Resistance is Utile

In this, my first year of a full-time job, I rarely find myself concerned about the extent to which I might or might not be procrastinating. Instead, I think a whole lot more about how much I might be able to increase my potential productivity to make better use of the limited time available. On the one hand, this might sound annoying, and perhaps it can even be taken as a symptom of my subsumption into the current conservative political climate of this country. On the other hand, I bet many of you often think like this out of a genuine sense of love and duty toward the job. You find yourself staring at the computer, wondering: Can I, in the next three hours, get a substantial, pedagogically innovative, and “fun” lecture prepared, finish that overdue review, and co-ordinate a research trip? Can I think about the first while writing the second and searching the web for the third? I think like this and I don’t even have kids, which is probably a good thing, since I’m saving up to buy my dog a treadmill.

My sense is that we know what procrastination is ... we hardly need to consult the oed to recite its meaning and usage—that since its first known recorded appearance in 1548, the term refers to the act of cleaning grout between the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush instead of writing wondrous works of literary and cultural criticism. And we know, we know all too shamefully well, what it means to wish with all our hearts that we had not procrastinated. But at the same time, we do not have any clear sense of what this activity of “not procrastinating” entails. We may sit upright, bright-eyed, caffeinated, and vitamined at our computers typing vigorously away. But sometimes even this is procrastinating in the sense that what we really should be doing is thinking more about what we are writing, prompting our consciousness to resist those paths-of-thought too commonly traveled, and allowing the ideas to coalesce and morph and ultimately soar to the upper echelons of analysis. Or, we should be marking Intro to Canlit exams.

What I wonder about is this: When are we distracting ourselves from our work, and when do these distractions in fact lead to the best work we’ve done in a while? What is the poise, the intellectual commitment, the state of mind/body fusion that leads to scholarly utility? What, after all, constitutes the academic procrastinator’s number one, always desired, and often begrudged, fantasy figure—the “utile” scholar-in-action?

I once took a research trip to the New York Historical Society where I read the diary of the nineteenth-century American architect A.J. Bloor.¹ Bloor never procrastinated. Every day in his diary begins with the entry “7:15 am: went to buildings.” Sometimes it was “7:10 am,” and sometimes “7:45.” But it was always before eight, and always the activity and the words he used to describe it remain the same, he “went to buildings.” He even spelled buildings “b-l-d-g-s.” Far be it for a man of stature such as Bloor to put off the next consonant by including vowels in his words. He went to bldgs. It seems that anything more would have been procrastination.

So, can Bloor then be taken as a good example of the “utile” professional? “Utile,” says the oed, means “useful, profitable, advantageous.” Now, in our profession, resisting procrastination probably isn’t going to end up making us a tidy profit. Perhaps then we need to adapt the definition to our particular case: the utile academic would seem to be someone whose faculties—the sensory-motor system, grey matter, desires, blood-flow, body heat, snacks, and memory—are all co-ordinated to participate wholly and to the highest standards of efficiency in the effort of doing academic work ... of academicking. Hence the cocktail of caffeine, vitamins, yoga, and poutine to which we diligently subject ourselves. But no matter how well we keep to our academic-fitness regime in the...