Critical Analysis

The English department has assigned me to assign my first-year rhetoric and composition students an assignment to find and analyze an artifact.

“Artifact” is the word the department uses to mean “a thing.”

When I ask my students what they believe an “artifact” is, they do not respond. They ignore me and stare at the pornography on their computer screens.

I ask again, “What is an artifact?”

Over the sloshy sound of heterosexual sex, one fraternity brother raises his hand and says, “A dinosaur bone.”

“No,” I say. “Pay attention to me. Paying attention to me will determine your future.”

Two students close their laptops and look toward me. Of course, their futures are determined by the oppressive structures of late capitalism, but I won’t reveal the fallacy of individual effort until our final class.

I tell them that the department has told me that an artifact can be anything man made, such as a song, a poem, a photograph, or even a concrete object rich in meaning, and that their analysis of the artifact should illuminate a larger issue, such as racism, gender discrimination, or homophobia.

I am a homosexual, and when I taught this class last term, all 23 of my students decided to analyze the song “Same Love” by Macklemore.

Many of them plagiarized each other.

I said, “Brett, this is the same paper Emmaline turned in.”

I said, “When you plagiarize, it needs to be from someone outside the class.”

This term when I introduce the assignment, my students ask, “Can we analyze a person? Such as Derek Jeter?”

I say that while a person, such as Derek Jeter, is in some sense wo/man made, a person does not qualify as an artifact for the purpose of this assignment.

My students ask, “Can we analyze a photograph of a person, which we found on the web?

I do not see a problem with this.

They ask, “Can it be a photograph of you?”

I say, “I do not get paid enough to care.”

&

 At Fred Meyer, a cashier with hanging moss tattooed down the side of her neck tells me my card has been declined.

“What if I remove the frozen tilapia fillets?”

She runs the card again.

“What if I remove the sponge?”

 Still declined. As she shakes her head, her shifting neck skin sways the moss. I’m left with three bananas, a small pack of crackers, a can of beans.

“Can we try without the crackers?”

She runs the card. Shakes her head again.

She says, “Open the can of beans.”

I do not have a can opener.

She says, “Use your long fingernails.”

My fingernails snap and bleed as I dig them into the metal. The metal punctures, and I pry open the lid. I spill the beans into a puddle of my blood on the register.

The cashier, watching, peels the banana, and as she chews, says, “You may take what beans remain.”

That night, my colleague Norma comes over and we sit on the kitchen floor and split the beans.

Forking a bean, Norma asks, “Are blood stains vegan?”

We’ve become vegan since moving to Oregon this fall for jobs as adjunct writing instructors, Norma from Chicago, where she’d had to flee “her Virgo stalker,” and me from New York. We’d both dropped out of PhD programs and received consolation master’s degrees, which qualified us for exactly one job—adjunct writing instructor. I could’ve taught in New York, but when the Oregon job came up, my boyfriend suggested we might save our relationship by giving it space. A whole country of space. To get to me, my boyfriend would have to cross twelve states, twenty major rivers, and something called the Continental Divide, a trip so impractical there are video games about it. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d map out the routes he could take to me until interstates began to sound like a list of updated versions of myself that would never exist—I-5, I-80, I-84, I-95. Then I’d stare out my window at the fog.

“I have an announcement,” Norma says, clutching the can of beans like it’s a microphone. “I’ve legally changed my name.”

“To?”

“norma.”

“Your name is Norma.”

“No, norma.”

“Norma?”

“norma! norma no caps! Technically, norma hooks—the state demands a last name—but the hooks is silent. The capital letter is toxic to classroom culture. Think of it. Upper case. Upper class. It embeds hierarchy within the name. It was intimidating the students, preventing them from embracing their intrinsic curiosity. I think if I’m norma they’ll come to office hours.”

norma is Italian and inconsistent with sunscreen, so the department chair assigned her to become the volunteer faculty mentor for the students of color support group. She resisted the extra work until she realized the students of color, like the rest of her students, did not want her support—this rejection shook her sense of self. Now between classes she asks me to help her staple Paulo Freire quotations to the walls of our shared cubicle in the department basement.

As we eat, norma tells me that her name change is part of her plan to implement “critical pedagogy” in her classroom. She informs me that this is a pedagogical philosophy that demands giving voice to the powerless, democratizing the classroom, etc. She will allow her students to vote on course policies and texts and will cede the floor to them, allowing them to direct the course of conversation.

“It’s really inspiring,” norma says. “I wish someone had taught me I had a political subjectivity in undergrad. I wouldn’t have worked at DSW for so long. I gave the best years of my life to DSW. Ah! There it is again. The oppressive capital.”

I’m intrigued by the concept but ultimately decide to continue running my class like an ineffectual fascist who forcefully sets forth dictates but allows them to be ignored without consequence.

“I’m thirsty,” I say. “Will you twist the faucet?”

It’s hard to twist with my bandaged fingers.

She says, “Ok.”

I say, “Will you Venmo me 40 cents for the beans?”

She asks if I can wait until her paycheck comes through.

&

I have placed the students into small groups to discuss their artifacts.

One fraternity brother has brought in my only published poem, which is called “Bottoming for the First Time.”

Another fraternity brother has brought in a photograph of me delirious at a gay bar the night someone roofied me last summer.

Another has brought in the hospital bill from the night I was roofied.

“How did you obtain this?” I ask.

He says, “By embracing my intrinsic curiosity.”

I tell them to examine rhetorical appeals within their artifact. Does the artifact attempt to persuade us either implicitly or explicitly by appealing to Logos? Ethos? Pathos?

One fraternity brother asks, “What’s the opposite of Pathos?”

“What?”

He seems genuinely distressed as he holds up a photograph of my boyfriend and me taken during winter break. I’d flown back to New York in an attempt to reinvigorate our long-distance relationship, though I quickly realized my presence was even more damaging than my absence, an awareness I also feel while teaching.

In the photograph we’re in some vaguely nice restaurant, the name of which I can’t remember, and we’re both washed out in the flash. The waitress made a big deal of taking the photo when she heard it was our anniversary. For some reason, which seemed more performative than necessary, she stood on a chair to take it, so our necks are both craned halfheartedly up toward her, as if we’re in the front row of a theater watching a movie neither of us like.

“This photograph makes me feel…” the student begins. “I don’t know. A void. Your boyfriend posted it to his Instagram, but I don’t feel like he was trying to depict or even elicit emotion. His caption reads, ‘One year later and still in love,’ and yet I don’t think he was trying to persuade you or his friends and family that love persists within your relationship. I don’t even think he was trying to persuade himself. This photo conveys merely the rote drear of togetherness. Nor is this a performative speech act—one that by stating the existence of love brings about its existence. This artifact is entirely devoid of agency, emotion or purpose. It is entirely empty of meaning.”

I say, “For the purposes of this class, let’s call emptiness an emotion, too.”

&

At home I drink four-dollar Chardonnay and send many texts, which will be unread for hours. It’s midnight in Oregon, but on the East Coast it’s 3 a.m. I’m texting the vestiges of friends, the vestige of my boyfriend.

Is this what it feels like to talk to the dead? Maybe. But there’s nothing I want to say. I say, “I miss you.” I say, “.” I say, “.” I say, “I hope you’re sleeping well.” I say, “How was your day?” I say nothing and put the phone down. I’m aware that these words don’t convey any intrinsic meaning. Asking “How was your day?” is in no sense an expression of genuine curiosity, but a plea, something like, Verify my existence! Acknowledge these words as a metonym for me! Respond like a pull cord doll and reaffirm my ability to enact a presence in the world! I can’t admit that I am a void, nor do I have the energy to engender a genuine connection.

Remember Bonsai Kittens? That early 2000s internet hoax that claimed cats were being grown in jars? Allegedly, the cat’s body would take the jar’s shape. Imagine a kitten desperate and squeezed into a space. The cat doesn’t choose its jar but grows to fill it. The cat loves its jar. It has to. If the cat leaves the jar, it will stumble. Its bones will break. The cat is in pain but safe in the shape of a baby bottle, a vodka bottle, an hourglass. Google the photos and see the cats’ faces squished against glass, unable to breathe but smiling, because though distortive, the jar is clear.

In their papers, my students mimic genre, mimic convention, mimic curiosity, mimic interest, mimic an identity. They are compelled to by the University’s baccalaureate core curriculum. They write not to express thought or belief, but to satisfy a requirement, one externally imposed but so deeply felt that it becomes constitutive of who they are.

Sweet dreams love. I thought of you today.

I suppose I too am writing to fulfill a requirement, a compulsion. If I do not send these texts, I will hyperventilate and dig my nails into my skin until I bleed. Perhaps if nothing else, my students practice a salutary obedience to habit, which is necessary to shape and propel an illusory notion of self from one moment to the next, and perhaps some will happily accept the delusion that language—not the unbearable, unknowable, unconscious drives woven like a tightening net through muscle and skin— constitutes identity. Perhaps, if only for a moment, they will point to their ungrammatical strings of linguistic not-self and say of that almost comprehensible artifact: it me!

Is that what I want?

&

Last term, my students would keep their headphones in until the exact moment our course began at 4 p.m., and when I said, “Class is beginning,” they’d let the cords flop from their ears like lost erections. This term, they buzz with excitement as soon as they enter the room. I fear their enthusiasm.

I say, “Today we will discuss research.”

The department has assigned me to assign the students an assignment to engage their artifact with “the cultural conversation,” i.e. the larger discussions taking place around issues related to their artifact. As part of the assignment, I’ve asked my students to locate three sources related to their topic. In past terms, my students struggled, often bringing in the top three Google search results located via overly broad search terms such as “the gays” or “the war.” Now that they’re researching my personal life, their research skills are stunning.

One student has decided to study my role in my parents’ divorce. He shows me letters between my parents, contracts, a neuropsychological evaluation of me as a boy.

I say this is a good start, but perhaps you might consider broadening your topic. Perhaps you might research “the role of precocious homosexual sons in divorce in rural Pennsylvania,” or you might formulate a research question: Is there a causal link between homosexual sons who nibble the ears of their male classmates at birthday parties and their fathers’ deeply felt need to start a new family in another state?

The student says that this suggestion relates to information he plans to integrate from the neuropsychological evaluation of the homosexual son in question. Drawing on transcripts from this evaluation, he may complicate his claims by considering how, during the years the homosexual son’s father prepared to leave and left and returned and left again, reality came to feel filtered through a gauze that wrapped the son’s body, covered his eyes and filled his throat, and how beneath that gauze, the homosexual son, with his limbs so numb and mossy, felt simultaneously unable to participate in his life and, though he saw the world through a mollifying blur, infinitely threatened by it. Through his gauze filter, his parents looked like two stuffed bears turned inside out, the ghost white of cotton forming a mound over their shape. Beneath the stuffing, he couldn’t make out the looks on their faces. These fluffy occlusions of their feelings and intent, which made his parents unknowable, and thus menacing, were ironically what allowed the son to love them. And so, unable to perceive his parents completely, the son was perpetually shocked when bluntly shoved along by their caprices: one month, home meant a dark room on a hard futon with his father on the floor; another month, home was his childhood bedroom, all its furniture pawned, with his mother napping on the couch in the afternoon; some nights, sleep meant the sound of his father contorting on carpet, and other nights, the sound of a shattering cocktail glass.

The student would love to see a neuropsychologist’s evaluation of the homosexual son later in life to see if any of these experiences correlate to a long-term inability to trust.

“This is a fruitful topic,” I say.

I instruct my students to think about the larger social issues with which their artifacts engage. I tell them this is an opportunity to think deeply about the social forces that shape our perceptions of reality, of society, of justice. I say this is a chance to contribute your own voice to a debate, to make a real contribution, to critique and reimagine an oppressive social hierarchy that may seem naturalized and set in stone!

Building on her artifact, a selfie I’d taken at an anti-Trump protest in 2017, one student is analyzing my own declining political activism. She notes I have not been photographed at a protest since the inauguration, despite the escalation of threats to the marginalized. She plans to link these observations to a larger argument about millennial apathy.

“Though you are gay, and though your salary is merely—”

“Don’t say it.”

“Well, despite marginalized aspects of your identity, and perhaps some personal trauma, you comfortably embrace the privileges of whiteness, and have all but given up advocating for social change.”

I tell her I am busy thinking about my art and my relationship.

She asks if she can integrate that quotation into her paper.

&

All year, a Confederate flag has hung in a fraternity window across from the Black Student Union. There have been some newspaper articles asking that it be taken down.

The department holds a meeting on the topic of diversity. When the whiteness of the tenure-track faculty is critiqued, the department chair laments that the University will not be able to hire any additional tenure-track faculty members, let alone tenure-track faculty members of color, perhaps for decades. Enrollment is down. There are cuts.

“Thank God we have norma!” The chair says. “Thank God for norma hooks! How many departments can say they have bell hooks’ granddaughter on staff?”

The rest of the faculty nod appreciatively and let out gentle moans, as if they’ve just heard a meaningful poem at an open mic night.

norma hides her face and looks down at her phone. Over her shoulder I watch as she Googles did Rachel Dolezal go to jail?

&

norma and I have decided to splurge. We’re going to brunch, and we’ll charge it to the credit cards we received in the mail. We buzz with the embrace of our naughty desire. The best brunch spot is called The White Room. It’s rumored to have been founded as a sort of panic room for white supremacists in the mid-1990s when Oregon first began admitting people of color. Now its walls are a muted floral print and there is a small sign above the register that says, “Resist.”

When we sit, we drink large cups of prosecco and eat fried chicken (we are no longer vegan), and norma updates me on the effectiveness of critical pedagogy in her classroom.

norma tells me that as their first act of democracy, her students have determined it would be most pedagogically appropriate, most conducive to their freedom and creative thought, if for the duration of class, she placed her body within a small metal cage rather than roaming freely about the room. The students felt this would create space for their own voices and unique perspectives in the classroom. They offered to build the cage themselves.

norma says that she was confused about how the students had time to build a cage. They had previously spent much of her class period complaining about the rigor of their course load.

“But one student, an engineer, got really into the project.” She pulls out her phone to show me photos. “See, he designed this intricate lock. It’s interesting in that it’s made of unbreakable metal and opens with a key, which the students collectively own, yet it also has a combination. I’m not even sure if the combination works, but I spend the whole class just kind of twisting it, hoping for some code to liberate me. I think only the key, which the students guard adamantly, will free me from my cage, but the students won’t confirm this.”

For now, norma says, she’s satisfied to continue obsessively turning the combination, trying to free herself (as she simultaneously teaches lessons from her cage), but soon she may grow restless. Soon, she worries, she may begin openly begging for her students’ sympathy and compassion, begging them to free her even for just a moment, so she can stretch her legs or take one lap around the classroom, a request she knows they will not grant.

“I bet your end of term evaluations will be better.”

“I’m just excited they’re finally participating.”

&

A student who goes by the internet name “HardBelly” has tweeted that he plans to kill the faggots.

For hours, as rumors of the threat spread online, the University does not send an email to warn us, though they do tweet a warning via the same Twitter account they use to announce the arrival of therapy dogs during finals week.

When the University does send an email, the University does not note that HardBelly has threatened, specifically, to kill “faggots.” The rhetoric textbook says words are dependent on context. I suppose I’m being sensitive. I suppose in this context “faggot” means anyone, anyone whiney and limp-wristed with that kind of voice, you know, high pitched and hard to hear, often saying things that are the reason Trump won, wearing things that are the reason most of the country doesn’t even want to go to college anymore.

My students ask what will happen when HardBelly comes.

They want to know if they will die.

I say, “Don’t expect any acts of heroism from me.”

I text my boyfriend to say I love you! Just in case. He doesn’t respond.

The next day the University implements a tiered emergency response system. An underground safe room, originally built for the massive earthquake which will one day destroy the entire Pacific Northwest, has been repurposed as a hiding spot for tenure-track faculty and administrators. A four-hour webinar on “How to Lock Your Classroom Door” has been held for office staff and non-tenure-track faculty in the sciences. Adjunct instructors in the humanities have been provided a brochure titled “Beautiful Trees of The Willamette Valley You Can Hide 

Behind.”

&

 I fear that my students’ analytic capacities have surpassed an acceptable range. They’re able to explicate, from the smallest concrete details, deep psychological truths about me. They observe me with a terrifying attention. I used to be afraid of what I could not know—about my own mind, about the minds of those I loved. What determined my own romantic whims and those of others? Would our affections persist? Was my boyfriend happy when we were together? Was he happier when I was away? I used to think you could never truly know another person, but I was wrong. Now, with my students’ research nearly complete, I’ve become like a model skeleton cased in the front of a biology classroom—all my bones known and nameable. All my idiosyncrasies—my diet, my desire, my simultaneous need for and fear of love—all have been noted and traced to their origins in childhood and adolescent traumas.

This has altered the classroom dynamic.

The front row of seats had always been empty, but now the second row is too. Without those two rows, there are not enough chairs. Students have taken to sitting on each other’s laps rather than coming closer to me. They must believe my defects are contagious, and if they said that was the case, I could do nothing but believe them.

They know me better than I know myself. In fact, my students have produced more compelling analyses of my life than even the neuropsychologist I visited last week. The evaluation took three hours and was meant to tease apart my anxiety, depression, and attention hyperactivity disorder. It resulted in an inconclusive report: “The patient arrived on time, dressed adequately, with adequate hygiene.” “The patient reports some feelings of sadness.” “The patient reports being in a good long-distance relationship.”

“Good!” I shout to my class. I have projected emails from my boyfriend onto the projector. “Look at this. Look here! Look how when he signs his emails, he leaves off the comma. Instead of writing ‘Love, Matthew,’ he writes, ‘Love Matthew.’ Like it’s a command! And look at this exchange of texts. I say, ‘I love you,’ and he merely responds ‘love’ as if gesturing to a love that is preexisting without agent or object, not emanating from him at all but rather floating in the ether. Analyze the rhetoric of that!”

“Dude,” one fraternity brother says. “You’re reading too much into this.”

“Yeah,” another girl agrees. “I love rhetorical analysis, but this is over the top.”

“We can analyze what you’re doing now though,” another suggests. “I might add this outburst to my paper, in fact.”

“This is making me sad.”

“Is it even possible to explicate language without insinuating aspects of ourselves into language that is not our own?”

“The closer we get to truth, the more I feel repelled by truth.”

“The closer a linguistic approximation comes to the self, the more that approximation becomes a point of vulnerability to the self,” a fraternity brother says. “And though the self can adapt to mitigate critique, language–once committed to the page–preserves the self in a state of perpetual vulnerability.”

Some of the students begin to cry.

I dismiss class early.

&

It’s raining when I leave my classroom, and I hear a scream—the scream of my friend norma. I run to her classroom, which is just down the hall from mine. I don’t know what she would be doing in her classroom at 5 p.m., since the class she teaches commences at 9 a.m.

I find norma at the front of her classroom, locked in her cage, which is just barely larger than her body. Her arms hang out from its openings.

“What happened?” I inquire with the type of astute curiosity I’d hoped to instill in my students.

“They voted again.”

 norma tells me that her students voted to allow student cell phones in the classroom but to ban hers. They voted to eliminate class time for themselves and decided that class must be eternal for her. They brought the keys to one of their fraternity houses, a location where faculty are forbidden or at least highly discouraged, and they voted that norma should stay, until it is decided otherwise, in the cage of their creation.

“What a mess our inexperienced pedagogies have made!”

“Our pedagogies are emerging not from research and observation but from the worst parts of ourselves!”

“When untrained teachers are employed in the classroom, all burdens shift from the institution onto the bodies of the laborers,” I conclude.

“Get me the fuck out of this cage!”

Hey, I think but don’t say, I would rather be in a physical cage than in a cage built of my students’ immense intellect and curiosity!

“They took the key to their frat. Delta Delta something? Epsilon? Alpha? Oh, I don’t know. Look for a welding torch!” norma squints, and her voice deepens as if another entity is speaking through her. “He who holds the torch guards the key.”

I walk to frat row. Because this is Oregon, the fraternities are housed in quaint craftsman bungalows. When I first moved here, I explored the neighborhoods surrounding the empty campus and texted my boyfriend a picture of one of the houses. “We could live here together!” I said.

“Uhhh,” he texted back, “That’s a frat house… There are Greek letters over the door… And a beer pong table in the yard…”

And he was right. He could be so attentive to anything that wasn’t me. The Greek alphabet even! It made total sense to him, though he worked in graphic design and rarely read books, even English ones.

Now, I stand across the street from the house, the one I photographed, trying to discern if it’s the fraternity that holds the key. There are triangles in the name. I feel the way my students must, staring at symbols that signify nothing but exclusion. There is a mound of vomit on the beer pong table, and a muscular teenager sprawls, asleep, across it. It’s six o’clock. It feels wrong to look, predatory, and I feel terribly jealous of the boys, who seem to pass out anywhere with total confidence in their own safety. Despite the drizzle, boys lie side by side in the unkempt grass, in piles of stripped off rain pants on the porch, in the driveway behind the BMW SUV parked there.

But even the conscious boys don’t notice me. Languageless and loud, they celebrate as stained balls clip the rims of cups and drop into warm beer. They lift red cups and drink, following rules they know by heart. They cheer as they choke and spit.

I want to take a picture for my boyfriend. I want him to understand. Unmediated bodies in a yard! Not even shirts between them.

But when I take the picture, the flash goes off. The boys look toward me. There’s one I recognize, one from my class, but as I stare at him, trying to remember his name or what facet of my life he’s writing about, he recognizes me too. After an exchange of head gestures, the frat boys back toward the house without taking their eyes off me and disappear behind the front door’s knotty, unfinished pine. What awful version of me lives in there?

I do not want to know. Please. Don’t make me know what you know.

&

When I return, keyless, to norma’s classroom, her locked cage is empty. She’s gone—well, her body is. I hear the vague sound of her voice, smell the herbal tinctures that imbued her skin, and feel her in the room as an incorporeal presence.

“norma!” I shout.

But I know she won’t return. I know she’s become what the department calls a hybrid instructor: a teacher whose body is subsumed into the ether of cyberspace. I know it’s for the best that norma’s body has dissolved, freeing her, but as I sit in the dark classroom, I miss her.

&

My students have begun uploading their papers to our course website. Given their fervent enthusiasm, I open the files with a sort of excitement, a sort of fear, expecting to find great insights into their topics expressed through formally creative pieces of writing.

When I review my students’ papers, I notice all 23 have the same title: “How The Macklemore Same Love Song Demolished and Destroyed Stereotypes In Our Modern Society For The Gays.”

They’ve all reverted to what they know: the mechanized production of convention. But perhaps this is different, perhaps this is not gibberish produced by mindless laziness but a learned embrace of nihilism, a world-weary acceptance of the impossibility of meaning!!!!!

I fall asleep on my keyboard and my cheek bone types: hgregjrxffffffffffffffffffff

&

By the end of the course, after completing several drafts of several papers, my students have each produced nearly 100 pages of writing. I do not grade the papers, nor do I fail the plagiarists. Instead, I instruct the students to tear their work into shreds and dip the shreds into glue to make papier-mâché. In lieu of peer review, the students work in small groups to coat each other in gluey strips. They lay the assignments over their peers’ limbs, genitals, eyes, mouths. We wait for the strips to dry. We embody the process. By the end of the class, the students are motionless, silent, unidentifiable mounds of white.

“Look at yourselves!” I shout. “Look at how you have constructed your identity through language! Consider how you will use this skill for the rest of your life.”