Carla Harryman, “Why I Can No Longer Teach …,” continued

There is a terrible gap in memory between that moment and our hitting it off. Somehow, between then and then, we became friends and she wanted me to visit her classroom, a number of times I should add, as guest artist or sub.  We were in a circle and the class plan—here thinking about Lyn Hejinian’s colloquy talk on March 5, 2021, that mentioned Moten and Harvey’s “class plan”[1]—vanished because Kathy, all leathery and me in work pants and tee shirt and tennies living by then in Oakland—having left San Francisco Hampshire Street in Mission of economic downturns desultory block of murders over parking places and twenty-five cents—had just gotten a contract from Grove Press. So we were instead of whatever I had to say about, what? My assault on narrative, construction of non-rational sentences that were sentences but behaved otherwise—in books from Tuumba and This Press—Chomskyan something,  perhaps and language—in long emergence of  “language writing” label—were talking about the event of her radical writing being taken up by Grove, absorbing her into a certain tradition, aspirational in her devotion to Burroughs, who I had pretty much stopped reading in maybe 1975—but we were all and variously impressed—time contracting and dilating so that six months ago would be both another lifetime and just yesterday. I had at that moment become positioned with the students as admirer of someone who is making it.  This story of authorial success—something that a radical poetry and poetics more and less—I mean does and doesn’t—skirt—could have been the end of a relationship, not because of antagonism engendered—whatever the thwarted promise of engagement I had imagined in her classroom—but because of a loss of connective tissue in conversation in a mode of living being fashioned in the present. Though it turns out that how one lives even if  “reliable” and “stable”—a designation my friend needed me to be for her—is unpredictable and that connective tissue is living, animated, plastic, and not so brittle as one might have imagined when for instance it comes to trying critically to sort out feminism—we were both skeptical of the positive power-image good example sort—questions  of gender, language, textuality—that we like to travel by train and the connection of this to folk narrative.

I believe Blood and Guts was the first of the Grove publications. It begins with a scripted dialogue with italicized parenthetical information like “Father: (still in the same sad, hesitant, underlyingly happy because he wants to get away tone).”[2]

Janey, our ten-year-old protagonist, is as much ten as you or I are fifty or sixty-nine—what age do you feel you are right now?—I have just swerved radically from my mid-twenties to more than Social Security eligible—and she is concerned that her father will abandon her, because he is having an affair.  Janey is volitionally a sexually active ten-year-old who fucks a lot of people—including her friend Bill Russie whose cock is too big so it didn’t work out—but because her father is having a hot affair, she fears abandonment and the anxiety about this causes her to climb into bed with him for protection. Of course they have sex and it is not described, though Janey is uncomfortable because of Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. Here is a snippet of dialogue that leads up to this passing event with the father:

Janey: You tell me you love someone else, you’re gonna kick me out, and I shouldn’t push. What do you think I am, Johnny? I love you.

Father: Just let things be. You’re making more of this than it really is.

Janey (everything comes flooding out): I love you. I adore you. When I first met you, it’s as if a light turned on for me. You’re the first joy I knew. Don’t you understand?

Father: (silent)[3]

And so on. The narrative never stabilizes—a reader can have a heyday with how to read the text as incestuous—and other moral values are flattened. Everybody is already damaged, just like in Greek tragedy. While satire in this ventriloquized mode is an assault on patriarchal power—any position the feminine occupies is a patriarchal construction, so Janey occupies whatever position her desire, fear, curiosity and traumatic apprehensions take her—well, that’s a way to begin a reading of the novel.  The negative is a source of possibility, though the options within the possibility are severely constrained by language, society, and the body. The question eventually arises after some years of it not being a factor, what if the fiction is interpreted as a reader’s reality? In our creative writing classrooms this doesn’t happen very often, but I wonder if I were to teach Acker’s work now would this be different?

If you are someone who has little familiarity with literature—outside of an elementary school—in not rhyming but rhymey poetry—and you find yourself in an advanced college creative writing class as a creative writing major or minor—a result of an interview with an academic adviser outside of the creative writing program—a program that focuses as much on contemporary literature, certain literary histories, and critical and cultural theory,  as on writing, and this is one of the first texts you encounter—and you are a victim of domestic sexual assault, you might be overwhelmed by the information, not literary in nature, or tested through a variety of feminist theories that you have brought to the reading of the text. Consider that many students from the economic underclass are not politicized in the manners represented in this colloquium; some are or become so through education. This is a quasi-fictional scenario of a possible “problem in the classroom” that the instructor has little or no training in addressing—prior to and following the popularization of the “trigger warning,” which now seems as a feature of classroom culture to also be fading a bit—but at one point I recall that almost anything presented in one class—the one in which we were reading Maggie Nelson’s Art of Cruelty—was signaled by a trigger warning. This is an instance in which an assigned text has required of someone that they experience and intellectually process something that exceeds a normative idea of educational experience. Such experiences, as in the fictional (not a so-called FERPA violation) case accounted for here, can be transformative in the sense that one can process and survive the traumatic event and learn something about one’s capacities that are also about reading and writing. One’s capacity to learn the text and navigate its push-me-pull me projective powers—and indifference to one’s personal experience—can be enabling. This would have been sometime between 2009 and 2012. 

I was learning that the mechanism put in place to address student issues—the need for counselling, the need for mediation, the need of profs to have rights in the classroom to ask students to leave (this we got with our 2015 contract at EMU), and even the legitimated need to discuss student issues—to problem solve with the help of colleagues—were addressed through avenues that were potentially useful but underfunded, or that served little or no constructive purpose except to protect the university from liability. At my university, while there is an appearance of effective pushback and adjustments made, there are  no guarantees that something could go off the rails for no fault of anyone and become subject to a patchwork of procedures that give me pause when I select each semester’s books, articles, and course materials—and try to imagine, often underestimating the drives—the will to know, change, become—of the students I have the good fortune to talk to and learn from.

2. School again / or why not be paranoid?

Or: Can I teach the writing I live with?

Or: “Nothing in this section shall be construed to supersede the institutional autonomy or academic freedom of instructors involved in the selection of college textbooks, supplemental materials, and other classroom materials.”—Higher Education Opportunities Act.

Or: Neither the circumstances of difference that produce unequal forms of discomfort in the public classroom nor the discomforts of learning “difficult texts” and using them for other, creatively productive ends can be sufficiently addressed: because of time and money, because of student and often faculty precarity.  Because the entire trajectory—privatized, corporatized, class-size increase economized, class-hour decreased, library access decreased; bookstore book orders diminishment; persistent dormitory internet failures—that imagines the “human subject”—without study permission granted—will accommodate this less and less successfully—in some system of belief that corresponds to an abstract quantification of “success” far removed from the “human subject,” who is figure in and of this late capitalist  experiment.

The interdisciplinary creative writing program, planned and realized by four full-time faculty and a small number of part-time lecturers at Eastern Michigan University, offers instruction in poetics, the reading of contemporary “experimental” writing including and not limited to new genres, hybrid writing, performance writing, experimental fiction, “new media,” image/text, and sound poetry;  historical background and contexts for apprehending contemporary writing practices; and theoretical frameworks used in literary studies. Unlike the commonplace that there is an antagonism between creative writing programs and literature— “fights for domination”—to quote Watten’s Foucault’s Nietzsche—in times of scarcity, and possibly in other times too, literary studies and our creative writing program have a cooperative interdependent relationship.[4]  The different approaches to teaching literature across these disciplines actually supports the educational agendas of each—as far as I can tell. My teaching practice arises from my interdisciplinary arts and literature education and my literary and performance practice. I think of my classes as laboratories that incorporate into “studio art experimentation” questions of practice, questions of poetics, engagement with theoretical concepts, and reading in, around, and across genres. The concept of “critical art practice” can serve as a gloss for my pedagogical orientation, which I think also resonates with that of my colleagues. Barrett Watten, in a blog post that refers to a chapter in his book Questions of Poetics, describes critical art practice as “the real time engagement with fundamental questions of language, style, form, genre, medium person, identity, discourse, reception, history.”[5]

All of these “questions”—within the context of “left” poetics—have become increasingly fragmented and volatile. “Real time” to me is a concept up for grabs—I have my theories or poetics of (feminist) time or temporality, which I cannot rehearse here except through the question of labor and money as these pertain to the educational experience of students. 

In 2016, at the same time that the University of Chicago put out its statement about academic freedom and critique of the “trigger warning,” the outrage over Donald Trump’s p-word video had caught fire—to the degree that using that word (how more obscene it sounds to allude to rather than state it directly) publicly, would result in a fierce and likely out of control reaction. The Trump video plays, and my first thought is—not surprised but what an effing creep—and my next, delayed, thought is, and now I can’t even refer to, much less teach, Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates. I can’t put it on the syllabus or place the mandatory bookstore order without fear of complaint, sanction, getting into trouble over free speech issues when speech itself has been hijacked by slick proto-fascists.  Since 2010, texts taught in publicly funded university classrooms are a matter of public information:

These efforts are designed to maintain EMU's compliance with Federal regulations. We are required by law to make all books and materials available and viewable to students (and other audiences) in advance of each semester's start of classes. All instructors must provide any textbook information as soon as your adoption decision is made.

“You may provide course materials information to the bookstore, to your department head or school director, or you may provide it to me [the provost] by return email. If you are not using purchased materials, please inform us of this. It is required that you provide it to one of these options.”[6]

The regulations are part of the Higher Education Opportunities Act and include the language on academic freedom I quoted earlier. The regulation to disclose textbook information is ostensibly related to making text books affordable for lower income students. It is also a potential surveillance instrument put in place to protect the university from liability for the overcharging of expensive textbooks in certain disciplines. The instructor is a compliance mechanism for a “one size fits all” solution to a complex situation that would not be so complex if university education were free. When I started at the University of California in 1970, tuition was free: I paid a  fee of somewhere around 250-350 dollars to the university, which included book purchases, and went to the college bookstore to pick up whatever books I needed each quarter—for courses such as psycholinguistics, analytic philosophy, Greek mythology, and literature.[7] How the escalating economy of textbooks plays into present college bookstore practices and the agenda of the Higher Education Opportunities Act, established in 2008, is a matter for another discussion: I note that according to an NBC news article, the cost of textbooks rose 1,041 percent “between January 1977 and June 2015,” and that whatever the savings in book costs due to instituting book rentals and other regulatory measures, many students at my university cannot afford to rent or purchase all of their books in a given semester.[8]

3. School: civility and work

While the university launches a civility pledge campaign, civility in the now remote undergraduate classroom has reached an all-time high in my experience: the remote classroom is the alterity—the radically alien—to rude social media, which the university is campaigning against in its pledge drive. And while this emergent version of discipline including the discipline of ever-smoother self-enclosed speech, the speech that sets itself apart from internet speech transgression and the bullying that has affected so many young people, supports the concept—but does it support the actuality?—of getting a job after college, it is productive of something for which the works of Kathy Acker address negatively. Acker’s work critiques the ball and chain of labor under capitalism, the smoothness of moving from one region to the next, and authoritarian logics of adaptation to new modes of rationality, often by enacting fantasies of revolt off “worksite” and by writing through the force of capitalisms’ logics in the total environment of the text:  imprinted on and in the damaged and questing entities that parade through its narrative assemblage. Teaching works by Acker can be an experience of relief and hilarity—the vertiginous sense of being freed from while suspended in the nothing that is at the root of the comic-tragic text—but it is also an event of discomfort, which challenges reader’s preconceptions of positive and negative identifications as we navigate through a writing that persistently throws us off the narrative and back onto language, while never abandoning narrative entirely; thus the action of reading is always doubling and oscillating between the tracking of narrative or narratemes and the being thrown back on the language of the text. Language/text is the material of evaluation and crisis; because language is also limit and failure. It is I believe this being thrown back onto language, of not being able to get passed it—while it  is tied to often buffoonish  or magical (magically mythical)—with the devices of magic laid bare and its representations of sex and violence—that is particularly disturbing to some people in encounters with its events of incest, rape, fucking, and auto-eroticism. This not being able to get passed the text and its effects means that representation does not result in the offering of transformative or transcendent experience but of transgression within and across fields of writing and thought;  and thus of “the laws of genre.” And in a next segment of this work, I will debate the various contemporary dismissals of and qualifications surrounding “transgression…”

So that I can better understand what I need to address to teach the writings of Kathy Acker now.

[1] Lyn Hejinian, “Social Meaning in the Event of Poetics,” paper presented at Poetics & the Crisis of the University, webinar colloquy, sponsored by Chant de la Sirène (March 5, 2021), and included in this CDLS issue. 

[2] Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York, Grove, 1984), 9.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Barrett Watten, “Poetics: Origin and Descent,” paper presented at Poetics & the Crisis of the University, webinar colloquy, Chant de la Sirène (5 March 2021).

[5] Barrett Watten, “Document 74: Critical Art Practice,” at www.barrettwatten.net

[6] Office of the Provost, Eastern Michigan University. February 19, 2021. The memo containing this information is circulated months in advance of each semester. This one is directed to Summer and Fall, 2021 book orders.

[7] See http://thebackbench.blogspot.com/2007/08/tuition-at-university-of-california.html. This is one of several sites that can be searched for information about UC fees at the time. The fees of course continued to increase to the extent that they surpassed the state contribution in 2011. I am trying to remember how books got included in the fees; and my memory is that I was charged for the books when I paid the fees. 

 [8] Ben Popken, “Textbook Prices Have Risen 1,041 Percent since 1977.” NBC News, August, 2015.