On a quite different event from the one I am about to discuss, one “Mr. Eugene Debs” writes:
You are the master of nothing! There is one master, and he is King Jay-sus! And there is no other!”
…..And the audience rose to their feet and applauded. Laughing. Uproariously. As though the thought vastly delighted them. . . . And I—who had in the past been often left angry or repelled or even dismayed by the sort of things I heard from these quarters—I found myself surprised to be simply…sad.
…..It’s hard to isolate the precise utterly demoralizing quality about the utter, vacant happiness, the casual self-debasement of the human spirit on display; but it struck a deep well of melancholy within me. Even the Communists—or the Nazis, if you will forgive me for Godwinizing myself—never quite managed, in seven decades of repressive conformism and gunpoint-enforced groupthink, to pull off the trick of telling people that they were nothing more than chattel and have them actually laugh and applaud them for it!
This quite neatly summarizes the experience of Reeducation.
And oddly, I am at this moment up to date on all work. I am not saying ahead, only up to date. I got behind when I reentered Reeducation, but now at last I am up to date. It was a terrible feeling to be so far behind, and yet not to be enough of a master of one’s fate to catch up. I knew it was a bad thing, but it is yet more obvious now that I am caught up.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Oh, I can’t wait to look back on my present condition and understand how bad it really is. I’m afraid I sound sarcastic but I’m really truly sincere! From this vantage point, it’s hard to imagine being caught up. I’m looking forward to the possibility.
I’m sure I’ll be behind again but never in the way I was when I was dragging Reeducation around with me! It is a huge difference not to be behind (and behind for that reason, wherein just hurrying up wouldn’t work). I got so used to being behind that I had forgotten entirely what it was like to begin the day with a clean slate, as it were.
But what is the elemental difference between the speech given above and that of a certain strain of english academic thought that says we are all superficial haze with only the illusion of depth and we should grasp this as a mutual act of superiority in the face of Modernist attempts to do anything more?
These days I accept that I can be nobody’s channeler of insight and certainly nobody’s guru, except in the case of those who already have ears to hear. There are those who are addicted to thanatos. That is hard enough to understand — but there are all sorts of consciously aware and semi-conscious adherents to that which will give them a haze or cloak to hide their own distaste of themselves. They embrace incoherence because they are afraid of being called to account. And, they become enablers of others who they expect are into the same game (which is why it is VERY hard to get any clear or honest dialogue going within much of academia). Everybody wants the salve, but nobody (or few) have the presence of mind to speak honestly.
I was caught up, once.
Difference between that speech and a certain strain of academic thought: very little. This connection is worth remembering.
Addicted to thanatos – yes. Embracing incoherence because of being afraid to be called to account (and results of this), YES.
I am constantly called “controlling” because I think discussions should stay on point and if they are about business, some conclusion should be reached on action. It’s not that I want MY way to be the one chosen, it’s that I want SOME COHERENT WAY to be chosen and acted upon.
I am also constantly called “too intellectual” and “too rational”. In an old job I was constantly called “unpredictable” because I was objective – would vote on my point of view on a particular issue, not join a voting bloc. (They finally got used to it and enshrined me as an official tiebreaker. 😉 )
I had professors like that. My favorite professors were like that, but most of the students would complain.
I’ve also been criticized for that, unpredictability. I think the unspoken assumption is that the person who’s (trying to) be objective has either totally spaced about the politics, or else possibly joined some kind of new and disruptive cabal. The idea that the decisions actually matter to the organization (as opposed to the members who benefit from them), I think people normally just assume that kind of talk is a smokescreen.
AHA, this is very helpful, Tom!
Of students, only freshmen complain about intellectuality and rationality. Faculty, on the other hand, are the ones who have a more serious problem with what I’d call professionalism, and they mix it with the “unpredictability.”
You’re right about how attempts at objectivity and long term planning, etc., are taken. At least here. But I’ve worked at other places where the sort of analysis , discussion and planning I do is normal – in fact, that’s where I learned it!
That, actually, is what confuses me. Having had so many colleagues over the years who did have integrity, I am really surprised to not have it be the default assumption. Now, though, it seems that with the corporate university and the corporate style chairs, that kind of talk really is just a smokescreen. It is very interesting.
I guess there must always be a mix of the two. I’ve had my focus on what was really going on make me points with the same guy who later found me “unpredictable.”
Part of it, at least in the Corp, was that everybody saw themselves as being potentially in charge. And of course if you do stuff then you rank lower than people who don’t do stuff. It got to the point, at least during the Bubble, that new PhDs interviewing for jobs, if they couldn’t handle a technical interview, would sometimes just promote themselves over my head. I remember one guy said something about “the efforts of talented people like yourself.” During the interview. It was puzzling. Somebody (not me!) did hire him, and he wasn’t intrinsically a bad guy, or particularly weak in his field … just … I dunno, it reminds me of what some of the Bushies say now, they say something like “we create reality.” And people don’t say something that psychotic unless they think they’ve seen it happening.
“I’ve had my focus on what was really going on make me points with the same guy who later found me ‘unpredictable.'”
Me, too. It all depends on whether what you know or perceive supports the reality they are trying to believe in, or not.
It’s interesting. As a person from the academic, not the corporate model, I do not dream of becoming a CEO type officer in the university but I do expect autonomy and to have input and especially, to be treated as a colleague and not a Wal*Mart employee.
However, many people now seem to expect that one wants to rise to power over others, and to do this by cutting throats, manipulating, and so on.
Ohhhhh … of course. I had jimmied together some picture about how it was because the guy got promoted and changed his focus or something. This is simpler.
Yeah, I think the climbing-over-people’s-backs model of “organization” is pretty bad. I grew up hearing about administrators behaving that way, but I think most faculty did not.
I actually wrote an email to Noam Chomsky once about something related. The business I was working in was not particularly driven by profits, instead the primary focus seemed to be literally on disempowering workers. So workers who figured out how to get a higher yield, creating less scrap (and this was astronomically expensive high-tech scrap), each of those workers was attacked and ultimately driven out. And the business was losing money like crazy due to the yield problem, and they didn’t care, the important thing was to crack the whip.
He actually answered, and he said it’s a long tradition, that in practice companies have tended to take decision-making power from people lower down, even when it costs them money.
I don’t think he had any particular explanation for it.
Still, what Chomsky said is pretty interesting! I think it’s about control and expendability … if all decisions are made higher up, the lower level workers can be rotated in and out, and are not depended upon for anything but routine work … and oppression is important for keeping people in line.
I know plantations and many kinds of companies do these sorts of things, but I was not raised in universities that did this sort of thing at the academic level … although in their business dealings they did. Now, though, it seems it is done, and to be done, at the academic level as well!
It’s really disturbing. I don’t know how professors can do their jobs that way.
Well … I’ve been obstructed by it for years. It helps, a lot, to actually identify and name it.
FYI – Chunk didn’t write that – he merely posted it. It was written by one Mr. Eugene Debs who posts once a year or so on our blog. He’s a former student of mine. Brilliant. Slovenian. I’ll let him know that you liked it.
“we create reality.” And people don’t say something that psychotic unless they think they’ve seen it happening.
If the Bushies were incapable of creating thier own reality… they’d hang themselves.
Hi RG – I’ve changed the credit!
Tom and Poetryman – this idea of “creating reality” is quite odd. I think in self-help it is directed at people who claim to be helpless or don’t think they have any responsibility at all for what is happening to them. I also was taught it in a lot of postmodern type French classes in graduate school and thought it was psychotic. I said so and people said I was naive, the creation and production of reality was happening all around me.
cero,
Are you saying reeducators told certain folks that they had “created their own reality”?
I also was taught it in a lot of postmodern type French classes in graduate school and thought it was psychotic. I said so and people said I was naive, the creation and production of reality was happening all around me.
In my postmodernist class we were told that it was sophisticated and right to adopt a posture of solipsism — we should no longer refer to anything happening “out there” since the structure of reality was actually in our own heads.
Tom – yes. Slaves can sing in their chains, and all, you know 😉 .
Jennifer – I was told this in several postmodernist classes. In my PhD exam I wrote words to the effect of, look, I know what I am supposed to say on this matter but this is a PhD exam in a famous department at a famous university, and out of respect for the institution and the discipline I simply cannot mouth these obvious falsities.
Jennifer – I was told this in several postmodernist classes. In my PhD exam I wrote words to the effect of, look, I know what I am supposed to say on this matter but this is a PhD exam in a famous department at a famous university, and out of respect for the institution and the discipline I simply cannot mouth these obvious falsities.
It seems to be linked to some Kantian notion that we cannot know the ‘thing in itself’. Actually I think it is a misappropriation of Kant. I think — although I’m not knowledgeable enough to say for sure — that Popperian science is more of a correct appropriation of Kant. It is good to have a certain skeptical distance from what we think we know, in order to maintain the possibility of having been mistaken. If we are too confident and too dogmatic, we cannot learn. So it is good to accept that reality isn’t simply what it seems to be.
The quarrel I have with po-mo is that it takes away the power to perceive the world …. and gives nothing in its place. We can all become self-reflexive, but there is no skymonkey to distribute the browney points.
I think it’s the same as Reeducation. Reeducation was directed toward people who thought they could do no wrong and were always right, so it undermined self-confidence. Post-modernism sets itself up against a sort of straw man: a single, perceivable, always stable reality, and so on.
I didn’t follow your last sentence. There may have been a word missing.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot of liberalism lately but especially po-mo liberalism is that (perhaps this is what you meant to say?) they place themselves within (and in some senses at a vantage point) over a very stable reality. There are other things that they do, too. For example the same ‘spiritual’ sadomasochism that is found in medieval christianity is replicated in the patterning of their thought. Specifically, they see that human beings were travelling along on a trajectory of a heretical faith (science and humanism — specifically, the Enlightenment). But due to the heretical nature of the faith, they committed a sin (killed a bunch of Jews) – and now we have to repent (be penitent for a term) by denying that we can accurately perceive anything. We have to doubt our own perceptions and our own reason. After this time of penitence, a new dispensation will come, which will lead us out of the wilderness and into a phase of greater human harmony and peace. (But this cycle of penitence and redemption is the form of sadomasochistic bipolarity of the christian mindset that Nietzsche critiques in Genealogy of Morals.)
Also, whereas everyone now knows that it is wrong to persecute the Jews, because this moral lesson has been hammered home somewhat, it is still considered correct, according to both postmodern and Western thinking, to persecute those who “weally twoolly” deserve it. Thus it has become an excellent and highly moral idea to persecute white colonials (although those who have insight — such as Ashis Nandy — warn against this) and it is considered not too inappropriate to persecute Muslims so long as they have information that we need.
OK, I changed it slightly. I mean: if you didn’t believe in some sort of monolithic ultra-objective “reality” in the first place, you don’t need the postmodern corrective.
Yes … interesting on sadomasochistic pendulum swings, and also on reform. We can stop persecuting Jews, or any particular group, but not stop persecuting people in general, because to do that would be to have to start living in a different way.
?
Right agreed and agreed.
Little palliatives and salves for conscience bought at the expense of facing life with clear vision and boldly.