Samuel Rosenblum is the editor of the Amherst College Disorientation Guide 2015-2016.
Last semester, inspired by disorientation guides assembled by activists at colleges and universities across the country, several students at Amherst began work on our own. The premise of our disorientation guide was that orientation directs students toward particular questions (with particular answers), and away from other questions (and other answers). This direction takes on the form of a mandatory leap over a boundary which it itself constructs, between our pre-Amherst and college lives. In so doing, orientation demands that students uncritically assimilate to Amherst’s legal, political and social norms, without sufficiently working through the disorienting struggles and confusing emotions which students entering, living at and graduating from the college face.
Concerned about the very (best) practice of orientation, perhaps articulated by its claim to finality, toward cutting off discussion of sensitive and personal questions prior to the beginning of “disinterested” and “rational” study, many other students and I realized that we needed a mechanism to rupture orientation, to refuse to be oriented, in a word, to be disoriented.
As Jeffrey Feldman ’15 writes, orientation is “an assimilative process … that attempts to foreclose questions by limiting the time during which it’s acceptable to raise them and the way such questions are dealt with.” If orientation is unified in closing in upon its objectives and goals, disorientation is unified by its lack of purpose, its varied perspectives and its occasionally divergent views. Precisely because the essays are a diverse amalgam of styles and tones and (occasionally) take on contradictory politics, the guide collectively opens and frees its reader from the rules and regulations which orientation prescribes. Even our list of faculty and staff warns the reader that the criteria students used to add names may have contradicted other criteria. However, the list offers a collective voice from the organizers, a group of students who have chosen to be part of this project seeking to stand with each others’ choices for which faculty to recommend not in spite of, but because of, their differences, perhaps an attempt at political solidarity.
Of course, the contradictions and differences in the guide present a critical point: the guide is limited, in what it claims to do. Consider what remains unsaid in the guide: topics such as heteronormativity, ableism and Zionism; perspectives from blue-collar and white-collar staff. The former are modes of oppression hegemonic to academia and Amherst. The latter are points of view from community members whose work is invaluable but unrecognized, necessary for the functioning, perhaps existence, of the physical group of facilities, processes and resources known as Amherst and deserving of more respect than many will grant them. (You might say that these staff separate Amherst College from a MOOC.)
To be clear, I did not deliberately exclude all of those aforementioned themes and perspectives. On the contrary, I solicited numerous essays from many students and staff which never materialized. For many, overworked and burdened with classes, internships and jobs, the most radical and intimate form of activism which they could take for themselves and the rest of us was self-care, saying no, deciding against working on this project. For others, reflecting publicly on certain topics could have had profound repercussions on their own academic and professional lives. I do not write this to blame those who chose not to write. Nor do I articulate this to lament what has been left unsaid. Rather, I note this to explain how, because of contemporary labor and political conditions, certain topics have been silenced, to remind us of the temporal and emotional labor and personal risk involved in writing, and to empathetically show my gratitude.
This critique names a symptom and an invitation present in much activist work: the impossibility of achieving full inclusivity. In other words, we fail to speak on every struggle at every occasion, even during those instances when conditions are ripe and resources plentiful. In the inability to achieve what it desires, the disorientation guide invites other students to make their own claims on questions, practices, ideas, and ways of living important to them. Thus, I write this pragmatically to my fellow students as an invitation to work and act collectively.
Why “collectively”? At the risk of self-congratulation, I also ask us to consider the sometimes menial, technical and time-intensive labor it takes to create 800 copies of a 9.02-inch by 6.2-inch, stapled, printed, material pamphlet, plus a website on Wordpress. (Although I by no means did this alone, I would claim that I was the decisive laborer, alongside numerous necessary laborers, to whom I am grateful.) Engaging in activism which disrupts and re-acts requires forms of work which, in the fantastical world of small, liberal arts colleges, many think are below us, less than us (and our great, brilliant minds!). Writing (on a screen) and editing (at the click of a Google Docs invitation) — in other words, producing beautiful text — are acts we should value, but not by forgetting to acknowledge the other labors involved in assembling a pamphlet: designing a cover, laying out the articles, navigating AAS budgetary procedures, sending invitations and requests to writers, spending time in meetings and Skype conversations, exploring Wordpress design themes, etc. These take time and energy from our own intellectual pursuits, from what Professor Thomas Dumm names the “riot in your mind,” of that “peculiar and rare freedom that is afforded to ... students.”
But again, let us not see the dull workload required to achieve material results — whether they be pamphlets, zines, constitutional amendments, protests, social clubs — as cause for cynicism or despair, as a justification to reject critique, criticism and activism, to be scared of labor. No, perhaps to belabor the point is precisely what we must do, so as to realize the full potential of collective action and solidarity, as a mechanism to organically spread that “lesser” labor vertically beyond the ceiling of the working-class and into the “elite” bourgeoisie of Amherst activists and horizontally throughout the community.
