What time is it?
Posted on | November 4, 2005 |
Kylie’s right. I have no idea why I’ve been imagining work isn’t arduous until now… maybe I’ve swallowed all the rhetoric that cultural elites in ivory towers have cushy jobs and bludge off the taxpayer? Well, it’s also because I grew up on a farm, and I know what it’s like to do hard physical work. What I do now has never felt comparable. If this blog does anything though it serves to attest how often I go through this process of doubt about careerist academia, and each time it feels just as intense. I appreciate the chance to do what I do, which doesn’t change my desire to have more experiences outside and apart from it. I actually think that kind of experience would help me do what I currently do better.
Now that I’m getting in to even more of the literature on affect theory, I’m also wondering if I can understand my generational sensitivities and weird postdoc neuroses in another way… that is, how long can an optimistic disposition survive in an institutional environment where the dominant affects are exhaustion and depression? To elaborate on a point Glen raised, I do pick up affects from what I read in referee reports, or in email, or on blogs, and from what I hear in meetings too. It’s because I don’t get out much! But it’s also because I have been trained to interpret writing and voice in ways that actually make that my “profession” now. That’s why I can usually tell when a reviewer hasn’t been trained in literature, for instance, or feminism. How you write matters.
I had to leave work today because I started panicking in response to another unexpected deadline. I couldn’t concentrate any more. Everything became irremediably stifled and claustrophobic. (Okay, well it is Friday, and my office has no windows, and I did finally get my review essay finished yesterday. It was probably the last straw telling me that I should feel I have achieved something this week!). But I remember reading somewhere that this kind of response can be understood in terms of a clash of temporalities: when the time of ‘everyday commitments’ comes in and punctures that of extended immersion (like the temporality of writing a book). I’ve actually started the book discussing this scenario in the draft introduction. Well whatever, I don’t have time to think about it a moment longer!
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