Study & Care under Pandemic Capitalism
We once studied critiques of capitalism as part of our university education, as one way of analyzing the world in which we lived. We later studied critiques of capitalism out of personal desperation and mutual need. We once studied theories of care in the classroom. We later studied as a way of caring, in coffee shops and bars, in text messages and shared song links. We once went to the university because we believed in a life of shared study. We still believe in study as a way of life, but we no longer believe in the university. The university is now prohibitively expensive for those who want to study and prohibitively exploitative for those it would employ, too. The university is no place for students. And it is certainly no place for care.
We have always known, somewhere, that shared study was a form of care. Despite the many degradations forced on us by higher education, the extra administrative and emotional hoops we often jumped through to prove ourselves worthy — whether because we were women, working-class, femmes, GNC, queer, or of color — we nevertheless found in the university people who wanted to read books together, listen to music, watch films, and talk about them, to through them study the conditions that had come to condition us, to have our minds collectively blown, and our world’s re-created through the shared experience of studying together.
The experience of collective study, of being moved by what one studies as well as those one studies with, is — in that movement — an act of connection through shared vulnerability and care as we change together. We know this may sound overly romantic. And we will not say this happened in every situation, in every class, with every passage read aloud. . . but it did sometimes happen, and the fact of its sometimes happening, the promise of its possibility, kept us tied for too long to an exploitative university system. But in the pandemic, in the face of having nothing left to lose, having lost almost everything, we have found new places to study, and are working to build new formations that will allow us to continue to study, which is to say to connect and therefore to care, while we are at our most distant and vulnerable and in need of collective life. It was from precisely these conditions that Night School began.
Like many others, when the pandemic began, we lost jobs; we suffered lack of wages; we waited days and weeks for unemployment checks that never came; we logged onto the broken-net systems of our states again; we completed our form again; we waited and waited for approval, for the system to approve of us, to say that we were worthy of being human beings. . . while it repeatedly returned that we were not, or rather, that our worth was pending. Under capitalism in general, and in the corporate university in particular, it is hard to divorce our sense of worth from the monetary worth assigned to us, the rank we’re wrung into. As adjuncts, we’ve been shown over and over again that despite being the central labor force of the university, our worth is a mere adjunct to that of football coaches and midlevel administrators and even tenured professors. Unemployed, we felt even less valuable; and it was clear that our values did not align with any of the systems assigned to assign us value.
Like many, many, many people under capitalism, economic precarity brought with it despair. This only magnified the sense of depression and ongoing loneliness that the pandemic had opened into, had opened the floodgates onto: the epidemic of loneliness became a pandemic of despair as across the country financial instability, even ruin, and social isolation intensified. So we did the only thing we could: we offered a class, a chance to study together, for anyone, anywhere, who might want to take it. . . for free.
From late May to early July, almost 30 people across 3 continents and even more time zones, from Chicago to Edmonton, Birmingham to Bucharest, met once a week to talk about Art & Illness. The topic was initially imagined as connected to needing art in order to process the fact of illness that was plaguing our world. But as protests erupted around George Floyd’s murder, as lockdowns proceeded, as horizons of affordable care receded, it became more and more clear that we needed to diagnose not our illness in the world, but the world’s illness. And art — literature, music, plastic arts, philosophy — would be crucial to our process. We read about the ways that race, gender, and class were named as diseases — feminine hysteria, Black schizophrenia, the “addictions” of the poor — and we discovered artists who counter-diagnosed our systems of oppression: van Gogh, Kaysen, Ellison, Baldwin, Woolf, Lazard, Goya, McArthur & Zavitsanos, Hurston, etc. etc. etc. And through them, we learned to do the same. In doing so, we came to think passionately and to care for one another.
At the end of the class — the free class to which no one had any obligation, no debt paid or credit received — ten people stayed to write. We workshopped these creations — essays, ‘zines, poems, things experimental and reaching without a name. We encouraged each other. We motivated one another. When only a handful could get things prepared for the first workshop day, we waited patiently; we coaxed and convinced; we waited more patiently still for the stories each person had inside them that they wanted to emerge. And then we workshopped those, too. What came out was breathtaking and lifegiving: histories of misdiagnosis and misogyny, chronic pain and artistic creation, assault and self-affirmation, the meanings of which were accessed through quotation and cut-outs, interpretation and images. And there they were, these pieces of writing and art, and there we were: a community of students who had studied together.
Afterwards, people wrote and said how it had helped them, how meaningful it had been. Some said it helped expand their empathetic imagination, helped them think about patients and doctors, helped them understand their own experiences of illness, medicalization, grief… For some, Art & Illness was perhaps even more. In the midst of absolute abandonment by our government, financial desperation, intense loneliness, and consequent depression, study — coming together to study — was truly a matter of life or death. Or rather, study was a form of life against death. We know this sounds dramatic, but in this instance, we also know it to be true.
We know that the history of study in the university has often been opposed to care. Study is dispassionate, objective, impersonal. In the university we know this is the case because you go to the off-campus center for care, not the classroom. You confess sexual assault and racist aggressions behind the closed doors of Gender and Ethnic Studies faculty, who do the double duty of care while both their care work and their scholarship are devalued. Care hides in the university; the university effectively separates study and care.
This is because the power of care through study is immense. Perhaps this kind of care is dangerous to the university because of its power. Maybe if we connect study and care, we also connect ourselves to the world, we revalue personal meaning-making, and we revalue ourselves in a world that continually devalues us, makes us only as valuable as our (non)essential labor. Maybe to study outside the university might be to extract ourselves from extraction-based systems of value. Maybe we’ll find out, if we continue to study together.
Night School was born out of the early pandemic moment and the affirmation we received that collective study is both desirable and possible outside of the university. In order to continue this work and keep offering courses on a donation basis, we rely on community support.
You can donate to Night School Bar by helping us build our 2022 Student Scholarship Fund. There are 2 days left for this fundraiser. Learn more & make an end-of-year tax-deductible donation at: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/night-school-bar/campaigns/4584
