The Uncanny Campus

In a J. G. Ballard novel I read years ago called Running Wild, a tribe of kids in a gated community one day goes berserk and murders all the adults. This outbreak of violence seems unprovoked and inexplicable, but it has to do with what we now call safetyism, and with the postmodern transformation of everywhere into anywhere. Today’s global elites are cut off from their tribal roots such that when violence breaks out among them it seems to tear the fabric of reality. That’s because they live in a false reality, one that is not generated by AI as it is in the Matrix films, but by academic theories that are nevertheless cybernetic at bottom. These theories include Chicago School economics as well as the idea that human subjectivity is an effect of the linguistic software we’re running, and that by changing the language we use we can fundamentally change ourselves and the world.

Both these schools of theory have contributed to the ethical formation of the kind of idyllic North American campus described by Mary Gaitskill in The Chronicle of Higher Education recently, where her privileged students write stories about suicide and serial murder that often cross the line into pornography. There’s something amiss behind the beautiful façade of this expensive campus that the unhappiness of the students makes clear but that she nevertheless finds it hard to put her finger on the reasons for. She is obviously constrained by the ideological regime there, but one senses that she’s almost red-pilled about it. For example, when sketching the sociological background of student unhappiness she says “Black people—actually, white people too—are being murdered by the police; white nationalists are plotting a race war; lies and disinformation are everywhere…” 

By including white people as victims of police shootings, Gaitskill almost destabilises the victimhood hierarchy by which the progressive worldview is structured. However, by prefacing “lies and disinformation are everywhere” with “white nationalists are plotting a race war,” she allows her predominantly academic readers to continue telling themselves that white people are to blame for whatever is wrong. It’s not yet possible for a working academic to point out with impunity that America’s governing lies have been generated by the campus left. However, their operation can be seen in her students’ willingness to venture into obscenity in their writing while evincing extreme compunction about using the n-word even as a third-person quotation. It’s not hard to guess that the repression of free speech around race and gender relations is precisely what leads to the kind of acting out she finds in their creative work, and to their myriad psychiatric complaints. 

Gaitskill thematises the relief that comes from pointing out that the emperor has no clothes but never quite manages to do it. She instead compares her recent experience with troubled students to one she had twenty-five years ago in Texas when a middle-aged man in her class—whom anybody familiar with the serial killer genre will naturally assume to be white—began writing stories about killing women that seemed to express something he wanted to do himself. To her bemusement, the young women in the class stood up for him, until finally an older female student said that she was sick of his stories. His cheerleaders rolled their eyes at her disapproval until Gaitskill seconded her and said that the stories generated fear, and that that was their purpose. Suddenly the desire to be thought cool and unfazed by something that was actually sinister gave way to a collective acknowledgement of the truth, and even the cheerleaders admitted that they were scared by the stories. The further truth that many women are excited by brutal men goes unexplored in Gaitskill’s account.

In her 2020s classroom the threat is also from a male writer, a younger one this time. She doesn’t tell us that he’s white but she calls him ‘Luke’ - 81 percent of people with that name in America are white. She finds herself unable to decide whether the lurid violence in his stories means that he himself is dangerous, but the university protects him because he has a psychiatric diagnosis and in order to assuage the people who are afraid of him they would have to risk a discrimination lawsuit. Gaitskill seems to recognise that this young man is a symptom and not the root problem, but her own and her students’ inability to be accurate about the wider causes of their discomfiture is once again displaced into writing about suicide and violence against women. Meanwhile, the man who is a potential source of violence hides behind an appearance of being ‘just kidding’ redolent of the online right who use humour to create plausible deniability concerning their objectives.

One of the things missing from Gaitskill’s essay about creative writing in the groves of academe is the fact that not only is the police violence she references a problem for people of all races, but black people are killing each other and white people at a much higher rate than the police are killing any of them. This is an important part of the context both for police brutality, and for the campus shootings whose spectre lurks behind Gaitskill’s article. Scott Adams recently got cancelled for drawing attention to the animosity of the black population towards white people, which is what would happen to Gaitskill too if she pointed out that her white students are being stitched up for causing the problems of black America. Meanwhile, the latter is permitted to avoid responsibility for any of these problems, to its own detriment. The perpetrators of this imposture hide not behind humour—they are generally humourless—but behind the doctrine that white people are racist and black people victims because of how their skin colour ‘codes’. 

Gaitskill theorises vaguely that her students have been alienated from their bodies by Covid lockdowns, but doesn’t discuss how contemporary academia is obsessed with the body as a site of ideological struggle, a thing to hang your identity on that has no existence of its own. It has been dissolved into the system of signs that we are assumed to be products of. Most students don’t understand this theory, insofar as it’s understandable, but the identity politics that they participate in forces them to live it all the same. They are subject to other people’s interpretations of them in an unprecedented way because the ‘critical thinking’ they’re taught encourages a forensic attention to ordinary life. The hidden meanings they find there are always racism, sexism, homophobia, and latterly transphobia. Bigotry is the master signifier that refuses to go away even as the words and things that connote it change constantly such that we are always one step behind, always already guilty or victimised. At the same time as being considered guilty, white students are stripped of agency, are powerless to shape themselves other than by posting the correct signifiers of contrition on their social media profiles.

We are enjoined by them to remain on the right side of history by following woke speech codes whose claim to moral authority in a world without metaphysics is deeply paradoxical. It's small wonder then that many on the dissident right are taking their stand in Platonism, which teaches that words have reference to real essences, and are not just empty signifiers playing off each other in a universe without a moral centre. They champion traditional marriage, segregated gender roles, and ethnonationalism. Many of them seem to be in favour of free speech because it’s a soapbox from which they can appeal to whatever remaining liberal values are to be found on the left, but it’s unlikely this would be a core concern if they got into power. Where progressives appeal to history to justify their efforts at silencing their political opponents, rightists and conservatives are more likely to appeal to truth. It’s true for the foreseeable future that children do better when their parents stay together, that women and men gravitate to different professions in free societies, and that there are only two genders.

That Platonic essences and Derridean master signifiers are comparable generators of repression on the authoritarian right and left respectively can be seen in censorship of the school curriculum in red and blue states in the US. Platonism and poststructuralism are not the only theories on the menu today, however. For more libertarian souls there’s also a Nietzschean vitalism of the right and left. The right variety is exemplified by Bronze Age Pervert, and the left by Jane Bennett who was profiled in the New Yorker recently. She believes that rocks and discarded plastic bottles have ‘agency’, which sounds like a backwards way of saying that you and I are mere things that signify in ways we don’t intend. In contrast to the Derridean theory that flattens humanity into linguistic code, her theories cast us bodily into an assemblage of objects. BAP’s take on Nietzsche also believes that our lives are expressions of a force beyond our ken, but his amor fati is more masculine than Bennett’s kooky nihilism which is why he’s persona non grata on campus.

In non-academic spheres of life most of us are still Platonists in that we believe unironically in the authority of people’s conscious intentions, treating them as moral agents with responsibility for what they do. Some of us are also with BAP in believing that the world, and we ourselves, are not fully knowable, and that instinct is often a better guide to action than theory. However, agency and instinct are being repressed among college students who are taught to constantly police their own speech in case it betrays their inherent bigotry. While this purports to be in the interests of ‘safety’, it’s a deeply unintelligent way to organise the lives of young people, particularly young men who often relate to each other through forms of incivility. Moreover, white students alone among the ethnic groups in American academe are forbidden to celebrate the kind of tribal identity that other groups seem to find so meaningful. In this context, it’s interesting that progressive handwringing about mass shootings focusses on guns and rarely displays any curiosity about why the rate of mass shootings has soared in the last few decades while gun ownership has remained steady. 

Gaitskill’s essay might seem to be an exception in that it’s premised on the fact that campus violence appears to be symptomatic of something hidden. The mystery arises because white people are the predominant victims of campus shootings, reflecting the fact that they form the majority of college students. Meanwhile, women are the primary targets of male violence in her students’ creative work, though not in society at large. This is to say that outbreaks of ultraviolence on campus rarely seem to be motivated by the most topical forms of bigotry, and imaginary violence in creative writing classes doesn’t represent the most frequently occurring forms of it outside the classroom. In part because its perpetrators usually die, nobody knows for certain why mass shootings happen in the safe space of academia. However, given the prevalence of Freudian hermeneutics in this arena, it’s surely significant that smart people like Gaitskill don’t intuit a connection between the fact that certain identities are seen in entirely negative terms there, and the outbreaks of savagery that disrupt the campus idyll with increasing frequency.