Synecdoche University
At a university campus, somewhere in the U.S., two graduate students walk casually along manicured paths during late afternoon.
PAT: What’d you get on your paper?
RICH: ‘A’. You?
PAT: Same. What’d you write about, again?
RICH: About how beauty is a tool for fascism in Morrison, Kramer, and Speer. You?
PAT: Ya. I wrote about Hoover’s use of info about people’s sex lives. I argued that Theoharis is an apologist for Hoover.
RICH: Mmmm. That’s pretty good.
PAT: Thanks.
PAT: Do you want coffee?
RICH: No. I’m cutting down.
PAT: I want to get some.
The campus bell chimes the hour.
PAT: Hey, if you knew that one of your teachers was sleeping with a student, what would you do?
RICH: (takes a breath) Hmm. Which student?
PAT: Let’s just imagine.
RICH: Grad student?
PAT: Sure.
RICH: They have any classes together?
PAT: Uh, no. But it’s likely they will. She’s in the same program he’s part of.
RICH: The teacher’s the guy?
PAT: Does it matter?
RICH: Nope. I’m just trying to figure out who you’re talking about.
PAT: No, not the point. I want to hear what you would do if you knew it was happening.
RICH: That’s funny. Because, now that you told me, don’t I know it is happening? If you know it’s happening, then, I suppose, now I know too. Right? Cause you just told me. Transitivity—
PAT: Again, not the point. It’s hypothetical. Just tell me what you would do.
RICH: —That’s how disease gets spread. Heh. I suppose I’m already doing what I would do.
PAT: Okay, so you’d just gossip about it?
RICH: Like you?
PAT: C’mon, Rich. I said it’s hypothetical. Your epistemic games get old quick.
RICH: You’re calling me out on epistemic games? What do think hypotheticals are?
PAT: Fine, whatever.
A student on a skateboard rolls past them, between them.
RICH: Look, it’s a rotten thing to do. Alright? I think it’s corrupt. No matter who came on to who. My analogy would be crapping in a community pool—only inconsiderate and incontinent people do it. A little restraint does a body good. If I knew who it was, I would do my part to get them fired. Mine, yours, all our degrees are less valuable if our program gets a reputation for being a sex club.
PAT: That’s what I was looking for. Thank you.
Pat’s phone buzzes. She looks at it and silences it.
PAT: I’m kind of surprised though. Don’t, or didn’t you have a crush on **?
RICH: Ooh, and disappointment fills my bowels. I confided in you and asked you not to bring that up.
PAT: That’s why I bleeped it out. I had to bring it up, it’s pertinent.
RICH: Crushes are innocent. They don’t affect anything except the imagination. Part of their fun is that you don’t have to deal with the actual, the real causal details of doing it with someone.
PAT: Causal details.
RICH: Yeah.
PAT: But what if they, the teacher and the student, love each other?
RICH: Love? Like how? Like a parent loves a child? Like an alcoholic loves a drink? Like a husband loves a wife? Like a teacher loves a student? Your question is vague.
PAT: Okay. Like a husband loves a wife, Rich.
RICH: Mmm. I’ll say this, part of the way married couples love each other involves assuaging, consoling, encouraging each other when one or the other or both are uncertain. When paths become confusing, complicated, or treacherous, one’s spouse, as part of spousal love, helps one deal with those paths. But when it comes to the way a teacher loves a student, this encouraging/consoling property of love isn’t there.
PAT: How so? When I’m reading passages from Derrida that undermine the way I’ve always thought of myself, my relation to the world, my “path” looks pretty confusing and scary. Am I supposed to go to a husband with these worries? What if he hates Derrida and refuses to read him? I go to my teacher and get guidance or encouragement or whatever you call it.
RICH: Yeah, but you go to your teacher as a student. I’m talking about the other way around, the way a teacher loves a student, not the way a student loves a teacher. Of course students love teachers for helping them through complicated, confusing paths. But are teachers supposed to love students for the same? Not at all. When the students start showing the teachers the way through difficult paths, the teacher-student relationship has dissolved, the teacher isn’t a teacher anymore and, thus, cannot love the students in the way a teacher does. The teacher is devolving and loving the students as a student loves a teacher. See? If a teacher loves a student the way a husband loves a wife, the love ruins the teacher-student relationship, or at least changes it into a completely different one.
They arrive at the coffee shop
PAT: I don’t know. I’m getting a coffee. You coming?
RICH: I’ll wait here.
Pat goes in. People are walking busily in and out. Rich stands outside watching evening hues push up on the clear sky. Pat comes back holding a coffee, with Jackie, who is a fellow student and holding a coffee as well.
RICH: Hi Jackie.
JACKIE: Hi.
RICH: So, shall we keep walking or go to class. It’s still a bit early, I think.
PAT: Let’s sit down.
The group finds a place to sit and settles down.
RICH: Pat and I were just talking—
JACKIE: I know. She told me.
Jackie looks for something in her oversized purse and sips her coffee.
JACKIE: At this level, when going to school is basically like going to the office, you really think it’s wrong to be intimate with faculty? Are we children? Are we bound to some religious doctrine? Teaching is about feeling. If a teacher feels especially drawn to a particular student, or the other way around, it makes the relationship between them more potent. It makes each want to do their best, and the instruction becomes more enriching for both. Teaching is an exchange, just like sex. In fact, how do you think people even get sex, consensual of course? They build toward it by many little exchanges. As the exchanges happen, they feel out where they’re leading them. If the exchanges lead to sex, well, if it’s good, that’s something to be happy about, no?
RICH: Whoa. Okay. Getting off pretty impetuously, Jackie. I guess, now I might know who’s the one doing it with a teacher. Heh.
Jackie quits her purse.
JACKIE: Save the ad hominem attacks for someone who doesn’t know a fallacy when she sees one. If you think you’ve got a response to me, say it. If not, be quiet and listen.
RICH: Ah, but Jackie, that was my response. I suspect you mistook my gesture toward pathos for a personal attack. I was merely pointing out that your suddenness seemed especially emotionally driven. And that’s nothing against you, but it should cause pause in your argument. Because, isn’t sex tied to emotion? Aren’t lovers always emotionally involved, no matter how much they claim they’re not? And if they’re truly not, isn’t that, well, sociopathic?
JACKIE: People can have sex without being “emotionally involved”. Apparently you’ve never had any fuck-buddies.
RICH: And I might guess you’ve had many. But maybe we can agree that a good number of people get emotionally invested in their sex lives. I might even argue that that makes them better. But another time. For now, I’ll say that the classroom, like the office, is a delicate environment. If we want to think green, I think we can say that both places have their own ecosystem. Not only that, the ecosystem of the classroom, at least, is a goal driven one, no? Teachers, if they’re teachers at all, necessarily work toward causing their students to learn. That is, they intend to cause their students to become more aware, in a controlled, beneficial way. This is a difficult thing to do, Jackie. How much more complicated do the complexities of sex and its relation to emotions make the job? My answer: way too complicated, to the point of bringing the classroom to entropy.
JACKIE: Part of being an adult is being able to manage complexity.
RICH: Isn’t self restraint in the face of sexual appetite managing complexity?
JACKIE: Your implicit theory about a teacher’s role is skewed. A teacher is not over and above the class. A teacher is not an authority figure. A teacher is not a boss, or some hierarchical presence that the lowly ones, the students, must answer to. A teacher is an equal. A teacher is a friend. I said the student-teacher relationship is an exchange. It’s symbiotic. You talk about ecosystems. What if some perverse outside force prematurely stops an exchange before it fulfills its telos? What if that outside force holds the symbiosis unnaturally, fixes it at one point in its growth? Does this not defeat the system?
RICH: Yes, but that’s exactly what sex in the classroom does.
JACKIE: That’s a puerile statement. My point is: as parts of a process of give and take, an ecosystem as such, we should let things flower as they will. Part of being an adult is upholding all the give-and-takes you’re involved in. Do you understand? Part of being mature is not allowing one exchange to ruin or taint another. It’s this fluidity, back and forth, that empowers people. Exchange gives people capital and/or means of production. Constant exchanges, constantly evolving exchanges, give everyone involved much to give others and have themselves. In this way people are empowered. Inventing precedents for shut-off, limits for give-and-takes, is only a way of prescribing power, contracting it, hoarding it, creating hierarchies and hegemonies.
RICH: (upset) Wow. Jackie, you’re intense. I totally don’t believe anything you just said. I think the idea that fluidity empowers people to the point of dissolving hegemonies is irrational. I think the idea that sex between a teacher and a student could be a natural part of evolving exchanges that take place in the classroom is wildly specious. And I think the claim that a teacher is not an authority but a friend is flat out false. Think about it, think Althusser and Nietzsche, isn’t fluidity quite tyrannical, fascist? In such a structure, where everybody gives and takes constantly, as you say, won’t exchanges themselves become the objects of power? Won’t the people who are able to generate the most give-and-takes simply have their way with others who cannot? Instead of the stable, the fluid will be the monarchs. And sex between a teacher and student that evolves from exchanges in the classroom is like a weed in a flower garden, it threatens to change the flower garden into a weed garden, it threatens to change, say, a literature class into a sex class. The teacher “evolves”, as you say, out of his role as literature teacher and into some bizarre role as sex teacher. But we need literature, and thus literature classes. So we can’t have them supplanted. Furthermore, not an authority figure, really? A friend? Frankly, I think this is absolutely wrong. A teacher is not a friend to his students. He may be friendly, but the moment he becomes a friend I think he steps out of his role as teacher. What do you think we’re doing in grad school? Learning how to be friendly? No. We’re developing an expertise; we’re becoming better at a set of skills than other people, so when our skill set is needed, then we may provide authoritative demonstrations and or knowledge of it. A teacher is a person who has taken on the obligation of training others in his skill set.
Rich then stands up and spits on the ground.
PAT: Well, I think it’s time to head to class.
The sun has set and the students walk to their class without saying another word.
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