<div dir="ltr"><div>Thanks, Mimi, for warding us off the track of "self-care for greater service." You remind me that, before capitulation, a dominant social system will often seek first to integrate elements of its counter public in order to maintain as many of its elements as possible for as long as possible. I am reminded of this both by stressful workplaces that integrate health options to mitigate workplace effects, and by the tendency for individuals to be identified as the site of ailments, rather than the context. An obvious example of this is the therapeutic language that positions the individual as depressed, rather than the societal conditions as depressing, instructing the individual to use self care in order to accommodate their socially untenable surroundings. </div><div><br></div><div>Charlotte Linde explains how a life story serves to account for oneself and demonstrate worth to the community. When your creative and intellectual work is not "*for* the institution, then what is it for? An answer might be, "it's not *for* anything" or "it's for itself." This "non-productive" logic tends to baffle, especially in a culture whose basic personal inquiry is "what do you do?" But it is exactly the logic of productivity that renders youth, the elderly and folks without so-called normative ability (that is, many of the people we love, and the people we will ourselves are or will become) outside the scope of social legitimacy in a capitalist, production-oriented culture which can't help but breed abilism and distain for life cycles and death. </div><div><br></div><div>In response, there can be an integrationist approach that seeks legitimacy from the academy for various forms of work that currently go unrecognized, which reflexively positions the university, not the cultures of origin, as the final arbiter of value. William referred to "osmosis;" it is important here to remember directionality... it the university integrating/accommodating the community? Or vise versa? </div><div><br></div><div>So, Mimi- I have two directions to offer you…it's choose-your-own-adventure! </div><div><br></div><div>Option One… Given what you have seen regarding the co-optation of non-dominant cultures, whether they be indigenous, politically adverse (punk!), or otherwise: <b>What are the offers and risks of seeking or extending academic legitimacy to practices, ways of thinking, cultural work, etc. that currently lie outside of the university's blessing? </b></div><div><br></div><div>Options Two… One of the foundational questions of this Engineering the University thread is: <span style="font-size:13px"><span style="font-family:arial">"</span></span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">What can the study of technology, ethics and society offer a discussion </span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">about the research university's potential as a space of social or </span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">political imagination?" <b>What do you consider to be the contemporary university's potential as a space of social or political imagination, broadly or in specific cases? </b></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><b><br></b></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Warmly, </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">elizaBeth</span></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>elizaBeth</div><div><br></div><div>217-979-2820 cell<br><div><br>The bad news is you're falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there's no ground. - Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche<br><br><span style="font-style:italic">learn about my latest creative initiative:</span><span style="font-weight:bold"><br>Art from the Streets!</span><span style="font-style:italic"><br><a href="http://www.ucpeopleshistory.org" target="_blank">www.ucpeopleshistory.org</a><br></span><br></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:42 PM, Nguyen, Mimi Thi <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mimin@illinois.edu" target="_blank">mimin@illinois.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
(I hope this works!)<br>
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Thanks, ElizaBeth (and Kevin and Empyre), for having me in this space! Let me see if I can answer your question, which encompasses quite a constellation of clashes and concerns. First, thank you for mentioning the interview I did with the brilliant undergraduate students who run the feminist magazine Bluestockings; in the interview, they specifically asked me about self-care in the output-driven economy of the digital age, so I responded to them in their terms.<br>
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(Found here: <a href="http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/01/27/unproductivity-in-the-digital-age-a-conversation-with-mimi-thi-nguyen/" target="_blank">http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/01/27/unproductivity-in-the-digital-age-a-conversation-with-mimi-thi-nguyen/</a>)<br>
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For myself, I would actually wish to consider the wandering of the term “self-care” which –like so many terms we use in art and politics (“creativity,” “flexibility,” “participation” –of the latter especially I’m thinking about Claire Bishop’s critiques—and so on)— has been harnessed as a social good under the (produced) conditions of austerity, both in terms of the economic but also political imaginary. First, I am reminded of Nick Mitchell’s brilliant exploration of the life of the Audre Lorde quotation about self-care (“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”), and his careful observations:<br>
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"I would argue that the “self” of self-care came into being precisely as an effect of [neoliberal] management, as well as of the clobbering that both preceded and accompanied it. It euphemizes as a goodwill gesture (the benevolent “take care of yourself!”) an imperative that, if elaborated, looks much more like a relation of coercion and discipline (“take care of yourself or your job will go to someone who does”; “take care of yourself lest you fall ill and get saddled with medical debt”; “take care of yourself because you have no right to expect that society will”; “take care of yourself…or else”). The self of self-care, all of this is to say, has a history that should serve as a caution toward attempts to make self-care an unqualified good. It is a self that is specifically calibrated as a defensive reaction to the combination of austerity politics with reinvigorated forms of gendered racism that cut across the entire social formation."<br>
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(<a href="http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/50428216600/on-audre-lordes-legacy-and-the-self-of" target="_blank">http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/50428216600/on-audre-lordes-legacy-and-the-self-of</a>)<br>
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Self-care and all its attendant qualities, and others also make this point, has become a part of the austerity politics of the moment, as it is presumes to sustain or adjust our range of capacities and skills in order to prolong our productivity; consider the language of resilience that pervades the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program, examined so well by Alison Howell, that aims through positive psychology and an array of “mindfulness” practices to instill in soldiers the necessary capacities to endure what is now an unending war.<br>
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Mitchell goes on to argue that the leftist version of this same austerity logic that produces self-care as necessarily useful – in this case, as “political warfare”— should also trouble us, because self-care then must be justified (and can be evaluated) according to its generation of political value. He thus argues that this logic reproduces the demands of hyper-productivity -- especially for him, from black women in the forms of superhuman strength and resistance.<br>
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This is all to say that I am a little resistant to the hope that our institutions might provide for us the conditions to better practice self-care – not necessarily because I don’t enjoy meditation (which I do), but because I know too well that our institutions would love for its laborers to generate for them more economic and other value. Consider the emergence in the last decade or more of the no-collar workplace, for instance, which might provide on-site childcare or exercise facilities in order to encourage employees to spend more time at the workplace, and to invest affectively in their labor as a form of gratitude for that “care.” This arrangement is arguably preferable to the absence of these services in other workplaces, but as someone who values an anti-work ethic, it bothers me that these services are not “free,” but attached to labor and increasing productivity.<br>
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But this is not to say that I disagree with you that we need to consider what communal and personal well-being looks like, especially in the academy where intellectual and other labor has that particularly terrifying resonance of being over-identified with one’s sense of self or value! I know that for me, I struggled for some time with the academy’s evaluation of my intellectual and creative labor (counting publications, weighting them according to journal rankings, et cetera) – but that I also do not want the institution to “have” it all (which is to say, to hold that labor as a quantifiable property or to count it capital as such). It was and is important to me that the greater part of my intellectual and creative labor is not “for” the institution; and I depend on those other encounters with my labor (through my zines, or whatever) to sustain those aspects of my well-being that hinge upon building communion or dialogue outside of the metrics of productivity or employability.<br>
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At the same time, I do wish there were practices in place to recognize and value the affective and other labor that does sustain the academy, and the students that they claim to value – which comes from our office support, our faculty, and at times especially our women faculty, our people of color faculty, and our queer faculty who bear the particular weight of rendering the institution a “caring” one. One of the buttons I made for the Gender and Women’s Studies teach-ins this last semester reads, “The more she works, the less she makes,” a quip from my wonderful colleague Professor Ruth Nicole Brown (also a member of the Hip Hop and Punk Feminisms Collective), and it also reminds me of that infamous lyric from the British anarcho-punk collective CRASS: “Do they owe us a living? Of course they fucking do!”<br>
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So the question becomes – what constitutes a “living” outside of and not dependent upon our present and possible productivity as laborers for institutions such as the military, or the state, or the corporation, which might want to force upon us a particular form of living that, as Lauren Berlant put so well, is meant to both prolong our lives through these continuous adjustments to our capacities, and also wear us out?<br>
<span class=""><br>
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Mimi Thi Nguyen<br>
Associate Professor,<br>
Gender and Women's Studies<br>
</span><span class="">Asian American Studies<br>
Unit for Criticism<br>
Associate Chair,<br>
</span><span class="">Gender and Women's Studies<br>
</span><span class="">Conrad Humanities Professorial Scholar 2013-2018<br>
University of Illinois<br>
1205 W. Nevada MC 137<br>
Urbana, IL 61801<br>
<a href="mailto:mimin@illinois.edu">mimin@illinois.edu</a><br>
<a href="http://www.mimithinguyen.com" target="_blank">www.mimithinguyen.com</a><br>
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</span>________________________________________<br>
From: <a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a> [<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>] on behalf of elizaBeth Simpson [<a href="mailto:elizacorps@gmail.com">elizacorps@gmail.com</a>]<br>
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 7:00 PM<br>
To: soft_skinned_space<br>
Cc: Hamilton, Kevin<br>
<span class="">Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen and Simpson<br>
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</span>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
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