I’m participating in Plymouth State University’s Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community (CPLC), and this post is a reflection on one of the first activities of the year’s CPLC.
For the activity “A Community of Values”, we brainstormed a list of values for our work at a university, how we see ourselves able to live up to those values (or not), and how the university as an institution supports those values (or not). A value as a concept was defined via a description adapted from the work of Sidney Simon:
- It’s something you chose to value, not something imposed on you.
- You feel good about having the value, and you are willing to tell those you trust about it.
- You act on the value. It’s reflected in your life somehow.
My initial response was predictable at first — I value curiosity, experiment, thoughtfulness, etc. — but then another value popped into my mind, and I chuckled, both because I recognized that it really is a value to me and also because it feels utterly ridiculous in the current climate of education and society. That value is uselessness.
A great argument could be had about whether anything is actually useless if someone values it. Entire planets of abstruse and abstract philosophy might be visited by exploring the implications of the word uselessness. My own use of it is both paradoxical and perverse. I am, paradoxically, asserting that in some contexts uselessness is useful. And I am, perversely, trying to deploy the energy in the negative connotations of the word for positive effect.
First, two examples that come to mind when I think of how and why I value uselessness.
The first is a conversation I had while working on my Ph.D. It was in a course on professionalization, and the university’s grants officer had come to talk with us about how we, beleaguered humanities scholars all, might get grants for our work. Grant applications, we were told, ought to emphasize how useful our work was, especially to people outside our field. One by one, we were asked how we might explain the usefulness of our work, and then the grants officer offered ideas for what sort of grants we might apply for. I completely failed this activity. “My work,” I said, “has no usefulness for anybody outside the field, and very little usefulness for most people inside the field, other than myself, and its usefulness for me is that I find it interesting.” We tried some limp brainstorming of ways that the study of esoteric questions of modernist literature might be useful, but ultimately came up with nothing, and the very well-intentioned grants officer quickly moved on to somebody else, someone to whom she might be useful.
My feelings in that moment originated in the fact that I did the PhD for myself. It was an act of absolute selfishness. When I started it, I made a pact with myself that I would pursue the questions that interested me, regardless of whether they would lead to great scholarship, a job, world peace, whatever. The decade before had been excruciatingly difficult, I was at wit’s end, and I used the five years of the PhD as a way to save myself. (Not a good plan for most people! Many people experience terrible mental health consequences from doing a PhD! I also had financial resources that allowed me never to go into debt. One of the things that had made the previous years so difficult was my having to sell off my dead father’s businesss. As excruciating as that was — I still occasionally wake up at night from nightmares about it — it left me without financial worries during the time of the degree, so long as I was relatively frugal, and I was.) Ultimately, my dissertation (and the resulting book) ended up focusing on something like this dynamic that I had wrestled with myself. In hindsight, it seems quite obvious to me why I ended up focusing on how writers in times of political crisis found ways to feel that their work was something other than just fiddling while the world burned around them. Starting from uselessness, I ended up with a topic that was, relatively speaking, useful.
Here’s the second thing that comes to mind when I think of the value of uselessness: an old folk song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” as performed by Utah Phillips. I’m particularly amused by the story Phillips tells of a neighbor, a “little retired banker fella” who has
been known to cannonball his rotundity across the road and stand there and publicly berate me for my sloth and indolence.
“Why don’t you get a job?!” he says.
Now, me bein’ hip to the Socratic method fires back a question: “Why?”
“Why?!” he says, taken aback. “If you had a job, you could make three, four, five dollars an hour!”
I said, “Why?” (Pursuing the same tack.)
He said, “Well, you make three, four, five dollars an hour, you could have a savings account, save up some of that money.”
I said, “Why?”
He said, “Well, you save up some of that money, young fella, pretty soon you’d never have to work another day in your life.”
I said, “Hell, that’s what I’m doin’ right now!”
This reminds me of Thoreau’s essay “Life Without Principle”: “Cold and hunger seem more friendly to my nature than those methods which men have adopted and advise to ward them off. … The ways in which most men get their living, that is, live, are mere make-shifts, and a shirking of the real business of life,—chiefly because they do not know, but partly because they do not mean, any better.”
The logic that Phillips and Thoreau contradict is the logic that work (or, we might say, usefulness) is inherently better than sloth and indolence (or, we might say, uselessness). This is the logic that says time is an entity that, like money, can be wasted. This is the logic of bean counters and obsessive type-A personalities, and while it may be productive, it’s hardly healthy.
The value of uselessness for teaching and learning is freedom. It is intimately linked with the more commonly accepted value of curiosity. We may begin by being interested in something for reasons that we don’t know. We explore for purposes that are, at least at the beginning, unclear. Will our study be useful or useless? Academia at its best offers the freedom to answer: “It doesn’t matter!”
Thus, because the freedom of curiosity requires the freedom of uselessness, uselessness is central to the production of knowledge — in fact, it seems to me that plenty of usefulness starts from uselessness, from daydreaming and experimenting, from embracing serendipity and accidents. And uses may change. You may develop a putty for cleaning wallpaper and soon discover that it’s much more popular as a toy for children.
Where, in our learning and teaching, do we make room for daydreaming, experimenting, and repurposing? A great American once advocated: “Dare to be stupid!” Perhaps in academia we ought to advocate: “Dare to be useless!”
If you’re in academia, though, you probably feel how absurd, even dangerous, such a statement can be. Before COVID-19, higher education was under attack, its administrations often resorting to austerity measures, and the global pandemic has accelerated the crisis beyond anything most of us could have imagined before. Programs are under extraordinary pressures to prove their worth. To prove their usefulness.
I wonder how an institution might embrace uselessness. For us as individual teachers, it feels perilous enough. (“Today, class, we’re going to do something useless,” is not a sentence most of us want to utter, even if it would perhaps be useful to do so!) But for institutions in a culture that does not see higher education as a public good, and that values immediate gratification over long-term thoughtfulness, and that has long been attached to an idea of overwork as the highest virtue — in such a culture, an institution that celebrates uselessness is unlikely to thrive. Instead, our institutions are rife with spreadsheeted work plans and bullet-pointed learning outcomes, subject to consultants with calculators and boards of business leaders confused by the difference between students and widgets. My inherent anarchistic tendencies buck against these policies and systems — the effluvia of bureaucracy with all its cover-yer-ass busywork and logorrhea of hollow language — but I don’t begrudge the systems, really, or have much else to offer except a sigh. The changes necessary to get recognition for uselessness as a virtue are changes far beyond any individual institution’s power.
Yet perhaps what is not available to an institution is available to an individual. Perhaps we as teachers can embrace uselessness, or something like it, in our work in a way no school could as a whole. Perhaps schools will, for the foreseeable future, have to attach themselves to immediate gratifications, but we as faculty might celebrate the joys of Rube Goldberg’s machines.
Otherwise, we lose beauty. And pleasure. And delight. These are qualities that often get labeled as useless, and yet they are inherently valuable. If something is beautiful, pleasurable, delightful it is not useless, and it is only an obsession with instrumentality (or puritanical hatred of pleasure) that would make us think so. We too often insist that something be good for something else (usually, the making of money) rather than simply good in and of itself. Beauty, pleasure, and delight are intransitive. If something is beautiful, that is justification enough.
And now I think of another classic sung by Utah Phillips, “Bread and Roses”: Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes. Hearts can starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses!
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
