Laura Smithers

Not much grants the illusion of linearity like bullet points, so here goes:

• The violence of considering the passage of time in college to be a variable subject to statistical manipulation and optimization through best practices and other quality interventions is real.
  • Via Kara Keeling: this is quotidian violence: “In other words, quotidian violence names the violence that maintains a temporality and a spatial logic hostile to the change and chance immanent in each now; a quotidian violence presently holds in place a spatiotemporal logic that is hostile to the queerness in time” (p. 17).
• What might come by retiming college – granting a non-linearity to the events of learning, honoring the queerness in time in and around educational environments?
• Learning: re/forming communities that enhance our capacities.
• How would a retiming interact with notions of reform that paint the present as a broken object that can be made into a better future object through policy, incentives, planning, and other moral actions that would give assurance to the present as broken but improving?
• Histories that are still live aren’t quite histories in the sense they are past.
  • James Baldwin: “White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history” (p. 47).
• A history carried within us is present.
• Thick present: a thinking/writing/moving-with of time that takes a conception of the present out of a scientized chronology. The present isn’t this second or minute or day, but a hazy push-pull of this moment in the life of the concept you’re thinking through.
  • Karen Barad: “Not only does this experiment call into question the classical Newtonian conceptions of time, as an unabated continuous flow moving inexorably from past to future, where the past is passed and the future will unfold on the basis of what is the case in the present moment, but also the assumed existence of a present-past and the very possibility of erasure without trace. I have argued that an interpretation that seems to be in better accord with the empirical evidence than the one offered by the experimenters is that while the past is never finished and the future is not what will unfold, the world holds the memories of its iterative reconfigurings. All reconfigurings, including atomic blasts, violent ruptures, and tears in the fabric of being – of spacetimemattering – are sedimented into the world in its iterative becoming and must be taken into account in an objective (that is, responsible and accountable) analysis” (p. 73).
• A conception of a thick present might put a view of the present of the accountability movement in United States higher education to extend from the chronological present to at least 1984’s Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education.
• That’s not to say the present of the past 40 years is flat – there is much to be learned from navigating what the sign of accountability has brought together, in ever-shifting configurations, in this time. This conforms with Barad’s note above; we must take into account the reconfigurations of the world that are here, now.
• Why I insist on eclecticism in research, reason #27435: I find a notion like the thick present really generative and one that links up to all sorts of really mind-expanding conversation. But as a gay American in her early 40s who as such has the Broadway cast recording of Rent committed to memory… isn’t this pretty analogous to saying no day but today?
  • No day but today is a constant refrain in Rent, most memorably in Act I’s “Another Day” and to close Act II/the musical in “Finale B.”
  • Spoiler alert: the anecdote (Dies Iræ, Dies Illa, Buzz) that opens Chapter 5 in our forthcoming book is most certainly inspired by the opening of “La Vie Boheme.”
• There are many routes into the sense of a concept, and very few of those routes require high theory.
  • In fact, via Jack Halberstam: “Low theory might constitute the name for a counterhegemonic form of theorizing, the theorization of alternatives within an undisciplined zone of knowledge production” (p. 18).
• Theory isn’t out there, it is here, now, all around us.
  • A re-timing of predictive analytics in education for the Cheaters crowd: “People of all backgrounds cheat, and people of all backgrounds call Cheaters to ‘exercise [their] right to be informed.’ A confrontation happens. Extensions fly. Tears happen. Cars get tagged. Drinks and even billiard balls soar. What does not happen in Cheaters is an intervention at the start of the relationship to shape each party’s behaviors such that cheating never happens, making the couple successful-in-every-moment through a million behavioral and cognitive nudges” (p. 7).
• What makes it so common to not trust our own intuition or received/community ways of knowing when they come up against science?
  • Not that received ways of knowing are inherently liberatory…
• High theory can give this sense of legitimacy to intuition or the banalities of everyday life, but we should fight that act of legitimation (and concomitant delegitimation) at all costs. All are important in conversation with each other.
  • Halberstam, again: “Here we can think about low theory as a mode of accessibility, but we might also think about it as a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples and that refuses to confirm the hierarchies of knowing that maintain the high in high theory” (p. 16).
• Social science that asks us to optimize our everyday life through acting according to the truth of science, or planning, etc. etc. violates these terms – there is no conversation in optimization.
• Optimization is a colonizing force. There is no room to live within difference, the ground of all life must be remade in the image of productivity.
• Such optimization creates a past and a future – a static past that is a graveyard of variables and data, and a future that is always right beyond reach, always the thing to effect, never a place or time of arrival.
• Productivity as a concept requires this chronological conception of time, even when it takes as its object the bending of time to optimize life (“expanding efficiency,” future-proofing, etc.) within the time of a permanent present rather than a thick present, a present dependent on a past and future whose object is optimization rather than experimentation.
• What is improvement – enhancing our capacities – within a thick present? What is improvement that does not rely on conceptions of past and future for its force?
  • Surely this is something that explodes a concept like improvement science or even quality assurance.
• Improving college environments surely is a modus operandi for most? all? researchers, teachers, administrators, and practitioners in higher education as well as policy makers and the public.
• From each of these social locations, what is improvement within a thick present? What actions are privileged? What habits are formed? What becomes thinkable and what becomes unthinkable? What questions do we take as problems to be lived out?
• With a retiming of education, risk takes a different valence. Instead of the thing to be controlled for, it is the part of the system that makes it human, if by human we mean livable. Risk, and specifically risking something of oneself, is the precondition to making higher education a space that increases the capacity of all who interact with it. Controlling for risk – ensuring the production of good future – ensuring bad futures never arise – becomes a nonsensical task.
  • “There’s only now / there’s only here / give into love / or live in fear / no other path / no other way / no day but today”

I find Halberstam’s undisciplined zone of knowledge production truly aspirational. In some way, I don’t find it that hard because my mind doesn’t work in all that disciplined of a way. With a moment’s more reflection, I know that’s a woefully incorrect take. The common sense that does provide the structure that exists is something to fight at every turn – not do always disconfirm it, but to make it work for its ability to structure, always.

To retime education would be, at least, to fight the common sense of time at every turn, not to disconfirm it, but to make it perpetually justify whatever structure it provides.