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.
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.