Me, Queer Theorist

In 2017, as a sociologist friend (hi Margarita!) and I were finishing our PhDs and facing the academic job market, we were also, I can’t remember why, rediscovering queer theory, which we’d largely forgotten about since college several years before. In an attempt to think through—or maybe just mourn—what seemed like the collapse of professional futures (not only for ourselves but for our friends, cohorts, and fields) and crazy-making imperatives to keep on the narrowing path to conventional success, we ended up writing the following article, which appeared in an edited volume addressing the ‘Slow’ movement in the academy.

The latter is so totally misguided that now I wouldn’t bother engaging with it (which we do in the first half of the essay through a review of a pro-Slow book). What’s more remarkable to me now is how useful we found, at that moment, strains of queer theory running through Halberstam, Edelman and Berlant (the matter of the essay’s second half)—useful for thinking together about how our precarious professional positions did somehow also feel like our being sexual minorities (is it gay to be poor?), insofar as both, in a political climate of impasse or in which events happened without any possibility of our acting on/in them, seemed to only offer imperatives/possibilities for giving up on traditional expectations of futurity and having to rather sadly ‘re-imagine’ possibilities for social reproduction and survival (re-imagining—indeed like queering—is one of those words that when someone uses it, lets you know you’re going to be eating a shit sandwich; I’ve been re-imagining what I want ever since Mom told me Santa isn’t real but the ‘Spirit of Christmas’ is. No! Bring me Santa!).

It was telling that neither of us were involved in grad student unions, and neither of us took very seriously (dismissing in a sentence) the possibility of political organization leading to change at the local or national-economic level. Queer theory and its ethics of self-interpretation are a sort of poor substitute for that, or what has to serve in its absence, or what justifies our not joining The Movement.

As we say towards the end: …In the absence of a structural transformation in the university, there may be no one solution that will work for all academics, only a multitude of custom-made dodges, short-cuts, and escapes by which scholars find ways to survive. Rather than going slow, they may have to go queer, pursuing “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.”

Which, one, we did—so I guess, good/bad on us for following our own advice. And of course, while I appreciate the good things grad student unions—often just by the threat of their possible emergence—brought about in the past several years, they did often strike me as a LARP akin to that of the DSA. I’m sympathetic to the ends to be achieved, more or less, but the sort of people I knew who got involved in such things seemed to be rather looking for an activity into which they could throw a lot of time and passion.

‘Material’ interests, conditions, politics, are what such people talk a lot about, but that materiality doesn’t after all don’t account well for their own psychic investment in the rituals of performing being workers (which grad students and precarious academics so clearly are not—or maybe many and evermore are, both at the most desperate end of adjuncting hand-to-mouth immiseration and at the super-productive Stakhanovite pinnacle of 2-articles-in-top-journals-a-year R1 field-leaders—neither of whom lives anything like the free and easome life of mind I had imagined as the point, or practice, of being an intellectual—indeed as much as it may be impolitic to admit it, doesn’t one want to become one of the latter to avoid work? Aren’t I too good for working—or at least as Warren Zevon sings in the ‘The French Inhaler,’ ‘not cut out’ for it? If not always dumb enough to go around saying so).

As soon as I had finished course(uh,)work I went to Europe and stayed for several years (I am on the barest of technicalities in Europe now) so in telling myself to pursue custom-made dodges rather than sit around in or join the collective struggle against our politico-economic impasse, I guess I was also, as the kids say, telling on myself. I am more the Ashberrian Pierrot than the militant, however much I might essayistically militiate against antipolitical essayism… I am rich in contradictions—which often have left me, however, fairly close to broke.

Oh well. The original essay, which I copy and paste below, stands as a sort of personal way-marker of my imagining leaving the academy, and, intellectually, of my, I think in retrospect rather mistakenly, seeing something in queer theory’s attempt to bring its hesitating between melancholia and hope out of its original context of speculations on the possibility of alternative communities and life-paths and put that hesitating to bear on our collective problems (something queer theorists are increasingly and mistakenly doing these days).

I kept thinking with Berlant and Edelman at the beginning of Covid, when, invoking Arendt, I insisted on what I saw as the limitations, or indeed the impossibility of productively using the melancholic ethical (having to do with individual conduct and the making of a particular life through practices and self-interpretations) stance of this queer theory to address political (collective, normative… and ‘mythic’/delusional) problems.

But the point isn’t to reject queer theory, which in that later essay and elsewhere I link, although queers may not like it, to liberalism in its insistence on how we are all secret antinomian perverts, different from others and more importantly from whoever we take to be ourselves—how a good life of our own is always at odds with visions of the common good (see my essays on Joseph Litvak, Philip Rieff, Roland Barthes etc), which are nevertheless the unavoidable platform for the political activity required to sustain the basis for life.

Instead, one of the things I want to do moving forward is to hold onto what I see as the antipolitical, privately antinormative, perversely universalist and thus in its ethics liberal dimension of queer theory, while better incorporating it with the form of Arendtian/Foucauldian identity politics (which we could call, it its desire to invent and address a world of people, democratic) I find in the work of Michael Denneny and Christopher Street.

A recovery and balance of both the problematics opened up by queer (a universal insight into the difference of the particular; the ethics of self-reinvention amid the inadequacy and necessity of social and political norms that threaten our vital, private negativity and its resources for remaking ourselves) and by gay (the creation of a new particular communitarian world; the possibility of being a minority without oppression or resentment), in which those terms, queer and gay relate to each other as liberal relates to democracy, such that liberal democracy, so obviously everywhere tottering and unlikable, can be thought anew from the perspective of the perpetual outsiders and minorities we all, at least in America, necessarily are. Tall order!

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Well, anyway, here’s that old essay:

Queerness Over Time: Slowness, Speed, and the Chronopolitics of Scholarship

Margarita Rayzberg and Blake Smith

            Slowness is a privilege many in academia cannot afford. Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber make a moving (although not always convincing) case for a slower pace of academic life in The Slow Professor (2016). They condemn the imperative to haste in research and teaching that issues from increasingly corporatized university administrations and, less explicitly but perhaps more dangerously, from intense competition for permanent academic jobs. Early career scholars may wish to heed this call to slowness; who would not want more freedom to “act with purpose, taking the time for deliberation, reflection and dialogue”?1 But time is not for these scholars' taking. As they shuttle from one temporary, precarious position to another, they know that their careers may come to a sudden end upon the failure of any given year’s job search. Nevertheless, the search for jobs, postdocs, and research funding compels them to perform optimism, as they write grant requests that anticipate fascinating findings, craft course descriptions and syllabi for prospective employers, and try to impress senior scholars with their ‘promise,’ i.e., with a sense that their careers are headed to bright futures. This double-bind, in which the future is experienced as anxiety but must be represented as bearing the assurance of success, seems to preclude the possibility that junior scholars could find the temporal dimension of their work a source of experiment and empowerment rather than dread.

            We should know. As graduate students in the humanities and social sciences at a major North American university, we find ourselves in a complicated, frustrating relationship with time. Berg and Seeber’s opposition of slowness and speed seems unable to account for the contradictions of our situation, which offers a great deal of ‘free time,’ i.e., years of unstructured archival research, field work, and dissertation-writing, and a plethora of pressures to use that time with maximum efficiency. Facing an academic job market in which we can expect, if we are lucky, to spend years in a limbo of short-term positions, we often feel a tug of worry urging us to research more, present more, network more, and publish more, even as we have no way of knowing what combination, if any, of articles, grants, and personal connections may unlock the door to professional stability. We are perhaps particularly subject to the system that Hartmut Rosa identifies as “late-modern temporality.” In this relationship to time, individuals, pushed by the “silent force of temporal norms” rather than by directives issued by a visible authority, strive to be as efficient and busy as possible, out of fear that “in a competitive society with accelerated rules of social change... taking a prolonged break means becoming old-fashioned, out-of-date.”2 Thus, for us, going slow may mean becoming an unemployable anachronism.

            While acknowledging some of the professional risks that a ‘slow’ approach to scholarship entails, Berg and Seeber argue that slowness will lead to better research, teaching, and interactions with colleagues. Changing the pace of academic life, they claim, will pay off for individual scholars and the academy as a whole. This line of argument, we intend to show, makes untenable promises about the rewards scholars and institutions can expect to receive from slowing down. Berg and Seeber’s analysis founders because it rests on an understanding of time that is simplistic and contradictory. Rather than explore the stresses that are created by the experience of time as a scarce commodity, or by the feeling of hurtling fretfully through one’s work, we focus on an experience of time characterized by uncertainty about how much is available, what should be done with it, and where it is headed. We offer an alternative framework for interpreting academics’ experience of time, exploring the structures that produce academic temporalities while connecting personal and institutional levels of analysis.

            If we criticize Berg and Seeber’s account of time as experienced by academics, it is in part because the framework that they provide authorizes us to do so. Borrowing insights from feminist critique, they foreground “personal narratives,” centering their own experiences of time alongside scholarly literature on psychology, pedagogy and the workplace. We are indebted to their analysis, which allows us to likewise analyze our own experiences in order to arrive, hopefully, at larger truths about “the secret life of the academic.”4 We begin by outlining what we see as the problems of Berg and Seeber’s analysis of academic time and the self-defeating advice that follows from it. After revealing the ways in which The Slow Professor remains entangled in the neoliberal framework that Berg and Seeber seek to resist, we analyze our own experience of time as early career scholars, which, understood through conversations in queer theory, points to new pathways for resistance to the worsening working conditions and widespread anxieties of academic life.

Timeless Wisdom for Neoliberal Subjects

            The temporality that Berg and Seeber imagine is one in which individuals modify their use of time and their relation to it in order to experience greater autonomy and happiness. Insofar as it is a series of quantifiable units, time is available for investment; insofar as it is a set of experiences, time is open to re-interpretation. In both aspects, Berg and Seeber warn, time has been made to work against academics, who find themselves with too few hours in the day and too much time-related stress. The authors insist, however, that scholars can take back control over their time, urging readers to re-invest in practices of relaxation and collegiality and to foster an orientation towards time that savors the present moment while anticipating the rewards that a ‘slow’ lifestyle is sure to bring.

            The understanding of time at work in The Slow Professor is in part a function of the book’s position at the meeting of two genres: texts of the Slow movement, and self-help literature. Each of these genres has its own problematic assumptions about time. In the following section, we will show how the temporalities of the self-help literature and the Slow movement draw Berg and Seeber into giving advice that recapitulates the injunctions and inequalities of the neoliberal university that they are trying to resist.

            The Slow Professor is, as its authors state, a “self-help book.”5 While Berg and Seeber mention that “this book is also addressed to graduate students,” it belongs, essentially, to the body of self-help literature pitched to middle-aged, upper-middle-class professionals.6 This is a group, it seems, that experiences a great deal of stress, not least the stress that comes from expecting that life ought to be rather more mindful, restful, and joyful than it is. It is also this class that, through self-help books, lifestyle blogs, and other media articulates a vision of well-being in which individual subjects are framed as responsible for their own mental and physical health. Cultivating well-being, in this perspective, is both a possibility available to individuals and an imperative placed upon them. Indeed, the self-help genre, almost by definition, seems to rest on a foundation of individualism. Self-help authors’ claims about the power of individuals to transform their own lives celebrate personal agency while suggesting that failure and unhappiness are the lot of those who fail to exercise their agency appropriately. The reader of self-help literature is not encouraged to look outwards, towards social structures that prevent individual flourishing, but inwards, towards aspects of themselves that can be transformed.

            As a discourse of individualism that places responsibility and blame on agents rather than structures, the self-help genre is ideally suited to the ideology of neoliberalism. Indeed, even self-help advice that aims at promoting happiness and psychological well-being often has a covert relationship to economic demands for greater productivity. As Sam Binkley argues in his analysis of happiness in the era of neoliberalism, individual well-being is increasingly seen as an economic asset, since happy, healthy workers are reasoned to be more productive and creative than sickly malcontents. Through techniques touted by self-help gurus, it is widely claimed that individuals can further their professional success even as they deepen their joy. Here there is no contradiction between being true to one’s most personal desires, feelings and aspirations on the one hand, and attaining one’s maximum performance as an economic agent on the other.7

            Berg and Seeber are not uncritical of the self-help genre. They call attention to the ways in which self-help literature pitched at academics often produces more of the stress it is meant to alleviate. Academics, they observe, are already worried about not having enough time to do what they imagine that they will need to do in order to secure (or justify having) a permanent job. Advice literature aimed at improving productivity risks encouraging academics to speed up their unhealthy paces of work, and to scrutinize their use of time with still more intensity. Meanwhile, the authors note, the real cause of academic stress, the university itself (and the larger economic system behind it), goes unchallenged. Having observed the pitfalls of existing self-help literature, Berg and Seeber then leap into them, advising readers to take on a heightened sense of responsibility for their own uses and experiences of time.

            In what strikes them as a radical alternative to time management, they urge readers to take “regular sessions of timeless time” in which they can relaxedly “do nothing” or become single-mindedly engrossed in an activity, no longer keeping an eye on the clock or their email. Berg and Seeber assure us that these sessions will boost our scholarly performance. This means, however, that the sessions serve as a supplement to the neoliberal logic of productivity, rather than as a site of genuine resistance to it. Readers are warned, however, that not only do therapeutic sessions of timeless time need to come at scheduled intervals, but that they will “take longer than you planned.”8

            Such advice raises questions. How much timeless time should we pencil in this afternoon? How will we know when we have had enough? If going timeless is good for productivity, can we be reimbursed for it? Beyond the ridiculousness of trying to schedule an encounter with the ineffable, Berg and Seeber’s advice exposes some of the fundamental problems of the concept of time on which the arguments of The Slow Professor are built. The authors suppose that academics can manipulate their experiences of time through meditative techniques and sound planning. This ignores the ways in which experiences of time ground individual agency. On the one hand, much of our orientation to time is shaped by the demands of institutions such as the university system, or by broader forces like economic system in which we work. On the other hand, even our most personal experiences of time, those that elude such bureaucratic and economic imperatives, may not be ‘ours’ to control and may resist the injunctions of a happiness-maximizing self. Even if it is possible to harness timeless time as a tool to boost productivity, doing so risks collapsing the  possibility of a distinction between professional and private life, a move which furthers the particular kind of “colonization of the lifeworld” characteristic of neoliberalism.9 Critical of the corporate university’s demands on its employees’ time, Berg and Seeber call for academics to use their own fleeting experience of freedom from such demands as a resource for meeting them more efficiently.

            The entanglement of Berg and Seeber’s approach with neoliberal temporal imperatives is seen still more clearly in their promotion of collegial behavior as an investment of time. Here they draw less on self-help and more on the Slow movement, which “urges us to immerse ourselves in local cultures,” including that of our home departments.10 Berg and Seeber find that collegiality, a value they associate with such actions as helping colleagues, listening to students’ concerns, and other  moments of affect-rich interaction, has become scarce on today’s campuses. Scholars, they explain, find that maintaining meaningful connections with those around them (even to the minimal degree of paying attention during faculty meetings) is a waste of time that would be better spent doing research, writing lectures, or doing some other form of individual work. Berg and Seeber acknowledge that performing inter-personal interactions with greater frequency, affect, and sincerity may present some initial costs. Going slow, in the first instance, “may actually mean being inefficient at times.”11 Yet they also assert that, in the final calculation, practices of collegiality will reap rewards. People who work in collegial environments will be happier, healthier and thus more productive. When time is seen as a collective resource to be shared with colleagues and enjoyed, slowly, over affect-rich interactions, there is more of it to go around.

            Berg and Seeber frame collegiality as a form of resistance to demands placed by the university on professors’ time. An unfriendly workplace, they warn, enables the “corporate university” to isolate its workers, turning them against each other and “further instrumentalizing us.”12 They are horrified by the “instrumental view not only of time but also each other” that the contemporary pressures on academic life produce.13 Berg and Seeber, however, propose only a more subtle, sociable mode of instrumentalizing one’s colleagues. From the vantage they offer, our peers should not be seen simply as vectors of potential intrusions on our time, but also as means of accessing desirable psychological and physical states linked to the efficient, productive use of time. The same tensions that troubled Berg and Seeber’s calls to appreciate “timeless time” reemerge in their repeated injunctions that collegiality only works (only produces positive states of mind and body) when interactions are voluntary, candid and authentic. Yet anyone pursuing collegiality after being inspired by The Slow Professor is necessarily taking an instrumental view of their colleagues, seeing interaction with them as a means of creating a healthful, stress-reducing atmosphere.

Even as they call for academics to disconnect from obsessive over-work and reconnect with colleagues, Berg and Seeber insist that these forms of slowing down will contribute to academic success. The mode of slow temporality associated with personal life (the time of friendship, self-care, relaxation), characterized by spontaneity and the suspension of anxiety, appears as an economic resource to be harnessed for the needs of professional life. Slowing down appears as a more efficient form of being a “neoliberal subject” whose worth is measured in output. Berg and Seeber long to escape this form of subjectivity, which they compare to becoming a “machine.”14 Yet the alternative form of subjectivity they sketch, however full of emotion, is no freer than the mechanical, stressed-out subject of neoliberalism. Berg and Seeber’s slow subjectivity requires carefully monitoring and controlling one’s affect, interactions with colleagues, and sense of time in order to achieve pre-determined ends. In the name of happiness, it extends the neoliberal burden of self-management into a more intimate realm.

Queerness, not Slowness

            Berg and Seeber's advice fails on its own terms. The notion of time to which the authors are committed is a neoliberal one, in which time, and the experience of time, is understood as a form of capital available to be exploited by individuals. This understanding of time not only leads to calls for self-defeating practice, but also ignores the experiences of early career scholars. Authorizing ourselves to generalize outward from our own lives, as Berg and Seeber do, we argue that the Slow Professor framework overlooks three critical features of our cohort’s relationships to time. First, the experiences of early career scholars are multiple and contradictory. Second, these experiences are produced by unequal structures of power at institutional and social levels. Third, because of the excess of new PhDs relative to shrinking number of permanent positions, early career scholars are likely headed towards professional failure. Only by accounting for these features of junior scholars time, we argue, can viable strategies of resistance be developed.

            In order to make sense of junior scholars’ relationship to time as lived reality, as effect of structure, and as potential site of resistance, we employ three respective concepts. The first of these, queer temporalities, allows us to explore the ways in which academics’ time is fragmented, ambivalent, and disoriented. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Jack Halberstam and Lee Edelman, we argue that grad students, postdocs, adjuncts, and other early career scholars experience less a single, straightforward imperative to speed, than a jumble of temporalities.15 These scholars are not only over-worked, under-paid, and too busy; they are living at a conjuncture when the timeline of scholarly achievement, progressing from coursework to exams to dissertation to job and finally to producing students of one’s own, is increasingly unviable. As the gap between the number of Ph.D. students in the humanities and the number of tenure-track jobs continues to widen, our practice as scholars is not underwritten by any assurance that we will reproduce the careers of our advisors. We are, in a sense, children who may never become adults, much less have children of our own.

            Yet, we also experience luxuries of time unavailable to many other workers. However, our relative freedom from explicit rules concerning our everyday use of time leaves us particularly exposed to the pressures of Rosa’s “temporal norms,” or internalized social pressures concerning the proper use of our time. While we may plan, or justify, each day’s activities in terms of their contribution to the trajectory of our career, such time-managed days may only be moving us closer to a professional dead end. We are, all at once, free to spend time how we want, forced to regiment our time with great care, and faced with the possibility that the future will be a blank. Early career scholars, then, can be compared to queer subjects whose lives resist, exceed, or come up short of being emplotted in terms of such milestones of heteronormative achievement as marriage and childbirth. As queer subjects, such scholars may experience their position as a dizzying but liberatory extended adolescence, unrestrained by expectations about ‘growing up’ and living out a productive, future-oriented commitment to time (Halberstam), or as a negative space without identity, community, law, or direction (Edelman).

            We argue that this understanding of experience of time has greater application to the lives of early career scholars than does the model of the time-scarce, harried professor sketched by Berg and Seeber. We insist, moreover, that our experiences of time and our representations of those experiences are conditioned by structural forces that escape our control and indeed often our attention. Berg and Seeber call attention to time-related stresses that come from within academic institutions and, to a lesser extent, from broader economic conjunctures. We refer to the field of forces, structures, and norms that constitute individuals’ relationships to time by outfitting them with constraints, freedoms and orientations as chronopolitics. The term has most often been used to examine the values surrounding individuals’ sense of time in the course of their decision-making. Here, however, we are concerned with the production of a sense of time, in particular with how the power to make decisions that distribute different quantities and qualities of time (time-as-stress, time-as-freedom, time-as-promising-future, etc.) is distributed in the university.16

            The time that Berg, Seeber, and their interlocutors experience is not the same time that exists for early career scholars, and the former have a certain degree of power over both their own experience of time and that of their junior colleagues. In the midst of a general movement throughout contemporary societies towards greater speed, there are strange islands of slowness. Rosa, describing cases of “pathological” inertia, points to the example of the traffic jam, in which drivers, pressured to get to their destinations as quickly as possible, find themselves contributing to a situation in which no one can move.17 We might think of the aspiring scholar immobilized by depression, but we might also consider situations in which inertia seems pathological to some but justifiable to others. Academia instills feelings of nervous haste in researchers, but slowness abounds among reviewers for peer-review journals and administrators negotiating with unions. To focus on the ‘fast,’ research-oriented aspect of the neoliberal university is to ignore the many ways certain agents produce and profit from slowness.

            The concepts of chronopolitics and queer temporalities work together. Chronopolitics recognizes an uneven distribution of authority concerning time, and queer temporalities requires that resistance to the norms and pressures emerging from such temporal authority be multiple and fragmented, rather than understood simply in terms of velocity. By presenting slowness as the privileged form of resistance, Berg and Seeber offer a program for action that is, as Steve Pile says in another context, “the underside of the map of domination.”18 They accept, in other words, the schema of time produced by the chronopolitical forces that dominate the university: as a resource available to individuals, to be managed well or poorly, with the successful skillfully investing their time and gaining returns of happiness, while stressed-out failures flounder. Our perspective complicates this notion of time as a commodity accessible to individuals, insisting that individuals experience multiple kinds of time all at once, and that these experiences are structured by forces beyond their control.

            Drawing on a conversation among queer theorists Halberstam, Edelman and Carla Freccero, we propose to think of time not as a resource at the disposal of agents, but rather as the medium through which they become, and can make sense of their becoming, future dead people. Freccero introduces the concept in an observation about her own sense of mortality: “as time goes by I have begun to think of myself as a future dead person writing myself out of my time while my time is running out.”19 She underscores the ways in which time refuses to be a commodity at our disposal, by moving past us as we attempt to use it, by drawing us into forms of obsolescence, nostalgia, and other states of being out of sync with the present, and by hurtling us toward our disappearance from the world. Edelman, declaring himself struck by this formulation, argues that “in writing we’re always already dead,” insofar as the act of writing is governed by an “unrecognizable drive” that is not the self of the writer.20 Even as we marshal units of time for writing, research, etc., and even as we remind ourselves to perform these tasks slowly and deliberately, we might find that by their very nature they elude the purposive self. To this Halberstam enthusiastically answers, “Future dead people of the world unite!” Refusing the negativity of Edelman's formulation, Halberstam notes that even as one considers oneself “dead” one is also necessarily imagining oneself as part of a particular community with a particular orientation towards time: “there are so many situations when one might feel that one is definitely among future dead people like department meetings, for example. I jest, of course, but notice how impossible it is not to create community and a future, even if that community is made up of the dead.”21

            Halberstam's “jest” makes it possible to consider a leap from literal death, and the orientation towards mortality that Edelman places at the center of queerness, towards a consideration of the metaphorical sorts of death at play in the academic labor market. Indeed, if sitting in a department meeting as a tenured professor evokes the feeling of being a “future dead person,” the situation of those without tenure is still more fraught with intimations of mortality.

            In the current labor market, early career scholars can easily appear as a community of the soon-to-be dead. Time is always running out on our Ph.D. funding or fellowship contracts; if we manage to land another temporary position, we appear only to have dodged, for a moment, the professional death that is still pursuing us. Indeed, not only is it easy to imagine ourselves ending up in the rejection pile of academic failures, but academia itself to be lurching towards the grave. The kind of academic positions enjoyed by our advisors are disappearing, and in the current political and economic climate, the situation seems more likely to worsen, perhaps catastrophically, than to improve. The future of academic life, marked by the expansion of the administrative bureaucracy and of an under-paid, precariously employed teaching staff, less and less resembles its past. The rules of success in a changing academia are undetermined and uncertain. They are being rewritten by forces outside the sphere of traditional scholarship. Under such conditions, the strain of imaginatively projecting ourselves into a future in which we will succeed (in terms recognizable to our advisors) may be a case of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” the kind of hopefulness that orients action towards counter-productive ends.22

            Our success as scholars will be assured neither by frenzied submission to the temporal pressures of academia, nor by commitment to slower practices of thinking, writing, and service. Indeed, given the distribution of power over academic time among politicians, administrators, and (to a more limited extent) senior faculty, individual academics are likely to be unable to do much to steer their time in either direction. Taking control of our ‘own’ time, we posit, would require a large-scale collective effort to reform the chronopolitics of the academy. Participating even in local union drives and graduate student meetings, however, can appear like a sacrifice (or a waste) of one’s time; in the near future, no liberatory structural changes seem forthcoming. Reluctantly, we suggest that there may be no single, definitive answer to academics’ problematic, stress-producing experience of time. In the absence of a structural transformation in the university, there may be no one solution that will work for all academics, only a multitude of custom-made dodges, short-cuts, and escapes by which scholars find ways to survive. Rather than going slow, they may have to go queer, pursuing “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices.”23

            Time appears here as an overpowering force that eventually sweeps away those living within it, prying them away from each other. But it is also, as Halberstam insists, a medium within which subjects recognize each other as part of a community. Early career scholars, even as they pursue their own personal queer exit strategies, might benefit from seeing themselves and their colleagues as part of a community of future dead people, whose careers are bound to be stopped by a metaphorical mortality in the form of a failed job search. This perspective allows us to experience a non-straightforward relationship to scholarly practice, decoupling it from an imagined personal timeline moving towards a permanent job and located within the life-history of a discipline. It also allows us to remember that our very practice as researchers necessarily resists, or at least runs counter to, the temporal norms of the corporate university, entangling us in a temporally diverse community that includes the literal dead.

            Scholarly work, from this perspective, appears as participation in a kind of open-ended archive, a particular form of temporal play. Early career scholars, whose careers may ‘die’ before even starting, reach back in time to engage with people who are or might be quite literally dead, using historical sources and writing back to scholarship from previous generations. We resurrect events and ideas that were deemed irrelevant, insert ourselves into conversations that seemed over, and insist on the importance of actors and texts that have been ignored. While our work thus engages with the past, it is also subject to the future, as our work itself becomes part of the archive of dead, forgotten texts that scholars may or may not revive. Scholarly writing aims at intervention in contemporary debates, at achieving relevance and visibility, but it is precisely as something overlooked, unseen, and apparently dead that it may disclose itself as a ‘discovery’ to future scholars. As a conversation among those already dead, those about to die, and those coming after our deaths, scholarship necessarily chafes the corporate university’s demand for research productivity, understood as the fast, regular creation of obviously useful pieces of knowledge.

            In making their case for a slow ethic of scholarship, Berg and Seeber suggest that some of what we might call the queer aspects of academic life, if properly understood, can be resources for navigating the corporate university with less stress and greater efficiency. The uncanny temporality of scholarship, the moments of ‘timelessness’ in our private lives, the warmth and authenticity of personal relationships with colleagues, however, do not appear to us as forms of capital that can be reinvested in professional success. Understood as expressions of the queerness of scholars’ lives, they appear not as inputs to be managed through a system of result-driven time-management, but as reminders of what the current chronopolitics of higher education denies and endangers: the rich, fraught, fractured multiplicity of time.

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1           Berg and Seeber, Slow Professor, 11.

2    Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, 41, 32.

4    Berg and Seeber, Slow Professor, 12.

5    Berg and Seeber, 13.

6    Berg and Seeber, ix.

7    Binkley, Happiness as Enterprise.

8    Berg and Seeber, Slow Professor, 30-31.

9    Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 371.

1                0           Berg and Seeber, Slow Professor, 75.

1     1      Berg and Seeber, 60.

1     2      Berg and Seeber, 14-15.

1     3      Berg and Seeber, 72.

1     4      Berg and Seeber, 59.

1     5      Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure; Edelman, No Future.

1     6      Klinke, “Chronopolitics.”

1     7      Rosa, Alienation, 35.

1     8      Pile, “Introduction,”, 23.

1     9      Dinshaw et al.,  “Queer Temporalities,” 184.

2     0      Dinshaw et al. “Queer Temporalities,” 189.

2     1      Dinshaw et al. “Queer Temporalities,” 194.

2                2  Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

2                3  Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place,1.

            Bibliography

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            Binkley, Sam. Happiness as Enterprise: An Essay on Neoliberal Life. Albany: SUNY Press, 2014.

            Dinshaw, Carolyn and Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher S. Nealon, Tan Hoang Nguyen. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13, no. 2-3 (2007):177-195.

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            Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

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            Pile, Steve. “Introduction: Opposition, Political Identities and Spaces of Resistance.” In Geographies of Resistance edited by Michael Keith and Steve Pile, 1-31. New York: Routledge, 1997.

            Rosa, Hartmut. Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmö: NSU Press, 2014.