I heard the term “left melancholy” used for the first time the other day. It startled me. I’m familiar with the concept of racial melancholia, but had never thought to extend it to politics, and as soon as I heard the term “left melancholy” my ears kinda burned, because it’s an easy and habitual (and, I think, learned) stance for me and a lot of other people. “Left melancholy” is a perspective that assumes all progressive agendas to be somehow ideologically or methodologically co-opted or tainted from the outset, and so results in considerable energy being devoted to a critique of any possible progressive project before it even gets underway. I do that a lot, and it shuts down avenues for productive change.
At the same time, I can’t believe there’s no place for critique, and especially not in so relentlessly positive and instrumentally-minded a field as computers and composition. Critique, while it shuts down avenues for agency, simultaneously establishes an alternative language within which one might imagine possibilities for positive change. I think about Christianity in the West and what it offered in terms of a space for redemption and rehabilitation, and the connection of that space to what Foucault talks about in Discipline and Punish, and what the combination of both of those factors mean for my brother as he serves his sentence. One couldn’t enact prison as rehabilitation if one hadn’t thought it. This is the problem for those who contend that theory is meaningless, and that practice and policy are the only ways to make change: you can’t think outside the current problematic situation if you don’t theorize it in some way. Those who would contend otherwise would do well to revisit Plato and Aristotle, Erasmus and More, Hobbes and Descartes, Kant and Rousseau, Marx and Rawls.
So, well, OK, that’s all highfalutin and whatnot. Here’s the small thing I’m working on tonight: Colin Williams, in “A Critical Evaluation of the Commodification Thesis” (2002, The Sociological Review), sets as his mission the pointing-out of “large economic spaces [. . .] where alternative economic relations and motives prevail” (525) in order to demonstrate that “there exist large alternative economic spaces of self-provisioning, non-monetised exchange and monetised exchange where the profit motive is absent” (526). Once again, there are other ways to think about things — and what Williams is talking about applies to the university, too, Bunky.
Williams defines the economy as the production, distribution, and allocation of “the goods that people need to survive” (526), and the first thing I notice here is that there’s nothing said about scarcity, and this makes sense to me: why do we have to assume that there’s not enough for everyone in order to be able to talk about the economy? What if there is enough, and there’s no actual problem with scarcity, only with distribution? Let me be a little more specific, and perhaps attempt to point to my own hypocrisy and complicity in the problem of inequality: I just went to my closet and counted, and I own 21 glorious solid-colored navy, brown, green, french blue, grey, cream, light blue, black, beige, and even white (my boss said to me yesterday, “I didn’t think you owned any white shirts”) long-sleeved cotton dress shirts that I wear when I teach. I don’t need that many — I don’t need half that many — and there are plenty of people who do need shirts. Another case: I went on yesterday about all the stuff I cooked. I’m a single man living alone, and could probably survive on half that much. (I used to be a little thin at 5’9″ and 150; I went up to 165 on the 4th Brigade boxing team, 170 after my first year of grad school, and I think I’ve gained 15 pounds since my mom died.) Why, then, am I OK with cooking what I do when others are hungry? The easy answer: some people will always get the short end of the stick. (The Reagan/Bush conservative corollary to that answer: those people deserve it.) Scarcity is a fact of life, and we shouldn’t question it.
I don’t believe the easy answer.
Williams remarks that “The view that predominates is that the overwhelming trajectory of economic development is towards a commodified economy. Although the extent, pace and unevenness of this process is open to debate [. . .], the process of commodification itself is not” (527). He contends that there are three necessary conditions for an economy to be understood as commodified: “goods are produced for exchange”, “exchange is monetised and conducted under market conditions”, and “the exchange of goods and services on a monetised basis is motivated by the pursuit of profit” (527). This definition would seem to call into question assumptions about the university being a commodified economic space, in part because those assumptions depend both on the way the university constructs itself (for-profit or not) and on the way students construct themselves: are they pursuing higher education solely for the sake of profit, or are there other motivations? Hm. Questions that, to me, feels like they’ve pulled together some of the issues I’ve been working with. A good stopping point, maybe.
Zeugma continues to misplace the binder clips I give her to play with. She then decides that they must be hidden in the stacks of books and papers (prospectus, readings, dissertation, presentations, student work) I have set up atop the storage space in my office, and proceeds to knock the stacks down in her search for her toys. Then she gets angry when she can’t find them, and chews on the papers. My office looks like a flippin confetti factory.
Several years ago, another TA asked me: “How do I tell a student that I spilled gin on his paper?” I won’t tell you how I answered — perhaps it’s good to leave as an open question — but I’ll ask a related question: how do I explain to my students the tiny multiple kitten-sized fang piercings in their papers?
A good teacher doesn’t have to answer questions like these.
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