Finding Precious Time! (Pt 2)

In the last post on the blog you will find some off-the-cuff, raw and honest reflections from Lena Simic and Gary Anderson based on the writing exercise I suggested in my 2016 post, “Write. Just Write. And Be Amazed”. Gary and Lena are writing about time: the way it overtakes us, in a job where the line between “work” and “life” is blurry (welcome to academia, friends); the way it is sized and measured, in an economy hell-bent on increasing productivity (sometimes for better, in the form of flex time and work-from-home; often for worse, in the form of job creep and assessment exercises); and the several ways we might do time differently, on our own terms, clawing back hours or days for less productive, potentially more radical and open and community-oriented uses. (Gary and Lena’s Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home aims to do just that, all the time.)

When I asked Gary and Lena if they would write me a guest post, they in return invited me to contribute to a book they are building, called “10”. Together, they suggested, we could reflect on the conundrum of time, from our different perspectives within academia: them as working parents (and Institute co-founders) in Liverpool, me as a single, mid-career scholar at a big research school in Canada. I said immediately I would accept that compelling collaborative challenge.

Here, then, is my first stab at a contribution to Lena and Gary’s offering. And it is, fittingly, about finding time through collaboration. I hope you enjoy it.

***

Whenever anyone asks me to sum up the ethos of my teaching, I talk about collaboration: the students and me, working together to make new ideas. I do this, too, when I’m asked to talk about my research: I usually say I am a collaborative scholar, most at home co-writing or editing. I don’t identify as a typical academic: I’m not itching to write another scholarly monograph, and I don’t really like being in the archive or the library all by myself. I even get lonely in my office after everyone else goes home.

Time is a perennial problem for me, the way it is for so many of us: there are not enough hours in the day to do all the things that we need to do in order to fulfil the expectations of our academic jobs. But when I’m alone, time sometimes seems to creep, not rush: that creeping feeling reminds me of how lonely, isolating, and insular the labour of academia can be. I don’t, at those times, feel like I’m in a bobsled tunnel whooshing toward a hard, bumpy finish; I feel like I’m hanging in outer space, frightened about what’s below me. (Not even sure which way is up or down, truth be told.)

There’s a paradox here, I think: I’m at once incredibly harried, rushed all the time, exhausted. And yet at other times I feel suspended in air, rudderless, unsure that anything I do makes any difference. Both of these feelings are, for me, connected to outcome expectations: we must work more/harder/faster to do the job well; we must produce, just produce, more STUFF ANY STUFF to do the job well. Which means both of these things – rushing through time, suspended in time – are connected to feelings of dissatisfaction with my job. Both are connected to the pain of over-worked isolation.

When I feel that suspended-and-drifting feeling, to ward off the terror, I usually jump back into the work, always more work, surrounding me: at those times, I work to insulate myself from breakdown. That means time is also an emotional problem for me: afraid of the stillness, the silence, its loneliness, I seek the race and rush. At least it is familiar. And I have coping mechanisms.

I have just started commuting between my new home in Hamilton, Ontario and my job in London, Ontario. This is the first time in my life my commute to work has been longer than an hour, and dependent on a vehicle. Now, I race to get into the car to race the 85 minutes to my campus office and then I race through the day’s tasks in order to jump back in the car to race home again. Or anyway, sometimes it feels like that.

But what do I feel when I finally get home? I experience a rush of calm, to start. I unpack and undress. I walk the dog, who is thrilled to see me. I shower, I eat dinner. Later, I head up to my home office, which I’ve designed carefully to be as supportive and sustaining an environment as possible. It includes my desk and office cabinet, arranged against a long wall papered in a gorgeous graphic rendition of Charlotte Brontë’s garden. It includes plenty of books, neatly filed on shelves. It includes a chaise and coffee table for reading. It includes my dressing area, too – a place I can unwind as I undress, or as I dress up to reinvent myself. It’s a space of imagination.

(My office wall/Charlotte’s garden)

As I’ve been writing this I’ve realized that, in my new space, I am at ease more often than not. It is a place I have carved out in order to shape the time I spend there into calmness, and into the kind of productivity that I want to direct my energies toward: public writing, writing for students, collaborative activities with friends and colleagues, and lots of rejuvenating activities for me (cycling and walking my dog and spending time with my good friends nearby).

I have realized, while writing this, that my new home, and especially my new office, could (should) be characterized as a collaborator in the life I am working towards living – the (new) life that prioritizes my needs and well-being first, the new life that makes space and time. (Those are its productivities.)

My commute, come to think of it, may also be a collaborator in this strategy. It’s easy to conceptualize the time that I now spend driving to and from work in another city as wasted or lost or barren time. But from the start I knew I would value that time, somehow – I sensed it would be good time. I knew that, alone on the road, just me and the drive, I would have space to breathe. Time to think. Room to decompress a bit. I asked around for awesome podcasts and loaded a bunch up onto my phone. These are windows on other worlds, lives, and experiences – worlds I otherwise might not have the time to visit or even recognize as a part of my own.

(Sidebar here: Ear Hustle, from Radiotopia, is simply outstanding.)

Maybe my car is now also a space of imagination, then: as I drive, it makes time. Time for me to be by myself, but also time for me to be other to myself. The commute offers me time to do nothing but go home. It offers me an hour and a half to leave the rush that is not sustainable, and to approach the space I am building to be, to become, sustainable.

(Another sidebar: the dog is totally a collaborator, too. You cannot rush a dog with a nose like Emma’s. The sniff takes the time it takes, yo.)

I began this reflection about time, improbably, by talking about collaboration. What does collaborating with others have to do with time?

First, it transforms work time into social time, community time. Time to share. Time to be alive to otherness, to be outside of ourselves – rather than to be deeply, cruelly sunk into ourselves, the way we are when we are in the race and the rush, preoccupied with the crush on our shoulders.

Second, it makes time to spare: shared work is a load lightened. Yes, collaborative work creates other labours; when you work with someone else, the negotiation process can add to the overall time-to-product (time measured as productivity, maybe). But collaboration also creates a bond, a shared investment – time spent together with another thinking and feeling person, talking and thinking and building ideas. There is a gift in that bond: it is worth far more than the work that emerges.

Finally, I don’t know about you, but I am most proud of the work I have done in my career with others – both colleagues and students. So when I look at that work I think: that was time well spent, in every way – ways that can be measured, but lots of ways that cannot.

I’m still adjusting to my new commute, and to my new home. But I am going to keep thinking about my time in the car as a collaboration, my time in my comfy home office as a collaboration – moves toward sustainability, towards a new conception of how my work life is organized, both spatially and temporally. And I am going to continue prioritizing working with others over working solo – because I’d rather be in this together, with you, than in this spinning space, alone.

Stay warm!

Kim

 

Finding precious time!

Back in December I did some traveling. First, I visited Konstanz, the beautiful university town on the Bodensee in southern Germany, to host a workshop on arts pedagogy in the neoliberal public sphere. Then, it was off to the University of Sussex, and later to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, to hold two related events about the way forward for theatre and performance teachers, students, scholars, and artists inside the neoliberal academy (aka, the university that wants to train you for a job, probably in the sciences or business, and kill everything else that might be alive inside you. More or less).

These events were all related to the new research project I’ve just begun, in which I ask questions about how we are already, and better can in future, recognize and re-situate the transdisciplinary value of performance as a “mobile critical paradigm” in universities around the world that are currently hell-bent on destroying as much arts programming as possible. (Note: “mobile critical paradigm” is a term that comes from the brilliant book In Defence of Theatre, edited by my friends and colleagues Barry Freeman and Kathleen Gallagher. Thanks for this amazing inspiration, both of you!)

I had a wonderful time hosting these discussions, but they shared a quality that was not wonderful at all: bone-weary fatigue. My lovely, inspiring, resilient friends and colleagues and their students and junior colleagues are struggling so, so very hard to keep their heads above water even as everything they believe in is painfully devalued and possibly destroyed. Yet we remain hopeful, and we remain convinced (as we should be – we are resilient!) that we can turn this ship around and make space for broad and nuanced and critical and compelling arts and humanities discourse once again, soon.

If only we had more time. Time to think. Time to breathe.

(Thanks to the extraordinary Rebecca Hayes Laughton for her extraordinary work on the Central event. That’s her on the right. Above left, Kat Low and Rachel Hann express the pleasures of going off-brand.)

Fast forward to the end of 2017. I was late sending out my thank-you email to all of the wonderful allies who attended the two-day event at Central. In my message, among other things, I invited attendees to contribute guest posts to the blog in order to reflect on the many difficult and painful and critical and hopeful ideas we had circulated and argued over and cherished and fretted about.

Without much prompting, Gary Anderson and Lena Simic of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home said they’d gladly take up this thrown-down gauntlet. I’m proud to publish their reflections here.

These reflections are about the most precarious of our institutional precarities: the struggle to find the time. To think, to reflect, to plot, to collaborate fulsomely, to dissent, to take action. Not that we are not doing these things; Gary and Lena most certainly are, along with their amazing four boys. But, as you’ll read below, it’s far harder than it should be – than it should be for any and all of us, if we are to retain the energy, the drive, the nourishment and the scope to generate from this moment of crisis real and lasting change.

What to do? Gary and Lena have ideas but no firm answers. They have also asked me to contribute some words to the project of thinking about this conundrum of time for an upcoming book of theirs, and I’ll share my reflections in response to that kind invitation in my next post.

But first, let’s hear from them. To create the pieces below, Lena and Gary followed my suggestions in a post on the blog in 2016 about low-stakes writing and what it can teach us; they each wrote for 30 minutes, observing on paper what came.

***

Lena 

It was September 2014 and I was on my maternity leave with baby James. I was in Dubrovnik visiting my parents for a couple of weeks. We fell into a routine. After lunch, James would splash about in his little green boat and I would go, on my own, to the beach. I was lucky enough to have James looked after by my parents. I was alone. I’d go to Banje, Dubrovnik’s central beach, somewhat too crowded for my liking, but it was September, the light was gorgeous, really sharp, and I was alone. I had my book with me, Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald. It was one of those books that I was reading very slowly in order to live in it and with it for longer. Deleuze spoke about the water-ski episode in the book as ‘ten pages of total beauty of not knowing how to age’. I was keen to learn about the disgrace and the shame of ageing, of trying to stay young, appearing fit. I was 39. My 40^th birthday was in November that year. On the beach, I swam (3 times to the red buoy and back) and I read the book. Suddenly, I realized. I am not alone. I am with Dick and Nicole Diver. All my time is managed. I am swimming furiously, making the best out of my time. What if I just lay on the beach? I couldn’t do it. It was too crowded and too hot, a total waste of time.

In preparation for my 40^th birthday performance 40 Minutes I used to go to the Institute every day for 40 days before my birthday, for 40 minutes and fill out a page of a 40-page notebook. I was creating 40 notebooks for my 40 invited friends. The time of 40 minutes was my methodology of creating/stealing time, being alone in the Institute and thinking/writing/performance making. I only worked on this performance in that given time – 40 minutes for 40 days, my 40^th being the actual performance.

The Institute combines life and art, as well as life and work. Everything’s a project. This is exhausting. Last year, I wanted to quit the Institute. I wondered what it would be like not to frame our family life through it. It is true that the children are less involved these days, but they have grown up with the Institute, with a very particular activist family life. At our 2017 AGM Sid (10) said: ‘I don’t want it to end-end, I just don’t want to participate in everything.’ His other wish was to do a presentation again – he enjoyed being a part of Playing Up symposium with our presentation ‘Being and Things’ at Tate Modern in 2015.

The other day I got an email from a colleague who said that she can only, at the moment, perform her ‘basic contractual work obligations’. I found such liberation in that phrasing. It’s ‘work to rule’ – Gary said, reminding me about union disputes. Everyone knows we academics work so much more than our contracts stipulate. I am multitasking and channelling my energies into different work spheres: research, performance making, producing, teaching, mothering. Am I doing any of the activities well enough? And yet, all is so over-combined in my life.

One of my best friends from Zagreb works as a civil servant, with the Ministry of Finance. I am not actually sure what her job is. She studied law. She never talks about her work. It’s a waste of our time together. For her, work is elsewhere, compartmentalized into a different world. I envy her. In my world, all is too combined, too much fusion. Yes, I’m so good at not checking work emails after 5pm and never ever at weekends, but I have three more email addresses, WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram and a Facebook account. I think about my children and their future jobs. I am not sure my career is the one I’d advise anyone to follow.

I was inspired by Kim’s post ‘Write. Just write. And be amazed.’ I was reminded of my own methodologies of working with students on their essays and research papers, and myself in performance making. I remembered that my favourite writing is always in relation, when I write with/to my research collaborator Emily Underwood-Lee about maternal matters, when I write letters to my friend and colleague Zoë Svendsen. I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s quote in A Room of One’s Own: ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’. I am yet to achieve either. The habit of freedom might be an ability to let go and be truly alone and unproductive. The courage to write exactly what I think is going to take a while, at least a little longer than 30 minutes.

(Here’s Gary, talking us through, among other things, how to appreciate the otherness of the accidental cockroach, during the event I hosted at CSSD in December 2017. Most fun in a hotel room ever. Really.)

Gary 

Lena’s already started. Half an hour of writing in response to Kim Solga’s blogging. Lena’s furiously tapping away on her keys and I’m stuck writing about her getting ahead of me.

10 per cent. I have a problem with the way we are always compartmentalising stuff – like time, and schedules and how to divide up a day – because in the end I naively believe in a Spinozist universe of infinite substance. I want integration. I don’t want separation. Lena, correctly, tells me that this world view suits somebody who is actually quite lazy. It means I don’t really have to prepare for anything, structure stuff or plan. I can bump into things and try to transform them. Lena suggests this is my modus operandi. I don’t know if that’s fair but I do like the sound that bumping into stuff makes.

However, we’ve decided to divide our time into two portions: a 90 per cent and a 10 per cent. The 90 per cent is where our contractual obligations are fulfilled (our jobs at university) and the 10 per cent is where all the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home work for 2018 gets done. We made this arrangement under some duress whilst we argued and argued about who is the lazy one and who is the one who maintains everything – at our 2017 AGM in Dubrovnik – at the Biker’s Café.

There’s a history of decimation in world religions; the churches of the late middle ages thought it wise to decimate all parishioners to the tune of 10 per cent of their wealth. The churches grew astonishingly rich from this levy whilst the consequences for dissenting parishioners were severe. Penalties were dished out exemplar-fashion. Retrospectively, we’ve applied the word decimate to mean the killing of every tenth Roman solider who dissented.  Whether in Rome or elsewhere everyone soon got to know what being decimated meant. From the perspective of hegemony – you were ‘saved’. We have a similar methodology at home. All monies that come through us, from lecturer salaries to child benefits for our four children to any invited commissions, are decimated and put into the Institute. It’s a way of saving ourselves from the full onslaught of the current equivalent of the Roman Empire or the oligarchy of the late Middle age Christian church. We need saving from our late capitalist living all more or less 100 per cent covered by legal contracts and insipid insurance structures.

We’ve decided to extend the metaphor into our time. We are contracted to operate as full time employees of higher education establishments in/around Liverpool. That’s 35 hours per week. On Tuesday mornings we spend 3.5 hours on the work of the Institute. This short writing exercise, in response to Kim Solga’s blogging, is part of that 3.5 hours. We said we’d get everything done by then, between 9am and 12:30pm. The kids are all in school. We are at the kitchen table trying out a writing exercise ‘Write. Just write. And be amazed’, from The Activist Classroom blog. I’ve about 10 minutes left…

This is part of a book project we have decided to work on called ‘10’. A book of 10 ‘chapters’ each talking and writing through a key problem. We might call the book ‘10 Problems’. We don’t know yet. We need to decide everything within the 10 per cent of our 35 hours on a Tuesday morning: get the concepts of the book clear, do all the writing and thinking together and make sure everything is in place until publication and dissemination. It’s fun to work in this way sometimes. Feels like a joke at our employers’ expense, one they wouldn’t even be interested in, would just ignore or brush off as incomprehensible or ‘it’s what drama teachers do…’ That gives me a little bit of energy and focus.

This will go through a re-reading now, after the half hour is up, then will be shared with Lena, then we’ll try to pick out the best bits, then we’ll write a proposal for Kim’s blog based on what we’ve learnt or produced from this writing exercise. We started off with the idea that all of us, and all of our strategies and tactics for working, are simply over-productive; that we are struggling with a paradox: we need time in order to slow down, but that time would have to be scheduled into what is already no time left, again.

Time up.

***

Want to know more?

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, based in a family home in Liverpool, UK, founded in 2007 is an intervention into family life and the normative upbringing of children. The Institute identify as anarchist, anti-capitalist and feminist. Our interventions happen across various levels: through activities in our own home by way of performances, artists’ residencies, meetings, reading groups and through our participation as a family of performers at different art events, protests, festivals and academic conferences. The Institute’s activities involve taking the children to political demonstrations and learning together how to be critical citizens rather than passive consumers. The Institute is funded by 10% of the family’s net income (two university lecturer salaries, child benefit and any other artist commissions), and currently stands at around £530 per month. The Institute are Gary Anderson (45), Lena Simic (43), Neal (17), Gabriel (15), Sid (10) and James (4).

The Institute publications include art activist books 4 Boys [for Beuys] (2016), The Mums and Babies Ensemble (2015), and Five (2008-2012) (2014). The Institute have presented their work in various arts centre (Tate Modern, Arnolfini, Artsadmin, Live Art Development Agency, the Bluecoat, FACT, Tobacco Factory, New Art Gallery Walsall, Chelsea Theatre, Stanley Picker Gallery, East Street Arts, Wysing Arts Centre, 25 SG), academic and arts journals (Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research, RiDE, Feminist Review, Meta Mute, The Concept Store Journal, Liverpool Art Journal) as well as numerous national and international conferences.

The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home are currently collaborating with Live Art Development Agency on Study Room in Exile, co-organizing Family Activist Network and co-editing (with Adele Senior) a special issue ‘On Children’ for Performance Research.