Woah this came out longer than expected.

Now I suppose that this will be either obvious to everyone or too stupid to be worth speaking about, so I shan’t promote it in any sort of official or academic capacity, but this thought came to me just now as I was reflecting on a dispute I had (consensually) in an online chat room about… well I’m not sure about what exactly, because this character started out trying to make some arguments about “social justice” but ended up outing himself as an unwitting reactionary. The thought was this: since verbal arguments are judged by immanent formal criteria, they don’t mean anything about the world. Winning or losing an argument has literally nothing at all to do in any sort of way with being right or wrong. You might as well say that the winner of a chess game is a better person.

Now I tend to have a fairly formal view of discourses, in the sense that I don’t think words actually mean anything more than the series of moves in a chess game or in a mathematical proof: they’re all just series of symbols that can be validated by some rule. When I make an argument, I need to ensure that my syllogisms follow, and that my premises are sound, and so on, but that doesn’t mean I am wrong, any more than a painting of Mary on the rocks means that Mary actually appeared on any rocks. I can tell that the painting is reasonable and perhaps even beautiful, but Da Vinci nevertheless made the whole thing up.

Now I’ve sort of shot myself in the foot here, because if I’m right then I can’t argue that I’m right, because any argument to that effect would, if I’m right that arguments don’t have anything to do with being right, be self-destructive: if I claimed that the argument I advanced showed that arguments couldn’t show anything, then the argument wouldn’t show anything, certainly not that arguments don’t show anything. But if arguments can show something then the valid argument that arguments are meaningless would show that arguments are meaningless and so not show anything at all. Contradiction. So either I’m wrong and arguments can show something, or I can’t present an argument to show that arguments don’t prove anything about the world.

Now that’s all very pretty and seems like the sort of thing that could be formulated as assumptions and modus ponens and conjunction elimination and so on (assume that no argument can actually show anything about the world; suppose for the sake of contradiction that I presented an argument that showed something about the world; contradiction), but either that means something or it means nothing at all. What I mean is that my debate opponent here liked to occupy the strongest argumentative ground and in certain cases occupied unassailable positions, but it’s like saying that my being ahead in terms of material on the chess board will protect me from your shooting me with a gun: clearly my strongly-defended king has nothing to do with my weakly-defended skull.

What the hell am I talking about, though? I deleted a whole passage about the books Digital Black Feminism by Catherine Knight Steele and Distributed Blackness by André Brock because I sounded like a pedantic asshole, exactly like this guy I was sparring with in the chat room. It frustrated me that he, like many of philosophy professors in school, chose positions merely because they could be well defended, rather than figuring out how to defend positions that are true: for example, this guy wanted to say that there’s no discrimination anymore, because the Civil Rights Act made it illegal — that sort of thing is what I mean: it flies so violently and absolutely in the face of the world as it is experienced by most people that it cannot seriously be entertained; that’s when I knew I had won.

I think what I’m saying (in writing, ironically enough) is that there’s no point in writing. I’m pissed off, too, not that that has anything to do with anything. The University has been jerking me around. First I was bounced between all the advisors: “I can’t help you, contact someone else.” And on and on until I finally blasted someone I knew couldn’t help me but might find someone who could, who ended up being some random employee of the advising office whose responsibility for my particular program is indicated nowhere, unless it’s in materials I never received because my acceptance was delayed until two weeks before the beginning of courses. I’m beginning to think that this whole thing has been a massive waste of time, and it may take several more years before I can complete the program: even if I can actually complete the requisite number of hours of course work in another year, it’s not clear that I will complete the right kinds of courses in the right categories to form a complete degree, but the courses that are available to me are a quarter or less of all those available to those on campus, and many of them are only offered at certain times of the year, but certain ones are prerequisites for others, and this semester I could only sign up for courses that still had space at the last minute because of the delay in processing my application. I wanted to do the program part-time to avoid the misery my colleagues are going through, except they have just been informed in their materials that it is possible to do the program in person part time, except when I asked this advisor about it she said that that wasn’t so, and then after a night of troubled dreams I woke up to discover that I had become some sort of enormous vermin. People who don’t think Kafka was writing cold dry realism are part of the problem, frankly: I don’t know of any author whose work more accurately, clearly, and minutely captures my own experience. I pretty much literally acted out K.’s attempts to call the epinymous castle this summer while trying to get information about my pending application; I didn’t hear distant laughter over the line, but it might have been drowned by my seething. I asked this advisor whether it wouldn’t be possible to transfer to the on-campus program, to which she said “You are currently a part of the MCS [Master’s of Computer Science] – Chicago program. If you wish to move to the MCS On-Campus program, then you will need to apply for the program using the standard application and be admitted to the MCS On-Campus program. The next cohort you could apply for is the Fall 2024 cohort.” Oh and though course registration opens in three weeks, the courses available have not yet been confirmed, and she won’t meet with me before they are, but she wants me to fill out a degree planning form, which I can’t do with any actual meaning because I don’t know which courses will be available. Frankly I want a mulligan on my life at this point.

This has been an argument that the University of Illinois’ Master’s in Computer Science program based in Chicago, when preceeded by their Computing Accelerator for Non-Specialists, is a fucking scam. If things continue at this rate I’m going to fuck off to Bali or something and do the course from there: it’s not as if I’ve taken any courses in person at the Chicago location in any event. The professors are terrific, though, when I can actually interact with them: often the courses are massively over-subscribed and so the professors are drowned, but I think that’s the normal state of affairs at big institutions like this one in science subjects. Frankly I feel like a dupe: that’s what it is, I feel like a dupe. But the non-dupes err, as has been said before. I guess I should have known better than to believe the marketing, but the operating assumption would have to be that a) all the information on the University’s website is false, which is clearly not true (just the majority) and that b) all the information shared by recruiters was false, which is almost certainly the case, from which it follows that c) I should have known that it would be fucking miserable and sketchy and a scam in advance, since they more or less said the opposite of those things on the site. But that feels paranoid, and I don’t want to live in a world where the institutions of research simply lie about their teaching. But I also don’t want to live in a world where my mother died a year, a month, and thirteen days ago; but that’s the way it is.

I feel as if I’m on the verge of some sort of psychotic break, but I guess this is how most people feel all the time. Honestly though I thought that I was the most annoyed I had ever been by the — I literally just this instant received a message from the Student Affairs office of the University with the subject “MASSMAIL - Supporting You During Stressful Times.” I am not joking:

We are halfway through the fall semester and undoubtedly you are busy with midterms, papers and projects, all while trying to balance life as a college student. Tumultuous world events—natural and human-made—only add to our collective stress, anxiety, exhaustion, anger, and host of other emotions.

Honestly I’m not stressed by any of these things except for whether I’ll be able to take the courses that I would like to take and complete the degree in a reasonable amount of time. The absolute worst case scenario would be if they forced me to postpone completion by another year. I think what I’ve realized is that Chicago fundamentally is just a miserable place; I think what I’ve realized is that most of the USA is funamentally a miserable place, except maybe Manhattan and the wilderness. But even then, there’s big cities and wilderness everywhere. I fear to ask whether it’s possible to change from the MCS-Chicago to the MCS-Online; for the purposes of courses I have been treated as online, but that might have been because I registered for the wrong courses or the wrong sections, but I couldn’t get any replies to emails from the advising desk. Honestly I’m very close to dropping the program at this point, but I have to finish it or I’ll never amount to anything in life.

I’m not sure about that last part, but the utility of completing the program and having the degree is so obviously massive that it behooves me to be stressed and miserable in the meantime to attain it. Or achieve. Or come to have. Honestly Catherine Knight Steele had the audacity to say “Digital technology, like all technologies before, interpolates with its users. It is not possible to study digital technologies without considering the history and culture of those using them.” I have no idea what the heck she meant by that first sentence; I don’t mean to be a bore, so I won’t blame her. I think “interpolates with” is either an error for “interacts with,” which makes more sense in context but is more remote in terms of edit distance, or “interpellates” without “with,” which is a quite understandable blunder and one that I had to look up in the dictionary to verify, but which, though an extremely hot take I would love to see worked out (I for one was interpellated as illiterate by the interface of the checkout machine in the grocery store, where images of the produce were far more prominent than the text), makes relatively little sense in the context. I blame Scribe Inc. and Ideas of Fire, who did the editing and indexing, and the entire editorial team at NYU Press, who should have caught such an error. Honestly it’s as if nobody read through the uncorrected proofs with a red pencil before it was finalized. This is unfortuante, because it’s really a very nice book with whose conclusions I agree:

Knowledge constructed outside of traditional means has the power to be subversive both through content and through the mode of delivery. While grappling with the unintended consequences of Black feminist thought’s commodification, digital Black feminist work transgresses white Western models of expertise and knowledge dissemination. Blogs, vlogs, and even Twitter threads allow users to create and disseminate ideas to a willing and engaged group of followers. Socially mediated discussions outside a traditional classroom reside alongside formal writing as acceptable modes of knowledge production. Black feminists construct knowledge using both theory and experience, and this process “decidedly involves the inclusion of the ideas, theories, orientations, experiences, and world views of persons and groups that have been previously excluded” (Thomas, 1998, p. 496). Digital Black feminists turn vlogs and Twitter threads into generative spaces of discourse that dismantle the elitist power dynamics involved in Western teaching.

(The included citaton is from Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm by Linda E. Thomas, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24461012). The charming phrase “socially mediated” means, I think, “carried out via social media,” though it may also mean that the discussions are formed by the social context in which they are carried out; perhaps both are intended. Or another citation summarizing the argument of the book and which, as I hope the sensitive reader should detect, speaks quite closely to the heart of this blog:

While principles of agency, complicated allegiances, and self-care have been a part of Black feminist discourses of the past, digital culture provides a new urgency and priority. The virtual beauty shop is more than a site where Black feminists work. The shop’s affordances and tools impact how digital Black feminists form new strategies and find methods for deployment. The blogosphere provided a unique environment for Black feminist thinkers to work out ideas, cultivate community, and create a safe harbor. Blogging opened the doors to new possibilities in Black feminist thought.

Knight Steele’s operative metaphor is of the blog as a beauty shop, which she explores literally through the disemination of the skills, techniques, and knowledge of the care of black women’s hair, whose political content is all too well documented, and metaphorically as a metonym for spaces by, of, and for Black Women, both in person and online. It should be obvious by now (and if it isn’t I haven’t done my work well) that this is an analysis that I agree with: if I didn’t think that the internet was a great way to communicate this blog wouldn’t exist, and it’s not a coincidence that another excerpt from this book is an epigraph on the index page of this site. I just wish the proofreaders had done their work to shore it up against the onslaught of tiny pedants like me who would pick it to shreds because of minute issues like “interpolate with” (which really did get me for some reason, probably because the take that “technology interpellates its users” is so excellent that it infuriates me that I can’t actually ascribe it to Knight Steele with any certainty). But hey, as I haven’t argued at all through the long and winding road of this post, it’s not as if verbal argumentation like this actually proves anything about the world: even if her work or mine or anybody’s lacks rigor or strength does not mean a priori that it is wrong or its claims false. It just means that you don’t get all the style points you might have gotten and that some “classical liberal” asshole white guy on the internet might think they’re better than you. But fuck those motherfuckers.