Good news, dear reader. You too can learn to be a performance artist and thereby make the world tremble. You could, for instance, attend Sandrine Schaefer’s course in Durational Performance Art, which is run by the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art. The ripened fruits of this intense and demanding study can be witnessed in the video below. Among its gems are the vigorous crayoning works of Nicole Dube, complete with off-camera grunting and sounds of exertion; a 90-minute display of marker pen misuse and poorly choreographed wrestling by Ambar Janual and Luke Ryba; and Darien Stankowski’s haphazard scraping of a wooden door, the purpose of which remains stubbornly unobvious and hard to care about.

However, the video begins with the colossal radicalism of Elaine Thap, a woman who refers to herself as “they,” “their” and “them,” and whose talents are described thusly, if only by herself – sorry, themself:

Elaine Thap uses identity in their work to convey layers of being and relationships… Taking the form of social constructs and the irony of it, they are asking for critical communication and concocting the politics of identity. Performance allows them to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility. They seek intersectional meaning and memory in others by the act of othering.

Ah yes, the politics of identity, intersectional meaning and of course othering. How terribly non-conformist. Now brace yourselves, people. I don’t want anyone fainting from the daring of it all: 

Speaking, as we were, of campus intolerance and the Clown Shoe Left, here’s something that may be worth half an hour of your time. In the following short film by Steve Brulé, Professor Janice Fiamengo of the University of Ottawa talks about the assumptions and effects of doctrinaire feminism and the censorious tactics of self-imagined radicals. Tactics that are illustrated quite vividly throughout. 

Professor Fiamengo also discusses campus censorship here. Via Joan in the comments following this. 

This just in from academia, more words you mustn’t use: 

The words “angry,” “passive” and “exotic” are also strongly discouraged and will no doubt be tutted at. Please update your files accordingly.

Via The College Fix.

Jim Goad on when a “hate crime” can’t be called that: 

I can only guess that the reason you don’t hear much about black-versus-Hispanic violence in America is that you’re not supposed to hear much about it. It’s the sort of thing that swims upstream against the dominant narrative with the tenacity of a thuggish, heavily tattooed salmon.

Somewhat related.  

Heather Mac Donald on the clown-shoe circus of identity politics: 

The Centre for the Study of Sexual Culture at the University of California, Berkeley, is presenting a talk next week on “Queering Agriculture,” dedicated to the proposition that “it is absolutely crucial queer and transgender studies begin to deal more seriously with the subject of agriculture.” […] The talk’s presenter, a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at the University of Maryland, will allegedly show that “the growing popularity of sustainable food is laden with anthroheterocentric assumptions of the ‘good life’ coupled with idealised images and ideas of the American farm, and gender, radicalised and normative standards of health, family, and nation.”

And Thomas Sowell on the peculiar impunity of self-styled campus radicals: 

An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object. Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others.

On the contrary, these students went on to demand mandatory campus “teach-ins,” and the administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that courses on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement for graduation. Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore, every student who trampled on other people’s rights could be expelled and there would be plenty of prospective students available to take their places. 

As we’ve seen so many, many times, some children need to learn that this world has consequences. But apparently the Clown Quarter of academia isn’t the place for that. And if you’re still not convinced, don’t forget the third item here, in which Alice McLachlan, a professor of philosophy, insists that censorious mobs who shriek personal abuse and shut down discussion are in fact the very model of progressive debate. You see, Professor McLachlan is “warmed” by such behaviour and she “cares a lot about free speech.” Just not for people who might dare to disagree with her.

Kevin Williamson on lifestyle leftism and class disdain: 

Progressivism, especially in its well-heeled coastal expressions, is not a philosophy — it’s a lifestyle. Specifically, it is a brand of conspicuous consumption, which in a land of plenty such as ours as often as not takes the form of conspicuous non-consumption: no gluten, no bleached flour, no Budweiser, no Walmart, no SUVs, no Toby Keith, etc. The people who set the cultural tone in places such as Berkeley, Seattle, or Austin would no more be caught vaping than they would slurping down a Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s — and they conclude without thinking that, therefore, neither should anybody else… There is no meaningful evidence that organic foods are more nutritious or safer, but the lifestyle progressives who run the Boulder schools insist on them, along with yoga. What’s banned? Chocolate milk.

And Charles C W Cooke on leftist in-fighting and the endless search for ideological purity: 

“I am out of ideas,” the socialist blogger Freddie DeBoer admitted yesterday afternoon, before inquiring rhetorically what he is supposed to conclude when he sees so “many good, impressionable young people run screaming from left-wing politics because they are excoriated the first second they step mildly out of line?” Among the things that DeBoer claims lately to “have seen, with my own two eyes,” are a white woman running from a classroom simply because she used the word “disabled”; a black man being ostracised for suggesting that there is “such a thing as innate gender differences”; and a Hispanic Iraq War veteran “being berated” for using the phrase “man up.” Worse for him and his interests, perhaps, DeBoer also claims to have under his belt “many more depressing stories of good people pushed out and marginalised in left-wing circles because they didn’t use the proper set of social and class signals to satisfy the world of intersectional politics.” What, he asks in exasperation, is he supposed to say to them?

I daresay that if I had been in any of the situations that DeBoer describes, I would have walked happily out of the class. Why? Well, because there is simply nothing to be gained from arguing with people who believe that it is reasonable to treat those who use the word “disabled” as we treat those who use the word “n***er”; because there is no virtue in arguing with people who refuse even to entertain the possibility that they might be wrong.

If you want to find bad faith theatrics and unshakeable idiocy presented as virtue, head for the Clown Quarter of the nearest university. It’s where you’re most likely to find the word “privilege” deployed as an ad hominem device. A way of saying, “Your opinion doesn’t count (or doesn’t count as much as mine) because you have a certain level of melanin, or a penis, or the wrong kind of upbringing, or an insufficient number of hang-ups and fashionable pretensions.” Think of it as a kind of Maoist snobbery, in which, as Jesse Walker notes, the unwary are denounced for the rhetorical equivalent of using the wrong cutlery.

In my experience, the personalities to which such things appeal aren’t terribly interested in civility or justice, “social” or otherwise. What they seem to be interested in is opportunist scolding and one-upmanship, that all-important social positioning. And so what you see, and see quite often, isn’t concern for the supposedly vulnerable; it’s an assertion of status and a pay-off for all that wound-up dogmatism. It’s how professed egalitarians let us know they’re better than us. Because they really do have to let us know.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.