getting past forms

So really I just want to plug this TNI piece from Keguro Macharia, because it really is remarkable. I recognize many of the critiques Macharia makes of the contemporary university; some I agree with, some I don't. But the piece is moving and brilliant regardless of your take on that. I particularly am moved by his discussion of his very personal relationship to Fanon, and to how a writer, long past, can be a companion in confronting exhaustion, alienation, and surrender.

One thing I want to highlight is the recognition that people look to change forms as a way of changing what's internal to forms, and it doesn't work. I have friends who left the academy, wrote me the typical "goodbye to all that" emails, and expected to emerge into a new life. Yet they find that many or most of the things they disliked in the university remained. In part, I suppose, this is just the age old observation that people tend to believe that the next step is always the one that will put their life right, and it never is. But I more mean that a lot of times people ascribe the various pathologies of different cultures (and the academy has many) to those cultures in a deracinated way, when really the contagion springs from the same sources. You may attempt to ride out the neoliberal world in a small university town in the Midwest, or you may choose to spend it in an arty enclave in a city on the coast. But the ideology of power and reaction is totalizing and it is not susceptible to geographical self-defense.

As a grad student, I have been subject to the typical gentle ribbing from the independent thinkers and young literary set who eschew that route with a variety of critiques, some deeply theoretical and some gleefully superficial. I dig that about them. But I have noted before that many of those who are most proud in their rejection of the physical and bureaucratic structure of the academy are, in every intellectual way that matters, more thoroughly graduate students than any actual graduate students I know. Indeed: the particular nature of their rejection strikes me as an implicit acceptance of the intellectual architecture of graduate education. Which is not in any sense an argument that they are doing or saying something wrong. I merely say again: escaping the form is the easy part.

For myself, I have a perhaps irrational commitment to doing everything I am doing at the moment I am doing it. I got tattoos when I was younger. People ask me, do you regret them? I can only say, when I got them, I was the person who wanted them, which is all that matters. I am in school, and so I am committed to trying the curriculum. If I am of it, I will be in it. And I was of it before I had chance to be of something else. I never had a choice.