[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen and Simpson

[Nguyen, Mimi Thi]

I don't know if this sort of thing is done --anxious addendums and such-- but I should also parcel out the fact that so much of the teaching labor is performed by graduate students and adjuncts, at least in the United States (apologies for not being sure what the percentages are elsewhere), which I failed to do in the paragraph that begins, "At the same time...." 

(I'm also slightly anemic right now, so apologies for typos!)

Mimi Thi Nguyen
Associate Professor,
Gender and Women's Studies
Asian American Studies
Unit for Criticism
Associate Chair,
Gender and Women's Studies
Conrad Humanities Professorial Scholar 2013-2018
University of Illinois
1205 W. Nevada MC 137
Urbana, IL 61801
mimin at illinois.edu
www.mimithinguyen.com

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Nguyen, Mimi Thi [mimin at illinois.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 3:42 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Cc: Hamilton, Kevin
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen  and     Simpson

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(I hope this works!)

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.

(Found here: http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/01/27/unproductivity-in-the-digital-age-a-conversation-with-mimi-thi-nguyen/)

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:

"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."

(http://www.lowendtheory.org/post/50428216600/on-audre-lordes-legacy-and-the-self-of)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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?




Mimi Thi Nguyen
Associate Professor,
Gender and Women's Studies
Asian American Studies
Unit for Criticism
Associate Chair,
Gender and Women's Studies
Conrad Humanities Professorial Scholar 2013-2018
University of Illinois
1205 W. Nevada MC 137
Urbana, IL 61801
mimin at illinois.edu
www.mimithinguyen.com

________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of elizaBeth Simpson [elizacorps at gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2015 7:00 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Cc: Hamilton, Kevin
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week One : Nguyen and      Simpson

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