lynx -dump URL > filename.txt

for i in $(egrep ^" *[0-9]*\." filename.txt | sed -e 's/^ *//g' | cut -f1 -d ".");
do egrep ^" *\[*$i(\.|\])" filename.txt | tac | perl -p -i -e 's/\n//g' | perl -p -i -e 's/ [0-9]*\. /\n<a href="/g' | tr -s " " | perl -p -i -e 's/ \[[0-9]*\]/">/g' | sed '/^ *$/d' | sed -e 's/$/<\/a><br \/>\n/g' >> filename-clean.html;
done


This is, of course, something that every academic experiences and I probably shouldn’t fret about it too terribly, but figuring out how to understand other people when they are speaking another language is part of the job and it pisses me off when I can’t do it. Usually this is a fascinating and enjoyable part of the challenge. I’m infinitely intrigued, for instance, by the very different ways that all my colleagues have for going about writing, because I think it reveals something fundamental about the way their minds process information. Or that some people are really expert at identifying all the moving parts of an argument, where others are good at separating the parts that matter from the parts that don’t, or that still others have an especial knack for anticipating the implications of an argument. And I love when they do it and you see where they’re going with something and all of a sudden they make a thing clear that you would never have thought of on your own, because your own particular way of doing something is better at X than their Y.

But there is this one thing that I absolutely cannot grapple with, and that is when people suss out all the fine little details and individuals parts of a concept or argument without first identifying what the argument is! I liken this to the old parable about the blind men and the elephant, where each of them has a different part of the elephant and describes the particular part, but none of them knows what the elephant itself is or what it does, nor do they understand how the parts fit together. I feel like this every time I go to class on Foucault, with everyone talking about the trunk and the tail and the feet, but we never actually identified that we’re talking about an elephant or understood what an elephant is. Maybe some people are actually good at thinking this way (or maybe they already know Foucault and so the point of his elephant is already known and taken for granted by everyone but me), but I simply cannot make heads or tusks of a single class discussion and they inevitably leave me doubting that I understood the reading, even though the night before it seemed just fine.

This happens to me every class (and I do mean every), but there was an especially pronounced moment today where the class somehow ended up discussing whether, in a situation where a person has two choices (they are plea bargaining and they can either go to jail for 4 years or 10 years), the ethical/resisting position would be to refuse the plea bargain and go to trial, thereby gumming up the system, or whether it would be simply to take the plea bargain. This hinged on whether the resisting position was a dramaturgical act. Because, by this logic, it is performing, and it is choosing, that opens up a space for freedom.

Now, perhaps I have completely misunderstood Foucault, but this question does not even make sense to me at all given what I understand the larger overall project to be, or the foundational assumptions, or the situation itself. It seems to be assuming that any sort of action (acting, drama, statement of truth) is ethical and thereby free. Which I guess would make sense taken wholly out of context (though even out of context concocting such a question seems inexplicable to me?) or if one were to conflate choice with freedom. But given the things I thought I did know, I do not see how we even went down this road. Let us consider, first, the foundational claim that power is a form of mastery. How does one achieve mastery? By controlling what happens. Well, if one knows everything, has infinite knowledge, then they can control all outcomes—if one removes all uncertainty and can make things happen exactly as one desires—then one is masterful. The state of subjugation or slavery, as opposed to this, is a state in which one does not have the ability to exert such control. The outcome of events is out of one’s hands. This can come about either because one has no knowledge at all and does not know how to make things happen to desired effect, or because the options in front of one are wholly outside of control. A slave, for instance, might be given choices, but those outcome of those choices, and the choices themselves, are already predetermined by the master. There is neither control on the part of the slave nor uncertainty on the part of the master concerning the outcome (choose A or B, either way I know what will happen to you).

Within such a system as the plea bargain, then, I see no way whatsoever in which the “choice” presented equates to freedom. Not even a little wiggle room, frankly. Choice and freedom are not the same, though it is the brilliance of such a system that it could make them appear as though they were.

Well, then, what might Foucault actually be trying to tell us about this question? What would a free or ethical situation look like? Here I think is where the concept of drama comes into play, but only if you consider it connected to truth, and not as completely separate things, as we were trying to do in class. First, truth. Foucault seems (seems) to be trying to find a way in which truth telling can be a way of finding ethics, but given the above foundational points, we should be very wary of saying that absolute truth as is constitutes a way out of the power dilemma. It was, after all, the ability to have absolute truth that gives one absolute control. So having the slave reclaim total truth for himself just turns him into the master, which is a decidedly unethical position. So Foucault cannot sensibly want us to keep striving for truth.

So now we can ask what relation, what pattern, or similarity, or whatever, is there that connects truth to drama? Let’s think GRE analogies here. Truth is power because it shuts down all options and removes uncertainty. It is a stopping point. It is the end in other words. But drama is acting. It is means or, better yet, action. It is always unfinished. It is in the present. It also, by definition then, cannot know the outcome. It requires a level of uncertainty to remain definable as dramaturgy. So Foucault is not speaking here of “performativity” in the shallow way we use it today. He is talking about a very rich and deep action in which one retains, not the guarantee, but the possibility of altering the outcome of events.

The example of the plea bargain is an example of the most craven understanding of freedom imaginable, the kind of freedom that a performing monkey has (you can dance this way for your supper or you can dance that way for your supper, but just so long as you dance). So, then, is the court itself. The master is not any freer that the slave, because, in knowing and controlling everything, he has no possibility for meaningful action. His own actions are just as predetermined by his total knowledge as are the slave’s, because nothing will happen which he does not already forsee. The key, then, is not merely choosing. The key is not merely telling the truth. And the key is not merely performing. Freedom involves doing all of those things so that they work together simultaneously and in harmony. None can do all the work of being an elephant by itself, or it becomes a grotesque and deformed thing that cannot be called an elephant at all.

At any rate, it got me thinking about the tizzy plagiarism has got academia in, and a few random ideas on detection started popping into my mind.

1. A centralized, university-run database of papers
We do everything else consortium style, so why not this? Currently, professors have the option of submitting papers to Turnitin, but many refuse because of intellectual property issues (Turnitin’s schtick is that it keeps copies of submitted papers in order to catch sharing between students and from other such unpublished sources). So why not run such a service ourselves? This would be especially beefy if we could work out some sort of a deal with the big database companies to allow it to also plug in to their backends, simultaneously searching our own collection of papers as well as databases of published papers (although, honestly, Google scholar is getting better at this every day—at the very least, it can identify a citation we need to track down, even if it won’t provide us with the full text for it). Free paper mill sites should also be scraped and their papers dumped into the database.

2. Flood paper mills with dummy papers
To be fair, paper mills are already filled with crap papers, which is what makes it so easy to tell when someone has purchased one. But why not go ahead and intentionally submit more—ones that themselves plagiarize shamelessly from web sources (which makes it easy to catch them from a simple Google search), are simply duplicates of well known published papers, or that have hidden red flag words or phrases that professors are made aware of in advance? And then loudly publicize the fact that we are doing it? This is basically the academic equivalent of sending undercover 18 year olds to try and purchase liquor.

3. Sniff our networks
Yes, I can hear privacy people screeching now. For what it’s worth, I am a huge privacy advocate, and I believe there are ways to do this that do not interfere with privacy. I picture something like: sniff network for connections/e-mails to/from paper mills; if connection is found, save pages transferred; extract paper from transmission; add to database in #1 or distribute to faculty. At least in this scenario, it is not necessary or even desirable to identify who is downloading the paper. It’s only plagiarism, after all, if someone turns it in, and there is neither a guarantee that this will happen or that the person who downloaded it is the one who ultimately submits it. But if someone—anyone—turns it in, we already have a copy ready and waiting for us to compare it to.

That’s it for now. I’ve left out the ways that already exist, thinking instead of more efficient ways (seriously, Googling a suspicious paper and compiling painstaking evidence for several hours just sucks, and when you add that to multiple papers…well, I don’t know about you, but I have other things I would much rather spend my time on) than what we already do. I’m sure there are plenty of other crafty, efficient ways to detect plagiarism that I’m not thinking of in this one-off little thought experiment. Any one else have any brilliant schemes?

In other words, in the past, it was taken as given that those in power (emperors, patricians, etc) needed certain virtues in order to rule, while those who were ruled needed others. A just judge was impartial, and his impartiality was his fairness. This was a mixed blessing—it was easy for those who maintained total impartiality to others to become frigid or cruel, impartiality slipping into disinterest or isolation from others. To combat it, we cue up notions of shared humanity, fellow feeling, camaraderie with all as humans and brothers. But it is, by definition, abstract and not particular. The leader must universalize to be fair, but in doing so he creates a barrier between himself and those he rules, and he creates a different set of rules for himself and for others. This is understood as a paradoxical answer to a paradoxical question. To erase the paradox is not possible. The question was in maintaining the proper balance between two competing needs—identifying with others, but not so much as to cloud our judgment. Refusing to connect with the particular, but not so much that we lose the ability to connect altogether.

But with democracy, we are all judges, and we are all leaders, and we are all equally citizens (that’s the story anyway…the reality would involve a much longer set of musings). As such, we are expected to maintain a judicious distance from one another. We are to see all as equal, and yet as the personal sovereign we stand apart. That is what we do if we are good leaders and citizens anyway. Those who do not exercise this self-control and objective distance are, one must assume, crappy at their jobs. They are not as good at being citizens as we.

It is a holdover. An atavism. As mini-sovereigns, we exercise our duty with care and understand that those around us will not have the same needs, beliefs, or responsibilities. We accept the plurality which we rule over and live amidst, and this is a requirement of the job. But now those around us are not merely our subjects (as subjects, we forgive them their different virtues, for those virtues are appropriate to subjects and they do their jobs well). But we judge them harshly as fellow rulers, for they’ve got it all wrong. When our fellow citizens are beneath us, we forgive them. When they are equal to us, we despise their failings and judge their values as inappropriate. In other words, they may rule as they wish, but only so long as it is as we.

We believe in the ideal type of democracy and equality so deeply that we no longer see the possibility of these different positions. There’s no distinction between them anymore, so the bourgeois (psuedo-leader) adherents to notions like cosmopolitanism assume that it simply makes sense for everyone to be a cosmopolitan, and that that will mean the same thing, and serve the same purpose, for everyone. It is a virtue for all. The virtue. But what does it mean to be a cosmopolitan as a leader, and what does it mean to be one as a citizen? What does it mean to be both at the same time? Is it self-defeating and antithetical to plurality when separated from corresponding conceptions of hierarchy, which temper its inherent tendency to be universalizing?

Or is it, instead (or in addition to), that the Stoics were quiescent? One could act against Nature, or against another man, but the harm done was not important, indeed, could be imagined away. Today, however, our dignity is brittle and fragile, and any affront presents a terrible danger which compels immediate action. Those who do not agree thus pose a much greater threat than in the past, so, again, there is little to temper the demand that all must concur on this point.

At any rate, asking for things. I can’t blame anyone but myself for my lack of an advisor at this point, because in this stupid reluctance towards asking for things, I waited ’til the end to ask and everyone’s already been snapped up—no one has any time left to give. So what might have been only a moderate debt for me to incur has now become all the greater.

I hate this.

To find a string of text and replace it with part of the original string intact:

sed -i 's/\(foo\)\([A-Z, -]*\)/\1\L\2/g' file.txt

Putting things in escaped parentheses creates a group—\(foo\) is group one, \([A-Z]*\) is group two. Then in the replace string, you call up a group by putting \#. So group 1 becomes \1. Thus, the above replacement string—\1\L\2—means keep group one as is but convert group two, whatever it might be, to lowercase.

Literature and non-empirical pursuits are not unscientific any more than any other sort of observation is. Scientific method, folks. Hypothesize, observe, record, adjust hypothesis. Literature as observation. Don’t knock it. It gave us gravity.

Ordinary vices are the sort of conduct we expect, nothing spectacular or unusual…we are familiar with it…so commonplace that they are not worth discussing…one must suppose that everything that can be thought about it is too obvious to mention.

From Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p1-2:

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges…Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen.
p3
Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures. They are the kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place.

[Stewart's is basically just a Foucauldian definition of social interaction. It literally just described being alive and, hence, everything. Meaningless. Shklar's definition more interesting because it doesn't say what is, in fact ordinary, but speaks to what we assume is ordinary, which is much closer to hitting it on the mark—a subjective interpretation of things in relation to what we are used to and thus do or do not take for granted. What can be classified as ordinary will differ depending on who you ask.]