untitled 11:20 PM 11/30/06

I just got internet in my apartment for certainly the first time since May - when the wireless connection i was "borrowing" cut out, but really the first time ever, since this is a dependable connection I pay for and control. It's exciting. In a totally banal kind of way.

I've been thinking about academics a lot, in part because there's no picket line around the library so i have more time to do so this year, (although there's a lot of organizing that needs to be done,) in part because I'm incredibly stressed out and need to be thinking about academics if I want to stay in grad school, and in part because, dude, I like thinking about the work i do or i wouldn't be in grad school in the first place.

I've felt detatched - and lost. I've been unexcited about my work and I'm still angry about last year, and, perhaps most keenly, unsure of what i want to focus on and what focusing on certain aspects of american studies will mean within the context of my university and/or department. The guest lecture i did last week, and the research i did for it make me increasingly certain that I want "labor" in there somehow, but perhaps coupled with "cultural theory" or making the move to specifically deal with cultural histories of labor and workers' movements, something that isn't in itself a new gesture, but could point my attentions towards places I would find it useful and rewardling to go. The spatial metaphors I'm using here are somewhat out of control.

And then the second exam could be something like "histories of capitalism," maybe. I don't know. Any suggestions?

Interdisciplinarity kind of sucks. It seems at least in part an illusory intervention. The limits of free play and open exchange become readily apparent not only when you get told you aren't focused enough or you're looking too narrow and need to be more broad - these are helpful interventions, more often than not- but, more pointedly, when it becomes all too clear that interdisciplinarity's an open signifier and as much a symptom of the neoliberal discursive hegemony of the "University of Excellence" as a zone of resistance to it - at least that's part of Bill Readings' argument in The University in Ruins, which I m enjoying but the pagination in my copy is totally fucked up and makes the second half unreadable so i have to find another copy. I haven't given up on cultural studies as a site from which to lodge powerful critiques and mobilize political and anti-political interventions, but I think I've done a poor job of figuring out how to situate what I want to do within such projects. Does this make any sense?