A simple explanation for Scott's situation (with apologies to Baudrillard)

Scott feels somewhat bemused by the Washington Post's choice of words ("a blogger named Scott Eric Kaufman, who says he has a PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine").   Only "says," says Scott? However, I suspect that the WaPo may actually be on to something.  Let me explain. 

[Clears throat]

Perhaps you have yet to realize it, but UCI does not grant Ph.D.s in English.  Oh, no: all of its degrees are simulacra.  The truth (well, it would be truth, if truth existed any longer, which it doesn't, at least not at 1:33 AM, Eastern time) of the matter is in this age of global capitalism, the age of the hyperreal, your diploma is a sign without a referent.  The text inscribed on your diploma (and the very existence of the diploma as paper, a tangible object, is itself an attempt to produce the effect of reality, an effect all too necessary when it is possible to reduce one's dissertation, the labor of years, to ephemeral pixels, all weightless, unless you're viewing them on a laptop and you drop the laptop on your foot, in which case your scream of pain marks the rebellion of the somatic against the tyranny of the sign, sort of an updated Johnson vs. Bishop Berkeley thing, only with expensive electronics instead of a stone, so I really don't recommend it) conceals the non-existence of UCI as a university, as an institution apart from the shopping center across the street (and surely that connecting bridge announces what the university is all too keen to conceal, that the realms of intellect and commercialism have become fluid, indistinct, that consuming a slice of Z Pizza is no different from consuming a quarter's worth of CR100A, although the pepperoni pizza at Z Pizza is arguably tastier than excerpts from Foucault, and I recommend adding parmesan for extra zest, by which I mean the pizza and not Foucault, because parmesan does bad things to paper).  It is impossible to have a Ph.D. from UCI, but one may be had by it.

[This post brought to you by CR100B, circa 1990.  I kid because I love.]

Comments

[Brooke]

For my part, I sympathize with this blogger who claims to be Scott Eric Kaufman.

[SEK]

This is what happens when your department's founding principle is an aporia.

[Russell Potter]

With all due admiration to your (justified) panegyric on the postmodern indeterminacy of any and all PhD graduates of UCI, and the purported parallels between Ayers and Obama, I would only add that there does already exist a relatively reliable method of ascertaining the likely authorship of a text -- one which does not rely on anecdotal evidence -- and does not seem to have been used here. When Ruth Plumly Thompson was hired by the publishers Reilly & Lee to "write" the next "Oz" book "by" the late L. Frank Baum in 1919, her work was published under Baum's name. Careful computer analysis has shown the work to be Thompson's and not Baum's -- a signal case -- and nothing less than this should be employed to test Obama's work. The skeleton in the closet is doubtless JFK's "Profiles in Courage" -- but here the case seems much more "cut and dry."

[Russell Potter]

p.s. here is the link to the analysis of Thompson's book:

http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~zzeng/soc357/OZ.pdf

RP

[jkcohen]

I don't know if you've been keeping track of what's going on here in California, but the "non-existence" of UCI and its degree programs in the humanities is not quite as abstract or humorous a prospect as in years past.

As for the shopping center across the street, the number of empty storefronts is increasing markedly.

[Miriam]

I can imagine, from what I hear is going on at UCSB.

The shopping center has never been able to maintain stores, given its habit of raising the rent whenever the store starts making a profit, so the current economic situation must be making things tenfold worse.

[jkcohen]

I believe that the leases in University Center (formerly "The Marketplace") explicitly tie rent to profits, so the arrangement is built in from the get-go. That any business should agree to such terms is probably a function of desperation caused by the Irvine Company's monopoly. That so many of the stores (4-5) have survived over the years I've been in Irvine is a tribute to their tenacity. But with their exception, the turnover has been complete.

[Rokeya]

I love this.