two poorgradstudents

The title of this entry is also the title of Pierre Carles’ documentary on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdeiu, which, in turn, is one of the sociologist’s slogans, by which he means that sociology, in its ability to peer through claims to their sources in cultural and economic capital, is a way of defending oneself against the ideologies of those in power. (That’s how I remember the slogan, at least.)

Today, for me, sociology is no martial art. I woke and read that the young man who “killed five and wounded 15 before turning the gun on himself” was a sociologist. Additionally, Stephen Kazmierczak was a criminologist, co-writing a reaction essay, “SELF-INJURY IN CORRECTIONAL SETTINGS: “PATHOLOGY” OF PRISONS OR OF PRISONERS.” (The journal Criminology and Public Policy published the essay, which attempts to construct self-injury in correctional settings as a pathology of the environment (the corrections facilities) and urges for policy changes that address the various deficiencies of corrections facilities, instead of the pathologies of individual inmates.)

Given his research and his involvement in criminal justice, Kazmierczak confronts us as a young man in peculiar relation to his own violence. As a sociologist, he stared through American violence and studied some of its sources. As a young man, American violence was something else; it spoke in some other kind of language; and it made some other kind of calling.

I don’t want to repeat the hysteria that typically follows these kinds of shootings. Nor do I want now to turn to the usual suspects – guns, individual pathology, or, even, social roots. Right now, I am not a good sociologist, capable of inverting or imagining personal troubles as public issues. Moreover, there is already very good sociology on school shootings.

I have a tendency to do anti-sociology. By imagining the public as private, I find myself with pockets full of sentiments.

Last night, when first reading about the shootings at NIU, I commented to Jennifer that we belong to an ill generation, whose high school rampages have recently graduated and taken to college campuses. This was before finding out that Kazmierczak was a graduate student, which only makes that statement truer, since those of us born in the early 1980s, as Kazmierczak was, as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were, as Kipland “Kip” Kinkel was, and as Luke Woodham was, are, or would be, now in our mid-twenties.

Again, pockets full of sentiments. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that men under thirty keep committing crimes. Also, it shouldn’t surprise me that students who commit crimes at schools are around the same age and of the same generation as me. Until recently, that would have to be the case, since I’ve been the age of most students for the last twenty years.

That said, this constellation of school shooters were born within a year of 1981 (my birth year). Scattered across this generation are young men who dramatize violence, dressing for the roles and carrying too many weapons to use.

I don’t know how it is that violence comes to call them, whether it appears as a masculine exit, as the Rampage authors suggest, or if it comes promising meaning-as-spectacle, or if it offers only its density, its possibility at unmaking worlds. And I don’t know what it is that is called out of these young men, and especially not Kazmierczak, by this particular form of violence. But we keep losing something; my cohort keeps losing something. Named or unnameable, it goes, is becoming gone; now less decipherable; now just less.