A blog on (not) blogging

 

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/bird-death-dead-829242/

Nowadays when someone asks me whether I blog, I am tempted to say “I used to blog, but not anymore” but then the next question would be “So, why did you stop blogging?” and that, my dear readers, is what this blog is about. In future I can just refer those who ask the question “Why have you not blogged recently?” to this blog to explain why I am not blogging… Mmm, somehow there is a Mobius strip in this narrative, but anyway, here we go…

My most recent blog was on 25 August 2016 – Nested Scholarship: Towards A Scholarship of Transgression, Anger and Hope – a very long blog (I admit) – in which I tried to map my own scholarship practices in the context of the (at that stage, current) higher education landscape in South Africa. Before this specific blog I attempted make sense of my own networked and networking scholarship – The (not so) secret life of a networked and networking scholar, posted on 19 July 2016. Compared to my blogging since 2011, the frequency of my blogs this year is really dismal. Guilty as changed. Mea culpa. Not that I have not tried. I’ve checked this morning and in my 2016 folder titled ‘Blogs’ there are 15 unfinished blogs – ranging from some only having a title and a first paragraph, to a few that are actually almost complete. So what happened?

In this blog on (not) blogging I try to make sense of my recent experiences as blogger. To a certain extent this blog is a confession. But this blog is also a defiant manifesto of trying to make sense of my own scholarship in an increasingly quantified and competitive world of academic scholarship. So please bear with me.

I recently came upon an article by Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti titled “Torpor and awakening” (2016) in which she shares the experience of making sense of picking up a dead hummingbird on campus

It looked really fresh, and I did not know what to do because I did not want people to step on the tiny bird. … So I wrapped the dead body of the hummingbird in my scarf, I sang it a couple of songs, and I put it in my bag…” (par. 5).

She forgot about the dead hummingbird in her hand bag until later the day when she  remembered and as she took it out of her bag she found that it was showing signs of life. This ‘resurrection’ was explained when she found information on the Internet showing that when hummingbirds experience external threats, “they go into a state of sleep where just 8% of its metabolism keeps it going” (par. 9) – a state described as ‘torpor.’ Torpor is a survival strategy by animals to survive temporary resource constraints or context-specific trauma. In her article she continues reflecting on the torpor she herself experiences in many of the people surrounding her with their exaggerated sense of importance,  entitlement and living in bubbles that separate them from themselves, others and the Earth.

Though the article resonated with me on a number of levels, it was the description of torpor that resonated the most strongly.  It somehow gave me a handle, a way of making sense of my own experiences of shutting down, Ctrl-Alt-Del, of playing dead, of stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off feelings. I often wish I could hibernate for a while, just allowing my mental and emotional processes to calm down, and wake up, be resurrected with a new sense of purpose and recovered mojo.

In 2013 I  blogged about these feelings of being overwhelmed, of doubting whether speaking would make a difference, I compared my experience with that of having aphasia or being tongue-tied and illiterate. I wrote how often “I would start with a title for a blog or a first paragraph only to lose interest or lose my way halfway through the second sentence. Words, concepts, images would race through my mind but somehow the coherence, the rationale for blogging was lost in the inner noise and confusion.” I added that in trying to make sense and trying to cope with the pressures and changes in the higher education landscape I resembled “migrants or refugees trying to make sense of a foreign culture and expressing themselves in a language that is not their own.” I found myself illiterate, not knowing the language of performativity and the pervasive quantification of everything I do.

Now, three years later, my feelings of having aphasia and being illiterate, of being a perpetual imposter in disparate discourses resemble torpor, of shutting down, of pretending to be dead…

I’m not dead. I am just overwhelmed.

What is interesting, however, that while experiencing torpor, I am more alive than ever. While lying still on the ground, I am intensely aware of the voices around me, of demands on me.  I listen to the various petitions that faculty and researchers should just have more ‘grit’, ‘pull up their socks’ and have a ‘growth’ mind-set.  I just cannot. I.Just.Can’t. I am lying still on the ground. I hear you. I hear you that I should appreciate the fact that I have tenure. I hear you. I hear you when you shout that I am benefiting from years of inter-generational privilege as a white person in an increasingly unequal society.

I hear you. I hear you. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Allow me to reflect shortly on competitiveness in the academe, the increasing sense of precarity, the information overload, and what I did, so far, this year. Please bear with me.

In a context where funding grants for research are becoming increasingly competitive and the majority of grant applications are not successful; where applications for attendance of foreign conferences are increasingly contested (#TheHungerGames); and where your gravitas as researcher, networked professional and scholar is measured by your h-index, number of citations, who follows you on Twitter, the number of Likes on Facebook and exploding hearts on Twitter; failure is not an option. Competitiveness has become one of the great unquestioned virtues of contemporary culture (Will Davies, 2014). Davies points out that competitiveness in the markets is not a feature of modern markets, but “the fundamental reason why markets were politically desirable, because it conserved the uncertainty of the future.” In a (higher education) context where ‘winning’, ‘world-leading’, ‘excellence’ are valued and rewarded, the majority of staff are condemned to “also rans”, or “losers” – “thank you for your grant application. This year we received many more applications than in the past, and for which we have funding. We therefore, unfortunately, regret to inform you that your grant application has been unsuccessful. We wish you all of the best.”

I am lying still on the ground. I hear you.

David Frayne refers to the state of work as being in crisis with the erosion of stable and satisfying employment being something is something of the recent past, and where “mass unemployment is … an enduring structural feature of capitalist societies.” We’ve become “a society of workers without work: a society of people who are materially, culturally and psychologically bound to paid employment, but for whom there are not enough stable and meaningful jobs to go around.” And then this: “Perversely, the most pressing problem for many people is no longer exploitation, but the absence of opportunities to be sufficiently and dependably exploited.” To be unemployed has become “a form of deviance.”

I am lying on the ground. I hear you. I cannot afford to lose my job. Not now. Not ever. So I cancel the appointment with friends in order to work on the latest draft of yet another article. As a relative late bloomer in the field of higher education scholarship, I cannot say ‘no’ to an invitation to submit a chapter, an article and/or present a paper. This year also saw the first invitations to deliver keynote addresses. I just could not say no. For an African scholar to be invited to keynote at an international education conference is just not an opportunity to be missed. On the other hand, I am a white, male scholar – so my invitation probably fits the often hollow but filled spaces of  #JustAnotherWhiteAllMalePanel.

[Excursion: one of the incomplete blogs is a reflection on how I try to make sense of these invitations as another white male, but for now just take note that #IKnow that with these invitations comes a lot of issues].

So in this carnival of academic scholarship and publishing, I feel like a slave being crowned as King for a day. I know that the day may pass, but for now, I dance, I provoke, I make fun of the real kings and queens , I make fun of myself while not affording myself one moment to take my eye of the clock.

I can’t afford to lie down. I must get up. I must keep moving. But fuck, I am tired.

And then there is the issue of comparing my blogging tempo, content and style with the blogs of others in the field – those who, when I read their blogs, I swear I will never write again. I am just not quick enough and/or profound enough. Often I have the distinct feeling that while I am still trying to formulate my words in the first paragraph of a new blog, someone else has responded, claimed the space, wrote about the topic – and so the moment has passed and the unfinished blog shuffles out of sight, embarrassed that, somehow, it did not mature fast enough to claim a space in the increasing fluidness of a Twitter feed.

So, my dear friends, in this blog I am singing to myself, Carefully. Caringly. As I unwrap my soul full of expectation looking for signs of life.

I’m not dead. I am just overwhelmed.