Immeasurable middle

Today: Please join us in welcoming new Hydra contributor Ian Williams, graduate instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Issue No. 216

Hard, But Worth It
Ian Williams

Hard, But Worth It

by Ian Williams

Basically, the following is a writeup of my closing lecture to my cultural studies class this week.

I want to start today by revisiting my advice on using AI in your papers. Don’t. Don’t do it, don’t even be tempted by it. Reading and writing are the entirety of the work. I told you on day one that if you were looking for classes which will get you this or that job, my class wasn’t it, nor would it be an easy A, but that it might offer some equipment for living going forward. A significant part of that is to struggle—with ideas, readings, and your writing. These are big ideas about human nature, history, the future, why we do the things we do and what those things are. It’s hard. That’s okay. 

If you take nothing else from this class I hope that it’s an understanding that this culture has set up a systemic focus on efficiency and productivity that tries to remove all the friction of life in pursuit of some metric, determined by your manager at work or a stock broker a thousand miles away, which is always just out of reach but which, with just a little less friction, we could reach. 

That’s crap. And, in any event, I truly, sincerely do not care what a robot writes. I care about what you write, what you think (because they’re the same thing), even if it’s imperfect.

On our first day, I told you that my job isn’t to get you to believe a specific thing, despite the fact that I believe specific things very deeply, but to understand the material. What you do with it is up to you. For the next 30 minutes I’m going to break that rule.

First, let’s return to conjunctural analysis. In the words of our own Nic Gerstner, conjunctural analysis is the study of that snippet of time between the epoch and the event. The epoch is that big thing, capitalism, colonialism, and the event is that thing in the now, the BLM protests of 2020 or the Covid lockdowns. Conjunctural analysis is the interdisciplinary, always messy study of that middle space where there are always possibilities and is as much a stance as it is an analysis. How might things change and how might they be nudged one way or another? 

Conjunctural analysis isn’t the single method that will get you to a final understanding of the world, but it gets you partway there. The problem is that everything changes all the time. As soon as you write something down, there’s a shift that can unravel all the work. That’s okay.