ABSTRACT
If it can’t be measured it doesn’t exist; it is nothing. And the one thing that doesn’t work is doing nothing. Contrary to these views, expressed by President Bush’s and President Obama’s Secretaries of Education and which inform so much of what passes for educational reform today, this chapter looks at what it might mean to make nothing happen, to nd in that happening what Auden referred to as a mouth, or the words that might issue from and bring us out of the ‘isolation and the busy griefs’, the raw places so many educators in the United States now inhabit in the age of audit and the Race to the Top. is chapter considers what happens when teachers are overwhelmed, shocked, and numbed in an educational order that renders any alternative, linguistic or otherwise, as dangerously regressive or fungible within its own coordinates. It explores professional melancholia, the aective state that results when public discursive forms cannot convey the inchoate, inaudible losses that one’s profession has sustained. But the chapter also oers the possibility of nding within that melancholia and accompanying loss of speech an immanent utopianism. Quite simply, my intention in this chapter is to talk about what it might mean to survive in the new educational order.
