Overstock

On the edge of my couch sits a stack of books i've purchased this semester for one of the graduate classes i'm currently enrolled in. All 5 books pursue speech act theory in some fashion, a conceptual hot topic around which my latent academicism purportedly orbits. Speech act theory takes J.L. Austin's designation of "performative" speech, language that calls into being what it names, as the impetus for its linguistic formulations. i'm in grad school because i found Judith Butler's reframing of performative speech as performativity, and of performativity as a way of considering the ways in which "reality" performs its way into being through such persuasive encores as gender, provocatively compelling. But like many other overeducated waitresses, i'm beginning to wonder, what is the point? What is all of this fun and exciting theory making?

Exhibit A: inevitable intellectual hypocrisy. i own an ipod and i update it daily.
Exhibit B: pathetic retention. As i searched my bookshelves for a title for this blog, i came across a copy of one of those new books eagerly perched on my couch. i pulled the book off the shelf, humbled to find my own fastidious undergrad notations ("Rorty is a wanker") confirming that this was indeed my book and that i had indeed rebought a book i had, some years earlier, scrupulously perused.
Exhibit C: classroom logomachy. i frequently roll my eyes at the sincerity with which my classmates and i defend the dangerous propositions inherent in Derrida's work in between sips of our radical praxis corporate coffee treats. Then i push play on my ipod, hop on my bike, and head home to prepare inspirational classroom exercises designed to inspire my students into exposing cultural mythologies a la Roland Barthes. After passing by the College Republicans' advertisement for a Sunday afternoon "P.E.T.A." BBQ at a frat house, i consider giving up.

Michael Warner, in Publics and Counterpublics, his collection of essays revolving "around a central question: What is a public?," bitterly laments, "But most of the imaginative energies of queer culture have come to be focused on a rigorously anti-assimilationist rhetoric invoked only in non-state public-sphere contexts such as Modern Language Association panels." (212) But Michael Warner, when you came to speak at my (state university) campus's "Counter-Cultures: Dissent, Radicalism, and Community in American Life" conference during the year i dropped out of graduate school, i only heard about your lecture and about this radical conference from some grad students who came into the feminist bookstore where i work after your lecture. Why didn't those grad students post a flier at the FEMINIST bookstore, or at least at one of the bars where disillusioned ex-grad student hipsters drown their sorrows, or even at the non-profit record store across the street from the feminist bookstore? Michael Warner, why didn't you organize a reading at or at least drop by the record store or the bookstore?