“No, two weeks. Let’s push this close to final before I head out on holiday, and my in-laws get their claws in me.”
Panic jolts in her throat. “Right—sure, yes.”
Kerr holds her gaze. “I understand it’s a tight timeline, but with focus and investment, this revision could be a real achievement,” he says. “Let’s finalize by fall, get you lined up for a December graduation—get youahead,take advantage of your ambition. It’s a weapon if you wield it right, we’ve talked about this. You’re already young for a grad student, don’t cede that advantage by regressing to only what’s expected of you. And when I’m back in September, I want you to have five specific career avenues you’re looking at—as in, job titles, organizations, potential contacts. You’re starting exploratory interviews. Understood?”
She grits her teeth but flashes a bright smile. “Got it.”
He nods, appeased. “Wonderful. Now sit, sit,” he says, gesturing at the familiar armchairs—worn-down leather, split-open armrests—by the window. Taking a seat, he uncaps a pen, flips to the front page of her draft. “Let’s dig into this.”
She shakes out her laptop from her tote, settling into the other armchair. Despite her anxiety, the stress—deadlines, career, timelines accelerating—she feels safe here; she’s come close to crying multiple times in this office, like in sophomore year when she’d broken down during the depths of winter semester, distraught over next steps after graduating, and he’d asked, gentle:Have you considered a master’s degree? It’s not like with poli-sci or humanities, you can make actual money with an econ postgrad, and you don’t always have to cash in morals for a paycheck.
Now, Kerr says: “I meant it, you’ve done excellent work.” He pushes up the sleeves of his loose linen shirt to avoid ink stains from his pen; the dark brown skin of his hands is already splattered with ink, signs of a morning spent writing. “You clearly understand the Protestant ethic as a historical phenomenon, its theological tenets, that tricky shift into secularism and contemporary economic forces that so many people trip up on. Now, how can you push the connections further? If you dive into what’s going unexpressed in this draft, what else could you uncover? There are obviously quite a few counterarguments you need to address. You’ve always tended to willfully turn away from arguments you don’t like, and hope the sheer force of your own argument will carry you through, which I’m not going to let fly—but we’ll get to that later.
“First off, let’s strengthen your exploration of Luther’s doctrine of vocational calling. You don’t spend enough time there. He’s playing within Aristotle’s concepts of the good life and the ordinary life, squarely slotting the good life—the pious life, in his terms—withinthe ordinary life. Divinewithin the quotidian, sacred within the every day, all that. That shift is crucial.”
“Right.” Lili nods. “It establishes the groundwork to spiritually justify a vocation that’s this-worldly. Focused on the material world, the tangible elements of the every day. Weber and Taylor have a lot to say about that.”
“Exactly, exactly—this-worldlyis the crucial turn. Your vocational calling, the way you serve God, can be within this ordinary life. From there, we see inklings of the modern concept of a career—the idea that all work, however earthly, was equal in the Creator’s eyes paves the way for ‘labor for labor’s sake,’ in an eventually secular context. That was anextremelyradical concept in the sixteenth century. You need to really unpack that shift. We’re seeing the birth of an inner drive to work. That’s where your argument around neoliberal conceptions of self-propelling capitalism can come to life. State that more clearly.”
“Isn’t that a big jump to connect across so explicitly? Sixteenth century to modern day? You left a lot of edits about how I was moving between ideas of different time periods,” Lili notes warily, clicking through the marked-up draft. “You said, and I’m quoting here: ‘More time jumps than a Time Lord,’” she relays dryly.
Kerr looks delighted by his own comment. “Of course, don’t overstate the Reformers’ intent here. You’re not claiming they saw these outcomes. But strike the right balance between their intentions and their consequences. Emphasize these as roots that evolve. Especially with asceticism, too—you don’t divenearlyenough into asceticism. Protestants did a huge amount to bring asceticism into the broader world. Just compare a Catholic cathedral to a Protestant church. It’s stark. That superficial contrast speaks to much deeper, underlying differences, grounded in that ascetism, which persist in modern culture, especially American culture—think hustle porn, startup execs and their cold plunges, waking up at four a.m., Silicon Valley exceptionalism, the revival of Stoicism among biohacking tech bros, all of that. That’s going to be vital to weave through.”
Lili frowns. “I mean, didn’t Weber argue that ‘victorious capitalism’ didn’t need asceticism, anymore? Aren’t those themes better tackled through my analysis on how we self-discipline as workers, like how westart to internalize surveillance, and that becomes the self-propelling part of capitalism?”
“No. Asceticism played a crucial role in capitalism’s victory as the dominant mode of production. You could ignore it as easily as you could ignore the Industrial Revolution. You need to tackle what asceticism offered us, morally speaking, because what is this unending work offering the laborer, internally? In the States, certainly, there’s the promise of class mobility, the idea that even if there is a hierarchy, you can climb it, through sheer force of your moral virtue as expressed through your capital making, your career advancement.”
“We get some interesting tensions there, with the otherworldly versus this-worldly.”
“Yes, that’s good—very good,” Kerr acknowledges. “Write that down, explore that. And again, secularization really comes into play there. Dig into the texture of that tension, its evolution into secular concepts with just as much pull over us as godly ones. Industriousness as proof of one’s predestination, rather than a means of guaranteeing your spot in heaven—that’s heady stuff. Think about how its narrative power persists. Today, the career functions as a narrative vehicle. Through it, within neoliberalism, capitalism, these dominant ideologies, we’re trying to make sense of our lives.”
“The same way Protestants used work as a narrative vehicle through which to understand their lives,” Lili offers, “their predetermined fates, a way to come to terms with their lack of agency. It’s a similar dynamic to what we’re engaged in today, just without religion involved.”
“Great, yes. If you really emphasize that idea of a narrative vehicle—and you already touch on it, you dive into these ideas of man as a meaning-making creature that are nuanced and well-balanced—that could be a great through line for the centuries of thought you’re working with. I’d also like you to better incorporate the idea of self-disciplining, surveilling one’s self, how that evolves. It’s one of the most crucial theological ideas that becomes secularized, omnipotent God to neoliberal subject.”
“I think Foucault works really well in support of that point, no?” she suggests.
Kerr frowns. “You have too much affection for Foucault.”
“I do not!”
“And I don’t want to see any heavy-handed Panopticism metaphors, alright? They’re a crutch, I get them enough from my undergrads.”
“Well, isn’t the Panopticon inherently a metaphor?” she quips.
“Next, you need to tackle productive subjectivities,” Kerr continues, ignoring her joke. “The topic is entirely absent from this draft. You need to pick up Hochschild and Negri again—I have some copies here...”
It’s a long discussion. Over the course of the morning, Lili’s quips and interjections steadily diminish, as Kerr digs hard into soft spots of her thesis, which start to bruise into major, gaping flaws, zeroing in on all the areas where she’s made logical jumps, waved her hands, or not fully pushed an argument home. Her notes become a mess, trying to jot down his feedback. By the time he sends her off—“It will take some serious effort, but if you clarify these elements, expand the range of thought you’re drawing on, this thesis will be exceptional,” he encourages cheerfully—she’s trying not to panic about how much more work she has to do.
In the library, she attempts to chart out a plan, but she’s lost all sight of the overall thrust of her argument; she can’t grasp its structure anymore, can’t see the forest for the trees—can’t even see any fucking trees either, after the wholesale destruction Kerr just unleashed. Her phone keeps buzzing. Eileen, her farm manager, responds to her earlier text about missing this morning, saying it’s no issue; Lili nervously fidgets with her septum piercing, knowing she’s going to have to ask to reschedule all her shifts for the next two weeks to have any chance in hell of tackling this revision, but she can’t deal with that right now. The group chat keeps pinging; her friends are making plans for tonight. iMessages keep pushing to her laptop—including multiple texts from Amina badgering her about France, sending her links to exhibits, restaurants, pictures of places—before she mutes everyone.
It’s dead silent and almost empty at Butler. The dark library stacks filled with soft summer light calm her a little.
But she can’t block out all distractions. As she continues working, she keeps hearing Amina’s words across the din of breakfast that morning.
Does he know that?
As the hours progress, thoughts scratch in her mind: old paintings, limestone, the gleam of dark oil paints, a hand on the back of her knee. She feels rattled, unsettled.
