Tom Clougherty on Tax Freedom Day:  

Tax Freedom Day 2011 came on May 30, three days later than in 2010. That means that for the first 149 days of the year, Britons were earning for the taxman. Only on May 30 did they start earning for themselves. But even this alarming figure understates the heavy financial burden imposed by the British state. If the government had to finance all its spending through taxes, rather than relying on borrowing, Tax Freedom Day would not have come until July 1. To put it another way, the government would have to take every penny earned in the United Kingdom from January 1 to June 30 – a full six months – in order to balance the books for the year at current levels of spending.

Evan Coyne Maloney and Greg Lukianoff on speech codes, conformity and the heckler’s veto:  

These are not cases that are really open for debate as far as their constitutionality, but what ends up happening is that, because the rules are there, people feel as though they can’t engage in this discussion to begin with. If you’re a college freshman and you’re worried about your grades, you’re worried about what your professors think of you, you’re not going to do anything that’s going to get you in trouble with the school. You’re certainly not very likely to get involved in a court case…  When it does go to court the schools always lose defending speech codes. The problem is, who wants to be the guy who spends their college career in court so that they can say what you can say anywhere else in the country?

My review of Maloney’s film Indoctrinate U can be found here. The subjects of campus censorship and efforts to “correct” improper views have been discussed many, many times.

And via Franklin, Charlotte Young discusses art bollocks, a term that may be familiar to regular readers of this blog. Ms Young’s former art tutor, Nico de Oliviera, coughs up this gem:

Stefan Brüggemann’s work, of course, comments on the absence of conceptual art, because conceptual art no longer exists. It existed once, but it no longer exists. So what do we put in its place? What does Stefan put in its place? One might say that he re-presents something which is absent, and in this absence what he represents is remarkably similar to that which once was.

The of course is, of course, typical of the genre. Readers keen to bask in the aesthetic radiance of Mr Brüggemann’s work can do so here. And here. And here.

As usual, feel free to add your own in the comments.

Mark Steyn on the hierarchy of phobias and the collectivist inversion of human rights:  

In some of the oldest free societies on the planet we’ve entirely corrupted the concept of human rights. It’s not very difficult. Human rights are rights for humans, rights for individuals. Back in 1215, Magna Carta – Magna Carta Libertatum, to give it its full title – couldn’t have made it plainer. Real human rights are restraints that the people place upon the king. We understood that eight centuries ago. Today, we’ve entirely perverted and corrupted the principle. We’re undermining real human rights, like freedom of speech, and replacing them with ersatz rights that, rather than restraining the king, give him vastly increased state power to restrain the rights of his subjects. These new rights are not handed out equally but in different ways to different degrees according to which approved identity groups you fall into. 

The tribal approach to rights and entitlement is discussed here and here. Consequent attempts at attitude management may also be of interest. Though some academics prefer the term “social justice education,” or simply “treatment.” 

Bella Gerens notes the conformist trajectory of the comical Laurie Penny:

She has certainly worked very hard to communicate a message, but I don’t know if it’s the message she intended. Like many people from Wadham [College], she seems to want to improve the world in a certain way. But what she seems to do is reinforce the belief that privileged people from privileged educational backgrounds can, as long as they say the right things, engender trust among the lower classes whilst taking their place among the elite… She is travelling an extremely well-trodden road bearing the placard of thoroughly-explored philosophies. And the destination, reached so many times before, has benefitted no one except the travellers themselves.

And Heather Mac Donald revisits ‘radical’ graffiti and the art world’s double standards:  

Art in the Streets is a classic exercise of the elites’ juvenile dalliance with countercultural norms that they have no intention of adopting in their own protected lives. The Museum of Contemporary Art has never tolerated graffiti on its own premises; none of its wealthy Hollywood and real-estate-mogul trustees would ever allow tagging on their homes or businesses, either. So opposed is MOCA to unauthorised graffiti on its walls that it stationed additional security guards around its premises before the show opened, to guard against the inevitable upsurge in graffiti that the show would (and did) trigger. Yet there is no sign that [MOCA director, Jeffrey] Deitch or his trustees grasp the contradiction. Indeed, in a breathtaking display of stunted moral development, Art in the Streets never even addresses the seminal fact that behind every act of graffiti is an invisible property owner whose rights have been appropriated against his will.

Readers may spot a thematic link with, among others, our academic radical, Alexander Vasudevan.

Feel free to add your own.

Your host has an article posted over at Minding the Campus. It expands on a few themes that may be familiar to regulars here.

Natural variations in cognitive ability, unlike those in musicality or athleticism, are a thorn in the paw of devout egalitarians. Avid readers of the Guardian’s arts and music pages would no doubt feel free to delight in the prowess of, say, Helen Mirren or Pinchas Zukerman without believing that everyone they passed on the street could with training do the same. It seems that only intelligence attracts contrarian manoeuvring.

The latest example of which comes via Fabian Tassano, author of Mediocracy: Inversions and Deceptions in an Egalitarian Culture. Tassano steers us to the claims of senior philosophy lecturer and Guardian contributor Dr Nina Power, who insists, apparently based on nothing, that “everyone has the potential to understand everything,” and that equality of intelligence is “something to be presupposed” because – well, just because  - “everyone is equally intelligent.”

Dr Power’s assertions are bold and her reasoning unobvious, indeed difficult to detect – thus meeting the key criteria of Very Deep Thought. She refers to the French postmodernist Jacques Rancière, whose “axiomatic assertion of the equality of intelligence” is, we’re told, “one of the most important ideas of the past decade.” On what basis Rancière felt entitled to make such claims – and why Dr Power sees fit to agree with them – remains somewhat mysterious. Dr Power does, however, cite fellow philosopher Peter Hallward, who tells us, “Everyone has the same intelligence, and differences in knowledge are simply a matter of opportunity and motivation. On the basis of this assumption, superior knowledge ceases to be a necessary qualification of the teacher, just as the process of explanation… ceases to be an integral part of teaching.”  

On this, Dr Power elaborates, highlighting another benefit of the egalitarian ideal: “In principle then, there is no reason why a teacher is smarter than his or her student, or why educators shouldn’t be able to learn alongside pupils in a shared ignorance.” 

Knowledge, competence and the ability to explain – none of these things will be needed in our socialist utopia. Children will simply inhale education or absorb it through osmosis. On reflection, a couple of the teachers at my old comprehensive were particularly unskilled at explaining their thinking and struggled to remember facts. At the time I had no idea this would soon be regarded as a cutting-edge educational strategy.

Readers, it’s time to acquaint yourselves with the work of Dr Graham St John, a Research Associate at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and “an anthropologist of electronic dance music cultures, festivals, and movements.” Dr St John’s scholarly projects include Performing the Country: Culture, Identity and a Post-Settler Landscape, “a study of  contemporary performative contexts for the (re)production of ‘Australianness’ in the wake of recent historical and ecological re-evaluations,” and Making a Noise, Making a Difference: Techno-Punk and Terra-ism.

The latter “charts the convergence of post-punk/post-settler logics in the techno-punk development in Australia” and “provides an entry to punk through an analysis of the concept of hardcore in the context of cultural mobilisations which, following more than two centuries of European colonisation, evince desires to make reparations and forge alliances with Indigenous people and landscape.”

As the texts in question may induce an urge to self-harm, I’ll attempt to convey their profundity with some visual extracts:

Above, a “cultural mobilisation.”

Some speakers, radically situated.

Radical philosophy.

Another blow to the Hegemon.

Dr St John’s more recent and even more ambitious project is Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. For the heathens among you who don’t already subscribe, and for whom the terms noisecore and bloghouse are just strange and scary words, the Dancecult journal is,

A platform for interdisciplinary scholarship on the shifting terrain of electronic dance music cultures (EDMCs) worldwide.

Its concerns are of course numerous and deep.

From dancehall to raving, club cultures to sound systems, disco to techno, breakbeat to psytrance, hip hop to dubstep, IDM to noisecore, nortec to bloghouse, global EDMCs are a shifting spectrum of scenes, genres, and aesthetics. What is the role of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion and spirituality in these formations? How does existing critical theory enable understanding of EDMCs, and how might the latter challenge the assumptions of our inherited heuristics? What is the role of the DJ in diverse genres, scenes, subcultures, and/or neotribes?

The journal’s current gems include Media Studies lecturer Dr Hillegonda Rietveld’s Disco’s Revenge: House Music’s Nomadic Memory, an article rendered lofty by obligatory references to Deleuze, Guattari and de Sade, and which “addresses the role of house music as a nomadic archival institution,” one that is “keeping disco alive through a rhizomic assemblage of its affective memory in the third record of the DJ mix.”

Some of you will, I’m sure, feel a strong urge to contribute, thereby helping to expand the boundaries of human knowledge on matters of great and pressing import. Happily, Dancecult is preparing a themed issue, due for publication in April 2012, to which scholarly contributions may be submitted:

This special edition of Dancecult seeks contributions from scholars of psytrance from all disciplines and methods attending to this genre (or meta-genre) in a period of transition and growing complexity.

“Critical attention” should be paid to the following:

The role of the contemporary psytrance festival,

The continuing significance of the “traveller” (as opposed to “tourist”) pretence or sensibility,

And,

The repression of Goa/psytrance.

If some readers are unfamiliar with the cultural minutiae of raving sub-genres, a brief outline is helpfully provided. It seems that for devotees of psytrance, now is a time of crisis:

In the 2008 edition of Psychedelic Traveller magazine, in an article “The Exodus of Psytrance,” Sam from chaishop.com reported that… “the exodus of artists and dancers is clearly visible. Most primitive cornerstones of psytrance parties have lost half or more of their visitors. Most labels have signed bankruptcy, media companies are struggling if not yet dead, scene workers left for a ‘normal’ job.”

Dark days.

Yet, while psytrance has been buffeted by manifold economic, political and aesthetic crises, it appears to be a hardy and durable phenomenon… In the areas of genre, music production/performance, event production, virtual distribution, pharmacology, it appears that psytrance flourishes amid complexity.

Sweet mercy, the dream still lives.

Now get cracking on that paper. It’s vital work.

When it comes to the less reputable quarters of academia, you’re a cold-hearted, cynical bunch. Oh, don’t deny it. Some of you chuckled wickedly at that mistress of limpid prose Dr Caroline Guertin and her Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. Some of you managed to turn the infinite nuance of artistic theory into bawdy comedy. Others somehow found amusement in Professor Sharra Vostral’s musings on the politics of menstruation and her discovery that the humble tampon is “an artefact of control.” 

I mean, really. You people are such heathens.

It’s with some trepidation, then, that I share the latest find by TDK and Mr William Briggs – Stuff Academics Like, a compendium of curios from our Towers Of Learning. One of its regular features is the Guessing Game series, where readers are invited to ponder a list of imposing conference papers and lecture titles in order to fathom which of them is the imposter. Below are a few contenders from a recent list, only one of which is officially hokum. Feel free to take a shot. 

Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica. 

The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.

Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.

Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings. 

Not sure? How about,

The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.

Or,

Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.

Or could it be,

Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?

Nope. They’re all actual contributions to the broadening of our minds and the swelling of the culture.

The imposter, of course, is,

Guattari and the Onomatopoeic Imperative: Decentering the Archaeologies of the Speech-Act.

Which is obvious now that I’ve pointed it out. Oh, there’s more.