Succumbing to Hegemony

Songs of the Hour: Wilco, Reigning Sound

Oi, what a week.
School started Tuesday. I have now managed to make it to each of my classes, and I can tell I have a hell of a semester in front of me. The research assistantship for the psych lab I signed up for is going to be incredibly time consuming. Fun, challenging, educational... but time consuming. So far, I haven't had much time to do anything else.

Before us lowly assistants can start looking at real data, we have to study for and take an ethics test. This is a 5 hour process, that had to be done by this morning.  I've never cheated on a test in my life. I'm not sure I'll ever really wrap my head around the irony of midnight last night, finishing the last 2 modules, where I sat flipping between browser pages looking at the information and the test alternately, filling in the little circles and passing the course.  Now, there are no instructions demanding that these hypothetical situations or history questions be answered purely from memory. But as a general rule, I try to navigate through life using fairly legitimate methods. Last night, however, it could be argued that my first, and last, experience with cheating was on an ethics test. Well, if you're going to do it, do it right I guess.

My other classes are Shakespeare, 20th Century Literature, Terrorism, and Practical Cultural Studies.  The last requires a 20 minute presentation, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. I need all of my classes except Terrorism in order to graduate in December, but hell if I'm giving a 20 minute presentation by myself. It took a lot of drugs and alcohol to get through the last presentation, and I had a partner. I just can't do that again. So, that's pending.

Aside from the aforementioned stressors, I'm having a blast. Christ, I love learning. My favorite lessons this week were how Nelson Mandela was a terrorist; and learning that Hegemony isn't what I thought it was; it is instead the word of which I've always dreamed.  One of those obsessive thoughts, those concepts that lurks in the back of my mind seeking vocalization, seeking a name, has found one. I know it has a variety of meaning in different contexts, but "Ideological Hegemony" is the ticket. It's like paradigm with power structures. mmmm. Hegemon. Like digimon or pokemon but different. Hegemony. Finally. Expect me to work it into every conversation I have for the next 3 weeks. You've been warned. Hegemony.

I had one of those moments in 20th Century Lit today that have run like exit signs on the highway of my English degree. In discussing differences between Modernism and post-Modernism, in how Frost and William C. Williams fit the ambiguous Modernist definition in different ways, in the elements of alienation, I had the tell-tale thought: "What a load of bullshit."
In some analysis of writers feeling "alienated from the self" as opposed to "alienated from society", my prof went on this Freudian-based tangent of dreams and identity and having not knowing oneself and ultimately, divided an individual into various sub-parts with the capacity to look at each other without recognition. Now, I'm going into clinical psych for chrissakes. You'd think I'd be patient with these sorts of metaphors and perspectives. But they get under my skin like few things can. If you don't encourage people to break themselves down into sub-parts, into parts of a collective and say there are some aspects one can't ever know, well, then there isn't much to be alienated from.
I adore TS Eliot. Prufrock's Love Song is my favorite poem. I get the idea. But it was soooo academically self-absorbed somehow. Seriously. We are given expectations of how we should live and feel, and it rarely works out as prescribed (by the Ideological Hegemony) and we experience a cognitive dissonance that makes us unfulfilled and unhappy.  There are lots of ways to describe the same emotional phenomenon. I'm not unreasonable. But 45 minutes of an in-depth discussion about the interaction of metaphorical sub-parts of a human being , well, makes me want to throw myself from the ivory tower in a giant ball of flame.  What luxury we have to spend our time this way.

Ok. All done. I need to write Joss' teacher and try to set up a meeting with the school counselor. Some one, I won't say who, is apparently not doing ANY of his classwork, and getting homework done is like pulling teeth. From an infant. I'm gonna bite the ADHD bullet and see what's going on with an actual diagnosis. It's that, or he repeats the 4th grade and graduates when he's 20.
Wish us luck.

love.

Comments

[Sara]

I couldn't agree more about your comments on the English class. Sure you can apply meaning to anything, but just because you can apply it, doesn't mean it's real. This is precisely why I wasn't an English major in college and why now I am researching all sorts of random PhD programs b/c I can't stand the thought of reading writers' work and looking for threads of meaning that I guarantee most were unconscious and accidental. I am glad I'm not in your class, although I probably should have taken a class like that in college now that I am teaching literature. I taught intro to lit last semester and am teaching world lit this semester and I keep thinking what a bad person I am to be doing this since I treat those classes almost like a MFA workshop. "What do you think the author is trying to say? What do you like about it, what do you hate?" That's sort of the extent of my literature teaching and I keep thinking, am I helping or hurting these kids by not giving a crap about critical anaylsis, etc. I keep thinking I will try to give more craps at some point.

Email my mom about the Joss/homework issue. I bet she would have some ideas.