DRAFT: Learning Conditions as Working Conditions & Conditions as Shared Purpose
I'm typing up some notes for something that's relatively far away (August): a "Faculty Institute" (it's half bullshit and half useful) panel I am trying to organize around the topic Learning Conditions as Working Conditions & Conditions as Shared Purpose.
Sometime during 2021 or 22, in the midst of our national and university crises, I read the small press booklet Angelo’s Ashes or To Live and Die in L.A. In it, publisher, writer, and artist Marc Fischer (no relation to theorist Mark Fisher but indeed related to–partner to–our very own advisor and poet and NEIU alumna and daughter of faculty alumni Jen Blair; the connection was unknown to me at the time) explains, with an unbending clarity, how he navigated the end-of-life arrangements for a friend on the other side of the country. Angelo had been released from his multiple-decades-long incarceration only two years before his death. Fischer needed to make ethical and psychosocially complex decisions. The booklet both narrates the experience/the seething rage of our many institutional failures and explains this process like a guidebook. This is DIY punk ethos. It’s simply designed, cheaply printed, easily distributed via formal and informal channels. The booklet taught me something about smallness, gesture, and acting justly. In fact, at some point, I emailed about it on an NEIUPI brainstorming list because I think it has a kind of meta-information about our teaching in these particular conditions.
About fifteen years ago, colleague and former NEIUPI VP Tim Barnett told me, regarding individual devotion of some effort and time to union work, whenever possible: “It’s never enough & Every little bit helps.” The pair of two arguments here that don’t exactly contradict one another, but also don’t not contradict one another, is compelling. I have written to him and others a bunch of times about the way that this utterance helped me to understand my ethical duties and possibility itself. Around the same time, Tim gave me a copy of Megan Foss’ “Love Letters,” an essay about the writer’s experience using language and increased access to nuance (“the con”) to move away from her life of incarceration, exploitative sex work, and addiction. I assign it every single semester. The students nearly always go wild for it. They love the way she narrates her troubles, the clever way that she lets her past version of language into her current “respectable” mode. Tim gave me this thing somewhat randomly, a small gesture of collegial sharing–but it shaped my entire teaching career and pedagogy.
I have had similar feelings of smallness and possibility while listening to my students and others spin tunes and read the news on WZRD. Who’s even listening in those moments, anyway? A very tiny group of us, a kin group, in offices and cars/on the bus/hanging out in the basement of LWH.
For a while, I devoted my Creative Writing classes to a framework that I called Small Explosive Art Situations. I’m obviously aping 60s stuff and the 90s AIDS activist group ACTUP. But I’m also trying to tap into something that’s particular and magical about NEIU: the way we’ve been abandoned by decades of neoliberal de-funding, the way that I think/hope that we all see ourselves as working in true and unending solidarity with our marginalized students. I hate the fact of an Institution but can I make something happen inside of it that would otherwise have absolutely no occasion to exist?
Former undergrad/grad student and poet and friend and current advisor Katrina Underwood told me, via another friend and former student and advisor Mark Gunter, to read theorist and science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s nonfiction hybrid text Times Square Red Time Square Blue. In it, he explores the gentrification and attendant “sanitizing” of Times Square’s erotic movie houses: the end of an often positive and life-affirming scene, the cruising scene. He says that “life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.” I want that pleasantness as our very air.
In a pamphlet put out by a small experimental lit press, I read three writers’ correspondence regarding their work in a radical collective study group in Indonesia, looking at “the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor.” The writer Sulastri says, of “strategies aimed at connecting different articulations of staying in, withdrawing, persevering, and surpassing chronic deterioration of marginalized forms of life in various geopolitical contexts,” that they “open up spaces for still-hidden possibilities of the everyday to emerge from seemingly narrowing horizons for social projects.” Sulastri calls for a “turning away from the modes of (re)-presentation that, in trying to speak against the violent institutions of our times, are often inadvertently absorbed by the very things they seek to overcome.” And: “propose[s] ways of being with others and becoming together within and beyond spectacular consumption . . . a time and space for collective listening, sense-making, and common solidarity in the wake of the crisis as ordinary.”
In her memoir about her own institutionalization for mental illness and what it means to read and write within and beyond that time, Suzanne Scanlon says that being an English major "help[s] you to understand what it means to be alive." I don’t campaign for all of my students to become English Majors, but I sure as hell want to advocate for our collective work to be an overt and covert study of what it means to be alive.
Jonathan Haidt can be a bit annoying, but when colleague Julie Kim forwarded me an excerpt of his new-ish book about smartphones and mental health and young people, I found immediate comfort in its stringent view that we must reassert ourselves in physical reality. It aligned with my somewhat paranoid and somewhat exhausted and somewhat radical shift to blue books in my Composition classes. I refuse to read things that AI wrote. In that move, I’m refusing clean and polished and easy-to-digest student writings. We’re writing, together, as alive people.
Sheila Liming’s book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time is, often, like Haidt’s work, an accidental reifier of some white liberal NPR worldview, but it’s still useful: she argues for a kind of forced observance of unstructured time–maybe something akin to the way some of us used to smoke cigarettes or read printed periodicals or look out windows. Within this “hangout time,” we can arrive at some notion of “the story” of self and others in community that refuses the capitalist machinery of seasonal consumer experiences.
Many of my students were subjected to my endless delight in a talk by the Turkish writer Merve Emre about Literary Criticism and international community. She says that we need
"a shared project of criticism. This project would traverse and exceed the institutions of the university, the publishing house, the library, the magazine, the festival, and the bookshop. It would touch our ordinary activities and conversations; our habits, our routines; the well-worn fabric of our lives. What I am suggesting is both future oriented and very old-fashioned. It looks back to the eighteenth- century’s optimism about civil society and its ability to forge free, voluntary, and active associations between readers and writers."
Friend, former student, alum Daniel Woody told me about Heavy Processing, a theoretical framework named after the notion of “lesbian processing”: “an orientation to the pleasure (sexual, emotional, political, intellectual) of complex and sometimes incommensurate information.” Can we use that, too?
Returning to the intersection of student purpose/need & labor issues, I’m both wildly optimistic and utterly apathetic. A friend (poet and musician Kevin Edwards) visiting this summer, in his half-joking and half-despairing description of the difficulty of working as a college librarian in this moment, said “College is dead.” His point and my response, of course, are at both ends.
Right now, as I type out some notes and ideas for this event, it is July 2024 and the Supreme Court just said that a president is a kind of monarch and I have answered five work emails even though, as a contingent faculty member, I am not an employee of the University.
Right now, I think that my idea is that the only way forward is small and weird kinships that collectively assume that the question What is the University for, anyway? is the subtext of our classes and that our answer might be some radical combination of hanging out, being alive together, revolutionary praxis, clear-headed guidance on small and big problems, and getting off of screens because they are eating us.
This is more than I'll actually use in that event--and I haven't edited or tweaked, but I'm starting to think.
I'm also a bit off-topic, but somehow I'll fake a synthesis of everything.
And maybe others in academic labor have thoughts, too. Please!
(Many of you are directly or indirectly here.)
Sometime during 2021 or 22, in the midst of our national and university crises, I read the small press booklet Angelo’s Ashes or To Live and Die in L.A. In it, publisher, writer, and artist Marc Fischer (no relation to theorist Mark Fisher but indeed related to–partner to–our very own advisor and poet and NEIU alumna and daughter of faculty alumni Jen Blair; the connection was unknown to me at the time) explains, with an unbending clarity, how he navigated the end-of-life arrangements for a friend on the other side of the country. Angelo had been released from his multiple-decades-long incarceration only two years before his death. Fischer needed to make ethical and psychosocially complex decisions. The booklet both narrates the experience/the seething rage of our many institutional failures and explains this process like a guidebook. This is DIY punk ethos. It’s simply designed, cheaply printed, easily distributed via formal and informal channels. The booklet taught me something about smallness, gesture, and acting justly. In fact, at some point, I emailed about it on an NEIUPI brainstorming list because I think it has a kind of meta-information about our teaching in these particular conditions.
About fifteen years ago, colleague and former NEIUPI VP Tim Barnett told me, regarding individual devotion of some effort and time to union work, whenever possible: “It’s never enough & Every little bit helps.” The pair of two arguments here that don’t exactly contradict one another, but also don’t not contradict one another, is compelling. I have written to him and others a bunch of times about the way that this utterance helped me to understand my ethical duties and possibility itself. Around the same time, Tim gave me a copy of Megan Foss’ “Love Letters,” an essay about the writer’s experience using language and increased access to nuance (“the con”) to move away from her life of incarceration, exploitative sex work, and addiction. I assign it every single semester. The students nearly always go wild for it. They love the way she narrates her troubles, the clever way that she lets her past version of language into her current “respectable” mode. Tim gave me this thing somewhat randomly, a small gesture of collegial sharing–but it shaped my entire teaching career and pedagogy.
I have had similar feelings of smallness and possibility while listening to my students and others spin tunes and read the news on WZRD. Who’s even listening in those moments, anyway? A very tiny group of us, a kin group, in offices and cars/on the bus/hanging out in the basement of LWH.
For a while, I devoted my Creative Writing classes to a framework that I called Small Explosive Art Situations. I’m obviously aping 60s stuff and the 90s AIDS activist group ACTUP. But I’m also trying to tap into something that’s particular and magical about NEIU: the way we’ve been abandoned by decades of neoliberal de-funding, the way that I think/hope that we all see ourselves as working in true and unending solidarity with our marginalized students. I hate the fact of an Institution but can I make something happen inside of it that would otherwise have absolutely no occasion to exist?
Former undergrad/grad student and poet and friend and current advisor Katrina Underwood told me, via another friend and former student and advisor Mark Gunter, to read theorist and science fiction writer Samuel Delany’s nonfiction hybrid text Times Square Red Time Square Blue. In it, he explores the gentrification and attendant “sanitizing” of Times Square’s erotic movie houses: the end of an often positive and life-affirming scene, the cruising scene. He says that “life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will.” I want that pleasantness as our very air.
In a pamphlet put out by a small experimental lit press, I read three writers’ correspondence regarding their work in a radical collective study group in Indonesia, looking at “the intersections of affective, manual, and intellectual labor.” The writer Sulastri says, of “strategies aimed at connecting different articulations of staying in, withdrawing, persevering, and surpassing chronic deterioration of marginalized forms of life in various geopolitical contexts,” that they “open up spaces for still-hidden possibilities of the everyday to emerge from seemingly narrowing horizons for social projects.” Sulastri calls for a “turning away from the modes of (re)-presentation that, in trying to speak against the violent institutions of our times, are often inadvertently absorbed by the very things they seek to overcome.” And: “propose[s] ways of being with others and becoming together within and beyond spectacular consumption . . . a time and space for collective listening, sense-making, and common solidarity in the wake of the crisis as ordinary.”
In her memoir about her own institutionalization for mental illness and what it means to read and write within and beyond that time, Suzanne Scanlon says that being an English major "help[s] you to understand what it means to be alive." I don’t campaign for all of my students to become English Majors, but I sure as hell want to advocate for our collective work to be an overt and covert study of what it means to be alive.
Jonathan Haidt can be a bit annoying, but when colleague Julie Kim forwarded me an excerpt of his new-ish book about smartphones and mental health and young people, I found immediate comfort in its stringent view that we must reassert ourselves in physical reality. It aligned with my somewhat paranoid and somewhat exhausted and somewhat radical shift to blue books in my Composition classes. I refuse to read things that AI wrote. In that move, I’m refusing clean and polished and easy-to-digest student writings. We’re writing, together, as alive people.
Sheila Liming’s book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time is, often, like Haidt’s work, an accidental reifier of some white liberal NPR worldview, but it’s still useful: she argues for a kind of forced observance of unstructured time–maybe something akin to the way some of us used to smoke cigarettes or read printed periodicals or look out windows. Within this “hangout time,” we can arrive at some notion of “the story” of self and others in community that refuses the capitalist machinery of seasonal consumer experiences.
Many of my students were subjected to my endless delight in a talk by the Turkish writer Merve Emre about Literary Criticism and international community. She says that we need
"a shared project of criticism. This project would traverse and exceed the institutions of the university, the publishing house, the library, the magazine, the festival, and the bookshop. It would touch our ordinary activities and conversations; our habits, our routines; the well-worn fabric of our lives. What I am suggesting is both future oriented and very old-fashioned. It looks back to the eighteenth- century’s optimism about civil society and its ability to forge free, voluntary, and active associations between readers and writers."
Friend, former student, alum Daniel Woody told me about Heavy Processing, a theoretical framework named after the notion of “lesbian processing”: “an orientation to the pleasure (sexual, emotional, political, intellectual) of complex and sometimes incommensurate information.” Can we use that, too?
Returning to the intersection of student purpose/need & labor issues, I’m both wildly optimistic and utterly apathetic. A friend (poet and musician Kevin Edwards) visiting this summer, in his half-joking and half-despairing description of the difficulty of working as a college librarian in this moment, said “College is dead.” His point and my response, of course, are at both ends.
Right now, as I type out some notes and ideas for this event, it is July 2024 and the Supreme Court just said that a president is a kind of monarch and I have answered five work emails even though, as a contingent faculty member, I am not an employee of the University.
Right now, I think that my idea is that the only way forward is small and weird kinships that collectively assume that the question What is the University for, anyway? is the subtext of our classes and that our answer might be some radical combination of hanging out, being alive together, revolutionary praxis, clear-headed guidance on small and big problems, and getting off of screens because they are eating us.
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