projected_space:
arrivals and departures, learning and learning again
I lean back in my chair to be closer to the clanging heater, and I look up at the basement window, a pile of leaves and snow smooshed against its glass. In a minute, Joe will lean back in his chair, and he'll say something smart about Gadamer, or The Smiths, or Minneapolis's hip-hop scene. This will lead to a conversation and then a collaborative project about which we're both excited. The project will inform our pedagogy in general, our classrooms in particular, and I will spend a significant amount of time being grateful for Joe's camaraderie and partnership.
This collaborative reciprocity must be related to my growing sense of personal accomplishment. The first few months of graduate school were shocking, and I was certain I would never learn to read or write or think the way my instructors wanted. But I will work on these future projects with Joe, and I'll find a compelling project to work on alone, and at some point, the graduate experience begins to make sense. I can do this, and I can do it well. Arrival.
Where did this paper come from? I remember the histories, the critical texts, the seminar discussions about central questions and lines of argument, but my paper is a ghost, a figment I hardly recognize. The ideas are mine, and I remember writing them, but in following this process through, I found myself saying things I'm not sure I understand or with which I probably don't agree. But the semester is over, and I depart.
How many times have I washed these bottles? Zora nurses at least eight times a day, every two hours, but she has a bottle or two in the evenings, and I wash them. I scald my hands trying to get them clean, and I think about the next paragraph I'll write when I get the chance.
Nurse, write, nurse, write, settle into a nap, and write. But I can never start where I left off. There is always some retracing of steps, and I am certain the path as well as my point has shifted more times than I can remember. In writing one essay, I write a thousand unfinished essays.
We are supposed to get somewhere. Arrive, at the end of the semester, at a destination. But where we end up is unfolding into the future, the reverberations to be felt like sonic booms or rowdy laughter or quiet pauses in the projects, relationships, and adventures we will imagine. I consider myself lucky to have participated in so many exceptional graduate courses where my professors, in developing evaluations, considered the hopeful potential of a project as well its present actuality. The tension between the real and the imagined reveals a realandimagined point of departure and possible transformation.
When I read through this section of the hypertext ("hello/goodbye: project introduction/conclusion") I regret that I did not have time to engage more directly with the theory I reference. Mary-Louise Pratt, Edward Soja, and Lev Manovich were with me throughout the design of my project; at each rhetorical moment — from composing code to composing prose — I wrapped myself in theory. But how is this invention to be assessed, graded, and rewarded? I feel this concern during my own teaching. How will I assess the student who spends several evenings dreaming of and contemplating her project's possibilities, the student who spends hours debating the merits of her project with trusted peers, or the student who writes and deletes and writes and deletes and writes as she works toward the final product I must grade?
Moreover, how will I assess the ideas she wanted to pursue but rejected in the face of fears I did not mean to inspire? If I work with students to shape our class into a contact zone, there is the possibility that people will get hurt, that hearts and spirits will be broken, if only a little. There is the possibility that I will not be able to handle or engage with awkward criticisms levied by students, and, not knowing what else to do, I fear the silence I might run to.
I have, after all, run to this silence in my own work. As I was developing my hypertext project, I was also continuing to develop an increasingly radicalized feminist identity. But in this new academic environment with new colleagues and seminars, how much could I engage with and discuss the "F" word? Would eyes roll, would snickers follow? I felt myself regressing and turning too easily to a hiding place. In hindsight, I am bolder because of this moment of fear, but at the time, I felt betrayed by progress, by my own failure to move always quickly forward.
