The Dangers of Love, Continued

In my last post, I talked briefly about how teachers are exploited because we are generally framed as being passionate about our work. We are required to see teaching as a labor of love and not just labor, and are therefore required to sacrifice our own best interests to the greater good of educating the next generation. And the more we buy into this myth of love and sacrifice, the more complicit we are in our own exploitation. That was the gist, anyway. It was more a rant than anything constructive or helpful. After doing a little searching for anyone who has felt a similar frustration about the way teachers have been discursively created by the myth of the passionate laborer, I came across this eloquent and carefully articulated post by low end theory.

The post incisively identifies a series of inter-related contradictions, the most arresting being the irony that "the university contains [and exploits] those that would challenge it not by suppressing them, but rather by giving them a space in which to work" and by doing so "keeps us working for it," not against it. The foundation of these spaces, says low end theory, are the "popular narratives" we tend to tell ourselves about making a difference in our students' lives, about introducing them to challenging discourses, about transforming the world through the student. In service to these ideas, we are always passionate and always willing to sacrifice. But of course the second we do, we become the victims of our own best intentions. Low end theory asks an important question about these narratives:

What, then, does the official story crowd out? Perhaps something that is all too obvious: more likely than not, we also came to the academy because we thought we could make a living by working here. Even though we might have left perfectly good jobs to come here, what makes it possible to remain here is that, whether through TAing, fellowships, or the accessibility of loans, grad school and academic employment helps us to (sorta) pay bills, eat, clothe ourselves, etc. If we didn’t need the university in such a way that allows it to exploit us, we might have found (or founded) other outlets, other practices, other fields, in which our political and creative work could take place. We might have found or founded different kinds of work. We tend not to tell this story about the needs we have in common not only because the fact that we need to work to survive seems natural, or obvious, but also, I’m willing to bet, because we know all too well that we are supposed to speak about academic and intellectual work as if it were some sort of natural fit for us. Otherwise, how could we justify taking on a career in which one agrees to spend at minimum, half a decade getting paid poverty-level wages and, more often than not, going into five, and, yes, sometimes six figures of debt in order to enter into an academic job market that, as no one seems to be able to tell us enough, has never been worse and shows little potential for improving in the future?

How many times have I told myself this same story? This is what I was meant to do, the one thing that fits the kind of thinker I am, the kind of laborer I'd like to be. And because I tell myself that it's somehow naturally what I should be doing, I accept all kinds of exploitation. Just part of the story. Love at first sight, maybe. Or maybe it's love finally found after years of lust for corporate careers, lust for material wealth, lust for all the things our friends and family seem to be able to take for granted. As low end theory observes, this connection between labor, love, and righteousness is nothing new, and that many of us who teach in the humanities share assumptions with longstanding Protestant beliefs about God and work:

In the classically Protestant formulation of the work ethic, one’s willingness to deny pleasure while embracing work functioned as a sign that one had embraced the highest Christian values. Present-day radicals, by contrast, generally do not find a Greater Good in the prospect that the work we do will bring us closer to God, but rather, in the thisworldly and, seemingly to us, more reasonable belief that such work creates the possibility of generating political community and radical social transformation (or at least the desire for it). In response to such conditions, we often talk—without having to be explicitly taught to do so—about our academic work as though it were more than a job, as if it held for us some greater, higher, or more fundamental meaning, as if it promised some deep, core expression of our political desires—if not our personhood—that we couldn’t find in any other place.

And here is where low end theory really nails what I was merely ranting about. Love for us has become a kind of curse, a "four-letter word" and a financial death sentence:

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, though. Yes, is a privilege to love your work, but it is that four-letter word—love—that needs some scrutiny here, especially the way love and work relate. It takes work not only to love your work but to learn to love it. Love, we might say, is always the effect of a social pedagogy. What makes the relationship between, loving, learning, and working so complicated has something to do with the ways in which learning and loving are both kinds of work that only rarely find compensation (this is why the term “labor of love” is in this context both redundant and obfuscatory) because of our training to recognize them as non-work, pre-work. (And there is a gender politics at work here, no doubt.) We ask students to work and at the same time tell them that they are not yet workers; we take for granted the work that it takes to love in a deep way. To bring the discussion round to the example I opened with, yes, I loved my work because I felt, finally, like I was really doing what I came to the academy to do. It is that sense of purpose, that sense that you are doing what you were called to do, that you’re doing socially important or necessary labor—labor that, you are supposed to imagine, might not get done in your absence—that makes teaching work so exploitable.

It’s this Weberian point that Kathi Weeks spends a good time elaborating in the first chapter of The Problem with Work. That is, what makes work like teaching exploitable is not simply due to the presence of masses of people in need of work to make a living, work which compensates them, in return, for far less than the social value that they produce (insofar as such value can be quantified). What makes it exploitable is that the conditions that bring you to work are shaped by an ethic that teaches you to imagine and relate to work as something you were called to do, to relate to work, again, as if (not because) it were a calling from God. As Weeks explains, whereas at one point, this particular aspect of the work ethic was once restricted to certain kinds of professions—clergy and medicine, for example—it now characterizes the dominant discourse around work in general. And it’s this work ethic that fuels educational work at large these days. That capacity to love and care and nurture others far exceeds not only what we’re compensated for, but also how much we should ever really be expected to work, even under optimal conditions. Full stop.

The entire post is worth reading. All of this has become all the more true as the university system in general is transformed into a corporate animal concerned first with profits (grants and donations) and only secondarily with the quality of education. So if we can't subvert this system by working in it (because, as the post makes clear, the system creates a space for our subversiveness precisely so we'll work for it), then how do we speak the kind of language persuasive to university presidents and administrators, who are now as good as corporate officers? We are valuable, but is it simply a matter of being able to explain our value in the language of profit and growth. Plenty of corporations seem to value the humanities, or so they say, but how many have been given a reason to invest in the humanities? We don't like to think this is our responsibility, that our value is implicit and built into the very idea of the university system, but the system has changed, and we're quickly losing ground in terms of funding.

I can sense the sudden cringe of revulsion. Ask for money? Think of ourselves in those disgusting terms? I know, it's horrible. But I have to believe we can persuade the financiers to support us without losing ourselves in the process, that is, if we can just get over that nauseous feeling.