Under Pressure

Counting

From the program of the 12th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, “Critical qualitative research is under assault . . . Scholars around the world, inside and outside the academy, struggle against the regulatory practices of neoliberalism . . .” (www.icqui.org/program/).

Regulatory practices: Counting, measurement, scrutiny, assessment . . . The terms of regulation are speed, efficiency, productivity, market forces, metrics, quantity, assessment. In the hyper-simplistic cult of neoliberal scrutiny and measurement and production, if we don’t count things, we don’t count.

So autoethnography is particularly vulnerable to assault.

At my institution, I have seen the growth, in both power and size, in two offices devoted to these neoliberal principles: The Office of Assessment and Accreditation, which insures compliance with the rules of accreditation, and The Office of Institutional Research, which tries to keep track of what we do. Together, they are larger than some academic departments, nearly as large as the rest. Their tasks are tasks of measurement, scrutiny, and control. Counting what might count.

Have you ever thought about counting? I mean, really thought about it? I remember teaching my kids to count. They could count before they could speak full sentences. In other words, counting is one of the least complex mental operations.

Mind you, I am not against counting, or measuring, or careful scrutiny, in the right contexts, and with the right intentions. Carpenters say, “Measure twice, cut once.” They also need a specific number of boards and bricks to build a house. But have you ever noticed how much more your home is than the sum of its boards and bricks? Have you ever noticed how the best things in life cannot be measured?

How do you measure love? Or joy? Or friendship? Or ecstasy? Or family? Or spirit? How do you measure the impact of a secret? Or a story?

Autoethnography counts because we don’t count.

This is an autoethnography of the pressures of scrutiny and measurement.

September 1964

I remember it like it was yesterday, the first time I knew I was being watched.

I mean really watched.

It was all very sudden.

In one brief moment, it became clear to me that I was under surveillance.

I was, all of a sudden, scrutinized.

Soon, I would be evaluated.

Graded.

Up until that moment, my world consisted mostly of my parents and my barely older brother. My parents were, at the time, also a bit distracted, and thus inattentive. They had their hands full, I think. My dad was in seminary, and my mom worked, and they had two rowdy young boys, and my parents were still in their early twenties, and were very likely sleep deprived, and probably way out of their league.

Up until that moment, I had been free to do what I pleased, within a few specified guidelines, including not endangering myself or others.

Up until that moment, I had been, well, barely noticed.

Until those rare occasions when I violated the code, of course. Then, discipline was swift and authoritative, bordering on obtrusive and obnoxious.

But if I stayed in line . . .

That moment—like I said, I remember it like it was yesterday—was the day I walked into my first grade classroom.

I stand in front of the school, scanning my new domain. Slowly, I walk up the concrete stairs, metal Mighty Mouse lunchbox in hand, and through the doors of Sewanee Elementary School. It is my first day of first grade. As I enter my classroom, I am immediately suspicious. A stern graying woman, Mrs. Greene, stands at the front of the classroom, lips pursed, hands clasped on the front of her starched dress. A sinking feeling grips me, but I soldier on.

I take a quick scan of my new world. The desks are in perfect little rows. There is a stool at the front of the room, in the corner. I know its purpose. Everything is very orderly, crisp, ship-shape. I regard these as bad signs. This is already starting to seem an awful lot like church, where they expect you to sit still and be quiet for more than an hour every Sunday, and you’re not allowed to touch anything, and you have to wear starchy-scratchy shirts. My gaze slips over to the windows that line the far wall. Outside is a playground. That looks promising.

“Your name, sir?”

“Huh?”

“You mean ma’am.”

“Uh, yes ma’am.”

“Your name?”

“Oh. Sorry. Chris.”

“Last name?”

“Poulos,” I mutter.

“Speak up, son.”

“Poulos, ma’am.”

“Find a seat, young man.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I scurry over to the row of desks on the window side, slip into the one remaining empty desk, four back from the front.

A good position: To my left, the window, and that playground-world outside it, beckoning to me. To my right—wait a minute! Who is she? Her skin is so smooth. Her curly hair lets off a glimmer. She is beautiful. Wow. OK. I’ve staked out a good position, to be sure.

But I have a bad feeling about this. This is not kindergarten. In three weeks, I will turn 6. We are expected to get serious now. This is SCHOOL. The teacher doesn’t just look stern. She personifies stern. Even her breath is stern. We sit in rows. We raise our hands to be called on. We walk to lunch, and to recess, in straight lines. We remain silent unless granted permission to speak. But my mind—and my heart—lives between the wide world to my left, and the cute girl to my right. I quickly learn that staring out the window—or at this girl, whose name, I learn, is Phyllis Greene, no relation to the teacher—and, well, daydreaming . . . drifting into imagination . . . is no longer acceptable. I spend some time on that stool at the front of the room before I develop my peripheral vision.

For the first time in my life, I begin to feel anxious. Years later, after the anxiety that first gripped me that day gets out of hand, my therapist will name this condition: generalized anxiety disorder. It goes very nicely with my diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, which in turn came from some pretty intense and repeated trauma.

But, in the beginning, it was all very simple. There was a simple, straightforward reason for my anxiety.

Like I said, it begins with the realization that I was under scrutiny. For me, the fact of being watched, evaluated, graded . . . is somehow existential. It was, believe it or not, pretty traumatic for me.

Note: The Greek word for trauma is . . . trauma. It means wound. My consciousness, it seems, is wounded by this moment of scrutiny. That moment of self-consciousness is NOT therapeutic or uplifting or enlightening. It brings a deepening anxiety into my world.

This was not entirely new territory. I had, of course, been to church, this being the South and my dad being a seminary student. And, my dad had always been the type to “grade” my performance. But now it was intensified; now it was everywhere. I was under scrutiny wherever I turned. And now, I began to feel self-conscious about it, and suspicious, and a bit anxious.

I quickly learned how to play the game we were being taught, and I began to notice that I had some distinct advantages over my peers. For one, I could already read because my mom was a reading teacher, and I was her willing guinea pig. For another, I have a strong memory. I can memorize stuff easily, and in the 1960s, much of learning was about memorizing facts and dates and places and information. So I found, very early in life, the one thing I was good at: being a student.

There was a problem, though. I have a touch of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Not severe, and nobody even knew what it was at the time, but I have a tendency to fidget. I also lean toward the “dreamer” type. I spend a fair amount of every day, to this day, daydreaming. This put me, at times, at odds with my teachers, who, for some reason, wanted us all to pay attention. So, they took to calling me out of my reverie, putting me on the spot. But I quickly had their number. I knew the answers. So, although I sometimes had to ask them to repeat the question, I always knew the answer. Although they took issue with my “conduct,” they could not quarrel with my knowledge or ability.

Their problem (and I do think of it now as their problem) stemmed from a desperate need on their part to impose order, structure, regimentation, discipline . . . on a roomful of unruly little kids.

They wanted order; we preferred chaos.

The most ancient of dialectics.

Meanwhile, they seemed to need to measure something that’s pretty much immeasurable.

In neoliberalism, measurement is a driving principle that pushes production.

But how do you measure knowledge? How do you even begin to corral all the knowledge a six-year-old holds inside? Or a seven-year-old? Or a thirteen-year-old? You see the problem. Even the smallest human has a capacity that far exceeds any measuring device ever invented by a big human. There’s no way to really measure, to see if a kid measures up, because we little kids (and we bigger grown ups) are so much more than any “metric” ever devised by the most skilled measurement-obsessed technocrat. The best they can do, probably, is guess.

And all that obsession with measurement deflects the attention from what really matters: Is this little human being growing in love and compassion? Is this little human being becoming someone who will practice caring and ethical communication, who will apply critical and creative thinking, who will use his or her store of knowledge for the greater good of us all, who will lead a joyous and fulfilling life?

How the hell do you measure that?

But this was also a world of “survival of the fittest.” The classroom, and its accompanying playground, were each Darwinian and “free market” in their own way. Inside, the smart kids ruled. Outside, it was the big galoots—the oversized mean kids who had been held back, and who were, thus, pissed at everyone who hadn’t been—who held sway over that kingdom.

In neoliberalism, “market forces” ensure “survival” for those who best “compete.”

In the classroom, I was king. Measurements indicated success in my domain.

On the playground, I was prey for the hungry–angry predators. Measurements were more . . . shall we say, brutal . . . measured in body weight and fist size.

June 1976

Twelve school years later, in June of 1976, our nation poised to celebrate its bicentennial in just a few short weeks, I graduate from R.J. Reynolds Senior High School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Sitting among row upon row of my classmates, clad in cap and gown, I feel unremarkable. Like a number. I’m done with school, however, at the ripe young age of 17. The following autumn, having left home and declared my independence, I decide that I will try my hand at working for a living instead of going to college. So, I find myself standing in my first “adult” workplace.

The Kennesaw Lumber Company pays me US$2.70 per hour to ride on the side of a forklift and load boards, according to the specifics of a particular customer order, onto it. Then, we ride over to either a truck or a train car and load the packets of boards we’ve constructed onto one or the other. The faster we go, the better, as our performance is measured in the number and size of orders fulfilled. We get small bonuses for “productivity.” We race around the yard, trying to beat our colleagues back to the next order. Whoever gets there first, gets it.

Neoliberalism promotes “revenue enhancement” via low wages. No benefits. Low costs. High profits. Emphasis on speed and efficiency. Competition. Free markets. Productivity.

Hmm. Productivity. This is the first time in my life I’ve heard that terminology. One night at the library, I grab a dictionary. It tells me that productivity is “the effectiveness of effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.” In other words, how many boards did we stack on the forklift during a specified time period? Or, how many orders did we fulfill in a day, a week, a month, a year? Years later, I will remember that definition, much to my chagrin. More on that later. Right now, I have other fish to fry. You see, I have this job. They want me to work ten hours a day, five days a week, and another five on Saturdays. Overtime pay is a whopping US$4.05 per hour.

Every day is the same. We lift and count, “One, two. . . ,” lift and count, “three, four,” lift and count . . . and on and on and on and on. All day long, hour after hour, day after day, week after week.

It never changes.

But we are being watched.

The yard boss is always on the lookout, riding around, ferreting out laziness, making sure nobody’s taking advantage of the lovely surroundings, napping on piles of lumber, or sneaking away for a smoke break. If we are caught engaging in any of these “extracurricular” activities, our pay is docked. Which, of course, leads to great creativity among those hoping to “beat the system.”

Control. Regimentation. Scrutiny. Surveillance. Discipline. Punishment. These are the management games of neoliberalism.

This job is physically demanding but—how shall I put this—not exactly mentally challenging. It does, however, give me a good deal of time to contemplate how my fate is playing out.

One fine January morning—and by this, I mean the temperatures are rising upward, almost touching 20 degrees, so, you know, a warming trend—I find myself in my usual position on the right side of the forklift, loading two-by-fours onto the forks, one at a time, in rhythm with my partner, Bill, who drives the lift. Cold! Man, all I can think of is the cold! My fingers are frozen, and despite my thick work gloves, I can barely feel them. My feet, I think, are nearly totally numb inside my steel-toed work boots. We count the boards in rhythm: “One, two, three, four, five . . . fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two . . . eighty-five, eighty-six . . . .” And right at that moment, I call for a rest, and look down at my feet.

At first, I’m not quite sure what I’m seeing. Then it dawns on me. I’ve been standing in a pool of mud about three inches deep, which is, frankly, not at all unusual. The yard is a muddy place. What is different this time is that my feet are stuck. The mud has frozen up solid around the sides of my boots. I’m stuck in the mud. Frozen.

Ah. A metaphor, I find myself thinking.

I call over to Bill, who is in his early 50s and has been working at the yard for over 30 years. I’m pretty sure he didn’t finish sixth grade.

“Hey, Bill. Look! A metaphor!”

“Huh? A what?”

“You know, a metaphor. A figure of speech . . . ah, never mind.”

It takes me a couple of minutes to extract my feet from the mud.

Bill comes over, and watches.

“Yeah, that happens,” is all he says. He winks at me and laughs.

That night, I go back to the library, this time to research my escape.

I gotta get out of this place.

I find myself looking at college catalogs. I then find a book that purports to list all the colleges in the United States. I focus on the Rocky Mountain West.

I’ve always wanted to follow Horace Greeley’s dictum: “Go West!”

Over the next few weeks, I send inquiries to every college in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

One day, I come home from the yard, exhausted. In my mailbox, I find a catalog from a place called “Colorado Mountain College, Timberline Campus.” On the front is a picture of Mount Elbert, rising up out of the back of this catalog. Mount Elbert, I learn from the photo credits, is the highest mountain in the United States, outside of Alaska. It rises to 14,439 feet. Its neighbor, aptly named Mount Massive, nearly measures up. It stands at 14,429 feet, just 10 feet shorter. Impressive “metrics.” I choose my first college based on an admittedly impressive photograph.

I can’t wait to give notice at the yard.

I need a change of scene.

January 1986

Ten years later, I find myself in a theater. I am, after all, a bit of a moviegoer, and I often find myself entering these spaces on my “search” (Percy, 1960). In the 1936 (nearly) silent film, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin lampoons “modern” factory work on the assembly line. The opening montage is of a mass of humans entering a massive factory. As you watch the humans bustle toward the door, they somehow morph into sheep heading into a corral. Inside, the highly mechanized assembly line workers each perform tasks not unlike my lumber yard job. Charlie’s job is to tighten bolts on widgets as they roll by on a conveyor belt.

In an upstairs office, the President of the Electro Steel Corporation sits and reads the comics page, works a jigsaw puzzle, and occasionally flips on his big surveillance system, a giant two-way screen through which he can see the factory floor and check on the “productivity” of his workers. When things are going too slow, he commands the guy who runs the belts: “More speed!”

Side note: In May of 2016, as I write this article, I see a brief column in my local newspaper reporting on a new report by Oxfam America, regarding working conditions in American poultry processing plants. Apparently, workers are so routinely denied regular bathroom breaks that many have been spotted urinating and defecating in their clothing as they stand on the processing line. Some wear diapers to work every day to avoid the embarrassment. Free market conditions, right?

June 1999

I stand in the blazing sun, in full academic regalia, awaiting my moment. Soon, I will be hooded, and pronounced “Doctor.” It’s been a long haul, and the place I now inhabit is pretty far from the lumber yard. As I look around me, though, and listen, I realize that the university is taking some credit for “producing” all these graduates. The year has been a productive one, measured by sheer number of graduating students. I walk with the largest graduating class to date in the 135-year history of this fine institution.

From one point of view, I am the proud new doctor, full of grit and gratitude, happy to have “made it,” about to embark on a career in academe after many very long years of working in the corporate world while studying at night. I’m a sleep-deprived denizen of libraries and classrooms and hallowed hallways.

From another, I’m just another graduate, a cog in the machine, a number, one of hundreds, all dressed in the same costume, enacting this annual rite of passage. Next year, hundreds more will be “produced.”

Meanwhile, I will dutifully sweat under my heavy black robe, listening to the speeches that are not unlike the ones I heard just a few years ago, or the many more I will hear in the ensuing years, and then walk across the stage to capture and savor my moment. And then, it will be over, and I will be onto the next thing, which is a nontenure track one-year contract lecturer position—a precarious start, but at least a start—beginning the coming fall.

Before I know it, I’m deep in it. While I focus my attention on teaching philosophy of communication and conflict, film and culture, and diversity and dialogue to my students, the administration of this fine institution wants me to teach more of them. So, I sign students in above the course caps, which are set for pedagogical reasons. I sacrifice quality for quantity, or to put it in neoliberal terms, I create efficiencies. Along the way, I find myself so overwhelmed by my workload—nine courses offered to nearly 300 students per year—that I fall into a habit of all night grade-a-thons, reading paper after paper after paper until the wee hours of the morning. One night, I find myself wondering whether any of this paper came from the pulp mill, which was a side business of the old lumber yard . . . and then I soldier on . . .

And one day, I start hearing this odd word, a word that doesn’t seem to fit what we’re doing here: Assessment. From what I gather, we are now being required to demonstrate that we are doing what we set out to do, by looking at what we’ve done. There seems to be some sort of “measurement”—and scrutiny—involved. I’m immediately suspicious. The word has an ominous ring to it. I begin to realize I am under surveillance. Again. I suspect this assessment thing will come back to haunt me one day. Again and again and again.

September 2001

Two years later, I embark on my first tenure track job. I find myself scrambling to get everything on track. My workdays are long. The expectations are immediately high. There is no rest for the tenure seeking.

Six weeks after my start date, it is an ordinary September 11. A Tuesday, just like any other.

Until 8:46 a.m.

And 9:03 a.m.

And 11:00 a.m.

These times are etched into my memory forever. We all know what happened at 8:46 and 9:03. At 11:00, having just heard the news and not quite digested it, I walk into the auditorium where I teach a course called “Persuasion in Western Culture,” which is a large-lecture history of rhetoric course in which I oh-so-efficiently teach 156 undergraduate students. Most of my students, who have been in classes for the past two hours, do not know what has just happened. What is normally my moment on stage, largely entertaining but sometimes actually teaching, has been transformed forever. I stand, hands at my sides, struck mute for the first time in my teaching career. I know what just happened, but I’ve barely got my head around it. How do I put it into words?

“There’s been an attack . . .” I begin.

And the classroom becomes a place for communicative triage, as students step to the front of the room to find out more. We huddle up, and I try, haltingly at best, to explain what is going on. After a few minutes, I release them, telling them, “Go and be with the people you love. We will get back to our work when the time is right.”

Over the next week or two, I gather informally with students who just need to talk, to explore, to question, to engage in dialogue, to take some kind of action. We forget about assignments, about course structures and requirements and efficient modes of teaching and learning. We just, as we used to say in the 1960s and 1970s, sit around and “rap.” And we discover, to our surprise, that we’ve learned more in a week—about ourselves, about our world, about how to engage in constructive dialogue, about memorializing the fallen, about healing the wounded among us—than any set curriculum or procedural pedagogy could have taught us.

The course morphs from “Persuasion in Western Culture” into “Transformative Communication in the Age of Anxiety.” And, propelled by circumstances beyond our control, we find ourselves on a new path. We learn, together, ways of speaking and listening and writing to, and through, our anxiety and our collective trauma (Poulos, 2002, 2004). A small group of students and I begin to move into the deeper spaces of true “accidental dialogue” (Buber, 1971; Poulos, 2008).

In the eyes of the neoliberal academy, nothing I did that day—or that week, or that month—counted.

In my teaching career, nothing has ever counted more.

September 2006

As I progress toward tenure, I am, of course, told what kinds of things count. I’m told that my time should be allocated as follows: 40% goes to research, 40% goes to teaching, 20% goes to service. That word—productivity—shows up regularly in conversations about faculty. Gradually, “faculty productivity” becomes the watchword for a collective understanding about what we are about. Faculty reflection, or deep thinking, or reading deeply are not only not talked about, they are rarely done any more.

We are busy. We are being productive.

Meanwhile, students have begun acting as if they are our customers, and they remind me of my old days as a CSR. This new crop of students is far more demanding than the last crop. They want access, and they want success, which seems to be defined as efficient adherence to the “graduation checklist” so ably constructed for them by the Admissions and Advising offices. When I try the commercial enterprise analogy out on them, I shift the terms and position them as employees rather than customers. I call them out, indicating that employers will not tolerate them skipping work (ditching class) or even being late. Savvy consumers, they turn the tables on me, claiming that they and their parents (as tuition and taxpaying entities) pay my salary, so perhaps they are the employers. Realizing my kowtowing to the analogue has backfired, I quickly abandon the game, returning to the model of education as a “greater good” beyond the commercial needs of a capitalist system.

But, of course, we are short-handed. We have more students than we can handle, and not enough tenured faculty to serve in all the available service roles. In fact, there are only three tenured faculty out of 10. I find myself thinking that the expectations ratio has been shifted. The expectations seem to be 100%+ in all three categories. I’m scrambling to keep up with all the writing and the teaching and the advising and the grading, and the grading, and the grading. Two years in, I’m appointed Director of Graduate Study. Now, I’m really scrambling.

And I’m told, over and over and over, what counts toward tenure: the number of articles, book chapters, and books I publish; the number of people who read and cite my work; the number of manuscripts rejected by the outlets I publish in; the number of grants I apply for and the number of grant dollars I attract; the number of students I teach; the numbers associated with my teaching evaluations; the number of students I advise; the number of service roles I take on. Dutifully, I set my goals. Dutifully, I lean into the strictures.

When the time comes, I dutifully compile my dossier, write my narratives outlining the numbers, and . . . wait. In September 2006, my department head tells me the outcome of the vote at the department. The vote is 3 in favor, 1 against. This is not good news. My transgression, it seems, lies in what I’ve been publishing: autoethnography. I write personal narratives of how our emotional lives—and my life as a communicator— play out in a world of emotional/embodied communicators, a world I see as driven by, constructed by, and navigated through the deeply emotional/embodied praxis of communication. I am, after all, a holistic scholar of communication, and I happened to notice, long ago, that parsing out the chunks of praxis into little data bits doesn’t capture or even describe, much less evoke, the deeply textured nuances of human encounter. But I’m told that the reason for the negative vote is that my work is “not mainstream” and that my teaching, based on my work, is “too therapeutic” (Poulos, 2010). The argument is that autoethnography does not lead to generalizable results, and that, therefore, it’s not “mainstream” scholarship. Not that I ever pretended that it was, or desired to be in the mainstream. Nor, was I ever told that I was supposed to be.

I find this reaction to my work both puzzling and ominous. Apparently, I’m being disciplined, not because of the quality of my work, nor because of the quantity (my numbers are solid, according to the strategically ambiguous “metrics” of my department), but because of its content. In this case, what I write is seen as a danger to the emerging-prevailing zeitgeist. As the case goes up the line, the story darkens. The College committee votes against tenuring and promoting me by an 8-1 margin—again arguing that, by not measuring and generalizing and counting things, by not following standard research protocols, that I am, somehow, not contributing to scholarship. In other words, my work does not parallel the hegemonic march of positivist methodology and purpose, numbers and generalizations, that fits so neatly with the neoliberal models and methods of efficiency and productivity.

Emotional landscapes—and their outgrowths—are, after all, inefficient, messy, and counterproductive. “Mainstream” scholarship has largely ignored them. So I should have been more focused. I should have ignored what I researched, and instead researched something else entirely.

I’ve chronicled this story elsewhere (Poulos, 2010)—I eventually won my tenure fight, so I was left to tell the story—but I mention it here because it is instructive in the context of the increasingly neoliberal vocabulary and action we see in the academy. Governing and determining the “mainstream” by policing the agents in the system, by scrutiny and surveillance and disciplinary action, is, after all, what I’ve been experiencing since that first day of first grade. Symbolically, this process is akin to being sent to sit on that stool in the corner.

What those in power never grasped (and likely still don’t) is that sitting on that stool gave me ample opportunity to consider how to transgress even more.

That stool taught me how to write my own story, outside the bounds of scrutiny. I noticed, nearly immediately, that, sitting on the stool, I was promptly ignored. Which I read as an opportunity.

May 2016

As I write this today, another semester has just ended. Last year, I was promoted to Professor without a hitch. Now at the close of my fifth year as Chair of my department, I’ve dutifully completed evaluations of 25 students and 20 faculty. My teaching evaluation scores this spring hit 4.95 on a 5.00-point scale (with 5.00 being the highest attainable score). I’ve dutifully graduated ninety Communication Studies majors. I’ve dutifully written at least a dozen reports on my department’s productivity, and a couple on my own. I have dutifully entered data into databases. I have written two reports evaluating the state of my department and “envisioning” our future hiring needs, based on enrollment increase projections. I still have no fewer than six assessment reports to write.

Meanwhile, in the name of “efficient use of space,” the new “Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management” has instituted an automated classroom assignment system that offers efficiency but no flexibility, no human thought or touch. Problems proliferate, as do the various mini-chancellors, associate vice provosts, and deanlets who are charged with regulation and control and measurement of our “operations.” The Provost is making noise about raising class enrollment caps—again—in the name of “efficiency.” And a new regime of “post-tenure review” has been institutionalized. The committee and I had to conduct six of these five-year reviews this spring. In my own self-report on my scholarly and teaching productivity, I find myself counting, reporting that this year, I published four journal articles, one encyclopedia entry, and two essays. A pretty good year, according to the “metrics” of my institution. It all counts.

The bureaucratic hoop-jumping I do on a daily basis sometimes makes me want to pack it all in. But then . . . there is the teaching. And the writing.

Which brings me back to autoethnography. I write autoethnography as direct resistance to counting, control, scrutiny, measurement.

One, two, three . . . ah! I can count! I count! My writing counts! But in it, I rarely count.

One, two, three . . . I write, speaking back to control, claiming my freedom and my passion as mine and mine alone.

One, two, three . . . I write vulnerability as a response to scrutiny, and as a powerful way to speak truth to power.

One, two, three . . . I write quality, and qualitatively, as an assertion of the strength of character over counting. The best things in life cannot be measured.

One, two, three . . . I write, railing against the gods of speed, efficiency, productivity, market forces, metrics, quantity, assessment.

One, two, three . . . I write the messy language of emotion.

One, two, three . . . I slow down, writing against the grain, exposing efficiency for the sham-god that it is.

One, two, three . . . I write to play, to play with ideas, to play with feelings. I rarely know where I am going when I start. I just go. I wander. I play. I write against the grain. I write through the pain. I write as an exercise contra-productivity.

I write a page, print it out, toss it in the recycling bin.

Just because I still can.

I write and name the brutes who abused their power and tried their fists out on my face, or imposed their means of control in the regimentation of my work. I call them out, again speaking truth to power, manifesting my resilience. Market forces be damned!

I write the slowly emerging emotional landscape I occupy into waves of resistance. There is no metric for pain, for anger, for sadness, for joy. I write the autoethnography of the antimetric. I am the antimetric.

The best things in life cannot be measured. There are no numbers in the language of love. Quality, baby, not quantity!

Love, life, joy, sorrow, hatred, friendship, depth, intimacy, anger, affection, despair, loyalty, trust, compassion, serenity, courage, hope . . . these are but a few of the countless, immeasurable qualities of humanness that animate us.

Neoliberalism speaks the language of the analytic.

Autoethnography writes the stories of the heart.

Measure that.