From Academia is Killing My Friends:
#78
An academic from another university once told the grad students in my program that we should treasure every moment of our time here, because he’d never seen a department with such positive and supportive interpersonal relationships. I’m entering my fifth year now, and his statement has proven true time and time again. My advisor, my committee members, even our faculty in other subdisciplines - everyone has been wonderful to me. I feel so much better for having had them in my life.
Knowing this makes me even more ashamed of how much I am struggling. I know they would be supportive if I told them about my mental health problems, my socioeconomic problems, my loneliness and isolation. But I couldn’t bear the thought of letting them down. So instead I buy scalpels and cut patterns into my chest, take lit cigarettes and apply them to my arms, binge copiously on food and vomit it up before bedtime. Knowing how much they do care about me is the only thing keeping me from suicide. And that thought shames me most of all - because I don’t know what I’m going to do when I finally finish and have to learn, first hand, the other side of what that academic was talking about.I can't stress enough how much I appreciate the work being done by this blog for graduate students like myself. This suffering should be archived. But at the same time, it threatens, gently, to tip over into a perverse voyeurism, made all the more twisted because we have a sense that we are looking at ourselves. I know this because of the other end of the graduate student in pain continuum, a comic strip that actively invites us to seek out our suffering.
Exploited, mostly. None of the characters in the PHD Comics like their work. To
be sure, there are sub-comics which celebrate certain projects, but the core
set of characters are never seen to enjoy what they do. Not only do they hate
the paperwork and teaching, but their investment in their own identities qua research
is notably joyless. Note the dour expressions (though fudge factor seems to be having an alright time):
We could say, superficially, that this comic strip demystifies
the aura of the academy, poking fun at the reality of the life of the mind. O wicked pen of satire, not our sacred cows! But the logic of admiration runs in a more
complicated direction. Desacralizing might, counterintuitively, fuel the power
of the sacred (Michael Taussig, Defacement).
Watching our own exploitation doesn’t drive us away; graduate students love to
see ourselves suffer. There is a certain degree of masochism involved, as
everyone knows.
Psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent in his 1990 essay “Masochism,Submission, Surrender: Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender” offers a view of
what he calls “surrender,” which he argues “convey[s] a quality of liberation
and expansion of the self as a corollary to the letting down of defensive
barriers” (1). Such surrender is not, as classical psychoanalytic theory would
hold, a sublimation or compromise formation stemming from a more primary sexual
masochism. Instead, this essay assumes—or attests to—something in the subject
that desires a cure from the ways in which we lie to ourselves. Surrender is an
unmaking of the self, giving oneself over, a fracturing of the false selves
which we erect around our kernels. Yet, Ghent writes, this is a frightening
prospect, a disorganizing experience which unmoors identity; faced against each
other, our sense of identity and the force which compels us to surrender produce
a comprise formation of masochism which reimagines the act of giving oneself over, the surrendering of our false selves, as fantasies of domination and submission. The analyst confronted with an
analysand displaying masochistic symptoms must take care to avoid the snares
of transference, which means not becoming part of the masochistic and submissive scenario the patient creates. Instead, the analyst should seek out and foster the underlying force towards surrender
which is itself the subject’s own desire for truth and cure. “[T]he pain and
suffering of the masochist . . . may well be the excuse the caretaker self has
devised to get the true self to where it has the chance of being found, a signal
that something deep inside is rent, a tear in the self, that unbeknown to its
bearer, seeks healing, and that the masochistic patterns, especially if a
certain satisfaction and pleasure accrues, are really expressions of the
patient’s efforts at self-cure” (13).
Ghent is at pains to cleave apart the idea of surrender from
its perversions (masochism, submission, and some forms of sadism), holding out the
goal of cure, but we should keep in mind that this is a destructive process.
The destruction of defenses, resistances, and narcissistic investments may be
productive in the end, but it is destruction nonetheless. His use of
object-relations psychoanalysis, and his heavy citation of Winnicott in
particular, should point us to the origin of this kind of thought. Indeed, the
idea of surrender can be seen as the logic of Winnicott’s theory of object-usage
turned back towards the subject. A subject negotiating the tricky terrain between hallucinatory fantasy and the reality principle requires a certain independence on the part of a loved object. Only that which survives destruction is real, is
true, and therefore deserves love. From Winnicott's "The Use of an Object Through Relating and Through Identifications": "The subject says to the object: 'Hullo object!' 'I destroyed you.' 'I love you.' 'You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.' 'While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.'" (120-1).
(I remember, over a decade ago and in a mobile home on the
side of a New Mexico highway, that feeling: fake wood paneling, the smell of stale cigarette smoke in the furniture, traces of hallucinogens. My shoulders arc back and grind and
pop, my lower stomach cramps in what I imagine to be a shade of creased blue, my fingers are numb and distant, skin prickles, the heart races. There is something inside me that is willing to be cruel, if only to see the other remain. And there is
something inside me that won’t accept that I’m loved unless I am suffering.)
Rather than masochism being the primary, sexual, stage then
fixed to a scenario of surrender, Ghent reverses the pansexual psychoanalytic
model. It would not take too much to align this theory with Freud’s final
theory of instinct, from Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, where Freud himself attempts to move beyond the sexual
instincts and their repressions. In Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, the aim of the death instinct is a return to an
earlier stage, namely the state of the inanimate. Freud describes “the most
universal endeavour of all living substance” as the “return to the quiescence
of the inorganic world” (76). Beyond the liquid calculations of the pleasure
principle lies an end to such movement. What Ghent, in his humanism, approaches but
cannot accept is our desire to be mere objects. Freud in turn, perhaps, took his
metaphysics too far in identifying the aim of all life as the return to an
inorganic state. A simpler organism, something anterior, would suffice. Say an amoeba. And despite the humanistic claims of education as a path to
self-consciousness, we might have to accept that it is precisely the
opposite—the fantasy of being stripped, reduced in complexity, the violence of psychic life quelled—which subtends our
investments. We do not want to be “complex human beings,” we want, in fact, the
opposite.
Education, we say, is edifying. Edification, we say, is a process of building, development, growth. The certifications and
degrees are there to prop us up like a retaining wall. But such edification
requires a subject always already too little, and it would be naive to assume that this poverty could easily be fixed. These props (awards, grants, certificates, degrees) fail to supplant us adequately; they are not enough. No, we feel insufficient, like an fraud, forever kneeling at the feet
of tall concrete buildings—brick, if you’re lucky. Imposter syndrome is a familiar enough term among academics, especially graduate students. Since we love to talk about our suffering! But
what is it about this position that draws us towards it? Learning is often figured as a process of accruing knowledge, but we all also dream that it is the process of
shedding ignorance, of destroying our old world and our old identities. We might complain, but we secretly seek out our imposter syndrome, for we imagine it augurs the day when we will be fulfilled, our authentic selves. Counterintuitively, a self too little becomes a self good enough through a process of destruction, not through a process of building. A
certificate, in this world, is proof that your former self has been destroyed. We cannot separate our development, our growth, from an image of catastrophe; our degrees must also hide secret marks of our own undoing. Or, at least, that is the fantasy that sustains us. Take me, break me, we tell the academy, and make me worthy of your love.
A brain on a stick: not, we would admit in the end, how
professors think of us. Nor, for that matter, how the university thinks of us.
If it were, the administration wouldn’t be so bloated in its attempt to grasp
us in our "lifestyles" (grad housing, the gym, food courts, sweaters emblazoned
with our university’s name, mental health). No, brain on a stick is what we fantasize about ourselves. Stripped,
deprived, stick-like and thin. We don’t want the position of mastery; we resent teaching. We
don’t even want to be dominated, S&M style, by our superiors. That sort of sexual scenario is already too much, too egoic, not to mention pedestrian. No, we want
to be the emaciated, sickly graduate student who has sacrificed his self, who carves away parts of her own body with scalpels, giving them away until nothing remains but a core, amoeba, brain, stick, self-cure.
One of the English graduate students in Margaret Atwood’s clever
and biting early novel, The Edible Woman,
offers us a script of renewal through utter destruction:
“What we need is a cataclysm,” Fish was saying. His voice had become almost a chant, and was swelling in volume; he seemed to be building up to some kind of crescendo. “A cataclysm. Another Black Death, a vast explosion, millions wiped from the face of the earth, civilization as we know it all but obliterated, then Birth would be essential again, then we could return to the tribe, the old gods, the dark earthgods, the earth goddess, the goddess of waters, the goddess of birth and growth and death. We need a new Venus, a lush Venus, big-bellied, teeming with life, potential, about to give birth to a new world in all its plenitude, a new Venus rising from the sea . . .” (200)
And another understands the appeal of this chthonic Venus-as-primordial-soup:
“At last I know what I really want to be,” Duncan said into the suddenly quiet room. He was gazing serenely at the ceiling, a whitish-grey trace of sauce in his hair. “An amoeba.” (200)
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ReplyDeleteas ever beautiful, bracing and setting it to work. hugs, dina
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