Work, School, and Utopia

I've been absent from this blog for about a week now, taking an InDesign course, which is why I haven't posted. I've had this sinking feeling since I came back to work yesterday. My job's not bad in the grand scheme of jobs: I get along with my co-workers and the organization I work for has a noble mission. But I sensed there'd be a sharp contrast coming back to work after having taken a class all week. And that difference was that during the class, my mind was engaged from the time I sat down to the time I left for the day. At work, this is not the case. I experience long stretches of what feels like fatal doses of boredom. And I fear that this just might be the nature of the office job, or more frighteningly the day job.

During times like these, I consider the implications of getting my Ph. D. Mind you, I am not ready to do this. When I finished my Masters, I all but swore that academia had seen the last of me. There's an infinite amount of reasons why grad school was a very bad no good decision the first time around, including that I wasn't ready when I went, I happened to land at the worst of institutions and I had literally no clue how to deal with faceless, byzantine bureaucracies. But to me, the saddest part of grad school was not so much the feeling of not wanting to learn in an academic context (because most good students are good self-teachers), but of no longer having any desire to teach. This was the opposite of my college years in which I frolicked in daisy fields with the great thinkers of the western world at an institution whose name rhymes with 'Lard' (but this too had its ugly flip side: it was a bubble of privilege) and I thought for sure that some day I'd end up a teacher.

These two experiences left me with two very polar ideas of what school can be like, either a 40k per year utopia or a proletarian work camp for ideas. But at heart, I miss being in a place where ideas really matter. Unfortunately, I don't think the American university is the place where ideas really matter; I've come to see it more as the stock exchange of cultural capital, the place where ideas becomes things. I've done a lot of railing against theory in the past couple of years, but theory itself is not the enemy it's the use and misuse of theory that so angers me.

I don't think the academy of my dreams exists, but I do constantly think about a places like Black Mountain College, where the American avant-garde of the latter half of the twentieth century was fostered. The illustrious list of teachers included Charles Olsen, Buckminster Fuller, WCWilliams, John Cage, Willem deKooning, Robert Duncan, Josef Albers, Merce Cunningham, and the list just seems to go on and on. And it was run on almost no money. Students and teachers so wanted to take part in this utopian, interdisciplinary experiment that they slept in their cars. It's so beautiful it makes me want to cry. Can this exist under late capitalism or are we all too bogged down in credit card and student loan debt and the idea that the art world(s) is happening in big cities that cost too much to live in?