Adjuncting Love

Recently, questions about desire and love have come out of the woodwork in conversations about graduate/adjunct labor, the work of academia, and intellectual occupations more generally. Meanwhile, student workers at the University of California are on strike protesting unfair labor practices. In the last five years, writing on the working conditions in California public education has been instrumental in communicating the terms of this struggle to those located within and without; the website Remaking the University and the blog/journal Reclamations are prominent examples of places where this writing is taking place. Even while not the explicit subject matter of this writing, the affective intensity of such work is evident here as well as in the on-the-ground organization, activism, and struggle that much of the writing work grapples with, describes, inspires, and responds to. Two recent examples of work that exhibits this affective intensity are "Why We are Striking," a document signed "some strikers, some friends," which puts forth the terms of the current strike at the UC over unfair labor practices; and Earl Perez-Foust's "Why Solidarity Is Important, or an Open Letter to UC Faculty," which addresses the importance of faculty members supporting the strike as a way of making conversations about the conditions of the academic workplace more transparent.

One thing about the intensity of this work that's worth noting is the way that it considers itself to be destructive, or it understands that this is its potential; this is to be understood in opposition to the do what you love ideology that allows the labor of academic work to go unacknowledged as such. While such a naive "love" is widely recognized as "too much," it also becomes quite clear, as Hannah Black describes in "You Are Too Much," that a model, or perhaps better, a narrative, of love that affirms the fitness of the object is long past. Black identifies the way that the model of heterosexual love is not only not available to those who don't identify with this narrative, but "how blackness or queerness or even being gendered female in a white male supremacist world can make it hard to accept love because you are encouraged from childhood to hate yourself." I'm extending her discussion about race and sexuality to academia, because I think that her central insight about love, that the choice we have about it is reserved for the attitude we have toward hate, poses something worthwhile for the discussion. As she finds, there are two positions indicated by the White Family: over-attachment (the maintaining of a belief in attachment as health, as figured in the overly attached girlfriend) and hate or destructiveness (being foreclosed from the narrative, refusing the narrative). Black writes, "For the White Family love is health, but for us love is at once a symbol of a possible future, a vanishing present, and the sign of the patriarchal white permafrost that threatens to destroy us. If we are ambivalent about love in its present form, it is only because, against the odds, we choose to feel something other than hatred."

We might export these two positions to the realm of academic labor: over-attachment or destructiveness. This invites a brief (as brief as possible) discussion of an essay that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Elizabeth Segran's "The Danger of Victimizing Ph.D.'s." Her argument can be surmised from the subtitle, "No one but you is forcing you to accept low-paid adjunct work," and what's shocking about the piece (in addition to the fact that there's no mention of the "productive" ways that people at her former graduate institution are also, on the same day, attempting to influence the "labor market") is that there's no account of the complexity of "choice," as an instance of coerced volition in a narrative that's not just ideological, but "bad" psychology.

Segran's presentation of this choice ("Yet Ph.D.’s have the power to resist. They can choose to reject academe altogether and find satisfying work elsewhere.") and her valorization of professionalization (if you fail in being a professional academic, you just need to choose another field in which you can be a professional success) is laughable, perhaps, on certain days, at certain times, because the other side of what she presents is all that cannot be included in such choices, including the very idea of a "choice" as something that can be made "freely" by an individual. As 1970s Marxist feminism has shown, and as this article by low end theory also notes (thanks to Michelle Ty for the reference), choices, in particular about objects of love, are always also coercions. I keep dwelling on this insight, now outdated—perhaps too outdated to explain love now, but also, I suspect, not—in thinking about the close residence of love and hate and the role of destructiveness in love. For as much as Black writes against "love," she also gets that the joke about overattachment is not that funny: "One side of the joke — that a woman would have to be crazy to long for entry into a couple — is negated by the other — that a woman who can’t negotiate her way into a couple is crazy." Put otherwise: One side of the joke—that a PhD has to be crazy to long for entry into academia—is negated by the other—that a PhD who can't negotiate her way into academia is crazy. This ambivalence cannot be resolved by simply choosing another object to love, another profession, another .com identity.

At least, it's not a choice of the sort that I'd want to make. There's no "choice," for example, in some strikers, some friends' phrasing "Today’s strikers, tomorrow’s adjuncts." But there is something to think about in the continuity that is asserted between these positions, which are often seen as occupying different places in society: one, choosing to feel something other than hatred (i.e. choosing destructiveness) and the other, overattached, atomized, nostalgic, failed. The continuity is further asserted at the end of the document with the statement, "We are striking so that we do not end up like the fortunate ones."  In other words, I think, we are striking so that we don't have to be the professionals, the ones for whom choice is both a matter of production and consumption.

Although throughout grad school I resisted professionalization and I was a striker, it's taken me quite some time to see where this leaves me, outside of feeling like I am not a part of anything--too far from the UC (and from my life as a grad student) to be anything but a spectator and too alienated from the University of Minnesota (and my life as an academic) to do anything there. But the insidious component, which I've been trying to describe, is the way that my market failure has contributed to my feeling that I also am not worth enough to contribute to these conversations—the ones at the UC that I described above and read so avidly—as anything more than an overattached spectator. It's been harder to resist feeling like my lack of success on the job market is not tied to wanting "too much," harder to think in an un-atomized, de-individualized way about the plethora of rejection and nonadmittance to the institution.

In other words, it's hard to go from being a striker to an adjunct; it's hard to feel like overattachment is your fate (or that the White Family is) and to come up with a way to articulate a resistance to this structure of affective relations when your relation to the institution seems to affirm that fate. But what the continuity that is described by some strikers, some friends suggests is finally quite helpful for thinking about the very real reasons that are there for not wanting to count oneself as part of the "fortunate." For the Tenure-Track Professor and the White Family (and with the understanding that these are not social categories but upheld and often invisible ideals), there is no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about love, or perhaps better, there's always another reason to feel ambivalent about love, but perhaps too there's no longer a reason to feel ambivalent about one's love objects. In addition to the fact that this is "too bad," the loss of such ambivalence, of a relation to a loved object that does not involve the capacity to hold one's destructiveness, is a profound but perhaps less apparent price to be paid for professionalism.

Federici and Arendt

Paolo Virno`s ``Virtuosity and Revolution`` pursues some of the lines I have been trying to draw between Arendt`s take on the ``subjective illusion,`` the contradiction between freedom and necessity, and the Marxist concern with the contradiction within the subjective modes of reproduction and productive to capitalism. Resolving such a contradiction on the side of a productive subject who is resistant, autonomous Marxist theorists such Cesare Casarino, Hardt and Negri, and Virno, posit the notion of the ``common`` as a way of thinking about positive models of subjective resistance. Casarino writes, ``To claim back and seize the common as production entails a drastic reorientation of subjectivity.... It entails the production of a form of subjectivity constituted by a counterdesire. Such a counterdesire is the desire to be in common--as opposed to the desire to be for the common-as-negated-by-capital, the desire to be captive of one`s own negation--in short, as opposed to the desire not to be`` (17). Such theories, which prescribe a mode of subjectivity, implicitly--or explicitly, as Casarino--corralling reason and desire, are predicated upon an opposition to the Arendtian model of subjectivity, or rather, the liberal subject that is assumed to be the model or the outcome of Arendt`s ideas about work, labor, and political activity.

Virno`s essay makes clear how central the opposition to Arendt is to work on the common, since, as he claims, ```To each his own` seems to be the message of Arendt`s The Human Condition, and every man for himself...the other two fundamental spheres, work and intellect, remain unchanged in their quantitative structures`` (206). Virno uses Arendt as an (or the) example of unfettered individualism, figured first as a feature of the intellect and then as a figure of work. Virno`s claim that this is what Arendt is doing is built upon the idea that she ``rejects out of hand the very idea of a public intellect`` (193). Conflating the ``life of the mind`` with the private sphere, Virno wrongly concludes that the intellect--which includes thought, willing, and judging, according to The Life of the Mind--does not entail a ``care for common concerns`` (Virno 193). As both The Life of the Mind and her Lectures on Kant`s Political Philosophy demonstrate, however, the care for common concerns turns out to be the central thesis of our intellectual life. What is perhaps more immediate to my concerns here is not this interpretive argument, but rather the noticeable absence of the term ``labor`` from Virno`s analysis of Arendt.

The absence of labor is all the more notable in light of Sylvia Federici`s critique of autonomous Marxists` work on the subject of immaterial labor, ``Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.`` More particularly, the points that Federici claims to be missing from this work--namely that ``capitalist development is always at the same time a process of underdevelopment,`` and that unpaid reproductive labor continues to remain unrecognized, despite feminist analysis of the sexual division of labor--can be seen to be functions of the same type of disregard that is paid Arendt. For in Arendt`s case, labor involves exactly the realm of unwaged labor and the uneven development of freedom to which Federici refers. In her discussion of the private and public realm in The Human Condition, Arendt writes:  ``What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polis life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to master necessity--for instance, by ruling over slaves--and to become free`` (31). Later in this same section, she describes how the private realm, far from being a realm that individuals could choose (over, say, the common or the public realm) is the realm of labor: ``Hidden away were the laborers who `with their bodies minister to the [bodily] needs of life` and the women who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species. Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else`s property but because their life was `laborious,` devoted to bodily functions`` (72). These lines from Arendt describe how the freedom of the worker is dependent upon a realm of necessity--whether his own or the necessary labor of another--from which he cannot become free. It is her concern with the effects of feeling that one is free--the justification of ``force and violence``--that inform her insistence of making visible the distinction between labor and work.

While the distinctions between private and public or between labor and work themselves may be belabored, Arendt`s distinctions in general--such as between ``necessity and freedom,`` ``futility and permanence,`` ``shame and honor`` (73)--they do not serve prescriptive purposes, as I indicated above in the case of the Marxist subject, but rather they work to retain other distinctions that runs across and within both categories (see, for example, unquiet/quiet distinction, HC 15). Arendt`s concern is not only that as work ``assumes the character of labor,`` the value of work (its permanence, the durable world it creates) is denigrated, but that no longer being able to see necessity, the private realm, has its own consequences. In this regard, it remains for Arendt crucial that man knows ``he is subject to necessity,`` since in contrast to ``life in slavery,`` ``this condition [of being subject to need and necessity] is no longer fully manifest and its lack of appearance has made it much more difficult to notice and remember`` (121). But why is it that Arendt finds it so important to maintain the perceptibility of the private realm, which is indeed that realm which is about ``privation,`` about the ``life processes`` which are ``futile``because they appear and disappear? Is it the easing of this ``repugnance to futility`` (121) that she seeks, or, in fact, its opposite? It is the figure of ``socialized mankind,`` the indistinction between society and the life-processes themselves, that presents a threat large enough to defend against with the insistence on maintaining the perceptibility of the private realm.

In Arendt`s conceptualization, the private realm is like ``the other, dark and hidden side of the public realm`` (64), and thus perception of it, or the ability to perceive it does not have the same qualities as perception in public life, which is built around being among others. The perception of the private entails the capacity to see what is ``no longer human`` about human existence, to see that ``man exist[s] in this sphere not as a truly human being but only as a specimen of the animal species man-kind`` (46). And while it is true that Arendt does not elevate the capacity to perceive this to the realm of action, its clear function is to preserve the ambivalence within ``futility``--its not only that futility is to be guarded against, as indicated by the danger of the phenomenon of ``loneliness`` (59, which in The Origins of Totalitarianism has consequences for terror), or by the threatened reality of a world that appears impermanent--but the idea that the feeling of ``futility`` is one that provides individuals with the ``strongest impulse`` toward liberation (and thus also toward mastery, violence, and force). The ambivalent treatment of futility in the private realm has to do with the fact that registering it is like registering the desire not to be. That this still follows a model in which the darker ground is given meaning by ``rising into sight,`` does not minimize the potential for thinking about the impacts of losing what Arendt calls the ``non-privative traits of privacy``: ``a life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses that quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense`` (71).