While ruminating on campus sexual mores, Captain Yips wonders where the next installment of Pictures from an Institution is. Ever happy to oblige, I hereby publish chapter nine of Critical Mass' ongoing serialization of anon's study of academic life. Earlier chapters are available here.

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"The Metamorphosis"

Friday, December 28: Erwin R. Sackville nurses a drink in the lobby of the Sheraton New Orleans. He settles back into the same big bulky armchair he sat in that morning, closes his eyes against the sharp orange glare of the late afternoon sun, and sighs as whiskey seeps warmly through his veins. He needs the whiskey. It has been an unsettling afternoon.

Erwin R. Sackville lets a sip of Jack Daniels slide down his throat and contemplates the nature of his agitation. There was more to it than the annoyance of being dragged to the interviews against his will by Michiko Fry. After all, he had not had any pressing plans for the afternoon. And he knew from experience that in missing the panels on "Contested Closets: Passing, Coming Out, and Disability" and "New Wave Shakespeare," he had not missed more than the dubious pleasure of a chuckle at his profession's expense. The talk on mahogany had indeed looked good for a laugh, but laughter was cheap and plentiful at the MLA, where righteous pontification frequently impaled itself on the spoke of its own pointed irrelevance. Besides, he could enjoy the foibles of his colleagues just as well by watching them conduct job interviews as he could by attending their talks.

No, the agitation came from the interviews themselves. It came, he carefully admitted to himself, swirling the golden liquid in his glass, from a sensation he had not felt in many, many years; from a sensation he had, in fact, devoted his entire career to evading: the feeling that he was wholly and utterly insignificant, that his presence, his opinions, and his judgement mattered not at all to the business at hand.

Continual, committed metamorphosis had been Erwin R. Sackville's method of self-preservation in a profession that prided itself on its eternal newness, its capacity for discarding ideas and approaches with astonishing, even reckless speed. Erwin R. Sackville had made a career out of staying ahead of the field's steep curve of philosophical abandonment. He made sure that he would never become obsolete by anointing himself with the power to declare the obsolescence of others. His commitment was not to an idea, or a genre, or a method, or even a politics, but to being among the first to embrace every new trend and to being among the first to leave old ones behind. He was a sort of scholarly hit man. He liked to nail a coming thing when no one was looking, make a quick getaway, and then watch from afar as people flocked to the scene and tried, always unsuccessfully, to copy the grace and power of his early, definitive statements. It was endlessly diverting. It kept him sharp in a world where it was all too easy to stagnate. It kept him young where most of his colleagues were, intellectually speaking, prematurely old.

Toes tingling with the strong proof of sour mash, Erwin R. Sackville confessed to himself that his pride had been assaulted that afternoon. He had been able to steer the postcolonial and feminist interviews with ease--and it was a good thing, too, since Chairman Stan couldn't run a decent interview if his life depended on it. Hell, that festive bastard couldn't run a pencil sharpener if his life depended on it. Erwin R. Sackville smiled behind his sleepy lids and took a moment to appreciate his wit. But the new media candidates--they had caught him completely unawares. He had not known what to ask them, had not been able to follow their descriptions of their work, had been, he owned, shocked to discover that there was such a thing as "new media," amazed to learn that the computer he had hitherto regarded as a gray, serviceable box whose chief virtue lay in its elimination of the need to hire a typist could in fact form the basis for a whole new theory of reading and an entirely new set of debates about the value of the book.

Agitation had been Erwin R. Sackville's initial reaction to these realizations, which arose from the depths of his discomfort at finding himself speechless in a space where he was accustomed to shine. His soul had been suffused with resentful shame as he watched the likes of that bean-counting hack, Michiko Fry, and that vitae-thumping charlatan, Delbert Jett, quiz the candidates about hypertext, cyborgs, and something called "radiant textuality." Now his cheeks burned with alcoholic regret at the memory of how he had sat silently by while lesser men did what he ought to have been doing, and did it so clamorously, so combatively, with so much ego and so little style. Oh, he ached to think of it.

But he also sensed, like an inkling of an itch, a familiar feeling beginning to well up beneath the annoyance and embarrassment that had shaped his afternoon. Always, this feeling took him by surprise. Always, he resisted it. Always, it made him feel exhausted in anticipation of the effort it was about to require of him. And always, it took him over. Metamorphosis was to Erwin R. Sackville as it was to Gregor Samsa, sudden, violent, total, complete. First he changed, and then he had to make sense of the change by belatedly creating the conditions for it.

Erwin R. Sackville's head sinks forward onto his chest and he sleeps.

Time passes.

Erwin R. Sackville's head snaps up off his chest and he wakes with the full and certain knowledge that he is a cybertheorist.

The Planckton Hall faculty would be joined in the fall by a young man fresh out of school, eager to embark on the arduous process of transforming his dissertation, "The Political Economy of the Link," into a book. Erwin R. Sackville was certain that he could have a monograph on new media ready by early summer. He would call it "The Cyberspace Manifesto." And with it he would emerge as the authority on Marxist approaches to the internet before the ink on that young bounder's diploma was dry.

He sprang from his chair, downed the dregs of his whiskey, adjusted his Armani tie, and strode out into the coming New Orleans night. Hailing a cab, he ordered the driver to take him straight to the airport. He would have his belongings sent to him. There was no time to pack. There was no time to lose.

to be continued