the same time are needed since so many graduate students are in that position. Some put off having children indefinitely out of fear that they will lose their careers. As one fellow graduate student hesitantly asked: "If you're pregnant, does that hurt your chances of getting a job?" As I walk on campus, I am struck by the limited segment of the population I see. I wish there was a children's play area on college campuses, a place where parents can sit with their children. Such an area would serve as a physical and visual reminder that children are part of our world; it could also inspire discussions about being a par­ ent in the academy today.

Reading around the Kids Michael Rectenwald

NOTE Special thanks to Constance Coiner, who encouraged me to write this essay.

The books are everywhere, stacked like barricades between me and my family, on coffee tables, end ta­ bles, the kitchen table, dining room table, chairs, desks, dressertops: Social Semiotics by Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress; The Predicament of Culture by James Clifford; The PostModern Condition, Jean-Frarn;ois Lyotard; Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault; The Field of Cul­ tural Production, Pierre Bourdieu, to name just a few. All of them in­ terlibrary-loaned-I couldn't afford to buy them, I have three kids to support. Gretchen waits tables evenings. When I come home, I pass the car keys; she tells me what to cook and goes. I have tomes to read, so I slap something easy on the stove, like macaroni and cheese, feed them, and then descend to the basement. The kids watch Nickelodeon game shows while I read Adamo's "The Culture Industry: The Enlightenment as Mass Deception." After a few hours, I come back up for air, find kids slouched all over, light­ ing too dim, two-and-a-half year old's diaper loaded; toys, plates, sun­ dry items scattered all around the floor. Flip on lights, straighten up, change the baby, milk and cookies on the house. I give them the old tirade about T\1, but the truth is, it's me that puts them in front of it­ the damn thing's the best baby-sitter on earth. It grips them. How else could I get a Ph.D. in English than by exposing them to such hypno­ sis? For every book I read some 12 hours of combined television pro­ gramming are viewed by my kids, as if one activity necessitated the Michael Rectenwald is a graduate teaching fellow in literary and cultural �heory at Carnegie Mellon University. 109

evitable given my own contradictions: "For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere ofactivity, which is forced upon him and from which he can­ not escape" (160). I try nonetheless; stay up reading till about 3:00 A.M., write for another two, slip into bed beside Gretchen, trying not to wake her, and get up for work by 8:00. It confounds sense, trying to teach and sell advertising, manage eight interns for the station, read six hours a day, and do my own writ­ ing, as well as that for class and business. It all has to do with wanting out of my "original" career. It seems like it's either this or always doing "meaningless work." Francis Thompson's first lines from "The Hound of Heaven" aptly describe my flight from the Ad Man: "I fled him, down the nights and down the days. / I fled him, down the labyrin­ thine ways / Of my own mind" (89). Of course, Francis Thompson was referring to a zealously panoptic God and his own therefore futile at­ tempts to escape such a God. As, perhaps, am I. I'm in my office trying to read Friedrich Schleiermacher's herme­ neutics, when in pops my boss, a punctilious administrator, asking whether I've raised any new money for the radio station. The last time he came by was about an hour ago. I was reading then too. Again, I slip the book under the desk quickly. My haste confirms any suspicion he might have had. I wish I had the hermeneutic key to unlock the mean­ ing of this: I am compelled to work very hard at that which doesn't support me (and my family), avoiding that which does, to the point of very real danger. Twice a week, I drive a hundred miles to teach and take classes. I hope for something exceptional to happen. Recently something did. The cultural criticism professor was talking about some students in his other class who "aren't real students ... I mean," he said, "they have jobs." He was quick to add, not quite apologetically, "like you guys." We were, the two of us working stiffs, stupefied. "Work degrades," he was saying, just like the elitist modernists he's always ripped on. This is apparently my problem: I actually believe this. That this kind of slan­ der still has not been adequately addressed-that the ideal of the grad­ uate student still has ivy clinging to it-is not as fundamental as is the denial that intellectual activity itself is supported by other life-sustain­ ing labor, whether one's own or someone else's. Likewise, a working­ class background or the need to be employed are not only practical liabilities in academia; they present image problems as well. One so­ lution to this is a kind of romanticism where one works a "lowly" job to support a "lofty" ideal. But such romanticism may not be available

other. As Adorno noted, without the formatting of leisure, total sys­ temization fails. But what leisure? Gretchen works all day at home, then at night waiting tables. I accepted a job running the sales department of a university radio station. This job brought us to a small town unlike any of the metropolises we'd been living in. For me a big part ofthe com­ pensation for losing the allure of San Francisco, Washington, D.C., or even Pittsburgh was the chance to study for a Ph.D. in English with partial tuition reimbursement and partial sanction from my employ­ ers. Employer support for such studies is no small thing when one's work background is advertising sales. I've worked for many broadcast­ ers for whom even a modest interest in intellectual matters makes one suspect. Sales people are supposed to hustle, not contemplate things. The university where I take classes happens to be almost one hun­ dred miles from the one where I work. I started out taking one class a semester and then was offered a teaching fellowship the following year. So now I teach a class and take two others at one university while working full-time at another almost three hours away. I spend some time with the kids, then put them to bed. Their mother comes home. We talk a while, questioning everything, includ­ ing whether all this is pulling us apart. There is financial stress, time pressure, and, perhaps most important, the contradiction between theory and praxis. After all, I am the one studying feminism (amongst other things), while Gretchen labors taking care of children, straight­ ening the business of the household, and waiting tables. As Marx wrote in The German Ideology, the "division oflabor"-and its atten­ dant inequities and alienation-"only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. ...This can only occur because existing social relations have come into contradiction with existing forces of production'' (159). In terms of our dilemma, my consciousness (reified as reading) has come into conflict with my existing social relations (family), but only because I have come into conflict with my position within the realm of produc­ tion. I am resisting the division of labor that I "chose" earlier in life, that of an advertising salesman. Meanwhile, Gretchen is now finding herself, naturally, in conflict with the current set-up of productive and nonprdductive forces. This theory, which is really only a reflection of praxis in the world, has come to take on the appearance of reality. It almost represents an adequate description of our life.That it actually reflects circumstances that I am helping to perpetrate even while studying it seems to me in-

to those that either have no access to the "lofty" or else cannot afford to work a "lowly" job. These images, as social constructs, aren't therefore "all in one's head." But they are there too, nonetheless. I have to keep slashing at them. But it behooves me politically not to mention that I am a hus­ band and father, who likewise must work to help support life. These appurtenances just don't jibe with the "pure theory" of the academic, which, regardless of what is studied, always depends on labor to sup­ port it, maternal labor being the first form thereof. Like typical Ger­ man ideologists, we academics like to imagine that we have no mate­ rial (or maternal) history, but rather were just plopped down in the universities as full-grown students, lecturers, and intellectuals. This kind of denial of personal history (and labor) extends itself to the children we engender. Children are the graduate student's leprosy in polite company. For instance, when recently a young Iraqi student who is also a mother met her husband and four children in the hall during a class break, the professor rolled her eyes and cleared her throat repeatedly at the slightest noises the children made. "When the voices of children are heard" in the hall, the result is not the breast­ stilling awe that occurred to William Blake, but rather is-too often­ ignominy. Children embarrass us because they point ever too clever­ ly and clearly to our denial of personal, material, and maternal history. This accounts, in part, for academia's pedophobia and the hush-hush we maintain about parenting. I am implicated in this contradiction between pedophobia and some of the more progressive positions that I hold. This is due large­ ly to the nature of intellectual life as a kind of self-flattering divorce from labor, in both senses of the word. While pregnancy embodies lit­ erally and inadvertently many Western ideological contradictions-the subsequent labor of which (giving birth and taking care of children) has never counted in the calculations of economists (excepting those of recent feminist economists and perhaps Marx)-such contradic­ tions are perhaps even more prominent in academia. The sheer phys­ icality of the event embarrasses, and the reality of human reproduc­ tion doesn't fit into rationalistic-bureaucratic schema. Leave policies are deciped by bureaucrats who only yield to the fact, but never real­ ly own up to it. As an ontological event, it defies logic. I am loathe to speak for the hypothesized Others, women, as to how this is experienced-as external pressure or internalized oppro­ brium or both. As for myself, I admittedly internalize what I feel is an implicit pedophobia and disavowal of parenting, denying by omission

my status as a father on many occasions. My standing as an intellec­ tual, I somehow feel, would be affected by regular referral to my chil­ dren. This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. But it is no less powerful for that, until it has been exorcised. If we brought children more often into our halls, as a kind of talisman to drive away our pedophobic ide­ ologies, we might help to make the university resemble more closely the kind of community that we expect others to become, one that ac­ cepts diversity in its many forms. And hopefully by airing our varying concerns about the suppression of parenting in the academy, we may come to acknowledge and reclaim it for ourselves and for others. HOME

Child: You live in my room daddy, it's big enough for us, I can sleep on the floor, you sleep in my bed, I won't talk at all, and I won't bother your thinking and you don't have to be sorry for anything ...

Chorus: Between the children there's a father, an absence they play with, like an imaginary friend, everything between the covers, as if he were about to read them a book not even he can construe­ there are no constants here, they will forget even the myth.

WORKS CITED Thompson, Francis. "The Hound of Heaven." The Poems ofFrancis Thompson. London: Oxford University Press, 1937. Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2d ed. NewYork:W W Norton, 1978.

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