On this page, I continue my response to 32 posts uploaded to the anonymous “blog” in April 2019. My effort is to encourage, even leverage, the unknown owners of the site to take it down. And I hope to inspire those who posted on it, not having any occasion except for the mobbing campaign then ongoing, to rethink their participation and press for its removal—at least of their own obsolete interventions. I continue to teach at Wayne State University; I am there to educate and to learn. The destructiveness of this effort, as the motivations of a few key figures comes into relief and the more inadvertent eruptions fade into cyberspace, is remarkable. My intention is to post my responses, circulate them so that they have their effect, and then remove them. Target date: 1 May 2026, seven years on, and all this will disappear.
The “parent” of this page, “This Tragedy Is Farce” (here), inaugurates the take-down campaign with a breakdown of the 32 posts. The 12 authored by literary figures who are not at Wayne State have now been answered here and here; there is plenty of “new evidence,” as it is called, leading to surprising conclusions and new concerns. Some of these posts were motivated by tensions in the poetry world that go back to the history of Language writing and its detractors over decades. A number of the nastiest, however, occur at the intersection of the poetry world and academia, where a huge battle was being fought from the 90s and on—when I got my tenure-track position at Wayne State—over legitimacy, gatekeeping, and institutional power. Marjorie Perloff and Joshua Clover are the most strident voices in that sense, both departed so that there is no reconciliation. But also junior faculty on the tenure trail and graduate students threw their hats into the ring.
Of these seven academic figures, none remains at Wayne State—that in itself says something—but in 2019 several were in the process of blasting their way out to a better place. In the trench warfare or hand-to-hand combat I and others experienced, gossip and talk down the hall were major weapons in creating long-term departmental faultlines and cliques. A central figure in this process, Jonathan Flatley, was a master of intrigue and encouraged a good half of the other posts in this category. Over the two decades since his hire in 2003, Flatley was drawn into the pitched factionalism between Literature and Cultural Studies (a.k.a. the “Oligarchs” and the “Left”) that continues, vestigially, to this day. Every alliance, every hire, every seminar became the site for more bolstering and defensiveness—much of which was never overtly expressed. Fracturing and siloing ruled the day. Lack of chair leadership and a viable department “public sphere” were major enabling factors.
What happened in 2019 was in no sense an isolated incident or complaint from students. It had decades of department history behind it, to which the students were held hostage as the least powerful actors but with the most at stake. They were being used. In the mix between opportunism and use, a mobbing campaign the likes of which has scarcely been seen took hold. Academic mobbing is a well-known and much studied phenomenon. I have found useful this short summary (here) as well as a longer study (written by a faculty at Wayne State, here). Mobbing takes on a life of its own, which then provides multiple occasions for power moves of all types, once the mobbed person has been identified, denigrated, and expelled (here). The psychic fantasy of scapegoating leads the process onward; its dynamic is collective (and political in a sense we now see everywhere), but it is catalyzed and accelerated by the individual drives, ambitions, and resentments.
Before continuing, it is important to note that I, too, was an actor in this process. When I have responded to what I am concerned with in the public domain, I want to write on my own involvement and the deeper issues—such as “antagonism” and “aggressivity,” which I have started to explore here—that I know led to this event, though I could have never foretold the outcome.
Danielle Aubert
Danielle Aubert’s participation in this event is a remarkable combination of her relationship with Jonathan Flatley, with whom she moved to Detroit in 2003; the art world tensions and career openings leading to an academic position that followed; and finally her election as President of the local chapter of AAUP–AFT, the faculty union. In summer 2019, shortly after my case broke, Aubert unseated the union’s until-then-indomitable, stalwart, long-term President Charlie Parrish in a stunning overturning of the hegemony that ruled Wayne State faculty for forty years on the basis of her youth, activism, and graphic design. And this entire sequence, which culminated with her and Flatley leaving Wayne State for better opportunities at Chicago and her election as AAUP-AFT national treasurer, was catalyzed by the turmoil and scandal of my case, which she accelerated online. At the same time, her Left and union credentials are excellent—as well as her design ideas—and her catapult into national prominence otherwise deserved.
The story begins when Danielle, newly arrived with a degree from Yale, started making her way in the Detroit art world, about the time of MOCAD‘s founding, and got involved in our ad hoc effort to start an independent art critical journal (Detroit, I.e.), initiated by art writer Lynn Crawford (here). She was not part of the original group, and other designers/design ideas had been floated (including mine), but soon was drawn in. Dissensus then emerged over whether the journal would be affiliated with MOCAD. When I returned from a Fulbright in Germany, I found Danielle installed as designer and the move to MOCAD in process (here). After a contentious discussion, Crawford withdrew from the effort to keep the journal independent—but that could not succeed without her support. I organized a frustrated, last-ditch attempt to figure out how to continue; Danielle and a friend she wanted to get involved, Nina, an intern at the Michigan Chronicle I recall, attended.
The meeting failed on two accounts—first, the lack of consensus of how to frame, or fund, an independent journal. But second was the pressuring of Danielle at the meeting, who wanted to get Nina into the group without prior discussion. It was aggressive and embarrassing and we were getting nowhere. As tempers frayed, Danielle attacked my attempt to set an agenda or lead discussion: “You’re [being] a bully.” I stood up and said, “OK, this meeting is over” or words to that effect, with emphasis due to emotions in the room. There was a large table between where I had been seated and Aubert, who was sitting down. She construed my standing up as “lunging at her,” which was impossible. What was unpleasant, most certainly, was the feeling in the room, and I saw no hope of continuing.
This meeting took place in 2006. Danielle and Lynn continued their pursuit of MOCAD, and three issues of the journal appeared. For a while, I believe she had a role as official designer before moving to a job at Wayne. Her career was rolling. But Flatley took it hard; not long after he accused me: “You yelled at Danielle,” in an agitated voice. I said I had not, and you weren’t there. When Flatley accelerated the mobbing campaign against me, he referenced this event as part of a pattern of abuse. Though Aubert was not at the time a part of Wayne State, her accusation was circulated in 2019—thirteen years later—and investigated. Her claim that I acted badly was decisively refuted, on witness testimony. But the contretemps remained, stayed psychologically active, and entered into the mix.
The whole exchange was so absurd. He seemed to demand that we recognize his authority as an important person. But several of the artists and designers in the group literally had no idea who he was prior to working on the journal. There was no institutional framework to support his sense of superiority—we were a group of people coming together to work voluntarily on a project. At that point I was not yet teaching at Wayne State, and he was not my senior colleague. (Thankfully I’m not in his department.) / Objectively, there was a physical threat—he lunged across the table. But there were many witnesses, and I felt I had people on my side if I needed to defend myself (or something? Like I still ask myself, what was going on there?). / Needless to say, the group split from Barrett. We published a couple more issues of the journal without him. [N.B.: I wasn’t interested, after the poor editing and design of the first one, in which I published a piece on art in Berlin.] / Over the years I’ve seen Barrett Watten around—at the YMCA pool, on his bike, at Wayne State. I stopped going to the Y pool for a while so as not to run into him. Like so many other people posting here, I do what I can to avoid him. (“Blog”)
Giving Aubert her voice in this passage, several things stand out. First, she makes a false claim about my status in the group: as one of its original figures, my art experience and literary work were what got me involved. This leads to her projection onto me as an “important person” who was not in fact “my senior colleague”; something of where her spouse was working comes through. Next is her presumption of group consensus (since I had been in Germany, and she had only recently been involved) and the false account of the interaction, which she embellished over time. It is evident that Aubert was organizing her own (age) cohort and engaging in a Power Play to advance to her ends (which were to get involved with MOCAD). In the end, this lack of resolution created a bad object that remained in the Detroit art world ever since. It is this bad object that became the “antagonistic kernel,” as it is termed, that led to its emerging in the narrative that spiked the mob.
We had a bad meeting, that is for sure, and my reasons for frustration extended far beyond that to the context of the arts in Detroit. But why did it take on the psychic dimension it did? Lots to speculate on here. But when the students circulated their complaints—occasioned by my having to grade an overdue paper by one—Flatley jumped in with a litany of such material, as aggrieved bystander, which he circulated in the most inflammatory way possible. He preserved the psychic kernel of Danielle’s offense, which he connected to other events and material of any origin whatsoever, and organized it in a way to get rid of the bad object once and for all.
But what was really going on at this stage in our professional lives? The t-shirt one sees everywhere here is “Detroit hustles harder.” I moved from the intensely active arts and writing community in the Bay Area for an academic job in a state university, in a rustbelt city at the bottom of its drop. 1994: when the last shoe outlet closed on Woodward, and the t-shirt read “Will the last person to leave please turn out the lights?” After a decade of struggle, I had partly succeeded: tenure; award of the Wellek Prize in 2003; first Ph.D. defense in 2004; Fulbright to Germany in 2005. And my experiences in the Bay Area arts community, at New Langton Arts and as a critic for Artweek, were certainly relevant—but unknown or ignored. Flatley and Aubert had just arrived from an opposite experience at the University of Virginia; though a Fulbrighter in Moscow, his book was delayed and he was back on the market. In Detroit, you hit the ground hard and learn to “hustle harder.”
Fast forward to 2019 and the uses of bad history. When the students launched their complaint—after I charged one with a Student Conduct offense for their Twitter campaign to keep me from grading his late paper—Flatley, who knew nothing of that history, was quick to upload his own. He promulgated and circulated a petition, eventually signed by 18 colleagues, that I be removed from graduate teaching and my office (both now restored). Outside any formal procedure or knowledge of the issues, he tied in his own material—and Aubert’s from 2006—to claim a pattern going back 20 years: “We are writing to you with grave concerns about Professor Watten . . . extending over the past 20 years to the present” (Chronicle of Higher Education). The date range is established by the meeting with Danielle Aubert, and no other; reviewing these charges, the investigator found no “pattern of conduct” as was claimed.
The release of this letter, along with the social media campaign, created a firestorm of denunciation at Wayne State. The issues were displaced from questions of my grading a paper or dealing with triggering in class to charges of misusing vast and unjust power, creating an “unsafe space” that had to be terminated by my removal. Larger discourses of tenure, power, prestige, and, inevitably, gender and race were at play, along with the downsides of ressentiment, opportunism, and rivalry. The union, led by an indefatigable power broker in his own right (Charlie Parrish), joined my defense and mobilized the union’s legal resources and grievance protections. Here was an opening nearly Shakespearean in its profundity: Aubert seized the moment, associating the overturning of the old union order with outrage against “power and privilege” in his case and mine, and beat Charlie Parrish fair and square in the union election. I could see it coming—as fatal as a species extinction.
Would Aubert have been elected President without the turmoil of a mobbing campaign in her husband’s department, in which she lent a hand? Maybe not, but such is the contingency of history; often events that are overdue (Parrish dominated the union for thirty or so years, and had been accused of bullying himself) are catalyzed by a “butterfly in Manchuria.” The fact is that the union condemned the egregious lack of due process in my case as a protection for faculty in general, and made good on that support through grievances, arbitration, and return to normal duties. Aubert took over the union, which won a major victory for lecturers though it caved on faculty protections. Still, her tenure was impactful. The question I now ask is: Danielle, are you comfortable with this narrative? If not, please take it down!
Jonathan Flatley
Even after the above, this is where it gets hard. My collegial relationship with Jonathan Flatley was a true tragedy, but one I am going to unfold given his public airing of unanswered allegations. It could have been otherwise. Back to 2002 and we were hiring for a position in [American Studies?]; Richard Grusin had been appointed chair and was given lines to build the department—more than one, an event as rare as hen’s teeth these days. I was on the hiring committee. At the very last moment before the window closed, I pulled a file of applications and was struck by one: a comparative American-Russian book project, forthcoming from Harvard UP; a letter from Fredric Jameson at Duke. I brought it to the committee’s attention; this led to an interview and campus visit and eventual hire. In the process, I put the case for what looked like an edgy, interdisciplinary, comparative project to a full faculty meeting (an exercise in democracy little possible since). I made the case, over competing views, and remember being congratulated by a senior faculty for bringing in someone in my field.
This was promising, but knives would come out. The semester Flatley arrived, I recall a few things. There were initial social opportunities, all very friendly as I showed him around a bit. There were occasions with other faculty I got along with, and my students were drawn to his classes. I remember a screening he arranged of Warhol’s Blow Job as a calling card for his brand—so far so good. Then the click of the lock—a couple of months later, mid semester, and we were walking near campus. “There’s something I’d like to ask of you, Jonathan, and it is namely this—don’t go to Kathryne Lindberg, as she will tear down the department and claim it’s racist.” “Oh that’s already happened,” was his reply. A bit later we were talking and he said something like, the one thing I have to look out for is not to get on the wrong side of department factions; that’s what did me in at Virginia. I took that to mean me, and that I was not to assume he was on my side—likely after the Lindberg visit.
Things started to get complicated and edgy. I remember Bruce Andrews was in town and I put him on at the Scarab Club. Flatley was not that comfortable with Language writing but would go along in the early days. The topic of teaching Joyce came up and Flatley said, “I can’t stand Ulysses.” I took this as a dismissible remark, something like “I hate Shakespeare,” so I responded, joking but a bit dismissive myself, “That means you don’t know shit about modernism.” He took it hard and later we had a talk; turns out he was not satisfied because I would not get down off my pedestal or yield. Later on I found out that he described this interaction in detail to the investigator. It was a psychic wound. This cycles to the topic of “aggressivity” and the care one needs to take not to assume reciprocity in such exchanges. But there was also an asymmetry and some insecurity. Things needed to get worked out.
Over a decade or more there were lots of chances for working things out. I remember taking him around to local bookstores. At John K. King’s back room, where the collectibles are, I found a copy of Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography—a work I had been looking for, then priced at $100. You interested in this? He said he was, and took it. Then we were up at Cary Loren’s Book Beat in Oak Park—the one avant-garde bookstore in Detroit, curated by a former member of Destroy All Monsters, with claims on the “glam” lineage in Detroit. After we left Flatley opined, “That guy is really an asshole.” This is the kind of thing that happened when I tried to build a connection, so we were left to fight it out in the department as Jonathan built up his teaching and we competed, regrettably, over the interesting students, of which there were many.
I am writing informally to given an impression of affect, as it’s called. Students would go to Flatley to talk about their projects and come back saying, “You guys agree on nearly everything, why aren’t you getting along?” On the other hand, he would advise students not to work on certain topics or approaches from a rigid Left perspective. On graduate committees Jonathan was often bad tempered and obstructive, to the extent that students would return in distress after meetings with him. I came down on him for that on an early occasion: another psychic wound. What developed was a kind of carping around the edges of reading lists, qualifying exams, dissertation defenses. There was an aura of resistance, interpreted in informal dress codes, Cool Kids attitude, and late arrivals to meetings. Five minutes late, and “you can set your watch by that,” one colleague remarked. In one defense, with Lyn Hejinian as outside reader, she remarked on the hostility visible in the room. One such occasion was relayed to the investigator: a totally false account of a Prospectus Exam as confrontational that I can easily disprove by my written notes. This psychic continuum accelerated, punctuated by brief moments of dissensus but never fully elaborated in any fundamental discussion over principle. Rather, something like Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences” took hold.
The real downside to this psychology was the splitting of the graduate cohort. About 2010, in contemporary literature, you worked either with me or with Jonathan—there were two groups. An early student affected by this was Marie Buck, as we will see. As things continued into the 10s a line in the sand was drawn, and if you were “working with Barrett” it was seen as a negative; you were part of a cult. Things started to get even more serious after Flatley began to get more clout, and students I worked with would have troubles with funding. There were a series of contentious hires, particularly one in Queer Theory that split the department. And as all this was going down, there was the aggressive cultivation of alliances and talk down the corridors, walling up defenses, starting a series that would ultimately lead to ruin. At every point, the Chair was no use: first Richard Grusin before he was removed, then two years of substitutes, then a decade of nonleadership where there was little comprehension of what was going on, what the basic issues were, or what to do about it. A kind of intellectual paralysis set in as department culture.
About 2017 lines hardened even further. Jonathan had built up his own group, and they took on his defenses against communicating with me. A number of the students who appear on the “blog” were allied with him, and the tension of that split was part of the complaint. Then I heard that Jonathan had told students he would no longer serve on my committees; it would be either him or me. He had enough allies in the department, evidently, to do so but what was regrettable was the effect on the students, leading to consternation and doubt about their projects and even the profession itself. Here I may offer that I am an optimist, no matter what, about the value of a higher degree; Flatley is not, as “there are no jobs.” Both arguments have their merits, but I am in favor of cultivating opportunity, not winnowing the pack. But what was so remarkable about all this was the degree of resentment. Where was it coming from; what did I do to make it happen and intensify it to such a degree?
[As a kind of cliff hanger, I will break off this discussion here in order to set the stage for the institutional issues that took place in 2019, which are the immediate context for the material Flatley uploaded to the “Blog.” Thus the return to the topic will take a somewhat different tone: here.]
Links
Page 12: “The Tragedy is Farce”
Page 12.1, “Literary Contexts I”
Page 12.2, “Literary Contexts II”
Page 12.4, “Academic Contexts II”
Page 12.5, “Academic Contexts III”
