Slacking For Social Justice, Part Two
Laziness, apparently, is “a political stance.” Specifically,
As political action, laziness… provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.
Ah, yes. The neoliberal condition of modern academia.
To meet social justice commitments, postqualitative inquiry must affirmatively disavow neoliberalism and confront it with new sets of materialist-empiricist toolkits for configuring assemblages in retaliation of the reductionist economic becomings and becoming-economies. We must refute our work. We must become lazy.
The author of this unhappy word-pile, Professor Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, is the department chair of higher education at the University of Denver. To spare you needless exposure to the professor’s prose, Greg Piper of The College Fix offers a handy summary:
Unsurprisingly, the professor says the concept of laziness is used to harm poor people, nonwhites, “overweight individuals” and women. But they can also use laziness as a weapon against “the dominant power structure” by, for example, housekeepers “completing the minimum required to keep their jobs” to protest “the subjugation of their profession and personhood.”
Not hoovering under the sofa is, it turns out, a radical act, a feat of protest and empowerment.
The full paper can be perused here. Though I feel I should point out that it’s a wearying thing and may inspire thoughts of self-harm.
When not championing the doing of things in a tardy, half-arsed way, and driving his car back and forth over the English language, Professor Gildersleeve mingles with “historically marginalised communities” and “non-dominant youth,” where his prose and searing insights will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins.
The professor’s other contributions to human advancement include The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic, in which we learn that,
All of our things, whether natural or plastic, share agency with us humans.
Yes, dear readers. Bubble-wrap lives.
And,
Neoliberalism… can be understood as a particularized governmentality of things focused on rendering reality using technologies of hyper-individualism, hyper-surveillance, economic determinations of productivity, and competitive entrepreneurialism.
Something tells me it’s those “economic determinations of productivity” that really chafe the professor’s cheeks, given the customary expectations of competence and usefulness.
Previously in the Clown Quarter, and very much related.
Not hoovering under the sofa is, it turns out, a radical act, a feat of protest and empowerment.
I’ve been saying this for years. 🙂
The Lazy Activist’s Manifesto: Slackers of the World!.. ah f*ck it.
The mind boggles.
I don’t even know where to begin.
Words and hackneyed catch phrases just strung together with punctuation added. All to defend some idiot’s desire to slack off and get paid for it?
What happens in his theoretical world when everyone has the same attitude? When the basic infrastructure on which his sorry existence depends and which he takes for granted breaks down and ceases to function properly?
Or does he assume he and those properly-coloured and sexually orientated have some kind of laziness privilege? And the rest of us just have to work around it and accommodate it? I think there is something in Darwin’s evolutionary theories about that, and I don’t think this worthless excuse for a human would like very much what that would mean for him.
The good news is that Professor Guildersleeves influence will not extend to the actual lazy who cannot be bothered to interrupt binge-watching the Collected Works of Jerry Springer. This proves the Professor’s thesis that the Lazy’s non-contribution by not reading the Professor’s paper actually improves the tone of academic discourse.
My guess is that the Professor wants to grant tenure to otherwise non qualified persons who haven’t met the requirements for research, teaching and service, and proposes to attain this outcome by redefining the lack of accomplishment as meeting the University’s standard.
Good luck.
Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?
“economic becomings and becoming-economies”
See, that kind of thing is how you know he’s clever.
But isn’t this just the go-slows and work-to-rules beloved of bolshie 1970s British Leyland employees warmed over? Now that’s lazy…
driving his car back and forth over the English language
Now laughing on the Tube.
Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?
If you’re white male – really, need you ask?
As political action, laziness… provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.
Great merciful Zeus, what did I just read?
Poe’s Law winner for 2018 found already. What will we do for the remaining 346 days?
Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?
Apparently. And if you expect the cleaner, the one that you’re paying, to do a decent job and not cut corners at every opportunity, then… well, I suppose you’re Hitler’s nastier neoliberal cousin.
“To meet social justice commitments, postqualitative inquiry must affirmatively disavow neoliberalism and confront it with new sets of materialist-empiricist toolkits for configuring assemblages in retaliation of the reductionist economic becomings and becoming-economies.”
This is how you make your fake science unassailable outside of your own clique. You clothe it in vernacular until your words have meaning only to your chosen group.
You cannot parse these words using tools of language. You cannot, for instance, derive meaning from “postqualitative inquiry” by using a dictionary. It is merely a label assigned to a concept, accepted by your clique as having some specific meaning cloaked from non-members.
Once you have so cloaked your meanings in such labels, you cannot be challenged on your words by those who are not schooled in your labels.
If these people were forced to speak English, they would be laughed out of academia. This is their defense.
“it’s a wearying thing and may inspire thoughts of self-harm”
Prog mission accomplished.
The good news is that Professor Guildersleeve’s influence will not extend to the actual lazy who cannot be bothered to interrupt binge-watching the Collected Works of Jerry Springer.
Like so many pretentious lefties, the professor seems unnerved by the unremarkable fact that drive, aptitude and mental wherewithal are unequally distributed, and always will be. Indeed, this fact is apparently so traumatic to his sensibilities that he now seems convinced that plastic is sentient.
Somewhat related:
Does anyone detect a theme?
Honestly, are we completely convinced that this isn’t a parody? Somehow, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve sounds too much like it came out of an early SNL skit for me to be completely comfy believing it. I concede that the prolix density of his prose is rather like that of his academic competitors in Critical Studies and Art Criticism, but he seems to struggle with occasional elements of limpidity which the Derrida/Foucault crowd tamp down so effortlessly.
He’s the “Department Chair of Higher Education” at University of Denver.
Isn’t a whole university supposed to be the “Department of Higher Education”?
So, maybe the whole school is a parody?
Ryan Gildersleeve:
http://portfolio.du.edu/rgilder2
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve
Associate Professor & Chair, Higher Education Department
Biographical Description
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve’s (RyanEG) research investigates the philosophical foundations of American higher education in relationship to the social and political contexts of educational opportunity for historically marginalized communities. He has a particular interest in supporting Latin@ (im)migrant families. A critical qualitative methodologist, he is interested in theorizing a materialist inquiry that informs social policy for more democratic postsecondary institutions. These lines of research connect in their contributions to understanding what it means to seek social opportunities as democratic participants in an increasingly global society. . .
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve
Gildersleeve was the name of a pompous blowhard in the radio show Fibber McGee and Molly.
The character was spun off into a separate show sarcastically titled “The Great Gildersleeve”.
The inevitable conclusion to the ‘equality of outcome’ nonsense.
If all that matters is the outcome then the inputs don’t matter.
Our biggest tasks r 2 defeat the 2 ideological pillars of capitalism: 1) that we have to pay our debts and 2) that we have to have jobs.
I have a solution for people like that: slavery. It is all they are fit for.
I was gonna read her paper but it just seemed like too much effort. Taking a nap instead.
…will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins.
More likely the scratching and stroking of many neck beards.
Great merciful Zeus, what did I just read?
As the carnivore said when he walked into the salad bar restaurant, “what fresh hell is this?”
…where his prose and searing insights will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins
Is that a shot at the aforementioned “overweight individuals?
The inevitable conclusion to the ‘equality of outcome’ nonsense.
Given that academic bureaucrats endlessly blather about the importance of “equity” – which translates as “equality of outcome regardless of inputs” – then contortions like the one above are merely an extension of the philosophy, such as it is.
So in recent years, we’ve had to put up with qualitative research, which is basically a pretense allowing “academics” to do a couple of focus groups or case studies and then write up their summaries as though they were meaningful, all because nobody on that side of campus can do the statistical analysis required for real research, and they’re too proud to talk to the data geeks about helping them with the numbery bits. It all gets published because the “peers” in the peer review process can’t do math, either. (A lot of these projects turned out surprisingly well, if only because a focus group of stoners telling you that they’re often late for work because “reasons” really is representative of the demographic segment as a whole, even if nobody could be bothered to prove it mathematically.)
Now, along comes “post-qualitative” research, which I can only assume is related to qualitative research in the same way that Stephen Glass’ work was related to news reporting.
*sigh*
Did not someone, once, write a book called “In Praise of Idleness”?
I imagine it was written long ago, well and with tongue in cheek. I am sure someone here can confirm.
So, maybe the whole school is a parody?
Consider:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1532708616669522
“The Neoliberal Academy of the Anthropocene and the Retaliation of the Lazy Academic
Focusing on production and dissemination of academic knowledge, this article discusses the role of higher education as it serves the neoliberal imperative. Emphasis is given to two fundamental realities that are influencing higher education today: neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. These two realities shape the crisis of the Professoriate: differentiating faculty into the romantic individual while simultaneously forcing the production of human capital in the name of neoliberalism. The production and performance of the neoliberal knowledge imperative is illustrated through the faculty performance review system. To reclaim the knowledge imperative the article argues that the refusal of work must occur. The refusal of work generates a posthuman subject, the “lazy academic” that is able to reconceptualize how the faculty can confront the neoliberal university.”
Pompous blowhard. Fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Other_Essays
If these people were forced to speak English,
Some people will put amazing amounts of energy towards avoiding any real work.
Did not someone, once, write a book called “In Praise of Idleness”?
Bertrand Russell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Other_Essays
“In the eponymous essay, Russell argues that if labour was equitably shared out amongst everyone, resulting in shorter work days, unemployment would decrease and human happiness would increase due to the increase in leisure time, further resulting in increased involvement in the arts and sciences.”
It seems that Russell knew a lot about math, but virtually nothing about human behavior.
Russell argues that if labour was equitably shared out amongst everyone, resulting in shorter work days, unemployment would decrease and human happiness would increase
He didn’t get out much, did he?
From Wikipedia:
“Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy.”
It is interesting how many children of aristocratic families became socialists.
Naturally, Russell’s socialism did not extend to giving away his own wealth.
“Russell opposed rearmament against Nazi Germany. In 1937 he wrote in a personal letter: “If the Germans succeed in sending an invading army to England we should do best to treat them as visitors, give them quarters and invite the commander and chief to dine with the prime minister.” In 1940, he changed his view…”
He shared that early follow with many others bien pensants. As Orwell wrote, only an intellectual could be so foolish.
But in his favor, while he was a socialist he was not a communist.
He didn’t get out much, did he?
I suppose it isn’t at all remarkable that someone titillated by eugenics should favour a totalitarian premise. But it’s odd that he favoured a totalitarian premise that has fairly obvious dysgenic implications.
I knew it. All this time i was sitting on my ass and getting high i’ve actually been smashing the patriachy! Bet my mum won’t even be grateful..
I knew it. All this time i was sitting on my ass and getting high i’ve actually been smashing the patriachy!
See the South Park episode “Die Hippie Die”. Hilarious.
See the South Park episode “Die Hippie Die”.
It’s one of their best.
We read it here first!
http://thefederalist.com/2018/01/10/19-insane-tidbits-james-damores-lawsuit-googles-office-environment/
Congratulations, David, you beat out a “news” site!
“In Praise of Idleness” – The importance of not being earnest?
What the hell does “postqualitative” mean?
“It’s a wearying thing and may inspire thoughts of self-harm”
Truth, yet it also inspires warm thoughts about Mao Tse-Tung. He would have sent these grifters to work in the rice paddies.
David:
Do you know that there is a Maoist Professor of Economics at Utah State University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Minqi? If this can happen at a university in the most conservative state in the union, what the hell goes on in the rest of the country? These universities are basically Trojan Horses at this point, and people who send their children to an American university should realize that they are playing Russian Roulette with their childrens’ brains. They are not there to get an “education”, they are there to get brainwashed.
Do you know that there is a Maoist Professor of Economics at Utah State University?
Imagine my surprise.
The future that awaits the graduates of the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver, once the Chair of the Department of Higher Education is through shaping their eager young minds, depicted in the form of a visual metaphor:
Kindly old couple release young squirrel into tree to live life of freedom
OT, but we haven’t had Fine Art lately, so enjoy and be enlightened.
Professor Ryan Evely Gildersleeve, is the department chair of higher education at the University of Denver.
Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver
All right, I call bollocks. You’re making that up. You got those names from Harry Potter.
The “Gildersleeve” does sound suspiciously close to the name of one of the Potter characters. He too was a posturing, bumbling, pretentious, self-regarding incompetent.
Honestly, are we completely convinced that this isn’t a parody? Somehow, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve sounds too much like it came out of an early SNL skit for me to be completely comfy believing it.
It does have a Godfrey Elfwick / Wrightly Willowleaf aspect to it.
Speaking of the pretentious and self-absorbed, former President Barack
ObamaOzymandias plans to erect a monument befitting his glory.Unlike previous Presidential libraries, this one will contain no documents, but will have a Museum and 2-level Forum, which will be a “two-story public meeting space, with one story above grade and one below ground, where people of all backgrounds can come together for programming.”
Programming, like Google employees?
(O_O)
(Hoping Typepad won’t choke on TinyURL links…)
we haven’t had Fine Art lately
I… uh… I just dunno anymore.
On the plus side, that did lead to this attempted recreation. Somehow, I find that one more compelling.
Meanwhile in the Illinois Clown quarter, Asian studies professor says Asians are guilty of “colorblind racism”.
Unfortunately a clown to English translator is unavailable.
Of course.
Re: the Obama Temple, from the AoSHQ comments:
Nobody does snark like the Moron Horde.
This is proof that we have way too many PhD candidates. All of the good and worthwhile dissertation topics were covered years ago, but we keep producing more PhD candidates. So, they keep digging for more topics, and we end up getting drivel such as this asshat has produced.
Whon I saw the bho library pic on Ace, I thought it was a joke. Looked to me like a Normandy Atlantic Wall battery surrounded by barbed wire. Who uses denuded trees in an architectural model?
This is how you make your fake science unassailable outside of your own clique. You clothe it in vernacular until your words have meaning only to your chosen group.
Postmodernism defined…
Five years after it opens the Barack Hussein Obama Presidential ‘Library’ And Community Center will be a trash-strewn magnet for every prostitute, gang member, and crackhead in town. Its walls will be lit up at least once a week by the blue flashing light of Chicago P.D. patrol cars responding to another shooting.
This is how you make your fake science unassailable outside of your own clique. You clothe it in vernacular until your words have meaning only to your chosen group.
Postmodernism defined…
“Normandy Atlantic Wall battery surrounded by barbed wire”
Ha! That’s what I thought, too, but then figured I must be just seeing things.
Or maybe we both need to spend some time in its below ground programming space.
I wonder if it’s worse than David’s re-groover?
That “whirring” noise you hear in Chicago is the sound of the bodies of Van der Rohe, Burnham and Lloyd Wright rolling over in their graves.
Frank Lloyd Wright is starting to emit a grinding sound: The bearings are rusting due to the fact that his flat roof leaks.
….the concept of laziness is used to harm poor people, nonwhites, “overweight individuals”
and then,
will no doubt prompt much nodding and the rubbing of many chins.
I don’t know if the connection was intentional or not, but I got a bloody good laugh out of it.
Via Ace again. “The work has political underpinnings” donchaknow. Of course it does…of course…
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdxZD_EAedg/
The Lazy Activist’s Manifesto: Slackers of the World!.. ah f*ck it.
Look, if you’re trying to figure out if it’s ignorant or apathetic, really, no one knows and no one cares.
Unlike previous Presidential libraries, this one will contain no documents, but will . . .
Oh, yes, that level of quite untethered and rather shrill hysteria did seem a bit much.
From the center site;
and then also . . .
Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?
Uh huh. And if you don’t hire a cleaner you’ll be oppressing and excluding them.
The obvious effort this nimrod expended to pile of the verbiage would tend to subvert his thesis.
I have a solution for people like that: slavery. It is all they are fit for.
Eh. I’d settle for instructive starvation.
“Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?”
Or, you’re, you know, driving the economy? Helping someone put food on the table?
they can also use laziness as a weapon against “the dominant power structure” by, for example, housekeepers “completing the minimum required to keep their jobs” to protest “the subjugation of their profession and personhood.”
And lots of lazy workers wind up getting replaced by less lazy ones. *golfclap*
And lots of lazy workers wind up getting replaced by less lazy ones. *golfclap*
Well, quite. It doesn’t sound like an optimal strategy to improve one’s life. But as we’ve seen, the left is famed for giving terrible, life-ruining advice. And our self-imagined betters continue their perverse counsel because, unlike their vain and credulous victims, it costs them nothing.
It occurs to me that this may not be entirely unrelated.
Via Ben.
An explanation of postqualitative analysis (sic).
From the introduction:
As I noted earlier, I argue that the structure of conventional humanist qualitative methodology is so deeply marked by contradiction that it deconstructs itself and, so, can be displaced.
OK, so far so good; but when we get to the chapter headed “Deconstruction: trouble from the beginning” we encounter this:
At that time, translations of the French poststructuralists’ work were just being published, and there were still many French texts to be translated and not many secondary sources that provided commentary or critique. Foucault died in 1984, and translations of his interviews and essays were slowly published in various collections. Those who could read French cited the French editions of Foucault’s, Derrida’s, Deleuze’s, Deleuze and Guattari’s, Lyotard’s, and Baudrillard’s work; the rest of us were in the dark.
Well, let’s hope that the translators applied rigorously some of that there conventional humanist quantitative methodology when they did their thing, or the world might have ended up with the impression that postructuralism is a right load of old bollocks.
“Poststructuralism”, damn it. (Yes, I know, “Edit is your friend”).
Great merciful Zeus, what did I just read?
Heh. That’s inspired.
Also, on postmodernist critique; if I am correct in thinking that the entire concept is based upon the notion that the each and every feature, text or artefact of the classical Western academy/canon/whatever is to be regarded as a sort of palimpsest informed by the psychology and innate prejudices of its creator, how come (as in St. Pierre’s essay) Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Baudrillard’s work is apparently regarded as sacrosanct?
After all, a lot of this stuff has been around for thirty or forty years now, and has become kind of mainstream in the humanities, so why do they get a free pass?
Is it because one might come to the conclusion that here we have a bunch of failed soixante-huitard pseuds who needed to come up with something- anything, really- once it became apparent that the revolution wasn’t going to happen?
Because scholarship in the humanities has been replaced by scholasticism. Starting in the early Eighties. Scholasticism was the mediaeval school of thought in which enquiry entailed appeal to authority. It led, famously, to heated debates about angels dancing upon the heads of pins.
These days Aristotle, Socrates and Plato have been replaced by Foucault and his ilk. David’s elegant exposure of the grandiose idiocies churned out by the modern scholastics demonstrate the net result.
Please may we have the Enlightenment back?
The reason why deconstructionism and poststructuralism remain popular in academics is that anyone can do it with absolutely no training. Better still, all deconstructive and poststructrualist scribbling is by definition beyond criticism.
Prof Guildersneeze uses “postqualitative” as a new term to encompass both deconstructionism and poststructuralism. This is his enduring legacy to the Academy and may be the reason he is the Chair of his department.
David, do I have a comment stuck in the spam filter?
Nope.
“It is interesting how many children of aristocratic families became socialists.”
I’ve always said that socialism, especially in its British form, was a scam whereby the aristocracy reinvented and rebranded feudal paternalism as something revolutionary by allowing a few commoners in on the action if they didn’t upset the applecart too much. And the masses fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.
How else do you explain the National Health? Or the Kinnock family?
“After all, a lot of this stuff has been around for thirty or forty years now, and has become kind of mainstream in the humanities, so why do they get a free pass?”
Same reason Marx did: because internal consistency would break the nice little racket they’ve got going.
“The work has political underpinnings”
I watched with the sound on … instead of the promised dance with music, I got ‘seizures set to sounds of industrial vacuuming’.
Russell argues that if labour was equitably shared out amongst everyone, resulting in shorter work days, unemployment would decrease and human happiness would increase
He didn’t get out much, did he?
Well, if by “out”, you mean “into the pants of his friends’ wives”, then yes. He was an enthusiast of open relationships, especially on his end. As Paul Johnson noted in Intellectuals, though, he was eventually forced to concur that such theoretical notions didn’t work out that well in practice.
In other news, noted intellectual mecca the Atlantic takes a break from worrying about emoji intersectionality to worry that children are learning “dangerous” lessons about diversity by hearing cartoon villains speak in foreign accents.
I knew it was all those Saturday morning cartoons that turned me into a shitlord.
I’ve always said that socialism, especially in its British form, was a scam whereby the aristocracy reinvented and rebranded feudal paternalism
Yes.
“Let me get this straight. If I hire a cleaner I’ll be “subjugating their personhood”?”
That is entirely orthodox Marxism: having to work for wages is “exploitation”. And thus visitors to the Soviet Union saw shoddy goods and rotten to nonexistent service, because the populace had been indoctrinated to see performing a service as demeaning.
worry that children are learning “dangerous” lessons about diversity by hearing cartoon villains speak in foreign accents.
Can I traumatize the idiots at the Atlantic simply by saying “Moose and squirrel”?
having to work for wages is “exploitation”
Reminds me of the Guardian’s Leo Hickman, who seemed to believe that the way to help poor people is to not buy their products.
worry that children are learning “dangerous” lessons about diversity by hearing cartoon villains speak in foreign accents.
Tom Clancy’s book “Sum of all fears” the villains are Palestinian terrorists with the help of disgruntled East Germans.
When the movie was made in 2002, the villains were changed to neo-Nazis out to take over Europe.
Indeed, post-9/11 I don’t think any fictional movie, but one, allowed for Islamist terrorists as villains
List here.
Personally, I love the President Barack Obama Presidential Library. As a showpiece of marxist brutalism, it a textbook of what modern leftists think about beauty, the relationship of human beings to the structures we inhabit, and the ongoing dream to turn the entire world into a Soviet Union-era abandoned shopping mall.
I think it should be nicknamed Obama’s Codpiece as quickly as possible.
Turk Turkleton,
I knew it was all those Saturday morning cartoons that turned me into a shitlord.
pst314,
Can I traumatize the idiots at the Atlantic simply by saying “Moose and squirrel”?
But of course, dahlink!
Smallish Bees,
… a showpiece of marxist brutalism, it a textbook of what modern leftists think about beauty
Preezy his own bad self seems impressed.
…and the ongoing dream to turn the entire world into a Soviet Union-era abandoned shopping mall.
Heh.
“a scam whereby the aristocracy reinvented and rebranded feudal paternalism as something revolutionary”
I admit that that same thought has rattled around in my own brain from time to time.
rebranded feudal paternalism as something revolutionary
I’ll just leave this here.
Some “quite untethered and rather shrill hysteria” from the notoriously right-wing Chicago Tribune .
It’s nothing but a Temple to Obama.
Because scholarship in the humanities has been replaced by scholasticism.
Bingo. In the movie, The Name of the Rose, the character Jorge de Burgos announces, “There is nothing new . . . only blessed recapitulation.” Sums up modern academe quite well, I think.
It’s nothing but a Temple to Obama.
Technically, the actual temple is inside because the styrofoam Greek columns don’t hold up well to weather.
I’ll just leave this here.
The ‘Trek’ thread is great. You should blog about it more. 🙂
The ‘Trek’ thread is great. You should blog about it more. 🙂
It was fun, that one. But I’m not sure I’ve much to add to what’s already been said.
You know, another great thing about the Barack Obama Presidential Library is that, without physical books, the entire thing can be backed up on Huma Abedin’s computer system.