Expect Delays: Procrastination and the Graduate Student

My experience of graduate school began, in a sense, with an act of procrastination. Back when I was an undergraduate, I simultaneously moonlighted as a professional dishwasher, and, as I attempted to juggle this (what seemed to me) hard labour with my first year of study and its attendant classes, assignments, and social obligations, I began to form an image of university life as delightfully Utopian—an image that seemed particularly resonant on those nights when I had to wallow elbow deep in dirty suds for twelve hours at a time. I remember quite vividly one particularly rough night at work, harried by demanding waiters and buried beneath piles of dirty dishes, someone asking me “What I wanted to do with my life.” My answer came as if premeditated, even though I can’t recall ever having formulated it before: I wanted to get a phd in English and become a professor. Simply put, I think, I desperately wanted to delay, for as long as humanly possible, the necessity of working a job I didn’t like.

Of course, from the ostensibly more “enlightened” vantage point afforded by a rudimentary education in critical theory, I now recognize this perspective as a rather naïve valorization of the “life of the mind,” an idealist view premised on a misrecognition of the complex material and ideological entanglement of intellectual and bodily forms of labour in a late capitalist economy. At the same time, though, I would argue that graduate work nonetheless maintains a close (if vexed) connection with the originary procrastinatory urge I detect in this late-teenaged romanticization of academe. As philosopher Mark Kingwell has astutely noted, “[G]raduate school in the humanities is an especially acute site of procrastination,” fertile—or perhaps toxic—ground for the latter’s “intricate mixture of self-justification and self-loathing,” its “self-defeating spirals of defensible deferral” (364). The prime mover in this anxious universe is, as Kingwell observes, the doctoral dissertation: a large and difficult project “with an unspecific deadline, which is to say no deadline at all,” and which, as a result, “feels at once pressing and pointless” (368). On the one hand, “there is too much to do, the important task ... too big to tackle” (Kingwell 365): the dissertation—particularly in the halting middle stages in which I currently find myself—simply seems too Sisyphean a task to complete. There is no way for you to sit down and, as in the famous advertising slogan, “Just do it,” and the intermittent realization of this apparent fact tends to make any work seem rather pointless or futile, thus heightening the attraction of other more pleasant or practicable diversions. On the other hand, and somewhat paradoxically, the relatively elastic time frame in which the project is to be completed—say two to four years for the dissertation itself—means that for a large part of the process nothing necessarily feels all that pressing, and thus everything becomes relatively easy to put off for one more day. Graduate school—and, more particularly, the dissertation-writing process—thus might be said to consist in a continual oscillation between a nearly existential despair (I’ll never finish anyway, so what’s the use) and a flippant nonchalance (It’ll get done; may as well go have a beer), a kind of procrastinatory dialectic whose synthesis is, all too often, “stasis” (Kingwell 365). Complicating matters is the fact that successful graduate work is to a large extent reliant on self-motivation and self-surveillance, meaning that there are few “external constraints” (Kingwell 369) in place to keep the errant procrastinator on the straight and narrow, except, perhaps, in the form of various “secondary” tasks endemic to graduate school, whose “primary” goal is ostensibly the completion of a thesis. These tasks—I’m thinking of, say, teaching or “ta-ing,” committee work, attending conferences, and polishing work for possible publication—tend at once to appear more pressing (since they involve the expectations of others) and slightly more straightforward to accomplish, thus encouraging the “deferral of action” that Richard Beardsworth locates at the etymological root of...