Spaces of Refuge
On creative and intellectual work under late capitalism
The other day I listened to a podcast with Carlo Rovelli, the Italian physicist slash leftist intellectual. When he was talking about his reasons for going into academia in the 1970s, he said something that struck me.
He recounted how he became an academic because he felt uncomfortable with the way society worked. Critics of society often become intellectuals because that is the only space in which they can exist authentically. He said he became an academic because he did not want to belong to society the way it was, and academia offered him a place at least somewhat outside of it.
This got me thinking about academia today, and whether there are any spaces left where writers, critics, and artists can thrive. I have considered going into academia myself, and remain conflicted about it due to both my own and my friend’s experiences within contemporary academia. I almost felt a sting of pain when Carlo implied that academia was a kind of refuge for him. Because it doesn’t feel that way for me, though I wish it did.
Right now, pursuing a PhD in anything on the left of the political spectrum means signing up for years of living in poverty. It means begging for the tiny bit of funding that seems to shrink year after year. It means somehow making your project palatable to the neoliberal ideology of cost-benefit analysis, of targets and outcomes, of measuring and evaluating “success”. It means marketing yourself, proving over and over that you deserve to be here, that you are The Best and always aiming higher.
The current intellectual climate is one of constant production without break. Academics are expected to churn out papers as if they are machines. Freelance writers are always chasing after the next project, always networking for the next job, writing almost as if an essay can be produced in the same vein as a physically assembled product in a factory. Intellectual work has fallen victim to the same inhuman speed and rhythms of social media production. If you stop running, you will fall out of the algorithm; your existence falls off the radar.
It's a climate of constantly having to prove your worth and justify your existence. It’s a climate of precarity, of always being in danger of falling off the moving carriage you’re so painstakingly balanced on. In short, it’s a climate of fear, driven by the ideology of aspiration and self-improvement. If I don’t aspire, I don’t exist.
In the podcast, Carlo talks about the fear he sees in the younger generation. How we worry about finding our place in society, because if we don’t, there is nowhere else for us to go. How the constant pressure to produce, to aspire, to become a commodifiable package for the labour market destroys the space and time necessary for developing big ideas. There is an assault on both the physical and immaterial spaces of thought: the commodification of public space denies us access to places where we can exist in public without paying, and the neoliberal ideology of anxious aspiration denies us the spiritual space to sit and think without any ulterior motives of productivity and self-improvement.
There is also an assault on our time in general. Inflation means that we have to work more hours to afford the same life. Increasingly demanding jobs extract more of our energy, leaving us with less when we come home at the end of a shift. Even when we’re off work, the relentless cultural conditioning of the 21st century bombards us with messages of hyperactivity. It invades even your innermost life, as you sit there in your living room worrying about whether you’re being lazy, whether you should be doing something instead of nothing. That negative space necessary for truly thinking, that space between activity where all that exists is the quiet harmony between you and the world, is being attacked by the relentless commodification of time. All of your time must exist in service of some form of production, even when it is the production of yourself.
How is it possible be a critical intellectual when knowledge work increasingly exists in service of capital? Academia has long ceased to be a place of refuge. Outside of it, work has invaded more and more of our time. Even your most personal time is subject to the forces of production, so that even when I write presumably for my own enjoyment, there’s always that compulsion in the background to think about how I am going to monetise this. How can I make this an additional source of income? How do I gain social capital, which can be transformed into money? How do I morally absolve myself from the failure of inactivity? I am Doing Something, therefore I am a Good Person who is not Lazy and Useless. I am Aspiring.
What I am looking for is a true refuge. A time and space in which true thought and true creativity are possible. I believe that these refuges exist, but they are ephemeral, perhaps few and far in between, and they must be deliberately carved out among the barrelling speed of the death train we are all on. I am looking for spaces to breathe, for time to think. A space outside of society within society, where ideas for different societies can flourish. It can be as small as a private inner space, carved out through careful unlearning and relearning of what it means to exist. Or it can be as big as a reclaimed public space, a collective rupturing of revolutionary joy and anger. It can be as mundane as a website, as exciting as an occupied school building.
If we accept careful intellectual work to be a vital part of our political project, we must ensure that this work can survive. We must carve out times and spaces of refuge.
Zines are a space of refuge for me because they provide a space to share my ideas without any of the ulterior motives that warp how I talk and how I present myself, without any of the pressures of neoliberal aspiration that paralyse me with anxiety. Here, I have no one to please, no one to answer to. I have the space to do the work I want to do, I have no deadlines to consider. This will not lead me to success. But I’m tired of running towards a version of success that will only deplete and extract my inner resources in service a deeply broken system that I stopped believing in a long time ago.
When I create now, I ask myself the following questions: Am I doing this in the expectation of future monetary gain? Am I doing this to gain a certain form of social capital? Am I doing this to morally absolve myself from the failure of inactivity?
If the answer to any of those questions is ‘yes’, I rethink the idea. I take a step back to reevaluate, I take the time to deliberate what it is I really want to do. This is not to create a false dichotomy between “writing for myself” and “writing for someone else”. I write both for myself and for others – I want to share with others, because ideas are a public good, an invaluable form of cultural communication. What I don’t write for is capital. I don’t write for a nebulous idea of success that I don’t believe in. I don’t write for the approval of power structures that only serve to oppress me and people like me.
I write out of an innate compulsion to understand and interpret this world in the hopes that it may help both myself and others navigate this incredibly messy plane of existence. This is my space of refuge.