Trading Well Nicole Simek (bio) I want to argue here in favor of smuggling as a way of conceiving of our trade as literature professors, in favor of taking up a sort of ironic pirate's life. My starting premise is that under neoliberalism, studying or teaching literature is in effect and inescapably a trade, in a couple senses of the word. Neoliberalism's economistic logic has sway in just about every sphere of life today, and the academic study of literature is not immune. The main question I want to consider here, then, is not how we might protect literary studies, and the liberal arts more broadly, from the encroaching logic of economic interest, but rather, since we are already here, since we have been made into a trade, what does it mean to trade well under these constraints?1 What we trade in and how to sell our wares are important questions to raise. But we also need to be asking with whom we should be trading, and how. What kind of traders has neoliberal logic pushed us to be, and how might we trade differently? Is it possible to smuggle enough contraband into our work to create new circuits and logics of exchange and help shift conditions on the ground? Imagining new modes of trading, or even just making sense of our new normal, is difficult when the pressure to make ourselves vocational and to justify our worth as handmaidens of business shakes any belief that what we do in the humanities still matters. As the autonomy of the university as a whole, and of the humanities in particular, has waned, becoming more and more subject to the logic of the economic field, the value of our work and our investment in it are repeatedly thrown into question, leaving many of us deeply disheartened, disenchanted, and pessimistic. Funding cuts over the last decades and the rise of neoliberal structures of hiring and accountability have made our working conditions more precarious and pushed us to channel our energies into anxious assessment activities, defensive sales pitches, and survival tactics. We seem to be left with few choices in such a situation: from our position of economic and political weakness it seems nearly impossible to reestablish the autonomy of the university and shore up its values, while trading our old values for new ones is an even more demoralizing prospect when the new paradigm on offer restricts teaching, research, and learning to [End Page 405] profit-incentivized, individualistic, and technocratic endeavors. If we do our best to ply our trade as a trade, to sell ourselves, it seems that we sell ourselves out by conceding to neoliberalism's economistic terms. Conversely, refusing to play the neoliberal game would seem to lead to the same demise, so long as lawmakers and accreditors determine our educational mission and set the criteria for funding according to such a paradigm. And yet I believe we need to struggle to imagine other possibilities and enabling metaphors for our work, even if we are unsure of their success. In the service of that goal, I'd like to propose a few contraband ideas to smuggle into our language and our work whenever we can: first, we should consider and speak of ourselves not as a trade, in the singular, but as members of the trades, plural, who can infuse the concept and practice of trade with new meanings; second, smuggling can be an acceptable form of resistance in certain aspects of our lives, not just a compromising and bankrupt form of complicity; and finally, the different marketplaces in which we trade—the classroom, the faculty floor, publication outlets, the halls of administration, the union meeting, our private lives, our public lives as citizens or community members—call for different tactics, not a single, all-encompassing, calculable strategy. Taking up the first point, we might ask, why insist on the plural? What meanings of trade should we try to bring into practice, over and against others? Trade schools are most often represented, approvingly or pejoratively, as the other of the liberal arts: a trade school is thought of as providing manual or technical training leading to a...
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Aug 14, 2024
Xinye Feng + 3
Open Access
