"I fell in love with the first cute girl that I met who could appreciate Georges Bataille..."

Friday, cigarette #6

[The saint's] actions are driven in no small part by cruelty: "There is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one's own suffering, at making oneself suffer" — the pleasure one would call cruelty... [But] whatever value one might place on medieval ascetic practice, it is, as noted in the introduction to the discussion of thse practices, resolutely medieval: that is, it occus within a religious context not directly available to us. Counterpleasures, Karmen MacKendrick

The prospect of going head-to-head with Phi Beta Cons on sado-masochism doesn't especially appeal to me, but given that the most interesting and provocative reading experience I had in 2007 was Karmen MacKendrick's Counterpleasures (I still don't know what to do with the sentence "Pleasure is not subversive if we make of it something useful, even if that use is to subvert," although I might venture to call it conservative), I should point out how completely they missed the mark on why universities might offer bondage seminars. Michael Filozof writes:

The great question of postmodernity is this: what to we do with ourselves when the bridges have been built, the rivers dammed, the diseases cured, and man on the moon? What do we do with all the time on our hands that we're not spending doing research, doing engineering without computers, and so on? Well, the answer has proven to be that we smoke dope, have sex, and entertain ourselves with music, movies, and video games...

The most lunacy in colleges today exists in the social sciences, languages, administrations, and law, whereas the most sanity still resides in physics, math, and engineering. In the social sciences and administrative staffs, postmodernity allows complete subjectivity because there's no obvious need for truth – these parties are not building a bridge that will fall into the river if they're wrong. (Ultimately, in a large, macro-social sense, there are in fact dire consequences to being wrong in these fields, but the consequences are not immediately obvious.)

In sum, we're victims of our own success — we've seen the future, and it's totally irrational, because we can afford irrationality...

In other words, "We've gotten to a point where everyone who can pass basket weaving is guaranteed safety and survival, which has allowed universities to spend money on frivolities, much to my conservative dismay." He's right that college education is looking more and more like the luxury it is, but throwing every frivolous college program from queer theory to women's wrestling into the same pile is overly simplistic.

Either PBC's problem is that universities are offering BDSM classes, or they're upset that students show up when they're offered. If it's the latter, then they should ask themselves why students who have arrived at the post-modern crisis point of "Okay, now what?" start looking for frivolities that offer danger. (One of the classes cited is "Dominance and Near-Death Experiences with Jeff.") Especially given that Filozof thinks it's the demise of real danger that's responsible in the first place.

Lastly, please take a moment to notice the poetry of "with Jeff" in that course title.