When you separate a man from what
he loves the most what you do is purge what’s unique in him. And when you purge
what’s unique in him, you purge dissent. And when you purge dissent, you kill
the revolution. Revolution is dissent. You don’t re-write what I write!
--Jack Reed, as played
by Warren Beatty, Reds
For anyone who’s watched Reds,
what Jack Reed loves the most is not his art, or the revolution, or his
wife, but the fantasy of the artist, the revolutionary, the lover. He is, to
varying degrees, all of those things. But fantasy is about escaping from
oneself, becoming something we cannot possibly imagine what it is. What we desire is the feeling of
anticipation experienced just before the moment of transformation. The arrival
of the promised escape. And we wait, for a sign, for anything really. A
harbinger. We’re not sure. And then, one day, we ponder how something that
never existed could possibly melt away.
Or so
the high school Godot essay goes. It’s
a pity we young academics oftentimes intellectualize
these themes rather than reflect upon
them. But then again, Beckett and, to a far lesser extent, Beatty have lived some
shit. What the young academic and their high school selves lack is not intelligence,
but experience. What can we know of
Beckett when we’re 17? Or 25? Aren’t his condition and themes, for us, more
like intellectual toys we play with but think are real? How dangerous is this? Quite,
so it seems. We’re in grad school. And won’t stop bitching about it.
Our
culture treats knowledge as an unmitigated good. But perhaps it’s still the
case that some forms of knowledge are
dangerous if held at the wrong time. What do Beckett or Proust or even Hegel impart
to us at that tender age beyond the fantasy that we are on the verge of knowing
some hidden truths about life and the world? The Beckettian references, the
Proustian gestures, the Hegelian dialectics are nothing but accumulated
cultural capital and seemingly existential
comforts. One should never read Beckett and feel that he’s been mastered.
But that’s all the young person can
do.
It’s
painfully ironic, then, that Godot
and works like it have become their own sort of Godot for us: by devoting our
lives to these texts and others like them we’ll one day achieve transformative
knowledge. The act of reading Godot is the promise of escape.[1]
And when transformative knowledge awaits, the gamble of tenure can be easily
rationalized.
The life of an academic, just like
the life of an activist, is a life of ritual. And ritual, as the anthropologists
tell us, opens us up to transformation. In Reds
Jack Reed performs all those required of the Marxist activist: the gestures,
the meetings, the agitations, the speeches and polemics. Each action is thought
to further prepare you for the transformation. It will purify your body and
mind, make you ready. Just have faith in the rituals themselves.
Academia, like activism, is no
different. It’s a mood, a collection of gestures, objects, and arguments. It’s
what you wear. How you talk. The secret language you speak. The dusty book
stacks. The tenor of your thoughts. The arguments as they are framed. The very
problems that you consider. These all prepare us for transformation.
It would seem, then, that in
leaving academia, we’re abandoning this project. That we, like Jack, have
watched the fantasy melt away. But I doubt it. A constant gripe among academics
in the humanities and social thought is about the stultifying nature of
academic writing and argumentative conventions. Liberation from this confinement
is an important and prominent theme in much of “quit lit”. But if this is the
case, what’s being abandoned is not the fantasy, but the ritual. The ritual,
you see, was tarnished. By modernity. By capitalism. By liberalism. It’s time
for a new ritual at a new site far away from the academy. Because the academy
is now wicked. It’s tainted. Its oracular properties disturbed.
It’s time, then, to found a new
religion.
[1] It’s
astounding, yet understandable, how so many supposed readers of Nietzsche fall
into this trap.
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