The Fundamental Irrationality of Grad School:

A faculty member told me the other day (during a committee meeting, when we were discussing how best to help grad students find balance between work and life) that being overwhelmed during grad school is a good thing, a necessary thing, because it prepares you for a life/career in the academy. While I understand the importance of learning how to balance things...

In the words of William Shatner, I just can't get behind that. What is the point of grad school if you barely have time to finish the course readings? How are you supposed to engage all the available resources and get the most out of seminars if you don't have the time to properly prepare? Pardon me, but I thought we were here to become academics or public intellectuals, not to be trained as highly efficient, task-juggling, sleep-deprived machines.

So if I haven't been posting lately, please forgive me, but I'm positively overwhelmed and not handling it too well. Actually, let me clarify: I'm handling it fine because I'm working all the time, but I'm really pissed off that I still don't have time to finish all my readings, because this is interesting stuff, and I really really want to get everything I can out of this year.

But, apparently that's not what it's about.

So fuck it.

* * *

I needed a break from course work today and picked up Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Abjection is our reaction, like horror or vomit, to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other).

Oh, Kristeva ... I love it when ideas grab you and crack your mind open, make you sit up and gawk at the page, marveling at the revelation it incites:

There looms, within objection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.  It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.  It beseeches, worries and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.  A certainty protects it from the shameful--a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it.  But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned.  Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself.

When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have properly speaking, a definable object.  The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine.  Nor is it an ob-jest, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire.  What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous.  The abject has only one quality of the object - that if being opposed to I.  If the object however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.  A certain 'ego' that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away.  It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game.  And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master.  Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out.  To each ego its object, each superego its abject.

It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that 'I' puts up with, sublime and devastated, for 'I' deposits it to the father's account [verse au père - père-version]:  I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other.  A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome.  Not me.  Not that.  But not nothing, either.  A 'something' that I do not recognize as a thing.  A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.  On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.

There, abject and abjection are my safeguards.  The primers of my culture.

* * *

Other fun stuff I've been up to lately: late night walks to the Second Cup down the street; reading The Onion; watching my friend Christine on her reality TV show When Women Rule The World, and; free episodes of The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website.

Oh, and Hamilton still blows.

Damn, Grad School Is Hard.

I remember saying once, a while ago, that I hoped grad school would be challenging. Well, kick my ass and call me challenged. So much reading. So much analyzing. Just so much.

Not that I'm complaining. It's amazing to be surrounded by fellow grad students. In seminars, every single comment is well articulated, relevant, interesting, and stimulating. It's fantastic.

Some of the things that have dominated my thoughts every waking hour of the last month:
neoliberal rationality; all forms of capital; visual culture; political philosophy; feminist/queer theory; necropilitics; power; biopolitics and biopower; ideology; hegemony; spectacle; media democracy; globalization; activism and new social movements; identity politics; the nation state; sovereignty; agency; consumerism and commodity; diaspora; literature; the concept of culture...

My profs are all fantastic. And hilarious - big bonus.

I even have a kind of academic star-struck-ness: one of my profs actually knows, and is in regular correspondence with, people like Zygmunt Bauman, bell hooks and Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida!! jesus christ. Although, despite having known bell hooks for over 20 years, he says they don't talk anymore because she's a bit of diva (!).

On the flip side, I have keys to an office, I hold office hours, and I have a mailbox. I'm (partially) responsible for the education of 36 students. I have 36 essays on my desk to read and mark.

It's really difficult to cultivate a certain professionalism, yet remain accessible and, for lack of a better word, cool. The other TA's and I have shared stories of inappropriate (and entertaining) things said in tutorial, and worries about misinterpretations and misunderstandings. At least we're all figuring out the same stuff together.

It makes me nervous though - you know how sometimes I say things that are deeply ironic or sarcastic, not to mention politically incorrect? Yeah...apparently I can't just turn that off ha.

It's all a work in progress. Things are cool right now (I think) but who knows what will happen when I hand back the first assignment...nothing like a room full of people silently hating you. Should be fun!

Hamilton still blows. 7 months (of incredibly stimulating intellectual activity) to go.