I thought things were quieting down (see this post), but Cornell University student journalists, taking note of the sexual harassment case that has “garnered widespread attention in academia and elsewhere,” have now attempted to ask three Cornell professors why they signed the now-notorious letter (“a terrible letter,” writes Masha Gessen in the New Yorker) defending the harasser.

Two of the professors responded like Donald Trump when asked by reporters about John McCain.

[Cathy] Caruth and [Cynthia] Chase declined to be interviewed by The Sun… Caruth said she understands “the general interest in this letter, but I feel it is too complex to be handled adequately through an interview for an article.”

The familiar too complex move – with its evasion, condescension, and self-aggrandizement – puts Caruth solidly in the Slytherin camp among the now-squabbling letter signers.

(Update: Here’s a whole analysis of the way the too complex bit has been used in this case.)

Slytherin because of what David Lehman memorably called the “slithering elusiveness” of the deconstructive analytical/argumentative method.

Rather than deal forthrightly with moral questions, you slither away by talking about complexity, or enigmatic gay coding, or the instability of signifiers. (The model here is Derrida’s 62-page dance around the obviousness of his friend Paul de Man’s wartime – lifetime, as it would turn out – degeneracy. “Borrowing Derrida’s logic, one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that its author was conflicted on the subject of the Jews,” as Lehman wrote.)

The Ravenclaws among the letter writers go the other way, seemingly forgetting everything they’ve learned and taught about a world of indeterminacy/performativity, and instead going right in for the linguistically transparent kill. “If any of the sexual contact alleged by the complainant had taken place,” writes Jonathan Culler to the Cornell reporter, “there would doubtless have been references to it in the emails,” and he doesn’t find any, so case closed. “If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position,” announces Slavoj Zizek, taking up an astonishingly naive univocal position on the matter of language, not to mention cause and effect.

People seem to have tired of talking both about the Derrida Professor’s having been found guilty by NYU of sexual harassment, and the lawsuit the grad student she harassed has filed against her and the school. But Ronell’s animating intellectual commitment – deconstruction – is worth revisiting, and here are two comments on it, from very different political positions.

First: Martin Jay, reviewing, in 2011, a book of interviews with Ronell.

[Ronell] depends … heavily on mobilizing the tired rhetoric of combat that animated the “theory wars” of the 1980s. AR herself seems frozen in that moment, a bit like one of those Japanese soldiers on a remote Pacific island still fighting for the emperor long after he surrendered. There are, after all, just so many times you can act out Zéro de conduite before the audience gets tired of adolescent rebelliousness as a mode of critique. Intellectual mooning grows as tedious as the real thing. It is fair to say that the ranks of her regiment are in fact getting thinner and thinner as the scandal and provocation of deconstruction recede further into the past.

Second, Francis Fukuyama, in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Q. You have an unusual background for a political scientist. You majored in classics at Cornell, then did graduate work in comparative literature at Yale, where you studied with Paul de Man. Later you spent time in Paris sitting in on classes with Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Any memories from this journey through deconstruction?

A. I decided it was total bullshit. They were espousing a kind of Nietzschean relativism that said there is no truth, there is no argument that’s superior to any other argument. Yet most of them were committed to a basically Marxist agenda. That seemed completely contradictory. If you really are a moral relativist, there is no reason why you shouldn’t affirm National Socialism or the racial superiority of Europeans, because nothing is more true than anything else. I thought it was a bankrupt way of proceeding and decided to shift gears and go into political science.

The superannuated subversion both men evoke suggests a reading of Ronell’s recent troubles in which, perversely, she rather got what she wanted: A new lease on academic deviancy.

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Which, Jay notes, Ronell believes Derrida invented.

“One cannot imagine how whited-out the academic corridor was when Derrida arrived on the American scene. There was really no room for deviancy, not even for a quaint aberration or psychoanalysis,” she asserts, blithely erasing Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky, C. Wright Mills, Hannah Arendt, Natalie Zemon Davis, Hayden White, Florence Howe, etc., from memory.

Both – to their despair – find themselves headline news this week. And why? Because no matter how much divides us, sexual strangeness, and a kind of desperate emotional lostness/loneliness, unites us.

We all have access to these things – I mean, being sexually strange; and feeling, in a restless, panicky way, lost and alone – though if we’re lucky in life and love we may seldom experience them.

Smith – until recently a powerful, highly paid coach at Ohio State; and Ronell – a powerful, highly paid professor at NYU, seem to have experienced these things more acutely than most other people; more importantly, their sense of their invulnerability to punishment seems to have allowed them to behave with total abandon. Ronell is tenured; Smith and the famed OSU head coach, Urban Meyer, have a very close personal relationship. Ronell was found guilty of sexually harassing one of her graduate students; she had, with unaccountable stupidity, written down everything culpable she had done in emails. Smith took dick pics of himself in the White House and on the OSU campus and sent them to friends; he ordered large numbers of sex toys to be delivered to his university office, and openly boasted of sexual encounters in the same office with various subordinates.

In both cases as well, powerful friends of these powerful people protected and defended them, which is another whole scandal. In a just-filed lawsuit, Ronell’s graduate student has credibly claimed that Ronell’s associates

launched a widespread disinformation campaign against [Nimrod] Reitman, falsely accused him of, among other things, having waged a ‘malicious campaign’ against Ronell and having a ‘malicious intent,’ thereby further ruining his hopes for any future career in academia.

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Of course there are differences between these two. Zach Smith appears to be a complete mess: Along with what I have already described, he has been arrested for drunk driving; and his ex-wife accuses him of extensive and extreme domestic violence. Ronell is far from a mess; what she is, rather, despite her revolutionary self-presentation, is that saddest of traditional figures: An older woman whose self-regard convinces her she remains attractive to men. Ronell was helped along by countercultural ideology; Smith was helped along by a hypermasculine, alcoholic, risk-taking sports culture.

But under these two current tragicomic figures from the American university lies the same old same old: self-destruction.

Remember the “terrible” (as Masha Gessen called it) Avital Ronell letter? (UD‘s posts about it are here.) Remember the regret its authors eventually expressed after it turned out they got the facts (about whether Ronell sexually harassed a graduate student) wrong, and in a very unseemly way threw their institutional weight around, and thus further abused an innocent grad student?

So… the fools who wrote the anti-Steven Pinker letter everyone’s currently laughing at maybe could have consulted that bit of history before marking up their own missive, with its overripe racism claims and its rich mix of real and forged signatures. Ask the authors of the Ronell letter whether it pays to be a bit … epistoleery…

Only in America, mes petites; only in America.

Only in America would a person even think to say that anyone presenting herself to a surgeon as simply wanting this or that surgery must get it. The special brew here, of limitless national wealth and limitless personal entitlement, is uniquely American.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The quality of writing in the opinion piece is strikingly high; I love the prose. The larger argument that happiness is not an end (see Adam Phillips for some of the best language about this) is an excellent one. Plus, the writer had a lot of good stuff to say about the recent Avital Ronell embarrassment.

But otherwise. Good lord.

Well, good luck with that; your Grievance Studies hoax (aka Daughter of Sokal), just now disclosed, will get plenty of attention, etc.

It might even help people understand how scandals like Avital Ronell happen.

But although the hoaxes keep coming, and although America’s best minds – Richard Rorty, for one – have for decades warned us about the deadly combination of hypertheory and political correctness —

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

— no one seems able to find their way out of the fog.

A bunch of nasty stuff goes on among groups of elites that everybody knows about but can’t do anything about because it’s hidden. Only when someone – a reporter, a whistleblower – blows their cover does anything happen. And even then, nothing really happens. I mean, there’s a reason they’re called elites; there’s a reason people resent elites.

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Two examples, starting with the more recent:

1. A very high-ranking cancer researcher at Sloan Kettering has for years and years failed to report his financial conflicts of interest. He just don’t do it, folks, and everyone has let him get away with it even though it’s an enormous no-no. (Best headline: “Top Cancer Expert Forgot to Mention $3.5M Industry Ties.”)

Ethicists say that outside relationships with companies can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Reporting those ties allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts.

This guy was chief medical officer.

Jeffrey S. Flier, who was dean of the Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016, said medical leaders should be held to a higher standard.

“The higher you are in the organizational structure, the more important it is that you fulfill those obligations,” he said. “You’re not just another faculty, you’re also a faculty to whom other people look up and your reputation is tied to the institution’s reputation.”

Like wink wink if he doesn’t do it we sure don’t have to do it. It’s a win-win situation and we all make lots of money. Look how much more he’s making than his paltry $1.5 million (in 2016; figure it’s significantly more now) salary! What a role model!

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In statements to industry analysts and the American Association for Cancer Research, Dr. Baselga praised two drug trials that many of his peers considered failures, without mentioning that the trials’ sponsor, Roche, had paid him millions of dollars.

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How much more?

Look, I’m too grossed out by the final paragraphs of the NYT article, which list his takings – I mean haha some of his takings because for sure he’s still hiding a hell of a lot even from the nosy NYT guys. Read them yourself.

My favorite part of these stories is always the boards these people sit on. Money for Nothing is the title of the best-known book about board-sitting, and this guy hauled in hundreds of thousands by doing absolutely nothing.

In an editorial, the NYT says: “Ban paid appointments to outside boards… [When] appointments come with payments that meet or exceed a doctor’s existing salary, the process is almost certain to be corrupted, and public trust is sure to be undermined.”

*************

A letter-writer at the Times poses a really naive question:

[H]e received a salary in 2016 (the most recent data available) of more than $1.5 million from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he is the chief medical officer. This is a princely sum, which, given the work he does, no one should begrudge him.

But it appears he also earns uncounted millions more in consulting fees, director’s fees and ownership interests from businesses directly involved in the areas of his expertise, and he is criticized for not fully disclosing this in his professional writings evaluating the products of some of the companies that pay him large sums.

But I would ask another question: Why isn’t $1.5 million enough?

Recall the classic porn film – Never Enough.

***************

The main point UD‘s making in this post, however, is that the scheme doesn’t work unless this guy lives in a closed world of fellow privileged who all agree to keep their traps shut in order to protect their privileges. The scheme works for years – the guy is about to turn sixty – until maybe some grotesque bad fortune falls out of the sky and an outsider squawks.

The guy resigned immediately.

But don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine.

2. The now-notorious letter sent secretly (or so its authors thought) to NYU, threatening to do whatever angry groups of elites do if you come down too hard on someone in their group, has generated plenty of anger and plenty of thoughtful writing about the same subject: How groups of powerful people (here professors) protect bad actors among them. As with the Sloan Kettering guy’s nondisclosure, what went down was routinely corrupt behavior until someone decided to intervene.

But again, as with the cancer researcher, the result of the exposure is embarrassment and some docked salary. A lawsuit or two. Things are a bit bumpy, and they’ll stay a bit bumpy for awhile, and then these groups will reconstitute themselves.

[T]he commonality of all of these people is the entitlement. Do as I say, not as I do. We see this so often in the exemptions politicians create for themselves, and the same can be said for highly profitable executives and physicians, whose organizations exempt them from scrutiny as long as the profitability is in their favor. Do you really believe CBS didn’t run a cost-benefit analysis on retaining or removing Les Moonves?

************

It’s just as Kurt Vonnegut said in Slaughterhouse Five:

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

And the silver lining in the long tragicomic thing the NYU sexual harassment mess is turning out to be is that it directs us again to the final two sections of Camille Paglia’s hilarious 1992 essay about people like Avital Ronnel, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders.” Camille, it’s been too long.

I flashed onto Paglia’s classic when I read these sentences, written today in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by a woman who, very unhappily, worked as a grad student at NYU with Ronnel:

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it.

Her point is that deconstructive method has given academics sympathetic to Ronnel a way to sidestep the obvious abuse she doled out to the complainant – by theorizing and complexifying and performatizing human behavior. Derrida showed everyone the way when he denied his friend Paul de Man’s fascism by fogging it up so thoroughly that nothing meant anything.

This is the Paglia excerpt that came back to me:

Hey, fellas: there’s something out there that electrocutes people on beaches, collapses buildings like cardboard, and drowns ships and villages. It’s called nature. The next time the western horizon flames with crimson, remember that this is what Foucault never saw.

Richard Rorty, too, came to mind:

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

*****************

The clear and present realities the letter-writers in this case theorized away were, UD thinks, two:

1. Some human beings are very cruel.
2. Human collectives have a perennial tendency to degenerate into gangs that punish outsiders.

[Avital] Ronell’s work strikes me as a big bowl of word salad. But I understand that the general project of deconstruction is the analysis and dismantling of conscious and unconscious structures of power. How odd, then, that these professors could see domination operating everywhere except the one place they could actually do something about it: in their own relations with students.

And she says it well. Excerpts:

[Avital] Ronell’s [background here] supporters have swarmed to defend her. But rather than expose a hypocrisy or invalidate the #MeToo movement, this has only underscored the point that #MeToo feminists have been making along — about the nature of power and the way it fosters abuse.

… [Avital’s defenders admit] they have had no access to the dossier of claims against Ronell. But they called [her accuser’s] allegations “malicious,” while emphasizing Ronell’s seniority and prestige — precisely what the allegations accuse her of exploiting. The signatories said they have “collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.” Later in the letter the group noted, “As you know, [Ronell] is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.”

In the last few days, further defenses of Ronell have appeared online from well-known figures in cultural studies and literature like Chris Kraus, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam. Duggan … dressed up harassment in the guise of sophisticated theory. The language of Ronell’s emails must have baffled the investigators, she asserted, because they could not understand the sexualized language that passes between queers (Ronell and Reitman are both gay). “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders,” she wrote. This reasoning echoed the philosopher Colin McGinn’s denial that he sent sexual overtures to one of his graduate students, saying he referred to masturbation in an email only to teach her the difference between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

Yes, I know it’s getting funny. That’s why, in an earlier post about this scandal, I used the term “tragicomic.” Another Ronell defender, Slavoj Zizek — a person in all ways indistinguishable from Chauncey Gardiner — believes he has disposed of the power-corrupts essence of the case in this way:

To explain the accuser’s participation in the game with Avital through her position of power is ridiculous. If he effectively felt oppressed and harassed, there were ways of signalling this, which would have definitely not hurt his position.

This is the vacuously oracular Chauncey Gardiner with Lady Augusta Bracknell thrown in – the comedy lying in the clueless conviction that anything asserted by a person of … magnitude? … becomes true.

Livingstone again:

Furthermore, other former students have accused Ronell of abusive behavior, with one anonymous student accusing her of a variety of unethical practices on Facebook, including breaking her students’ self-esteem, humiliating them in front of others, then using the newly malleable student to do menial tasks for her, like folding her laundry. Andrea Long Chu, who was at one time Ronell’s teaching assistant, wrote on Twitter that the accusations track “100%” with Ronell’s “behavior and personality.”

So how surprised can we be by the obvious parallel with the brutal coaches also in the news lately? Same hierarchy, same closed ranks, same self-pleasuring abuse of subordinates. As I said in an earlier post, whether it comes from the most reactionary or the most revolutionary arm of the university, abuse of power would seem to be the constant, the name of the game. On the field of corrupt behavior, the coach, the Continental, and the cheering squad meet.

“If even one-quarter of what [Ronell’s accuser] describes … is true, it suggests a more intense, more extreme, more abusive instance of a pervasive imbalance of power in academe,” concludes Corey Robin.

… but she often attended his lectures, and listened to his conversations with other professors and students [at the Warsaw Academy] on a range of issues related to modern art. She was inspired by his fresh and open attitude to art, his nonhierarchical approach to the applied arts, and his enthusiasm for his students. Abakanowicz came into closer contact with Soltan after her graduation, when he granted her permission to use studio space at the academy and encouraged her to submit her painted fabrics to interior and industrial design shows in the mid-1950s. His integrationalist philosophy, which tried to destroy the traditional division between ‘art’ and ‘craft,’ helped convince Abakanowicz that her textile work belonged within the language of contemporary art.”

UD’s late father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, was an important influence on the sculptor Magda Abakanowicz.

UD smiled and remembered the many books about her in his Cambridge house when she read this article from The Daily Princetonian:

The nine-foot headless guardians of McCormick Hall have vanished. The collection of statues by 79-year-old Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, titled “Big Figures,” has been on loan to the University Art Museum for the past five years and was taken down this summer.

“We were sad to see the work go,” art museum director James Steward said in an e-mail. “It was a great piece to have for that length of time, and now we have a new opportunity to site something there that makes dynamic use of the space.”

… “Big Figures” — which is made up of 20 unique, bronze, headless, armless, backless, hollow human forms that each weigh 600 pounds — is only one work in a series of metal headless figures done by the artist, according to Abakanowicz’ website. In total, she has created more than 1,000 figures, which are displayed in museums and private collections in Italy, Australia, Venezuela, Japan and Israel, among other nations.

… The disappearance of the bronze statues has elicited a mixed response from students.

“I find it difficult to give good directions this year,” Rivka Cohen ’12 said. “I can’t say things like ‘Walk straight until you pass the extraordinarily disturbing visages of potentially modern art. When you’re level with the leftmost column of the giant, headless bodies, turn right.’ ”

… “They always seemed sinister and depressing to me,” [Avital] Hazony said. “It would be nice if [the art museum] had something as striking, but more positive, instead, since it is such a central location.”

Abakanowicz said she intended for “Big Figures” to be unsettling, though.

“It happened to me to live in times which were extraordinary by their various forms of collective hate and adulation,” Abakanowicz told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 2004, when the figures were originally installed.

“Marchers and parades worshipped leaders, great and good, who turned out to be mass murderers,” explained Abakanowicz, who lived through the occupation of Poland during World War II and the Soviet regime. “I was obsessed by the image of the crowd, manipulated like a brainless organism and acting like a brainless organism. I began to cast human bodies in burlap to finish in bronze, headless and shell-like. They constitute a sign of lasting anxiety.’’…