roachboy

there is alot of politics around symbolism at colleges. i suspect it follows from a whole range of factors, one of which i think is that students run into fundamentally new ways of thinking about the world around them at univerisity, many of which are far more historically and politically oriented than they seem to have run into in the "what is real is rational" no child left behind backwater that is most high schools. the way in which these approaches to the social world are taught is via texts---so the effective politics--and often the conceptual frames--condense around words, around signs/signifiers--and amongst students who feel particularly strongly about the questions they encounter and the factors they discover, it is not surprising to find a kind of heightened sensitivity to symbolic politics.

personally, i think that this is in the main a good thing, though i wish that it would form the basis for a different, more active and militant public political life outside campuses as well, but one can dream i guess.

at any rate, conflicts over symbols are not necessarily empty, they more often than not resonate with or are linked to political questions in the outside world. i think there are few downsides to having the experience of political organization. i like that campuses are noisy places and that students (in particular) gather information, disseminate it, and stage actions. i think it is a good thing that they will make noise, take over the manicured greens, rattle the place.

this extends to conservative organizations even, though i would hope that conservative students would be less exactly like their talk show counterparts, would be less absolutely in line with the conservative talking points of the moment, would be more independent intellectually and discursively, but hey maybe servility is a skill as well. but it doesnt matter so much: what does matter is the experience of organization building and political mobilization. you would think this an important set of skills were the united states anything like a functional democracy, woudln't you?

that said, i dont think it follows that every action is equivalent as action, every protest a great thing because it is a protest. in the hopkins case, it is pretty clear that you have a stupid fraternity party based on a kind of meathead provocation as its theme, the invitations for which floated into the supercharged space of symbolic politics that is the public sphere at that school. it seems to me a passing conflict the significance of which is being magnified here by it being the topic of a thread.

in general, i an not a fan of fraternities: i think them floating islands of organized stupidity. they function mostly as retrograde extensions of high-school based modes of sociability. they throw stupid parties. they consume bad beer. they listen to bad music. but i guess they serve a useful function--folk forget that university functions as a theater of a complex developmental phase and that it is difficult to keep one's moorings as one passes through the system and so maybe it is reassuring to have a space to be a meathead at and about parties---it is surely a good thing to have alternatives to living in a dorm and eating the appalling food that most universities dump on their students--and it is a good thing to be provided with a space for creating networks of friends that can then have adventures. so i can see why fraternities are ok for the folk that pass through them, but i still dont like them. too many have too dense a history of doing really stupid things.

since frosstbyte brought it up.....

at penn, which is a school i know WAY too much about, the greek system as a whole was is much about a reinforcement of the class order from which the student population was drawn as anything else. they seem to be about reinforcing a sense of class position when other aspects of their education tend to force students to re-evaluate their sense of social identity. and in that, the system served a pretty foul function: it doesnt really matter so much what you learn or what you think, what matters is how much money mummy and daddy have, what your background was as a function of how much money mummy and daddy have, your class-specific modes of sociability, based on how much money mummy and daddy have, and whether your particular embodiment of your class position "fits" with the template of a particular frat. so dont worry so much if you get to penn and find that you are not as elite as you imagined yourself to be in high school--all this academic stuff only goes so far--remember, kids, that your class position can be determinate of your identity---what you wear, how you carry yourself, your abilities at bonhommie--these things matter.

i found frosstbyte's posts in this thread to be very very strange in that they seemed to be a totally unself-conscious repetition of the narcissism of penn frat life---why would anyone take offense at stuff that "we" do for "us"? it is not about "them"......our parties, their stupid themes, they are "our" jokes--the parties are about bad beer, bad music and class-specific mating rituals--if you dont like it, dont come to the party, dude.

it is as if the primary institutions within the university that reinforce social class as determinate (within a university that effectively does the same thing objectively as a function of admission criteria and tuition levels and--in particular--the relaxed admission standards for legacies) are in some bizarre private sphere and should not be held to account for anything, much less for affronts generated by their actions at the level of symbolic politics.

and this is, at bottom, why i find fraternities to be foul: they generate and sustain the illusion that class is not a political issue, that it is not a public sphere matter, that it---and its effects---are private matters. that class position is about "us" and not about the relational system of which it is necessarily a part. this seems to me the underlying problem that surfaces through what i take to be a fairly insignificant political flash at hopkins, and what i saw running through frosstbyte's posts as well-which i single out only because he references my alma mater and so brought a space that i know altogether too well into this...

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite