, and the demise of facts is blamed on one or another development of social, literary, and philosophical thought—“postmodernism” or “deconstruction” or even “feminism” or “gender studies.” Generally, this charge is made by academics who have not read the main texts attributed to these developments, but have the vague idea that they all spell doom for scientific knowledge, truth, and disciplinary method—if not also for cardinal direction, physical laws, and matter. (I used to try to educate my colleagues about these “movements,” even going so far as to suggest that they try reading Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, a report commissioned by the government of Québec and published in 1977. It would seem odd that it took 40-50 years for deconstruction and postmodernism to destroy facts, but perhaps the US is just that much in the intellectual rear-guard.)

The fact is, facts are produced. They are assembled from observation, hypothesis, theory, and, often enough, “common sense.” They are debated, using methods of inquiry, by experts in every discipline. They are never final, even when they are firmly established. Everyone who understands any form of respectable method of inquiry should know this.

Instead, the discussion of facts usually takes the treacherous shortcut of assertion: there are facts, there are no “alternative facts,” there are multiple versions of facts, there are no facts, there is no difference between facts and opinions, etc. None of these assertions acknowledges the complexity of facts themselves. That’s too bad, especially for critics of the current President and the “alt-right,” since it is precisely the lack of any reasonable methodology for establishing their assertions of fact that is most vexing. (Hint: someone saying it on Fox News does not count as a reasonable methodology.) The political left has its (smaller) share of those who seek to establish facts through bald assertion, too, and these people are not helping.

I don’t have a lot of confidence that an honest discussion of the construction of facts would improve the political situation. Too many people have been trained to react to the dog whistles of demagogues and advertisers. But the movement of high school students demanding that elected representatives enact legislation that would make schools safer from gun violence might make us optimistic. They have realized that thoughts and prayers are not making them safer, and they seem to want change based on what to many seems like a clear pattern of facts. They are much smarter than the dominating elite in the country credit them to be. Perhaps there is a larger interest in rational discussion of debatable facts, and debatable hypotheses to explain those facts.

On the other hand, that didn't move my students this term.

x

a disabled man riding a bicycle

I had to cancel class yesterday, at nearly the last minute. Symptoms from Ménière's came on, over a one-hour period, and I was unable to stand much sound or understand much speech. I wrote up a prompt for an online threaded discussion, based on the structure I had set up for the class session. Then I drove up to a fruit stand and bought some stuff.

That afternoon, we took a bike ride. I had intended to ride around 20 miles or so that afternoon anyway, but the loss of good hearing, and especially the differential head pressure from one side to the other, made it seem like that was a bad idea.

This morning, I have canceled my face-to-face class sessions for the day. I've again posted online discussions for the classes. My head is more evenly pressured and my ears are more equally hearingless, and that makes a longer bike ride more viable.

Cycling is the best thing I do for my physical and mental health. It reduces anxiety and depression -- a lot. Even when I have some symptoms, the change in my blood pressure while I'm on the bike reduces them, and usually for at least an hour or so afterwards. I am also trying to get stronger and faster. All good reasons to go.

I have a serious qualm about going, which is that a student in one of my classes might happen to see me, zooming by, apparently healthy. I might appear to be malingering.

In fact, I am struggling with an internal accusation that I am malingering. I'm not "sick" in a typical sense, after all. I'm not bed-ridden, debilitated by a vertigo attack. I believe I'm thinking fairly clearly. I can write and read -- hell, I've just read about 40 pages of Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason. If my mood wasn't so sour, I'd probably be capable of making jokes.

Yet, I am disabled, in the sense that my job normally requires vocal/aural interaction, or at least physical presence in a place where I am subject to people talking to me, crowd noise, and the various sounds of HVAC plants, landscapers' equipment, vehicles, and so on. (In fact, yesterday it was the HVAC system on top of the building housing our natural science departments that told me I wasn't teaching face-to-face. What is usually an obnoxious squeal and rattle was a screaming, percussive detonation.)

I've asked for, and have been granted, having my classes scheduled as "hybrid" in person/online courses, in order to inform students enrolling that this is part of what they'll be dealing with. And by posting the assignments and setting up the discussion fora I'll be reading and commenting on for hours later, I'm doing my job. Still, nagging at me, is the wonder about how this will be perceived.

Is that going to stop me getting on the bike? Not today.

setting limits

Faculty work is open-ended, and difficult to quantify. This creates a number of tensions in labor relations between faculty and administration, and where there are labor relations tensions, you can bet there are ethical issues as well.

The work faculty do is mostly invisible to most people, because it is outside the classroom. Scholarly work happens in any place that it makes sense: the field of study determines that it might be a library, or one's living room chair, or a literal field. The work can arise in odd hours, and some faculty also choose to work in odd hours, and most of us work on weekends during the academic year.

We could measure faculty work by simply counting up all the hours, but I believe that would miss an important feature of the kind of work faculty do. Because much of it is intellectual work, and because we have our brains with us most of the time, faculty work can happen when faculty are not expressly working. When I'm riding my bike, my mind wanders all over the place, but often splurts out stuff I need to do with classes or something scholarly I'm writing.

Faculty also usually do committee work in their departments, colleges, and the university at large, and work in professional or community organizations. Faculty are often assigned work that is atypical of what we think is faculty work, e.g., directing a program, designing a course, or facilitating an internship. These tasks seem to generate more than their share of conflicts between faculty and administration over the limits of faculty work. I want to argue that a key reason for this is because of a faculty ethic of caring or of donation.

If faculty are expected to work during the academic year, but not required to work during the summer, it might seem obvious that they cannot be called on to perform a task for their university employer during the summer. They are "off contract." Yet frequently enough, faculty give their time and energy to the university even then, or during the academic year, add to their workload by assuming additional tasks, committee responsibilities, etc. Faculty tend to identify very strongly with and care a great deal for their disciplines, their departments, their colleagues, and their universities. They give a lot of themselves, even within the minimum required work of teaching, research, and service. When the call comes to do even more, we tend to do it, if sometimes begrudgingly, because of that identity and caring.

When a faculty member says "no" to the administration, or to fellow faculty, this is a claim to setting a limit to work. It's difficult to understand the claim, though, because of the open-endedness of faculty work in general and because of the faculty ethic of caring and donation. In fact, "no" seems to require justification, even "off contract."

At their worst, the tensions this provokes become serious conflicts. For instance, someone with an academic-year "director" position may be called upon by the administration to do that work during the summer, under the presumption that the "director" gig implies being on-call--even if the job description explicitly says it is an academic-year only position.

Some administrators may take cynical advantage of the faculty ethic of caring and donation, and manipulate faculty into volunteering work without pay. Some fellow faculty may do this as well. But when it isn't cynical, the problem can still arise, which tells me that the ethic itself is part of the problem.

Faculty are not generally very good at saying "no," and not very good at understanding the limits of what they can do. The faculty who have arrived in their positions by way of being successful undergraduate and graduate students have developed capacities to work tremendous amounts under high levels of stress. Some of us may be hooked on it. Some of us use it as an escape. Some of us may take it as a point of pride. Saying "no" seems to be an admission that one is not superhuman after all.

What I think is called for is articulating the ethic of caring and donation, trying to distinguish it from some of the behaviors that lead to the attitude that saying "no" is somehow wrong, and using this articulated ethic to consider the problem of limits. So, more on this to come, I guess.

"something happened between us"

Let's say there were only the two of us there, or at least that only the two of us were witnesses to what happened. Anyone else would have seen whatever was objectively observable, but could not have been witnesses to what happened, because what happened was "between us."

Now, what happened? If what happened "between us" is different for each of us, then what did happen? Even more: if what I say happened you say did not happen, then what did happen? Did our intentions pass by each other without engaging each other "like gears" (Merleau-Ponty)? Or are our present intentions, to deny or remember, now passing by each other? Or are we each intending something different?

If you deny that anything happened, or deny what I say happened, and if I take your word for your intention, then I am stuck without the reality of anything happening at all. It could be, or it is, only my imagination, my own denial, bad faith, or fantasy. It can't be real as long as you deny it, because I can't determine what really happened between us. And this includes meaning, affect, history, futurity, facticity, morality.

Still more. You are the only other person in the world who was witness to what happened. You are the only one I could possibly talk to about it. If you deny that it happened, that is, deny what I say happened, then we will not be able to talk about it as though it were the same. If you won't talk about it, I can't know even whether you deny it, let alone whether there ever was a moment when our intentions engaged each other.

But why should I know? What difference would it make, for instance, if I were "right" or "wrong"? The urge to know what happened seems possessive, not only of what happened but of our intentions, that is, of us, that is, of you. And so, I haven't talked to you about it. I haven't been able to choose between permanent irreality perpetually wanting a witness to become real and to take on a meaning, and violating you and what happened between us by demanding to know.

Descartes in love

Descartes is bugging me. In the second meditation, he argues that because he is able to perceive and judge that he perceives wax, this demonstrates (1) that he exists, and (2) that his knowledge of himself is more certain than his knowledge of the wax. Whether or not he perceives and judges the wax accurately, that he perceives and judges shows that he must be capable of so doing, and therefore, that his mind “exists.”

I understand the argument for (1) as a proof that subjectivity as such must be, in order for there to be experience, sensation, perception, judgment, etc. One could be deceived by absolutely everything that one encounters, but never be wrong in concluding that one has a subjective being, because otherwise, one could not be either wrong or right, about anything. This position opens the door to transcendental philosophy, and seems to me simply to be the correct position. I cannot fathom an alternative to the transcendental philosophical idea that there must be a subject for whom there are experiences, in order for us to make sense of any experience, or in order for us to understand anything about understanding or knowing.

But the argument for (2) is unclear. In Cress’ translation: “… if my perception of the wax seemed more distinct after it became known to me not only on account of sight or touch, but on account of many reasons, one has to admit how much more distinctly I am known to myself. For there is not a single consideration that can aid in my perception of the wax or of any other body that ails to make even more manifest the nature of my mind.” Descartes does not claim merely that he knows that his mind exists, but that he knows about it more than he knows about the wax, and this seems also to be the case regardless of whether he is deceived about his supposed perceptions of supposed external objects. Now, what exactly tells him this?

Let’s imagine that Descartes has badly misconstrued his experience, and that he is nothing other than a figment of the imagination of his notorious “evil genius.” The argument for (1) is that, if he can be deceived in this way, and if he can undergo being deceived, he must exist as, minimally, something that can be deceived: a mind. But the argument for (2) seems to me to say that he knows about himself more than about any of his experiences, on the basis of this same evidence. How can he know that he is not a figment of the evil genius’ imagination? What about his experience, his subjectivity, could tell him so?

This is the starting point of Hilary Putnam’s “brain in a vat” image. Putnam proposed this as a challenge to the unity of mind and body: if we can imagine ourselves as properly hooked-up brains in vats, through which hookings-up these brains are fed what they interpret as “experiences” of wax, fires, copies of Descartes’ Meditations, or whatever, then we will have a hard time proving that our minds/brains are “in” our bodies.

But Putnam is not answering the more fundamental question, which is, what is the source of, the evidence for, and the basis of judgments about our self-knowing? Do we know our own minds?

One of my favorite approaches to this question is a very uncomfortable one. Every once in a while, we hear someone declare something like “I thought I was in love, but I was wrong.” Well, how about that?

Here you are, merrily going about your fawning and praising of this god in human form with whom you are thoroughly and terminally smitten, and then, one day, you awake to a different set of circumstances, a different alignment of stars perhaps, and realize that your undying love was in fact stillborn all along. How does that happen? Are you wrong about your judgment of the things—the person, that person’s charms, etc.—or are you wrong about yourself, about your judgment, about your own perceptions? What is the difference?

That we are capable of self-consciousness of our own subjectivity seems to me patent and undeniable. That we are capable of self-knowledge in any deep sense seems to me uncertain, at best.

Where does this leave old René? Those of us who read this crapola know that he will use the self-knowledge idea in order to construct “certainty” a bit later on in the text. Uh oh.

I used to think I was in love with Descartes.

philosophy of mind -- yeah, right

I’m teaching Philosophy of Mind this semester. It’s odd that the philosophy department has a course called Philosophy of Mind. It’s throwing me for a bit of a loop, despite the fact that I’ve taught the course several times.

The phrase “philosophy of mind” connotes, at least to me, an analytical philosophy approach, which here means an approach that takes up philosophical “problems” to be “solved.” Among the problems in philosophy of mind are such matters as the “mind-body problem” and the “other minds problem.” The debates include whether “mind” can be reduced to physical brain events, whether we can have definitive proof that other minds exist, and so forth.

But the Cow State Santa Claus philosophy department is, and has been for many years, a continental philosophy department. Unlike analytical philosophy, continental philosophy emphasizes “questions” that elicit “answers,” but more importantly issue more questions.

The big difference between the analytical and continental approaches to philosophy is really this: analytical philosophy regards “mind” as a set of problems, and continental philosophy regards “mind” as a tradition of ideas dating to… Maybe Descartes? Maybe Parmenides?

That’s what’s driving me as I teach this thing. I don’t know what “Philosophy of Mind” is supposed to be. I believe I have a duty to provide my students some basic background in the debates about the analytical philosophical “problems,” because anyone looking at an undergrad transcript would think that’s what “Philosophy of Mind” would be about. But I’m also trying to undermine that containment, to question what I think is a broad petitio principii at the root of “Philosophy of Mind.”

In effect, I plan to teach a course in opposition to itself. I’m doomed.

an old poem

Every so often something overtakes me and I try to write poetry, or, more accurately, something like the following happens. This is from about 12 years ago. It is about a life I left behind. I just re-read it and a few others from that period, and I think some of it is kinda okay. So, for what it's worth...

I’d tried a thousand ways 

to worry through life,

caught in the romantic 

allure of despair, bemoaning 

our Heehaw anxieties,

bad luck and gloom, the 

cartoon violence of drunks 

bouncing each other off 

the walls or searching 

for mermaids in the bay 

like Prufrock heroes.

But I gave up on the ghost 

at last, and tossed out spare 

skeletons to boot, and if I 

didn’t smile at least I felt it.

Not all those empty bottles lined 

up beside the sink belonged to me,

lest you forget; and you know 

the dirty plates aren’t mine; but if 

you insist we both spoiled the nest 

at least we worked together. I’ll 

cop to that, alright. And I’ll take 

some blame for wreckage, and 

that will surely make me smile.

I can’t be made to fret about it.

What’s fair, what’s deserved, what’s 

to be done, what’s to come - I used 

to believe in answers to these 

unlucky questions, but I was 

older then and felt the stakes 

driven further and further up. 

I’ve wised up to the risk.

Now I’m never certain and 

I’m certain that it’s best.

I’m not alone. I’m not weary.

I’m living off the dividends 

of misspent youth: pointless 

delight and days with no end,
careless concern and grave hope.

consciousness, the imaginary, ideology, the real, sex and violence

Consciousness is a funny thing. Late modern and postmodern theories have attempted to establish, variously, that consciousness is an insignificant epiphenomenon of biochemical events in the nervous system, a technology of oppression and control through ideology, a grotesque product of the imaginary, a relatively self-aware if not entirely self-transparent absolute, or just the difference between what it’s like to be you versus what it’s like to be a goat.

As I start to gird the loins of my consciousness^* in preparation for the Spring semester, Althusser’s theory of ideology and what I understand of Lacan’s account of the imaginary keep coming up. (In some ways, Althusser + Lacan = Baudrillard, but that’s another story.) Althusser says that ideology is how we represent to ourselves our imaginary relationship to our real conditions of existence. Lacan says something that to me suggests that the imaginary is how the subject of desire is constructed, so that we are able to live despite the occasional upsurge of the real. In both cases, ordinary everyday consciousness is at closest a couple removes from the real.

This bothers a lot of students. It has bothered me, but mainly because I didn’t get it. Recently I’ve realized that any time we encounter the real, our apparatus of imaginary relations, desires and fantasies, that is, “reality” as we live it, crashes down around us. The real is unbearable.

In fact, the real is unlivable for a sane person. The real is a huge pile of shit, mouldering garbage, the doom of civilization, your own personal doom, all the lies you’ve told, everyone you’ve ignored, everyone you’ve fallen in love with, and everyone you’ve hated. And they’re all having an orgy of sex and violence. 

Even that isn’t real enough to be the real, because I’ve imagined it (and I hope you have too, fair reader). 

What the hell am I doing writing this? Well, it’s like this…

I write always to someone. The someone changes, depending on the time or the writing. I believe I’m at my best when I have someone I write to for a while. (And yes, it’s you. You know who you are.) So this is a secret message to that someone, while also masquerading as a public message about how I am thinking about consciousness.

Now, you don’t want to know all that, or be thinking about it when you read this, probably. I certainly don’t. When I do think about it, the imaginary relation I have to the one I write to, and to writing, and to myself, starts to come undone, and the real situation begins to appear, and it is not pretty at all. 

This writing is an orgy of sex and violence. Read it again from the start if you don’t believe me.

Where was I? Ah yes, consciousness, ideology, and the imaginary. 

I’ll give you another example, one that is more embarrassing to me personally, but less to you. Whenever I play the guitar, a part of my consciousness becomes a rock star. It is essential for me to have this imaginary relation to the guitar to be able to play. (And of course, I play to someone.) Ideology is the set of beliefs through which I interpret this imaginary relation: what I mean by “rock star,” and how I theorize the cultural position of “rock star.”  

Without the imaginary, I’m just a doofus with imprecise and weak fingers, plunking along. That’s hardly tolerable, let alone an engaging way to spend a couple hours. 

We need the real, and ultimately cannot avoid it. But we can’t bear it. Consciousness is where this gets worked out, and that’s why we’re always so goddamn tired.

^{* Does consciousness have loins?↩}

vertigo and reconstructing 3-D visual space using an old Renaissance painting trick

Shortly after eating lunch, after a longish bike ride that felt good, I realized I was starting to experience spinning in my visual field. Any time I looked at the top of the TV, it began to rotate slowly clockwise. Every blink, it would return to the more-or-less horizontal and begin rotating again at the same rate. The corner of the two walls was doing the same, but perhaps because of the prism of my glasses, the wall was bent toward the top and rotated more quickly. By about 4 o’clock, and then again after a brief period of feeling better, at 6, for about an hour, the symptoms were worse.

Proprioceptively, it was difficult to feel the orientation and position of my body. I say “my body” specifically because there was a certain alienation going on. While embodied, while there, while feeling that my head and legs were somewhere, and somewhere in relation to one another, there was a feeling of this being abnormal, and not normalizable, not correctible. Even eyes closed, lying like a corpse with my arms folded over my chest as I do when the vertigo strikes, with no visual twisting of the world to relate to, the world was not there for me and I could not tell how to enter into it.      

So I lie there. Every so often my head would seem to be in the wrong place, and I would shift slightly. The wrong place here means that it would feel unbalanced, one side lower or higher, or caving in, losing density or else imploding in density. No matter what, my legs felt like they were not straight out from my torso. I asked Lauren to straighten my legs for me, because, lying on my back, I felt them to be angled at the hips to the left. She moved my legs to the left—meaning, if they were angled, it was to the right.

After a while, I was able to get up. Drugs I’d taken earlier may have been kicking in. As I stood up, I caught myself about to fall again. I couldn’t balance spontaneously. I also couldn’t look out to determine how to balance myself, without seeing the slow rotation effect among the visual world, which would make balance impossible.

I made a discovery later on, that I could stabilize visual space by holding my hand about 10-12 inches from my face, allowing my eyes to avoid focusing on objects in my visual field. While I held my gaze at my hand, without focusing on it, either, other objects came into view in the periphery, obviously not in focus at all, but holding steady. I interpret this as a re-construction of 3-d visual space, like the use of perspective grids in Renaissance painting. As I adjusted further, I was able to focus more on the visual field and even on objects at distances from 2 to 10 feet, as long as my hand was still in my visual field to anchor it and produce the perspective effect. That is, the construction of 3-d space was not permitted by the mere stabilizing of visual field by having a piece of it that seemed to rotate counter-clockwise (i.e., with my vertiginous body) against the visual field, putting a kind of brake on it, but by giving a spot around which to re-organize space, a reference point.

3-d visual space is not usually constructed actively. We who are visual spontaneously occupy it, but not strictly visually, and this is something we don't usually understand about it. One value of the phenomenological account of perception is to help us notice the projection of being-in-the-world that is responsible for there to be a world of things that solicit our attention and action. This world we enter wholly, of a piece, rather than piecemeal. 3-D is not merely visual; it is aural, tactile, atmospherically tactile (e.g., sense-feeling of air pressure, current), and above all, oriented through the embodied orientation that our living perception is. 

When something has gone wrong in our ordinary orientation, then we have to construct this world actively. (This effort is exhausting, it turns out.) 

futility work

Even before traffic stopped on the freeway on the drive up to Sacramento on Friday afternoon, I was in a funk. The entire route I could see nothing but the detritus of industrial capitalism, which is to say, the world in which we all live. I was thinking about all the concrete and steel everywhere, not only around me but worldwide. Not only is so much of the world built by industrial capitalism ugly, it’s been built by ruthlessly exploiting resources and labor. 

I suppose the horrible effects of industrial capitalism are familiar. We have lived our whole lives steeped in pollution, poison, and garbage. No one really has to read Marx to understand that working people are exploited. All of that is plain to anyone who just looks around and thinks. 

At times, what upsets me most is the futility of it. In that mood, when I consider what I do for a living, what it enables other people to do for a living, and how our lives intertwine socially and productively, none of it seems worthwhile. Some students of mine have told me that my classes have deeply changed their outlooks on the world, and that they feel benefitted by this. I appreciate that, but then I am sometimes struck by the fact that all of us are forced to live by means of the monstrous enterprise, and having a changed outlook on it does not seem helpful. Some faculty I have represented have told me that they were grateful I helped them through whatever jam they were in at the university. But my help is a way of assuring that they can continue to function in a system that destroys. 

I come to believe that people are committed irrevocably to a life of plunder, rushing to consume more, with the only possible end result making the world uninhabitable. I become suspicious of pleasure, not out of guilt but on the basis of understanding that our pleasures are disastrous. I think of the unfathomable quantities of liquor or cotton or paper we produce, how wide spread they are, how they are made, and what they ultimately do for us. It’s as if we have a psychotic notion that if we produce and consume ever more, we or our species will survive forever. 

Even if that were true, the logic of this form of civilization commands that our survival is at the expense of the planet as well as ourselves. We somehow trick ourselves into believing otherwise, but still have no way to respond to the question: what for? After all, it makes just as much sense to conclude that the ultimate goal of industrial capitalism is to make me stuck in traffic.

what to do when you're doomed

It’s evaluation time for non-tenure-track faculty at the university. That’s the time I get the most faculty rights work, because when it comes to evaluating contingent faculty, there are no holds barred. 

Under the collective bargaining agreement the faculty union has with the administration, contingent faculty in the CSU (a.k.a. “lecturers”) have something contingent faculty nationwide generally don’t have: rights. The rights are procedural only, and are guaranteed by the amazingly thin concept of “careful consideration” for recommending future re-appointment, but they are rights. Contingent faculty get to see the procedures and criteria for evaluation, and the evaluating persons can’t deviate from them or simply write nice letters for people they like and rotten ones for people they hate. 

But the creativity of people stuck with bureaucratic requirements finds ways to produce fruit, however strange it may be. Already this season I’ve seen evaluations that use hearsay for evidence, lack of evidence as evidence, or ignore evidence of overall positive assessments of their work in favor of single complaints. Some departments don’t have, or don’t explain their criteria. Some departments impose higher criteria demands on lecturers than on tenure-track faculty. A fairly large number of departments go through nominal evaluation procedures with the result that whoever is chair decides which contingent faculty to re-hire on an entirely subjective basis. 

In a lot of cases, when a faculty member with a lousy evaluation letter comes to me, it’s too late. Because they are unaware of their rights, or even that they have rights, they don’t follow the rebuttal process, lose their chance, and end up losing their work. Worse than that is when it’s obvious that the evaluation is being done unfairly, in order to get rid of someone the evaluator doesn’t like, or in order to carry out a proxy war against a colleague by not rehiring that colleague’s pet lecturer. 

Today this reminded me of my last weeks teaching in Pennsylvania in Spring 1998. The university I was teaching at part-time had already informed me I was not going to be re-hired. They said this was because of the way their union contract was written, but I didn’t believe them. I had had a run-in with a dean at the satellite campus I worked in, over the temerity with which I assigned failing grades to students who had deliberately flunked logic, making the satellite campus, and hence the dean, look bad. 

I was teaching a class through that university conjointly with Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, for a cohort of students who were training to be school teachers, and had taken a deal that gave them loan forgiveness in exchange for a minimum of four years teaching in poor inner-city schools. I was teaching a class that was called something like Ethics of Race that I was totally unqualified for. 

During the semester it had become clear that the students really could not understand the philosophical texts I had them read. I got into the practice of writing extensive notes on all the readings, so that we could spend class time actually trying to discuss the relevance to race issues and their future endeavors. And when I say extensive, I mean extensive: for an excerpt of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, my explanatory notes were often longer than the text itself. I provided the notes on a web site I had through Geocities (remember Geocities?). 

The situation was this: I had no future job prospects. I had every reason to believe this would be the last time I taught philosophy. I was doomed.

Before every class session, I drove over to the North Side, to the weird CCAC campus made of decrepit mansions of the managerial bourgeoisie that had been donated but couldn’t be kept up, and modern multiple-use boxes. My class was in one of the old mansions, and I loved it. I didn’t have an office, so I held “office” hours in the formerly grand, currently unheated foyer. I would get there and start prepping, and look around to see all my students exchanging the copies they made of my notes and talking about the notes, the text, and their questions in hushed voices while they milled about trying to stay warm and waiting for the classroom to open. 

It was ridiculously intense work. I had that class, and two others on the other campus of the university, a total of three totally different preps, all for students who were not ready for prime time. And I was doomed.

Class would start with their questions, then the text, and finally a set of uncomfortable questions about ethics, race, class, and teaching. Then I got back in the car to drive to the university satellite campus to teach Intro or Ethics or whatever it was. 

On the 90 minute drive, I could only think, I am doomed. This is the last semester I will ever get to teach. These are the last students I will ever teach. 

Late in the semester, the administrator involved in the cohort program (among a million other things) asked me to meet with her. The only time we could meet, because of my commute, was just before the class, around 8 AM. My recent experience of administrators had taught me that a meeting with an administrator is not a good thing. It means what so many things mean to contingent faculty: I’m doomed. 

She asked me what was going on in the ethics and race class. I asked what she meant. Well, she said, she’d never had students make comments about a class or an instructor like this before. I asked again what she meant. The students had been in for advising, and individually and in groups had been telling her that the class was amazing, that I was an incredibly dedicated teacher, that our discussions in class made them understand philosophical ideas that they had never imagined before, all kinds of wonderful stuff. The administrator said she wished she had a job for me, and would hire me on the spot if she had. She asked if she could write a letter of recommendation for me. 

It was mid-April. The vast majority of jobs teaching in colleges and universities had long since been filled. The last Jobs for Philosophers was printed on two pieces of letter size paper. So I turned down her offer. I didn’t have any jobs to apply for, so a letter of recommendation wasn’t going to be very useful. I was doomed.

When I walked through the hallways today on campus, I thought about all the lecturers I know here who are doomed, and wondered what they’re thinking, and how they manage to keep doing their jobs. 

w(h)ither liberalism?

The work of Michel Foucault has had a deep impact on theorizing in gender studies, queer theory, critical disability studies, and other critical theoretical investigations of the production of certain types of embodiment. In particular, Foucault’s work on discipline, surveillance, power-knowledge, and biopower remain current in academic publication. Even when Foucault’s way of working or his analysis is criticized, the basic conceptual frameworks he developed in books like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality continue to underlie and underwrite critical theoretical investigations.

What is usually left behind is Foucault’s insistence on periodization in the production of power-knowledge. This theme, most prominently examined in Foucault’s pre-genealogical, transitional work The Order of Things, should caution us to resist positivist impulses to totalize any theory. In the game of academic publication, the posture of positivist totalization is a significant display of dominance, so it continues.
 
In so far as the theorist is dissatisfied with every partial truth, the theorist should interrogate the way that a given theory appears true—under what historical and political conditions, under what episteme (remember those?), under what regime. When times change, the ground shifts, and with it eventually the groundwork of theoretical knowledge.¹ And times have changed.
 
Foucault explored the births of the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. They share a general historical-political context, which in all cases coincides with the development of bourgeois industrial capitalism. To my knowledge, Foucault did not write anything about the development of capitalism that would parallel his theorizing about the clinic, the prison, and sexuality. My guess is that this was because of academic politics of the day, but an interesting thought would be that it is because capitalism was too base for Foucault’s theoretical tastes or capacity. In any case, these are all contemporaries, age peers.²
 
The basic set-up of capitalism has changed a great deal, even since Foucault’s death. Multinational corporations have overtaken the capacity of any state to control them, and the state and all institutions are being broken down, restructured and rebuilt through the auspices of corporations. Among the institutions undergoing this radical change are the clinic, the prison, and sexuality—and also identity, language, music.
 
Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality both rely on a notion of the individual as the site of power-knowledge, produced through the construction of subjectivity, self-consciousness (a word Foucault eschewed), and self-identity. The Panopticon relentlessly called upon the prisoner to attend to himself as prisoner, to become penitent, and eventually to become productive citizen. For that power-knowledge to effectuate that conversion, the individual implicitly had to understand himself in terms of identity-within-society, as a person-with-personhood, as one who would be held to account, and to whom this account should be significant as a matter of who he was. Individuals-as-persons were needed, and their self-surveillance was needed. To become “docile”—Foucault’s name for the ideal type of socially productive, well-adjusted citizen-body—one must be interpellated as social being, as a being whose identity within society could matter.
 
On the other side of the ledger, the anonymous bearer of power-knowledge was subjectivized into a hierarchical, bureaucratic position by way of achievements of docility (e.g., earning PhDs, moving up the corporate ladder, etc.) The fundamental attributes of power-knowledge, leaving aside all details of their nominal spheres of endeavor, are the capacity to produce knowledge, the capacity to produce docile bodies, and the capacity to produce and reproduce its own hierarchical bureaucracy. In short, at its base, power-knowledge requires a division of labor and a division of social control that depends on every member doing the assigned work in the assigned time in the prescribed fashion. Without bureaucratization, the liberal institutions Foucault interrogated could not continue to exist.
 
Where we are now is a situation in which systems of bureaucratization and hierarchy are in crisis. Obviously, this is not due to a proletariat revolution.³ It is due to the contradiction inherent in bureaucratization as a form of power. Perhaps the exemplar of bureaucratization in our computerized, networked society is the dominance of control and decision algorithms for guiding financial, industrial, and other major economic behaviors. The relationship between computer systems which wield power-knowledge and individuals upon whom power-knowledge inscribes and prescribes is at so abstract a remove from lived experience that it is barely intelligible. To most individuals, most of the time, it is invisible not only in its production of oneself as a subject, but also in its prescriptions.
 
I am not personally very interested in knowing how my credit scores are arrived at, and I am not suggesting, nor am I interested in the notion that computer systems control my life. My point is this: the fundamental arrangement of power-knowledge has gone past the models Foucault concerned himself with. The persistence, omnipresence and invisibility of power-knowledge in the shape of something like a credit score makes it appear to fit Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. But if I am not aware of being in prison at all, if I do not or can not understand myself as a consumer, for instance, then I can not be subjectivized as such.

To conclude this all too briefly. Industrial capitalism needs workers—that is, subjects who work, subjects who are conscious of themselves as workers, who are accountable for being productive, industrious, conscientious, and “free.” The institutions of power-knowledge belonging to the era of industrial capitalism likewise need subjects who are conscious of themselves and who are accountable for having knowable identities.
 
It is not clear to me at all that consumer capitalism needs consumers who are subjects conscious of themselves as consumers. Consumers need not be accountable at all. In this era, we are not called to account as productive, industrious, conscientious, and least of all as “free,” despite (because of?) the cultural currency of these brand names.⁴ While it may appear as if advertising and marketing has taken on a decisive role as the Panopticon of Panopticons in our era, the programming of consuming does not rely on the production of subjectivity in anything like the sense Foucault analyzed. Instead of power exerted to produce an affirmative active subject, consumer capitalism produces a passive recipient/perceiver.

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<sup>1. I have always suspected that Foucault was deeply Hegelian, especially in the archaeological period: theorization of power-knowledge always comes on the scene too late to effect change. Critics who charge that Foucault provided no basis for action are fundamentally correct. The owl of Minerva flies only at the coming of the dusk.↩
2. We ought to be struck by the way Foucault’s analyses, even of power-knowledge, assumes the relative stability of bourgeois industrial capitalism and its production and reproduction of power. Who or what else could be power if it is the nameless, identity-less, universal that Foucault suggests? Who or what else could be everywhere at once, underlying all social forms, all forms of knowledge, all institutions? Being? God?↩
3. If anything, the contrary: it is due to the crisis of industrial capitalism, and the proximity of its catastrophe. ↩
4. The hierarchical relations of our age are beginning to resemble feudalism more than industrial capitalism.↩</sup>

on arguments against full inclusion of non-tenure-track faculty in governance

I wrote the following to respond to arguments against reforming the constitution of the general faculty at my (beloved) stupid university. The proposed amendments would extend the definition of general faculty to include part-time faculty, who are currently assigned a secondary status as “associate” faculty without the vote but with “the privilege of debate.”

One of the tenured full professors who opposed the amendment very vocally insisted that the problem was the proposers of the amendment didn’t understand that if the amendment passed, part-time faculty would be able to vote, and that because the constitution says they can’t vote, they can’t. I am not making that up.
Another of the tenured full professors who opposed the amendment insisted that this would make it possible for part-time faculty to vote en bloc to advance some agenda of their own, seemingly contrary to the academic standards of the various disciplines and against the mission of the university. The other objection was that part-time faculty are not capable of exercising academic judgment in shared governance because they are part-time faculty and not qualified professionally or academically.

There was never the right moment in the debate to bring out this screed, mainly because, as a lecturer, and as probably the most vocal and active advocate for non-tenure-track faculty on our campus, I have had to practice extreme forbearance in the interest. As the saying among us contingent faculty goes, every precarious faculty member is never more than 15 seconds from complete humiliation. The only thing we can do in those situations, if we want to survive, is remain silent.

***

I am responding to the argument that the distinction between general faculty and associate faculty in our current constitution must be maintained because of the distinction between faculty with governance responsibilities and those without. The argument as premised on the distinction in the current constitution is clearly begging the question, and so should not detain us. With all respect that it is due, I say we should not waste any more time on it.

Since there must be some principle not in the current constitution that would be the basis for the discrimination against part-time faculty being recognized as members of the faculty, what would that be? We are told that it cannot be based on the definitions of faculty and their responsibilities in the Collective Bargaining Agreement because that addresses faculty as employees, not as academics, and to accept the CBA definition would conflate the two. Let’s take it to be so and dismiss the CBA for now. (It’s just as well, because it would be a losing argument for opposing the amendment, since its definition of faculty is inclusive, rather than discriminatory.)

Then what is the basis for the distinction? It is asserted that part-time faculty are not qualified for service in governance, on the basis of their employment status. Why would that be? Either there is something about part-time employment status, or about those who are employed part-time, that explains why they are unqualified. It’s not academic degree status, because people with PhDs are hired to part-time and full-time non-tenure-track positions routinely by the CSU. It also cannot be lack of experience, since that would also disqualify probationary faculty hired out of graduate school, and ignores the lengthy experience and knowledge of academic standards and practices in their disciplines that part-time faculty gain at this and other institutions. So it must be something about so-called “part-timers” as such.

The defense of the current discriminatory exclusion of part-time appointed faculty from the definition of faculty rests on the view that people hired into part-time positions are inherently unqualified (because it is not related to employment classification, as we have been told, and it is not because of degree status or experience).

Let us consider the other reasons given to object to part-time faculty inclusion, to identify what those disqualifying traits are. Part-time faculty, it is asserted, are ignorant of their own discipline’s academic values and ways of being, are incapable of thinking rationally about decisions about their own disciplines, and are incapable of acting as responsible professionals or simply ethical human beings. Instead, they are irrational, moblike, and dangerous.

If that were really true, it would be shocking to discover that any of my colleagues would hire such crazed insurgents to teach in the first place. On the other hand, my own department has survived despite relying on this mob for much more than half of its teaching for the past few years.

But seriously, it is incredible to imagine that anyone could manage the day to day tasks of teaching classes, explaining concepts and imparting core knowledge in any academic field, evaluating student progress and student work, and fulfilling the other obligations that are endemic to academia, without disciplinary knowledge, ethical or professional responsibility, or a capacity for rational thought.

Finally, I would personally like to say something to the tenure-track minority who would be persuaded that non-tenure-track faculty are so incapable. You are not morally superior human beings by dint of your status and rank. Non-tenure-track faculty are not your inferiors. We are not your little brown brothers. We are in fact your colleagues, whether you like it or not, whether you recognize us or not, and we are not going away. Far from it. We are the majority already—yes, on this campus as well, though not yet in the numbers common across higher education—and a minority can only assert a tenuous claim to monopoly over institutional and professional authority.

teaching and going home

It's been a long time, but I once used to teach my classes and go home. I had other things on my mind then, like trying to hustle more classes to avoid falling even further into abject poverty, and limit intimidating phone calls from people I owed money to. This weekend I've been missing those days.

I am now deeply involved in many aspects of my stupid university. When I'm not teaching classes, I'm involved in the academic senate and on the senate executive committee, I do faculty rights representation for the union, I join book clubs and sometimes facilitate discussions, and I'm also involved in the AAUP. I know several faculty who do as much or more, but mainly, they do less. I understand why.

I know my level of involvement causes stress, and I know my motivation for being so involved is not entirely healthy. Anxiety seems to be self-sustaining, constantly reproducing the kind of alertness that makes everything appear to be threatening.

And then last week, two major sources of stress became serious objective threats. My anxiety level reached Threat Level Busey at once. I feel vulnerable, exposed, and low on energy. I don't want to keep having arguments in my head when I'm trying to sleep, and waking up with them raging again. I don't want this crapola affecting daily life like this. Dinner should not be a daily crisis.

I know my friends have my back. I know I have support. Generalized anxiety means that I can't trust that I have support. I can't even trust that I can support myself.

Kinda awful.

normalization: remedial gym class, eye patches

I’m letting ideas swirl around a bit. Some of my motivation for investigating normality and normalization is autobiographical.

I wrote in a blog post once that I had been in “remedial gym” in elementary school. This is not what the school called it; in fact, I don’t know if they had a name for it. This happened in first grade, so my memory of it is not all that reliable. Some parts of it are crystalline.

Evidently, I was so awkward and inept physically that it was noticeable in gym class. I couldn’t catch a ball thrown or bounced to me, or throw or bounce a ball to someone a given distance away.

I don’t remember the precise circumstances, but I was sorted into a special gym class, of something like six kids. The one classmate I remember was an unfortunate soul who lived down the street from me, David Swisher. He was chubby, hyperactive, a fairly ineffective aspiring bully, and unsuccessful academically later on. He was called, of course, Swishy or Swish.

I had homework for remedial gym class.  So I could practice, my parents had to buy one of those hideous raspberry-Koolaid-vomit pink rubber inflatable balls with the scuffy texture—you know the thing, it was the “gym ball” because it wasn’t any particular kind of ball. I spent time in the hallway between our front door and the kitchen, bouncing this stupid ball back and forth to my mom. I think I wasn’t very good.

Now, this was strange, because I was physically very active, especially outdoors with my neighbors and best friends, Ryan and Trever Sink. It was hard to get us inside for the night. We spent every available daylight hour in good weather riding Big Wheels, bikes, or our old undersized trikes. We used the tricycles—solid steel and iron monsters—to play “Smash-Up Derby,” which involved riding them as fast as we could and running directly into each other as violently as possible. In the snow, we tromped around trying to see how far we could walk between yards, over fences that were nearly covered. I seemed reasonably coordinated for these activities.

It finally occurred to someone that I couldn’t catch, throw, or bounce a ball accurately because I couldn’t see it. On came the glasses. I still had trouble when the ball was to my left. It turned out I had a lazy eye. On came the eye patch, which was prescribed back then to try to train lazy eyes to work (I gather this has been abandoned since).

These were efforts to normalize my body and my movements. It didn’t matter that I was able, spontaneously, freely, and gracefully to crash tricycles together, to dig out of collapsed snow banks while suffering only minor frostbite, or to variously run, ride, leap, and so on. I did not perform to standard in the throw-catch-bounce test. Normalizing this performance began with identifying it as abnormal, separating my body from a mass where it could have remained relatively anonymous, placing me in a special location and prescribing special treatments. It reformulated my spontaneous, free, graceful embodiment as uncoordinated, incapable, and in need of correction.

Of course, a six year old with glasses and an eye patch (stuck onto the lens) is subjected to merciless hazing by other six year olds. This reinforced my body’s difference, the judgment that I am in fact uncoordinated and incapable, or in a word, defective. The failure of the eye patch to correct my lazy eye (lazy to this day) was my failure to achieve normalization, so along with my glasses becoming thicker every year, I remained defective, and it was my failure.

Now, imagine if my case had been really serious.

pain, perversion, desire, normal and abnormal

This morning, upon waking, I was thinking about situations in which pain is desired. The erotic relation to pain is exhibited and practiced in athletics, S&M, and by some guitarists who play until their fingertips bleed. In sports and among guitarists, there is a macho response, “playing through the pain,” that is interesting to consider as a cover story for the intense and very kinky, unacknowledged, or at least unnamable desire for pain. Psychoanalytically, this may be quite fascinating. In terms of neuro-evolution, this may be quite boring (our lizard brains incite us to replay melodramas of fear and threat for the sake of running through the motions of fight or flight—hence also horror movies and running for President). What I am interested in is what it tells us about normal and abnormal conscious embodiment.

Is it “normal” to desire pain? This is not the exact question, but could be a place to begin. Note first of all that to a large extent the discourse of modern scientific medicine defines pain in terms of an “abnormal” condition, both relatively and absolutely. In this discourse, pain is also treated as an aversive affect, which obviously makes desire for pain incomprehensible except as pathology.

Athletes desire to “feel the burn” from exertion. I do not see any reason to assume that this is because they take the pain as informing them of their success in extending their bodies’ strength or endurance, rather than because they desire and enjoy the pain itself. But I don’t want to get caught up in their motivations, so much as to understand as far as possible what they experience as pain and as desire, and how this experience fits into their overall sense of consciousness and embodiment as “normal.”

This is a relative-normal, a normal state of things for some individual embodied consciousness, rather than an absolute-normal, if there even is such a thing. In other words, the “normal” embodied consciousness of some athlete who desires to “feel the burn” is not here determined in relation to a statistical population, but only self-reflexively for that person. Even someone who has an “abnormal” desire for pain still experiences some pain as part of the normal course of erotic desire and some as abnormal—good and bad pains. (For many this may be based on what hurts versus what injures, but not all pain-perverts* are averse to injury.)

So we cannot say that pain is in itself aversive, or that it is in itself an abnormal state of embodied consciousness, either in a descriptive or in a normative sense. Perhaps this means that we cannot generate a list of universal, common characteristics of normal or abnormal embodied consciousness. There is no set of specific objectively describable conditions of embodied consciousness that is a set of “normal” conditions.

I’m using “objectively describable conditions” to mean what can be objectified through expression, indirectly shared through description or narrative, as opposed to “subjective” conditions that would have to do with the structures of consciousness and embodiment themselves. What I am trying to mark out here is what I think goes very wrong in so many analyses of pain, even those that call themselves phenomenological.

Elaine Scarry suggested long ago that pain is unshareable because it is absolutely subjective. That’s an overstated claim, but the truth in it is this: pain, and indeed any state or experience of embodied consciousness, entails a subjective dimension, what I called the structures of consciousness and embodiment, that are not “shared” by way of expression among us, not made “public,” but are nonetheless the common and universal structures of consciousness and embodiment. When pain is analyzed in terms of what is normal or abnormal, so often this leads to claims about what is normal and abnormal for embodied persons, not for embodied consciousness. Embodied consciousness of those of us who desire pain still has normal experience, including normal experience of pain.

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* I mean "pervert" in a kind and kindred way, of course.

capitalist accumulation and education

Ernest Mandel discusses the tension in the relationship of university education to capitalist accumulation in p260ff of Late Capitalism. Late capitalism, i.e., capitalism in which technological advancement has become the main impetus for continued accumulation, depends on the production and reproduction of intellectually skilled labor. For this purpose, universities were drafted or converted from humanist institutions into knowledge and knowledge-worker factories. By 1970 when he was writing this book, it was already clear that universities would become centers for technological innovation and hence workplaces of capitalist production. That is, humanities education, moral education, and other traditional notions of the purpose of higher education, were dissolved. Only very few intellectually skilled workers need any type of humanist or artistic education—specifically, those who will produce the ideological arts (science fiction, comic books, TV, movies).

An inevitable clash occurs when a large number of people begin to demand higher education in order to enter more lucrative fields, because this drive for upward mobility conflicts with the aims and needs of capitalists. Not many intellectually skilled workers are needed, and always a dwindling number in comparison to the quantity of constant capital (dead labor in the form of extant technology): the more technological sophistication and automation the intellectually-skilled workers produce for capitalists, the fewer intellectually-skilled workers are needed for capitalists to accumulate wealth and profit.

Thus far, the rise of political conflict related to de-funding higher education makes perfect sense. Capitalists, represented by legislators, or directly acting politically in the form of tax revolts, refuse to pay for mass scale higher education, for the simple reason that it is not in their interests. The vanishing middle class continues to expect and make rather feeble demands on the state for funding of higher education. The bargain struck between them has led to the erosion over time of tax supported higher education and the shift to debt funding.

There’s another story, less economic and more political, that I think is true and helps explain the situation. Mandel’s analysis sets higher education somewhat outside the main capitalist economy (oddly, similarly to the way economists he criticizes heartily later on set the arms economy outside the main capitalist economy). Viewed another way, what has happened is that capitalists have pressed a demand for the territory of education as a new market. In fact, capitalists have demanded not only higher education, but the entire territory of education, from pre-K on up. This makes perfect sense: enormous amounts of money are spent on education, meaning that there is a pool of potential capital circulating through these institutions. While capitalist accumulation is threatened by diminishing rate of profit in the established territories of capitalist production (Marx’ famous Departments I and II), opening a new territory, gaining access to new pots of money to convert into capital, and restructuring the entire territory on the capitalist factory model could avert further crisis, until the money runs out. (This, by the way, is very similar to theories of the permanent arms economy that Mandel agrees most with—tax funding supplies a source of previously untapped capital, and the production activity itself provides a way to valorize accumulated capital. That maintaining the arms economy as a profitable venture depends on deliberately destroying both the arms and people has an analogy in education that I will leave to the reader to contemplate for now. Enjoy.)

Education is being rapidly capitalized, through direct seizure of some schools (the so-called charter schools), but mainly through imposition of curriculum, through legislation that requires use of particular pedagogies, textbooks, standardized tests, etc. that are published by major firms. Standardizing the K-12 curriculum is precisely the replacement of variable capital (labor) with constant capital (technology), which lowers the value and cost of labor by simultaneously minimizing numbers of workers needed and allowing for a reduction of wages. The effort to extend this process into higher education is already well underway.

Then there are the labor conditions to consider. Here, higher education has been in the vanguard, because of the resistance of organized labor in the K-12 sector. Real wages, and the job protections of tenure, have been largely eliminated from higher education, as the result of a bargain not at all unlike that struck infamously between auto manufacturers and UAW leadership beginning in the 1970s or so: a smaller more permanent workforce, grandfathered in, were guaranteed continuing employment, income, and pension rights, at the expense of all future employees. The work conditions, income, and real job protections of workers in the auto industry or higher education in the 1970s look like unbelievable dreams to the workers of today—such has been the destruction of labor conditions in these industries. Labor in higher education has been entirely subjected to “free market” competition, which is to say, labor on the terms dictated by capitalists. This is why tenure has to be eliminated, after all, according to every education manager: it interferes with “flexibility” that the university needs to hire according to “market demand” (which means, in reality, the absolute authority to create and control an industrial reserve army, lower wages, and exploit workers).  

year in review, 2015

It has been a while since I wrote a year-in-review post--over three years, in fact. It may seem inapposite to post a year-in-review rather than three-years-in-review, but because, in the terms of the CFA-CSU Collective Bargaining Agreement, a three-year review is pursuant to the re-hiring of us long-time temporary faculty, the idea makes me anxious.

With that preface, my year in review, 2015.

Much as in recent years past, I confined the bulk of my activities to teaching, reading, writing, cycling, having debilitating vertigo attacks, faculty labor activism, guitar playing, and cooking. You will notice the conspicuous absence of larceny on that list. 

I would like to say that I feel as if I accomplished many great things in 2015. I suppose many others would also like that, about themselves. But how many of us can say this in good faith? And how many others who do say it are in actual fact university administrators instead? 

I tried burning the candle at both ends, and realized that whoever coined this expression must not have been using jar candles. I tried going the extra mile, but the result of that was that I had to return from that extra mile, because I had overshot the campus by approximately one mile. I attempted to give 110%, only to find that I had a 10% deficit. Since then, I have decided to just do it. When I discover what it is, and how to do it, I will update my progress. 

We continue to live with three cats, despite their efforts. This year, Alexander had surgery to remove a foreign body from his gut. Last year it was Valentine, so presumably this coming year it will be Arthur. On the other hand, perhaps it will be me, even though I am still not a cat, despite my efforts.

culture, language, racism, and capitalist relations of production

I know I need to learn more about critical race theory, and I know the reason I have not done so is that I’m afraid to confront my own racism. (I take it for granted that there is racism embedded in my consciousness and experience.)

I posted something on Facebook about the only real issue in the Presidential campaign being the class warfare of the capitalists on all the rest of us, and one comment I received was that this isn’t true — there’s rampant racist violence, and attacks on the reproductive and health care rights of women, to name two others. My response was that the only real issue in the campaign was the economic one because the base builds the superstructure. This is a standard Marxist line, taken to explain that culture is produced and reproduced in capitalist society by capitalist social relations of production, so that every cultural phenomenon is a phenomenon of class division, commodification, alienation of labor, and the mystifications and contradictions of capitalism. I think that’s true, but not a complete story. What I want to explain here is why it's a true story.

Culture is produced and reproduced by capitalist production in capitalist society—which by now means the entire global society. Some implications of this follow.

(1) What does it mean to say that culture is produced and reproduced by capitalist social relations of production? It means that there is a class of workers whose only commodity for sale, their labor, becomes the variable capital consumed in the production of cultural artifacts. Those cultural artifacts include books, newspapers, television programs, food, language, art objects, ideas, etc. (Right now, I’m contributing surplus labor by producing the ideas that I’m writing. These words are products of capitalist relations of production because I am not the owner of the means of production, even though I nominally own the labor that I exert. Once they leave my hands, it is not clear that I am any longer the “owner” of the ideas or words, for a variety of reasons, among them that I’m using MS Word that I acquired through the university.)

Language and ideas are produced under capitalist relations of production. They are commodities with potential for becoming capital in the production of something further—more language and ideas, or a new-fangled toothbrush, or whatever. For instance, a person once wrote in an email “;-)” in order to indicate sarcasm. That has become a cultural icon, and has been capitalized upon in the production of the cultural artifacts called emojis, and emojis are now commodities that are sold to users of various social media by way of the advertising revenue generated by users. Emojis, and “;-)” are now parts of culture, parts of language, that in our ordinary dealing with the world do not appear as products of capitalist social relations of production, or as commodities. They have become “naturalized” parts of the language.

(2) In order to understand what emojis are, we have to understand not only how to apply them in social media messages (i.e., how to consume them), but how they are produced. If we follow Marx still further, that understanding is not the point, the point is to change the world, that is, to change the social relations of production that are to be found by analysis of emojis. Every analysis of culture should go in the direction of a ruthless criticism of capitalist relations of production.

(3) In as much as language and (presumably) racism existed prior to capitalism, Marxist analysis can’t explain the origin of these phenomena. That does not mean Marxist analysis is not relevant. Whatever language was prior to capitalism, it’s not the same thing now, because language is a cultural phenomenon that is produced and reproduced by current relations of production.

While it is apparently clear that those from whom we begin to acquire language are close-by cohabitors who aren’t commodifying language by speaking in the household, it does not follow that spoken language is not a consumer object. There are obvious examples of consumer object language in everyday household talk, like cultural buzzwords that derive from media consumption. But further, all language is reproduced in capitalist society by capitalist production.

Like language, so too racism. While those from whom we learn racism are also our close-by cohabitors who do not intend to commodify racism, racism is still a consumer object. There are obvious media messages that reproduce racism through stereotypes, racist images, and so on. Racism is a cultural phenomenon, and in capitalist society, all cultural phenomena are produced and reproduced through capitalist relations of production.

(4) Why does anyone produce racist images in consumer media messages? The answer to that is simple: they’re paid to do so. Now, the workers who create racist messages might or might not “believe in” the messages, but from the standpoint of capitalist production, their belief is not relevant. Only the valorization of capital advanced by the capitalist in the form of profit is relevant. From the standpoint of the capitalist, the content of the message is irrelevant as long as it is saleable and profitable. Those messages that generate more profit will be reproduced again and again as long as they are profitable. Whether this produces or reproduces a culture that suffers violence, hatred, fear, and dysfunction is also not relevant to the capitalist, except in so far as those sufferings can be treated as needs for which consumer objects can be produced for a profit.

It is important to emphasize that this does not explain the origin of racism (or of language). But I’m not sure discovering the origin of racism is important for dealing with racism. I am sure that dealing with racism will require dealing with profiteering from it.