#BookTitleConfessions Twitterrant

Milton Friedman, "Free To Lose: A Modest Proposal." #BookTitleConfessions

Henry Hazlitt: "Economics in One Deception: The Shortest and Surest Way to Subsidize Plutocracy Is Defense Spending" #BookTitleConfessions

Friedrich A Hayek, "Back to Serfdom: How to Dismantle the Middle Class to Rebuild Feudalism and Call It Liberty" #BookTitleConfessions

HernandoDeSoto, "The Magical Thinking of Capital: Why Can't Exploited People Just Pretend Precarity is Liberty Like Exploiters Do?" #BookTitleConfessions

Thomas L. Friedman, "Flat Earth Society: Suck on This Twenty-First Century!" #BookTitleConfessions

Ayn Rand, "Everybody Across the Atlas Shrugged: Plutocrats Go On Strike and Nobody Notices" #BookTitleConfessions

Alvin Toffler, "Future Schlock: How Futurists Coin Neologisms to Peddle the Status Quo as Accelerating Change" #BookTitleConfessions

Charles Murray, "The Smell Curve: Using Graphs and Pseudo-Science to Make Racist Public Policy Harder to Sniff Out" #BookTitleConfessions

Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen, "The New Digital Stage: Making Plutocracy and Pollution Seem Liberating With the Internet" #BookTitleConfessions

Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Artificial Imbecillence: Humans Made Stupid By Pretending Things Are Smart That Aren't" #BookTitleConfessions

Sheryl Sandberg, "Lean Thin: What Remains If Feminism Is Reduced To Upward Mobility Within White Racist Plutocracy," #BookTitleConfessions

Andrew Sullivan, "Virtuously Normal: A White Gay Male Demands the Racist Patriarchal Privileges He's Entitled To" #BookTitleConfessions

Emasculating Gun-Nuttery: Or, What Atrios Said

I couldn't agree more:

Obviously they're a scary crowd to mock, because they, you know, have guns. Which is part of the point. But it is time to up the mockery of the giant external penis of death crowd. They're ridiculous cowards at best, and sociopathic wannabee serial killers, or occasionally actual serial killers, at worst. Losers.

Well, I couldn't agree more, but I'll try anyway. I have argued that an underappreciated dimension of the extraordinarily successful assimilationist model of gay politics was not just the mass coming out of my post-Stonewall generation, but the derisive interpretative gesture of treating acts of aggressive homophobia as exhibitions of a closeted gayness themselves and then making that interpretation stick. The special power of Atrios' mockery above is that it is emasculating.

Indeed, Atrios' formula is multiply and incessantly emasculating: it first insinuates that the gun-toting gun-nut possesses a small penis (more to the point, the public gun as figure of fun robs even a mighty penile oak the symbolic heft of the patriarchal phallus), then it accuses the gun-toting gun-nut of a conspicuous cowardice, it goes on to accuse the gun-toting gun-nut of a deranged and hence incontinent selfhood, a paranoid selfhood precluded from the rationalization of a protective role, and then it equates the gun-toting gun-nut with being a "loser," illegible as leader, breadwinner, trustworthy comrade or civic-minded citizen. It goes without saying (I hope) that the set of connections implied and demands made by such a construction of masculinity could only ever be a kind of catastrophe, that a masculinity so construed even at its best would always be an immensely costly and palpably threatened bearing of selfhood given that men are vulnerable, error-prone, historically-situated, socially entangled beings prone to humiliation and hungry for connection as much as anybody else.

What Atrios' formula recognizes is that it is not strength but the fragility of masculine selfhood in this construal that is symptomized in the figure of the gun-toting gun-nut. Of course, it is because this construction of masculinity is ever more threatened that it seeks to be ever more threatening: it is only when heteronormative masculinity is no longer immediately or inevitably or naturally and hence pre-politically legible that it seeks to back itself in an anti-political hale of bullets, it is only when heteronormative authority is no longer ubiquitous that the figure of the gun-toting gun-nut dreams of proliferating to re-occupy public space. Like the conspicuous homophobe, the gun-toting gun-nut is compensating. It is true, as Atrios said, that there is danger in this moment when a loss of legibility is lived as an experience of being cornered, and especially when there are weapons involved: But to react to the figure with fear is to collaborate in the success of his compensatory gesture, while to react to the figure with mockery is to refuse him success in the most catastrophic imaginable way. Mockery renders the gun-toting gun-nut illegible in his masculinity in precisely the moment of his public assertion of it. Just so, mockery of the aggressive homophone no longer vouchsafes but threatens his once confident ritual assertion of heterosexuality.

There are, by the way, a host of no less emasculating compassionate or apparently compassionate interpretive strategies available to aid in the emasculating mockery of the gun-toting gun-nut: the gun as the cry for help, the gun as the infantile play for attention, the gun as sign of the traumatized victim incapable of the love he so desperately needs, and so on. More to the point, I believe our popular press should be larded with impressionistic anecdotes and true confessions illustrating this emasculating connection, Comedy Central and SNL should make endless hay flogging it for laughs, hapless exemplars should appear as stock characters in commercials selling insurance and cars and candy bars.

Emasculating readings of the gun-toting gun-nut, should they come to represent the prevailing commensensical reading of the figure will not only render the strategy less available to him in the first place -- becoming sites threatening exposure of failure rather than promising successful incarnations of agency -- but in becoming prevalent will have done no small amount of the work of demolishing this particular ritual materialization of the threatened and threatening bearing of would-be ruggedly individualistic heterosexual masculinity to the good of us all.

It's Now Or Never: An Adjunct Responds to SFAI's Latest Talking Points

In the latest communication from SFAI Administration dissuading adjuncts from voting to organize with SEIU, Dean Rachel Schreiber writes:

The key question: Is SEIU the right union for you? There are very significant issues facing adjunct faculty at most institutions, including SFAI. But this particular election will not guarantee solutions to these problems. Instead, this election will only decide if you commit to having SEIU represent you. I believe SEIU is not the right union. That is why I encourage you to vote no.

Let us be very clear, the "very significant issues facing adjunct faculty [at] SFAI" are that we have no job security, no reliable prospects, no voice in institutional governance, and no consequential recognition of our contribution to the community of SFAI.

These are not abstract issues. They are very specific. They have been articulated many times in many ways in many venues -- in self-study documents, open letters, statements in public meetings, stakeholder petitions -- and the administration has not responded to these problems except to choke off lines of communication that once existed (eliminating department heads and thus severing communication networks while at once overburdening to the point of failure those few remaining people who have any standing with administration) and to threaten our employment (with "at will" contracts surreally unsuited to an ongoing teaching situation, and recently cavalierly proposing that no adjunct can teach more than two years but then informally kinda sorta taking it back, perhaps when they realized that this would betray trusted, beloved fixtures at the school who have taught for decades and also cause a level of churn among three-quarters of the actual teachers at the school that would undermine standards, student-teacher relationships, and cause chaos to no good purpose). The administration is making very real, very specific, very solvable problems worse, and that too is a problem.

These problems provide the obvious context in which adjunct organizing has taken on its present urgency in the first place. In describing SEIU as a vast, soulless, alien octopus with nefarious intentions SFAI hopes to distract us from the real problems we are experiencing with loose fears of the unknown.

"SEIU is not the right union," SFAI helpfully advises.

So, what is the right union? What union won't respond to these obvious problems in the obvious way that will obviously annoy SFAI exactly the same way that SEIU does?

Of course, there is no "right union" -- but more to the point, there is no "other union." Not here, not now.

Perhaps Dean Schreiber and I would both prefer that adjuncts be represented by the Lollipop Guild, but the Lollipop Guild is not on offer. The Lollipop Guild organizes labor in the Land of Oz. San Francisco is not Oz (though arguably it comes close on a good day).

The vote to organize with SEIU is the vote to organize at all. There will not be another, at least not for us.

Dean Schreiber continues:

Among my reasons why you should vote against unionization by SEIU:
* SEIU has made questionable promises to you -- they cannot make guarantees regarding pay increases, job security, or other benefits prior to negotiations.
* SEIU has been criticized for "charges of coziness with big employers, limits on internal democracy, excessive deference to Democratic party leaders and frequent clashes with other unions.” [Source: http://inthesetimes.com/article/13471/wrong_union_for_the_job]
* SEIU does not have a long history with higher education, and certainly not with small independent colleges. They have not yet negotiated a contract with an art school, so there are many unknowns.
* Signing on to SEIU would be a big commitment, and despite what they say, it’s not an easy one to undo.

As someone who confronts this enormously consequential election and has reviewed plenty of materials provided by SEIU by now, I want to say that I have received no promises that they will negotiate a contract that guarantees pay raises. They have merely pointed out that they have negotiated such contracts for others. SEIU has told us that union dues are 1.74% of our negotiated salary and are to be paid only after a contract is ratified. And it is hardly likely that we would collectively ratify a contract that set us back financially. It isn't exactly a surprise that this detail is not specified in administrative talking points, only circumvented with loose talk about a lack of guarantees. But of course, adjuncts are used to working without guarantees. That is the prevailing state of affairs, after all. No one thinks organizing makes the gaining of benefits inevitable, but everybody knows that SFAI has not provided these benefits on their own in absence of the standing organized adjuncts might bring to bear on negotiations.

It is rather curious that the administration insinuates that SEIU is cozy with big employers. I am not sure the Suits at the long abusive fast food corporations SEIU is organizing would describe their relationship with SEIU as a "cozy" one. Perhaps I can be forgiven the suspicion that SFAI's administration would be looking forward to quite a game of footsie were they really anticipating such corporate coziness, rather than quaking in their boots and spitting out misleading talking points. Turning our attention from SEIU back to SFAI itself, one wonders if SFAI always finds corporate coziness so objectionable after all? Is there any corporate coziness to be found in the donor list for the vast pharaohnic building projects that presently preoccupy the SFAI administration's attention, for example? Does one discern an elicitation of corporate coziness in SFAI's Corporate Sponsoring Packet, exhorting companies to "Secure exposure for your name and brand in social media advertising, web and print promotional materials, course catalogues, and event signage" in exchange for cash? (If you follow that link, by the way, do note and enjoy the prominence of Diego Rivera's fresco in these promotional materials.)

When Dean Schreiber points out that SEIU has little history organizing small independent schools or art schools she conveniently fails to mention the substantial commitment represented by recent SEIU organizing of adjuncts at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mills College in Oakland, the California College of Art, as well as at SFAI.

Denying that there is a history of such organizing distracts attention from a history of undeniable abuses but it also fundamentally misreads what is happening right now: a movement organizing the neoliberal precariat of the corporatized academy, happening in the present moment, of which we are being asked to be a part. That there is not yet a history of such adjunct organizing just means that we are Making History.

The abuses of a generation are palpable. The problems that beset us are clear. The promises of this moment are exhilarating.

Are adjuncts going to take this chance to organize? Or are we going to count on loose promises backed by administrative nobless oblige instead?

Educate! Agitate! Organize! The time is NOW.

San Francisco Art Institute Touts Diego Rivera Fresco Celebrating Labor Politics While Engaging in Union Busting

The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of A City (1931) is a fresco painted by Diego Rivera which is a source of great pride, and an attraction for no small amount of tourist attention, for the San Francisco Art Institute where I have been teaching as an adjunct for over a decade. The image of this beautiful work posted below originated (pointedly) at the SFAI website itself, and you can learn more about the fresco at this promotional page also at the SFAI website.

A life-long champion of labor organizing and of the democratization of the economy, Rivera founded the Revolutionary Union of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors in 1922. For the fresco he made for SFAI, which was already an historically significant art school, over half a century old, in an historically significant building designed by James Bakewell and Arthur Brown, Jr., students of Bay Area visionary Bernard Maybeck, Rivera chose to produce a fresco about the connections between artists as laborers and the creative power of labor in the world, making a fresco about the making of a fresco, showing artists with many different skills collaborating to create a work of art, in this case a fresco about laborers collaborating to build a city.

As I have already mentioned, I am one of the adjuncts who have been enjoined to vote to become part of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Adjuncts like me represent three quarters of the faculty at SFAI, we work for comparatively low wages given our contribution to the mission of the school, we have no job security, we have little sense of our prospects, we have repeatedly observed that no amount of volunteerism, committee work, conspicuous dedication, excellent student evaluations provides sustained recognition or a sense of responsibility to us from administration. This state of affairs is hardly unique to SFAI, but is of a piece with a larger pattern of corporatized education in which teachers are rendered ever more precarious, robotic standardization replaces actual standards, administrative and marketing activities swallow ever vaster resources, and schools enter into ever tighter relationships to corporations seeking a trained docile indebted workforce and to gain proprietary intellectual property portfolios via supported research.

Although I have not been focused on labor politics in my own political life -- my focus has been on gender politics (queer rights, reproductive freedom), democratic technoscience, and environmental justice -- this is nevertheless the third time I've been involved in labor organizing. In the 90s, first when I was working in a university library in Georgia, paying my way through my first graduate degree in philosophy, a public worker union organized my colleagues, and then later the UAW organized graduate student instructors like me when I was at the University of California at Berkeley. I was a steward for my Rhetoric Department for a while. For me, organizing to gain the collective standing to bargain for better conditions and to solve shared problems is simply a straightforward commonsense sort of thing that people do. Of course I recognize that there are problems with unions themselves, as there are with any collective formations, especially formations that are large and complex, but I also recognize that unions are indispensable both to larger aspirations for social justice and to ground level practical problem solving. SFAI's administration is a stakeholder with a different perspective on our shared problems and aspirations than that of adjuncts, in the nature of things, and I would expect them to take up a firm position in the present struggle in advance of the eventual negotiations unionization would bring. As I said, I consider all that only natural. I guess, however, I did not expect the kinds of misinformation, aggression, and scarcely stealthed threats that are coming from administrators at this time.

Many of the administrators resisting the formation of the union have done research that takes the value of labor organizing as its explicit point of departure. The online SFAI profile for Dean and Vice President of Academic Affairs Rachel Schreiber tells us that "[h]er research addresses the intersections of race and gender in labor activism." I would expect her to be an enthusiastic ally of adjunct organizing, even if she bargains with organized teachers in a tough, incisive, no-nonsense way that reflects her different position as an administrator.

Other administrators engage in disappointing boilerplate anti-union rhetoric while at once touting their respect for unions or of their own proud family histories with unions: President Charles Desmarais' letter urging us to vote against SEIU, made available to the public on SFAI's informational website about the union election, contains this flabbergasting paragraph:

As the proud son of a Teamster shop steward, I’m acutely aware of the benefits organized labor brought to sheet metal workers like my dad and their families in facing up to Big Business. But SFAI is a community working together toward a common purpose, and I believe that SEIU is a huge outside force that has little understanding of our unique culture and values

Outside agitators? Really? Do the concerns raised in this conflict by adjuncts not complicate the least bit any bald assertion that "SFAI is a community working together toward a common purpose"? More to the point, why on earth would a more organized labor force not be compatible with the vision of "a community working together toward a common purpose"? I would think it goes without saying that a democratized workforce bargaining from a position of comparative security would strengthen such a community and facilitate working together toward common purposes. The point is not a polemical one, but the most basic common sense as far as I can see.

In countless conversations and in sponsored talks and conferences on campus, and in much of the work of our own graduate students, problems of corporate models of education and the catastrophe of precarious labor are endlessly and earnestly debated. What on earth do these people think they are doing? Do they mean nothing that they say?

Again, although I expect actually different stakeholders (administration, faculty, staff, etc.) to bargain and struggle in ways that reflect the reality of their differences, I have a very hard time believing that intelligent, informed people of good will can really reject the very idea that it might be good for conspicuously precarious and silenced adjuncts doing the overwhelming majority of the actual teaching that is the actual reason the school actually exists to organize to ensure the conditions under which we do this work are conducive to it and that we gain a feeling of security from which we can voice concerns about the promises and problems of the institution from our vantage on the ground without fear of reprisal.

SFAI is a school nearly a century and a half old. It is a landmark physically, culturally, and also politically. The world has been enriched by the radicalism of both its artistic and political visions and activism. SFAI should be in the vanguard of teacher organizing in this historical moment, it should champion the turning of the tide from the anti-intellectual corporate looting of the academy in a world crying for an outpouring of critical, sustainable, creative, democratizing, problem-solving intelligence and imagination. Organizing adjuncts will give us the security of a voice from which SFAI will benefit, will give us a sustainable stake in the institution to which we are devoting our lives. Adjuncts are organizing in schools across the Bay Area, right here, right now. This is an exciting and also a promising time, in the midst of distress. There is nothing to fear from democracy and a world to gain. If SFAI administrators cannot see the vital truth of this, they should sandblast Diego Rivera's fresco from the gallery wall for they are already blind to its beauty and its wisdom.