…Ross comes along, and proves me wrong.
Well, really, Althusser too was disturbing, but somehow didn’t have as big an impact on me as Ross. I want to say this was because I feel Althusser’s ideas on ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses are ones I’m already very accustomed to, although, then again, I am also well aware of the truth of what Ross had to say. I suppose it’s just more of something I’m in denial about than Althusser. Probably because it’s something I relate to on a more personal level.
Reading Ross, I was reminded of reading Eagleton and being disturbed, in the same way I found myself disturbed a little in learning about Existentialism, actually, in a class last semester. It’s because I recognize myself so much in it. For Existentialism, it was realizing that our beliefs, ideologies, whatever gives our life meaning and helps us make sense of our world, is something that really has no inherent meaning. We make it up. Okay, this seems obvious by now, and once again brings to mind reader-response and poststructuralism to me, but the disturbing truth of it is still there. For me, the meaning I give to life comes more or less solely from literature and art. Hence, Eagleton resonating with me in a disturbing way. Literature is my opiate. And, I’m likely to be one of those women he describes as becoming an English professor, master of a “convenient sort of non-subject to palm off on the ladies” (Eagleton 2144).
Which brings me to Ross. I’m pretty sure there isn’t one thing he said that could have hit home in a more uncomfortable manner. Because I am the artist who wants to become a professor. The idealist who is more or less quite ignorant of economic realities, beyond the knowledge that capitalism has issues and is kind of scary.
The whole idea that as artists and intellectuals we willing choose to accept low wages for love of our subject has my name written all over it. The types of logic that Ross describes as feeding into the mentality of the bohemian artist and reasons that are used as justification for paying artists less than they deserve, the want to create a “hungry theater” because “only a hungry man feels compelled to say ‘what’s in him’ (Ross 2585)…all these things I have thought about myself as an artist and often thought would be reasonable rational for being paid less. Which is really messed up. Especially, when to create great art, more passionate art, I often notice it helps to have something that is bothering you, making you uncomfortable, at the least – at the most, something really difficult, something you need to work through and overcome, something that makes you “hungry.” And there is I think, in all artists, intellectuals, idealists, this “noble ethos of the unattached artist” (Ross 2586), who feels that to create real art you need to ignore the rest of the world, your monetary needs, etc. I do it all the time, even when I know I’m only hurting myself – for example, these blog posts: I know I should just get through them for the sake of making the grade, but I can’t resist writing so much because I find it too interesting. (Seriously – it’s a perfect example of this problem.)
Even more specifically, when he comes to discussing graduate students and the fact that “the attainment of a degree is not the beginning, but the end of their teaching career” (Ross 2590), I started to get even more depressed. Just recently I’ve come to the decision that I want to become a professor, because it seems like a great way to be an artist on the side while making some kind of living. But after reading Ross? Well, I guess there’s just no winning as an idealist. (I do believe this all stems, at least for me, from being an Idealist in the Myers-Briggs personality types sense, but that’s a whole nother story…)
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