When I received the email, I was holding a piece of toast. Dry, no butter. I remember this vividly because it was the last thing in my life with a clearly defined purpose.
“You got tenure!” my partner said, beaming.
“Oh! That’s… great,” I replied. “I think?”
And so it began.
In the weeks since, I’ve found myself unable to commit—grammatically, affectively, institutionally. Where once I might have said, “I teach,” I now say, “There are moments in which I find myself adjacent to pedagogy.” Friends have grown concerned. My dog, unfed.
I went to text my partner: “Be home soon.” Instead, I wrote, “Circling back into the infrastructural imaginary of shared dwelling—if, indeed, dwelling can be shared.” They replied with a thumbs up, which I interpret as either affirmation or resignation. Or both. Or neither.
Soon, everyday phrases became impossible. “I’m hungry” became “There emerges, within this organismal enclosure, a not-unfamiliar sense of lack—interpretable, perhaps, as nutritional, though not necessarily limited to metabolic vectors.”
I have begun chewing paper.
My lectures, once widely engaging, are now transcribed by AI and flagged for incoherence. Last Tuesday, I opened class with:
“If we are to approach the concept of ‘knowledge’ not as a static repository but as a contested site of epistemological re-inscription, then what does it mean to ‘learn’—and indeed, to ‘teach’—within the biopolitical constraints of the neoliberal university?”
A student raised their hand and asked if the midterm would still be multiple choice.
I told them, “Choice is an illusion constructed by the pseudo-industrial complex.”
Their hand lowered. Their spirit, too, perhaps.
Email has become a crucible. I can no longer say “Attached is the draft.” I must instead write, “Enclosed—though, of course, enclosure itself is a problematic modality—please locate a text-in-process, emergent rather than concluded.”
My signature is now required to include a content warning.
A colleague invited me to give a talk. I responded, “While I’m open to the performative potentialities of ‘giving’—insofar as knowledge can be gifted, rather than problematically imposed—I hesitate to endorse the teleology implied by the word ‘talk,’ especially when situated within extractive academic economies of listening.”
She replied, “Cool! Just let us know by Friday.”
I haven’t. I can’t.
Hence, resultantly so, as forth, conferences have become a nonzero variant of impossible. My last presentation was titled: Re-Reading the Readings: Toward a Non-Linear Lexicon of Deferred Legibility in the Wake of the Wake of the Wake. I read directly from a shattered mirror.
My partner recently asked, “Do you love me?”
I said, “I think it’s worth troubling the verb.”
They have not asked again.
Following a breakdown in domestic consensus—rooted, perhaps, in divergent interpretations of “emotional labor”—I’ve been spatially reallocated to the couch.
I sleep, but not where I once was legible. I dream of saying, “The cat is on the windowsill.” But even in subconscious nocturnal cognition, it emerges as: “The feline positionality vis-à-vis the aperture suggests a liminal domesticity—perched, perhaps, on the edge of knowability.”
Perhaps, then, the question is not what has been lost, but what remains articulable. Can one possess tenure and still say: The cat sat on the mat?
Or must it forever become: The feline subject, as situated in relation to the liminal textile geography of its domestic enclosure, performs a politics of stillness that refuses legibility within traditional narrative structures of action and intention?
Or, not become, but rather, hover—inhabit—subtend. The mat, no longer substrate, but site. The sitting, no longer action, but archive. The cat, of course, theoretical.
These are not rhetorical questions. They are, at best, para-utterances enacted at the jagged edge of discursive thresholding, within what Glissant might term opacity, or what Foucault might name the gaze. Or the gaze’s gaze. Or the gazed.
As Watzlawick remarks, “One cannot not communicate.”
And so, I ask: Institutionally, interstitially, and perhaps, bacterially speaking—
Or rather: Structurally, psychospiritually, and under the lingering haunt of Enlightenment taxonomies—
Who among us is the subject, really
[EDITOR’S NOTE: At this point, the manuscript became illegible. The author appears to have footnoted a semicolon.]
