two poorgradstudents

I’ve taken my writing to jdelrosso.wordpress.com

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.

When is the last time that I posted? Well, Edwards was still in the race. That’s a long time, in political-years, media-years. But that’s not so long in grad-student years. I’m writing today to do some major league catch up.

I’m so poor, I’m thieving books and selling them on Amazon.com.

I’m so poor, I had to cancel my class today because my car has a broke-down engine.

But I can afford a free blog, updated through free wireless, coming from wherever.

Today, I’m posting my two area exams. I wrote these over four days in mid-January, sometime after the NH Primary and immediately before winter break broke. I’ll post them as separate, long posts, just to pad the blog. (How long before some undergrad passes them off for his own paper in some sociology course? Not long.)

By way of an introduction to these essays…

 

Instructions:

This is a four-day take-home examination. The examination is to be received from Sociology Department staff at 9:00 AM on 9 January 2008 and returned by 4:00 PM on 12 January 2008.

 

Answer two of the following questions. Attempt to limit the length of each essay to approximately 15 double-space pages.

 

Essay 1

Title: ‘ The way we handle them’: A Sociological Account of Torture at Abu Ghraib

 

Response to Question Three

The torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military police at Abu Ghraib opened a public debate about the social meaning and causes of these specific acts of “deviance.” Write an essay that makes use of three distinct theoretical perspectives on deviance and social control in order to provide a critical sociological account of the events that took place at Abu Ghraib.

 

Essay 2

Title: Social Surveillance

 

Response to Question Two

Michel Foucault’s study Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison makes connections between modern forms of power (and resistance to power) and the historical emergence of panoptic technologies of social control based on omnipresent surveillance and the policing of the normal self. Today, technologies of surveillance extend well beyond formal institutions of control into the exigencies of everyday life. Write an essay that explores the intensification of surveillance in contemporary society as well as the ways that people are today responding to and/or adjusting to new panoptic technologies. Conclude your essay, by reflecting upon the ways in which current surveillance practices extend and/or modify Foucault’s thesis concerning the panoptic character of modern social control.

 

… without the degrees, without the jobs … this is two poorgradstudents.