What happened to “selling out”?
Back in the 1990s, all the cool kids knew that Nirvana’s first album, Bleach, had actually bested Nevermind (the band’s later pop breakthrough). The earlier demo raged with a rawness that Kurt Cobain’s success had compromised. But today, the slur “sell out” has lost its sting. And a search of Google Books shows a decline in the term’s usage.
I mention it, because — as I finish my dissertation and weigh the value of my Ph.D. in English — I regret that we have one fewer term for resisting the machinations of the marketplace. The anarchic spirit of punk — and the anarchic spirit, too, of punk’s kissin’ cousin, folk — has long since dissipated. Those art movements kicked and screamed with contempt for worldly notions of the good life. The loss of that energy renders illegible my relationship with the humanities doctorate.
I lack, in other words, a shorthand way to explain why, despite all reason, I am happy with my choice of work — why I refuse to lament that my degree does not guarantee me a middle-class salary. So I will explain my attitude in long form.
You may believe that the American Dream entails a chicken in every pot. But I’m a vegetarian, and I don’t want your chicken. As a citizen of a weirder America (the America of Cobain and Thoreau), I shrug my shoulders at the dream. I give your dream the finger.
My dream? I simply want to scrape by. Read and write. Try to keep my distance from mass society. Try to get my kicks. Try to love somebody.
As a teenager, I applied to only one college, because I figured — if I weren’t accepted — then I’d just hitchhike around like a beatnik until fate found me. But fate arrived in the form of an acceptance letter, and I matriculated. Often, in retrospect, this turn of my wyrd has seemed too great a sacrifice of self — a turn away from the road not taken.
Indeed, college put me in a bind, because I graduated with so much debt that I needed to find a real job. So I worked as a union lobbyist. (A rough experience! But one that, out of loyalty to labor, I have never aired in print.)
Back then, I lived with a cute Sephardic boy whose mother frequently lamented that he had not chosen to become a “real” doctor. “Joey” pursued a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he complained insistently about the stress. But — so far as I could see — Joey lived a charmed life (more pleasant than the union hall, anyway). Twice a week, Joey taught algebra. And the rest of his time, Joey studied at a cafe, spending his NSF grant on exquisite croissants.
Under Joey’s influence, I applied to graduate school. Of course, we humanists live somewhat less luxuriously than our compatriots in the sciences. But when I found a program that would pay me to study medieval literature, I sang, like Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket.”
And gradually, I became a company man. Graduate school began to warp my tastes, replacing my otherworldly frames with an earthly mind. Even as I studied the medieval mystical tradition — which preaches against worldly vanities, in no uncertain terms — yet my teachers persuaded me that I should wish to emulate them, that I should wish, also, to attain the plush (relative to adjunct life) berth of a tenured-track professorship.
My life became — not the vita of a premodern saint, rapturous and bloody and principled — but the curriculum vita of the bureaucratized mind. In my ambition, I deliberately kept my distance from other graduate students, because I had internalized one of academe’s dirty little secrets — namely, that humanities grad students are losers, the dregs of the system. (As one of my advisers really confessed: “Graduate students are insufferable!”)
I tried to rise above my peers — fools like me who’d gone down a hopeless path. I published excessively. I taught the right courses in the right ways (meaning I taught them well — but not labor-intensively). And I stood clear of the so-called “life” of the department, which, for doctoral candidates, is more like a living death, a life-of-the-mind on life support.
I don’t know which is crueler: that our education system teaches young people to want middle-class jobs or that it does not provide those jobs. In either case, I now have too much self-respect to agree to such rotten terms. As I began, later in graduate school, to study the state of doctoral study — particularly through the mentorship of my great teacher, Leonard Cassuto, author of The Graduate School Mess — I started to shirk off the constrictions of academic professionalization.
Now I feel proud of my colleagues — of the many other graduate students who have decided, too, to give their fingers to the tenure-track dream. I’m particularly impressed by friends who have had the courage to write outre dissertations. Who have declined to apply to jobs that they don’t really want. Who have pursued alt-ac positions. Who, above all, refuse to feel miserable.
Earning my degree on the public’s dime, I feel more than blessed. I feel naughty, because I have gotten away with something big: I have tricked an anti-intellectual people into feeding my intellect. For the last five years, the taxpayers have subsidized my eccentric fascination with premodern verse. Should I now complain that these same taxpayers have not forked over enough cash to hire me in a full-time position? How grotesquely ungrateful.
As someone who is out of sync with the mores of the mainstream, I feel thankful for the mere fact that I’m tolerated; thankful that I’m allowed to walk down the street without being bashed; thankful that society has afforded me a small space for thinking my own thoughts. I don’t expect — nor do I want — anybody’s acceptance. As a student of human nature, I know that my life could be much more painful (e.g., thought camps, gulags, or business-casual dress codes). It’s been a good run, even if it’s over.
Sometimes, though, I do wish that the taxpayers could fork over a little more. At present, I must work extra jobs in order to supplement my doctoral stipend. But I pay my bills, and I enjoy certain luxuries (e.g., croissants now and then, trashy television, and Chanel perfume). Though supposedly impoverished, I live more comfortably than most of the world’s inhabitants. I live more comfortably, too, than many of my neighbors.
Actually, my current lifestyle — like yours, dear reader — relies on intensive environmental degradation and untold oppression.
I do not feel guilty about my privilege, because I am not prepared to renounce my privilege. (Guilt, therefore, would be hypocrisy.) Also, I am frankly too insignificant — too powerless, in the grand scheme of things — to be held accountable for the macro forces that control our material conditions. (Guilt, therefore, would be hubris.)
Those who feel guilty about their privilege should not disfigure their faces in a sad countenance. Either start a revolution, or see a priest. I wish I could see a priest, but technically I am not a Catholic. (Sometimes, I see a shrink.)
All of which leads to my confession: I do covet more than what I need. What I covet is a tenured gig. And I also covet status. (Why don’t you jerks read my books?)
Regrettably, though, the cultural marketplace is overrun with a glut of other countercultural wannabes like myself. The best minds of my generation would sell out if we could, but the supply of hipsters greatly exceeds demand. So — rather than winning the full-time lotto — after my defense, I will probably struggle to maintain my current standard of living as an adjunct.
Yet I do not necessarily need to give priority to my lust for academic fame and fortune. I can try to sidestep that mind-set. Unlearning much of academia’s norms — and fighting against my own ambitions — I can conceptualize a dead-end market as an opportunity to reorient myself toward things more valuable than prosperity.
So I will do the usual search for a tenure-track job. But whether or not it materializes, I advocate dropping out spiritually. I advocate dropping out from the discourse that constructs me as “oppressed.” I’m not oppressed, because I can jettison the materialism that judges human value in terms of wealth and station.