EDITOR'S FORWORD
—Eric Larsen
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In the "Late-Penultimate" and "Ultimate" [1] periods of the American Collapse—a fact familiar to even the most casual student of this massive subject—the greatest destruction of business, cultural, and scholarly archives (other than those maintained in secure areas by the military, the government, or great corporations) did not result from direct action by armed forces or through military armaments, whether domestic or foreign, as might logically have been expected. Instead, most archival (and other) destruction came about through the massive, ruinous, uncontrollable fire-storms that engulfed all of that nation's urbanized and most of its densely suburbanized areas, caused by the myriad blazes set by masses of raging and anti-educated members of the middle and lower-middle classes. (The only slightly less widespread acts of arson that were committed by the middle- and upper-middle-classes, predominantly by their males, differed significantly, the sole motive in these latter cases being malicious vandalism, not the blind and near-directionless rage of the lower classes. For a complete analysis of the mass psychology of the Middle and Late Ante-Penultimate and of the Penultimate and Ultimate themselves, see Volume Three of The Decline and Fall of the American Nation [pp. 493-572].)
..........Even by the time of the Late Preliminary, undeniably, all American universities modeled themselves to an irreversibly debilitating extent (as we see the matter from our own modern perspective) on the hierarchic model of the corporation or corporate state. [2] The universities, as a result, like the corporations, maintained fire- and even thermo-nuclear-resistant security and preservation systems for their own archives, vast numbers of which, as a result, have come down to us undamaged. Little of that archival material has proven to be of any true significance, however, in revealing the root causes of the Collapse. The reason for this failure is that, with extremely few exceptions, the purpose of corporate archives of the period was not to express or clarify, but rather to obscure and suppress any and all information that might be revelatory of the real workings, conduct, or aims of the corporation itself. The sheer meaninglessness, to the point often of what seems little more than intentional gibberish, of the vast majority of such archives remains an extraordinary aspect of pre-Collapse American communication and culture. [3]
..........In the corporate university structure, those in leadership and governing (that is, in "ownership") positions were housed at the top of an imaginary pyramid and designated not through accurate terms such as "owners," "governors," "regulators," "chiefs," or "bosses" but through the ingeniously neutralized term [4] of "administrators." These figures, in the university as in the corporation itself, were solely responsible for the ongoing creation of what was then known as "product," this being something that, among college or university administrators themselves, was referred to almost invariably (and, again, abusively) as "image." Any "product" of a traditional kind actually suitable to the university—"education," "learning," or "knowledge," for example—essentially disappeared from the university altogether as the administrators, in a complex and curious evolution, took over the roles both of owner-governors and producers. "Image," in short, became the sole "product" of the university, the administrators themselves having become at one and the same time the producers, controllers, and beneficiaries of it.
..........The word "faculty," meanwhile, did for a certain time remain in use, although it was a term that even by the Late Preliminary or Early Ante-Penultimate was separated entirely from its original "medieval" connotation as designating both the university's governing and producing element (the body, that is to say, in charge of the gathering, maintaining, and handing on of "knowledge"). [5]
..........In applying this corporate model to the university, the administrator-producer-owners found themselves burdened with large numbers of useless "workers" or erstwhile "producers," these of course being the remains of their inherited faculties. Due to a byzantine complexity of legalities that were in place from approximately the Early Ante-Penultimate on, it was out of the question for administrators to dispense with these "faculty" in such simple ways as they may actually have wished, but they were forced to do so instead by relying upon far more indirect methods. Two of the most common of these were the encouraging of poor health and thus early death; and the curiously-named concept of "attrition," which in fact simply meant making no replacements for those "faculty" who died. Other methods of eliminating these expensive and useless workers included the equivalent of surgical excisions of previously accepted or even once-prestigious areas of "knowledge" (most notably, history, literature, art, music, and philosophy); the increase in numbers of "administrators" with a proportionate decrease in numbers of "faculty"; and, perhaps most common of all, the use of purely political means to give the appearance of there no longer being adequate "funding" for maintaining the university's previous numbers of "personnel" (as in the phrase "faculty personnel").
..........Important and effective as each of these methods was, still another aspect of "faculty-management" from the Early Ante-Penultimate onward is even more deserving of notice. This is the phenomenon of faculty members committing—and being encouraged to commit—intellectual suicide by themselves becoming administrators. [6] In some extreme cases, this was done by faculty members' voluntarily stepping forth and requesting [7] to be sent to special "schools" where they would be taught "how" to be administrators. Much more often, however, the suicide was accomplished not through full-fledged adminstratorhood but through faculty members becoming "fund-raisers" and "grant-seekers" of various kinds, thus being transformed, by definition, into demi-administrators and immediately losing their intellectual independence and integrity. Most frequently of all, however, intellectual death was accomplished by means of faculty members' taking up or embracing types of so-called "learning" or "knowledge" that in fact were nothing of the kind but that consisted actually (and only) of image rather than content, being thus by definition "product" rather than anything having genuine intellectual content, and thus being historically of no interest to a faculty member but only to an administrator. [8] Even through the use of such debilitating, corrupting, and deforming measures as these, however, faculty very seldom rose to the same entirety of privilege, power, "ownership," and reward that true administrators enjoyed. Nevertheless, the results were efficient in the elimination of "faculty" through neutralization, and therefore the methods continued to be held in great value by administrators. Notably, in none of the archival research projects undertaken since The Collapse itself has any archaeological evidence come to light identifying even one single "converted" faculty member who considered his or her intellectual suicide to have been a loss rather than a gain, or even to have recorded the thought, whether in public or private, that such a question could so much as even have arisen. Even so, there does remain the possibility that the converteds, if secretly in a state of humiliation and despair, could have been lying.
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..........As mentioned previously, because of the university structure that prevailed from the Late Preliminary onward (or possibly from even earlier), such archival information as we do possess is almost entirely that generated either by administrators themselves or by "converted" faculty, these being the only two camps (other than certain numbers of researchers in the "hard sciences") that had automatic access to encrypted, vaulted, and supra-heat-resistant storage and retrieval systems capable of surviving the firestorms of the Collapse.
..........Truly "unconverted" faculty members, on the other hand, being perceived by administrators as insignificant at best (albeit burdensome) and as implicitly dangerous saboteurs at worst, were caused to remain invariably under-equipped and poorly treated, even their physical health, as mentioned already, being put deliberately (although of course never openly) in jeopardy in the anticipation of premature death and thus early departure. As for the matter of the information storage and retrieval systems that were made available to the unconverteds, these remained primitive even into the Middle Penultimate. Evidence has been found showing that a small nucleus of urban American unconverted faculty members labored on archaic pre-Stigler, base-non-unified, sensory-depletive systems as late as into the Middle Ultimate itself!
..........All of which leads us to the Larsen papers themselves. So well known are these famous documents that in truth they need no introduction even to the non-specialist. The incalculable good fortune of our even being in possession of them, however; the almost infinite odds against their having been discovered at all in the ruins and ashes of the great burned city where Larsen long ago lived and worked—surely these are matters that deserve to be acknowledged once again as causes of amazement and gratitude even if only in passing.
..........As must, too, the sheer uniqueness of the documents. In spite of the often badly damaged state of some of the papers—so that in many cases we possess only widely separated pieces—the fragments and parts of whole writings that we do possess give us a clear idea of the scope, ambition, and intensity of Larsen's aim, his undyingly passionate concern for the doomed and inimical age he lived in, and, more sadly, the toll that all of this took on a mind so fine as his, as we know from the intimations of panic and perhaps breakdown itself that are hinted at in certain of the later papers, [9] even though these nevertheless remain some of this extraordinary thinker's most brilliant works.
.......... By the time Larsen set out on his final project, life in the American university—and nation—had become intensely uncongenial to unconverteds, whose sheer numbers had diminished enormously and whose extant contributions are therefore now extraordinarily rare. The Larsen papers, thus, are a part of that merest handful of surviving written works that are incontrovertibly known not to have been composed by administrators or by converteds but by single individuals from among that small, dwindling, turn-of-the-century category of unconverteds who, like Larsen himself, continued until the end [10] to struggle against the steady and (as we can now so easily see) increasingly deadly erosions of learning, meaning, and conscience in the decades preceding the Collapse.
.......... But let us allow Larsen's words to speak for themselves across the great silence that followed the Ultimate, bringing us their observations not only of the daily life of a true unconverted, with its pronounced rigors, losses, and hopes, but offering us also a candid record of the inside workings and structure of the American university as it existed in the Late Ante-Penultimate and Early Penultimate—knowing now, as the doomed Larsen never could—what incalculable, immeasurable, crushing sorrows and losses were so soon to follow.
X. Jin Li
The Asia Press
31076 M'tai Cordon
Beijing-AY38
10 October 2147 C.E.
The Asia Press
31076 M'tai Cordon
Beijing-AY38
10 October 2147 C.E.
A NOTE ON THE CONDITION OF THE PAPERS:
..........The Actaeon College of Institutional Analysis and Social Control was spared destruction by fire no more than were those areas of the city around it, whether immediately nearby or quite far away. A number of factors, even so, contributed to the fortunate and relatively complete survival of the Larsen documents.
..........We know that the college itself was housed in two buildings, neither of them especially large, one four stories high and the other six, known, respectively, as Non-Presidential Hall and Presidential Hall. By the time of the Ultimate, however, these structures had been pressed in upon by a number of very high urban towers—ranging from fifty to as many as ninety stories. Even so, those massive piles rose up only on that side of Actaeon toward the center of the city rather than on the side away from the center. As a result, when the Collapse actually took place, the hurricanic winds of the great fire-storm, rushing into the vacuum that had been created at the city-center, caused the great towers to topple away from Actaeon rather than toward it, with the result that the college's site was far less deeply buried in rubble than were other parts of the city, even some of those immediately adjacent.
..........Further, there is the matter of the location of the papers inside Actaeon itself. Although most scholars believe that the author had retired from the institution a number of decades before the onset of the Early Ultimate in 2031 (it is unknown—though considered highly doubtful—whether Larsen was any longer alive by that point), his office remained apparently untouched between the time of his departure and the end. Whether this was due simply to neglect, or to the precipitate decrease by then in the number of unconverteds (resulting in a diminished need for the inferior office space given them), or whether it was a reflection of the institutional chaos and absence of leadership or control by that time—these questions can never be answered for certain. What can be known, however, is that Larsen used the office as a repository for copies of every piece—or so it is now thought—of the writing that makes up any part of what we refer to with familiarity as The Larsen Papers.
..........In addition, the location of Larsen's office proved of major importance in the preservation—albeit a preservation both partial and imperfect—of the materials. In an interior and windowless room (in this, the smaller of Actaeon's buildings, most rooms were windowless) on the ground floor, the office was situated directly below the paired men's and women's latrines stacked above it in identical locations on the second, third, and fourth floors of the building.
..........At Actaeon, as elsewhere in the city and nation, fierce and uncontrolled vandalism preceded and accompanied the widespread arson in the weeks and months leading up to the true firestorms and final Collapse. At both of Actaeon's buildings, very strong evidence shows that this vandalism began in the latrines before spreading elsewhere, with the wanton sledging of ceramic fixtures and tiles and the breaking open of pipes of the kind used both for fresh water and for waste. Archival, historical, or archaeological research has discovered no other site where latrines were the first target of destruction. Whatever its cause, this anomaly in Actaeon's case was of very great consequence in the preservation of the Larsen papers. Over a period that must have extended over weeks and perhaps even longer—in the time, that is, leading up to the firestorms themselves—Larsen's office was saturated by a steady supply of water from above, both fresh and waste. This meant that when fire at last had its turn and swept through the college buildings, the papers, being sodden, stood a vastly improved chance of withstanding complete destruction.
..........Even so, given the extraordinary intensity of the fire-storms, some degree of burning inevitably occurred, depending mainly on the way the papers happened to have been stacked, clipped, bound together, tied, or piled up. Top and bottom sheets were the most susceptible to loss, with the result that the author's exact intent as to beginnings and endings is not always clear, those elements of the papers often missing altogether. Larsen, further, must have sometimes stacked the papers in random piles (for whatever reason), with the result that pages are sometimes absent in the very midst of a narrative or argument, creating lacunae of sizes we can only estimate, can do nothing to remedy, and can only regret.
..........In regard to damaged primary documents, editorial policy throughout has followed long-standing tradition in transferring them to the printed page in such a way as to duplicate as nearly as possible the exact physical appearance of the original. This policy explains, throughout, the presence of jagged beginnings or endings of text, sudden white spaces, and the absence of entire sections altogether. Finally, during the estimated eight decades that the papers remained in the office before their discovery, additional forms of deterioration naturally took place, beyond those caused merely by fire and water.
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The Editor
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