Everything Matters and Nothing Does

Living in a discursive object in contested times

I took the photograph above. I am not a good photographer and the conditions were less than propitious anyway. The point, however, was not to take a good photograph but to take a photograph that would illustrate what life is like on a college campus—my campus, for now—at a time when the media has constructed life on a college campus to be a series of crises.

If you look closely, you will note that there is a protest action happening. It is a very specific kind: a stand-up interview of protesters done by a local television news station. The reporter is in the yellow pants; she has been interviewing spokespeople for protests on this campus for a little while before this photograph.

If you were not looking for that, I doubt you would have noticed it. It is a small share of what was happening on my walk through the center of campus, not far from where more than a hundred police officers made more than a hundred arrests a night or two ago. The campus is full of students enjoying the weather (this counts as “nice” weather) and parents touring the campus with their high school-age children.

If you were to describe exactly what you saw on campus right now, then, you would say something like

1. People are going to class

2. They are talking to friends

3. They are playing video games in the campus center

4. They are having lunch

5. They are exercising

6. They are moving from place to place

7. They are working

8. They are talking with friends

9. They are representing an anti-war movement

I do not mean to minimize what is happening with the protesters. On this campus alone, there have been referenda, protests, marches, demonstrations, arrests, (allegedly) injuries, and so on. What I want to share, instead, is the unreality of living in a discursive space that others have created to describe one’s putative reality and yet which has no resemblance to that reality.

That the elite and the conservative media alike have decided to invest campus politics with a profound significance is well known. I do not know how to think about this. The protests are, in some ways, widely supported—polls suggest that younger and more liberal cohorts are more critical of Israel than older and less liberal generations. But they are also not a mass movement. I suspect that most campuses are like mine: tolerant of the protesters, sympathetic to many requests, skeptical of specific demands, and somewhat more outraged by the treatment of the protesters than strictly endorsing (all of) the protesters’ views. I would even go so far as to say that concerns about anti-semitic content are not entirely an elite fixation, even if those concerns are somewhat less prominent for most students than many members of congressional committees. Those concerns do exist; they are voiced; and they lead to notably nuanced conversations. But most students are not protesting nor even thinking about the protests most of the time, and most faculty are not encouraging the protests even if I would wager that a number of them are disappointed or even angry at how specific protests have been addressed by specific administrators.

The elements that lead protests to be truly explosive—like, say, the draft—are not present. That the protests seem to inevitably draw in a long list of demands and ideologies that limit their appeal is another restraining influence. But awareness of the war in Gaza is high, perhaps higher than any foreign policy issue since the Muslim ban, and concerns that impartiality is being weaponized to insulate a government unpopular in its own country are not too hard to find. Yet awareness of October 7 is also widespread and tempers many reactions as well.

In other words, what is depicted as stark and chaotic is mostly nuanced and contradictory.

That is not surprising. What is surprising, to me at least, is how this complex and contradictory mess of opinions has produced such a severe reaction as a general development. It is jarring to see snipers deployed to campuses. It is jarring to face constant insinuations that one’s entire profession is radicalizing people. It is jarring to be constantly reading articles and Takes that suggest that the confusing and mostly messy situations on campuses represents an immediate threat that should be dealt with by the use of armed agents of the state.

The scale of the reaction seems to bear out that there is something happening here, but what it is really isn’t exactly clear. Even if in particular instances we can argue whether certain measures were necessary or not, the overall scale of the discourse—the emotional fervor being poured into it—seems disproportionate to the cause of the discourse. The stakes really do not seem that high, in the strict sense that it does not seem like the resolution of any campus debate, separate from other changes and discussions in the world, will change any policymaker’s view—or if they do that they will modestly harden them. It is not, after all, like the debates about any government’s role in these actions began only with protesters calling attention to actions that have been more widely covered than any other events in the world for the past several months.

The photograph illustrates this point well. The story that will air tonight about my campus will be one about disruptions and debates tearing a campus apart. The everyday experience of being on campus for me, and I suspect for many of my students and colleagues, is one of routine mixed with varying levels of anxiety, annoyance, confusion, and sadness. I suppose this is what it must feel like to be an extra in a movie or an NPC in a video game—this sense that somehow everything matters but that nothing I, specifically, am experiencing matters at all.