Abstract
This exploration takes a look at how students in higher education are disempowered through regimes of social power that are always already extant and ubiquitous within educational regimes. Moreover, this exploration pays particular interest and attention to students in higher education because in many cases throughout relevant research, these student populations are conceived as being the most empowered students within a broad educational landscape, which this piece foundationally challenges. Fundamentally, this article uses a Camusian or Absurdist notion of power and social identity to make sense of how students in higher education take up space within seemingly disempowered educational spaces only to insistently and futilely call to themselves and other students as empowered, although such insistences are empty fallacies of specific social humanities hailing towards their only perceived means of ‘valuable’ social interaction defined by modern conceptions of humanity always already within power relations.
Camus (1983) defined the absurd condition: The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world … The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter – these are the three characteristics in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is capable. (p. 28)
Further, while Camus’s conception of the absurd is usually put into context with existentialism and other like explications of phenomena, I want to reposition the absurd as a poststructural critique of power and its conceptualizations. In particular, although Camus ostensibly dealt with the quest for meaning within a ‘formless universe,’ he questioned his society, the society in which he existed – the social regimes in place around him and within him (Camus, 1988). His literary magnum opus, for instance, The Stranger, is an ode to the absurd condition of man within society – not without or removed from it; Camus did not look for meaning in a formless universe as is the popularized image of the philosopher, but rather Camus looked for meaning with and of social understandings of being – he attempted to define his own existence in relation to the social sphere and then towards the universe and his very existence (Camus). In other words, Camus did not and could not escape his social reality within his works and neither did he try to do such a thing; Camus makes constant reference to his social understandings and rather than positioning himself in a formless universe, he positions himself within a social sphere on top of a formless universe, and as a result, the question that is then put forward is why such a social system exists, why social beings buy into such an existence, and whether absurdity, whether rebellion can even properly exist within such a social space – whether one might be forced to live an existential existence rather than rebelling within some absurd notion (Camus, pp. 122–123).
This is the connection that I would like to complicate – this social space of power, absurdity and regimes. Here, I want to begin positioning student power in higher education as an absurd existence and abstraction (Mau, 1992). Even more, I position this question within the realms of higher education since many students within these realms of social power are imagined as the pinnacle of student power, when I would rather argue that they are just as disempowered as students in elementary classes and high school. Furthermore, I would like to question why students rebel in such spaces of seeming powerlessness. Why do students rebel in these spaces? How can Camus and absurdity realize this disjunctive relationship between existence and rebellion? In other words, student power seems to be a self-contradictory phrase such that the word is trying to enact a reality in which students are not in a disempowered position within schools – as if their bodies and minds are not knowingly and intentionally being manipulated and tightly coordinated (Hoy and Woolfolk, 1990 (Hobbes, 1994). The phrase seems to be a progressivistic or liberalistic conglomeration of signs, trying to mould both the interpretation of schooling as a liberal institution while also attempting to arrange those signs to signify the ‘sharing’ of power with students in such schooling environments. Particularly in higher education in the US, there is a rising phenomenon of attempting to (re)designate students as empowered (Forgrave, 2002: Lapan et al., 2002; November, 2009); colleges and universities, stuck in a neoliberalist fight for national and global reputation as well as resources, simultaneously vie to create an image that students and parents will buy into, to divert student protest and rebellion and to recast the image of the conservative and stuffy institution as progressive and liberal (Saunders, 2014). However, in this process of liberalization, commercialization and reorientation, the college and university summarily exist within the context of normalized regimes of power including neoliberal market-based capitalism and authoritarian, pseudo-democratic power structures that mirror corporations and governments (Hawthorne et al., 1983). Thus, in the process of abiding power, students become enrapt in a temporal and trapped absurd condition. They are simultaneously told to believe in their power while they find their influence pressed up against walls that seem to be surrounding them (Manke, 1997); even more, these students also realize that this absurd positionality is the only ‘empowered’ existence that they can take up, for if they did not believe in their illusory power, then they would have to settle into complacency with systemic violence and a hegemonic reality without such a sense of power or ability (Tisdell, 1993). Thus, for students who are pressed within the frame of existence that Camus describes throughout all of his works, rebellion is necessitated and made to be empty – absurd (Camus, 1983). Ultimately, as this article continues, I will go on to describe the absurd creation of student power – how students are forced into a certain positionality to exist as human with the concurrent knowledge of constantly being objectified, monitored and manipulated. This process creates disembodied and disempowered humanities while existing within the absurd. While this may sound like a nihilistic attempt at explanation, absurdism is an impulse defined by endlessly searching for meaning within already extant meaninglessness – ultimately recognizing such powers and finding new powers to rebel against regimes.
Power
Power is an elusive concept that unceasingly changes interpretations throughout time, place, context, illusion and understanding. It plagues philosophers, political theorists, educational thinkers and everyday researchers. Hobbes (1994) noted the concept such that ‘The power of man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.’ Hobbes understood power and utilized power in quintessentially material and physical terms. Though he proposed the unification of the sovereign through the mutual benefit of individuals, he conceptualizes power as the sovereign’s ability to keep order and reign, imposing physically and materially if need be. On the other hand, Paulo Freire, Louis Althusser and others argued that power exists in structures – human constructions that guide individuals within society such as economy, the state and even religion (Freire, 1968). Althusser (2014) claimed that power was physical intentionality as much as the proletariat must seize such power to overthrow structures and ensure humanizing processes of work and existence. Still more, Michel Foucault and Judith Butler understood power as subversive and insidious: regimes of truth that dictate action, moulding human beings into neatly controlled pieces of humanity, existence and performance (Butler, 2006). Further, as Butler (1997) mentions, ‘if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence … then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence.’ In other words, contemporary poststructuralists not only de-physicalized power, placing it outside of structures and outside of the sovereign, but they also began to re-understand the utility of such powers – how humans create themselves regarding such regimes – defining themselves as masculine in opposition to femininity, as heterosexual instead of homosexual or bisexual, and as white instead of black, brown, or of colour – deigning upon themselves humanities that give them a sense of subjectivity and individuality (Skinner, 2012). Even further, there are those philosophers such as Max Stirner that propound that power, whichever form it may take, is always already a repressive regime that dictates certain possible existences and dehumanizes humanity (Antliff, 2007), while still other post-anarchist thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Saul Newman argue against certain regimes of power while considering the possibilities of power that come with a poststructural framework of thought (Illich, 1970). In particular, though Newman and Illich see the destruction of the ‘state’ and other regimes of power as one of the ultimate goals of anarchism and humanization, they simultaneously make space for other realms of power to propagate, acknowledging the many ways in which power and autonomy come into existence with and through subjectivity and individuality (Newman, 2011). Ultimately, throughout this piece, though I attempt to recognize the inherently confounding nature of power and critique, I will consequently use a post-anarchist framing of power that concurrently considers the repressive nature of power and its subsequent ways of subject-formation to make sense of student power and how it comes to exist and be understood within social spaces.
The irrational – Sense and nonsense
In other words, throughout this piece, I will argue that power is universal and yet somehow mutable. Power is subversive, insidious and deceptive. As members of a society, we come to terms with power throughout our lives: we learn how to raise our hands in elementary schools (Dixon et al., 2009); we learn to keep our things locked away in lockers in middle schools (Cauley and Jovanovich, 2006); and in high school, we learn more concretely how we are being hailed to behave in romantic relationships (noting which relationships are considered valid) – controlling our intimacies and our relationships (Forbes et al., 2006), yet all the while building those same connections – making them imaginable and physical realities. Post-anarchist theories of power realize the pervasiveness of such regimes of power like gender, race, sexuality, ability and others, yet such theories of power also believe that the destruction of such powers may be better for humans than the seemingly shallow sense of humanity that we receive from such regimes (Davies and Banks, 1992). In other words, as it pertains to student power, I will begin with the position that power may be anything: it may be a physical confrontation with protesters, it might even be unthinking language and how we use it; and still more, power may be how our bodies are continuously and semi-consciously presented to others. All of these may be power, and still more, they may not be. Power is essentially an affective insinuation of existence, meaning that a powerful action may take on the appearance of power but only when power (re)creates and/or destroys does it truly become some sense of power (Foucault, 1982).
Furthermore, when discussing student power, the conversation has to change towards a different lens. Students, for instance, are in a unique positionality of explicit becoming and unbecoming (Freire, 1968). That is to say that students exist within a space where individuals are testing the bounds of their germinating subjectivity within the confines of a socializing regime. Students become subjects within schools, and to a large extent, the school affects students in countless minute and important ways through various systems of power that emotionally, physically, ideologically and psychologically mould them (Eccles et al., 1993). Through punishment in schools, though they may challenge such things, students learn how they are being hailed to behave (Brantlinger, 1991). With language, students begin to understand emotion, tone, and how they are to behave in certain social situations based upon vocabulary and body language (Milroy and Milroy, 2012). Still more, with the formation of classes, groupings and categories (in and out of the confines of language itself), students begin to subliminally understand the ways that we are bidden to interact and think about themselves and others – dictating privilege, humanness and value (Roda and Wells, 2013). Further, student power within these places of discourse begins to take on very different visages, becoming powerful and becoming (disem)powered – having some sort of constructive or destructive effect on their surroundings and themselves and simultaneously not having an effect on their surroundings and themselves. Ultimately, students in higher education express power in three major ways concerning their environments: physically, economically and socially (Bonzo and Parchoma, 2010; Johnstone, 1969; Neary and Winn, 2009). Each of these has its importance and its shortfalls – its opportunities and its potential failures, and over the next few pages, I will briefly describe how these powers exist while also coming to terms with the absurdity of such realms of power.
Student power
The first and arguably most prescient form of student power is physical power. The power of taking up space, the power of moving between spaces, the power of imposing your body – your physical presence – on others, on spaces and in between the known and unknown (Crossley, 1996). Moreover, physical power is one of the more popular kinds of student power, because it does not require more than students’ bodies. It is a power that students have been honing since they were children – manipulating their bodies to challenge their own perceived powerlessness in certain areas including the school (Mau, 1992). Furthermore, with punitive forms of punishment such as suspension, expulsion, probation and others, the institutions of higher education are also punishing the body – dictating in response to some rebellion or scene of power where certain bodies and subjectivities can consequently take up space and where they can and cannot be (Kwan, 2010).
Physical power is a body politic. It is not only where bodies actively revolt against such an institution through demonstrations and protests, but it is also where bodies disrupt the normalized dialectics of being such as bending the dynamics of gender or challenging professors with the absence of your body from lectures or the like (Stinchcombe, 1964). In this way, physical power is at once one of the most perceived systems of power that students utilize in their rebellions against regimes of truth that surround them in collegiate environments and it is one of the most subversive ways of rebellion that students have at their disposal, sometimes evading even their awareness. In other words, physical power is at the same time conscious effort on behalf of the student to revolt against some system of power that is pressing in on their individuality or subjectivity and unconscious effort that is sublimated outwards against systems of power that are insidiously trying to manipulate students’ minds and bodies (Sharp, 1975). Ultimately, what this represents is a want for rebellion, a conditioning against such systems of power towards a more absurd condition. However, students in these spaces are neither fully absurd nor lacking absurdity, they are positioned within a system of socialization by choice (such that college is a choice that students make), and thus determine their commitment to some kind of adherence to society and its standards (Anyon, 1980); however, students within these spaces also use their bodies in innumerable ways to either challenge or test the limits of that socialization (Aggleton and Whitty, 1985). Thus, as we will continue to see, student power – their physical power in this respect – is both fleeting in absurdity and not fully rebellious: students flirt with such rebellion as a way of initiating some other kind of subjectivization, while all the while never totally coming to terms with either socialization as it is built within colleges and universities or the rebellion and absurdity that they participate in – initiating ‘their’ own forms and ways of subjectivization. This rebellion that they partake in simultaneously upholds their socialization and new ways that students come to be socialized – creating a rebellious dialectic between the student and the institution that at once creates new realms of control and summarily informs institutions on how to socialize students within newer scenes of social reality and through better and more insidious apparatuses (Popkova et al., 2020).
Following, how students ‘control’ economic fluctuations with respect to colleges and universities is yet another way in which they take on the temporal and illusory position of empowered (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). By going to particular schools, students bring with them a conglomeration of federal and state aid, scholarships and personal wealth that economically influences universities. In such a way, however, this power concurrently seems to be a null type of power without much significance regarding any absurdity or rebellion; for instance, this form of power seems to be null since those already within the institution of higher education always already bring some sort of funding to the institution unless they are fully funded through the university, which of course is rare (Kantowitz and Martin, 2011). In other words, this economic power is ideologically and practically entrapped, since the market-based choice that students make is beholden within the idea of the university, such that the university as an ideological apparatus will always already receive such funding from the student no matter where the student actually attends (Gerstl-Pepin, 2013), and although the student can ostensibly choose the college or university that they would like to attend (thereby initiating some kind of free-choice and power, influencing institutional trends of such socializing corporations), this choice will always already economically support such an institution no matter if they agree with such collegiate policy so long as they attend and summarily support such institutions economically and idealistically (Gerstl-Pepin, 2013). In such a way, this economic power is ensconced within the logics of market-based capitalism and neoliberal rhetoric; while students may choose to exist outside of colleges and universities – they invalidate themselves as humans as defined by their bourgeoning productive capacities while also limiting their futures as determined by their potential wealth (Olssen and Peters, 2005).
Summarily, students are trapped within such a choice, for they either choose themselves as being more human – defined through a neoliberal understanding as productive humanities – or relegate themselves to a ‘knowing’ dehumanized position for the mere feelings of powerless control: calling towards such absurdity. Furthermore, while this is a null set of power, ultimately deigning upon the university economic resources from individual students, this economic power also seems to simultaneously oppose absurdity, such that the student no matter what rebellious position they ostensibly make in relation to the university, so long as they economically uphold the institution, their absurd connection to their rebellion should be put into question – a non-absurdity of sorts, such that absurdity in this respect can only be understood and introduced outside of the university. However, at the same time, such decided powerlessness seems to institute an absurd condition: students knowingly giving up pieces of themselves for powerlessness – to be in disempowered positionalities in respect to specific institutionalities (Portelli and Konecny, 2013). Thus, the power that students superficially hold against the institution with relation to physical or social power is mitigated in part by the economic resources that they willingly give to their institution, while absurdly remaining within such an institution as a matter of perceived ‘choice’.
Finally, the last subset of power that students frequently hold is a social power (Jensen and Jetten, 2015), which can be defined as a subset of power that brings social attention to particular issues at a college or university. Of course, this power is primarily an extension of physical power, such that students usually use their bodies as indicators of problems that arise on their particular campuses, protesting and the like – placing their bodies in various and often-conflicted positions. In other ways, recently students have come to use their technological as well as physical-social power to argue with/against universities propagating histories of their institutions that may have racist undertones (Jacoby, 2017). Furthermore, however, I would position this subset of power as fleeting in absurdity, such that students throughout their classes and throughout their time at a particular university bounce from one particular issue to the next without really coming to terms with a substantive issue that will wholly change the normalization-ridden institution from its primary drive of socialization and hegemony (Morley, 2003). In other words, I would argue that students in these positions are actively looking towards the institution for guidance in their socialization while actively guiding the institution on how to ‘properly’ socialize a new subsection of their generation (Heleta, 2016). In particular, as can be seen with the case of Rhodes College, the institution in response to student ‘power’ and protest changed the name of an academic hall; however, in such a way, students and the college prevented themselves in the present moment and in the future coming to terms with the history of Benjamin Palmer – the previous namesake for the hall – in any concrete way that would challenge the ungirding logics and regimes of power that emblemized his name for a century, but rather, the student body cooperated with the administration in changing the name so as to reaffirm their progressivisms and to avoid such challenges in the future – mitigating such history and the college’s connection to it for future students (Hass, 2019). Ultimately, as these powers come together and inform one another at the collegiate level, the student, though sometimes ostensibly absurd, exerts ‘power’ in certain contrary and marginal directions. Students within these spaces want change, but they are caught within a system of normalization and regularization that they have become accustomed to throughout their schooling (Cook-Sather, 2002). While they note the injustices around themselves and even note how their bodies are being actively injured or violated, they also quite nonsensically and temporally rebel in directions that may be perceived as absurd rebellion but in actuality are only fleetingly absurd while primarily being constitutive of such an institution, upholding the institution through rebellion. In other words, as we move forward, it is important to note that students, while rebelling in an ostensible absurd fashion also uphold the very institutions they rebel against through the dialogue that forms between their creative constituencies and their institution, creating a common understanding and then becoming a fuller part of the institution through their previous ‘rebellion,’ which is continuously mitigated, such that multicultural centres and the like lose their rebellious positions and become constitutive elements and branches of the institution even though the rebellions that spurred on such change often go unresolved (Urciuoli, 2009).
Student rebellion rather than student power
Consequently, at this point in the essay, I find it pertinent to underline our language and question whether or not this power that we have been discussing is power at all, or rather if there is yet another concept that would more accurately describe this trapped essence of absurdism within essentialized social regimes of power. In particular, as we have gone through various types of student power that popularly come about at colleges and universities (Bonzo and Parchoma, 2010; Johnstone, 1969; Neary and Winn, 2009), we have also come to understand that each of these particular kinds of power is systematically ensnared in some way as previously mentioned. To explain, physical power is both a reduction of human autonomy to the body and a way in which student rebellion is brought under subjectivization (Sharp, 1975) – though that subjectivization may become broader as a result. In other words, physical power simultaneously signifies a reduction of student power to the body, thereby signalling the made-inherent limitation found within colleges and universities such that students are ostensibly barred, practically and idealistically, from the little policy-based or administrative power that is being performed (Anyon, 1980). Likewise, physical power also brings about an interesting conundrum of subjectivization such that students exercising physical power on campuses may not be attempting any sort of rebellion against the institutions that they find themselves within but rather they may be attempting to change or modify the realms of subjectivization that colleges and universities support, thereby acting as fuller constitutive agents of the university rather than against it (Butler, 1997; Cook-Sather, 2002). In particular, such students are popularly fighting for changes to the institution that may change the façade of the institution but not wholly challenge the institution as it exists: as can be seen with the controversy over naming rights on college campuses today or the growth of LGBTQ clubs and organization of collegiate campuses (Dennis and Reis-Dennis, 2019).
Furthermore, economic and social powers are similarly trapped within logics of social reproduction, social regimes of truth and progressivistic stagnating policies (Kaufman, 2005). Economic power, for instance, is inherently trapped within the ideological and economic apparatuses of the college and university. So long as the student actively engages with colleges and universities – believing in the social and intellectual capital that such an endeavor will bring them – students thereby negotiate unprecedented economic and social support for such a system of subjectivization, exclusion and domination (Nickerson et al., 2003). Yet another way, this subset of power may not be taken as an absurd notion of negotiating one’s experiences with higher education, as it would more likely be considered a constructive set of power that has not only allowed such institutions to grow but to flourish within the US landscape for the past half millennia (Gumport et al., 1997), changing only slightly to fit the constantly evolving mould of normalized hegemonic student–institutional relations. Thus, this economic power has challenges being signified as an absurdist rebellion; though economic power may potentially be considered a substantive potential ‘power’ for which students could grasp towards, so long as students support institutions economically, that potential ‘power’ is subsequently subverted and deigned upon the institution to do as it wishes. Following, social power also seems to subvert student rebellions in much the same way as physical power operates, such that social power is positioned as a conversation between student groups and the university (Templeton et al., 2019). Consequently, this situation is either a disintegration of such social ‘power’ (thereby noting a loss of energy or a breaking up of such student activism) or the institution of higher education communicates with such groups and comes to a compromise (thereby relegating and subduing such student power, consigning those once student-rebels to mere student-receptacles once again: made-fundamental supporters of the institution). Social power, in turn, is not wholly a rebellion of students against an institution, since students only act directly against the university in specific cases that potentially include the protests at Evergreen College (Decker et al., 2019); however, no matter the case or institution, so long as such an institution is not fundamentally and foundationally altered at the end of whatever protest or rebellion, there is a consequent subversion of power from students that were at once rebelling towards the institution that has subsequently survived and maintained its particular positionality while also using such rebellion to create an even stronger realm of subjectivizing and subversive powers in coordination with the once student rebels (Andrews et al., 2016).
Ultimately, none of these student rebellions reveals any concerted notion of student power, for, in reality, such influence and autonomy that students had at one moment is always fleeting towards the institution or away from their own autonomy. In particular, this is the very phenomenon that leads students to feel powerless and ineffective within colleges and universities, causing them to grasp towards some sort of power and rebellion (Bracy, 2010). Though, as mentioned above, the power in these particular situations may create and/or destroy within the institution, such power is abruptly taken away from students once an issue has been raised and then subverted towards the institution. For instance, though students may bring an issue to the fore through protests or other forms of student rebellion, such rebellion never actively takes steps to change the institutionality of the college or university, for such rebellion is trapped within itself and the institution. Such rebellion is simultaneously outside of systems of power thereby mandating such negotiation between students and administrators and professors (Lucas, 2016). Even more, the institution itself has control over whether or not such protests or rebellions affect any institutional change. Thus, these ‘rebellious’ students are summarily ensnared in a conflictual arrangement; they are simultaneously forced by economic and social necessity to participate in higher education all-the-while subjected to systems of control and power that necessitate their subjectivization under the codes and significations provided by the institution and its place within a society. No matter the rebellions that students mount or how they protest, we can see that they position themselves as perpetual absurd beings. Students rebel to rebel, and yet they never get closer to attaining any power other than the suggestive influence they already had, thereby aiding the institution and moulding it into a more effective tool for future subjectivization and repression.
This is where our language needs to be more complex and elastic. While students may rebel, while students may temporally perceive of power, enacting in some sense a temporally trapped autonomous condition, these positionalities are fleeting and only tangentially related to some sort of power that administrators and professors hold by social proxy to control change – to create or destroy at the university (Foucault, 1982). However, this powerlessness, this futility is the quintessential essence of the absurd condition that Camus continuously describes throughout his works. In particular, Camus imagines this very moment of futility and consciousness at the end of his work The Myth of Sisyphus. As Sisyphus reaches the apex of the mountain, he attains this ‘hour of consciousness’ (Camus, 1983), and as students reach out for power, as they bumble for some sense of autonomy, they are consigned to a vanquished positionality – a subjectivized position. Just as Sisyphus realizes his absurd position of perpetual relegation and ‘conquers’ his particularity, students realize their absurdity concerning power at institutions of higher education.
Nevertheless, to retain this position of absurdity, students must renew that experience of absurdity once again. Following Sisyphus, they must prepare themselves to climb the mountain again while coaxing the boulder along with them. In other words, this is what distinguishes, the absurd from the feeble condition (Foley, 2008). In essence, both of these conditions of human experience within our social understandings of college and university are powerless; however, absurdity is the refusal of such powerlessness through the continual personal and social challenge of such powerlessness (Camus, 1983). As Camus (1983) notes this ‘hour of consciousness’ in the Sisyphean quest, he illuminates how Sisyphus realizes the futility of his actions yet reframes his existence as an autonomous positionality, recognizing that absurdity is the only way to retain a partial subjectivity without losing all autonomy to a subjectivizing and totalitarian social procedure. To put it yet another way, the absurdity that I have been after in this essay is the particular ways in which students chase after their autonomy and power in the face of perpetual and experienced powerlessness (Camus, 1984); thus, student absurdity is an experienced and realistic always already powerlessness with a continuous insistence on power, which as Camus notes is the only way to retain ‘individuality’ and some sense of autonomy. Only through a seemingly inane insistence upon autonomy can we futilely frame our existence as our own (Camus, 1984); just as Camus imagines Sisyphus (re)framing his existence as his own, coming to understand his ‘hour of consciousness’ as reframing his positionality as his own instead of the gods, can we come to realize that this particular absurd existence is the only real way to retain ourselves as individuals (Camus, 1983). Thus, through these ‘powers’ and various examples, we see students perpetually throw themselves against an institution that refuses to mutate itself unless to change its outward face of subjectivization for the repression and manipulation of future students (Boren, 2019).
Conclusions
Consequently, this is why student power is more accurately represented by rebellion instead of power, absurd instead of rational and fleeting instead of permanent. Students attempt to recast their experience as their own in colleges and universities, while also knowing that their experience is shaped and controlled by the regimes of truth that are constantly set up around them – that forced them into college in the first place (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). This reframing, this seeming control over their personhood is embodied within such rebellion. When students walk out of class (Reynolds and Mayweather, 2017), when they protest the university’s policies (Rhoads, 2016), when they enact social media campaigns (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), they endeavor to (re)frame their existence in light of their consciousness, in spite of their felt and experienced powerlessness. In other words, as students are forced into college by economic, psychological and social prerequisite, some students simultaneously, incessantly and inanely rebel against such control as a way of remaining ‘whole’ (Camus, 1983). Just as Sisyphus (re)casts his own experience as his rather than the gods’, students’ only rational position to take within a dehumanizing social regime such as the college and university is the absurd. Students, to retain some sense of their individuality, even though such consciousness is ‘false’ or belying, must contradict their own experience (Camus, 1984); they must uselessly flail their bodies and their social power at regimes of control in order to exist as beings ‘outside’ of such power, and although Camus (1984) notes this positionality as absurd within itself, as constantly fleeting, we also have to understand such experience and consciousness as the only rational position to take within such a social reality. For Sisyphus, there is no outside of the mountain and boulder; for students, for individuals ensconced within regimes of power that exert themselves on our consciousnesses and unconsciousnesses, there is no outside of such ideological entrapments (Lorde, 1984) – outside of our existences that we coconsciously ‘create’ and abide by through our socio-economic influences and physical presences. However, only through such irrationality, such as absurdity (throwing our bodies and minds perpetually against such regimes of truth) can we attempt at what is deemed humanity (Camus, 1984). Only through such absurdity, can we honestly attempt to call our existence our own, and consequently, this a large contributor as to why students rebel in the face of such powerlessness – it is not wholly or even predominantly to make change but it is for the self: it is to call oneself their self – even if such interpretation is belied, fleeting, or absurd.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
