Chapter 6: The Poetics of a Fractalized Profession: “Shhh, Teaching as Labor”

We gathered five poems about laboring in higher education. We connected these experiences promiscuously to theory and art. We sought to locate some meaning in the midst of the resultant connections, the in-between. The paper is meant to serve as a rhizome, us as authors in the process of “becoming.” Rhizomes here suggest the structures of fungal networks connecting the roots of trees in the forest. This does not mean they are like the roots—a deep sub structure enabling the construction of arborescent hierarchies (the tree). None of these fungal paths are traced, that is, the lines of flight connecting disparities/similarities follow no predetermined route. Thus, they are by definition a-territorial, in-flux, existing within/between/beyond the stratified or mapped terrain. Rhizomes allow us to make new(ish) understandings, with meaning located somewhere along the connection. We don’t close possibility with our writing (coming to a conclusion) instead, we open possibilities. We embodied a not-quite-science and not-quite-art (and thus untidy) method. Throughout, we attempted to channel the stream of sheer antic joy illuminated by Deleuze and Guattari—particularly 1987’s A Thousand Plateaus. The resultant approach then is unambiguously undisciplined as we root about for those shimmering cracks in a collapsing plateau,¹ those slashes in the crust rioting in green, shroomy and wet.