Michael Wood on William Empson

Some 4 years ago, Prof Michael Wood, of Princeton wrote an article on 'Empson's intentions' in the LRB. 

It is deflationary- not with any malign intention but in a judicious and reparative manner which is mindful of our ever mounting disdain for 'Theory' and the Academy's mindless enthusiasm for woke histrionics.

Wood's article begins with a quotation-  

‘What is a hesitation, if one removes it altogether from the psychological dimension?’

Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem

The answer, cosmologically speaking, is that either there is a 'katechon', an impeder at work- like Shani, Saturn, in Indian astrology- or, for secular philosophy, there is a concurrency deadlock or livelock. Djikstra's philosophers starve to death before their discipline can arrive at a rule for sharing cutlery. But this has nothing to do with Poetry though in poetastering there may be a hesitation between, not 'sense and sound', but sonorousness and sententiousness to the degree that the thing is crap. 

Unlike Philosophy, which loses itself in even a one dimensional maze, Psychology is an infinite dimensional configuration space with no Pauli Exclusion Principle. This is the unthought known which allows one to binge watch Netflix serials about time travelling werewolves while eating pizza and checking one's email. 

Agamben, poor fellow, was a victim of his education.  The cretin did not get that poetry predated theology. Or that Heidegger had shit for brains- German pedagogues, and all philosophers, generally do. To be fair, Agamben had little Maths background. But Empson did. That's why, his precocious, but meretricious, shite appeared authoritative to dimwits. 

Empson, when young, seems to have taken the Buddhist route of rejecting pratibha- imaginative genius of a harmonious type- for kshanikavada chetana- staccato intentionality only compossible with a momentary Universe. Thus, though teaching in China, he didn't get 'shenyun' (dhvani) whose ineluctable modality is Time- which can be Buddhist as in kshana sampatti- because the only unambiguous 'ganying' inter-subjective, Muth Rational, field-theory is objectively Kairotic- i.e. solves a concurrency & a coordination problem in a timely manner. 

Empson started off bright. He is a game-theoretic hermeneut avant la lettre. But his notion of intentionality- and therefore 'ambiguity'- is 'comparative statics'. Yet, Literature is a repeated game. Prof Wood should know. He has been playing it for longer than I have been alive. He writes-

There is a moment​ in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over with.

Fuck off! This is a Cockney satire on the- canny-too-canny, and therefore so unspared by the uncanny as to become almost lovable for child-like- valorous, vainglorious, singular and unequivocal Scot!  

This is about as unreal as a thought could be,

Nonsense! It is as real, for arising out of an objective perturbation- a 'ganying' of the mimetic field- as any self-fulfilling prediction could be.  

coming from a man who seems to have been plotting murder even before he allowed himself consciously to think of it,

Coz of dem witches, dude!  

and whose whole frame of mind is haunted by what he calls consequence, the very effect he imagines it would be so nice to do without.

But the same shit goes down when you contemplate finishing off the bottle of Single Malt or ordering a phal curry. Why make such heavy weather of it?  

The speech begins

If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly:

this is the canting element to the canny Scotsman who, precisely because he is Scottish, has a conscience as funny, but functional, as his kilt 

if the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success ...

and this the declasse aspect to Scottish Paideia, the porridge of whose scandalously cheap Universities, would poison the long Eighteenth Century, which only ended, in the South, when Oxbridge started doling out degrees in Eng Lit. 

Empson takes us through the passage with great spirit,

but with the spirit of a Wykehamist gone to the bad 

commenting on every line and its spinning, hissing meanings, and then alights on a single word: 

And catch, the single little flat word among these monsters,

Fuck off! That's Ketch. The Devil. Sixty years later a hangman named Richard Jacquet was given the sobriquet Jack Ketch coz...Devil dun ketch u rite? Ah! but what if the fletch of your arrow repel that ketch? Won' Devil be vex? 

China, or Princeton, are bad places to philologize the work of a Grammar School Oik or an immigrant Curry & Chips Cockney poet like wot I iz. 

'Catch' was associated with both Legalistic fraud and the 'Wild Hunt' of the chase. It does not 'name an action' here. Rather it asks if, with Duncan's death, Devilry would cease to direct things. Could Ketch be caught out by a catch?

Empson, shithead that he was, says 'catch

names an action;

coz Macbeth was the Goalie of the Celtic Rangers right? Shakespeare was writing about a Soccer Match.  

it is a mark of human inadequacy to deal with these matters of statecraft,

fuck that's supposed to mean? Humans do statecraft. They may be inadequate in this respect, at least when compared to Unicorns or Dragons but- most of the time- they aint as fucking stupid as this Empson Salts of a diarrhoeac academic availability cascade.

Statecraft gets done by adult humans. Empson thought it had something to do with 

a child snatching at the moon as she rides thunderclouds.

How fucking stupid was that cunt? Why is Prof. Wood quoting this shite? Is it coz studying Eng Lit rots your brain?  

The meanings cannot all be remembered at once, however often you read them; it remains the incantation of a murderer, dishevelled and fumbling among the powers of darkness.

Nonsense! The meanings are remembered all at once by any fucking Londoner wot puts on a Scottish accent to recite these lines for the price of a pint.  

It is an act of alert critical reading

to fuck up so completely.  

to spot the action word

which is 'quickly'. Catching aint important. Stabbing the old geezer in an expeditious manner is what is of the essence.  

among the proliferating concepts;

there are no 'proliferating concepts'. There is a macho Scots guy fucking up in a stereotypical manner- at least as far as us Cockneys are concerned.  

and generous to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us.

Even in Shakespeare's time, there were neighbourhoods where every 'playa' was thinking, like Macbeth, about whether this was the right moment to stab the Boss. Does Prof. Wood not have HBO? Did he not, at least, when my age, watch the Godfather Movies? Empson may have been a Wykehamist shithead. But he lived in Warlord era China.

Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But then to call the other words ‘monsters’, to identify the small verb as a ‘child’, and to introduce the moon and the thunderclouds, is to create a whole separate piece of verbal theatre, and to create something scarcely recognisable as criticism. And when at the end of the passage Empson widens his frame, returns to Macbeth’s full, anxious meditation, he continues the same double practice. He sees our failure to grasp all the meanings as an achieved Shakespearean effect and not a readerly shortcoming; and he finds a figure of speech for the character and the situation. The word becomes a whole passage, the child becomes a fumbling and dishevelled magician, and the moon and thunderclouds become the powers of darkness.

So, Wood agrees that Empson wrote shite. But that was the nature of his discipline.  

What is happening here? Empson would say, too modestly, that this is descriptive criticism – as distinct from the analytic kind. But he is not describing anything.

But he is writing something which looks like the sort of shite you should put down to get a First in a joke of a subject. 

It is not impressionistic criticism either, an attempt to evoke the feelings the work arouses in the reader, although this is closer to the mark.

Because it is shite. 

Empson is tracing a pattern of thought, and finding metaphors for the behaviour of a piece of language.

Thoughts may have a pattern. But thought does not. 'A piece of language' is a metaphor. Finding another metaphor for the same thing won't make it any more or less real.  

Empson’s writing reminds us (we do forget such things) that characters in plays are made of words, they are what they say,

Nonsense! Even in Radio dramas, characters aren't what they say. They are what they are depicted as doing. 

or more precisely they are what we make of what they say,

This may be true of an orator, not an actor 

and his metaphors bring the life of these words incredibly close to us.

only in a manner of speaking. One could, with equal truth or greater impressiveness, say 'his metaphors bite like a zombie rendering homely words, humbly going about their business in neighbourhood streets, into Hamlet's hordes of the dead from whom the English fled. '

The child snatches and Macbeth fumbles; but the child is herself a verb; and Macbeth is a man using words to keep his mind away from a deed.

Or a verb is itself a child which snatches. A Noun is itself a Man who fumbles to keep his mind away from a deed. Why drag Macbeth into a parade of pseudo-profundity of this sort? The fact is, Macbeth is gripping. It is good theater. There are Japanese and Bollywood adaptations of it. Why? Because it is psychological, not philosophical at all.  

William Empson was born in Yorkshire in 1906 and died in London in 1984. He studied mathematics then English at Cambridge, wrote poems and plays, acted, reviewed films and books. After leaving Cambridge he worked as a freelance writer in London for two years before going to Japan, in 1931, to teach at Tokyo University, where he stayed until 1934. He spent three years back in England before joining the exiled universities in China. During the war he worked in London for the BBC Overseas Service, returning to China for a few years after the war. In 1953, he became an English professor at the University of Sheffield, where he worked until his retirement in 1971.

He published a collection of verse simply called Poems in 1935; another called The Gathering Storm in 1940; and his Collected Poems in 1949. He also published several works of criticism: Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930); Some Versions of Pastoral (1935); The Structure of Complex Words (1951); and Milton’s God (1961). In both poetry and prose Empson has the attractive ability to make paradoxes sound as if they are not paradoxes at all, just bits of moderately complicated thinking of the sort anyone needs to do now and again.

But type theory can resolve any paradox. Kids learn this almost immediately. Parents say 'you're a kid. I'm an adult. Rules that apply to you don't apply to me. We belong to different types.' 

There was a minor vogue in the 1970s and early 1980s for associating Empson with French theory, with deconstruction specifically, but Empson himself would have none of it.

Few Englishmen of the period would give Heidegger the time of day. 

When Christopher Norris sent him some writings by Derrida and others, Empson said he thought ‘those horrible Frenchmen’ were ‘so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them’. He also managed, perhaps unintentionally, to invent a new Frenchman: Jacques Nerrida. What Empson found disgusting was the quest, as he saw it, for complexity for complexity’s sake, a project that was ‘always pretending to be plumbing the very depths’ but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it – this was in 1971 – as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to the study of language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were playing among themselves, no agents or intentions were to be seen.

And yet it is the foul intentions of the fetid French which has dug the entrenchments of this no man's land where artillery shells mis-mate in flight.

And yet Empson’s work, for all his denials, connects him strongly to most major 20th-century movements of criticism and theory in English and other languages – not because of his influence on them or their influence on him, but because his preoccupations are central to any sort of ongoing thought about literature.

Or because this is a worthless subject adversely selective of cretinous pseuds. 

We can’t tie him securely to any style or approach, but we can’t get around him either: he will always be in the way.

Only if we study this shite or teach it for a living. 

Empson is often thought of, correctly, as one of the founders of the New Criticism, as it came to be called in the United States, and he is certainly the most brilliant close reader the movement produced.

But, as Wood has noted, still shit. 

But as close reading, a fabulous classroom device, became more and more of an established method, it turned less historical and less speculative, until finally it seemed unable to refer to anything other than the words on the page, or to allow the belief that anything existed beyond the page.

The exam existed beyond the page and beyond the exam a dissertation and beyond that a lifetime of writing and reading worthless shite.  

In​ 1946 W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley wrote an important essay called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, claiming among other things that ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.’

True enough. The design and intention of my novels is fucking awesome. Sadly, I'm a terrible riter and can't spell gud. Also, I don't actually know anything about India. I just make up all that Gunga Din stuff.  

The piece was and remains enormously useful for the ways in which it helps us to resist lazy critical confusions of life and art, and reductive notions of causality.

But everybody else already does that!  

It also reminds us of an easily buried fact: the road to terrible work in literature or any other art is paved with excellent intentions. Intention may be where things begin – although accident too is a promising start – but the result includes quite a few other ingredients. But then the phrase ‘neither available nor desirable’, dogmatic as good polemical announcements need to be, doesn’t stand up to any sort of nuanced consideration. An author’s design or intention is sometimes completely known and quite enlightening; sometimes far too blunt and entirely distracting. In some cases we shall never know it but desperately wish we could. In others we are delighted that we don’t. Many authors are articulate but distinctly evasive about intention, and unconscious intentions lurk all over the place. There is no general rule here, one simply has to do the work of reading and thinking.

Intentions aren't knowable if we are speaking of Art as opposed to the literary equivalent of getting down on all fours and barking or purring. Why? Evolution has a good reason to deny us a 'Momus window' into the heart. To evade a predator or parasite we must be 'unhackable'.  

For Empson, though, the doctrine of the intentional fallacy, which he liked to call the Wimsatt Law, was a rule. It said we were not to think of authors at all, literature was to be cleanly separated from the messy world of appetite and argument and intended meaning. He thought the rule was the bane of literary studies in the second half of the 20th century, and he was almost as obsessed with its noxious effects as he was with what he saw as the invasion of English and American universities by hordes of Christian critics.

Invasion? The ancient Universities were set up to train Christian clerics. 

The Wimsatt Law, according to Empson, ‘lays down that no reader can grasp the intention of any author’, or with a slight variation, ‘says that no reader can ever grasp the intention of an author’. Since he thinks this proposition is both nonsensical and harmful, Empson is inclined to parody it as well as simplify it, as in ‘a reader must never understand the intention of an author’ or his sarcastic suggestion that a 17th-century audience ‘could not foresee that Mr Wimsatt was going to make a law forbidding them to grasp the intention of an author’.

But 17th century audiences were aware that a good Christian, intent on clarifying dogma, might be discovered, to his great chagrin, to have strayed into heresy. Indeed, this fear was ancient. To write things down in a book is not just to put a sword into the hands of a child, it is to put one's soul in jeopardy of the Sin against the Holy Ghost.

‘We must consider the experiences and convictions of the poet,’ Empson insists; follow ‘the main lines of interest of the author’; and to tell students of literature that they ‘cannot even partially succeed’ in doing this is ‘about the most harmful thing you could do’.

If you were doing something utterly useless. 

Going out on a rather strange limb, Empson is willing to say that faking biographical evidence is ‘more humane than the refusal to admit help from biography, or any intention in the author’. This parti pris allows Empson to indulge in the guessing logic of so many bad biographers. Marvell ‘would have remembered a similar occasion’, ‘would feel ashamed of what he had done’. Yeats ‘must have loved such a toy when he was about ten years old’. ‘It seems clear that [T.S. Eliot’s] mother had refused to sleep under the same roof as the wife.’ But the passion that tilts these arguments is interesting, and we need to look at a wider range of Empson’s views to understand its force.

Very true! The passion depicted by Mia Khalifa is interesting and we need to view more of her work on Pornhub to understand its force. Spoiler alert. She always keeps her glasses on- a sensible thing to do if your job involves getting jizzed upon incessantly. Interestingly, many Professors of Eng Lit wear glasses. 

The most blatant example of Empson’s breaking the Wimsatt Law is also the funniest and the most illuminating. To understand Hamlet, he thinks, we must go back to ‘the moment of discovery by Shakespeare’. This would have happened when Shakespeare’s company took on a Hamlet play by Thomas Kyd (or someone else), and didn’t know what to do with it because they were aware that this creaking old revenge stuff was desperately out of fashion. Shakespeare would have thought of the rewrite as ‘a pretty specialised assignment, a matter, indeed, of trying to satisfy audiences who demanded a Revenge play and then laughed when it was provided’. Still, he carried on.

I think he did not see how to resolve this problem at the committee meeting, when the agile Bard was voted to carry the weight, but already did see how when walking home ... He thought: ‘The only way to shut this hole is to make it big. I shall make Hamlet walk up to the audience and tell them, again and again, “I don’t know why I’m delaying any more than you do; the motivation of this play is just as blank to me as it is to you; but I can’t help it.” What is more, I shall make it impossible for them to blame him. And then they daren’t laugh.’ It turned out, of course, that this method, instead of reducing the old play to farce, made it thrillingly life-like and profound.

Empson’s idea of Shakespeare’s ‘method’ makes the film Shakespeare in Love look like a documentary, and the touch about walking home is marvellous. But is he serious? Yes and no, but I find it impossible to measure the respective doses. He is serious about considering the ‘moment of discovery’, and about the reading of the play involved in the fiction he creates. Hamlet does talk as if he knew he was caught up in a terrible old play. The rest, the committee meeting, the ventriloquised author’s soliloquy, is bravura filling-in of comic detail: critical theatre. I don’t know – our subject is guessed-at intention after all – how comic Empson meant the detail to be.

Empson was telling a story. It wasn't as good as Stephen Daedalus's story but Empson was no Joyce. Still, for a pedagogue, it was passable.  

In other moods, Empson was willing to admit that Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument had ‘a kind of flat good sense about it, because it is hard to know how we do learn each other’s intentions’. But then he was adamant that this difficulty was no excuse for not trying to get into an author’s head. On the contrary, it means we have to try harder. ‘There is no metaphysical reason ... for treating the intentions of an author as inherently unknowable.’

Sure. The problem is that some people have the sort of theory of mind which means they can tell really good stories about storytellers and how they got the idea for the stories they told.  

The most important thing in these arguments is an element that is present everywhere in Empson but only occasionally stressed. Understanding literature is not different from understanding anything else: ‘We do it all the time.’

We turn on the tap all the time but when the water isn't flowing we have to call a plumber. Understanding plumbing is different from just turning a tap. Similarly, for any given level of linguistic competence, there is always someone who can help us plumb further depths in a text. 

Norris puts this very well when he says that ‘Empson’s books all seek, in different ways, to make terms between poetry and the normal conditions of language and commonsense discourse,’ and that ambiguity, for example, ‘belongs to a normal, not a uniquely poetic order of thought and language’. Making terms usually means making sense, and one of Empson’s rather tangled claims engages the Wimsatt Law in a truly intriguing way.

Any speaker, when a baby, wanted to understand what people meant, why mum was cross for example, and had enough partial success to go on trying; the effort is usually carried on into adult life, though not always into old age. Success, it may be argued, is never complete. But it is nearer completeness in a successful piece of literature than in any other use of language.

What people mean has to do with the means by which they stop wanting to mean that thing. Thus, the beautiful lady who pours me a pint means 'pay me five pounds when she says 'that will be five smackers luv'. I am completely successful in understanding what she means when I hand over a five pound note. She smiles and goes away. If I try planting five smackers on her luscious lips she beats me viciously. I have failed completely in understanding her. 

Literature, on the other hand, isn't meant to be understood with complete success. Indeed, it is at its best when, like love, it isn't understood at all but you like how it makes you feel. There are songs in a foreign language which enchant you. Then you learn the words and discover the thing is tawdry. The good news is it needn't be. There is poetry in that language which could have the same effect. What is surprising is that learning the aesthetic philosophy that informs that language may turn what once appeared tawdry into the thing which first you heard. 

‘Partial’ and ‘usually’ make clear the practice is common but not universal, and the remark about old age is a mildly mischievous joke. But the conclusion is startling. In the very region where we might think, from our own experience, from the long, conflictive history of literary criticism, and indeed from Empson’s own work, that it has always been hardest to ‘understand what people meant’, success is less partial than anywhere else. The author’s intention is closer than anyone else’s to being fully available.

Harry Frankfurt defined 'bullshit' as speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. In England we use the milder term 'waffle' for what is happening here. You could with equal impressiveness say Literature is where intention is most  transparent or where it is most occluded. Literature has no intentionality. It has nothing else. It is pure design. It is wholly aleatory. It is the prayer of the agnostic, the doubt that redeems Faith. It is my neighbor's cat. It is my cat's neighbor. Literary criticism is in the neighborhood of cattiness. Texts are the neighborliness of the cat, sunning itself on the roof of the garden shed across from your study window, which, for some reason, is always looking straight at you as, with increasing inebriation, you ring the changes on Saqi and Nadim, Li Po and the Moon.

The reason for literature’s success in this respect is everywhere in Empson’s writing, often lost in the noise he is making about what he doesn’t like in current literary study, but finally not at all far from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s claim, or that of most good criticism, new or old. The completed work is the test of intention, or as Empson says, ‘you must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good.’ If we combine this statement with his remark that ‘the judgment of the author may be wrong,’ it is hard to see what the quarrel is about. Hard, but not impossible. For the same reason that he would rather have a faked biography than no biography, Empson would rather guess at the contents of an author’s mind than leave the author out of the story. This is what he says in his quieter moments: ‘I would not mind agreeing, as a verbal formula, that the intention of an author can always only be guessed at, so long as it is also agreed that the guess ... should always be made.’ And rather more loudly: ‘If critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt.’

Or despise themselves the more for not being so condemned. The alternative is getting woke. One must seethe with indignation that texts exist at all and that pedagogues are chained to them like galley slaves. The literary canon is part and parcel of the Biblical katechon which restrains the lawless nature of Capitalist life from revealing itself in all its naked obscenity.  

If we borrow the figure of the death of the author, we could imagine Barthes and Empson staring at each other as if in a mirror, without either of them knowing who the mirrored figure is.

because people looking in a mirror seldom have any clue as to who it is they are seeing. I suppose a short sighted guy with books on his brain may think he is looking at some famous author. But if authors are dead, this can't be the case. So, contra Wood, we can't imagine Barthes and Empson looking at each other as if in a mirror rather than a bath-house.

Barthes thought the author had to be seen as dead so that writing could be rescued from the tyranny of gossip and academic pedantry,

Coz nobody gossips about the dead- right?  

and be properly read for its own sake – Calvino wanted to see writing as a machine for much the same reasons.

So he too did not know that people gossip a lot about the dead. Incidentally, writing may be done by a machine, it isn't itself a machine.

But then Barthes later came to see he couldn’t do without the author, that he ‘desired’ this figure, as he said, that he had to construct or imagine an author in order to trace out certain meanings – ironies, for example.

But one can also do this looking at clouds and the patterns they form and the stories they encode as light leaches from the sky.

This was a way of discreetly letting intention back into criticism – as an invited guest rather than a police presence.

So Literary Criticism is the same thing as seeing patterns in the clouds.  Intentions are invited to suffuse the sky-scape. Then Night falls. Netflix beckons.

Conversely, Empson never thought of intention as a police presence, only as the fallible but indispensable human source of any writing that matters.

Sadly, writing qua writing, whatever its intentions, does not matter at all. The machine grinds down its ghost. In the vast and echoing inedia of the Spirit, writing inscribes itself as a cheeky fart of which, invoking hauntology, only a Spivak would say 'Daramburam bhyam naasthi. Nishabdam prana sankatam'.

The Woke Dunciad targeting the Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation in Chicago has a lot of money. If it really thinks 'Black Lives Matter', it should give that money to groups whose work saves Black Lives by getting African Americans better legal representation and by suing Police Departments and Prisons so as to improve outcomes for poor Black people. It could also urge poets to stop being so fucking selfish and to make some money- perhaps by selling their kidneys- so as to donate it to Black victims of the discriminatory justice system.

Sadly, the Poetry Foundation did not give away its money. It did help some shite poets- a veritable Dunciad of them. Those poetasters are now busy biting the hand that fed them. They want to kill the golden goose. They demand that the Foundation hand over its money to them directly even though they don't matter to Black Lives at all. Indeed, they harm that cause. Why? Because their poetry is shit and their opportunistic demands actually delegitimize the current agitation sparked by the killing of George Floyd.

This is the letter they sent, which has caused two White people at the top of the organization to resign.

To the Members of the Board and Staff of the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine:
We write to you, as poets who have had associations with the Poetry Foundation as awardees, fellows, contributors, or collaborators, at a time when the centuries-long crisis of American profiteering at the expense of Black life is again made acutely visible.

These American poets want to themselves profit more intensively from those Black lives.

On June 3, 2020, the Poetry Foundation released a vague statement that you “stand in solidarity with the Black community, and denounce injustice and systemic racism.”

Instead of which you should have said 'we gonna hand over all our money to the worthless shitheads we previously helped because Black lives don't matter. Worthless poets do.'

This non-substantive, four-sentence statement—which contained no details, action plans, or concrete commitments—was the Foundation’s sole response to the ongoing state-sanctioned murders of Black people by police and the current wave of violent state repression of those protesting these killings.

How would giving money to worthless poets represent a better response?

For years, your constituents have been calling on the Foundation to redistribute more of its enormous resources to marginalized artists, to make concrete commitments to and change-making efforts in your local community and beyond. We find this statement to be worse than the bare minimum.

A 'marginalized artist' is one who- like me- nobody wants to read or listen to. How would giving money to worthless shitheads help the alleged victims of genocide?

As poets, we recognize a piece of writing that meets the urgency of its time with the appropriate fire when we see it--and this is not it.

But this demand for money for 'marginalized- i.e. unpublishable- poets does not meet the urgency of the times either.

It is an insult to the lives and families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other victims of the racist institution of police and white supremacy.

Similarly, if you refuse to give me a blowjob, it is an insult to the lives and families of countless victims of racist institutions.
Also if your b.j is not up to the mark, that too would be an insult to the same set of victims.

This shameless demand for money by worthless shitheads is an insult to the memory of the very people they commemorate. They should be saying 'give this money to the victim's families. Stop doling it out to us.'

It is an insult to the lives of your neighbors who have been targeted, brutalized, terrorized, and detained by the Chicago Police Department in the past week, including many Black youth.

But not worthless poets. Give the money to Black youth by all means. Don't give it to worthless shitheads who may go on to say 'your refusal to get on your knees and suck us all off is an insult to the countless victims of Transatlantic Slavery.'

Given the stakes, which equate to no less than genocide against Black people,

give us money and blowjobs and anything else we demand

the watery vagaries of this statement are, ultimately, a violence.

Yes! The very fact that these posh White dudes are not forming an orderly queue outside the door of these worthless poets so as to hand over their cash and perform oral sex is ULTIMATELY A VIOLENCE on a par with the Nazi genocide!

We demand that the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazine do more and do better.

By not publishing such worthless shite? Take the work of the first signatory of this letter- Kaveh Akbar- an Iranian American- it is puerile. Why give him money? What has it to do with Black Lives? The guy looks plenty White.

This is one step in a much larger global fight against racism, anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy,

in the same sense that demanding blowjobs and cash from rich people is a step in some global fight

but it is an important step because of the space the Poetry Foundation occupies within the poetry landscape.

It curates shit whose production it itself subsidizes. This is a waste of resources, true enough.

This is not the first time that the leadership of the Poetry Foundation has revealed itself to be woefully unfit to respond to the crises of our times. Though we can’t detail everything within the space of this letter, we refer you to the numerous critiques made in regards to the Foundation’s failures to support—or even appropriately acknowledge disparities as they relate to—Black and Indigenous poets, Latinx poets, trans and queer poets, disabled poets, poets of color writ large, and artists struggling economically. As it is clear that the Foundation’s leadership is unable to show up responsibly to the demands of this moment, we call for the immediate resignation of both President Henry Bienen and Board of Trustees Chair Willard Bunn, III.

They got their wish. But what difference will it make? Nobody now will pay the slightest attention to the worthless shitheads the Foundation promotes. It will be understood that they are all ignorant fools who receive 'affirmative aesthetic action' on account of their imbecility.

In addition, we have the following demands.
1. The President must be replaced by someone with a demonstrated commitment to both the world of poetry and the project of creating a world that is just and affirming for people of color, disabled people, trans people, queer people, and immigrants.

In other words, someone like Kaveh Akbar.

2. The Board of the Poetry Foundation must write a meaningful statement that details the specific, material ways it plans to “work to eradicate institutional racism.” What are the tangible actions the Foundation will take towards supporting racial justice initiatives?

There is only one 'tangible action' which securest that objective. Poets and Poetry Foundations must earn money and give it to those who are tackling 'racial injustice' in all its 'minute particulars'. To paraphrase William Blake, to trade in vacuous generalities, is the act of a scoundrel.

3. In addition to providing a meaningful, well-researched acknowledgment of the debt that the Foundation owes to Black poets,

a debt created by giving them money- except a lot of it leaked away to people who weren't Black at all but rather Iranian or other such immigrants

this statement must also include a specific acknowledgment of the harm done in recent years to Latinx poets, trans poets, disabled poets, and queer poets.

I take it Kaveh is queer.

4. Ultimately, we dream of a world in which the massive wealth hoarding that underlies the Foundation’s work would be replaced by the redistribution of every cent to those whose labor amassed those funds.

So the money should go to those who worked for Eli Lilly & Co.

As we work toward that world, we thus demand a significantly greater allocation of financial resources toward work which is explicitly anti-racist in nature and, specifically, fighting to protect and enrich Black lives, in and outside of Chicago.

So stop funding Gay Iranians or Pakistani or Indian origin women- like Fatima Asghar and Sumita Chakroborty, the next two signatories on the list.

As a group unified by urgency

we need that moolah now! Also a b.j.

but diverse in our visions,

Some don't want a b.j. They want anal. But we all want moolah.

we imagine a range of ways that such reallocation of funds might manifest--from much more robust local programming, to large contributions to organizations such as Assata's Daughters,

descended from the Black Panthers, this 'grass-roots' organization has only 68 members

Brave Space Alliance,

the first Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ Centre located on the South Side of Chicago, which is exactly as silly as it sounds

and Project South,

 which looked promising but has turned silly by losing focus and substituting utopian schemes for actual community organizing.

to more and deeper partnerships with spaces that support artists from marginalized communities.

By all means invest in rec centers and schools and libraries and so forth.

However it looks, we demand that the redistribution of wealth toward efforts fostering social justice be significant and long-lasting.

In which case, no more money must be handed out to credentialized cretins living off the 'aesthetic affirmative action' dollar while 'Mau Mauing the Establishment' for more money any time some Black people get shot by the Police.

5. As an extension on the above point, currently, the Foundation programming which engages most meaningfully with Black people and other historically marginalized populations is largely coordinated by the department of Community and Foundation Relations. This department is overtaxed and managed by a staff of two women of color. We demand a significantly greater allocation of staff and financial resources in this area.

In other words, there are some jobs for the boys here. This explains why Black Lives Matter. Some worthless bureaucrats can get a bigger budget and hire more of their chums.

More broadly, we demand that the staff of the Foundation more adequately reflect the demographics of the city of Chicago.

In particular, the number of non-graduates employed in senior positions must reflect the proportion of non-graduates in the population. So should the proportion of people who read or write poetry.

We believe that as long as the Foundation’s staff and leadership remain overwhelmingly White, it fundamentally limits the Foundation’s ability to ever be an organization rooted in anti-racist practice.

Indeed, so long as Whites remain a majority in the U.S.A it won't be an anti-racist country- except in the sense that Whites will be persecuted.

Until these demands are met, we will not be submitting any work to the magazine, nor will we participate in any future partnerships with the Foundation.

Cool. You guys could raise money for actual Black Lives instead.

We are invested stewards in the future of poetry,

No. You represent its dreary past as something you could get a worthless M.F.A in on condition of being a gibbering ape.

and so the onus is on us to push those with institutional capital to use it for good.

Why can't the Poetry Foundation fund good poets whom people would want to read?

We call on those poets who feel comfortable doing so to stand with us in this pledge. We acknowledge that material privileges make it such that individuals vary in their ability to make a pledge like this, and we extend love and solidarity to those poets for whom agreeing to this would create a situation of material precarity.

We recognize, for instance, that Poetry is one of the few reasonably-paying poetry journals. Ultimately, we dream of a world in which there are more sustainable ways for poets to support themselves that do not require them to engage with institutions that may not share their values. Indeed, for many of us this is a moment to reflect on the ways in which, while the awards or opportunities conferred by the Foundation may offer material benefits, they also involve forms of extraction, harm, exploitation, or even trauma. For instance, what does it mean for the Foundation to publish one’s work, to partner on various programs, or to see the Foundation use one’s likeness on promotional materials, but to feel unwelcome or unsafe in the Poetry Foundation building?

Good point. They should have better security. Employ some off-duty cops. What a swell idea!

Some of us have formed long-standing relationships with members of your staff, and we are grateful for those in your midst who have served as powerful supporters and allies while they themselves have had to contend from within with the Foundation’s harms. At the same time, we are in agreement with Justin Phillip Reed, who wrote in his June 3, 2020 letter to you: “Poetry Magazine continues to be legitimized by the divergent experiments, experiences, and dissenting voices of people whose lives are made precarious by the very acts and exploits that have aggrandized the inherited positions of these trustees.”

Sadly, this isn't true at all. We all automatically assume that people with exotic names who write like shite are 'diversity hires' and skip past them. Thus no 'legitimizing' is occurring.

We can no longer participate in this legitimizing project.

Sadly, you guys are delegitimizing Black Lives Matter by your brazen and opportunistic behavior.

We request an official, public response by no later than one week following receipt of this letter.

Otherwise we will say ooga booga and bite chunks out of your lily white flesh with our filed teeth.

Dr. Kevin Power & Terence's epigram vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum

The Irish novelist and academic, Kevin Power writes in the DRB 

One of the recurrent objections to (literary) theory has taken the form of a complaint that it promotes moral and epistemic relativism... As objections to theory go, this is among the more foolish, but it is also among the more sinister.

Not if the literary theory is pretending to be 'emancipatory'. In that case, if it ends up promoting moral relativism, then it is useless because who is to say slavery is not freedom from an equally valid perspective?

The alternatives to moral and epistemic relativism are, of course, moral and epistemic absolutism;

No. There are many alternatives to relativism- incomparability, pluralism or dialethia, type theories, hidden variable theories and so on. However, something which purports to be foundational or emancipatory is clearly nothing of the sort, it is stupid shit, if it actually promotes relativism.

and when they argue for a world of nonrelative values,

which may be incomparable, plural, type theoretic etc, etc,

these thinkers are often expressing, whether they know it or not, a barely disguised hunger for a world where minorities knew their place and stuck to it.

Nonsense! It so happens that literary theory appeals most to certain minorities who have reason to fear a world which may think their place is in the gas-chamber.

In any case, people who do theory are a tiny minority with no very exalted status even in the safe spaces where they earn their living.

To the extent that theory has helped to drag us at least partway out of this world, it has been an unmixed good.

But that extent is zero. Thus theory has been an unmixed good only to the same extent as the Socioprocology of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat.

A version of this point was made by John Sturrock when he reviewed Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostors: Postmodern Philosophers’ Abuse of Science for the LRB in 1998. Sokal is a physics professor at NYU, who in 1996 submitted a hoax article to Social Text, then as now a prominent theoretical journal. Sokal’s article was called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, and it was, as Sokal put it, “liberally salted with nonsense”, including the claim that quantum gravity was socially constructed. The editors of Social Text published the article, Sokal maintained, because it “flattered [their] ideological preconceptions”.The point of the hoax was that theorists were borrowing scientific ideas without grasping what they actually meant and using them to give their radical politics a patina of legitimacy; according to Sokal, if you couldn’t trust Jacques Lacan when he talked about topography, you would be an idiot to trust him when he talked about psychoanalysis. (It hadn’t occurred to him that the people who went to Lacan for his reflections on psychoanalysis were capable of understanding his topographical language as a metaphor.)

This is foolish. Sokal's point is that Lacan did not understand topology. He was just pretending. There was no question of using its language as a metaphor because he wasn't speaking it. It's like the following witty detournement of mine on Terence, the Latin poet's hackneyed epigram 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum'.  It can only strike you as having metaphorical aptness if you don't know any Latin. But, if you do know Latin you are likely to mistrust my claim to know about brain surgery. I am clearly a charlatan.

Sokal restated his argument in Intellectual Impostures, written in collaboration with another physicist, Jean Bricmont. Intellectual Impostures is fun to read for a chapter or two, but, as Sturrock notes, its critique of theory is based on a series of misprisions, and in place of imaginative thinking and writing it argues for a narrow scientism as the only legitimate way of understanding the world.

Nonsense! It argues that scientific theories are meaningful in the same way as the epigrams of Terence are meaningful to people who know Latin or who have a Latin dictionary. But  'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum' is not meaningful, though, no doubt, I pretended to understand it when a friend artfully dropped it into his conversation in the hope of making me look ridiculous to the blue stocking I was courting.

Sokal and Bricmont complained that the theorists (to call them “postmodern philosophers” as per their subtitle, is to suggest that you do not know very much about either postmodernism or philosophy)

Nonsense! It suggests that Sokal and Bricmont were familiar with the most common designation of that bunch of tossers.

preferred a tricksy “verbal veneer” to clear language expressing hard facts.

They were being charitable. Or perhaps they did not want to attract a nuisance libel suit. The plain fact is the theorists were ignorant and stupid. What they wrote was just one step above  'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum'

Sturrock counters with the example of Jean Baudrillard, a writer for whom “the ‘verbal veneer’ is the very thing; so that to read it as a disguise rather than a display is to misread it in a particularly philistine and irrelevant way”.

But to do so would be to advance Baudrillardian 'immanent reversal' though, to be fair, so would saying 'vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum' and not reading anything save the works of David Icke.

Sturrock’s larger point is that there is no imaginative writing without moral and epistemic relativism.

If so, the even larger point we must grasp is that Sturrock had shit for brains. Swedenborg's writing is imaginative. It is not relativist. I never finished reading Harry Potter- it was too scary- but I'm guessing J.K Rowling did not end up showing that Voldemort had as much right on his side as did Dumbledore.

Art is a free country,

No. It is Art. It may flourish in a country of slaves. It may wither and die where everybody breathes free.

and so is thought;

No! Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya has very conclusively shown that Thought is not a free country. It is a Disneyland where you have to pay extra to go on the cool rides.

and the essence of that freedom lies in the recognition that there is always another point of view.

What a worthless freedom! Suppose you happen to be tied up in my closet. You say 'set me free'. I say 'well, from one point of view you are free.  The essence of freedom lies in recognising that there is always another point of view. Thus my shitting on you rather than releasing you is an example of something you have freely chosen for yourself. Also you own me a tenner for this liberative experience I am providing you by going potty on your face.' I'm not saying that stuff like this actually happens but it is the essence of my business model. Hopefully, I'll be selected for Dragon's Den.

You could call this recognition différance, if you happen to be a theorist;

No you couldn't. Derrida's concept is like a 'hidden variables' theory. Univocal foundations exist, but not yet- never yet.

or, if you’re of a more liberal-humanist persuasion, you could simply call it irony, or play.

No you couldn't. Irony and play are delightful. This is sad shite of a laboured and stupid sort.

It is hardly surprising that an intellectual movement founded on this recognition was taken up by women,

Fuck off! Women haven't taken it up at all! They are sensible creatures! Third wave Feminism has nothing to do with Women though it may appear to have been useful in holding back reforms of a salutary type.

people of colour,

Sho' nuff. Me & my peeps are constantly talking about Deconstruction as we run around the hood setting fire to everything.

queer activists and so on; nor is it surprising that this should have caused some blowback from the more privileged parts of society.

Indeed. Gayatri Spivak is never surprised when the Duke of Westminster or the Maharaja of Patiala of the Saudi Crown Prince ring her up to give her a piece of their mind.

A more recent hoax, in which three right-leaning scholars submitted bogus articles on what they called “grievance studies” to various journals, ended up saying more about the flaws in academic publishing than it did about theory, but, once again, the unspoken message was reactionary in import – one of the hoaxers, Helen Pluckrose, is the author of a book complaining that theory has “made everything about race, gender, and identity”. Quelle horreur.

Helen is a man. That is why he objects to theory.  He is afraid his wife will stop cooking and cleaning for him if she starts reading Spivak or Butler.

I'm kidding. Helen is a woman. She knows that 'theory' has done nothing useful in the fields of race, gender or identity. It is merely a fraudulent type of claptrap like my detournement of a Latin epigram by Terence which is not itself Latin but gibberish.

Paul de Man, a convicted fraudster, a bigamist and a guy who failed to gain higher educational credentials, nevertheless conned his way into a job as a Professor. Everybody assumed someone else had vetted his witless shite. The man was a fraudster pure and simple. He represented the 'smoking gun' that 'Theory' wasn't just stupidity, it originated in a type of fraud which would not take in a child.

Kevin Power disagrees-

If l’affaire Sokal constituted a major skirmish in the Theory Wars, then the case of Paul de Man counts as a small war unto itself.

What war? The fact is people knew they had been conned but wanted to hush up the matter. But, by then, they themselves were making money out of the Ponzi scheme. True, in youth they may have been a victim of de Man's fraud, but now they were getting rich of it while pretending to stick it to 'the Man.' Mamta Bannerjee dotes on Gayatri Spivak. But then Bannerjee claims to have a PhD from 'East Georgia University'! This is the proof that 'Theory' is the intellectual equivalent of 'Babu English'.

Probably the best piece collected in The Meaninglessness of Meaning is Frank Kermode’s extended rumination on the posthumous disclosure of de Man’s wartime journalism. Writing in 1942 for the Belgian newspaper Le Soir, de Man – then in his twenties – published an article on “the Jews in modern literature”, which included sentences along the lines of this one: “it is sufficient to discover a few Jewish writers under Latinized pseudonyms for all contemporary production to be considered polluted and evil”. At the time of his death in 1983, de Man was the most celebrated of the Yale deconstructionists – the author of Blindness and Insight (1971) and The Resistance to Theory (1986), works distinguished, in Kermode’s words, by an “ever-increasing density and strangeness”.

This was a period when America was overproducing PhDs even in what looked like high I.Q subjects. There were plenty of Nuclear Physics PhDs coming into the backrooms of brokerages where they attracted attention by their extraordinary stupidity. Still, they either turned Chartists of the conventional kind or descended to the boiler room to sell penny stocks. Idiocy is no bar to making a living buying low and selling high. Similarly, 'theory' was no bar to not teaching French to people who wanted a credential in French literature but did not want to learn that disgusting language.

When de Man’s collaborationist journalism came to light in 1987, the theory-resisters pounced: here at last was irrefutable evidence that theory was rotten to the core; that its antipathy to bourgeois liberalism was fascism in a new dress; and that its expositors in the academy were not to be trusted. (It may have been the de Man affair that led the bestselling right-wing horror writer Dean Koontz to create, in his 2003 thriller The Face, a serial murderer whose day job is teaching deconstruction to university students.)

The problem here is that by the late Eighties Nazis were kinda cool. Kurt Waldheim was helped, not hurt, by revelations of his Nazi past, when running for the Austrian Presidency.

Kermode is properly severe about de Man’s antisemitic writings, observing that “the wartime writing is odious, that of a clever young man corrupted by ideas, and corrupted by war (for in wartime the intellect grows as sordid as the conflict), or merely opportunist, or a mixture of all of these”.

Kermode, like most British academics of a certain age, was tolerant of anti-Semitism. It was naughty, it was seductive, and since one can't expect greasy Continentals to take cold showers, play cricket and keep a stiff upper lip, allowances must be made. As Saki puts it 'tell me a man's longitude and I'll tell you his latitude'.

But he is not so intellectually gauche as to imagine that it easily or simply discredits de Man’s later thought, or theory itself.

What discredits de Man's later thought is that it isn't thought at all. It is gibberish intended to pull off a con.

Louis Menand, writing for The New Yorker in 2014, observed that theory “has never really recovered its reputation” in the aftermath of the de Man case. But the fact that theory has faded from public view may be less a function of specific scandals and more a function of theory’s inescapable absorption into the cultural mainstream – its gradual but undeniable de-radicalisation, as its language and concepts migrate from the graduate seminar and the peer-reviewed journal to the Twitter feed and the Op Ed column.

We all tell stupid lies from time to time. There is always some degenerate research program which we use to disguise imbecility if not mendacity. But we do distinguish between availability cascades on the basis of alethia. If you use pseudo-medical jargon to explain to me why I look like shit, I may actually make an appointment with my G.P. But if you use pseudo-astrological jargon I get the message that you don't like me and want me to feel shitty about myself. That's what happened with 'theory'.

When online ironists refer to “the discourse”, they are telling us that theoretical ideas are now part of our everyday armature of concepts;

No. They are part of our everyday armature of stupidity, mendacity, paranoia and misanthropy.

and as Louis Menand points out in his essay on de Man, the hostility to theory was always strange, because to express a preference for one text over another is already to hold a literary theory

No it isn't. It is to hold a theory of preference.

– the point being that theory, taken in toto, merely made visible certain things that we had in a sense been looking at all along.

Or not looking for but living with like a painful hemorrhoid or debilitating mental illness.

The Meaninglessness of Meaning charts the gradual transformation of theory from exotic financial instrument to the pocket-change of the intellectual economy, a process that was more or less complete by the time the theorists themselves were becoming the stuff of respectful obituaries.

Exotic financial instruments exist because there are genuine arbitrage opportunities. Fraudulent financial instruments exist because some people are con-men. 'Theory' was the latter. Its practitioners were not George Soros but Bernie Madoff. There is a wide difference between pocket-change and boogers intermingling with pocket-lint.

Thus Judith Butler, memorialising Jacques Derrida in 2004, writes:

Derrida kept us alive to the practice of criticism, understanding that social and political transformation was an incessant project […]

Butler was certainly kept alive by her pay check. But so were people who worked for Madoff.

How is justice done? What justice do we owe others? And what does it mean to act in the name of justice?

Yup. Butler sure has done a lot for Justice- thinks nobody at all.

These were questions that had to be asked regardless of the consequences, and this meant that they were often questions asked when established authorities wished that they were not.

Butler showed great courage in travelling to Venezuela and Zimbabwe and China to denounce injustice in defiance of established authorities in those countries. Except she didn't at all. Whose boat did she rock in the US? People like her helped the Right by turning undergrads towards the Federalists.

This is as eloquent a defence of theory as you could hope to find:

But it isn't eloquent! It is sophomoronic!

a moving claim for its continued relevance in a world shaped, in constantly changing ways, by power and by those who resist it

so ineffectually that change of an adverse sort is catalysed. This is like Mahatma Gandhi saying 'the way to get rid of the Brits is to form an orderly queue and get beaten on the head and carted off to jail'. Every time the Indians tried it, the Raj got stronger.  Ultimately, Nehru ended up begging Mountbatten to stay on as Governor General. Meanwhile, Gandhi got shot and an American caught his assassin. It seems the Congress Party did not want to protect the life of the Mahatma because the man was a cretin.

There are certainly problems with the world that theory has helped to create –

Paranoia and imbecility don't create a world. They represent failure to properly live in it.

it does sometimes feel as if we are stuck with an intellectual culture that, at its worst, devotes itself to finding misogyny, racism and capitalist greed in texts like prizes in boxes of breakfast cereal, and that in teaching us to see the politics in every text, theory has left us unable to see anything but the politics in every text.

With the result that America now has a choice between Biden whose 1994 bill hurt African Americans and Trump who thinks White Power nutters are wonderful folk. Crying wolf all the time is not an effective strategy to protect the community from that predator. It has the reverse effect. If Trump and Biden are Nazis then actual Nazis are just as good or bad as either of them.

In her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski observes that in the contemporary academy, “Rigorous thinking is equated with, and often reduced to, the mentality of critique [i.e. Theory]. The result can be a regrettable arrogance of intellect, where the smartest thing you can do is to see through the deep-seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of others.”

What would Rita Felski know about rigorous thinking? She is as stupid as shit.

Or, as Susan Sontag noted, back in pre-theoretical 1963, “Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”

What 'intellect'? She was a silly phrase-maker.

On campus, at least, things seem to be changing: Felski herself is an influential advocate of “postcritique”, a school of criticism that seeks to add ideas about emotion, affect, aesthetics and form to the theoretical menu.

Yet, these things were there when the literary work was first produced and consumed. If this cretin is only able to add these things to her menu now then she has been dining on cutlery, not food.

Which sounds oddly like liberal humanism to me – but there you go.

Yes, yes, we are going. The truth is we only stopped by to laugh at you. Your PhD is worthless. If you like John Sturrock so much, why don't you marry him? Also your fly is undone. Ha, ha- made you look!

As John Sturrock notes here, pace Sokal and Bricmont, “the more styles of intellectual discourse cultures find the room and time for, the healthier”.

Very true. We gotta invite more homicidal neo-Nazis to our faculty parties. Dodging their blows will give us healthy exercise.

This should go without saying.

Not say without going.

But if theory has taught us anything,

or if it has taught us nothing

it’s that nothing

or everything

– literally nothing at all

or metaphorically nothing at all or literally everything at all

– ever really goes without saying.

or really says without going

Or, to put it another way: La théorie est morte, vive la théorie!

Or to put it yet another way, as Terence, the Roman African playwright wittily put it- vincula jamis mortis, catulum gorbis pocultum!

Leigh Claire La Berge & why English should not be taught at University

 Leigh Claire La Berge is associate professor of English at BMCC CUNY. In addition to her book Scandals and Abstractions (which is about novels dealing with Finance in the Eighties)  La Berge is the co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014) and the author of numerous articles that have appeared in venues such as The Journal of Cultural Economy, Studies in American Fiction, and The Radical History Review. 

She writes in the LARB

The humanities have offered colleges and universities a way to be perceived as genuinely distinct from corporations and banks, even as they become more influenced by and dependent on those bodies.

This is very true. I went into the LSE to cash a check. The porter said 'We are a College, not a Bank'. I said 'but you don't have a Humanities Dept. Hence you are not genuinely distinct from a corporation or a bank.' Sadly, the porter came to the conclusion that I was inebriated and chased me out.

I'm sure the same thing happens to Imperial College and the various Medical Colleges and Business Schools and Law Colleges around the globe. They are perceived as genuinely identical with corporations and banks because they lack a Humanities Dept.

A university and a corporation’s organization of scientific research are different but relatable entities; but no corporation has anything like the “priceless” form of value that a Comparative Literature department offers.

Nonsense! Many publishing companies employ far better poets and writers than any Comp Lit. shithole Dept. of Grievance Studies.

This odd alliance, wherein the humanities both sustains and is undercut by financial schemes within the university, produces a discourse of serial crisis.

There is no such alliance. Humanities were taught even in Communist countries. They may cease to be taught in Capitalist countries if this author is a typical example of the sort of pedagogue our Universities produce. Why? Because nobody will pay for it.

Shitting yourself while screaming hysterically is an example of a 'discourse of serial crisis'. Why pay to be inculcated in its protocols?

How did we get here, and what effect will “the death of the humanities” narrative have this time around?

The Humanities turned into sub-Humanities and its professors stopped being able to write cogently or form a coherent argument. Some pretended this was because they were actually Marxists and Marxism wasn't shite. Nobody believed them. They were just stupid tossers is all. Still, if one were a cretin, one may as well get a sheepskin in cretinism just in case it meant one could get tenure for teaching other cretins. In other words, if the Ponzi scheme could find new suckers then it made sense to play along.

The Quantitative Easing of the HumanitiesThe GI Bill marked a pivotal moment in higher education. But such a bill should be seen as more broadly reflective of the country’s Keynesian moment: roughly, the late 1940s through the early 1970s, in which art, public culture, and, yes, education, were funded directly by both state and federal governments.

Nonsense! The GI Bill reflected the vast wartime expansion in the Public Sector. America's commitment to Higher Education should be seen as a direct consequence of the Cold War. Both sides were talent spotting bright kids and getting them into arcane fields of research. There was also 'soft power' competition in the Humanities which had a more or less explicit ideological purpose.

In the 1950s and ’60s, as Sharon Zukin notes, public expenditure in arts through universities “opened art as a second career for people who had not yet been integrated into the labor market” so much so that by the end of that decade “more than a million adults in America had identified their occupation as in some way connected with the creative arts.” [2]

The quote is from Zukin's 1982 classic, 'Loft Living'. She speaks of 'college educated, middle class women' being attracted to the Arts & Craft movement and reclassifying themselves as 'artists'. But that was back in the Eighties when lofts were still cool.

Why did the American tax-payer permit 'public expenditure' on 'arts through universities'? The answer is that American tax-payers thought they themselves would benefit by it. Once affirmative action took hold, tax-payers revolted. They believed that darkies and commies would disproportionately benefit.

Indeed, as millions more students and dollars entered colleges and universities, the number of colleges and universities increased. And as they expanded by population served and subject areas taught, universities became more radical places, particularly in relation to their own funding.

However, it was protests against the Vietnam War which had greater salience.

Students in New York and Massachusetts began to demand wages for attending college — the “Wages for Students” campaign. From 1969 to 1975, after intense student and community protests and strikes, the City University of New York announced a program of “open admissions,” which included accessible and free remedial education, Spanish-language instruction, and a tuition-free university.

CUNY was free but meritocratic from its inception in 1847. It started charging tuition in 1976, six years after it embraced 'open admissions'. Predictably, standards fell. In 1999, CUNY got rid of remedial classes. Its ranking rose.

Of course, there were always dissenters from the Keynesian order, and they too laid their eyes on the expanding university.

Nixon was the only President to say he was a Keynesian. Everybody else pretended to be a 'Balance the Books' budget hawk.

American neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman took note of this expansion. As Melinda Cooper laconically notes, they “began to suspect there was a connection between free and low tuition and the militancy of the student movement.” 

In 1955, Friedman wrote a paper advocating 'Income Share Agreements' whereby Universities fund students in return for a small share of their earnings. If Colleges are subsidized by the State, they will literally recruit bums to put more 'bums on seats'. The bums will get drunk and become very militant till given more booze and their belligerence subsides into incontinence.

[3]The extension of their concerns into policy prescriptions — fewer grants, more loans — was aided by the coming contraction of the US economy. By the mid-1970s, the Keynesian curtain had begun to draw to a close.

Why? Because Nixon's price & wage freeze had failed. The Workers weren't going to curtail their disposable income so students could get stoned and run amok. Keynesianism died because the worker's lost their 'money illusion'. It was at this time that Liberals lost any illusions they may have had that horny handed proles wanted their kids to be taught Gramscian grammatology or Bakhtinian basket-weaving at some fancy shmancy Collidge wot their own tax dollars paid for.

The reasons for its denouement were legion: the emerging productive output of a newly rebuilt Western Europe and Japan,

which had already emerged a decade previously

the spending on and loss of the Vietnam War,

That was a one time monetary shock fully offset by ending Bretton Woods. It was cost-push factors which kept stagflation on the road. But that was entirely because workers refused to finance the Liberal State.

the reaching of a limit of productive/consumptive capacity in many domestic industries,

there were no such limits.

the rise of an offshore financial system and dollar market.

Which had happened a decade previously.

By 1979, inflation topped out at 13 percent a year, and by the early ’80s this particular act was indeed over.

Thanks to Reagan who was voted back despite record unemployment. It was clear that workers didn't care about unemployment. They just didn't want to finance 'the L-word'.

Yet the role of higher educational institutions had come to play in cultivating and professionalizing the arts and humanities would not, of course, be ended at the speed with which Ronald Reagan quelled the air traffic controllers’ strike.

Nonsense! The Humanities had already turned into sub-Humanities featuring paranoid gesture politics of a cretinous kind. Alan Bloom's 'The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students' sold a half million in hardback in 1987.

As Howard Singerman and Mark McGurl have recounted in their complementary studies of the cultural and administrative success of MFA programs, the Keynesian moment had sutured arts, literature, and the university closely together and rendered them mutually dependent.

There was no Keynesian moment. What obtained was the Cold War. Americans was the hegemon of half the world and it made sense for some of its lower middle class people to learn a little French and German and I-talian and whatever jibber-jabber it is them spicks and chinks and dot-heads and sand-nigger use to communicate.

On the one hand, there were and are some very good Creative Writing courses which enable talented young people to find lucrative markets. But, these aren't necessarily housed in a University. On the other, there were plenty of crap MFA courses which can't instill a talent most of us- and I say this feelingly- entirely lack.

Now, in a new era of inflation, wage stagnation, and a diversified institutional financial sector hungry for fee-based transactions and safe places to park assets, the budgets of colleges and universities — and with them support for arts and humanities — would undergo a structural change.

What caused the inflation? The American worker's refusal to accept cuts in real wages. What caused 'wage stagnation'? The American Corporation's refusal to accept negative real returns on equity. Why did the institutional financial sector diversify? Because savers would not accept negative real interest rates. The 'safe place to park assets' was gold and gilts and blue chip investments. The place to earn fees and do arbitrage was junk bonds.

Smart people who understood STEM subjects could go in for high yielding Venture Capital funds which, more often than not, were directly tied in to University led R&D. The Humanities, sadly, had already turned to shit and thus weren't 'safe places to park assets'. Could they be 'cash cows'?- i.e. cross-subsidize STEM subjects?

They would no longer be places to fund but to invest in; a path was laid in which federal money that went into colleges and universities would return from them to private entities.

Federal money which went to colleges came back to the Government in the shape of the higher taxes graduates paid.

In the sciences, publicly funded research could now be privatized under the auspices of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980: grants to students became interest-bearing loans to them.

The Bayh-Dole Act meant that the people who made the discovery could benefit from the discovery even if federal funds were used. Previously, the Federal Govt. had accumulated patents while, 95 % of the time, not bothering to do anything with them. The situation was like the final scene in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark'- the Govt. takes control of the discovery and simply loses it in some cavernous warehouse. Bayh-Dole is generally considered a good thing- however, in a 'tragedy of the anti-commons' type situation, some amendment may be desirable.

Pell grants only came into existence in 1965. Previously and going forward, Student Loans funded much of Higher Education. It is difficult to understand what, if anything, the author is getting at.

This is also the moment when government revenue streams shift from tax-based to bond-based, or when we move from the “tax state” to the “debt state” in Wolfgang Streeck’s words.

Utter nonsense! The Second World War was when this happened. Wolfgang Streeck is a Sociologist! Fuck would he know about Fiscal policy? We're lucky if he doesn't eat his own shit in public.

Instead of taxing high-earning Americans and corporations, the US government would sell them interest-bearing bonds — treasury bills.

But high-earning Americans are smart. They won't buy bonds which don't correspond to an income stream. For a Corporate bond, this is Gross Profit. For a Government bond, this is Tax income.

The fact that since the 1980s, the United States’s government debt has grown exponentially is itself a measure of this transition.

The proportion of debt to GDP has doubled with most of that growth occurring under Obama. Still, it is linear, not exponential growth. It may be that the author thinks Obama & Biden &crooked Hilary and so one were evil Capitalist bastards who transitioned the economy into a Ponzi scheme. But, in that case, she should have joined the Tea Party.

As Sandy Brian Hager notes, from 1944 to 1979, such bonds averaged a one percent loss; from 1980 to 2015, the average return on US treasuries was 5.5 percent.

Why? The War economy used Keynesian 'money illusion'. There was 'forced saving'. Gold could not be owned from the Thirties through to 1974. This meant savers got a raw deal. But, the 'grey vote' became of increasing importance. Thus, along with Obama, the author should blame the elderly for the end of her 'Keynesian moment'.

It’s not only that a financial class is bankrupting public infrastructure, but that we are paying them to do it.

Clearly this lady is overpaid and thus her tax dollars are supporting the financial class. I would urge her to quit her job. That way the financial class will itself be bankrupted. Also her students might learn how to write a decent English sentence.

Government “debt” is of course a toxic political subject, but it sustains many financial industries both in the United States and abroad, and it allows for both a continuous supply of safe assets as well as a benchmark against which risk may be assessed.

Financial industries would exist even if no Government debt existed. Indeed, Financial Services exist even where there is no Government.

The tax-state to debt-state transition quickly and forcefully shrank direct transfers from states to public universities.

There was no such transition. In real terms, state funding for public universities doubled between 1974 and 2000. Since then, more particularly between 2007 and 2017, real per capita funding has fallen by a few percentage points. However,  'Baumol cost-disease' means that the burden on students has risen by about fifteen percent. This has nothing to do with Obama's borrowing binge. He could have pursued more egalitarian priorities. But, it was his call to make and any praise or blame attaches to him alone- not some mythical transition to a 'debt-state'.

But that did not mean there was less money in circulation — indeed there was more. Only now, that money needed to circulate profitably without going into well-known sinkholes like rising wages or social welfare programs — both of which could challenge the social relations of the emerging austerity program.

So Obama was a cruel bastard. He could have raised wages or improved social welfare programs but, like crooked Hilary, he was only concerned with lining the pockets of his billionaire buddies.

Tuition at both private and public schools began its alpine ascent at this moment, as well. Rising tuition meant that available money could be channeled through student loans, which became (1976 for public loans; 1984 for private loans; both strengthened in 2005) impossible to discharge through bankruptcy.

Impossible? This lady is a Professor. Why is she telling her students it is impossible for them to discharge their student loans through bankruptcy? It isn't true. There is a 'Brunner test' which allows people to do so by showing

1. the borrower has extenuating circumstances creating a hardship such that they cannot repay the student loan and maintain a minimum standard of living;
2. those circumstances are likely to continue during the repayment term of the student loan; and
3. the borrower has made good faith attempts to repay the loan. (The borrower does not actually have to make payments, but merely attempt to make payments - such as try to find a workable payment plan.)

 The fact is non-performing student loans have to be written off. You can't get blood from a stone.

Soon after, the US government began guaranteeing private loans to students under the FFEL program and did so until 2010.

Obama scrapped FFEL but the interest rate on Direct Loans is still too high.

Still, as of 2014, more than 75 percent of student loans were secured by US Treasury obligations. [4]

That Obama sure was a spend-thrift! If only Friedman had been listened to back in '55. Universities would have had an interest in turning out students with useful work-skills who could earn well and thus give more back to their alma mater through the Income Sharing Agreement. They would also have had an incentive for sacking bad teachers and dissolving worthless Departments.

Instead they had to pretend to be doing 'diversity' based social-engineering. But, they did it in a nakedly racist manner.

 Finally, public and private colleges and universities increasingly turned to bond markets to fund construction and infrastructure. These bonds would be secured by rising tuition, discounted by the state, and, as The Economist has noted, offer institutional as well as wealthy individual investors another safe harbor: they are low risk and tax free.

Quite true. Obama and his pals created a world safe for the super-rich.

In each scenario, universities produce much needed liquidity for financial markets and allow for the private capture of public wealth — this is the trick of post-’70s finance.

Universities don't produce liquidity. The Central Bank does. What the author means is that non-profits can produce fungible assets which soak up excess liquidity and which have a safe, non zero, real return. If the author doesn't like the manner in which Obama & Co. produced liquidity and took over the down side risk for the financial sector, she should praise the Tea Party and vote for fiscal hawks.

One effect of this influx of money has been to erase many of the distinctions between public and private universities, indeed to reconfigure what public education means. The federal government guarantees some of the money that flows into private colleges and private universities through loans and research funding, while flagship public schools have essentially become private in their funding since they increasingly have less direct state support to draw on. Likewise, consortiums such as the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities have been crucial in lobbying for continued and increased access to public funding for private institutions. Humanists, for their part, have been slow to view the public financing of private education at the university level with the same degree of abhorrence they view the voucher system in secondary education.

So, Humanists are stoooopid. Who knew?

Yet even as the public versus private distinction lessens in higher education, the profit versus nonprofit distinction, one which even a few years ago seemed tentative, looks for now to have endured. Indeed, The New York Times recently reported that “some owners of private colleges turn a tidy profit by going non-profit.”

Obama failed to crack down on these shady for-profit Colleges whose students fail the 'gainful employment' test- i.e. can't get a salary bump sufficient to service their student loans. The Education Dept. which ought to stop this type of fraud, appear to be asleep at the wheel.

Freidman's 'Income Share Agreements' would have prevented any such pathology developing in the first place.

 Nonprofits pay little to no real estate taxes and may be donated to for a tax deduction. The tax breaks allotted to nonprofits enable private schools to “build up” rather than “spend down” their endowments. Endowments make more capital investment possible. This pressures public schools to strive for similar endowments, through private fundraising and tuition increases. And only nonprofit entities may float municipal bonds, themselves tax-exempt.

Non profits can float bonds, but not municipal bonds, which, though tax-exempt, carry a higher risk premium.

The humanities may seem to be an outlier in this scheme, but, ideologically, their role is crucial.

No. Their role is cretinous.

They provide the nonprofit character that, above and beyond the legal status, sustains this operation.

Keiser College had courses in pastry making not Victorian poetry. Why? It is targeting people who like pastries but have little interest in poetry. Anyway, knowing how to make pastry could get you a job. Everyone knows Victorian poetry is about throwing away the textbook and standing on your desk and then either getting gay with the Professor or committing suicide or both.

The truth is nobody gives a shit about the Humanities. We think it destroys, not adds, value and leaves its victims less able to flip burgers in a hygienic manner because they are habituated to deconstructing their own poo in the belief that this will get them a higher grade.

As we saw with the TARP bailout of investment banks in 2008–’09, public subsidy of banks and corporations is not a popular policy prescription.

But it went ahead anyway because we need Banks. We don't need English Professors coz we alridy knowz how to spick English gud.

But universities appear to be of a different sort. Even with ever-decreasing state backing, “education” remains, along with health care, one of the most supported and sought-after state services. Unlike Big Ten football or university-based public-private partnerships, the humanities offer the semblance of a genuinely non-transactional space.

Fuck off! The Humanities demand not just money in fees but also that we write real stoopid essays and like read fancy shmancy books and listen to NPR and other such godlessness. How is that not a transaction? What's more everybody knows you gotta give head to get ahead. You can't tell me Shakespeare didn't have to suck a lot of cock to get his sonnets published. As for John Milton, I personally saw him bend over for Oliver Cromwell. Me? My poetry must rise or fall upon its own merits. Still, it would have been nice to be asked.

What is so distinct about the humanities, of course, is that they cannot be valued or priced by any consistent metric.

Sure they can. Graduate earnings are the way to go.

They are a form of conceptual elaboration that has as their structure a refusal of a predetermined outcome.

Every conceptual elaboration has this structure. Otherwise it is either not conceptual or not an elaboration.

This open reflexivity contrasts quite sharply with the ends-oriented logic of profit.

Profit only exists if there is uncertainty- i.e. outcomes aren't predetermined. Logic tells us that if there no Knightian uncertainty then only Rents obtain.

Once institutionalized in American universities, humanistic reflexivity was perfectly suited to both a life of erudition and to the patrician “gentleman’s C.”

Humanism was never institutionalized in American universities. Research, in general of a highly utile type, was. That's why American universities weren't shite.

Corralled under its sign was an institutional space of latitude that ranged from critical inquiry to luxury purposelessness; one could explore existentialism or one could simply do nothing.

This may have been true of the Fellows of an old fashioned Oxbridge College- like Tom Sharpe's 'Porterhouse'. It corresponds very little with the American 'publish or perish' academic culture satirized by David Lodge in 'Changing Places'.

It’s enough to remember George W. Bush’s commencement address to Yale in 2001, when he reminisced about his days in the Sterling Library. Bush, who had been a history major at Yale, and a friend, he recounted, “had a mutual understanding: [he] wouldn’t read aloud, and I wouldn’t snore.” Bush then continued: “And to the C students — I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”

But Bush got a Harvard M.B.A. He was only pretending to be a dumb frat boy.

But in the 1980s, like consumer goods and tuition prices, the gentleman’s C became subject to an inflationary spiral.

Inflation peaked in the Seventies and came down in the Eighties. Baumol 'cost disease' affected tuition prices- but amenities for students were improving.

The humanities led the charge. The whole point of the gentleman’s C was that the gentleman didn’t need it; it cost him little intellectually or monetarily.

Getting a C in a crap subject like History did not matter because everyone understood that this was no reflection on your intellect. Crashing and burning while doing an MBA or at Law School was a different matter. It showed you genuinely were a cretin. You could be as gentlemanly as you liked, nobody would trust you with their money or their law suit.

But pump enough money into the humanities market, and, like housing and equities, its stated value will rise.

But Humanities have slumped. There was a time when a Prof. of English at Ivy League spoke better English than the average man. Spivak and Bhabha speak worse English than the average Indian C.A or M.B.A. They are more not less ignorant of Literature and Philosophy.

Indeed, the humanities have been operating under the same kind of quantitative easing plan that has sustained the US economy, post-2008: loose government money wards off inflation or depression by boosting asset prices.

How does loose government money ward off inflation? If asset prices rise there is a 'wealth effect' which causes Aggregate Demand to rise. You can't ward off both inflation and depression at the same time. Either there is a liquidity trap, or there isn't. The author is wholly illiterate in Economics. What is her contention re. the Humanities? Is it that they have been selling bogus degrees to illiterate people? If so, how is this Obama's fault?

And yet, the ability of the humanities to signify multiple, contradictory positions within the university persists even in the face of their simultaneous inflation and diminution.

A sign is only useful if it signifies one thing unambiguously. Suppose you use the same sign for both the gents' and the ladies' toilets. That sign would signify multiple, contradictory, things. It would also cause a great deal of annoyance and embarrassment to your customers.

Is that the purpose of the Humanities dept?

The humanities function — rhetorically — as both the worst choice a student could make — for the price — and the site of insistence that the university won’t capitulate to an overly econometric logic simply by the fact that they continue to offer the humanities.

'Econometric logic'? Does the author mean a structural causal model of the economy? If so, what she is saying is- 'there is empirical evidence that students who choose to study the Humanities are cretins who will become yet more cretinous as a result of studying that garbage. Universities know this. Yet, they deliberately maintain a Humanities Dept. because they want to show that they hate their students and, furthermore, ensure that at least a portion of their graduates will be more cretinous as a result of their having paid good money to study Humanities in a Department only kept open for a cruel and inhumane purpose.'

Why do Universities not go a step further and chop off the arms of crippled students whom they admit only for that reason? That way they can show that they won't capitulate to an overly bourgeois utilitarian calculus which considers it wrong to harm disabled people.

But why stop there? Why don't Universities periodically decapitate and sodomize the eye-sockets of a portion of their students? That would send an even clearer message that Universities won't capitulate to the demands of Society.

They are perceived as a mark of indulgence and despair even while, as Christopher Newfield has been tirelessly demonstrating for years, they actually make money for the university because they cost so little to administer. [5] 

However, Law & Business Studies are even better at 'cross-subsidizing' STEM subjects. The trouble with Humanities students is that they stink up the place and, moreover, soon become as ignorant and stupid as their teachers.

The humanities organize academic obsolescence as well as offer a space of critique of the institution itself, and these properties truly do distinguish a college or university from a corporation.

How do the humanities 'organize academic obsolescence'? Consider this author's own pseudo-economistic drivel. It revives the ghost of a long dead research program in political economy. Itself wholly obsolete, it feeds vulture fashion on fallacies slain in long ago methodenstreits.

Where else can you find an English department?

Corporations trading with English speaking countries often have an in-house Translation and Facilitation Department. Language Schools are not Universities and there are several which have Departments of English and French and so forth. Some countries, have a Department within the Ministry of Education specially tasked with promoting the teaching of English in schools. Publishing Houses may have members of staff greatly superior at English to Academicians in that country. When I first visited Italy, there were some elderly professors of English who could not speak the language. By contrast, everyone who worked in Publishing was wholly fluent in English and could discourse learnedly on Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis and so forth.

Newfield’s point that the humanities subsidize the sciences has been widely cited and corroborated. Why doesn’t it then stick, or resonate more powerfully, both within and beyond humanist circles?

I've already provided the answer. Law & Business Studies & various other Professional courses are an even better alternative.

Here I’d like to add to his wonderful research. The humanities play a dual role: they both make money and ground a discourse of losing it.

Why ground a discourse of pissing money against the wall? The thing is too easily done.

They can always be cut more, but they will not be cut completely as long as the nonprofit organization of higher education remains in place.

Yet Keiser University has courses in pastry making but nothing which corresponds to a Humanities program. The market has already spoken.

And humanities scholars have been as attached to this discursive bind as anyone else.

Discursive binds don't exist. Only stupidity does.

Rather like Foucault’s Victorian doctor, who declares the horrors of homosexuality unspeakable before he undertakes a careful cataloging of them, humanities scholars have joined the funeral dirge for their own disciplines. But in the face of a seeming market correction, we need to ask: Is this funeral for the wrong corpse?

Foucault literally 'died of ignorance' endangering others by his own stupidity and recklessness.  His Victorian Doctor did not say that there was anything about the body which could not be spoken about. Rather, there were things which were so evil they should not be spoken of as if they were natural or ethically neutral.

A good teacher can improve the mind of her student regardless of the topic of instruction. The Humanities once attracted good teachers and thus retained good students. Those days are long gone. The Commies and their 'useful idiot' fellow-travelers began a 'long march through the institutions' which ended in idiocy of a wholly noisome type. Still, there are top law firms who will recruit Eng Lit or History grads from certain Schools. Journalism and the Bureaucracy will always have a need for cretins of a certain stripe as will the Tory leadership.

Our author thinks there has been a 'market correction' for the Humanities- i.e. the present value of a Credential of that sort had been inflated and has now fallen to its natural level. I was under the impression that the thing had happened long ago. Our author also asks if the funeral of the Humanities involves the wrong corpse. This seems reasonable. Her own prose has the stench of decomposition. Clearly, whatever it was that the Humanities buried, it was not its own rotting cadaver.

Nothing that is of the mind truly dies- so says the Sage Sanath Kumar in the Mahabharata- save by confusion or inattention. This author- though a Professor of English- refuses to learn the meaning of English words and collocations with the result that her thoughts are still-born and require immediate interment.

Clearly, she has seen the word 'Haircut'- meaning that bondholders are paid only a portion of the face value of the securities they own- and decided that it applies to a 'shakeout'- i.e. a contraction of supply because of adverse market conditions.

Time for a Humanities Haircut?After a series of college closings and near-bankruptcies, in January 2019, such lamentation intensified when an idiosyncratic liberal arts school, one whose reputation supersedes its endowment, Hampshire College, announced that it too would be closing.

'Supersedes' is wrong. She means 'one whose reputation exceeds its endowment'- i.e. it is more famous than wealthy. If its reputation supplanted its endowment, it could raise more money purely on the basis of its 'goodwill'.

(“Seeking to partner” with another institution was the choice idiom.) [6] Because of Hampshire’s roster of distinguished alumni along with its national profile, it became a kind of anchor in a long-simmering discussion: is this how the liberal arts–based humanities will end, not with a bang but a merger?
Writing in The Nation, Hampshire Professor Margaret Cerullo offered this assessment: 'As small colleges nationwide find themselves under siege, Hampshire may be the demonstration case. If [Hampshire] college can be destroyed — [even though it was] founded as an alternative by powerful institutions in western Massachusetts (Amherst, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and UMass Amherst) […] — then the arts and the liberal arts as inspiration to lives of critical inquiry and social engagement will have been dealt another serious blow.'

This seems reasonable. Cerullo's words might well get some billionaire with fond memories of her college days to write a check to save the place. Our author, however, takes a more censorious view-

Such sentiments are less a description of the problem the humanities face than they are a symptom of it.

So Cerullo is afflicted with a disease and the sentiment he, not inelegantly, expresses, is a symptom of that disease, the nature of which, like Foucault's Victorian doctor, our author considers unspeakable.

First, they reinscribe the false dichotomy between the economy’s instrumentality and the humanities’ abstraction by isolating the latter from the former.

How very naughty of Cerullo! He had no business reinscribing any such thing. Just think of all the billions of terrorized women and children who have been beaten, raped, sodomized and subjected to haircuts by neoliberalism all because that false dichotomy! The economy's instrumentality is univocal with the humanity's abstraction! Please don't isolate the latter from the former! Think of all the women and little kiddies who will suffer if you commit a crime so heinous!

Since the early 1980s this hasn’t been an either/or situation — it’s been a both/and. The humanities’ abstract character has precisely enabled their economic instrumentation in colleges and universities, which has enabled the humanities to expand and seemingly democratize.

Everything taught at a University- as opposed to a Trade School- has an abstract character. Theoretical Physics has a more abstract character than Mathematical Economics. Algebraic Topology is more abstract than Physics. However, my own specialty, forgetful functors in Socio-proctological spaces- is even more abstract. Sadly, it is utterly useless. That is why there is no demand for it. There was a demand for Humanities because it was thought they'd make you a better, smarter, human being. The supply side was adversely selective because pseudo-leftists were long marching through the institutions fucking things up for everybody while claiming to be third wave eco-feminists or some such shite.

Hampshire College — and many other small, private schools—could not have prospered for as long as they did without this pairing. The actual democratization of access to liberal arts schools was possible only under highly leveraged conditions.

Hampshire College, set up in 1970 with generous grants from the likes of the Ford Foundation, did well when it had good teachers and was in tune with the zeitgeist. People got some value for money. But the Humanities turned to shit and so good teachers couldn't be had for love or money. Hampshire started off with a lot of money. Thus, there was no 'leveraging'. The author is pretending to know about finance. But she is as ignorant of it as she is of her own subject. Why? It's coz she studied it after it had turned to shit.

These colleges are less “under siege” than they are confronting the end of the same quantitative easing that ballooned the number of institutions, their longevity, and their rosters.

For demographic reasons, there would have been a 'shake-out'- i.e. a contraction in supply. Students need to look at not just availability of credit but also the opportunity cost of taking a particular course or attending a particular college. Unlike financial assets which are highly fungible and thus gross substitutes for each other, investment in education involves massive hysteresis effects. Thus an increase in Knightian Uncertainty has a bigger impact.

Doing so had the further effect of conflating “critical inquiry” and “critical thought” with a kind of institutional liberal arts.

What is the author saying? I suppose, she thinks that Liberal Arts Colleges swindled their students by pretending to teach 'critical thought'. The whole thing was a Ponzi scheme. Now the money has run out and these Madoffs are being driven out of business. Since she herself studied 'Liberal Arts' and has clearly been rendered utterly cretinous in consequence, we must allow her to voice her grievance in such illiterate terms as she can command.

Yet that has necessarily been a conflation with institutional finance, too.

Why necessarily? It is because, in the poor addled brain of our author, if one conflation takes place another can't be far behind. And 'institutional finance' sounds like the sort of thing that will turn up and conflate with everything else like crazy.

Consider my own pet peeve re. the neighbor's cat which suns itself upon the roof of a garden shed which overlooks my study window. After a few shots of Bacardi, the realization dawns on me that the neighbor's cat has been conflated with the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neo-Gramscian nomenklatura. But why? The answer is that the cat observed me doing something which voided the warranty on my Dyson vacuum cleaner. However, I returned it to John Lewis without mentioning the incident. Since the real reason elderly men bought that particular model was well known to the staff, they darted at me many a dirty look and put on rubber gloves before disposing of the machine in a hygienic manner. The losses John Lewis made as a result, caused the workers to lose their bonuses (John Lewis being a worker's co-operative). This was clearly in the interests of institutional finance. Thus the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat had been conflated not just with the neo-Gramscian nomenklatura (who probably incited me to a lewd action against the Dyson) but also Neoliberal Institutional Finance!

There is nothing which can't be conflated with something else and then conflated with the Rothschilds or the Lizard People from Planet X.

Now it seems, without the student population to absorb the money, to recycle the funds not going to public infrastructure or wages under the auspices of the debt state, the private liberal arts school itself may undergo a market correction. Thus producing a new crisis in the humanities.

Very true! Now that Dyson can't rely on John Lewis taking back machines which have been nutted in, they have had to move to Singapore! Capitalism really does destroy itself! Ironically, the garden shed too has been knocked down so the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat can no longer occultly incite me to lewd actions against vacuum cleaners. This has produced not a crisis, but a lysis, in the Socio-proctological Sciences.

In New England today, one can hardly drive five miles without seeing another precarious private college or university admitting whoever it can find and offering them a “financial aid package” that means they’ll be paying off their debt for the next 30 years. And where do their graduates go? Many head down the road, to take up jobs as assistant managers, service workers, and so on. Should these students have the time and space to develop a sense of humanistic reflection? Absolutely. Should that be done in a private liberal arts school? The more these schools have become imbricated in institutional finance, the harder it is to make that case.

Imbrication refers to 'overlapping tiles'. Schools are not the shingles on the roof top of Institutional finance. Spivak's English was not that of a native speaker. She genuinely may have confused the term for something else. No doubt, as an undergraduate, she had professors who mumbled about the 'imbrication' and 'exbrication'. As part of the Sub-Humanities, she has foisted a nonsensical 'term of art' upon an entirely parodic type of gesture political pedantry.

What point is our author trying to make? Is it not that Schools which are connected in some way to the Financial Sector are unworthy of our respect? Even if they do something we approve of, it is hard to justify their existence.
Suppose these Schools were kept at arms length from FinanzKapital by generous grants from the tax payer, would their moral position be altered? Would it not still be the case that their students had been swindled out of the opportunity to study something more remunerative or, at least, socially useful or well regarded?

In fact, it’s not “the humanities” that will suffer, but certainly many individual colleges and universities will, and the ones serving already marginalized populations will go first.

If a 'liberal arts' college closes, the liberal arts can be said to suffer. More especially, if people say 'liberal arts colleges are shit, only cretins teach it and only cretin study it,' then it is the case that 'the humanities' have suffered a considerable decline in prestige.

Indeed, what is unique about Hampshire is that its decline transpires alongside its alternative yet blue-blood heritage.

Did Hampshire's decline begin in 1970? If not, this author's abominable English is also utterly mendacious.

Regardless, some aspects of institutional liberal arts will be forced to take a “haircut,” bond-industry lexicon for a write-down of value.

She means 'bond-industry jargon'. There is a 'lexicon' for the industry which features a number of precise legal terms under that rubric .

There is no 'write-down of value' here. There is a 'shake out'. It is not the case that Hamilton degrees yield their possessors a lower return. Rather, it may be, Hamilton ceases to award degrees as its accreditation is revoked.

Yet since the humanities are not equally distributed across such schools, and each relates to institutional finance through its own endowment and state-funding structure, “the humanities” itself is the wrong site of critique and attachment. Indeed, it is too humanistic.

So everything this author has written here was wrong-headed. But it wasn't 'humanistic' at all. It was brutal.

Humanists might use this moment to rethink the imaginary of the humanities, along with the private liberal arts school and the reality of what the quantitative easing of the humanities has promised and what it has delivered.

What would be the point? This author has used this moment to write garbage. Why should any of her colleagues be able to do a better job? Is it really the case that this author was the runt of the litter ceaselessly teased for her stupidity and ignorance by her class-mates all through her academic career?

Both have long had the effect of making “the humanities” less a site to understand the political economy of colleges and universities than one to obfuscate it. Perhaps a market correction in the humanities will open a space for a new conversation — new analysis and new demands. That doesn’t mean the fallout won’t be real, and painful. But humanities scholars would benefit from being less sentimental about the reasons for the Keynesian state’s success, as Annie McClanahan has explored, and more sanguine about realities of its disappearance. [7]

The 'Keynesian state's success' had to do with winning wars. But America lost the Vietnam war. It also became apparent that Public spending would disproportionately help non-WASPs. The specter of the 'Welfare Queen' brought Reagan to power. The campus became a safe space for the hippie and the commie and other such detritus from a '68 when History reached a turning point but failed to turn.

What would it mean to have a genuinely public humanities, one which has existed and could exist in places as diverse as union schools, community centers and continuing-education initiatives, community colleges, and so on? What would it mean to have a genuinely public college or university, one free from both the debt state and its perverse double, philanthropy? Mourning the loss of private liberal arts schools will not lead to such conversations. Understanding the arc of their recent trajectories might.

We all already have genuinely public humanities. Indeed, before Plato's Academy or Aristotle's Lyceum, there was the Agora where the likes of Simon the shoe-maker held forth.  Consider my own narrow peregrinations in search of enlightenment. When I hit upon a difficult passage in Bedil, I go down the street to consult the kasai at the Halal shop. If it is a mathematical proof I need help with, I post a question on the Stack Exchange. For more humanistic symposia, I can choose from a range of pubs and wine-bars.

We know now where that arc has led. Perhaps, as humanists, it is now time to ask ourselves the very question that has greeted newly minted humanities graduates, standing with degree in hand on the day of their graduation, wide-eyed if daunted, and maybe a little hung-over: “Well … what are you going to do with that?”

The answer is 'I will write ultracrepidarian shite for the LARB or some other such pseudo-Leftie rag.'