Why House? Economic Crisis and the Drive to Home Ownership

In his first speech to the Joint-Session of Congress [text and video],  President Barack Obama observed that one of the causes of our economic crisis was that, ”People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway.” The causes of our current economic crisis are complex, and I started to try to understand them last fall in my blog [here]. I can’t say that I succeeded, but I found lots of good sources and links… and all things considered, it seems to me that Obama’s explanation of what precipitated the crisis and his rationale for why we need strong credit markets — and therefore some kind of socially responsible stimulus bill — was generally consistent with what most economists have said.

But the politicians and economists often seem to be talking in circles, recognizing that spending beyond our means causes problems but then passing legislation that artificially props up a market system that enables and encourages the same problematic behaviors. In other words, it’s easy to observe that people are buying houses they can’t really afford, but what would motivate somebody to do that in the first place? Obviously, to explain all this is beyond what anyone would expect a president to talk about, and we should give credit to Obama for at least recognizing the problem and talking about it. But, if we understand that people are buying houses when they shouldn’t, why does the government then want to prop up this market? Shouldn’t we just let the market forces naturally correct?

One way of looking at it is that the market basically works just fine except for a few bad apples that ruin it for everyone, but I don’t think it’s useful to just blame individual greed or individual error since the phenomenon is so widespread. Clearly, there is something more systemic here, and I suggest that Lacanian psychoanalysis (which my class is studying right now, having just read “The Agencyof the Letter in the Unconscious Since Freud“) might offer us some useful insight into what both Obama and economists have noticed is an excessive “drive”  to own a home. 

While economists (and Obama in his speech) use the word “drive” simply to mean what drives the market, for Lacan the term Drive is a complex concept, and the important thing to realize about the Drive is that it’s not just instincts or repressed desires as pop psychology would have you believe, and neither is it just ideology or culture. So, what is it?

Before, I give the pat answer to that question, let’s acknowledge that there is something rather unnatural about the housing market, because it’s clear that people don’t just buy houses because they need a place to live. That would be the “natural” reason to own a home, but in our modern society today, when young adults are so mobile, it’s in many ways easier and more sensible to rent an apartment. It’s also a more efficient use of resources and space, if one cares about the environment. But “the house” seems to mean (or signify) a whole lot more than just a place to live. It also signifies that you’ve made it, that you have control of your life, that you have not just a house but also a “home” with all the lovely Norman-Rockwell-painting connotations of home… that you are now a responsible member of society.

As George Bush even argued in a somewhat famous speech in 2004, “We are creating an ownership society.” That speech is well-known enough to have an entire wikipedia entry dedicated to it [here], and our favorite journalist Naomi Klein has critiqued it [here]. Bush’s argument is that our economy would be stronger, and citizens would be more invested in our nation’s future, if they owned a home. Now, this is the interesting thing here, that in a sense home ownership is not just about home ownership, but is also a metaphor for something else. In other words, to put it in Lacanian terms, the home is a metaphorical compensation for what is lacking in our core being. Just as romantic lovers will say to each other, “you complete me,” so too in the postmodern ideology of home ownership, we can say of the home that it completes us, that it gives us citizenship. (Incidentally, back in the 18th and 19th centuries, ownership of land was a prerequisite for the right to vote. This perhaps made sense in a society that was largely agricultural and that lacked the technological means for tracking its citizens such as the modern identification card and census. But, if the home ever had some kind of real relationship to citizenship in the past, today the home as an expression of citizenship is purely metaphorical.) And so, one part of the Lacanian drive is how it works metaphorically.

But this is just one part of the drive. It also works metonymically, and this is why the Drive is not just a mystical ideology or false consciousness, but something very, very real. What the government did at this moment in 2004 was actually encourage a housing bubble, and it did so with all sorts of artificial incentives such as tax breaks, special loan programs for first-time home buyers, lax regulation of hedge funds and other investment firms, etc. In other words, what made the home valuable was not its value as a place to live or even its real market value, but a speculative future value. Even first-time home buyers who really didn’t have enough money saved could still buy the home because they believed they could count on its value going up. And, likewise, the bank who lent them the money believed they could count on its value going up, so it was willing to take risks with the loan.

You may think I’m just being paranoid, but back then there was a real push for the housing market, and many of my friends, who never considered buying a home before, suddenly bought them in 2004 and 2005 — and what was striking about these particular friends of mine buying a home is that they were all graduate students who were earning very little money and knew they would have to sell their house and move in just a few years. But it was hard to resist the housing-market buzz; one felt foolish for not taking advantage of it, except that it was being pushed so hard by the President and media hype that we all should have been at least a bit skeptical.

The upshot of all this is that people bought homes because of an artificially stimulated housing market. They assumed that the value would increase, and so it was worth making a risky investment. And this is a metonymical relationship, because as Lacan argues, the meaning of a signifier is not just in what it represents — its “signified” (which, in this case, is simply a place where one lives.) It’s also its relation to other signifiers. And here is why it is a mistake to think that Lacan’s analysis of language and dreams is not about real stuff… to think that it is not materialist. To the contrary, it is materialist because these signifiers (which, in this case, is the market value of the home) are the symbolic relations through which people and things relate, i.e., the social relations between things and material relations between people, as Karl Marx put it in his famous chapter on the commodity fetish. And more importantly, they produce real world effects. This is why Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek observed in a recent, and already freqeuntly cited, op-ed for The London Review of Books [here] that even left-leaning Democrats and socialists had to support the bail-out of the finance sector because of the extent to which the lives of working-class people were entangled in it.

The problem, of course, is what Lacan reminds us all along (and which economists and banks should have known from their own Econ 101 textbooks), that the market can’t just go up and up… and up. Or, as Lacan put it, the metonymic chain of desire is a displacement of a fundamental “lack.” We know that ultimately there is something missing from the equation, and that we are building castles partly out of air. Or, as my favorite Lacanian theorist, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, put it, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”

Admittedly, I’m being a little simplistic here, but this is part of how Drive works in our society. It’s not just natural instinct, and it’s not just ideology or culture. It’s more complex than that.

I could stop my analysis there, but since I began this blog post with Obama’s observation that there was something excessive about the drive to own a home, I want to speculate a bit further about the nature of what seems to me to be a pathological excess. Following the theoretical model of Lacan and Žižek, I suggest that the drive to own a house is a psychological symptom… but a symptom of what?

There is something, after all, a little bit creepy about the irrational desire to own a nice house with a picket fence and all of that lovely loveliness at a moment when global warming has been discovered to be a real threat. Houses in America have been getting bigger and bigger (obscenely large, just like SUVs), as Americans have moved from the cities to the suburbs and now to the exurbs. Indeed, the recent creation of the exurb seems to suggest a changing American geography just as the creation of the suburb in the 1950s did. And as such, these houses not only require more and more energy for heat but also create a society completely dependent on the gas-guzzling automobile. Not only do these houses and cars consume more than the world’s fair share of oil, they also take up land that could be used for farming or just left for forest. Ironically, it is often the nature-and-animal-loving individuals who push suburban life outward in their quest for that authentic, natural feeling, and in the process disrupt the very ecosystems they want to protect.

It should be pretty obvious that cooperative living arrangements are more efficient and increasingly necessary. No amount of technological innovation such as hybrid cars or ethanol is going to solve what is essentially a cultural problem — and not a scientific one. Unfortunately, these kinds of reasonable, cultural solutions are not encouraged by government investment like technological solutions are, nor do they receive the kind of artificial incentives that home-buyers receive. In fact, there are even laws on the books in some places that discourage cooperative and alternative living arrangements.

But there is more to the issue than that. When one looks at the history of the American suburb, one can easily discern two basic causes. First, Ford’s development of the affordable automobile, the Model T, in 1908,  and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 that committed the government to an automobile-based infrastructure. But another spur to the growth of suburbs was the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision two years earlier in 1954 and the Civil Rights Act in 1964. As soon as the government began to force schools to integrate, the nation experienced something popularly known as white flight. As a result, according to census data, the United States is more racially segregated now than it was in 1954, despite years of civil rights legislation and the election of a black president.

Now, we can return to the metaphorical aspect of the drive to own a home. As Lacan says, the metaphor (or condensation, to use Freud’s term) is a cultural symptom, and it is symptomatic of our relation to so-called others — others who are psychically, socially, and politically constructed as others… as others supposedly different from ourselves. For theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau, who use Lacan to analyze political relations, such metaphors might be symptoms of social antagonism. In this case, the metaphor of the home, with all its connotations of citizenship, responsibility, and safety, is a symptom of America’s racist history. After all, if I asked you to picture in your mind the perfectly safe, idyllic community full of educated citizens, what would you imagine? And then if I asked you to picture the opposite of that, what would you imagine? And would not race factor into those images, despite all your noble, politically correct intentions?

Hence, though it would be quite a leap of logic to claim that our current environmental problems were entirely caused by a deep, unconscious racism, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to argue that the Drive for home ownership and idyllic suburban life is a symptom of that racism. I would argue that it is. Moreover, this is a racism that still exists but which Americans repress, not wanting to believe it’s still a factor.  But, it exists powerfully in the housing market, as shown by a recent study about how racial discrimination in the lending practices of many banks exacerbated our current housing-market crisis. Liberals eat their organic food, go camping, vote for Obama, and wring their hands about the environment… but they also buy into the racist, environmentally destructive logic of the ever-expanding, suburban and exurban housing market.

More Globalization Cinema: The International

Those of you poor saps who read my blog regularly may remember back last November when I wrote about “Globalization Theory in the New James Bond film Quantum of Solace.” What I noticed there is that the new Bond was different from the old Bond because the way people today conceptualize the world has changed. But the new Bond is certainly not unique, as so many films today seem to be responding to a vaguely understood economic and social phenomenon popularly known as globalization.  For example, consider the last year’s versions of The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, in which the superheros find themselves in the ghettos of Brazile and the mountains of Afghanistan fighting againt a globalized, corporate military industrial complex. This isn’t the kind of superhero movie I grew up with; something  out there has obviously changed. But what?

And of course, many university instructors are now teaching classes about globalization through such films as Dirty Pretty Things, Babel, Lord of War, Blood Diamond, Syriana, and Children of Men. There is even a new guide book on The Cinema of Globalization. Hollywood seems to be reading the journalism of Thomas Friedman and Naomi Klein about globalization, as well as such sensationalistic memoirs as Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, if not also the academic theories about globalization such as Saskia Sassen’s Globalization and Its Discontents and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist going to see the new movie starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, The International, about a multinational bank that attempts to buy and sell missiles and manipulate the economy of war. I wanted to see if it would do what I predicted in my blog on Bond that all suspense thrillers about globalization would do…. and lo! It did.

Thing one: in the new suspense thriller, the evil organization is always part of a network of legimitimate and illigitimate organizations. This is what globalization theorists tend to call the “network” form. So, no longer is the good guy agent operating on behalf of a national government opposed to a nefarious crime syndicate. Now, the nation state is unwittingly part of a larger global network of legal and illegal activities that crisscross national borders. And in The International, Clive Owen’s character, Interpol agent Louis Salinger travels around the world to prove the nefarious deeds of this bank (just as all suspense thriller characters jump around the world so easily these days, as if they were Hayden Christiansen’s character in Jumper.) As he does so, he discovers how difficult it will ever be to prosecute this bank on acount of how enmeshed its nefarious deeds are in the global network. Of course, whereas in the real world this network is a complex chaotic mess, in the cinematic world the dark side of the network is personified. In this case, it is the evil banker, and the movie is obviously capitalizing (pun intended) on recent popular frustration with the many banking scandals. While banks collapse due to corrupt practices and governments scramble to bail them out, ordinary people lose jobs and starve. So, it’s certainly not the least bit surprising that a movie about an evil bank would appear in theaters at this particular moment in history.

Thing two: as Negri and Hardt argue in Empire, there is no longer anything outside Empire. What they mean by this is that in the old days, individual nation states had imperial ambitions to control more and more territory and competed with each other, but much of that territory remained outside their direct influence. Today, however, although nation states and smaller tribal communities still exist, they are all part of a single socio-economic structure that Negri and Hardt call Empire. So, in The International, banks and arms dealers are selling weapons to both sides of any political conflict. It doesn’t matter which political side of the fence you are on. It’s all part of the same global economy.

Thing three: in contrast to yesterday’s way of looking at international relations, or relations between nations, in today’s way of looking at things we analyze the relation of the local to the global, as in the environmentalist slogan, think globallay, act locally. Clearly the global economy transforms local cultures, often turning those cultures into commodities that can be sold. This dialectic between the global and the local has been called by theorists glocalisation. And in The International, local political conflicts proliferate in the background as effects of the evil multinatinal bank’s effort to benefit from the arms trade.

Thing four: because there is no longer an outside to Empire, the moral dilemma of global suspense thrillers is how can the good guy confront an evil that is part of the very same system (or network of relations) as the good guy. As the movie tells us, how can we go after a multinational bank that is protected by the very system of justice that would prosecute it? And how can an Interpol agent do any good “lost in the complexities of international law?” Of course, as with the new James Bond, the agent can either abide by the principles of law and order or can forego those principles and become a rogue agent. But, unlike the fantasy world of Bond, Clive Owen in The International finds he can’t operate outside the system. So, following one of the many fortune cookie maxims that saturate the dialogue of the movie, he realizes that when there is no way out, he must go further in.

Thing five: part of this opposition between a supposedly ineffective international law and the undulating, extra-legal, network form of global relations is an opposition we see in globalization theory. Some globalization theorists argue for the importance for international law, regulation, and transparency for preventing corporate abuses and war. Others argue that the legal system only protects the most egregious forms of economic exploitation, and instead values the multitude that resists such exploitation through its extra-legal connectivity. And indeed, in The International, the good guys are always circumventing protocols and resisting the evil bankers because of personal bonds — what Negri and Hardt call “affect.”

English majors, careers, graduate schools… ideology?

I thought I’d do something different in this blog today, something pragmatically useful for my students. As one might imagine, students often come into my office distraught about their career prospects (especially in in today’s economic climate, the dreary winter recession of ‘09), wondering what to do with a degree in English, and secretly hoping that graduate school might be a nifty way to avoid that scary, uncertain future — a future as loaded with all the hope and fear as those starry-eyed proponents of the American dream can make it. So, what I’m going to do in this blog post is give some practical advice about how to think about careers after college and even how to search for a good graduate program.

But, as this is a theory blog (and since my theory class has just begun its unit on ideology), of course I will also add a few remarks about that as well. After all, isn’t all the hope and fear about the future a product of the ideology of the American dream, an ideology that claims you can be anything you want to be? (And please notice here how – just as in the contradictory readings of Slumdog Millionaire found in the media, which I blogged on last week – ideology always produces a contradiction, as hope and fear are contradictory emotions.)

So, to be as useful as possible, I’ve divided this blog into several topics, which you can skip to as you wish: career options, why it’s surprisingly good to defer making that fateful decision, choosing a graduate school, and finally how to prepare early.

Career Options
Many students come to the English major because they love reading and/or writing. And of course, this presents a problem, since we aren’t always able to earn a living doing what we love. For instance, somebody may love sleeping, drinking beer, and having sex, but careers in such activities are highly unlikely, not to mention morally suspicious. Nevertheless, we have been taught since we were children that we should love not just our leisure but also our job (and I do love mine, so sometimes it works out.)

The real problem here, though, is not whether it’s possible to love one’s work. This is a false dilemma. Rather, the real problem is that most students don’t even know what their options are. Their imagination of what’s possible is obviously limited, but what limits it? They know what teachers are because they’ve been students, and they know what writers are because they’ve read books, and they know what lawyers and doctors are because television stations feature them on their dramas and sit-coms so often. Of course, television shows feature such careers not because they are the best careers but because they conveniently lend themselves to dramatic action — i.e., the ambiguity of crime, the risk of death, etc. In short, our knowledge of what’s possible is limited by our power to access various kinds of information, and this serves to underline how ideology works in strange and even unintended ways. Not only our idea of reality but also the form in which we learn about it (the form being the television drama or sit-com or even school) often serves to actually obscure and hide reality.

In addition to the two problems of access to knowledge and the form such knowledge is presented to us, such limitations are unfortunately perpetuated by the very people entrusted to advise students: teachers, who tend to advise students from their own experience. After all, what kinds of jobs do teachers of literature know about? You guessed it! Teaching and writing. What else is there?

Of course, despite the myth that English majors are good for nothing but teaching and serving hamburgers with-or-without fries, there are many other fulfilling careers out there for people who can communicate and think critically. Communicating and thinking seem like obvious skills, but as many employers know full well, few people on the planet actually have them. For instance, both governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) need such people. Working for an NGO can be a fun and rewarding job, and one place to start looking for work is Idealist.org. But also government jobs. For instance, the State Department needs people to work in embassies all over the globe, and the main skills one needs to work for the State Department is a criminal-free past and the ability to not be a jerk. (Again, not being a jerk would hardly seem to be a skill at all, but employers will tell you otherwise. And English majors seem to be  especially skillful here, perhaps because of the effect of literature on their subjectivity . . . . Sadly, I have to admit, literature has not endowed me with the skill of jerk-less-ness, and that is just one of the reasons why I could never work for the State Department.)

And although jobs in technology or medicine may seem more lucrative, a UNESCO study once estimated that America’s second largest export is not gadgets or pharmaceuticals, but… can you guess? The entertainment industry! (By the way, if you’re wondering what the largest export is, it’s money; yes, that’s right, we export pieces of paper with our presidents’ faces printed on them. It’s called the finance sector, and China and Saudi Arabia have quite a bit of these pieces of paper in their vaults.) The entertainment industry includes movies, television shows, video games, pornography (yes, sad to say, but that’s a big slice of America’s economy), sports, music, magazines, books, etc. And of course, English majors are perfect for all of these jobs, as writers, editors, managers, administrators, producers, etc. To give you an example, a friend of mine was a painter, and one day a random guy was looking at her paintings and offered her a very lucrative job. It turns out he designed video games, and he wanted her to design the background for a new NASCAR video game . . . . Cha ching! Money.

And of course, any university’s career center will have dozens of other possibilities, and there is even a book called Jobs for English Majors. So, taking a gander at books such as that (though I advise always gandering with some skepticism) and taking advantage of the staff who work in career center are a must — the sooner you do so, the better — but keep in mind that the career center and myself are often behind the trend. For instance, in the mid-1990s, back when the internet was just becoming mainstream (and when I was just graduating from college with my seemingly useless English degree), probably the best thing an English major could have done was to learn HTML and start designing web pages. At that time, the web was new, and HTML was easy to learn, and who better to design a website than somebody who understands the creative process of representation? Many of my English major friends did just that, and are now millionaires, but no career service center would have thought in 1995 to suggest as much. What’s the moral of the story? It’s this: pay attention to what’s going on in the world. And how does one do that? Ummm…. newspapers and magazines, duh.

It’s Good to Defer
One of the myths that causes so much anxiety is the notion that one must decide one’s career. Some feel that choosing a career is not only about finding a way to pay rent and buy food but also an expression of their core being. This feeling is also an example of how ideology works on you (or, as Althusser and Foucault suggest, works on subjects), and seems to me to come from the Protestant work ethic that defines your relation to God in terms of your labor. But the fact is, people change careers often, and the real fact of it is, you never really know whether you are that person until you try it.

What troubles me is that many seem to believe that the best way to defer choosing a career is by going to graduate school. This is, however, probably the worst way to defer, because you never get to test out real career paths. I suspect the notion that more education will make you a better person and better job candidate is also ideological — derived from the liberal belief that everyone can, and should, go to college, because that’s how one achieves the American dream. But more school is not always the answer. So, my advice is to defer choosing not by avoiding the world of work, but to defer choosing by experimenting with real jobs. Thinking about going to law school? Instead, why not work as a legal assistant for a law firm or get a job at an NGO such as the AFL-CIO, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, or Greenpeace that engage with legal matters. There are thousands of these NGOs, of all shapes, sizes, and colors. The upshot here is this: only when you really know what you want to do should you actually start applying to graduate school.

Choosing a Graduate School
So, what if you want to go to graduate school to become… a real, bonafied author… or a professor? Although this is the path I chose, I often find myself counseling students to be cautious about choosing it for themselves. People seem to believe that getting a Ph.D. is a sure way to a successful life, but here again is a myth perpetuated by television and movies. I personally know a few Ph.D.’s in literature who barely make enough money to eat because there just weren’t any jobs for them out there. And since American ideology seems not to value educators as much as it used to, government spending for higher education continues to decline (when measured against inflation and cost), which forces universities to cut back on their hiring of professors, as Michael Bérubé has discussed in his book The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies.

In addition, many people don’t realize what the professional aspects of being a professor really are and the amount of scrutiny that both graduate students and professors are subject to, as Greg Semenza has written about in his recent book, Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities. Again, I think this is in part due to TV stereotypes, but I also think such stereotypes are in some cases politically motivated. When Fox television represents professors as silly fools or bizarre geniuses, then Fox “news” can more easily ignore or dismiss the expert opinions that professors have to give on such controversial topics as Iraqi culture, the environment, and the death penalty.

But, if a career as a writer or as a professor is what one really desires, then the question becomes which school?  There are many resources out there – whole books on the subject — and certainly magazines such as the U.S. News and World Reports is famous for ranking colleges and graduate programs. But even more useful than a ranking is information about what kind of program the school has, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) actually has a guide to doctoral programs, which explains what the program really has to offer in terms of financial assistance and courses. (The MLA is also a place one can get a job, by the way.)

Another blogger has done a very comprehensive study on MFA programs in creative writing, which I wholeheartedly recommend you check out. But like many guides to graduate school, he left out some important information. First, rankings are based largely upon reputation, and though reputation is important, it doesn’t tell you what kind of training you will receive there. Some of the highest ranked schools are ranked highly only because they have famous professors . . . . And guess what? Sometimes famous professors are way too busy being famous to actually teach or advise their graduate students. So, although rank always matters, and we can’t pretend it doesn’t, sometimes high-ranking programs are not very good at training graduate students and preparing them for the job market. 

In addition, sometimes location matters. Universities in big cities will give you the advantage of access to many cultural resources such as theaters, libraries, and other schools . . . not to mention airports so you can more easily go places (like home). But rural universities will give you the advantage of greater sense of community and access to your faculty, who have nothing better to do than spend time with you. It’s a toss up as to which is better, urban or rural, but really, you should go to a place where you feel you can flourish. Because if you don’t flourish where you are, then the whole graduate adventure will not take you where you want to go. In other words, while rankings are somewhat important, they aren’t the be-all-end-all.

For instance, rankings won’t tell you about the personality of a graduate program. Some MFA programs are theory-phobic, and others (such as St. Mary’s College of California) is more theory-friendly. (In St. Mary’s case, though, it is mainly a particular kind of theory–modernism – which it mentions on its website.) And some creative writing or Ph.D. departments in English have close relations to other disciplines such as gender studies, Latino/a studies, or world literature. These affiliated disciplines may not seem important initially, but all Ph.D. programs require that one person on your dissertation committee be from outside the English department. And in addition to all of that, it is also the case that most of the interesting work being done right now is interdisciplinary.

But all things considered, the most useful advice I can give is this: apply to programs that have faculty whom you know about. Of course, you’re probably wondering how the heck you could know them, but it’s easier than you think. All colleges and universities regularly invite professors and authors from other colleges. For instance, my school just had three poets visit and read their work last week, and all three of them teach at other colleges. So, when there are such literary and academic events on your campus, I suggest that you go to them. And if you like the people and like what they do, then find out where they teach… and maybe read some more of their work.

This same principle can also be applied in another way. Even if you’ve never seen or met an author, you will often read recently published books or articles in your classes and when you do research papers. If you read something that you really like, then find out where that author teaches. Quite possibly, it might be a good place to apply, and in your “application essay,” you will actually be able to tell of a real, personal connection between you and the graduate program to which you are applying. The upshot of all this is that choosing a graduate school is not something that you all 0f a suddent start to do. Your entire undergraduate experience and education, in essence, has prepared the way for that choice.

The problem is that (again, for ideological reasons), students fail to notice the context of that choice. As Karl Marx points out in his famous chapter on the commodity fetish, the value of a commodity is not simply natural. It is social and historical. So, when you are looking for a graduate school, don’t buy into the ideology of the marketplace and think you can choose a graduate school the same way that you might choose a pair of pants at Macy’s. Instead, prepare early.

Preparing Early
And this leads me to my final point: preparing early. As I mentioned, you never really know who you are or what you want to be until you start doing it. You may think you know what you are, but as Foucault points out, your subjectivity is socially constructed. And even if you don’t agree with Foucault and believe in a God-given soul that is wonderfully unique and unaffected by the world around you — an ideology that is very convenient for capitalist countries, since it allows them to ignore the socio-economic conditions in which people live — you might still agree that the eternal soul is not exactly the easiest thing to actually understand.

So, in addition to getting good grades (since, these days, few graduate schools will pay much attention to your application if you have below a 3.5 GPA), you should also do extra-curricular activities such as the school newspaper or literary society or even a basketball team. All of these things not only will help you figure out what you want to do with your life but also give you something to put on your résumé — something that will demonstrate to future employers that you are a real person. Or, alternatively, you might do volunteer work such as caring for children or tutoring immigrants in English. For summers, try to find internships in various fields so you can see what they are like and gain experience. Your career center will have all sorts of information about such opportunities. Of course, the problem is that many of these internships (such as internships at publishers or magazines) are often unpaid, and some of you may need to make money by serving burgers with-or-without fries. But if that’s the case, then find an internship that’s only ten hours a week, so you can work full time as well.

Conclusion
In this blog post, in addition to offering some concrete information about what one could do and where one can look, I’ve also tried to give you the intellectual tools for critically thinking through the ideological baggage that might get in your way. Obviously, I don’t have all the answers, and you’ll need to figure things out for yousefl.

But I suppose, all things considered, I do have a thesis, and it is this: experiment, experiment, experiment. In other words, you do not have to make one single be-all-end-all choice. You do not have to figure out who you truly are (as if this were even possible.) Rather, you learn, develop, and improve yourself through a series of experiments — trial and error. When does this experimenting start? You’re doing it already. Do it more.

Good luck!