The American Comparative Literature Association conference at NYU was interesting.
The program made a late-breaking attempt to link the conference to punk rock. You might not think that punk had a precise birthdate, but apparently it was March 31, 1974, when the band Television played at CBGB. Therefore punk is 40 years old.
It's not a particularly punk way of approaching punk to historicize an anti-historicist movement, but then again this is academia. And if you look at the small print at the bottom of the one ACLA seminar devoted to punk, you'll see that anyone who wanted to attend the conference - even to see one meager talk about the birth of punk rock, or community theater - had to pay $35. And that "low" rate was only for students with valid student ID.
I wrote to the conference organizers asking for permission for students to attend the conference for free. A couple people in our class had said they might want to come. The organizers told me that students would be welcome to attend but only if they paid the $35 undergraduate student registration fee. No exceptions could be made... because of "security." I tried to think my way around this rule, proposing registration without a fee, or perhaps Oberlin paying the fee, but no dice.
I just couldn't swallow that, so I didn't bring up the conference again in class. In all honesty, I was ashamed of the ACLA and of academia more generally. I thought it was unbelievably stupid to require undergraduate students to pay anything to attend an academic talk. And it only increased when in my ACLA seminar on community theater we ended up discussing the insane monetization of academic labor today.
The seminar papers also had other themes in common, many of which we have been discussing in our class: the search for new ways of researching and writing the history of cultural movements that have been elided or outright erased from public histories; the meaning of the avant-garde in relation to the popular and the non-dichotomy of the two; and how theory can help to rethink the political dimensions of art.
Yet the overarching theme for me - punk's birthday notwithstanding - was the monetization of both art and academia: I couldn't help thinking of how - for most of us scholars, but also for our students - the most important parts of education are intensively dialogic experiences. Education happens, in other words, through encounters and dialogues, doing unfamiliar things and discussing the experiences. And yet this is rendered almost entirely invisible in the metrics that assess faculty productiveness and student learning. (The very word "metric," used as noun by educational administrators, makes me tense up.)
It's hard for me not to relate the excessive flattening of education so that it fits into overly simple quantitative metrics to its monetization. There is an attitude that because the cost of education has skyrocketed (tuition, but also living expenses, books, resources and materials, and money for access to opportunities, especially in the age of the unpaid internship), therefore "we" (professors) must be sure to give students what they are paying for. And there is a kind of subtle judgment involved, particularly for those of us who teach in the humanities - and even more particularly the less "practical" our subject matter. As though somehow our very fields - literature, theater, let alone marginalized forms and genres - are hurting students, preparing them to fail to get jobs.
Education is not the same thing as "hirability" by the standards of some random asshole who wants someone to be a personal servant, or even a tractable and serviceable assistant, or a coffeemaker.
Yet at Oberlin we don't seem to take seriously enough the idea (which to me is obvious, as it was to administrators at Harvard in 2008, and then at Yale, and then elsewhere) that the high cost of tuition is simply unethical, and needs to be lowered. That, furthermore, a living wage should be non-negotiable for faculty, and that the reliance on part-time and adjunct labor at colleges should be a last-ditch solution, not the new norm at the expense of sustainability. That it is unacceptable that some students not have enough money to take advantages of key educational opportunities at college, even if they were fortunate enough to get the financial aid to attend.
The avant-garde resists identification with money (check out Value-Form and Avant-Garde); and selling out is one of the most obvious forms of capture. Doing anything in life - let alone trying to make a living as an artist - involves quantum leaps from line of flight to capture to line of flight, and it isn't always obvious which is which. Just look at the Wu-Tang Clan's new album.
In my ACLA seminar, we discussed the idea of creating an avant-garde academic collective or workshop (workshop in the sense of the Brecht collective's sense of collaborative creation, not in the sense of being subjected to a powerpoint presentation on uses of Blackboard for expository writing while eating lunch out of a bag). We are still talking now about how to potentiate meaningful, ongoing collaborations when the very idea of it flies in the face of the academy's myth of the lone scholar as the unit of production, the sole genius, the single author. How to do this when we aren't given the time to do it, or the money to do it, because it isn't already monetized. How to build a movement that is not "just" a labor movement nor "just" an intellectual movement, but a truly avant-garde movement in the measure that it is always both simultaneously.
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