Strange Moon
On failing to write a lecture
Today my mind is like a strange moon—faintly lit, knocked out of orbit. I’m supposed to deliver a lecture to students that I wrote last year. Make a couple of alterations—bash in a new window. No sliding doors, nothing structural …
Last year I wrote towards the textures of melancholy I felt and saw in the air. When I return to that work, I see it’s broken roof tiles. The steps are cracked, a musty odour hangs around. There’s no visible mould. Still. I need to rip the kitchen out of last year’s thinking—this isn’t just a new year, it’s another world.
In the news I read about the exploitation of intellectual laborers at Australian universities. I am not surprised by what the article says: teachers with mounting debts, unable to pay rent, let go at no notice.
I’ve heard from people who have received email terminations that opened with, Dear [Name].
Still, L and I read today’s article hypnotized. One worker describes teaching in the morning, attending a funeral at mid-day, returning to campus to deliver an evening class. There is no paid leave. The only way to miss a class is to be on your death bed, they say.
Someone else lives with chronic fatigue but can’t say No to loaded-up teaching due to financial insecurity. Another worker wonders, “How do I play it so I don’t have a total nervous breakdown while guaranteeing I’m employable?”
Writing from the early days of the lockdowns in 2020—when tens of thousands of full-time and casual jobs were lost at Australian universities—essayist, art critic and casualised academic, Anwen Crawford, recalled a small socially-distanced protest against fee hikes and job losses that got broken up by a squad of cops at the University of Sydney. As she writes about this protest she also remembers, “when it was still possible to shame a university administration for allowing police onto campus …” No more.
Crawford goes on remembering earlier years—the Howard years—when student unionism was made voluntary, “thus knee-capping the organising capacity of students.” Not just industrial organising, but protest laws have been eroded these past years, too.
Crawford, again:
“Often I have felt in the past decade that some chain of transmission has been broken, and it has been; the lessons I was taught by activists blooded in the social struggles of the 70s, 80s and 90s have not been passed down, and this has not been accidental.”
So, you are good at teaching? Maybe you are excellent. You’ll never work fast enough. You try and manifest the changes you want to see in your life. How will you afford them?
So, a manager says you are in the wrong job if you can’t deliver complex and careful work at punishing speeds. Punishing because it is underpaid—though you are overworked—and you don’t have time left to get another job which, financially speaking, you really do need.
So, you don’t have money. Ergo you must have time because everything takes longer when you do not have money. Things you have made for yourself break. You cannot pay a plumber, so you become a plumber by night. Your car doesn’t work, but you can’t become a mechanic (you’ve tried). You get sick, can’t get to the doctor. Not this week. Or you can afford to go by slashing your bills. Your phone or internet runs out, you can’t recharge. Not yet. Not yet. You wonder if you can teach your online class using the library wifi in the next biggest town. But then you remember about your car. You sit down and try to untangle your problems, like untangling worms in a pile.
So! This is your life. Your one and only. Labor might hold value. Learning might hold value. But your labor, which is the business of teaching and learning, does not hold value. There is a hole in the logic of values at the university, and you have fallen through it. If you generate surplus value, it will not flow to you. So what? You do not get loans. You do not go on holiday. You do not go out for dinner. You have ramen noodles, no? You can plan your future one semester or one year at a time, no? Are you doing the bulk of your job in your car? You’re lucky to have a car, no? Say you learn to manage your budget, carefully. Still, your bathroom leaks. Your house is uninsulated. Holes everywhere. The mice, the mice, are shitting everywhere. You get sick. You work, regardless. You are self-motivated. Not a quitter. You tell yourself that the world is bright though you are passing through some dark years. At 3 am you find yourself alive and asking: What else can I be doing? You feel the collective power of other workers—colleagues! friends!—when you come together carrying your exhaustion—little green flames between cupped hands—but these are rare moments.
In ‘University.xslx’, Andrew Brooks and Tom Melick detail how the university is not just using the spreadsheet as a technology of violent efficiency but is actually becoming a spreadsheet—arranged in “rows and columns”—where degraded student experience is “re-branded as an ‘exciting opportunity to innovate’, and everyone employed comes to know, in no uncertain terms, they should be lucky to have a job.”
Following Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Brooks and Melick suggest that it might be worth “decoupling the work from the job” through study as a model of resistance.
This makes sense to me. When I was fresh out of my PhD, I started a group that met every Friday 10 am - midday. Those gathered read a book, out loud, for two hours. This was a collective practice in paying attention to each other, reminding ourselves to ask questions of each other. The most basic questions. We were reading as readers, not trained philosophers. We read all the footnotes. We looked things up. We paused and re-read passages we couldn’t understand. We were reading to think more closely about how to live, to withstand our bodies in this world. We had to listen carefully to each other, had to read mindfully. We were committed to reading cover-to-cover. We’d go slow to go deep. It would take us a year, often longer, to read a single book and discuss the ideas in detail so everyone understood. No one was left behind.
Later, the group decided to bookend each reading of philosophy with poetry, which is philosophy done in the language in which we approached philosophy, which is the language of bodies and rivers and beds. We wanted to see how poetry could deepen the meanings of more abstract philosophy. All of which is a form of resistance, which can’t be caught in a spreadsheet, and which we practiced in an environment that had / has no calculation for such labor.
Each Friday, in those two hours on campus, I felt like we were punching through the walls of the place. Fuck the doors, we were climbing in and out of our building’s windows.
I suspect that poets are viewed by the university system as a kind of wilderness. A green cathedral, embodied. I mean, maybe they are thought of as beings who stand apart from other beings. Like when they think, torrents of mist shoot from their ears. And when they walk, they walk with boots damp from morning dew. And when they speak, they speak as a lone crow calling from a great distance. If this is a way to understand poets, it makes sense of my sense that poets are treated by the university as a nature park: a thing to be managed, patrolled, audited, while also appearing to be authentic, untouched, complex, woven. Talk to a poet. Feature one at your conference, even. Have the whole eco experience!
Who knows what a poet thinks? Is something I think the university thinks. As the poet’s mind reels across the earth, new productivity techniques are devised by the university. When I read Naomi Klein’s definition of extractivism—as the “nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth,” a “reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value of their own…”—I feel that I am also reading a description of how the university relates to artists.
The art of bookkeeping is the privileged art form of the university. It seems to get more layered and complex, year-on-year. How can the artist’s time be quantified? How can art be captured as output and those outputs sorted into data sets and returned as value? Are the questions I think the university is fixated on. The question I am fixated on is what words poets can give to the transformation of creativity into productivity? I ask Rupi Kaur how she might say it and I read, “i’m lost in the sick need / to optimize every hour of my day”.
Lost, I go looking for answers to the question: How to write? I ask Carmen Maria Machado and she answers my question with questions: “Where do the lacunae live? How do we move towards wholeness? […] How do we direct our record keeping towards justice?”
After this, I walk around the streets feeling dazed, like every roof of every house has been ripped off, like all the animals are making unfamiliar noises.
I ask Meghan Daum: How to write? She says “… careful listening and a resistance to preconceptions can yield stories that do all the things we want and need stories to do—split sides, break hearts, open minds or even change them.”
So, I need to write this lecture but I worry if I start writing I’m going to drown. When I finally write, I write like I’m wading through a river towards high ground. And when I read, I read squinting, like I’m driving through fog at 5 am.