Postgraduate ardour. Postgraduate desire. There’s no stronger force in the universe. Except part time lecturer ardour. Hourly paid lecturer desire.
Our time as nearly men and women. As ghosts of full time academics. Drafted in for emergency cover. For maternity leave. As doubles. Doppelgangers. As Almosts. As Nearlys. As Not Quites.
And sometimes, your frustrations just bust out. Just break out. Free-style seminar rants. About those smug full timers. About how little they’ve achieved, those full time philosophers. About the complacency of full time uni staff. About their mediocrity. Which is what follows when like employs like.
About the unfairness of it all. About how many years you’ve studied. About how poorly you’re paid. And you can’t help it busting out of you. You can’t prevent it breaking through – erupting.
And bigger stuff. Wilder stuff. When you strut your edgelord stuff in front of them. It’s all going to collapse soon. The levels of debt – private and public. Like a Great Depression on steroids. When you talk dark. Talk apocalypse. To people who have to listen to you. Who actually pay to listen to you.
Your flights of oratory. Your pathos. Because you have that: pathos.
This might be your last chance, you tell them, your captive audience. These might be the last seminars you’ll ever run. Next year, someone else will be here before them. And the year after, someone else …
Your seminar students: the only people who’ll ever look up to you. Who’ll ever respect you. Who’ll ever think you have something to say. The only people in your life who take you seriously. And pretty much the only company you have, when you take them out for a drink after class.
Part time desperation of the heart. Bursting out of you in class. All your desperation. All your ardour. Your frustration at being paid per hour. At the terrible conditions of your labour.
The exploitation! The degradation! The great unfairness! Where you’ll only ever be unremembered. Uncelebrated. But busy keeping the whole academic show on the road. Keeping departmental life rolling forward on the back of your poorly paid labour.
The whole academic apartheid! The absolute division between the full time and the part time! Where the full time don’t even in recognise you in the corridor Where they don’t even know your name. Where you simply walk by them unrecognised, those for whom you are teaching.
Where you’re underlabourers. Invisibles. Nameless adjuncts, as replaceable as machine parts. Ghosts of the academic world.
There’s an oversupply of you, of your kind. There are too many of you, of your kind.
Which means that you or someone like you will always be teaching the seminars. Which means there’s always a new crop of freshly PhD’d part timers, looking for work. Desperate for work.
Reliables – that’s what you are. Dependables. Balancing teaching for several departments at once. Travelling here and then there. Crossing town. Teaching this and then that. Ready to be used until you’re burnt out and thrown away.
Standing in at short notice and even shorter notice. Parachuted in to talk of this and then that
Keeping it all going. Keeping the academic show on the road. Keeping it all rolling forward. But unacknowledged! Unthanked!
But how your soul burns! How your eyes shine when you teach!
Invisible one, your hearts beat higher than theirs. Buried one, your thoughts burn brighter. Obscure one, you feel more. Love more.
Oh precarity! Oh life on the edge! Your fate, not in your hands. So delicate, so trembling, your fate! Beating its wings, your fate! So tremulous, so sensitive, your fate!
If they’d only let you lecture! If they’d just let you run your own module. If only they could just give you a year’s contract. To show what you could do! How indispensable you were!
How you burn, inside. How you blaze, inside. How you scream inside,
The state of your soul! A Raskolnikov. A-that-guy-out-of-Hunger …
Philosophy could explode inside you. You could just explode with light in all directions.
Work in Progress 