This Pain in My Neck

The Drive, Part 1

In a hurried yet practiced fashion I race out of the driveway and onto McLaughlin Drive. I have a long commute ahead.

We have always purposefully sought dwellings in the city; some sort of spatial commitment to social welfare domesticity, we reckon. Or maybe we just liked having neighbors. Not here in Tallahassee. Not our new life. We’d had enough of Keynes (or at least Key’s ³ distorted version we came to know in Aotearoa).

Plus, our realtor made it clear that we had to be in the “good” (read: white) school district. After all, it’s my son’s future at stake now. We needed to do the “responsible” thing, buy a four-bedroom, lakeside house, with an acre of land. Plus, the previous owner—a famous military General—did such a good job keeping the house up. And sure it was more than we could afford, but it’s clean, and safe . . . and clean.

I veer onto our clean street, with its clean-coifed lawns and clean-spired dwellings.

And I do so with purpose.

On this day as most others, I don’t have a meeting to attend or any other pressing appointment on campus. Just writing. Just work. Nonetheless, when I drive to school, I like to go fast.

I recently bought a fast car—faster than my previous cars. It’s a “tight” little BMW coupe—or at least the man who sold it to me described it as “tight.” It’s a 328i, although I’m not really sure what the 328 means, or why there’s an “i” after it, or what that “i” means. It’s white, because I don’t want to stand out. The gas mileage isn’t great, and it is much smaller than what would be practical. And it suits my new lifestyle; fits in with the neighborhood.

So in my BMW 328i, I resist.

I go fast.

I weave.

I press.

When I am behind the wheel of my new car, my BMW, the tension shared by auto-driver and machine is tangible.

I need something else,

something . . . more.

Of course, music.

Endgame. (The new album from the Chicago-based “postpunk” band Rise Against.)

How could I forget what was waiting for me! There it was, with all the bravura conjured by its digitally-dystopic, American-apocalyptic album artwork. But it’s not the album art that stirs my veins, rather the sonic rage I am about to endure.

Endgame had been there, waiting patiently as I slept; waiting since I silenced its rage upon completion of my evening commute just the night before. I immediately feel guilty for not rewarding its loyalty with the touch of a white triangle upon commencement of my travels.

I was hesitant to buy Endgame—just as I was hesitant to buy any of the band’s previous albums. I’m a bit of a punk traditionalist. For years it was the Clash, Gang of Four, and nothing else. Yet, when I did decide to plunge headlong into the dreamworld of iTunes consumerism just two days prior, on a Tuesday I believe, I found in Endgame the right mix of critical affirmation and sampled 30-second vitriol to commit.

But there and then, two days and four listen-throughs since its purchase, I knew I had made a most prudent decision.

I again touch the iPod screen; my pace—both on the road and in my veins—quickens.

In that moment—faced with the prospect of commanding a fast car, and hard rock—and thus capable of conjoining the aesthetics, temporalities, and cultural politics of my very Self-being—things speed up.

It is an actualization of sound, speed, and the subjectivity.

And just as he had done in the two days prior, Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath does his part.

Unlike other so-called “punk” bands of the generation, and particularly those who have made into mainstream radio, this band is explicit in their political disquiet—and for that, I am grateful.

As I rip down the once-rural Centerville Road, the lead singer and his bandmates remind me, through bombastic prose and with electric guitar ferocity, all the things I hate about the national body politic within which I am once again entangled:

Poverty.

Inequality.

War.

The Koch Brothers.

Scott Walker.

Boehner.

Bain.

Bigotry.

Corporate Christ.

Bush.

The “free” market.

I buzz down the canopied asphalt lane as fast as the speed of the sounds coming from my BMW’s Bose speakers. A typically magnificent cloud formation over the Gulf reveals itself as I emerge from Centerville’s arboreal awning. I drive headlong toward it, partly as visceral response, partly due to the southerly direction of my commute.

With rubber ripping through road, McIlrath reminds me of those most grotesque of media spectacles I witnessed over the past decade; such as when those same cumulonimbus formations I see in the distance conspired to give rise to George W. Bush’s creolized experiment in new disaster capitalism. ⁴

I sing along, vociferously hurtling through the real and imaginary spaces of a predominantly White U.S. South that George Bush and I grew up in, that we have each recently returned to, and that I have increasingly come to abhor. I am reminded of my youth, of the hatred spawned in school halls and church pulpits; hatred of the other, of the queer, of those who are different. My thoughts syncopate with the aural indignation that fills my BMW.

McIlrath roars, denouncing religious fundamentalism and the tortured life it has created for many adolescent youths suffering from bullying, “gay bashing,” and other hate crimes.

Suddenly, this trip has become bigger than A-to-B motility, bigger than my German-engineered confidant and me.

This is war.

I drive hard for the displaced people of New Orleans, whose government failed them and continues to fail them six years after Katrina.

I drive fast for those school kids who have been bullied and harassed.

I drive for those sweatshop workers who continue to stitch the fabric of our failing empire.

McIlrath continues to provide the soundtrack for my rage: “A dangerous trick/Played on me and you/And so like a practical joke/We pulled on these bootstraps/So hard that they broke”

I’m overcome. The response I’m having to speed and sound is primal.

I accelerate down Midtown backstreets; and my auto-ferocity pays off! The Tennessee Street light is just turning yellow as I approach, which of course gives me full license to “gas it” and blast through the intersection as the light turns red.

Other than the postintersection, extralane occupancy of a bumper-stickered Chevy Tahoe behemoth—with its hideous wheel protrusions, Confederate insignias, and 8-cylinder patriarchal warble—I have no more distractions. Back to the postpunk fury that fills my veins and my BMW.

A couple of sharply taken right turns and I arrive at the Florida State University campus.

My head is filled with the lyrics to EndGame’s initial song, “Architects.”

I generally tend to like first songs. ⁵ I like this one in particular because McIlrath neatly captures the “30-something” malaise I’ve been recently wrestling with; decrying the apathy, if not conformity that comes with maturation, with growing into the system.

I recite the song’s disquieting words, reflecting on the architectures of obedience that insulate my everyday life as I open the back door of my car, reach over my son’s car seat and retrieve my backpack that had shifted during my tumultuous inbound commute.

As I lift my bag I am once again reminded of this pain in my neck.

It’s right about then that I arrive at my first medical diagnosis of the day: This intense, hypersensory routine that is my daily commute must be contributing to the stiffness in my neck.

This makes sense. My body is suffering from a physiological reaction to Endgame and the political anxieties it conjures up in me.

I gather a sense of calm and comfort upon making this realization; calmed by the fact that the ride is over and comforted by the realization that I have made it to school, to the confines of Tully Gymnasium, the home base of our Sport Management Department—a safe haven of sorts from the combustive machinations of my commute.

Interlude

The Comforts of McLaughlin Drive

Blow up Kreuzberg

Swallow Mississippi

Father is so proud . . .

The eternal returns of enlightenment

The spoils of adolescent rage

What are we seeking emancipation from?

Whose lives do our crooked pedagogies make better?

Go out for a curry

Look after your own

Mom always knew you’d make something of  yourself . . .

The investment bank of entrepreneurial humanism

The betrayal of those that live about which we sermonize

How do you do your Robeson-inspired touchdown shimmy?

And where does your hypocrisy end?

Sell counterfeit revolution

Wrap myself in bourgeois skin

They all love to see my wedding dance . . .

The god of my own godlessness

The concubine of this space I’m in

Is this the suffering of fulfillment or the bullet in Debord’s pistol?

Would I equally embrace any other necessarily false duality?

The Drive, Part 2

I unlock my office door, put down my backpack, open my laptop to login to the “network,” and begin my day’s labors.

Not too long after I access my email, Kevin stops by my office. He does this on most days, and I like it.

I haven’t known Kevin for that long, but he and his friend Landry have been incredibly welcoming since I arrived at Florida State University. Kevin, Landry, and I share similar political views, similar life experiences, and similar sporting interests.

The latter is the topic of discussion today. Kevin proposes we go out for a round of golf later in the day; maybe try out the country club near my house with Dr. Craft and Dr. Reese—(two very fine golfers).

I like golf, I like the members of my potential foursome, and I don’t have much pressing work to do this Thursday. Plus, I’ve wanted to try out the course at our proposed venue—the exclusive Shamrock Country Club—as I am thinking of joining as a member. And the only way to get on the course is to be a guest of a sponsoring member, in this case Dr. Craft.

“I’m in!”

I jump to my feet as Kevin leaves, primarily to wish him good tidings until we meet later at the course; and secondarily so that I might get in a few practice swings with the invisible clubs I just pulled out of my caddie bag of anticipation.

As Kevin disappears down the hall, I move into the least congested part of my nearly empty office. Time to loosen up, to work out a few kinks in my swing. Imagining I am on the first tee of the North Course at Shamrock Country Club—a place I’ve seen only from a distance while driving by in my BMW 328i—I pull my hands back and up, imaginary tungsten and titanium-optimized Ping V2 Rapture driver in hand.

Those who know me well know I am obsessed with the biomechanics of the golf swing, and of my swing in particular.

But those who know me really well know why. I didn’t grow up playing golf. In fact, I didn’t step onto a golf course until my senior year in high school.

You see, I grew up outside of the proverbial Country Club fence. ⁶

Where I’m from, as is the case most places, poor folks don’t golf. For me, as I’m sure is the case for many others, I didn’t choose not to play golf. Rather, golf didn’t choose me.

I didn’t even know the golfing hyperreal. We didn’t have a television for much of my childhood, and when we did we certainly couldn’t afford cable or satellite and access to the media-sport universe it gatewayed. For me, names like Palmer, Nicklaus, and Watson were just that: names.

Golf wasn’t really on the extracurricular radar at my schools. Looking back, I assume that school administrators there were more focused on trying to educate the youth of a county with a staggering 29.1% child poverty rate (higher than the national average), whose parents earned a median income that was more than 50% lower that the national average, and who came from families that were twice as likely to be living in poverty as other Americans.

By-and-large, the folks I grew up with only knew golf in the same ways they knew other luxuries of the leisure class: as minimum wage earning servants who—like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—took the long road into Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, or Sevierville ⁷ seeking work, a sustainable wage, and ultimately a better life; but instead found low wages, no health care benefits, and little upward mobility. We knew golf the same way we knew filet mignon, Air Jordans, or Guess jeans—through fleeting encounters with the Southeast’s touring class.

I knew golf as something beyond my reach; I knew the exclusive Bent Creek Country Club, a private course in my mountain hometown, as something out of my reach; a place people like me dare not enter; a place I longingly surveyed as my brother and I were shuttled back and forth on our family’s nightly wage-seeking journey into Gatlinburg. Bent Creek was as much imaginary as real; at once a source of great desire and distain during my youth—a reproductive site of a social class privileges I longed for but would never realize.

When I did start golfing, around the age of 17, I purposefully stayed away from Bent Creek. If the $50 per round fee wasn’t a primary deterrent, I’m sure the Self-mythologized exclusivity of the place was. I used what little disposable income I was able to secure washing dishes at the same restaurant that employed my mother to play at cheap courses, courses with brown grass and overlapping fairways littered with beer cans. I would drive nearly 90 minutes to play at a place called White Pine Golf Course, or even farther to a place called Lambert Acres—both of which seemed tolerant of my golfing habitus. These were the places working folks played at, with or without a shirt, and I loved them.

And I loved hitting a golf ball.

I rarely hit it well, but when I did, the ball went far. I still remember making my first eagle (two under par) on a par five at Lambert Acres. It was a mid-July afternoon in 1995 and I was playing with DJ. I hit a nice fading drive down the right side of the fairway, hit a three-wood up the right side about pin-high, just off the green, and chipped in for a three. I remember thrusting my pitching wedge skyward, releasing a cathartic “whoo!” and running to the cup to retrieve my hail-sized, jouissance-inducing jewel.

“Yeah!” DJ genuinely roared. “Eagle!”

DJ was genuine, and he was from where I was from. And being a few years ahead of me, he had been to college; had listened to college alternative bands like REM and the Psychedelic Furs. He was a perfect friend for that summer, the summer before I left Cosby for the University of Memphis. The summer before I left for good.

From that point forward I was hooked. Hooked on golf. Hooked on the Furs.

Since those early days, I’ve played hundreds of rounds of golf. I’ve played in Scotland, on Caribbean islands, on “dog tracks” (courses which aren’t well maintained, usually a derogatory comment which also implicates the course’s clientele), and exclusive resorts.

On occasion, I’ve played quite well—and more than once scored in the low-70s (“par” is usually 72 strokes for 18 holes). However, I usually play to a handicap of 10-12 strokes (meaning I usually score in the mid-80s).

My performance on the golf course, and the somewhat related score I produce, usually has everything to do with my swing—the swing I was practicing in my office.

I obsess over my swing; the motion, the aesthetics, the corporeality of it.

Whether I am playing well or playing poorly, scoring high or low, I hate my swing. I’ve always hated my “homemade swing.” ⁸

Each time I pull the club back behind my right ear, I am reminded of the inadequacies of my homemade swing. Playing partners have for years pointed out that my backswing is too long and that I should not “coil up” so much.

They don’t have to convince me. I know they are right. My protracted backswing creates an erratic launch angle, one that leads to inconsistent flight trajectory and ultimately unpredictable shot results.

And these are only the biomechanical issues with my swing.

Perhaps more significantly, I am embarrassed by the kinaesthetic qualities of my swing.

I know I am being read when I swing.

I usually play poorly on the first few holes, and especially when I am playing with a new group for the first time, largely because I know they are watching me, judging my swing, perhaps connecting my swing to my working class Appalachian past.

Such is the burden of a discourse and practiced embodied habitus, or what Pierre Bourdieu (1978, 1984) referred to as a “sporting hexis.” In some ways, one might argue that my golfing Self could be seen an example of social class hysteresis, ⁹ whereby bodily movement is bound to the architectures of social class—structures that have been determining my habitus since the day I was born—made to be out-of-place by the very subject position I’ve negotiated. In other words, and following the Bourdieu (1984) of Distinction, when I am on the golf course, I suffer from Self-perceived disjunctures of my own working-class Appalachian habitus and the social and corporeal field in which I am at play.

Class governmentality in its purest, most corporeal form, one might argue.

Maybe others see me as an interloper, maybe they don’t. When I swing, their perception of by belonging matters far less than my perception of their perception; always daunted by an incessant social class gaze that elicits a near schizophrenic range of governmentalities within this golfing subject.

So there, on that Thursday in my office, I practiced my swing, for fear of being found out; to hide my habitus; mentally reciting a cacophony of YouTube instructional videos, recent lessons I’d had from golf instructors, and past Self-remonstrations:

Cock my wrist.

Lock the left elbow.

Stay on plane.

Bend your left knee.

Not too fast, rhythm is key.

Short backswing, not too far . . .

  Oh! My neck!

Suddenly, Tim McIlrath’s antagonistic crooning starts pounding in my head. I flash back to my commute, to my BMW, to disenfranchised people of New Orleans, to Tyler Clementi. ¹⁰

Perhaps it would be best if I sit back down, get back to work, and save my energy for the golf course, I think.

*********

Later in the day I arrive at the gates of Shamrock Country Club. I come to two early conclusions as I drive through the mossy oak-lined entrance to Shamrock Country Club: (1) this club’s sustenance, much like our neighborhood, relies almost solely on old money; and relatedly, (2) this country club has very few active members. The parking lot, much like the surrounding green space, is effectively uninhabited.

To my relief, the new BMW 328i fits in with the few cars in the parking lot. Yet in spite my Beamer-belonging, I am nervous.

Very nervous.

A young man approaches as I get out of my car. “Can I help you with your clubs today, sir?” he asks.

“Sir,” I grumble in my head.

“Sure, thanks” I respond, whilst simultaneously launching into a deeper interrogation in my mind:

“Should you tip?”

“They do in Caddyshack”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, do I even have any cash?”

“Anne always tells me to keep cash on hand”

“How does she know?”

“She always knows”

“Well, I don’t think I have cash, so he’s out of luck”

“Have a great round sir, the Pro Shop is just up there and to the right,” he says with a smile.

“Thanks,” I reply, ending what I assume is a disappointingly cashless transaction.

What did he mean by “the Pro Shop is just up there”?

He must know this is my first time here.

Does he think I don’t know how to get to a Pro Shop?

Does he think I don’t even know what a Pro Shop is?

Does he think I don’t belong?

Kevin arrives just after I do, and goes through the same routine (but I assume without the internal dialogue) as I put my golf spikes on.

Damn, these shoes are dirty. I should have wiped them down before I left the house this morning.

What if they don’t let me in the Pro Shop?

His bags are loaded on to the cart and we both hop in.

“Did you tip,” I ask with some urgency.

“No,” he replies.

Calamity of hysteresis averted.

We walk into the Pro Shop to find our colleagues already there. Dr. Craft is signing a form that will allow us access to the course, and Dr. Reese is paying her greens fees.

I find both my colleagues to be incredibly comforting and kind, qualities I am more than grateful for at this moment.

I park my car just as my playing partner Kevin arrives. We walk into the Pro Shop to find the rest of our group already there. Dr. Craft is signing a form that will allow us access to the course, and Dr. Reese is paying her greens fees.

I approach the person behind the desk, who I assume to be the Golf Professional of the Club. (I assume as much mainly because he has the physique of an active golfer, because he is white, and because he is wearing a Shamrock-logoed polo shirt). I don’t smile at him, nor does he smile at me.

I don’t smile much, and especially around people I’ve just met, and especially not in these situations. I don’t like my crooked yellow mountain teeth, and I certainly don’t want the Golf Pro at the elite Shamrock Country Club to see them.

“US$40, sign in here,” he sullenly mumbles.

I panic slightly.

Does he know I don’t belong here?

Why did he mumble?

Should I have worn a different shirt?

I bought this one at Kohl’s and it already has a snag.

He sees the snag.

He knows.

Does he think I’m passing, trying to hide something?

Am I?

When did he start playing golf?

Was he a member of an exclusive club as a child?

Was he born here, in the confines of the clubhouse at Shamrock?

I thought he’d like my Milwaukee Brewers cap.

But is Milwaukee too working-class for him?

Is a sport-logoed cap too working-class?

I quietly pay my fees and quickly go outside.

Kevin soon joins me at the golf cart and drives us over to the first tee box.

My veins fill with excitement as I think about the round to come.

Immediately upon arriving at our destination, however, my balata-bliss turns to smothering performance anxiety.

My swing! Not only my shitty working class swing, but by damn neck as well.

Dr. Craft, Dr. Reese, and Kevin are about to find me out. They’ll know who I really am, and my existence here, in this place, will unravel like the tangled web I’ve woven to get here.

We step to the tee, under the assumption that Kevin and I would be teeing off here, as the “women’s tee” is 50 yards or so up ahead. Kevin inserts his Titleist-capped tee into the flat, lush grass; I’m glad he’s going first, I’ll have more time to relax. Plus I can take a few more practice swings, get my club on plane, and maybe loosen up this sore neck a little.

I’m always terribly nervous for my first tee shot of the round, especially when I’m playing with folks who haven’t seen me play.

Kevin hits his tee shot far, but off to the right. I’m happy about this—not because I wish for Kevin to have a poor round or a bad score, I honestly don’t. But he’s set the bar somewhat low, taken the pressure off me. Now I can take a longer backswing, open my hips a little earlier than I should (like I like to do), and if my ball goes right as well it won’t seem that out of place.

I won’t seem that out of place.

And yet, I also know—just as Kevin, Dr. Craft and Dr. Reese will soon know—that Kevin’s “slice” (as golfers tend to call a ball flight that tails to the right) is not a “homemade” slice like mine.

If you’ve been around golf long enough, you know that well-coached golfers tend to “draw” the ball. When a golfer first starts playing, they always slice the ball. This comes from the lack of synchronization between the arms (as they swing down toward the ball), the left hip, and the head. Most golf professionals and teachers, at least those on YouTube, tell us that this is a result of the player being too anxious to hit the ball far or to see the outcome of her shot.

Unlike a baseball swing, the golf swing is all about restraint. Like most things bourgeois, golf is seen to be a sport that emphasizes Self-control and temperance–unlike the “vile” aggressions of football or basketball.

I put my ball down, take two more practice swings, breathe deep, and pull my Ping driver back behind my head.

Crack!

The ball is struck firmly . . .

but then starts to drift. . . .

and drift . . .

It drifts right. Far right.

I slice it, and not in an “aberrational” sort-of-way.

The ball slices over the trees that frame the right side of the first fairway. It slices into a part of the course that well-tempered golfers would never travel.

“We should be able to find it,” one of my fellow golfers says in an attempt to comfort me.

“Find” . . . I’ve been found out!

In two short seconds, my swing tells a life’s story. Kevin, Dr. Craft, and Dr. Reese now know it all. They know how I became a class-posing imposter with a hack swing.

They’ll now know that I quit baseball in 3rd grade because the coach told us not to come back to practice unless we had proper baseball pants and stirrups; and rather than ask my struggling parents to buy me these things I simply feigned disinterest.

They’ll now know about that 8th grade basketball season, when I blew out my shoes during the first practice and had to ask my friend—the one whose mom worked at Bent Creek Golf Village and Resort—if I could use his shoes from the prior season. (And they’ll know my feet were at least two sizes smaller than his.)

And they’ll now know how during that same basketball season I injured my back during warm-ups before a Christmas-time game against Newport Grammar (the county’s only private school); and how I never cracked the starting line-up again (in that sport or any other). Because they’ll know that I had spent the entire afternoon before the game carrying and splitting firewood, in the freezing cold, so we could return from the game to a warm home. (Which means they’ll now know that burning firewood was the only option for heating our unfinished mountainside cabin.)

My thoughts race and I lose track of what transpires during my playing partners’ shots.

I am now standing over my ball, which we located near the out-of-bounds stakes on the far north side of the course. About 150-yards to the green. I need to hoist the ball up over those tall trees that line the fairway.

I remove the 8 iron from my University of Memphis-imprinted golf bag; time for redemption.

The muscles in my neck tighten. My face grows stern. No practice swings this time. I don’t care how far back I bring the club, I’m just going to crush the ball.

I do.

The ball flies high, very high, and straight; directly toward the green.

From the fairway, where Dr. Craft and Dr. Reese had each accurately driven the ball and were awaiting my rescue, I hear “Great shot!” and “Great recovery!”

Kevin confirms: “Nice.”

The pain in my neck suddenly disappears.

My round is now underway. My skills and my belonging somewhat validated (if only for a short while), I settle in for four more hours of performance in contrived ludic sporting expression and class ascendency.

The stress is gone—at least until I get back to my BMW.

Living Conscientization

So why am I sharing these two loosely interrelated stories? A bit of Self-indulgence mixed with Self-persecution? Probably. In some ways, I am hoping that as you read these words, you will grow to dislike me—or at least become unsettled by these contradictions of politics and praxis. I want you to hold great distain for the incongruous discrepancies of my Country Club aspirations, BMW-automobility, and angst-filled working-class movements.

Because here’s the thing: when I sit down and think about these contradictions, to really reflect upon my golfing performativity, I hate my Self.

I should be better. I should know better. I do know better.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I can certainly remember what was happening. Like Neo in the Matrix, I had, by choice or by habitus, taken the red pill. As I read contemporary social critics like Zinn, Chomsky, Giroux, Gilroy, Butler, Harvey, Haraway, hooks, Kincheloe, McLaren, Roy, Goldberg, West, Denzin, Giroux and their predecessors—namely Baudrillard, Foucault, de Certeau, Derrida, Hall, Williams, Debord, De Beauvoir, and Freire—I worked toward galvanizing what I came to believe was a sophisticated set of political sensibilities—an episteme that I could use to deconstruct the social world and my place in it.

The work of Giroux, McLaren, Steinberg, Kincheloe, and particularly Freire, were particularly instructive in illustrating the need to create a “critical consciousness” of the formations acting on behalf, and against, my intersubjective Self-interests.

And so I sought to refine my critical understanding of the world, with the idea that a better understanding of context, of base and superstructure, and of the articulations that bind us all to these broader systemic formations, I could through my teaching and activism take action against the oppressive elements in my life and the lives of others.

In my research and teaching, I sought to use my own body as a performative and political weapon, locating it in those social spaces I thought were most exclusionary or oppressive.

In particular, I sought out spaces of white privilege. Spaces where the body, by its very existence within those spaces, was subjugated to broader regimes of racism, patriarchy, and exploitation. ¹¹ For me, and following Denzin and Giardina (2010), critical inquiry was “not just about ‘method’ or ‘technique,’” but was also an inherently political project that worked toward “making the world visible in ways that implement the goals of social justice and radical, progressive democracy” (p. 14, emphasis in original). ¹²

Though my research and teaching, my goal was, and still is, to foster an engaged cultural citizenship amongst both the researcher and the researched, students and teachers; in effect cultivating a version of what Peter McLaren (2005) refers to as a revolutionary pedagogy.

In my mind that revolution was, and can only be, framed against social injustice, inequality, poverty, intolerance, and human suffering. I’ve lived some of these things (from both sides of privilege), and so I identify with Tim McIlrath’s public pedagogy; with its frustration and its agonism; with its rage and its optimist.

In spite of these commitments that drive my partial and at times inadequate critical consciousness, I drive golf balls. I drive a BMW. I live in Shamrock Estates. I left New Zealand and its social welfare stability to return to George W. Bush’s America—a nation I once fled, and for what I thought was good reason.

These tensions bring me back to science; back to the pseudomedical overtures of my article with a final diagnosis: This incessant pain in my neck—which encumbered my physicality on this day as it has on many days before and since—was and continues to be a physical manifestation of numerous intersecting contradictions; contradictions of the body and its uses, of the complex and precarious governmentalities it conjures up, and of the tensions that arise as a result thereof. This chronic neck pain is a manifestation of chopping all that firewood as a child; of spending much of my adulthood looking down at the keys as I type (as I am doing now); of holding my head up, like Atlas trying to shrug Reagan’s bogus meritocracy; of my “homemade swing”; of the time I really strained my neck, amidst the infuriation, the almost convulsively violent physical response to the early morning media flip of November 8, 2000 (and the many long days since); of long plane rides from Auckland to Los Angeles; of Endgame head-banging; of white-knuckled piloting of my BMW.

Why do I tell you, the reader, all this? I suppose through my confessions of purchase, pace, and play I am seeking to reconcile a few obvious incongruities which weigh upon my everyday experiences. In some ways, this is a passage of reflexive conscientization. My metabolic and hexis-based bodily Self has become a product of, and is physically enwrapped in, the poverty of my youth, of my pursuit to escape that poverty, the intellectual, pedagogical, and theoretical endeavors to eradicate those conditions of poverty, and the comforts that intellectual subject-being is now afforded. Of course, this brings up a number of serious questions:

Perhaps these questions are less important than questions like “why did I buy a BMW?” “why do I live in Shamrock Estates?” or “why do I play golf?”

Was the purchase of a BMW a moment of weakness?

Did I let my conscientization (guard) down when we bought the General’s house?

Is golf an affirmation of my subjectivity (both as a subject of neoliberal poverty and as an agent of neoliberal success)?

Well, I suppose it is all these things.

To me, a critical, radically-contextual dialectic ontology and a contradictory life are inseparable. I haven’t met a critical scholar who is living the perfect life—and I doubt I ever will.

In some ways, this is a story of praxis; a critical consciousness of living conscientization.

I do things that bestir jouissance of an aspirational Self in spite of my better judgment.

And perhaps that’s the point in all of this.

Like everyone else, I am at once a servant to the desires of my youth—to the habitus which gave those aspirations meaning, purpose, and direction—and held accountable by the critical consciousness that habitus led me to.

My 12-year old Self—the person who looked longingly across the coifed fairways of Bent Creek Country Club—would in many ways be pleased by the golf ball- and BMW-driver he has become 23 years later. Yet that same 12-year old Self—reminded daily of his late Reagan inadequacies—always held some trepidation, if not contempt, for 35-year olds like me.

They were men of privilege. Men of conspicuous consumption. Selfish men. I hated them in many ways because I wasn’t them (but wished I was). And because I knew my lack was connected to their glut.

Here’s the kicker: I didn’t like me when I was 12. I didn’t like wearing hand-me-down shoes or riding in the back of beat-up Toyota Tercels.

Hence, one might conclude that I’m just never happy being me. Fanon (1986) once wrote about how the first impulse at the arrival of awareness is often self-loathing. His point was that as the colonized or oppressed individual is made to believe her or his body—her very self—is nothing but ugly, naïve and wicked, then it is not surprising that she does not see herself in a positive way.

But for me it’s more than some kind of internalized oppression. In some ways it’s the opposite of that.

My 35-year old Self wishes I could be 12 again. In many ways, I like the 12-year old me more than the 35-year old me. I was uncompromised back then.

My critical consciousness was less refined, but my ontology was more pure.

Mine was a future-facing praxis. I planned to be a juggernaut, to exact change on my terms, to be an agent of social justice, to overcome (overtake) the BMW- and golf ball-driving bourgeoisie—those who imposed themselves on my youth.

I lived dialectics without knowing Hegel or Marx.

There, at the intersections of habitus, critical consciousness, and praxis we find the living tensions between the lived body and the idealization(s) of what it will do.

We are all, I would imagine, working toward something better. That something better is in some ways mapped along the lines of who we have been, who we are, and who we seek to become. What I am having trouble reconciling is how critical consciousness frames that “better” for those of us wrestling with multiple, often contradictory intersubjective trajectories established by habitus and history. If we are to concede that (1) conscientization alerts us to the ways in which, at any given moment, various architectures of power—of gender, social class, race, colonialism, capitalism, and other systems of governance—are working both with and against our performing Self(s), and that (2) those performances of a Self-building society work in dialectic cadence with [private and public] histories, then we might surmise that a heightened Self-awareness is always already bound to contingencies of Self, of power, and of the forward-facing trajectories that came before it.

Thus, in closing, I am merely suggesting that as I reflect upon my working class Appalachian habitus and the critical consciousness emerging therefrom—as I come to understand power and how my life has been thrust into its systematics—I realize that living conscientization is never pure nor without contradiction.

My guess is that I am not alone in these contemplations.

Of course, my golfing and BMW-driving aspirational performances are not without fault. Every time I start up my BMW, or tee off, I feel as if I am at once satisfying those adolescent urges whilst simultaneously turning my back on the struggles of my youth—and in some ways those who share similar struggles today. Simply put, I live in constant betrayal of my 12-year old Self. I betray the critical class awareness galvanized from that life of hardship.

And yet this tension gives me focus. And in this way it is oddly agonistic. In a strange way it locates me. It makes me 12 again. By becoming that which I both envied and abhorred, becoming an embodiment of the structural formations that once worked against my subject being, by realizing (if not actualizing) through both everyday practice and critical awareness (of those practices), by taking my place—I have become out-of-place. As I see it, I have become the class-privileged enemy I once sought to vanquish.

This is not to suggest that playing golf or living in Shamrock Estates is right. Rather that, at least for me, it is generative. My Self-satisfaction and Self-aberration are oddly symbiotic, and through bodily praxis and class performance I am at once the Self I aim to be and the embodiment of the politics I seek to implode. In the swings of play and self-loathing, I—much like the 20-something Freire written into the pages of Pedagogy of Hope (2007, p. 20-21)—am submerged in myself, whereby everything around me seems strange and foreign. This discomposure reminds me of two things: this is not me and yet this is who I have become. Like Freire, I am once lost in my Self—and the production of that contradictory Self (in both its immediate performance and biographical spectralities)—and the urge to ask a critical question about that internal disjuncture: What are the elements at work in this moment of hysteresis?

The answer is what keeps me coming back to golf. I suppose I am a creature of habit. In some ways, my habitual intercourse with golf is a product of various forms of “post-hegemonic” (see Lash, 2007) synthesis: Cartesian syntheses; past-future syntheses; autarkic-subjective syntheses; oppressor-oppressed syntheses; structure-agency syntheses; syntheses of bodily control and bodily jouissance. More than anything, I come back for the pleasure and the pain of golf.

In a Hegelian sense, repetitious performances of my golfing habitus are generative. I play for the corporeal pleasures and Cartesian pains it brings me. To make this point I turn to a lengthy postulation Deleuze (1994), drawing upon Hume, makes in Difference and Repetition:

Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it. Hume’s famous thesis takes us to the heart of a problem: since it implies, in principle, a perfect independence on the part of each presentation, how can repetition change something in the case of the repeated element? The rule of discontinuity or instantaneity in repetition tells us that one instance does not appear unless the other has disappeared—hence the status of matter as mens momentanea. However, given that repetition disappears even as it occurs, how can we say “the second,” “the third” and “it is the same?” It has no in-itself. On the other hand, it does not change something in the mind which contemplates it. This is the essence of the modification. Hume takes as an example the repetition of the cases of the type AB, AB, AB, A . . . . Each case of objective sequence AB is independent of the others. The repetition (although we cannot yet properly speak of repetition) changes nothing in the object or the state of affairs AB. On the other hand, a change is produced in the mind which contemplates: a difference, something new in the mind. (p. 70)

Golf conjures in me conversations of body and Self, and of the critical consciousness both (and the dialectics of and between) are now bound to; conversations between my (future-facing) past Self and Janus-faced present Self. Playing golf is both corporeal (Hume’s A) and ideological (B), but in some ways my golfing AB is never independent of a synthetic C (a Self-reflexive, critical consciousness of AB dialectics). As I play I try to make sense of the habitus that brings me back to golf, those contemplations remind me of the Selfs of my past as they have projected me forward into that moment. I live in and with these synthetic Selfs, never true to, yet always struggling with, their unstable temporal and political moorings.

Put differently, the longer I play golf, the more I am able to loosen up my swing, loosen up the muscles in my neck; yet all the while knowing I’ll be sore in the morning.