Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

The Visit

I've spent the morning prepping for a faculty meeting happening in a couple of hours at which I am getting called upon to address a host of ticklish and demanding topics about our graduate programs, some of which are likely to have long term impacts in ways I do feel I have a strong personal stake in. But it's strange to step back and contemplate just how I have come to inhabit these stakes, why I have come to feel these stakes so keenly. Since I was ABD and definitely since I got my PhD I've made my bread and board as a sort of itinerant lecturer in the Bay Area (there are lots of idiosyncratic reasons for this, reasons that keep me in the Bay Area when most of my peers went on nationwide job-hunts for tenure track jobs -- with highly mixed results). Anyway, in addition to the summer teaching I still do in the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley, from which I got my PhD in 2005, officially I'm "visiting faculty" at SFAI in the City, teaching a full load of courses every term since I guess 2003 or so by now. One has to wonder a bit at the nature of an interrupted seven year "visit" as functioning faculty in an institution. When does a visit become more than a visit, for pity's sake? Definitely I have found -- mostly in ways I have welcomed, or which seemed perfectly sensible as they have made their incremental way -- that one can accrue responsibilities and commitments and authorities simply through an engaged and competent persistence within an institution which doesn't really otherwise recognize or reward that persistence in a way the least bit commensurate with the ever greater demands and work you take on. There is a lot of this going on in the wider world, of course, in the midst of the distress of a planetary neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist catastrophe, of which the still ongoing corporatizing academy is a symptom and part, all in an abidingly anti-intellectual America ever more suffused by the deceptive and hyperbolic norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse. And of course I am grateful to be somebody who actually is working when so many are not, and not only working but teaching (which I love) and teaching what I love at that -- democratizing critical theory, which so few people get to devote themselves to, even when they are as devoted to it and well trained in it as I am. Nevertheless, there is something wrong and worrisome about my situation. And right now, anxiety and exhaustion is how I am living that wrongness.

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