How to Run To, Not From: Chores, Cooperatives, & Grimy Learning

In the last post of Starting Out in Philosophy, I spoke with Laura Nelson about experimental education and learning beyond the university. Since then, I wrapped up my first semester at Harvard, returned home to family in Ohio and West Virginia, and spent the last weeks of winter break volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, free to join in to help when those I serve are usually not free to drop out. Now, I’m in the middle of spring classes, haunted by the dislocation of our society.

Questions brought up by Laura’s interview stuck in my mind. I wanted to think about the negative pressures of my college learning environment. But, more than that, I wanted to imagine an alternative: How could I live and study in a way that would help me grow as a person? For me, this involves political orientation.

Part of the answer that I found is in the nature of chores done for a community of equals that I chose.

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Two orientation week social events

I. Entitled Escapism

As last semester was wrapping up, I went to a friend’s apartment for dinner. All of us talking, someone shared that he had spent years rock climbing after his undergrad. I was fascinated—why did someone who was smart and educated, and who had the potential for market success, choose something different at the moment when his career was supposed to start? How could he choose something different? I wanted to know what he thought about his education and, even more, the world and his place in it; half-jokingly, I asked if he took himself to be like Thoreau.

Perhaps Thoreau lives in popular imagination like the mythologized frontiersman, striking out on his own when the world he knows becomes too awful or uninteresting to make flourishing lives in it. I’ve always been critical of Thoreau, and I can’t imagine the women in my life retreating in that way—there were always too many people whose lives depended on them. Perhaps they should be able to run away and take time for themselves, too. But I think my problem lies deeper than unequal access to escape.

As Sidra wrote in December, we are responsible to work on our societies and toward addressing harm, even if we can’t be said to have caused it, so long as we are in a position to help. Leaving abdicates such responsibility. Then, as Michael Sandel seems to argue, responsibility stretches back in time and across generations on account of our membership in communities. And these communities are necessary to live well—we may run, but we would have nowhere to which to run.

The comparison to Thoreau, and the discussion about escape, struck a chord with the erstwhile rock climber. He came back to school to get a degree that he was somewhat interested in, so he could contribute to causes he thought were important.

 At this moment, I wondered about myself as a first-year college student, just starting out: What are my communities? What are my responsibilities to them? What am I doing here?  

Finishing a fifty-mile race around midnight (my parents sit in the background). Photo by Brien Green; Christmas day in Scott Depot, West Virginia (unincorporated)

The meeting could go on forever. We scroll on our phones, talk quietly, and fidget in our lecture hall seats. My friends rest their heads on my shoulders and we all sigh and then sit up when the person at the microphone brings up something new. In what should've been an easy meeting tonight, on the eve of the graduate student union strike, the bargaining committee accepted a tentative agreement. People queue to share perspectives. The bargaining committee listens as people object to their deal, and people listen as members of the bargaining committee explain their reasoning. The process of everyone being heard takes long enough to make my neck hurt, even as I intermittently go behind all the other seats to stand. Back there, people exchange numbers and discuss creating a campaign for a stronger deal. The graduate students vote and revote.

II. Freedom, Responsibility

College can afford a new freedom to young people. While studying at my school, people are often far away from home, distancing themselves from connections to place and people that once surrounded them. I wanted to move away for college, figuring that the newness of a place would be a source of learning in addition to the classroom; life in a city, too, would be a constant source of the new.

But college students also seem slow to take up responsibilities and become involved in areas around the university. University life can feel transitional, and I identify more with being between places, waiting for that which is come, than with where I am. Then, no wonder students are occupied with their work, and the ties between them and local communities may feel weak. Student interests are often also pitted against that of the community—to come to the chair where I’m writing these words, I had to present my university I.D. three times, in a building where interactions between campus police and the local population has drawn scrutiny. I could present a similar enough geography of most places where I spend my time.  

This avoidance of responsibility seems to be much larger than individual students. The rising cost of education, a competitive economy, and cultural expectations of success pressure students to focus on their individual academic success and ability to land a top job.

Editing a final project for a creative writing workshop last semester; part of a friend’s installation of food-based art, using eggshells collected in the kitchen of Harvard's Dudley Cooperative (artwork by Sophia Armenakas) 

Against this atomized, individualistic culture that academic institutions produce, I wondered what a community of individuals with reciprocal obligations to each other would be like; I wondered how education could actually be part of such a community. As Myles Horton wrote,

Life educates. Schools can give direction to the educative process not by presuming to educate for life but by becoming an organic part of life itself. Both children and adults live in a world where needs and wants are bound together. Schools must combine the economic, social, intellectual, esthetic, and moral elements of our culture, just as ordinary people combine them in everyday life. Organized education must move from the periphery of life where the school has formed an artificial society and become part of the struggles and dreams of the masses. Life, for the most part, is organized into communities, and the community must be the basis for social education (p. 78)

Horton spoke to me, because I’d earlier experienced education that seemed to be part of and spring from community. I talked about this late last summer. At the School for Ethics and Global Leadership, for instance, we wanted to know things about the world and grow up, becoming individuals who could handle themselves. Life happened differently there. Each other were the at the center of our lives, and we were trusted to make decisions for ourselves, too—I nostalgically recall SEGL students working out disputes about the cleanliness of the kitchen or about the material we wanted to learn next.

Since I had experienced this sort of community/education before, and also since my reading helped me to articulate my troubles with the university, I wanted a close community here. Joining the cooperative, I was to take part in democratically organizing our own living.

As part of being in the community, I would have to spend a few hours a week doing chores. I didn’t think I’d mind it that much, and doing our own work seemed to come alongside autonomy in other areas.

Chores were a good way to begin spending time at the cooperative. Even when I was surrounded by unfamiliar faces, I didn’t feel most of the anxieties of being somewhere new. In virtue of the chores, I was comfortable with my own contribution to the community.

Like many people, I began to do more work than I was assigned, sweeping the porch when it was full of leaves, or helping to put the living room back in order after an event. I cared about the cooperative and its strange way of living. Generally, people don’t trash the place, and an accumulation of dirty dishes can often be addressed with a simple message to the group chat (other silly stuff can be found there, too).

I wonder how much of this model is possible within life and education more broadly. My experiences of being responsible for mine and others’ living largely occurred within small, strange communities. Then, when I told a friend that normal university life seemed unreal because it was so transitional—the troubles I just articulated to you, reader—he remarked to me that the cooperative, too, is only a fleeting dream. Do you think real life is this democratic? If given more responsibility as part their education, what would students do?

Food is the subject

I borrow my roommate’s hand-held vacuum, and I move the desk and the shelves away from the walls of our room. I listen to a podcast, comprehending the speakers much of the time, but not when some grime under my bed starts fighting back. I decide to return later with paper towels, and my attention returns to the podcast for the time.

III. Coming to Terms: With Ourselves

Doing these chores was distinct from doing much of my normal academic work. Success or failure in this place is determined by the ability of my mind to produce something, with little attention to the other parts of my being. But how could such a narrow focus help me to become wise? A recent student Op-Ed regarding sexual harassment allegations similarly questioned the emphasis of our university, demanding that it not place “intelligence over ethics,” and “reputation over truth.” The article reminded me that, to learn philosophically, and to learn to live well, I’d have to seek maturity as a whole person (Sidra brought up a related issue last Summer).

Hurried socializing characterizes some of my time here. I’ve never known so many people, and I could run into three people on a walk to class, so not every meeting can result in a long conversation. But I worry about the hurry when it spreads to my close friends since, as Jeremy wrote in January, a good life is made with others: while it’s possible to live well without philosophy, it is impossible to live well without them.

While cerebral work is emphasized in university life, little attention is paid to bodies. I recall walking into a dorm in the middle of finals week and being struck by the smell of rotting food; apparently, maintaining the physical space where my friend was working wasn’t worth the time it would take in between tests. I am by no means exempted from the tendency to ignore or reduce the time spent on bodily work, and I used to wait to leave for appointments until the last minute, and I’d jog there if I could, because the time required to physically move places seemed like a waste. When people, pressed for time, ignore bodily work in this way, the labor is no longer a ritual, grounding us and reminding us of who we are as we take care of ourselves.

The work to maintain students’ bodies is often delegated to others. Eating at the dining halls cuts out the time it would take to cook meals, and many dorms have hallway bathroom cleaned by university staff. A division of labor is not inherently problematic, and I think it works out nicely that I carry furniture or heavy luggage for people I live with, while others are more likely to organize our stuff. But the politics of who does what sort of work is relevant. Historically, women were seen as more suited for domestic work and were viewed as more emotional and bodily, while men were likelier to labor outside of the home and were viewed as more capable of rational thought. In the university now, students and faculty are disproportionally white and wealthy, while it is often racialized, lower income, and immigrant populations who work in campus services. Noting all this, the emphasis on cerebral work seemed to be a part of the mind-body distinction that was utilized to rank activities and oppress populations.

The treatment of students as mere minds is uniquely harmful in an educational context. Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed about how we must act on the world to change it, rather than simply reflect on it. Our ability to transform our condition is an essential part of our humanity. But education in which we only perceive and understand the world dehumanizes us. That’s where bell hooks speaks to me. Influenced by Freire while also criticizing him, she brought the body into things. In Teaching to Transgress, she connected the understanding of a teacher as objective, perhaps even omniscient, with the way that teaching allows the body to disappear. Yet if we recognize the presence of bodies in the classroom, we can feel how each of our perspectives are situated, teachers just as much as students—or as the janitor coming in after hours to wipe the board clean that we forgot.

Recognizing our bodies in situ is empowering, but only when we have reserves of agency inside us or can turn our exhaustion into a source of clarity. What am I feeling and how are things sitting with me here? Where has my energy gone? Or am I all fired up? What is this anxiety coursing through me? Is it excitement or something oppressive-feeling?

So hooks even furthers that recognizing our bodies while learning allows us to be passionate. Can, now, the classroom transform us, maybe just a bit? As hooks suggests, sometimes you just got to walk around beyond the lectern!

But what if we students stood up when a point just wasn’t gonna cut it anymore? What would happen to education if we let our bodies in? I’m not talking ablism, but just the opposite—variability that we feel viscerally, like the thumping on the ground when a freight truck passes. And why isn’t the body of the janitor free to come in and school us about how detached from public life we might actually be?

For me, doing more chores has been a way to let my body into all this exalted learning. Chores are usually performed to address the needs we have on account of our having bodies. Chores are often done with our bodies leading the way.

I stretch to grab cornmeal from the top shelf, feel my wrist hurt from stirring soup, become aware that there are too many bodies in one space as we all try to clean the library.

Sometimes, awareness of bodies also comes from doing chores that are disgusting, pulling food out from a drain, cleaning a shit-stained bathroom. Yeah, but doing these chores feels positive and human for me. Do I feel similarly when in a classroom that floats in the airy space of the mind to the exclusion of all else?

There are certainly other activities that make us more aware of our bodies, of our whole selves. I think of running, or walking with a friend. But chores can hold something special in store. It all depends on the communal context.

I walk from the yard to the river, standing there for a time. The river is mostly frozen over. She greets me through the phone, and I ask my grandma how she’s doing. She and grandpa update me about their lives, and we talk about classes and friends. I keep walking. When we hang up—I have to get started on homework—I’m appreciative of the conversation. My grandpa told me about visiting Boston, and I didn’t realize he had ever been. I also think of my mother's advice, telling me that it makes their week when I call.

IV. With Others?

I believe that the sort of temporality experienced while doing chores, especially when the activity is for another person or a community, is distinct from what is experienced in other pursuits. Chores are cyclical by nature and don’t produce anything permanent—people will need to be fed again in a few hours, and laundry never stays clean for long. It seems right that chores don’t produce much, at least nothing lasting. Chores maintain what we already have. As Lisa Baraister writes in Enduring Time,

Maintenance is not the time of generation or production, or the eruption of the new. It is not revolutionary time, but the lateral time on ‘on-go’ that tries to sustain an elongated present. We maintain machinery, a position, our lives and the lives of others, our composure, our precarious mental states (p. 52)

I have found this sort of work—caring for what I already have, including especially my relationships but also the space I live in and objects I fill it with—to be some of the most meaningful things I can do. As Baraister continues, this focus on what exists presently isn’t necessarily backwards looking, and it tries to keep us afloat toward a future. Chores thus come to appear fundamentally different than other capitalist activities that prioritize production of the new, growth, and expansion. This is all the while other chores also clearly reproduce that expansion, exploiting available labor and available oppressions (of women, of people of color, of people living in precarity; Sidra spoke with Aaron Jaffe about this a year ago).

As I continued to cook dinner some nights for about twenty-five people at the cooperative, each time I seemed to be arriving earlier in the day to begin. Instead of spending three hours to prepare a meal, I would take six, leaving right after class to get started. I knew that it was strange to draw out a task as I became more skilled at it. Indeed, much of my efforts elsewhere in university life were to become more efficient: how much material can I study today? How can I read faster? I even felt the need to maximize my time while at the gym, working out intensely to justify the time spent, and I couldn’t recall the last time I brushed my teeth without also trying to read to news or otherwise multi-task. But I loved cooking dinner because during the chores my need for efficiency and to maximize the output of my efforts was replaced by something else.

I had cooked my own meals and did lots of my own labor at home, and I worked a restaurant job before. There, being more efficient was a concern for me. But I think that I experienced a different temporality because the work I was doing at the cooperative was an act of care for a community. It was more than just the food produced. I could have made a bad meal, which unfortunately does happen, and little about the act would change. By contrast, ordering food for everyone would be a much different experience. I’m ready to roll with the time it takes to cook for others with whose living mine is bound up. I’m not subservient to them; I’m serving them in turn in cooperation.

For care work, consideration of quantities produced is even more foreign. Care work is about being there for a person. In Pressed for Time, Judy Wacjmann writes that “while the dominant logic of capitalist workplaces is that of efficiency and profitability, a different logic governs domestic life–one that is primarily emotional and moral rather than quantitative” (p. 131). It’s impossible to speed up the pace of quality time.

The temporality of work directed toward others autonomously, not in subservience, works well within my experience of school. It provides a further reason why escape is not the answer. Imagine the main character in Melville’s “Bartleby,” saying, “I prefer not to” when confronted with a chore he agreed to do at the cooperative! I used to see lots of radical potential in Bartleby’s perspective, since I couldn’t imagine how one could make an okay, moral life within capitalist society or its academic institutions. But Bartleby tells us only how to run from—the question of how to run to is left unanswered.

OK, so I became most involved with chores by choice at the cooperative, and I have been able to experience some of that same temporality and logic elsewhere, such as when calling my grandparents or walking with a friend. But a ton of chores suck. Clearly, it’s the structure of community that is the wider context.

Three views of the cooperative kitchen

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

With help from my editorial team, especially Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Sidra Shahid, and from teachers and friends who introduced me to the texts, ideas and practices in this piece.