that which is awesome

13Sep11

Back in the day, circa 2007, when facebook was only for college students, every few months or so, I’d trek my way to childhood-land, and would inevitably be asked by a family-friend what I was studying. I then would translate my Evergreen education^* into the response, “I’m studying philosophy.” I could very nearly predict the time lapse and the exact intonation to the next question, “what are you going to do with that?” Somehow, and for reasons I’m still not so sure why, there was never a conversational flow after I responded with “well, I’m going to be myself.” Perhaps what I could have said was that I honestly had no idea what I’d do with a ‘philosophy degree’ – other than currently I was fascinated by questioning and analyzing structures and the space that thought creates.

Ok, now, enter to the present, which is circa facebook-as-my-parental-lifeline (if I want to know what’s up with my father – facebook’s my source – although I do have to sift through some of his more banal posts of which I miss his meteorologist persona). However to be more relevant to this post, it’s my week two of university teaching and it’s really exciting!

Today we went over situationist terminology. One of my students said, “I feel like I have smoke coming out of my ears.” When asked why, her response was that there was so much to think about and that it’s lighting her brain on fire (awesome right!?). The fun part was that Judith Butler had to show up with her performativity/reiteration as a way to explain recooperation and detournement, and they really liked the concept: psychogeography.

What’s awesome for me, is that, although Foucault, Nietzsche, Butler, and Situationist Texts (particularly Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life) have highly influenced me, my previous projects and so much more, now I get to directly figure out how to teach their concepts, and use their writing to engage within my students critical thinking skills.

Therefore, my past self could probably have said, “I’m studying philosophy, because I want to figure out how I can contribute to and change my world within and without.”

(and now, I’d like to predict my father’s response: Alright now you need to starting making money on that to pay off your student loans.)

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^* By the time I graduated and had to fill in documents for Ukraine, I translated my bachelor’s degree into Corporeal Theory. Although this translation more directly describes my studies and doesn’t imply that I studied obnoxious philosophers like Hegel and Plato, the consequence of this has been that during my Peace Corps Training my country director came to me and said, “You have the only degree I don’t understand. What is corporeal theory?”

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