Introduction, “The Polarities of a Crisis…” continued

and deans and administrators consumers who must be pleased in the shopping mall of educational wares. And to police faculty—because how can thinkers and researchers and poets be trusted?—syllabi must state the means by which knowledge is commodified, turned into “goals,” and numbered, like pricetags on merchandise. “Learning” is no longer a process with a possibly mysterious and winding, imaginative, on-going content. It must be named and branded. While students are made into consumers for faculty to appease—who wants a student complaint these days if the “customer” gets a poor grade?—neoliberal administrators make students tools to manipulate. They do so to keep the faculty under control—not just “against” faculty through unfair, pedagogically debunked uses of items like “student course evaluations” well-known by now to statistically harm women and minorites over white male college instructors; but also by defunding student services, eliminating essential campus sources of care for students in need, and increasing their tuition in the process. In this issue, you will have the opportunity to read the testimony of campus mental-health care advocate Susan M. Schultz, who has fought for years to encourage regular and available psychological services and mental-health protocols on her campus at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her essay exposes the heartlessness of the neoliberal system, whose defunded campus “counseling centers” now perpetuate the appearance of care through language and marketing devices, without the real systemic care itself to help many students thrive. And in this issue, you can also read Duriel E. Harris’ piece on the struggle for resources that she and others in her community are enduring, just to encourage and disseminate work by BIPOC writers at her own institution, Illinois State University. The stress placed upon the faculty who care, especially faculty of color, is enormous. These faculty who run special programs and publications work within a system always in processes of defunding and eliminating budget items. The most vulnerable of writers, artists, and students are a target of funding cuts.

This contemporary American notion of “freedom” has been going along in its Western hero get-up for a long time. And yet it is unsustainable. It is a false “freedom,” it is a charade, it has nothing to do with freedom of thought, freedom to grow and learn, freedom to write, publish, speak, teach and learn. It is Freedom as Con Game. Or the “freedom” of a few to wreak violence on the most vulnerable of communities, on individuals and collectives of people whose lives matter. Whose educations matter. 

*

I am still attracted to Roland Barthes as a writing theorist and writing mentor, even if I discovered him so long ago in graduate school I lose track of the decades. He has taught me, through books like his Writing Degree Zero, which I still reread, that “writing” (the technically untranslatable l’ecriture) can offer all the real freedom in the world as textual freedom, which no ideologically conservative movement like the neoliberal one can eradicate, unless they jail all the artists, and take away our computers, papers and pens. 

“Writing as freedom,” Barthes famously writes, is at the base of that “degree zero,” that textual substance—materiality through text—that cannot be excerpted or restated, which cannot be summarized and diminished, which can have no Reader’s Digest version. It’s not an emotional or individual-psychological “freedom” he is discussing. It’s a freedom to hold thought and to write, the “poetics” outside the polarities too often presumed to be undisturbed in our mental frame: the individual vs. group, the mastery vs. the slavery—even meaning vs. nonsense. What Barthes means by “freedom” is an unhinging of staid and settled polarizing orders of language and identity, of “meaning” itself, through the arrangements of words, syntax, contexts. 

So by “poetics” in this issue, we mean those avenues of thought (call it critical theory as shorthand) that open up rather than close down the possibilities of language to “mean” many things, up against those kinds of narrative telos, or, grand symbolic metaphors imposed upon rather than generated by language. By “poetics,” we mean language renewed, reborn, re-thought. Such freedom allows us to think differently, outside the polarities. It allows us to write without respect to prefabricated “old-coherencies” (which to most of us are not “coherent” at all). Poetics allows us to break and re-make new rules, to break again, in the uses of language. This “poetics,” this “freedom,” is a danger to neoliberal “freedom.” No wonder intellectuals in the American academy and those who think “otherwise” are targets these days. We expose the controlling metanarratives of our time. And yet these must be exposed. They must be de-coded, and disgarded, if democracy—if the planet, in fact—is to survive. 

Abigail Child, whom we honor in this issue as our Featured Multimedia Artist, describes in her writing here what it means to choose through her own film-editing work a visual language that ruptures the old controlling images, and the culturally conservative metanarratives they engender. Working with images, for Child, becomes an ethical activity, one that acts against the violence imposed by conventions that stereotype women, or Black and Brown people, and give rise to so many false conceptions of the world, leading to eruptions of physical social violence, bigotry and hatred.  

Carla Harryman, Tyrone Williams, and myself all detail in a following section our own struggles to present challenging literary works in classrooms that today’s on-campus codes about teaching may forbid. How does a university administration control multiple forms of representation and discourses on gender and race and sex in classrooms, which are now monitored by neoliberal administrations?  We all consider that question in different ways, and via the books we’ve attempted to teach, and now the books we are afraid, perhaps, to teach. Toni Simon’s Photoshop enhancements of Tarot card art, specifically the image of “The Tower” from the Rider-Waite deck, symbolizes the catastrophe upon us when professors can no longer teach major contemporary literary books—due to “trigger warnings” (which have been officially criticized by the AAUP), by parent or student complaints to administrators, or by fear of being “Title IX-ed.” UK literary scholar Grundy, along with American academics James McCorkle, Joe Harrington, and David Lau, likewise depict a toll imposed upon professors who challenge conservative polarities upheld by the university. Many of them have worked against labor polarities and hierarchies; they have fought against the dismissal of teachers as workers in the academy today. These writers talk about the struggle and defeat they’ve experienced by taking political action on their university campuses. But they also allude to possibilities for “trans*formation”—in the special uses McCorkle gives the term when he draws from Christina Sharpe’s  In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (from Duke University Press, 2016). Quoting Sharpe, McCorkle describes her notion of “trans*formation” as “an ethos of care,” but one that can only be generated by a recognition of the “dispossession” of so many in colonial history, and the effects of “the concentration of property” on US society. Call this form of “trans*formation” a neoliberal tonic, one that might reverse and play antidote to the toxic effects of neoliberal poison in contemporary US higher-ed cultures.

New York Public high-school teacher, grad student, and multimedia artist Dudgrick Bevins gives us all a “Civics Lesson” through his sound-scape piece, one that asks questions about the authoritarian moments occurring in education throughout the country in general. On the final page of the issue, he also offers some of his handmade artist books as samples / examples of a new kind of educational “freedom” in “How to Make Our Own Textbooks.” And Joanna Fuhrman offers us two wonderful poetry videos to illustrate the conundrums of the adjunct work life: many long commuter trips, very little pay. And yet Fuhrman, an ironic-comedic poet par excellence, also engages her celebratory wry humor through these multimedia works to amuse us and dazzle. How else to handle the true travesty of adjunct labor but through humor? Note that many adjuncts were asked to contribute to this issue, but they had not the time, nor the heart, I believe. They have been betrayed by the neoliberal university.

Other visual artists/poets engage the topic of the “university in crisis” in indirect ways through their talent for photography. Maria Damon’s “Frozen Wall,” on the first section page alongside Hejinian’s analysis of the neoliberal university and poetics, is a photo that almost mirrors and contrasts with her photo on the last page of the issue, that of multiple “rainbows” lying on a New York City street, both reflective of the filtered rainy-day light in an urban summertime and haunting through its broken material debris of rainbow-like chips. Damon, who has an ability to spot debris on the street and recreate it as form of art, also has a great photo of paperclips on urban asphalt in this issue.  

And alongside Schultz’s depiction in her essay of the mental-health crisis and scandal at the UHM are positioned her gorgeous photos from Volcano, Big Island, Hawaii, portraits of rust and rot, growth and garbage, in a rain forest. On the same page with her many photos and this important essay is an audio link to my talk from the original colloquy, on the phenomenon of academic mobbing. Relationships, as also “Elise Niemand” (pseudonym) shows in such beautiful witty poetic prose, will always be disproportionate to care and ethics at the Neoliberal U. Relationships will go awry, they will be thoughtless, they will hurt, they will be potentially damaging to self and others. How could they not be, given the corporate-style competitions set up among colleagues, given the polarities of the “insider” and “outsider” in fashion within so many campus departments? Given the inequities? You can listen to the talk while also playing the clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the sequence in which the character main character Melanie (Tippy Hedren) is first confronted by a flock of birds growing in number, and that I use to illustrate the onerous “mobbing” effect drawn from psychological literature on group-attack behavior that originated in a biological study of birds. (Thus, we should listen to that old-lady ornithologist in the Bodega Bay café a little more adroitly, instead of tuning her out like just another one of Hitchcock’s plot red-herrings). 

The colloquy’s original panel on “Race & Poetics in the University” is re-envisioned in this issue by a combination of short essays written by the original participants (based upon the transcripts of their talks), and with an audio recording of their actual colloquy dialogue and debate. This page brings together Harris and Williams, as well as African American literature professors Lauri Scheyer, Geoffrey Jacques, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen (who offers us poems set to his own music in .mp4 recordings rather than a prose statement). And the issue concludes with the writings of Alexander coupled with an essay by musician Susan Mohini Kane, as both poet and vocal artist seek a life outside of the academy to best develop their multimedia art. Kane gives her account of what propelled her into recent retirement, and speaks about now experiencing a gloriously productive creative life, marrying poetry with her performance work, nevertheless continuing to work with students in an open arts community beyond university walls. Alexander long ago stepped away from the university as a structure, when he began making handmade books and started his now highly regarded Chax Press. His university experience from the past mostly becomes an account of what not to do with poetry, although Alexander since has had what he calls “flirtations” with university systems, as Chax has developed.

Child’s photo on the Introduction page (to the right of the beginning of this piece) is actually a photo collage. This double and reversed set of images was used with her permission as a graphic symbol of “the university in crisis” from our March colloquy publicity. To me, her photo collage depicts through visual language how poetics and critical thought can be both rupturing, breaking the old world down, and inviting new ways of holding vision, of potentially rearranging thought itself. This image literally “breaks down the walls” as the spectator views it, and looks again. A celebrated filmmaker and multimedia artist, Child creates work about the image that can teach us to re-think the university, to re-think “vision” and all uses of images in American culture. I thank Child, also a well-regarded poet, for her many contributions to this issue, offering us so much of her work to see and experience. And once again I thank again my bold and determined collaborators, our original “Organizational” collective for the March colloquy, whose names are listed on the Introduction page, who worked tremendously hard with complete engagement in the original project for weeks. Additionally, I thank each and every collaborator from the original conference, as well as those contributing to this issue who may not have been part of that colloquy.

Our audience members who attended the colloquy last March, many of whom spoke up with such passion on these issues, also must be thanked. This attentive audience gave the rest of us the determination to keep up the discussion. With this publication of revised and expanded works from the colloquy, and including new voices and works in the process, we continue the conversation. Let us keep talking about what is wrong in the university. And let us continue to consider how poetics, honest critical thinking, and art might analyze, overcome, heal. The problems aren’t going away. We can expect them to get worse. And if “we don’t resist,” to quote the great American jazz poet Jayne Cortez’s poem “There It Is,”

…Then we will wear

The exaggerated look of captivity

The stylized look of submission

The bizarre look of suicide

The dehumanized look of fear

…the decomposed look of repression….

Cortez, who passed away in 2012, wrote this poem many years ago. She knew what was coming. She knew what she was talking about. We hear her.

—LH