Archives and Feelings

Holding on to the organic and the institutional

alexislothian

September 10, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 “There is no distinction between the American university and professionalization” –– Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons”

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 As a thoroughly professionalized academic, I have written a great many formal statements about who I am, what I write, why I teach, how pedagogy and research intertwine. You can undoubtedly find a few of them if you Google. I am challenging myself to offer you something more informal here (though using this assignment to practice your formal self-presentation would be a worthy goal) –– inspired by, though without much concrete relation to, this piece by trans legal scholar and activist Dean Spade.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 In the graduate seminar I took during my PhD, on which this one has been somewhat based, I found myself often in an adversarial position with a student who had worked for years as an adjunct and been involved in labor organizing. In class, he would rage against the academic industrial complex. He demanded to know: What were we here for if not in the hope of securing tenure track jobs? And what was to be done about the fact that those jobs would not be there for all of us? Hot and fierce, I responded that I was not in the PhD program for a job. Rather, I was there to spend five or six years thinking and writing in a way that would be of service to me and to my community. My community that was, at that point, a corner of what Gramsci would probably not have called the organic intellectual world of online fandom, of the internet vibrantly engaged in critical feminist and antiracist activism.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Writing, thinking, arguing, teaching, blogging, tweeting, engaging, listening: the labor of academia was meaningful to me because it seemed to expand more worlds than my own, because it seemed to connect the seminar rooms with conversations taking place at myriad locations on and offline. I felt myself as a link between traditional and organic intellectual spheres, taking secret knowledge outside of the ivory tower and sharing it where it would be most useful. I still do aspire to that; it’s why I put all my syllabi and publications online. And the thinking and talking and writing and blogging and tweeting and video editing I did in my community was meaningful for the ways it expanded my intellectual life within academia as well. The feminist science fiction convention, WisCon, taught me to think about different styles of speaking and listening and learning, about disability and access, about the challenges of argument on difficult subjects.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Since I gained my ultimate credentials and acquired the grail of the tenure track position, I’ve realized how difficult it is to keep intellectual investments orthogonal to the institution continually in sight. My reasons for being here have not changed, yet I am now acutely part of the transmissal of disciplinary knowledge. Here, after all, we are. And it is seductive to be a cog in an institutional wheel, to have a place clearly laid out; in her essay on Silvan Tompkins, Sedgwick writes of the pleasure of being held tight, and I imagine that she also felt this claustrophilia within her tenured employment, this feeling of expectations and curricula and administrative process wrapping her around while it also gave her space from which to develop her ideas about affect and critique, paranoid and reparative readings. Being held tight is restrictive, but it means knowing somebody has you in hand. How much less terrifying this is than the deep precarity that Moten and Harney ask us to risk celebrating.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Sedgwick’s work on affect and pedagogy speaks to me because it tries to articulate the excesses to what can be contained within academic professionalization, even as it might not fully appreciate the differences in how academics are professionalized in different spaces, times, and subdisciplines. Sedgwick’s work acknowledges that scholarship produces structures of feeling of its own even while it untangles the structures and feelings in literary and cultural texts. And Sedgwick takes the encounters and the responsibilities within academic life and labor seriously: the unexpected moments, failures and successes in teaching, the understanding that the relation to one’s students matters most because of the ways that they are not just like you. To more fully understand and embody that in my own teaching, thinking, writing practice is part of why I designed this class the way I did and part of why I committed to the writings as well as the readings. If we’re going to theorize affects and archives together, I’ll show you where mine come from.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 In Sedgwick’s writing about paranoid and reparative reading, I see much that I try to bear in mind in both the writing and the thinking parts of my academic life. Most obvious is the idea that we can read literary and cultural production, especially popular culture, not only for the ways in which it demonstrates the dominant ideologies surrounding us but for “the many ways selves and cultures succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture –– even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (164). The material life of academia does not offer much to sustain the strands of critical, liberatory, deconstructive critique and pedagogy we have been reading here, even though the ideas may be welcomed in its classroom; Ferguson has written some of the history of that state of affairs. Whether or not we think that we can be in and not of our institutions, whether or not we think that the dream is still the truth, though, maybe a reparative approach to professionalization is a way of finding sustenance within it.

You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.