what is to be done?
What is to be done? (Instructions for academics like myself and other people working in institutions plagued by a lack of invention.)
1. Think and feel with beginner’s mind. See the monumental walls separating the university from the universe as bizarre, unnatural and unproductive [Ù34, 39, 81]. Then instead of waffling between passively accepting them or wasting your energies beating your brains out against them, just go ahead and do your work as though they didn’t exist. Think and feel with beginner’s mind.
You live in the world. You think and feel in it all the time. You are curious and revolted in it. You feel excitement and peace, sadness and joy in it all the time. All this has everything to do with what you decide to read a bit more closely, with what you decide to think through a bit more intensely, with what you decide you want to communicate to others in your teaching and writing.
So why leave it out of your work? How will your work ever find its way in that wide world if you excise from it the matrix of life experiences that gave it birth in the first place?
The academy depends heavily on precedent and expertise. Think and feel with beginner’s mind. Remember the words of William James, non-Ph.D., receiving an honorary doctorate from Harvard, where he had taught for many years, “Our undisciplinables are our proudest product.”1
2. When you encounter a policy, rule, or practice that seems to choke the flow of life in or out of the university, ask:
What is it doing here? What good do we get from this? We are paying an enormous cost, so is it really worth it?
Consider evaluating such things according to the ethics of Spinoza, as presented by Gilles Deleuze in his little guide Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.2 “Good” is whatever increases your power to act; “bad” whatever decreases our power to act.
A lot of what we encounter in the university appears ahistorical. But nothing is. Ask: Where did this come from? Who made it? How and why? What joys and sufferings are buried in it? What can it do? What can I do with it?
Now, a person is good, Deleuze says, who “strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his and thereby to increase his power.”
A bad person, by contrast, is “someone who lives haphazardly, is content to undergo the effects of his encounters, and wails and accuses every time the effect does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence.”
Being good or bad, Deleuze adds, are just different ways we can be, moment to moment. But either way, they’re contagious [Ù93].
3. Make peace [Ù31, 47].
Overwhelm reaction, bitterness, and defensiveness with the force of your own affirmation. Don’t excise, ostracize, marginalize, abolish, or banish. Don’t, as my friend Catherine Brown likes to say, piss in your own pen. Don’t turn your corner of the institution into a battlefield.
Listen to the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh:
“Suppose you are in the desert, and you only have one glass of muddy water. You have to transform the muddy water into clear water to drink; you cannot just throw it away. So you let it settle for a while, and clear water will appear.”[3]
Or, if you prefer, Michel Serres, speaking to Bruno Latour: “What is an enemy, who is he to us, and how must we deal with him? Another way to put it, for example, is: What is cancer? – a growing collection of malignant cells that we must at all costs expel, excise, reject? Or something like a parasite, with which we must negotiate a contract of symbiosis? I lean toward the second solution, as life itself does.”3
As a writer and critic: learn the lesson of Dr. Frankenstein.
Give life only to what you’re willing to care for. Whatever you create without care will return to haunt you. Whatever you disavow may pursue you [Ù85, 86, 93, 94].
Deleuze once said, “ “My ideal, when I write about an author would be to write nothing that could cause him sadness, or if he is dead, that might make him weep in is grave.”4
Take inspiration too from Henry Miller in Sexus: “I wanted to enchant but not to enslave; I wanted a greater, richer life, but not at the expense of others; I wanted to free the imagination of all men at once because without the support of the whole world, without a world imaginatively unified, the freedom of the imagination becomes a vice.”
Miller wanted, he said, “to be absorbed in the common stream, to be a fish again and not a freak of nature.” And: “The only benefit,” he concluded, “which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the differences which separated me from my fellow man.”5
What would academic work look like if we thought of it in these ways [Ù1, 98]?
1 William James, “The True Harvard,” Essays, Comments, and Reviews (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 76-77.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, City Lights, 1988), pp. 22-23.
3 Michel Serres, with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 195.
4 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Trans. Hugh Silverman and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 119.
5 Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove, 1965), p. 19.