June 17, 2024

Doris Lessing and new left notes; embattled curiosity

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re all maintaining. I typically write things for my little blog when I have a specific thought I’ve only partially glimpsed and am trying to dig out of the ground further. (New working title for a memoir: These Thoughts Are Potatoes.) Other times I just sort of feel like writing, or don’t feel like writing but think I ought to write, a bit like brushing my teeth (new working title for a memoir: These Thoughts Are Halitosis) or stretching and moving around a little more (new working title for a memoir: These Thoughts Are Back Pain). Today’s more of the latter (so this is a halitosis and back pain post I guess. You think to yourself, “yep, again. Still.”)

I finished Doris Lessing’s novel The Grass is Singing. Lessing grew up in South Africa, later Southern Rhodesia if memory serves, where she eventually joined the Communist Party before relocating to the UK, where she became involved in the Reasoner and later the New Reasoner. The Reasoner was a dissident publication inside the UK CP formed largely in response to party leadership bungling its response to the revelations about Stalin in Khruschev’s speech at the party congress that year. Those larger events escalated to uprisings in Hungary then the USSR’s invasion of Hungary, provoking further conflict in the Communist Parties of the world, and the Reasoner editors, John Saville and EP Thompson, quit the CP, then forming the New Reasoner. The New Reasoner in turn fed into formation of New Left Review, NLR being the result of a merger of the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review. Lessing was in those circles, like I said. She’s got an autobiography that I’ve not read yet.

I don’t yet know what exactly I want to do about this UK New Left stuff, in the sense of what object I’d like to produce as a writer. I have a few things in mind. I’ve got an article on some of this under review at a journal, we’ll see what happens there, but writing that intensified rather than dispersed my interest in this stuff, and really everything I learn further about this stuff further intensifies that interest, so I’m keeping on reading. It’s nice to just learn things and not have it be instrumentally focused on a specific object - there was a phase with my book where I only read things if they served the book, and only read them with a mind toward serving the book, and that was followed by a phase of not really reading at all because I needed to put all available time into finishing the writing. I don’t regret any of that but it wasn’t fun and I’m relishing being in a very different place intellectually right now.

Of course, that’d go for learning about anything. I’m also enjoying that this is relatively new stuff to me. I now feel like I know enough to not be totally lost, and I know little enough that new things I learn are often surprising and exciting, rather than confirming things I already know. That too isn’t content-specific. In terms of actual contents, there are several things that appeals to me about the new left in the UK, particularly the first New Left that largely dissipated by 1962 or so. One is that I’ve learned a lot from later work by some of the figures involved, above all EP Thompson, and, closely related, every time I dig further into another figure it’s very exciting and thought provoking, as with my reason dive into Raymond Williams and now Lessing’s novel. Another is that there’s some degree to which that situation rhymes with our own - being in a kind of uncertain moment in the world, and a high stakes one, with what feels like inadequate conceptual frameworks and inadequate organizational response - and, again related, a kind of bootstrapping DIY impulse, in the sense of relatively ordinary intellectuals saying basically ‘look we don’t have an adequate framework, well, that won’t drop from the sky fully formed, it was to be worked out so let’s get down to it’ and applying themselves to that effort without much in the way of resources or spare time. (Obviously, I identify with that, though I want to stress that I don’t say this with any sense of self-importance.) I also like the politics and kind of thinking involved: thoroughly anti-capitalist, anti- any and all trespass on human dignity, and trying to connect concrete phenomena understood accurately with larger generalizations about broader patterns in society. I’m also enjoying reading more broadly than I usually do - literary criticism, novels, watching films like I mentioned a while back. I’m perpetually self-conscious about my lack of any training or well-rounded basis of cultured-person knowledge about literature and the arts (I never got around to taking art history or art appreciation and never took english after high school, I focused on theory classes in my formal post-secondary education) and as part of that I always feel like I must be missing something - my main response to culture is like my main response to eating, ‘yum’, ‘meh’, or ‘yuck’ - but I enjoy reading that kind of stuff. [Shrug]

There’s an important scene in The Grass Is Singing where Mary, the main character, who I’d call a run of the mill racist white Rhodesian farmer, attacks Moses, a Black farm worker. It’s unpleasant stuff. In that sequence, Mary is first sort of in the zone supervising the farm workers, imposing work rhythms harshly and enjoying it. Within that, there’s a kind of reduction of people to objects in the machinery of the farm, facilitated by the racist social organization, and part of Mary’s enjoyment is a pleasure of concentration. That jumped out at me since the pleasure of concentration is one of the main things I like about my job and is part of what the ‘open mode’ of my silly little blog’s title refers to. It also jumped out at me because Mary’s actions are largely thoughtless and seem to take her by surprise - from pleasurable state of concentration to sudden rage followed by a kind of confusion like ‘why did I do that?’ in turn further followed by self-justification. I have a hunch that a lot of fucked up things that people do work like this, being the relatively thoughtless result of an oppressive context wherein they’re sort of like a wind up kid’s toy, full of a kind of energy ready to spring out in a sudden release, and pointed in a hateful, oppressive direction. Then people rationalize, further winding themselves up and pointing themselves even further in that oppressive direction. That goes on, oppressors getting worse and worse. What I like in the depiction in the novel is the thoughtlessness of it. (I wrote a bit about this in a piece about the pandemic, much improved by the editing of the indomitable Chloe Reichel. If that’s of interest, it’s here: https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/09/19/pandemic-nihilism-social-murder-and-the-banality-of-evil/ and I had the great fortune and pleasure to talk about it with the mighty Death Panel here: https://soundcloud.com/deathpanel/pandemic-nihilism-and-the-banality-of-evil-w-nate-holdren-092922) This also relates to what I was saying the other day about Beverley Best’s book and William Clare Robert’s essay on ideology, that I think a lot of the time people in positions of institutional authority inhabit relative bubbles where they’re focused on their immediate tasks and rhythms and just don’t think much about what they’re doing and why and what its effects are on other people - and then when they do, it tends toward self-justification that primes them to become even more what they already were. That’s in part to say that the fucked up shit isn’t especially decided on rationally and then enacted so much as it’s already in motion with rational decisions mostly following on afterward (and mostly a matter of rationalizing rather than any kind of substantive - let alone critical - rationality, in a way that they’re keen to not see as a decision but as out of their hands). This is also why it doesn’t really work to talk people out of playing their roles, a thought that is an occupational hazard for people with jobs like mine. We can speak truth to power all we want and power continues to do as it will, indifferent to truth. That’s not to say ideas don’t matter, they do, but they do insofar as they help us to understand what’s really happening and so to better push for changes in a process of struggle that isn’t a debate or any other situation where reason and truth win out by virtue of their being reasonable and true.

In the aftermath of the attack scene, Mary further doubles down on justifying her own actions, becoming a worse person who more energetically plays her role. I think this is also a thing that happens broadly - middling actors and institutional authorities coast along in the thoughtless banality of evil get confronted with the reality they’re part of, experience a minor personal crisis via that confrontation, then resolve the matter for themselves in ways that deepen their buy-in to what they were already doing and enacting. Their urge is to get back to thoughtlessness, but along the way they will sometimes actively embrace the fucked up things they do and think, in ways that make them worse people and more effective (ie, less friction-prone) cogs in the social machinery. (I’ll add that I read the Lessing novel as a work of fiction largely about the social machinery - this arrangement fucks up everyone in it, though not equally or in identical ways, and this is also not to express sympathy with everyone involved: there’s still a clear us and them, rightly so.)

Having finished the book, Lessing’s first novel, published in 1949 or 1950, I’ve moved on to her second (after which I’ll do the third since I’ve got them together in a single volume from the library). I’m looking into getting some of her short story collections and her autobiography as well, again planning to mostly stick in the 1950s up through 1962 (the 50s last into the 60s, and the 60s aren’t really the 60s until the late 60s and last until the mid 70s... time is fake and weird) for the sake of getting a more fleshed out grasp of the left in the UK in that era. I’m also slowly looking for works by others involved, like the novelist Mervyn Jones, who published a few books in that time period as well. If I have thoughts on that stuff as I read, they’ll go here.

I wanted to also mention that I read two articles co-written by Zachary Levenson and Marcel Paret. They’re both about how to understand the relationship between race and capitalism. I thought they were great. They’re here https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2023.2219300 and here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.13054. (I’m also a big fan of Levenson’s book, which I reviewed here: https://brill.com/view/journals/jlso/26/2/article-p261_006.xml?ebody=previewpdf-117261) One of the articles is partly about Stuart Hall. Hall was one of the founding editors of Universities and Left Review and was the first editor of New Left Review when ULR and New Reasoner merged. The other article is about conceptions of race and capitalism on the left in South Africa, which is thought provoking in relation to the Lessing novel, so I’m primed to find both these pieces exciting. They’re also just objectively good works and I recommend them. One element of both essays is about the role of differentiating different populations from each other (constructing the differences that come to count as reasons to say ‘these are two or more groups of kinds of people’) as both cause and effect of a lot of what happens in capitalism. This has important resonances with the discussion of surplus populations in Health Communism (https://www.versobooks.com/products/2801-health-communism) and with how to think about disability, as well as having a lot that’s relevant to the pandemic and the related forms of discarding people (homelessness continues to increase in the US, for instance). All I’ll say for now on this is that ways of being differentiated by race and other categories are partly a cause of who gets what done to them and partly an effect: people marked as appropriately subordinated get worse shit done to them, and simultaneously the process of having fucked up shit done to people actively marks them out as appropriately subordinated. Social nobodies get pushed below the water line more often, and anyone who falls below the water line is going to get ideologically coded as a social nobody.

Two other quick mentions then a reflection: I’m excited about two records, a split by The Bug (AKA Kevin Richard Martin) and KMRU - https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/disconnect - and a split just released without warning today by Burial and Kode9 - https://burial.bandcamp.com/album/phoneglow-eyes-go-blank. It’s kind of abstract stuff, especially the first split, but it’s good in my humble opinion, and I continue to think that some of the best art for this unsettled condition we’re in mid-pandemic (a pandemic that it’s tempting to call obfuscated though I think that’s not exactly accurate, it’s more like this: I’m told that there’s a kind of device that records your speech and plays it back to you at exactly the wrong time so that you hear your own words in a way that breaks up your thoughts, inducing speechlessness. I don’t know that we’re having our thoughts played back at us, but there is a kind of induced speechlessness right now I think). I still hold out for good social realist pandemic art too, though I’ll say that sometimes when I think about this stuff my brain sort of shuts down because it’s all so distressing (I went through a phase of really struggling to check my work email because of bad memories of work stuff, I mentioned it to a friend who said ‘oh that’s a trauma response.’ Cool cool cool) so I’m not entirely sure I’d have the wherewithal to take in that kind of social realism about the present nightmare, even though I think it’s pretty important that more of that art come to exist.

Now the reflection. I had a lovely Fathers Day with my family - did some reading, did some gardening, played with my kids, watched some soccer on the TV - some of it while cuddling with my kids, total yahtzee - and exercised some. Really a lovely day. That plus the reading I’ve been doing means that today I’m really starting to feel the summerness of my summer. I work as a professor and a lot of things about this job I could take or leave - to put too fine a point on it, I’d happily leave if I won the lottery. I remember saying once to a senior colleague that I’d still work this job if I won the lottery, and they said ‘oh I remember when I felt that way.’ They’ve since left and now I get it in a way I didn’t before. This year was hard in particularly frustrating ways (bit of detail here https://notesfromasummer.blogspot.com/2024/05/nothing-personal.html) and that combined with a late completion date for the semester to mean that the semester really massively lingered. I still have a couple loose ends even now that I have to tie off but at least it’s now starting to feel like a summer. I don’t take summers off, I just work differently, in the ways that I thought would typify a professor job (and maybe they do for people at research institutions, I dunno, I teach for a living and increasingly feel like I attend meetings and answer emails for a living). I like the open-endedness, the chance to concentrate for extended periods and be self-directed, live/work in an open mode. That feels like it’s increasingly scarce in my work life, eaten up by basically busywork. That’s very frustrating, especially as the main selling points of this job are in this kind of quality of life stuff, rather than the hours or the pay. Of course ‘selling point’ implies options, which don’t exist. Ah well. Still, it’s nice to start to feel like I’m getting out of that orbit a little mentally. I wish this was kicking in a month earlier, but whatever.

I’m going to stop now, but I think I’ll also drop below a free write I did back in March, talking about what I was calling embattled curiosity at the time. I had a mind to try to do something else with it but after writing it I decided that this is all I have to say on the matter for now, especially given that I’ve got other stuff to spend my time on, for better and for worse. So that’s below in case it’s any interest.

On that note, I’ll break off with my final thing being to wish you a fine day (if you’re not me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1EsL2aiLlQ - if memory serves this is the one with the breakdown and the vocal sample of the guy saying matter of factly ‘I’m falling apart, I’m falling to pieces.’ Relatable). Keep on trucking, friends. Over and out.

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Free write on embattled curiosity:

I saw a tweet - you know you’re about to get good writing when you see those words - and I don’t remember the exact wording - feel that? those are your expectations, reader, rising further - but it went something like ‘universities can become intellectually deadening places when faculty don’t get any time away from teaching.’ It resonated with me because I’ve been increasingly aware of the lack of life-of-the-mind in much of my own work life. This has lots of sources, many of them very direct (not enough hours or energy) and many of them diffuse in a confusing way (I can’t always tell why I feel the way I do but given that I hear similar from many colleagues in similar circumstances I get the sense that the discomfort is significantly rooted in those circumstances.)

In short, I thought being a professor would be, well, thinkier in a happy way, involving, I don’t know, more reading, pondering, talking with others doing the same and feeling excited about it all - more intellectual curiosity and excitement, and in common with others. I don’t want to get into the details of my own workplace as I want to get into what I think are the more general patterns and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of institutional particularity. There’s a line that I’m told is often attributed to a famous Russian - when you hear those thirteen words you know you’re about to get wowed, hold onto your hat reader - and I don’t remember the exact wording - your pulse rises as your anticipation grows (and yes, I will make these jokes again if I can remember to, no promises of course) - but it goes something like ‘every happy family is the same, every unhappy family is different.’ At some level, everyone unhappy with their job is unhappy for unique situational reasons. On the other hand, a job’s a job, and by virtue - vice! - of being a job there are always downsides. I think what’s particular to this or that job is less interesting and important than the broad patterns. In short, I think a lot of us in faculty jobs are in a situation where it at least feels like we’re seeing our work lives, our lives as professors, intellectually hollowed out. I’m unsure how to prove that or to get at its sources and for now I’m writing to think so I’m going to shift my thoughts from explaining to causes to describing effects.

Whatever the sources may be, I have begun to feel a bit like my own curiosity is embattled, and I get the impression I am far from the only one in that condition. Certainly the ability to have curiosity as a lived practice I commit to is embattled because there are so many other demands on my time and energy that push actually doing anything scholarly to the corners of the work week or out of the week entirely, sometimes for weeks at a time if I’m not vigilant, and even then...! The same can happen in my teaching. I continue to like students as much as ever but at one point it felt like every course session involved new thoughts, seeing connections I hadn’t seen before between ideas, becoming productively confused, and so on. The frequency of those intellectual happenings during teaching have declined, and my feelings about teaching have shifted - I continue to be pleased that I will be in the room with my students because I like them, but my specifically intellectual excitement in anticipation of teaching has declined.

There’s a weird thing that happens where I sort of wake back up, realizing I’ve not done anything substantively intellectual as a scholar or instructor for a while and that I hadn’t noticed. There’s something really lovely about zoning out, and it feels really awful to wake back up and realize you had zoned out in a way and/or in a context that’s inappropriate. The return to intellectual life is sort of like that.

I prefer not to zone out and to stay actively intellectually curious and excited, but to a significant degree that’s just as bad, in that I can keep my curiosity consciously present, and often can pursue it practically in small chunks of time in the pockets of my day and week, but then I notice more, and resentfully so, the many things that hem in my ability to live curiously in a meaningful sense. I could be reading but I’m in a meeting, I’m filling out a report form, I’m triaging my email, I’m trying to write something explaining why I could use some funds to buy a few books to figure out something new to me, whether teaching or research related, or I’m trying to do something meaningful but am distracted by thinking about the latest problem and/or administrative decision on campus and how it affects my students and colleagues. Or I’ve done some intellectual work that felt meaningful and in order to get it done I had to let something else pile up (so much email, my god) and I feel guilty about the time and energy I held to actually think because it came at someone else’s expense.

Intellectual curiosity and excitement as a faculty member has been an important part of community in that groups of scholars and instructors can coalesce around the intellectual preoccupations we share. These qualities can isolate as well, in that it’s possible to have preoccupations that aren’t shared, or that are shared but there’s no time to be together doing that sharing in any active way, or where there’s no time to participate in others’ pursuit of those preoccupations and then one feels left out. Likewise it’s easy to feel left out seeing someone with a community around their interests while lacking such a community around one’s own. The sense of being alone with one’s preoccupations can reverberate to create other senses of disconnect in relation to colleagues who seem (but might not actually be, we don’t talk about this stuff much) less disaffected in these days, and from colleagues who are following the institutionally recognized pathway from faculty to administration and in the process give up teaching and research-related pursuit of curiosity.

The distress that comes from curiosity can lead to asking ourselves “why bother?” The sense that so many higher education institutions, or at least the people in charge of them, don’t care about the life of the mind (or don’t care enough or in the right ways, treating it as selling points rather than as intrinsically valuable) intensifies that. Many colleagues have said in private a version of “if they don’t care about my work maybe I should stop doing it.” That seems to correlate with people leaving academia for other work, a decision that I certainly don’t second guess - if anything, I sometimes fantasize about doing the same.

There’s an Oscar Wilde line: a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It feels like universities are run by individual cynics and furthermore are institutionally cynical in that we are required to state the value of what we do in terms of prices, and the different values of our projects are then compared and ranked against each other. It’s enervating even on the infrequent occasions that these institutional processes result in providing resources.

Years ago a colleague told me about an experience at their work. They were finishing a book and it was part of their tenure file. They were told that developing a second book idea would help really cement the tenure proposal. This colleague had a second book idea that they were slowly fleshing out so they had already met this requirement but they told me it felt terrible because the second book idea had felt like it was their own, something exciting and sustaining which they would plug into periodically to rejuvenate intellectually. Having it become part of their tenure file helped them to get tenure but it also made it feel less their own and less rejuvenating. I think this is another version of how the kinds of curiosity and life of the mind that made this an appealing job to try to pursue can become, when the context is wrong (and the context seems wrong more often than right across higher ed) can instead become things that make parts of this job painful. That colleague left a few years later.

Part of the issue is that the institutions get into our heads. Another colleague recently made a joke in a meeting in reference to some budget cuts and how they were trying to figure out how to make a project work without any support. They said “sometimes I imagine I’m a college professor, at a university…” We laughed and it then led to a conversation about what we would really do if all the distractions and austerity and administrative burdens weren’t factors, and everyone in the meeting was at a loss for words for a moment, because none of us were especially clear anymore on what we’d really like to do. Our curiosity remained a strongly felt need but the actual projects we’d pursue in practicing that curiosity had become foggy. That same colleague joked again “I wonder what I would do if I were me?” and again it was both funny and illuminating. There’s a a kind of loss of the parts of the work that feel most ours and a related loss of the sense of who we even are intellectually, and in that circumstance curiosity and intellectual excitement exist less as positive realities we live out and more as marks that our current academic lives don’t measure up to, sources of dissatisfaction and knowledge of the absence of fulfilment rather than actually enriching pursuits we actually do.  

One last thought. I said above that I didn’t want to get into the specifics of my institution. That’s only partially true. I very much want to get into the specifics of my situation, but that urge isn’t intellectual so much as it’s an irritation and resentment driven desire to vent. That’s eminently reasonable in my opinion but it has little to do with intellectual curiosity or excitement. This irritation and indulging it - especially indulging it collectively, griping together with colleagues - can be very appealing in part because it feels good to get bad feelings out a little and in part because there is a temporarily enlivening energetic quality to this. That doesn’t help sustain curiosity, though, and often in settings where faculty gather to reenergize together by talking about ideas this kind of venting can eat up some of the time. That’s not to say faculty shouldn’t gripe, far from it, it’s to say that yet again the way universities are organized right now tends to result in other activities substituting for the life of the mind.