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For some time now, this blog has not produced anything. But this summer was full of writing, projects of various kinds. Some of this writing required deep and complex research, some was intimate and emotional, calling for subtlety and care. I wrote for teaching, trying to articulate a rationale for practices that had become habitual. I wrote in literary genres, as a way of entertaining myself and clarifying my intentions. There was plenty of mundane, professional writing—emails and the rest of it. But here there was little. I often had the impulse to write here, and there are many unpublished drafts to remind me of that.
Today reminded me of the importance of doing nothing. Not only because it is Labor Day, a day that is a compromised holiday, one that forgets more than it remembers. (Why is it not on May 1st, observed with the rest of the world, we may wonder.) Today I had five long conversations, most unexpected, all delightful in their own way. And from all of them this theme emerged: it is good to know how to do nothing.
The first conversation was with a physician in residence. Though it was mostly personal, the personal was tied into labor, and specially so in this case since she is an obstetrician. She liked obstretics more than other medical specializations because there you always had to do something. When there is internal hemorrhaging of the uterus, you either need to stanch the bleeding or do a hysterectomy. There’s not a lot of empty space, places where you have to decide whether to act, in this part of medicine. You need to, and you may choose the wrong course of action, but you won’t hesitate to act.
The second conversation was with a poet. She is revising a translation of the Zhuangzi, and we spoke briefly of the line (not from it) that The sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. She spoke of how a recent experience—cleaning her room, actually—showed her what this might mean.
The third conversation was with a teacher. He wanted to ask me a question about a future class. The assignment worried him, because it required him, as the teacher, to do far less than he was used to. He had to let the students determine what they wanted to do. It sounded good to me—I had little to say. We laughed about this, and then spoke of other things.
The fourth conversation was with a young scholar. She is thinking of how to write about what matters—who to write for. She had an intuition, one I didn’t understand before, that she should write for her younger self. This intuition has become clearer: it is that sense of wishing to care for, protect, to soften the experience of the world for those who are innocent of it, as she says, that will motivate the writing. But now, things are ready for her to wait, to see how that idea grows. It is about, in some way, letters—communications to an absent friend.
The fifth conversation was with a stranger. He will not be a stranger long. He asked me if I will change his expectations. He did not tell me what those were.
This series of conversations, all different, has helped me formulate a feeling I have long had. The university should not teach skills. Skills, however valuable, are best learned by doing. And certainly, the university should encourage its students—and its faculty—to learn through doing. But it is simply obsolete: I do not believe there is any skill that can only be learned in a university setting. More often than that, the university setting makes the skill more difficult to learn than if we were to find ourselves in the context of its real employment. And one model for reforming the university (does the irony need to be marked?) is to have the university serve as the broker between raw labor and the skilling context. At Northeastern, where I am employed, this is normal justification for the co-op program, that is, a job placement service that is offered by the university in the midst of a university career, giving experience and, one hopes, skilling in a chosen industry, field, area.But if there were no artificial scarcity here, no arbitrary barrier to cross, the university would not be a necessary broker for learning skills. The university offers, I think, the best time for lying fallow. That is, not the method of production, but the power of producing something else. In the metaphor, a field sown with the same crop consecutively eventually loses its fertility. Crop rotation is one of the basic principles of modern agricultural science. Variety here is not aesthetic, but existential. Rotate or rot.
The modern university, when it adopts the “skilling” discourse, adopts an orientation of value that forgets the value of not doing. Knowledge should appear as an ability to, rather than an ability not to. It should be ability rather than potentiality. We often speak, or are told to speak, of Mastery—but the conception of mastery is horribly insufficient. In this discourse, mastery is simply the possession of a skill. But someone who compulsively does something, for instance, does not have mastery over what they do, even though they have the “skill” to do it.
When the entire global economic system turns around the production of discrete objects, activities, or services in real, clock-measurable time, it should not be surprising that our models of education also imitate this. But education preserves and transmits the means for the reproduction of our ways of living (something we never fully control), but also the orientation to adjust, alter, obsolesce, or destroy those ways. At this moment in time, constant production and reproduction of these ways of living are self-defeating: we cannot continue in the same way, because the climate, for instance, will not be reproduced with the traditional means, but it will be transformed. The apparent repetition of a process will, somewhere, be an amplification or diminution. Nothing is free from chance and randomness. The university, as the place where we might learn the negative side of knowledge, is already disappearing. What is being put in its place is apparently the same: same buildings, mostly, same people, mostly, same places, mostly. The real change is in what the university produces: knowledge and labor at once. But the knowledge of how not to, this has few defenders. We must learn from everything casual, accidental, and wild if we wish to preserve the preserve.
I loved this. The It-World we live in has no sense of rhythm. Here's to laying fallow--hopefully--in 2024.