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Affected
On Becoming Undone
and Potentiation
 Affected

“Reading this book takes the reader on a journey through a thoughtscape that
starts on an individual level and takes us all the way ‘up’ to the entirety of
contemporary life. In this journey, Rick Iedema shows with a profound analyt-
ical precision the existential strength of ‘being moved’, being affected. Departing
from a life being shattered, the books exposes with the help of Spinoza, Sloter-
dijk, and others, the many layers and forms of ‘becoming’. While written during
the COVID-19 crisis and extreme bushfires literally next door the book is not
only a plea for new ‘structures of feeling’, but also for a new way of doing social
science research, as today’s complexity and pace of change are too intense to be
adequately captured and controlled by ponderous forms of analysis. Although
Iedema refuses (rightly so) to offer an alternative research model of how to
understand life and the world we live in, he does not leave us empty-handed.
His discussion at the end of the book about potentiation and anthropotech-
nics shows us the way towards personal and intellectual courage: one that allows
uncertainty and nurtures emergent kinds of sense and intelligence.”
—Jessica Mesman, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
 Rick Iedema

Affected
On Becoming Undone and Potentiation
Rick Iedema
Health Faculities
King’s College London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-62735-5 ISBN 978-3-030-62736-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2

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 Preamble---Affected: On Becoming
(Undone)

Origin of This Book

This book was written not from the beginnings of an idea or an argument,
but from a growing sense that “to ‘philosophise’ about being shattered is
separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered” (Heidegger, 2000
[1946]). This sense of chasm remained my principal guide. I went back
to it when I was left wondering while writing, where next with this? For
the purpose of the present book, I flesh this sense out by including the
odd vignette recounting a person’s experience of becoming undone and
loss. The person in question shall remain anonymous.
Perhaps my sense of this chasm between discourse and distress had
been widening for a while. Since 2008 I had become interested in organ-
isational failure and harm caused to service users. Over a period of several
years, my investigation of organisational ‘incidents’ in health care made
me worry about staff and patients whose harm was ignored to protect the
reputation of the service, its management, the bureaucracy and politicians.
Wanting to go beyond interviews and focus groups, I immersed myself in
what people in those organisations were doing and experiencing. Having
videoed care work for some years (Iedema, Long, Forsyth, & Lee, 2006),
and sitting down with them to hear what the footage now enabled them
to say and ask (Iedema, 2020b), I involved people in videoed interviews
as a way of making the portrayal of their distress more tangible, and more
immediate for my audiences. I also turned to theatre (Iedema, 2020a) to

v
vi PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

engender still more energy among people to come to grips with the expe-
rience of distress and harm, and to discuss otherwise unspeakable things
and unremembered feelings.
If I had an aim and a procedure, these were no longer to do with
where I started in academia: analysing and generalising about social-
organisational life. Rather, my aim and procedure became increasingly
focused on wanting to move people by engaging them with what had
moved (harmed) others. Increasingly, all I wanted to do was to enable
if not to oblige people to confront hitherto hidden things and get them
to say new and different things about their own otherwise taken-as-given
ways of being, doing and saying. If anything characterised my research it
was a hollowing out, a depletion of knowledge and expertise, in favour of
questioning, moving and wondering. This was also because I moved more
and more towards handing problems, deliberations, decisions and conclu-
sions over to research participants whose ways of addressing these difficult
things were so often interesting and surprising. Their energy made me
move away from the rigidities of social science (‘this finding is validated’;
‘my relations with participants are pre-determined’; ‘my researcher iden-
tity and my research practice are defined by these theories and methods’;
‘this critique is justified by this evidence’), and invent different ways of
doing social science.
Important milestones for me were Still & Costall’s wonderful (1991)
collection Beyond Cognitivism which I read in the 1990s. The papers in
this volume relieved me of any remaining psychologistic misapprehen-
sions: action is not the effect of thought; thought does not rule us. I
also read John Law’s (2001) After Method in the early 2000’s. I carried
that book in my back pocket ever since to remind me it was fine to
question and withdraw from the assumptions, procedures and method-
ologies that continued to define the direction of social science and the
context of my career. These books steered me on to all kinds of other
amazing writers that questioned methodological, theoretical and inter-
pretive dogmas (e.g. Shapiro, 2005). Perhaps they led me to my academic
fall-from-grace, my disciplinary exodus, my degeneracy. Mind you, degen-
eracy may sound bad, but, as I explain later in the book, degeneracy is a
kind of strategic-tactical opportunism that plays a critical role in individual
survival (Virno, 2004) and species evolution (Edelman, 2006). Degen-
eracy makes possible the shedding of non-critical practices, unwarranted
rules and ineffective assumptions. Degeneracy risks going without rather
than hang on to non-critical things. It reminds me of James’ definition of
 PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE) vii

the ‘radical pragmatist’. According to him, “[a] radical pragmatist … is a

happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature” (James, 1907: 256).
In the midst of this descent into personal-professional degeneracy
Katherine Carroll and I put together an article from my readings of
Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres (Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004). I read Spheres
when I was beginning to disconnect from my disciplinary bearings and
academic moorings. My mood chimed with Sloterdijk’s rampage across
disciplines, theories, ambitions and divisions, shamelessly energising if not
steroidising (among other things) philosophy, anthropology, communi-
cation theory, sociology and (art) history. While his endless stream of
thick books may appear to just inflate the stock of knowledge, his work in
fact constitutes an extended exercise in acrobatic thinking. Sloterdijk takes
you places you suspect you’ve been before, but never consciously, making
the most distant and untravelled regions of existence recognisable, think-
able and discussable in a language so agile it feels futuristic and other-
wordly. Reading him, I could readjust my uncertainties and confusions
with increasing intellectual courage and flexibility.
Steeped in Sloterdijk, the article I just mentioned turns research on
its head: instead of approaching the world with a question, a method for
answering it, and the goal of knowing more, it argued we should approach
the world as a spatial-relational (‘spherical’) dynamic—or as a tangle of
people in space-specific relationships and ever-evolving (and, in this day
and age, increasingly fast-changing) ‘co-immunities’, a Sloterdijk concept.
Co-immunities: more or less temporary collections of spatially or tech-
nologically connected people constantly refreshing and resourcing their
communally constructed immunity. Sloterdijk’s co-immunisation high-
lights not so much the deliberative and moral aspects of contemporary
co-existence, as its anthropotechnics according to which techniques and
technologies are harnessed to realise the aim of communal security1 and
the pressure of creating advantage.
Studying or understanding the dynamics of human spheres, the
article argued, should mean (among other things) participating in and
contributing to their spherical becoming. Such becoming was inevitably
contingent on engendering relations of safety and trust. This is the
meaning of the article’s title: ‘spherogenics’, the engendering of spheres

1 The word security derives from securis (Latin: axe) and secõ (Latin: to cut). Security
thus derives from the proto-technological act of ‘cutting off from’.
viii PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

of co-immunity. For me, this concept defines research as the endeavour to

bring about and account for the becoming of social-organisational real-
ities. Without wanting to dismiss critique and formal knowledge, I now
regard my research as less in the business of knowledge production than
of nurturing emergent kinds of intelligence from a (re)energised human
sociality (Iedema & Carroll, 2015). Nurturing these things is contin-
gent on being moved by and being able to move those in whom we are
interested. Being moved is what this book is about.

A Note on Method
I leap across literatures and enjoy the creativity of the ideas and thoughts
I find there. This involves not necessarily following the rules of conven-
tional scholarship. For philosophers, the route to a reappreciation of the
present is through delving into the intentions of and relations among
philosophers’ writings: How should this or that be understood? What
evidence is there for believing that statement X means Y, or that author A
meant B? What do these things say and what don’t they say? My approach
in contrast is more one of going through philosophical corners and navi-
gating conceptual intersections at high speeds, if not recklessly ignoring
the existing road network altogether.
For their part, social scientists scavenge data in all kinds of formats,
personal accounts, audio/video recordings, large databases or any other
information in any other medium. They hold that data up as guarantor
for the legitimacy of their claims about recognisable and tangible forms
of life, using their analytical tools and discursive procedures to produce
findings and conclusions about the state of the present or the past, and
to make predictions about the future. The social sciences capture our
beings, doings and sayings. My work abandons much of this, other than
by drawing on brief vignettes that specify one person’s experience of
becoming undone. In doing so I scale the prevailing expectations of
science back and slow science down (Stengers, 2018). This gives me time
to engender more defensible and responsive ways of going on.
The humanities are now steeped in posthuman scholarship whose
(grand) narrative fixes on what exceeds human and ordinary life. Its prin-
cipal concern is to adjust the lenses through which we apprehend life
away from our personal crises and towards global crises, from human life
towards pan-organic and inorganic life. Posthumanities erase the personal
on account of its misapprehension that experience matters at all in a
 PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE) ix

world where becoming means that humans are an evolutionary blip in

the grander scheme of inscrutable things and events, and that what we
experience as ‘the present’ is no more than what we cease to be:

… the present therefore produces a multi-faceted effect: on the one hand

the sharp awareness of what we are ceasing to be (the end of the actual) and
on the other the perception – in different degrees of clarity – of what we
are in the process of becoming (the actualization of the virtual). (Braidotti,
2019: 36)

Given my invocation of a single person’s experience of becoming undone,

I fail here too. My approach and style of writing will therefore exasperate
proponents of each of these endeavours. My defence is that my intention
in this book is to come to terms with ‘becoming undone’ and ‘becoming
different’, and to clarify my fascination with this idea of Spinoza’s: our
power to be affected enhances our power to act. My exploration of this
idea results in an account of a journey into realising that “there is no crisis
here, just a huge vitality of inspiration” (Braidotti, 2017: 15). Finally, keep
in mind while reading this, that, really, …

We shouldn’t be producing books—unified totalities that reflect a well-

ordered world, we should be producing texts that are assemblages—unex-
pected, disparate and productive connections that create new ways of
thinking and living. (Colebrook, 2002: 76)

References
Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman critical theory. Journal of Posthuman Studies,
1(1), 9–25.
Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities.
Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327
6418771486.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Edelman, G. (2006). Second nature: Brain science and human knowledge. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2000 [1946]). Über den Humanismus [Letter on humanism].
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Iedema, R. (2020a). Hear me: Intervention theatre. In P. Crawford, B. Brown,
& A. Charise (Eds.), Companion for health humanities (pp. 239–243).
Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
x PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

Iedema, R. (2020b). Video-reflexive ethnography as potentiation technology:

What about investigative quality? Qualitative Research in Psychology. https://
doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1794087.
Iedema, R., & Carroll, K. (2015). Research as affect-sphere: Towards sphero-
genics. Emotion Review, 7 (1), 1–7.
Iedema, R., Long, D., Forsyth, R., & Lee, B. B. (2006). Visibilizing clinical work:
Video ethnography in the contemporary hospital. Health Sociology Review,
15(2), 156–168.
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Law, J. (2001). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.
Shapiro, I. (2005). Flight from reality in the human sciences. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (1998). Sphären I: Blasen—Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Sphären II: Globen—Makrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. (2004). Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp.
Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science (S.
Muecke, Trans.). Oxford: Polity Press.
Still, A., & Costall, A. (1991). Against cognitivism: Alternative foundations for
cognitive psychology. Hemel Hampstead, UK.: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Virno, P. (2004). The grammar of the multitude. New York: Semiotext(e).
 Contents

1 Transgressions 1
Descent into Greed 2
Child Sexual Abuse 3
Digital Surveillance 5
Academic Misconduct 6
Research Integrity 8
Clinical Incidents 10
Loss of World 12
The Monstrous 15
References 19

2 Affects 25
Affect as Practice 25
Vitalism—Active/Passive 31
Sense Modulates (or Exceeds) Meaning 39
Conclusion 41
References 41

3 Undoings 45
Undoing 46
Loss of Meaning 48
Effacing Self 60
Passivity 63

xi
xii CONTENTS

Conclusion 65
References 66

4 Prosociality 69
Introduction 69
Prosociality 72
Empathy 74
The Power to Be Affected 84
Being Moved as Sociopolitical Priority 86
Conclusion 90
References 91

5 Potentiation 97
Introduction 97
Being Moved: A Proximity that Requires Distance 99
The Ecstasy of Standing Outside 104
A Becoming of Becoming: Potentiation 109
What Keeps Us: The Ingenium 115
References 118

6 Conclusion 121
Looking Back and Looking Forward 121
Reprise 126
References 127

Index 129
 CHAPTER 1

Transgressions

Abstract This first chapter starts with a description of organisational

transgression and dysfunction that affected many people and that became
publicised through a number of governmental inquiries, research into
organisational ‘incidents’, media reports of scandals, and the like. The
chapter then shifts gear to question whether framing these dysfunc-
tions as individuals’ or groups’ transgressions of particular moral codes
does justice to what is at issue here. Does the morality that trades in
judgements of (dys)functionality still apply to what some now refer to
as a ‘third modernity’ where rules are becoming more contested (de
Vulpian in Towards a third modernity: How ordinary people are trans-
forming the world. Triarchy Press, Axminster, UK, 2008)? In attempting
to answer this question, the chapter refracts the problem of organisational
dysfunction through the prism of affect and the notion ‘monstrosity’.

Keywords Institutional transgression · Dehumanisation · Monstrosity ·

(positive/negative) affect

© The Author(s) 2021 1

R. Iedema, Affected,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2_1
2 R. IEDEMA

Descent into Greed

First, in almost every case, the conduct in issue was driven not only by
the relevant entity’s pursuit of profit but also by individuals’ pursuit of
gain, whether in the form of remuneration for the individual or profit for
the individual’s business. Providing a service to customers was relegated to
second place. Sales became all important. Those who dealt with customers
became sellers. And this confusion of roles extended well beyond front line
service staff. Advisers became sellers and sellers became advisers. (Hayne,
2019)

The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance

Industry concluded in February 2019 with the publication of its Final
Report (Hayne, 2019). The findings of the Royal Commission were
scathing about the practices in the Australian banking industry: contin-
uing to charge customers after their death; denying customers insurance
payouts; hoodwinking the public into paying for services that did not
exist and taking up mortgages they would not be able to afford, and
so on, and so on (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-04/banking-
royal-commission-report-at-a-glance/10777188).
While none of the major banks escaped condemnation, the Commis-
sion regarded the National Australia Bank (appropriately abbreviated as
‘NAB’) as an outlier. This bank’s leadership persisted in downplaying and
denying the seriousness of NAB’s transgressions right through the inquiry
(Bartholomeusz, 2019). The normalisation of deceit in this organisation
in particular had rendered employees at all levels immune to the damage
and distress they caused service users, including account holders, mort-
gagees and insurees. The size of the scandal was of such magnitude that
it was reported on internationally (cf. the reports compiled in the June
2019 issue of The New Yorker: The New Yorker, 2019).
NAB’s most recent website is populated by two moderately happy,
semi-smiling customers, advertising information about ‘community part-
ners’ and ‘people who make a better Australia’ (https://www.nab.
com.au/). Here, the media portrayal serves to background (if not bury)
the more sinister dimensions of banking uncovered in the Royal Commis-
sion Inquiry. The contrast between the media portrayal and the inquiry
findings could not be more stark. Their relation is not merely one of
contradiction, perhaps, but also one of cancellation: smiles and domestic
happiness are made to dominate over disconcerting legal facts. (A closer
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 3

look at the NAB website page reveals a pervasive dull grey and author-
itarian font on the left-hand side of the image1 with the kitchen scene
squashed into the right-hand side of the picture, an awkward distance
between the man and the woman, dour black and grey jumpers and a
tense and trite symbolisation of ‘togetherness’. It’s not all good, yet.)
Organisations will portray their operations and aims as ethical and
professional, and as upholding these standards for everyone who works
in them and with them. Only in some circumstances will organisations
subject conflicts of interest and the affective dynamics that drive them to
scrutiny and confront them using the standards and principles inscribed
into their codes and policies. Oversight bodies tend to err on the side
of condoning rather than confronting questionable and transgressive
practices (The New Yorker, 2019). Thus, the Australian Securities and
Investments Commission (ASIC), a government body called into being
to monitor banking and finance industries, was found to have condoned
unacceptable banking and insurance practices and to have ignored a large
number of consumer complaints over several years (Hayne, 2019).
The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking Industry was
pushed through parliament against the will of the (then Turnbull-liberal)
government in power, thanks to the opposition party teaming up with
independent members of parliament. The Commission’s findings have
stunned even those who were convinced that there was a need for an
inquiry into banking practices.

Child Sexual Abuse

In 2017, two years before the Royal Commission into the Australian
Banking and Insurance Industry, Australia conducted the Royal Inquiry
into Institutions’ Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The focus of this inquiry
was on sexual abuse acts committed by institutions’ (staff) members,
on protection given to these people by other people employed by the
institution, and on the general culture within these institutions towards
accountability for illegal behaviour: “The Royal Commission into Insti-
tutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established in response
to allegations of sexual abuse of children in institutional contexts that

1 In western forms of visual depiction, the left-hand side of the visual tends to portray
what is or was (the ‘given’), whereas the right-hand side portrays what will be or should
be (the ‘new’) (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
4 R. IEDEMA

had been emerging in Australia for many years” (Royal Commission into
Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). The reference to
‘many years’ may remind the reader that this inquiry followed on from
the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (‘Bringing them
home’) which outlined allegations of institutional sexual abuse of Aborig-
inal and Torres Strait Islander children (Wilson, 1997), a 2004 inquiry
whose report was titled Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians
who experienced institutional or out-of -home care as children, and a 2005
inquiry whose report was titled Protecting vulnerable children: A national
challenge.
Collectively, these reports make clear that child abuse in Australia was
and perhaps still is institutionalised. It took decades and decades for the
nation to confront this systemic destruction of children and take on the
pervasive mutual protection by and of perpetrators high up in these (often
prominent) institutions. The latest and most widely reported conviction
to come out of these inquiries was that of Cardinal George Pell in 2018
for acts committed several years earlier. At the time of his conviction, Pell
was officially employed at the Vatican. The Vatican.
The 2017 report’s Executive Summary starts with a section titled “A
National Tragedy”:

Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian

institutions. We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it
is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most
trusted institutions. The sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost
every type of institution where children reside or attend for educational,
recreational, sporting, religious or cultural activities. Some institutions have
had multiple abusers who sexually abused multiple children. It is not a case
of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed.
(Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,
2017)

These reports, put together, detail individuals’ and their organisations’

moral disengagement, or what Bandura and colleagues refer to as dehu-
manisation (Bandura, Caprara, & Zsolnai, 2000). This moral disengage-
ment and dehumanisation took place, and possibly still takes place, in
organisations that we regard as emblematic of society’s highest norms
and standards: churches, schools, sports clubs. This conclusion upends
our commonsense understanding of the sources of crime, injustice and
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 5

dysfunction as emerging from (organised groups of) rather brutish indi-

viduals, from their personality deficits and upbringing deficiencies, lower-
class accents, and generally deviant behaviours. This is a ‘commonsense’
that is consistently endorsed by much of contemporary cinema (Spina,
2017): it is individuals (however well-organised) deviating from the social
norm who are responsible for far-reaching wrongdoing and ruthless
exploitation of others. But the scale of institutionalised dehumanisation
reported in Australia puts paid to such stereotyped portrayals.
True, citizens’ faith in political and commercial institutions has a long
and chequered history (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). Yet the notion that
civic institutions may be engaged in systemic wrongdoing, exploitation
and destruction of people challenges all but the most jaundiced. And if
institutionalised dehumanisation is rampant in banking, schooling, reli-
gions and sports, what is the chance that it also permeates institutions
that have not yet been hauled through the wringer of a public enquiry?

Digital Surveillance
Shoshanna Zuboff in her latest book The age of surveillance capitalism
(Zuboff, 2019) describes the exploitation of ordinary citizens by big
data companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These
companies exploit what Zuboff calls people’s ‘behavioural surplus’: the
human features and conducts made available to these companies for
analysis and algorithmic computation through people’s use of phones,
search engines, social media and related technologies (Zuboff, 2019).
Zuboff likens this digitised data surveillance and extraction trend to early
twentieth-century totalitarianism. She warns us against its ultimate effect:
the hive, where humans are ruled by dysfunctional organisations who have
assumed full control of human nature and human future, and subjected
these to their capitalist priorities under the aegis of anodyne claims about
‘connecting people to friends and information’.
Zuboff’s verdict on the technologification and datafication of everyday
life is scathing. It is not OK, she writes, “to have our best instincts for
connection, empathy and information exploited by a draconian quid pro
quo that holds these goods hostage to a pervasive strip search of our lives.
It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be cata-
logued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through
the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit” (Zuboff, 2019: loc
6 R. IEDEMA

9404). Zuboff’s 800-page book exposes the dehumanisation of organ-

isations whose big data operations extract from us ‘our human nature’
and deny us our future by seeking to narrow the window that looks
out on existential uncertainty and complexity. Seething with anger at the
unconscious practices she uncovered through years of research into their
practices, Zuboff compares those running Google, Facebook, Twitter and
so forth to early twentieth-century totalitarian dictators such as Stalin,
because for them too there were no limits to what they did to people to
further their power and interests. While not routinely abusing or killing
people, she claims that contemporary data organisations are in the busi-
ness of extracting humanness for capitalisation, and thereby creating a
‘division of learning’ that will yield immeasurable power over the future
and human nature to data owners. It will relegate the larger and poorer
part of humanity into increasingly automatised and datafied subjugation.

Academic Misconduct
The above accounts shine a light on how perversity may become deeply
institutionalised, officially sanctioned, and widely protected, even by
people outside the organisation in question. Misconduct is no longer the
preserve of the lone wolf. It colonises a whole ecology of willing players
and enabling resources. It is less particular individuals than that whole
ecology of transgression and subjection that defeats those at the receiving
end, even before they are pushed so hard that they might think of chal-
lenging it. If the accounts above describe extremes of institutionalised
wrongdoing, there are also all kinds of rather less visible transgression
that equally affect people’s lives and well-being. Academia is one such
site: one where learned subtlety manifests not just in elegant conclusions
and powerful discoveries, but also in advanced forms of wrongdoing and
harm.
Academia is in some respects like the church: an institution whose lofty
function and altruistic aims make it near enough impossible for a person
to contemplate its involvement in institutionalised wrongdoing and harm.
There are signs however that institutionalised dehumanisation in academia
may be more prevalent than is commonly known or admitted. Consider
this recent article published in The Guardian in 2019:
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 7

“UK universities pay out £90 m on staff ‘gagging orders’ in

past two years: Fears that confidentiality clauses are being used
to silence victims of misconduct”
“UK universities have spent nearly £90m on payoffs to staff that
come with “gagging orders” in two years, raising fears that victims
of misconduct at higher education institutions are being silenced.
As many as 4,000 settlements, some of which are thought to
relate to allegations of bullying, discrimination and sexual miscon-
duct, have been made with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
attached since 2017.
The figures, uncovered by the BBC, have prompted allega-
tions that universities are deliberately using gagging orders to stop
grievances becoming public. Dozens of academics told the corpo-
ration they were made to sign NDAs after being “harassed” out of
their jobs following the raising of complaints” (Murphy, 2019).

The reporter of the article goes on to note that “It is not clear how
many of the payouts relate to allegations of bullying, harassment or
sexual misconduct as many of the institutions were unable to disclose
why the NDAs were signed” (Murphy, 2019). We thus do not have a
view of the actual scale of wrongdoing in academia. To investigate this
lack of insight into institutionalised wrongdoing in academia, I wrote a
research grant in 2014 which aimed to explore academics’ experiences
with academic misconduct and universities’ handling of that misconduct.
My focus was not principally on sexual harassment and bullying but on
academic misconduct per se: plagiarism and falsifying of track records.
I was particularly interested in what Garfinkel called ‘degradation cere-
monies’ (Garfinkel, 1956): the subtler forms of ‘scientific’ intimidation
(the practices of belittling and/or marginalising others’ work), and ‘sci-
entific’ appropriation (the practice of not citing those who should be
cited and crediting others or oneself instead). To inject this grant with
additional muscle, I sought involvement from national academies, the
overarching national body representing universities, and from my own
university’s senior leadership. All declined. I binned the proposal, having
concluded that academia’s Lance Armstrong2 moment was yet to come.

2 Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France 7 times. He was suspected of using
performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career, but denied this all through his
8 R. IEDEMA

Research Integrity
People’s views about what is appropriate research rarely align, but you
would think that research activity generally and more or less adheres to
the few ground rules that typify the scientific vocation: honesty, respect,
accuracy, openness and precision. These ground rules apply across the
board, whatever science you practise, and whether you’re interested
in history, linguistics, psychology, engineering, medicine, accounting,
biochemistry or dentistry. People engage in research on the assumption
that colleagues will not move goalposts past the wrong side of these
academic ground rules. Generally, people engaged in academic research
are so busy thinking of research ideas, writing proposals, managing
projects and people, analysing and interpreting data, writing up research
and thinking of the next proposal, and so many of these things have to
run the gauntlet of colleague-scrutiny, that one would assume spending
time on finding out how to stretch these values and bend the rules would
seem like a waste of time at best and an absolute folly at worst.
But what if research integrity is not at all as self-evident as is gener-
ally assumed among researchers (Anderson, Shaw, Steneck, Konkle, &
Kamata, 2013)? What if the pressures on academics are producing off-
limits behaviours to meet their faculties’ expectations of 10 journal articles
and around the equivalent of their academic salary in income every year
(Hil, 2012)? In the light of the rising floor of these expectations being
about to hit the sinking ceiling of limited and more thinly spread funding
and shrinking career opportunities, should we not ask questions about
whether people’s research integrity might be tested, or perhaps even
compromised at times? Hil finds that “performance checkers now run
universities, meaning that the ever-diminishing chances of doing worth-
while research have been increasingly sidelined by the drudgery of having
to make money” (Hil, 2012: 132). This situation raises questions, surely,
about how long it will be until we arrive at the point now attained
by competitive sport, where pressure and ‘performance enhancement’
produced not just victories and glory, but also drug testing and athletes’

career and during an investigation mounted against him by the international doping
agency USADA. A 2012 USADA arbitration that established he had engaged in doping
ended Armstrong’s cycling career. He never contested the arbitration while continuing to
deny ever using drugs. Then, in a 2013 Oprah Winfrey interview, he confessed to always
having used doping because ‘he was a guy who wanted and expected to get everything’
(Macur, 2014).
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 9

fall from grace. Lance Armstrong’s fall took down much more than just
the man himself, to the point where now we suspect many athletes to
partake in doping when we hear of their extraordinary achievements and
frequent early deaths.
Like competitive sport, academic research has witnessed transgressions
of the code of research integrity and professional conduct, but these
academic transgressions have not yet reached public consciousness beyond
attention being drawn to the odd ‘bad apple’ (Faneli, 2009). Strategically,
academic research organisations where these ‘bad apples’ are employed
have not yet had to recuse themselves from the investigation of university-
internal academic misconduct given the risk of conflict of interest. At
present, it is not uncommon for notifiers of academic misconduct to be
sacrificed (Murphy, 2019), no amount of carefully crafted whistle-blower
protection and legislation notwithstanding (Lewis, Brown, & Moberley,
2014).
No doubt due to notifications of research irregularities via channels
other than those internal to universities, journal article retractions and
research ethics transgressions are on the rise globally (Corbyn, 2009,
August 20). To be sure, this rise in notifications and retractions has
motivated researchers from around the world to meet and negotiate
principles for governing research practice and conducting misconduct
investigations (e.g. http://wcri2019.org/). Individual nations now also
have their own agencies for monitoring research integrity: the US Office
for Research Integrity, the Australian Research Integrity Committee,
the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty and the UK Research
Integrity Office. Few cases tend to be reported however to these agencies
(Anderson et al., 2013).
If research inaccuracy and falsification cases are reported, it is through
the public media targeting scandals (Sovacool, 2008). Only isolated
reports have appeared with evidence that research inaccuracy and falsi-
fication constitute a rather more pervasive or systemic problem (van
Kolfschooten, 2012). This situation where suspicion cannot be converted
into investigation let alone confirmation may be due to the fact that a clear
conflict of interest attaches to universities (where the researchers accused
of misconduct are employed) investigating internal misconduct. Not least,
this conflict is evident from the time it takes them to act on the notifica-
tions in question, and the manner in which such cases are ‘resolved’ (van
Kolfschooten, 2012). It is not in universities’ interest to advertise staff
transgressions to the world as this reflects negatively on the institution
10 R. IEDEMA

and the departments involved. This situation renders the whistle-blower

doubly vulnerable, as she/he is exposed not just to those who are the
subject of and may challenge the grounds of a misconduct accusation,
but they are also exposed to the power (and wrath) of those in charge of
upholding the university’s reputation and standing in the public eye.

Clinical Incidents
This ‘academic’ tension between honesty and standing is apparent also in
another sphere of life: health care—yet another domain not commonly
associated with but frequently involved in inconceivable transgressions
against patients and families.
During the 1970s, Ivan Illich published a series of diatribes against
what he regarded as the institutionalisation of immorality. He targeted
the institutions of schooling (Illich, 1970) and medicine (Illich, 1976)
among others, which he saw as ‘conspiracies against the laity’ (Shaw,
1906). With regard to medicine, Illich wrote in the opening paragraph
of Medical Nemesis, that medical practice “has become a major threat
to health” (Illich, 1976: 1). Illich coined the term ‘iatrogenic’ to refer
to harm caused by or during medical intervention. Since then, the term
‘iatrogenic’ has been overtaken by more anglophone but no less sterile
expressions to refer to healthcare-caused harm, including ‘clinical inci-
dents’, ‘adverse events’, ‘sentinel events’, and, most non-descriptive of
all: ‘never events’.3
How often do clinical incidents happen, and how serious are they?
From April to June 2018 (3 months), England-based services (or at
least those clinical practitioners willing and prepared to do so) reported
a total of over 500,000 incidents into the NHS’s National Reporting
& Learning System (NRLS). From October 2016 to September 2017
(12 months), the NRLS clocked 434,562 incidents that caused a low level
of harm (according to the reporting clinicians), 52,536 incidents causing
moderate harm, 5,525 incidents causing severe harm and 4,449 incidents

3 An incident that through luck or insight missed harming a patient is referred to as a

‘near miss’. It is not called a ‘near hit’, even though what would have been ‘near’ (and
for that reason a critical consideration) was the hitting or harming of the patient. To say
that an incident almost missed a patient does not make sense: the incident either misses
the patient; it misses them by this much, or it does not miss them. You can say though
that you almost missed the bus but that you just caught it in time. If you say the bus
almost missed me, you were expecting it to notice you or run you over.
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 11

that resulted in the death of the patient (NHS Improvement, 2019).

These figures are high, but need to read in the context of the almost
24 million patients who attend NHS England Accident & Emergency
services every 12 month period (in this case, 2017–2018).4
Incident reporting was made mandatory in health care following
several high-level scandals and high-profile inquiries revealing the ecolog-
ical (i.e. networked, widespread) nature of harm perpetrated on and kept
secret from patients (Hindle, Braithwaite, Travaglia, & Iedema, 2005).
In the early 1990 s, a whistle-blower (Stephen Bolsin) reported what he
regarded as sub-standard heart surgery at the UK’s Bristol Royal Infir-
mary (Bolsin, 1998): babies were dying at higher rates than elsewhere in
the UK and the world. It took several years for Bolsin’s complaint to be
investigated by the hospital and by the UK’s General Medical Council
(GMC), and this occurred only after Bolsin finally went to the public
media because he was met with indifference and even hostility from his
hospital’s management and from the GMC (Bolsin, 1998). It took several
more years for an Inquiry to investigate Bolsin’s complaint and publish
protracted responses to it. Published in 2001, ten years after Bolsin raised
the alarm, the inquiry report stated:

The NHS is still failing to learn from the things that go wrong and has no
system to put this right. This must change. Even today, it is not possible
to say, categorically, that events similar to those which happened at Bristol
could not happen again in the UK—indeed, are not happening at this
moment. (Kennedy, 2001)

I became interested in healthcare organisational responses to internal

problems and wrongs during my study of ‘clinical incidents’: care gone
wrong for patients, either because of individual clinicians’ errors, persis-
tent service problems setting clinicians up to fail, equipment failures,
management cutbacks, or just ‘snafus’.5 Since 2007, we have interviewed
hundreds of clinicians and patients involved in ‘unexpected events and
outcomes’ (Iedema, 2018; Iedema et al., 2008). Over the years, we found
that healthcare organisations that openly acknowledge care failures to the
patients that were harmed as a result are as yet rare (Iedema & Allen,

4 https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-acc
ident--emergency-activity/2017-18.
5 Snafu: ‘situation normal – all fucked up’.
12 R. IEDEMA

2012). Those managers and clinicians who in charge of these patients’

care and that did speak openly about incidents and harm had to put aside
reputational concerns, manage internal politics and allegiance networks,
grit their teeth in the face of legal risks and payout fears, and confront
uncertainty about the emotional fall-out following their admission of
responsibility. They were in the minority however (Iedema et al., 2011).
Openness to patients about care gone wrong has become increas-
ingly prominent in policy in recent years (National Patient Safety Agency,
2009). The UK Government signed off on the Duty of Candour Act
in 2015 which renders non-disclosure of internal failures to patients
resulting in their harm an offence. One important reason for govern-
ments and insurers to be talking about honesty and incident disclosure
to patients about health service-caused harm is that openness about fail-
ures reduces these patients’ inclination to sue (Berlinger, 2003): patients
tend to forgive clinicians and services if they feel they have been treated
respectfully (Iedema & Allen, 2012).
Incident disclosure is the practice of the service managers and/or the
clinicians telling the patients openly what went wrong. Complicating the
practice of incident disclosure however is that patients often disagree
with healthcare professionals about what warrants being disclosed as
failure or wrongdoing (Gallagher, 2009). If the failure or wrongdoing
is acknowledged, this is often done in ways that those harmed experience
as underestimating the impact and severity of the harm or the wrong
(Iedema et al., 2008), few of those who experience incidents are openly
told what happened (Iedema et al., 2011), and still fewer are invited to
come to an agreement with the service about (or ‘co-construct a perspec-
tive on’) what went wrong (Iedema & Allen, 2012). Adding insult to
injury, the emotional cost of not just the clinical incidents themselves,
but of their non-disclosure, has now been found to be inordinately high
(Bell et al., 2018; Iedema, 2018).

Loss of World
Let me change gears. I want to switch from discussing dysfunctional and
transgressive organisations to articulating what it feels like to become
caught up in organisational dysfunctionality and transgression. But I don’t
simply want to ask, What happens to people who get caught in the cross-
fire between upholding rules and offending powerful factions? Or, What
happens to people who insist on “speaking truth to power” (Wildawsky,
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 13

1979)? Rather, I want to ask, What defines the interests of those who
participate in the kinds of conflicts and transgression discussed above?
And, on a broader front, Do moral judgements of (dys)functionality and
attributions of transgression still apply given our contemporary circum-
stances have mutated out of “an explosion of complexity in the 20th
century” and a vanishing “capacity of hierarchy [and authority] to simplify
things” (de Vulpian, 2008: 14)? At the same time, I want to ask, To what
extent do these contemporary circumstances call for an alternative logic,
a different relatio-rationality, one that I now feel only becomes feasible
and tangible, paradoxically, through a ‘loss of world’ and a ‘becoming
undone’, on the part of those harmed (Grosz, 2011)?
Let me acknowledge first off that, having researched incident
(non)disclosure in health care for several years, I had thought that
services’ reluctance to disclose incidents was an effect that grew from
excessive power, moral weakness, complicitness, small-minded priorities
and negative expectations about the fall-out of transparency, inclusion and
openness. All these things were very easy to project onto both others and
The Other (i.e. the arrogant nurse; the disinterested doctor; the squirmy
manager). It was only when I became aware of the (non)disclosure of an
incident in my own organisation that I was confronted with a much more
complicated array of motivations for protecting and continuing ‘busi-
ness as is’ and defeating its challengers. These motivations defined and
animated a whole ecology of being, an impalpable, surreptitious network
of relationships, subtly-negotiated and invisibly-maintained commitments,
unquantifiable acts and untraceable decisions. Collectively, these revealed,
through their targeted destruction of what came in their path, their
unfathomable operations, their obduracy, their expediency.

2012: John discovers that a senior colleague (SC from here on)
fudged their track record to obtain project funding. Not once: more
than once. Not in a minor way. A major way. Books that didn’t exist.
Names that were changed around on books and articles to ensure
SC’s name came first and thus ‘looked better on paper’.
He reports this to management and hands over evidence of grant
proposals that were compromised by falsification. He thinks that for
him this is the end of the matter. He’s done his bit, now the rest
will be automatic. But what happens next is anything but automatic.
14 R. IEDEMA

Management informs John that they have invited SC to respond

to the charges of falsifying their track record. Hmmm. Ok. Surely
the answer can’t be much other than ‘sorry, my mistake’, or ‘won’t
happen again’, or even ‘I’m so ashamed’. But no. The SC’s answer,
besides a flat denial and tortuous justification, becomes an all-out
attack on John.
SC proceeds to mobilise a whole network of allies through circu-
lating rumours and counter claims. SC turns out to have surprisingly
easy access to the university’s upper management (UM from here
on, which refers to about 3 or 4 people). SC persuades UM that it
is not he, but John who is guilty of misconduct; namely, bullying,
intimidating staff, even, SC alleges, him attempting to break into
SC’s office.
While this is going on, other strange things start to happen.
John finds his car tires punctured, twice and in quick succession,
by nails inserted at straight angles into the rubber, in the office
carpark (where the SC also parks their car). Posters advertising
John’s latest book launch disappear from the university’s corridors
and walls. Charts appear the size of walls advertising SC’s claimed
international network with photos of ‘colleagues’ dotted around on
a map of the world, as if to advertise their legitimacy, importance
and trustworthiness.
John initially rejects all these developments as just signs of
distress, but SC’s strategy gains momentum. Bolstered by multiple
statements from friends (never revealed or shown to John, it should
be said; always just hinted at by UM), an alternative problem to that
of academic track record falsification begins to crystallise in UM’s
language: not SC but John has a behaviour problem.
John’s demands for closer scrutiny of academics’ approach to
compiling and submitting track records to funding agencies are seen
as evidence of misguided concern and as meddling with a domain
that falls under UM’s remit. John’s impassioned defence of academic
integrity is now construed as a ‘worrying obsession’. John now
understands that UM’s diffidence and reluctance to report back to
him about how they’ve investigated the matter means they have
chosen SC’s side. Other colleagues—the few he trusted with this
matter—begin to show reluctance to engage with John’s dilemma,
let alone share in his outrage and give him support. How could he
get them to listen? The whole place was now lost to reason. It was
now becoming monstrous.
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 15

The Monstrous
Always able to become different from itself, life has always been
monstrous. For this reason, Tarde saw “the normal” as “the degree zero
of monstrosity” (cited in Osborne, 2016: 195). Efforts to replicate the
normal as status quo in the face of monstrosity are equally monstrous.
In “seeking to fight evil, do good and protect the moral order, you
disrupt the boundaries of the very same moral order that you seek to
protect”, and “[f]ighting evil, you enact the very violence that makes
you evil” (Thanem, 2011: 4). We have all “been drawn into a sort
of complicity with … the monstrous” (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237). Think
of worldwide industrialisation and environmental destruction (Latour,
2018) or the datafication of human sociality (Zuboff, 2019) which are
effecting a “redistribution of subjectivity among humans and things”
(Sloterdijk, 2016: 243). At the levels of evolution, organisation and
sociation, everyone of us now participates in monstrous forms of life.

To be modern, one must be touched by the awareness that, beside the

inevitable fact of being a witness, one has been drawn into a sort of
complicity with the newer form of the monstrous. If one asks a modern
person, ‘Where were you at the time of the crime?’ the answer is: ‘I
was at the scene of the crime’—that is to say, within that totality of the
monstrous which, as a complex of modern criminal circumstances, encom-
passes its accomplices and accessories. Modernity means dispensing with
the possibility of having an alibi. (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237)

Modernity “transposes the monstrous into everyday life” (Duclos, 2018:

50). This growth of the monstrous in daily practices, presences and
experiences happen not so much because our community-protecting or
co-immunological practices and resources are weakening or breaking
down allowing monstrous alterity to take over. Monstrous modernity is
not merely about technology, violence, deviation, and permissiveness, nor
about a loss of hierarchy and authority. Instead, it is about complexity
that increasingly permeates modern life through its relentless pursuit of
change and novelty: “the monstrous rises to the surface as transformative
and differentiating unveiling” (Duclos, 2018: 51).
16 R. IEDEMA

Over a period of two to three years, John’s institution grew from

a nurturing cocoon into a place filled with monstrosities. He soon
realised he was not just up against SC, but a whole bunch of people,
including managers and upper managers, human resource people,
and SC-allies who didn’t even work in the place but somehow were
given a say in the matter. Then there were the colleagues who previ-
ously wanted a piece of him and who now turned into a wall of
fence-sitters, cold-shoulderers, and heads-in-the-sand.
People who had been friendly to him in the past now acted
strangely and stand-off-ish. This made him wonder if there was a
bandwidth of disparaging gossip somewhere he was unable to pick
up. But even if there was such a thing, he had no idea about where
and how to begin to tune into it.
Taking on academic falsification seemed such an obvious, natural,
and easy thing to do from a position of status and strength. But now
this mess began to reveal capacities and forces that he had never had
to contend with, never even considered possible. The whole thing
was turning monstrous. By the time he came to see that he was
entangled in this mess much more deeply than he’d ever realised,
his academic cocoon had fully disintegrated.

A 1940 article on organised criminality posits a link between institu-

tionalised misconduct and the close relationships among perpetrators.
Sutherland saw institutional misconduct as “determined largely by the
comparative frequency and intimacy” of contact among perpetrators
amidst communities that are “not organised solidly against” misconduct
(Sutherland, 1940: 11). Sutherland’s work ensured institutional miscon-
duct was put on the agenda under the label of ‘white-collar crime’
(Simpson, 2019), and his ‘intimacy of contact’ thesis is echoed in the
‘social cocoon’ metaphor that was coined in this context some 40 years
later. The image of the ‘social cocoon’ captures in graphic form the
monstrous affordances of close bonding if harnessed to enact and protect
institutionalised misconduct (Ashforth & Anand, 2016; Greil & Rudy,
1984).
These two notions—monstrosity, cocoon—both carry an affective
charge. They both talk about shelter: the one destroys shelter and the
other ensures shelter. Monstrosity carries a negative affective charge;
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 17

cocooning a positive one. Shelter means positive affect; the destruction

of shelter can be monstrous.
Affect has been increasingly foregrounded in twenty-first-century theo-
rising, perhaps as an attempt to re-enchant our world with monsters and
castles, and to rescue life from the relentless urge to critique, analyse,
produce evidence. The interest in affect perhaps counters a rising sense of
anomie by posing questions (again) that science has eschewed for decades:

How was it that certain fashions, fads and trends seemed to spread
throughout populations with a rapidity that seemed to defy the action of
logic or rationality? How did certain fears and forms of hysteria, mania
and emotion spread such that they appeared to bypass rationality and
reason? What caused individuals in groups to behave in ways that might
perplex, bemuse or undermine their sense of themselves as subjects in other
contexts? What enabled certain individuals to command the obedience,
compliance, love and adoration of others, such that they would be exalted
and revered as charismatic leaders? (Blackman, 2013: 23)

Affect does not submit to straightforward data gathering and to pre-

determined scientific procedure. Affect eludes and transgresses. From
the mid-1990s on, affect theory started to bring some of these tropes
together (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Ticineto-Clough, 2008). It defined
affect as “becomings that go beyond those [who] live through them”
(Smith, 1998: xxx). But affect as a concept may refer to different
phenomena. On the one hand, it concerns our “ability to affect and
be affected” (Massumi, 1987: xvi), which is derived from Spinoza’s
term affectus . Massumi, one of the original proponents of affect theory,
saw this aspect of affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to
the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and
implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”
(Massumi, 1987: xvi). On the other hand, affect manifests as affec-
tion (Spinoza’s affectio) or “each such state considered as an encounter
between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body
taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies)”
(Massumi, 1987: xvi).6 Whereas conventional psychology may be said to
have focused on individuals’ states of affection (joy, confidence; anxiety,

6 Steinberg cautions that Spinoza himself was “not always especially careful to distinguish
‘affects’ from ‘affections’” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 37).
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Contraband
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
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Title: Contraband

Author: Clarence Budington Kelland

Release date: November 8, 2023 [eBook #72066]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK

CONTRABAND ***
CONTRABAND
 Books by
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Youth Challenges
The High Flyers
The Little Moment of Happiness
Scattergood Baines
Conflict
Contraband
The Hidden Spring
The Source
Sudden Jim

HARPER & BROTHERS

Publishers
 CONTRABAND
By
Clarence Budington Kelland
Author of
“YOUTH CHALLENGES” “THE HIGH FLYERS”
“THE LITTLE MOMENT OF HAPPINESS”
“SCATTERGOOD BAINES”
“CONFLICT” ETC.

Harper & Brothers Publishers

New York and London
 CONTRABAND

Copyright, 1923
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition
A-X
CONTRABAND
CONTRABAND
 CHAPTER I
TUBAL gave the key another quarter turn in the quoins and tested
the security of the type in the form with the heel of his grimy hand.
After which he shut his eyes very tight and ran his tongue carefully
over his upper teeth and clucked. Then, in the voice of one who
pronounces a new and wonderful thought he spoke:
“Simmy,” he said, “I dunno. Mebby so—mebby not. There’s p’ints in
favor and p’ints against.”
“I,” said Simmy with the cocksureness of his seventeen years, “am
goin’ to git through. Don’t ketch me workin’ for no woman.”
“She’s one of them college wimmin we’ve been readin’ about.”
“Makes it wuss. Wimmin,” said Simmy, who had given deep thought
to such matters and reached profound conclusions, “hain’t got no
business gittin’ all eddicated up. What they ought to study is cook
books. That’s what I say.”
“Calc’late she’ll be gifted with big words.”
“She’ll wear them kind of glasses,” said Simmy, “that’ll make you
think you’re lookin’ into the show winders of the Busy Big Store if you
come onto her face to face.”
“Simmy, I’ll tell you suthin’.... I’ll be fifty year old, come September,
and I hain’t never married one of ’em yit.”
“I hain’t never goin’ to marry, neither.”
“Shake,” said Tubal.
There ensued a silence while Tubal completed the locking of the
form and secured it on the job press.
“Well,” said Tubal for the hundredth time, “Ol’ Man Nupley’s dead
and gone.”
“Seems like he might ’a’ left this here paper to you ’n’ me that’s
worked and slaved fer him, instid of to this female nephew of
his’n....”
“Niece,” corrected Tubal. “No.... Ol’ Man Nupley wa’n’t fond of me,
but he didn’t owe me no grudge to warrant him wishin’ this thing onto
me. Say, we got out two issues since he passed away, hain’t we?
You ’n’ me—alone and unaided.... Gawd!” Tubal mopped his brow at
recollection of the mental anguish suffered in achieving this feat of
editorship.
“They was dum good issues,” Simmy said, pridefully.
Tubal was not without his pride in the accomplishment—a pride
tinctured with doubt which had been made acute that very morning
when he stopped in the post office for the mail. Certain of the
village’s professional humorists had greeted him with enthusiasm,
and quoted from his works with relish. Tubal had been very much put
to it for copy to fill the paper, and had seized upon every incident,
great or small, as worthy of mention, and as lengthy mention as he
could achieve. He had not used one word where there was a
possibility of enlisting two. For instance, after hearing it quoted, he
felt there was some defect in the style of the personal which stated:
Our fellow townsman, Herbert Whitcomb, has painted his
large and spacious and comfortable residence on Pine
Street near the corner with a coat of white paint. Herb did
the job himself, working evenings, but not Sundays, he
being a Methodist and superintendent of the Sunday
School. Many assembled to watch our Selectman and
tyler of the Masonic lodge (Herb) working at the job of
painting his residence, and thus, besides showing public
spirit in improving the general appearance of our village,
gave many something to do, there being no other
amusement in town. Good for you, Herb. That is the spirit
we like.
He had rather fancied the item about Jim Bagby, and considered he
had filled the maximum space with a minute piece of news.
 Jim Bagby our prominent farmer and Democrat from north
of town, has been dynamiting out the stumps out of the
pasture lot that he has used to pasture cattle. Jim used for
the purpose the best and most powerful brand of dynamite
he could get and the numerous explosions of the
dynamite, each blast removing a stump out of the pasture,
could be heard the length and breadth of the village.
Dynamite, says Jim, is the thing to make the wilderness
blossom like a rose. Another year we hope to see the
pasture out of which Jim dynamited the stumps covered
with the verdure of potatoes or other garden truck.
Tubal recalled the mental anguish which went into the composition of
these and columns of other similar items, and solemnly renounced
forever the dignities of editorship.
“No,” he said, waggling his head gravely, “I calc’late Ol’ Man Nupley
done us a favor by leavin’ this sheet to somebody else.”
“She’ll be comin’ on the noon train,” said Simmy. “That’s when I quit.”
“I s’pose,” Tubal said, as he cocked his eye at a cockroach scurrying
across the floor, “she’ll favor Ol’ Man Nupley in looks. Seems like
that’s a cross heavier ’n any woman ought to bear.” He estimated the
rate of progress of the roach, and, as it were, brought down his bird
with a supremely skillfully aimed deluge of the juice of the weed. “If
wimmin is goin’ to insist on keepin’ on bein’ wimmin, they ought to
see to it you kin look at ’em without sufferin’.”
“Mebby she’s jest comin’ up to sell out,” said Simmy, hopefully.
“Sell? Sell this here rag?... Say!”
“Why not, I’d like to know?”
“Because,” said Tubal, “it owes about two hundred dollars more’n it’s
wuth ... and, now we lost the county advertisin’, it’ll owe a dum sight
more.”
He walked to the door which gave from the front of the shop to the
business and editorial office of the paper, and there he stood as if
upon some vantage point, surveying all that existed of the Gibeon
Free Press. What he saw was not especially inviting; nowhere was
an indication of that romance which is believed to lurk about the
business of disseminating news. The shop wore the haphazard look
of a junk yard, contented to recline and snore in dust and frowziness.
The room wore the air of a place where nothing ever happens and
where nothing is apt to happen.... Just inside the door squatted the
antiquated, limping cylinder press which gave birth weekly to the
Free Press, and which gave off with sullen brazenness the look of
overmuch child-bearing. It knew it was going to break down in the
middle of every run, and it had been cursed at so often and so
fluently that it was utterly indifferent. It was a press without ambition.
Of late years it had gotten into a frame of mind where it didn’t care a
hang whether it printed a paper or not—which is an alarming state of
mind for a printing press to be in.... Over to the right were shelves of
stock, ill sorted, dusty, dog eared at the corners where Tubal had
rubbed his shoulder against them in passing. Thin stacks of red and
blue board, upon which tickets for the Methodist lawn sociable or the
Baptist chicken dinner might be painted, lopped with discouraged
limpness over the edge of the shelving and said improper and
insulting things to the slatternly press. A couple of stones elbowed
each other and a case of type a little further back, and a
comparatively new (and unpaid-for) job press, whose paint still
existed even to shininess in spots, rather stuck up its nose at the rest
of the company and felt itself altogether too good for such society.
There was also a theoretical spittoon—theoretical because it was the
one spot in the room safe from Tubal’s unerring jets of tobacco juice.
These were the high spots arising from a jumble of rubbish which it
was easier to kick about from place to place than to remove
altogether.... Tubal waggled his head.
He turned to survey the business and editorial office, and found
nothing there to uplift his soul. There was a grimy railing of matched
lumber, inside which a table staggered under an accumulation of
exchanges and catalogues and old cuts brought in to pass the
evening of their lives as paper weights. An old black-walnut desk
with a bookcase in its second story tried to maintain a faded dignity
beside an old safe from which the combination knob had been
removed for fear somebody would shut and lock it, as once
happened, with disastrous results. On the wall hung a group picture
of the state legislature of 1882. One could have bedded down a cow
very comfortably in the waste paper on the floor.
“Simmy,” said Jake, solemnly, “she’s a hell of a messy place. Seems
like we ought to kind of tidy up some for the new proprietor—or
suthin’. No use, though. Hain’t no place to begin. Only thing wuth
cleanin’ up is the chattel mortgage Abner Fownes holds over the
place....” He turned and scowled at Simmy and smote his hands
together. “By Jing!” he said, “the’s one thing we kin do—we kin wash
your face. That’ll show.”
Simmy responded by jerking his thumb toward the front door, before
which two men had paused, one a diminutive hunchback, the other
an enormous, fleshy individual with a beard of the sort worn, not for
adornment, but as the result of indolence which regards shaving as a
labor not to be endured. The pair talked with manifest excitement for
a moment before they entered.
“Mornin’,” said Tubal.
“Mornin’,” said the corpulent one. The hunchback squinted and
showed his long and very white teeth, but did not respond verbally to
the greeting.
“Say,” said the big man, “seen the sheriff?”
“Why?” replied Tubal.
“’Cause,” said Deputy Jenney, “if you hain’t nobody has.”
“Since last night about nine o’clock,” said the hunchback in the
unpleasant, high-pitched voice not uncommon to those cursed as he
was cursed.
“He got off’n the front porch last night around nine o’clock and says
to his wife he was goin’ out to pump him a pail of fresh water. Didn’t
put on a hat or nothin’.... That’s the last anybody’s seen of him. Yes,
sir. Jest stepped into the house and out of the back door——”
“Mebby he fell down the well,” said Tubal, helpfully.
“His wife’s terrible upsot. I been searchin’ for him since daybreak, but
not a hide or hair kin I find—nor a soul that seen him. He might of
went up in a balloon right out of his back yard for all the trace he’s
left.”
“What d’ye mistrust?” asked Tubal.
“You hain’t seen him?”
“No.”
“Well, say, don’t make no hullabaloo about it in the paper—yit.
Mebby everything’s all right.”
The hunchback laughed, not a long, hearty laugh of many haw-haw-
haws after the fashion of male Gibeon, but one short nasal sound
that was almost a squawk.
“Might be,” said Simmy, “he sneaked off to lay for one of them rum
runners.”
“What rum runners?” said the hunchback, snapping out the words
viciously and fixing his gimlet eyes on the boy with an unblinking
stare.
“The ones,” said Simmy, with perfect logic, “that’s doin’ the rum
runnin’.”
“Hum!... Jest dropped in to ask if you seen him—and to kind of warn
you not to go printin’ nothin’ prematurelike. We’ll be gittin’ along,
Peewee and me.... Seems mighty funny a man ’u’d up and
disappear like that, especial the sheriff, without leavin’ no word with
me.” Deputy Jenney allowed his bulk to surge toward the door, and
Peewee Bangs followed at his heels—a good-natured, dull-witted
mastiff and an off-breed, heel-snapping, terrier mongrel....
“Well,” said Tubal, “that’s that. I hain’t mislaid no pet sheriff.”
“Mebby,” said Simmy, with bated breath, “them miscreants has
waylaid him and masacreed him.”
“Shucks!... Say, you been readin’ them dime-novel, Jesse James
stories ag’in.... Go wash your face.”
In the distance, echoing from hill to hill and careening down the
valley, sounded the whistle of a locomotive.
“On time,” said Tubal.
“And her comin’ on it,” said Simmy.
From that moment neither of them spoke. They remained in a sort of
state of suspended animation, listening for the arrival of the train,
awaiting the arrival of the new proprietor of the Gibeon Free Press....
Ten minutes later the bus stopped before the door and a young
woman alighted. Two pairs of eyes inside the printing office stared at
her and then turned to meet.
“’Tain’t her,” said Tubal.
Tubal based his statement upon a preconception with which the
young lady did not at all agree. She was small and very slender.
Tubal guessed she was eighteen, when, as a matter of fact, she was
twenty-two. There was about her an air of class, of breeding such as
Tubal had noted in certain summer visitors in Gibeon. From head to
feet she was dressed in white—a tiny white hat upon her chestnut
hair, a white jacket, a white skirt, not too short, but of suitable length
for an active young woman, and white buckskin shoes.... All these
points Tubal might have admitted in the new owner of the Free
Press, but when he scrutinized her face, he knew. No relative of Old
Man Nupley could look like that! She was lovely—no less—with the
dazzling, bewitching loveliness of intelligent youth. She was
something more than lovely, she was individual. There was a certain
pertness about her nose and chin, humor lurked in the corners of her
eyes. She would think and say interesting things, and it would be
very difficult to frighten her.... Tubal waggled his head, woman-hater
that he was, and admitted inwardly that there were points in her
favor.
And then—and then she advanced toward the door and opened it.
“This is the office of the Free Press, is it not?” she said.
“Yes ’m. What kin we do for you?”
“I’m not sure. A great deal, I hope.... I am Carmel Lee—the—the new
editor of this paper.”
In his astonishment Tubal pointed a lean, inky finger at the tip of her
nose, and poked it at her twice before he could speak. “You!... You!”
he said, and then swallowed hard, and felt as if he were unpleasantly
suspended between heaven and earth with nothing to do or say.
“I,” she answered.
Tubal swung his head slowly and glared at Simmy, evidently laying
the blame for this dénoûement upon the boy’s shoulders.
“Git out of here,” he whispered, hoarsely, “and for Gawd’s sake—
wash your face.”
Simmy vanished, and Tubal, praying for succor, remained,
nonplused, speechless for once.
“Is that my desk?” asked Miss Lee. “Um!...” Then she won Tubal’s
undying devotion at a single stroke. “I presume,” she said, “you are
foreman of the composing room.”
He nodded dumbly.
“You—you look very nice and efficient. I’m glad I’m going to have a
man like you to help me.... Is it very hard to run a real newspaper?”
“It’s easy. You hain’t got any idea how easy it is. Why, Simmy and
me, we done it for two issues, and ’twan’t no chore to speak of!...
Where’s that Simmy?... Hey, Simmy!”
“He went,” said Miss Lee, “to wash his face.... Now I think I shall go
to the hotel. It’s next door, isn’t it?... After I have lunch I’ll come back,
and we’ll go to work. You’ll—have to take me in hand, won’t you?...
Is this a—a profitable paper?”
“By gosh! it will be. We’ll make her the doggonedest paper ’n the
state. We’ll——”
“Thank you,” said Miss Lee. “Right after lunch we’ll start in.” And with
that she walked daintily out of the office and turned toward the
Commercial House.... Tubal gave a great sigh and leaned on the
office railing.
“Has she gone?” came a whisper from the shop.
“You come here. Git in here where I kin talk to you.”
“Here I be.... Say, when do we quit?”
“Quit? Quit what?”
“Our jobs. We was goin’ to. You ’n’ me won’t work for no woman?”
“Who said so? Who said anythin’ about quittin’, I’d like to know. Not
me.... And say, if I ketch you tryin’ to quit, I’ll skin you alive.... You ’n’
me, we got to stick by that leetle gal, we have.... Foreman of the
composin’ room!... By jing!... Perty as a picture.... By jing!”
“Say, you gone crazy, or what?”
“She’s a-comin’ back right after lunch. Git to work, you. Git this office
cleaned up and swept up and dusted up.... Think she kin work
amongst this filth.... Git a mop and a pail. We’ll fix up this hole so’s
she kin eat off’n the floor if she takes a notion.... Simmy, she’s goin’
to stay and run this here paper. That cunnin’ leetle gal’s goin’ to be
our boss.... Goddlemighty!...”