Never having been asked to comment on anything on this blog, I felt a little puzzled, but eventually thought, why not? So here, if you like, are some theses on understanding this instance of a presidential speech.

(1) A presidential speech is a balancing act, a diplomatic performance; and as such, it is almost inevitably produced under severe institutional and diplomatic constraints. One might put it like this: university presidents enjoy no right to free speech. Or at least, no free speech without the threat of retribution from any of numerous quarters. If you read Dean Dad’s wonderful blog about his life as a community college dean, the first thing you find out is that university management (call them leadership or administrators if you prefer) operates in a state of constant compromise and constraint. In a great recent post, he explains something about the constraints on what one can say in his role: “When I spoke only for myself, it didn’t really matter what I said. But as a leader in the institution, comments that once would have been merely snarky were suddenly taken as indications of larger directions.” Just think of Larry Summers. As president, one is heavily vetted to begin with, continuously accountable to multiple constituencies, and under pressure not to rock the boat. And as Dean Dad points out, “front-room talk” isn’t the same as “back-room talk”: even if presidents may be frank in private, they are seldom unguarded when acting in their ceremonial role. First thesis: presidents are not free agents. Corollary: a presidential speech on academic freedom invokes a value that it cannot practice.

(2) The presidential speech is a kind of self-instituting, self-authorizing ceremonial language that functions to assure or reassure the continued dignity of the institution. And a presidential speech is hence less an empirical report on an institution than a moment in the reproduction of an institutional self-image. As in commercial advertising or a political campaign, one puts one’s best foot forward. It’s less that what is said is false as that campus life is glossed with the veneer of an institutional fantasy. This fantasy — one can see it in Zimmer’s speech — implicitly embodies its own criteria of evaluation, which are essentially aesthetic. In such a speech, institutional reality vanishes into the self-satisfied ether of institutional desires for beautiful self-representations.

Hence one of the most striking moments in Zimmer’s speech is when he says — his speech by the way is about academic freedom and hence he talks about the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, a document which I have already examined on this blog — anyway, Zimmer, I was saying, rightly says that to understand the Kalven Report we must situate it in its institutional context. But to my eyes as an anthropologist, what Zimmer calls “contextualiz[ing] the Kalven report within institutional culture” would be better called contextualizing the Kalven report in his obligatory presidential fantasy of institutional culture. See for yourself:

…I believe it is necessary to contextualize the Kalven report within institutional culture. The commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom is not a simple one. It is difficult and to succeed demands a culture and community that will support it. The University of Chicago holds these as its highest values and we seek to reinforce them at every turn. The Kalven report is a component of this culture. Many other institutions push other values forward as legitimate competing interests, and their culture may not support such a strong position on this particular set of values. Every institution needs to come to its own conclusion as to what it is and what it wants to be. It needs to decide how much weight to give to various competing interests. Kalven only works at the University of Chicago because of these common values at the University, and can only be fully understood as a part of the realization of these values.

The University of Chicago’s “culture” here is one that is presented as having monolithically shared and uncontested values. Its community is portrayed as a heroic agent that has managed to maintain a difficult but successful “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom.” This obviously is not an empirical description but an artfully patterned and arranged permutation of highly valorized ceremonial language. There are no real people in this description, no disciplinary or economic or political differences, none of the gritty detail of routine institutional dysfunction. Uttered by a janitor, this description would be surreal (given the class and educational connotations that lie hidden within this governing language); uttered by a student, it would be sycophantic. Uttered by a president, it is a moment that shows the empty self-referentiality of ceremonial rhetoric. (I don’t mean to completely trash these fantasies of institutional valor, and I’m certainly not saying there’s nothing good about the university, but I do want to emphasize the aesthetic fixations of this discourse.) And while presidential descriptions do vary over the years, this public affirmation of institutional virtue is clearly part of the obligations of the president’s job, and not mainly the expression of a personal or scholarly opinion. Second thesis: a presidential speech is institutional fantasy hour, an obligatory ritual pause whose ideological emptiness guarantees that its form will be more significant than its content.

(3) This description of institutional culture should be taken as official self-image rather than a genuine description, but let’s say we read it naively as a description, since Zimmer does gesture towards describing a culture, even if somewhat rhetorically. Now, frankly, this description of a “culture” strains my ethnographic faculties. If Zimmer ever happens to read this blog — a moment I do not foresee — I must protest that my experience suggests that, as an empirical description, what he says is quite false. Chicago is in reality not as special as it imagines itself: it is an institution much more like institutions elsewhere: it is a university where one hears plenty of false and unrigorous claims, plenty of lazy inquiries that are neither open nor intense, plenty of situations where “intellectual freedom” is limited by prevailing disciplinary prejudice and intellectual narrow-mindedness. Zimmer states that the university has a “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom,” but interpreted empirically, this statement is not only false but also performatively self-refuting. In other words, the very sloppiness and clearly deeply constrained nature of this presidential statement is already evidence in itself that institutional culture is neither perfectly rigorous nor perfectly free. Third thesis: read inside-out, contextually and symptomatically, presidential speech can serve as a barometer of the disingenousness of campus self-images.

(4) The rhetoric of “culture” and “community” serves to conceal all the ways in which the university is neither a settled culture nor a community of equals. Particularly disingenuously, the university administration disappears as an actor, as if the voice of the president was, unproblematically, the voice of the university. It seems, in fact, that Zimmer has a deeply autocratic view of himself as the sole authorized voice of the university:

Were [former president] Hutchins’s political activities an expression of academic freedom or were they chilling, given that he embodied the University as its president? Many today, including myself, would question this level of political engagement for a University president. While separating the University from its president in a legal sense is easy enough, it is problematic practically, and thus the potential chilling effect of a politically active president is something I and other of Hutchins’s successors have tried to avoid.

Now, indeed as I said above, it is difficult for a president not to be viewed as a spokesperson for a university, but what strikes me here is that Zimmer sees his only option as being one of retreat into his role as the practical “embodiment” of the university. He shows no interest in developing a campus process for developing a more democratic university consensus. Indeed, insofar as he ardently defends the Kalven Report — which asserts that the university (administration) must take no political positions, even ones overwhelmingly demanded by faculty and students — he asserts that the university president’s role is to resist the will of the campus majority. For Zimmer, the administration’s role appears to be to resist outside as well as inside pressures. (There is something deeply disturbing to me, frankly, about his equation of 1930s Nazi dominance of the University of Berlin with 1980s calls on the university to divest from South Africa. The idea that he would very nearly equate these as unwanted political influences is frightening.) What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that the administration is permanently obliged to bring in funds for the university and that this might be relevant to an assessment of political neutrality. “Investing” for him does not count as a political act, only “divesting,” which is suspect, apparently, because it involves imposing an outside political will on what should be a strictly internal business decision.

Thus again we are back at the nexus of institutional power and money, two major features of university life that, one might think, would be highly relevant for a theory of academic freedom. And yet are so thoroughly unexplored in Zimmer’s speech. But in the end, I almost pity this president. Even if he happened personally to agree with everything I had said here, he would, on my assessment, be incapable of saying anything so scathing in a public forum. His role, and the dignity of the institution he claims to embody, would prohibit it.

One day when I have time to write a longer article, a comparative analysis of university presidents’ discourse from both sides of the Atlantic would seem to be in order.

I recently came across the very curious Europhilosophie, which seems to group together a number of philosophy working groups (on Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bergson, Fichte, phenomenology, materialism, and psychoanalysis, among others). An acquaintance of mine, doing a thesis on the situationists, is part of the Groupe de Recherches Matérialistes. It turns out that members of this group offer seminars in various places. For your entertainment I therefore present the course description for a seminar on “Reading Marx/Readings of Marx” (Lecture(s) de Marx). It will be offered next fall at the (very philosophically prestigious) Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris
Seminar 2009-10

Reading(s) of Marx

Place: Ecole Normale Supérieure – 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
Contact: Guillaume Fondu

The idea for this seminar comes from a simple observation [constat] drawn from the development of last year’s university movement: that of the nonexistence, as far as students were concerned, of structures of collective reappropriation of philosophical discourse, or at least ones falling between professorial lectures and solitary meditations, which by themselves cannot constitute the horizon of a veritable philosophical engagement. Given this starting point, it seems sensible to us to constitute a reading group around a well-defined program, so as to learn to work together and to permit a labor of common theoretical elucidation. In so doing, the choice of Marx as a philosophical figure strikes us as decisive on account of the new discursive practice he set in motion: a science of the collective by the collective, and a theoretical practice inseparable from its own genesis and from its micro- as well as macro-social effects. We wish to set in motion such an enterprise, one which will devote itself above all to the study of canonical texts reassessed in their “actuality” [leur actualité, their contemporary significance] which we know does not correspond to a spatiotemporal interval but rather constitutes the untimely mark of every revolutionary project, inasmuch as it connects to the concrete not to describe it “purely and simply” (ideology) but to give it its only true political form.

Marxist discourse has not finished, neither with writing history, nor with inscribing itself in history; and no approach to Marx can ultimately economize on the successive readings and rewritings of a text that constantly wanted to reactualize itself [ré-actualiser, make itself contemporary again], according to the whims of the fluctuations of the epoch and of its immanent revolutionary potentials. Reading(s) of Marx will thus take several directions, united in the coherence of a rediscovery of the social both in theory and in practice, with Marx but sometimes also perhaps against him.

The seminar will meet weekly, and will be split in two parts, devoting alternate weeks to Marx’s early texts and to the study of Capital, so as to permit everyone to get involved at their own pace. The year will begin with a presentation and a discussion of the seminar’s practical details, and the first sessions will be organized by the conveners [les responsables], dedicated to a reading of Marx’s early Critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, and to an immediate start on Capital in the second week. One can only hope that the rest will follow.

The dates and the room for the seminar meetings will be announced at the start of the academic year.

At an earlier point I think I would have been interested in how a document like this incorporates a subtext of classroom power relations. So for instance one can observe that this document contains a tension between the desire to produce a collective of apparent equals and the obvious assumption of pedagogical agency and authority by the teacher. Not to mention that the intellectual subtext is in certain respects marked as secondary; bold text (in the original) is used to give practical directions about how to find out where to show up and whom to contact for more information, rather than to emphasize, say, some intellectual point.

Although these hidden dynamics and contradictions of authority are certainly active here (and the pedagogical contradictions of leftist philosophers have in fact been the object of explicit reflection by French students, which I will come back to sometime), this sort of analysis now seems to me a trifle predictable. (My paper on literary theory classrooms goes into some detail on this topic.) What seems now more interesting is the organizer’s intense sense of the relation between a philosophy – Marx’s work for example – and its presence in the present, its “actuality” as they put it.

Marxism is cast here in the temporal frame of a going concern, not of (say) a dead doctrine. It has the temporality of the “untimely” (intempestive), of the unfinished. That is, the temporality of constantly bringing itself back to the present, of constant reflexive re-involvement in its genesis and effects, in its fluctuating “revolutionary” potentials. The political horizons of the course appear to be both radically Marxist and also radically academic: although it proposes to delve into Marx in order to offer students a philosophical engagement with the present, it also proposes no concrete form of political practice beyond reading and seminar participation. For that matter, even its pedagogical form remains somewhat indeterminate. The unfinished nature of Marxism apparently corresponds to the unfinished nature of the proposed seminar: its details are left uncertain, filled for the present only by the “hope” that “the rest will follow.”

Have been reading Sartre lately, the Search for a Method (which so far seems to be a grumpy critique of Marxist orthodoxy), and I’ve been struck by his insistence on delving into the specifics of particular social forms, his insistence on sociological and psychoanalytic detail in the analysis of any particular historical phenomenon (petit bourgeois authors for example). I have often felt unsatisfied with what feels like a refusal, by sociologists of knowledge, to enter the interior of the intellectual worlds they analyze, by their privileging of social form over conceptual content. I’m hoping, in examining French philosophy courses this year, to avoid this kind of mistake; which means, among other things, thinking more closely about the urge to make philosophy, as in this course description, a means for a “veritable philosophical engagement” with the present. What kind of intellectual future is implied in a hope to make philosophy fully present at a time when it seems out of sync with its moment?

One day a few weeks ago I stopped by a political demonstration against the French university reforms. The organizing group, La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, specializes in what are essentially indefinitely long circular marches, rather after the pattern of a vigil. Their name amounts to “the infinite rounds of the stubborn,” though someone tried to explain that une ronde infinie could also be interpreted as a merry-go-round! At any rate, the idea is that by marching nonstop they can manifest their “infinite” determination and commitment to the cause. But what cause, you ask? Well, for those anglophone readers out there, I thought I would give a rough translation of their pamphlet (French original here). As you’ll see, on this occasion they were trying to persuade French candidates for the European Parliament to take a stand on university reforms.

100 hours to make teaching and research into a campaign debate

“It’s more than time…”

Four months of strikes, of protests, of occupations, of infinite rounds of the stubborn. We, who make, think and dream the university, we, teachers, researchers, staff and students, affirm that the current reforms striking the university are part and parcel of a real political will, one in full submission to the economic field.

Four months we’ve faced an enterprise of propaganda, an enterprise of governmental denigration of the men and women who make the university live.

Four months in which the movement against the consequences of the LRU has grown stronger, because we understand today the deep vices and mortal dangers with which it threatens the university: all-powerful presidency, business-like management, marginalization of scholarly criteria in decisionmaking, generalized precarization of the staff, explosion of the price of tuition. This law will produce in France what it has produced wherever these principles are put to work: arbitrary management of careers and research groups, dependence on private money, walling-off of knowledges, destruction of whole teaching sectors, growing social injustice.

At once authoritarian in its implementation, bureaucratic in its principles, and liberticide for the university world, this law “Liberties and responsibilities of the universities” (LRU) is only a French caricature of a European process.

In effect, the European university system is affronted today by a transformation and reforming that is the academic side of the submission of the whole of society to the “invisible hand of the market.” The promoters of this society and their national craftsmen have associated this destruction with the names of two of the oldest European universities, those of the Sorbonne (declaration of 1998) and of Bologna (declaration of 1999).

But the “Bologna Process,” which is at the heart of European university politics, has never been publicly discussed. Its inscription in the Lisbon Strategy (2000) destroys the university as a place where enlightened and thinking citizens are formed; it means foreclosing on the values of elaboration and transmission of knowledge on which European universities should rest. In appearing to valorize the university’s missions, it negates them. It aims to apply to the university world rules that can never be applied to it.

It is thus time to affirm that the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy have the function of introducing into the universities a generalized competition put under the auspices of economic profitability.

It is time to affirm that the notion of “employability” is no more than a tool for destroying the humanistic knowledges that are at the heart of our civilization.

It is time to affirm that the notion of the “knowledge economy” conceals the transformation of knowledge into an economic good.

It is time to affirm that the slogan of “adapting the university to society” doesn’t say that this society is reduced to purely economic ends.

Today, we affirm that the adaptation of the European university doesn’t necessarily entail a reductive utilitarian obsession with the employability of its graduates. We refuse the application of this market logic to the university, this logic which reduces the rational to the useful and calculates utility in terms of profit. The university is not the place of a pure utilitarianism calculated in exclusively economic terms. The acquisition and invention of knowledge is a right for all and cannot be limited. Knowledge, creation and research are not commodities, but are the good of all: they are not for sale.

We demand from the future members of the European parliament a clear formulation of their vision of the university of tomorrow. We require that they take up the fundamental subject of the education of future generations of free and enlightened citizens, that they pose the problem of the university and of research, of education and formation as a major theme of the European campaign, that they publically accept or forcefully reject the complete submission of the university, of research, of the education system to market logic and to purely economic interests. We demand that they affirm with complete certainty that education is a public good, and that they draw out all the necessary consequences.

We are stubborn and our vigilance, infinite.

This should give you a flavor of the arguments against the current university reforms (which have been ongoing now for years, actually). And I quite like the poetic structure of this document. Of course, if one were to evaluate the results in purely utilitarian terms, as it seems to demand not to be evaluated, it probably wouldn’t count as a total victory — the recent elections were a major loss for left-wing parties and a gain for the UMP, which, of course, is the party that has implemented the university reforms that the Ronde is protesting. But people I talked to at the time were happy to see that five political parties had sent responses to queries about university policy. Just getting a political response already is a success for a relatively small group like this one, I’m sure.

And all month I’ve been asking people: where do they find political hope after months of politically fruitless protests and demonstrations? Stubbornness, in this light, becomes a rather interesting and strategic political emotion, a way of refusing despair and refusing defeat and a way of deferring the end of a struggle until the desired results have been obtained.

(Thanks to Jean-Claude for the photo of the Ronde.)

With the onset of summer, I’m faced with the end of the academic year, the end of class meetings and conferences, the end of departmental meetings and protests, and hence the temporary loss of most of the usual opportunities for face-to-face ethnographic observation in the traditional sense. My field site is shutting down. But I’m trying to ask myself: what do I make of the fact that I still possess an wonderful, unmanageable number of printed pages, of written things, of texts, that I need to read? And that this reading is simultaneously a chance to do textual analysis but also, and this is what seems to deserve more attention, a form of participant-observation in the world in question. Academia is nothing if not a community of readers. What then are the tactical or theoretical implications of a summer spent reading in a project on academia?

It strikes me that my point of departure has to be this: that reading isn’t something I can approach as a form of background knowledge, as a source of pure context. Nor for that matter can reading be a form of pure textual decoding that serves only as an instrumentally necessary prelude to some type of textual analysis. Nor, for that matter, is this necessarily a matter of doing “ethnography of reading,” which is essentially a traditional ethnographic investigation of a given set of readers. Of course it’s important to examine local means of reading, interpretation and textual reception, as Jonathan Boyarin or Janice Radway or Charles Bazerman have done in various contexts from physics labs to Book of the Month Club editors. But still, what I’m interested in isn’t ethnography of reading but ethnography as reading. Sitting on a bench reading a book as a way of being-there in an academic world. Reading as a form of participation, not just of observation. After all, the locals are constantly trying to get me to partake in their common means of textual exchange, by constantly suggesting books for me to read. These book suggestions are of course themselves invaluable ethnographic data. But reading itself is a way of learning one’s way around a space, a way of retracing a set of thoughts or “problématiques,” a way of developing competences of comprehension and belonging for later use, a way of assimilating some of the aesthetic parameters of a social world, its characteristic framing devices, its cast of characters, its rhythm. There’s a reason why half of my conversations here revolve around who has read what: having read a text provides a source of social solidarity and a ground for further exchange.

On a more theoretical level, in conceptualizing reading as a means of participation in an academic world, I think we must make a real effort to resist the temptation, always common, to theorize a social world as, above all, a world of physically co-present human beings in real-time social interaction. Rather we have to think of academic texts as moments in a complexly mediated and disaggregated social world, one where perhaps you can learn more about someone by reading their book than by having an hour-long interview. Ursula K. Le Guin has beautifully asserted that authors are, always, already there in their texts: “We write stories about imaginary people in imaginary situations. Then we publish them (because they are, in their strange way, acts of communication—addressed to others). And then people read them and call up and say But who are you? tell us about yourself! And we say, But I have. It’s all there, in the book. All that matters.”

I don’t know many true post-structuralists, but this blunt assertion of authorial presence should give them chest pains, if they happen to be reading this blog. Le Guin, incidentally, never claims that authors are the uniquely privileged interpreters of the texts they produce; but only that their texts, being the products of long labors of writing, provide evidence, acquaintance, knowledge of the author. This seems to me true, particularly for academic texts, which, with their thickets of formal citations and fairly clear displays of intellectual affiliation, are relatively useful guides to systems of professional relations. For example, there were certain sociologists who I already suspected to be quite politically different before I arrived in France, and who turn out, in fact, to be quite politically different. (A euphemism.)

In this sense, one can read social relations out of texts, can read intellectual trajectories and movements out of texts, can read stylistic maneuvers and claims of authority or importance out of texts. To be sure, reading alone produces a rather limited and partial experience of an academic world. But the academic world would be equally inaccessible, maybe even incomprehensible, without reading. Because, again, reading is a form of participation. And one could go farther: reading is one of the constitutive forces of academic worlds, a practice of social and intellectual (re)production, an act of worlding that yields a cosmos where there are landscapes of ideas and concepts, immaterial “schools of thought” and “intellectual trajectories,” clashes of ideology playing out at once in terms of pure theory and in terms of the job hiring process.

Now, to do ethnography through reading as a way of examining textually mediated academic worlds is not, I emphasize, to become the kind of idealist semiotician who believes that there’s nothing outside the text. Is not to believe that everything human is a text. Is not to argue that anthropology is just hermeneutics or that every percept or behavior is a “cultural text.” I oppose those theorists who hold views of this sort. But I also don’t think that academic reality is reducible to its more obviously sociological dynamics (to positions on a disciplinary field, to institutional hierarchy and competition, etc). That kind of sociology tends to elide or minimize the cultural and intellectual content of the world it dissects. A better way of thinking about academic life would perhaps begin neither from the institutional infrastructure nor from the purely intellectual dynamics, but rather from an analysis of the relations of intellectual production, a theoretical placeholder term that I hope to think through before long.

Will try to post more often. Coming up soon: photographic analysis of academic pride parades; preliminary readings of some recent French philosophical work on the university; perhaps notes on my somewhat problematic relationship to the French language…

Intellectual: … Difficulty is illegitimately manufactured whenever an absence of empirical breadth is mistaken for the presence of conceptual depth. Say you restrict yourself to speaking in the name of Marx and Freud, and then address things that cast doubt on what they said, such as the absence of a proletarian revolution or the presence of post-Oedipal identity formation. Not surprisingly, you end up saying some rather complicated and paradoxical things. But you have succeeded only in engaging in some roundabout speech that could have been avoided, had you availed yourself of a less sectarian vocabulary. But the continental philosophical game is mostly about deep reading and roundabout speech. By the time you have gone to the trouble of learning the relevant codes, you will have become an ‘insider’, capable of wielding a sort of esoteric power by virtue of that fact alone. This is a trick that the US continental philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler learned from Plato.

Philosopher: All I know about Butler is that a few years ago she won the ‘Bad Writing’ contest awarded each year by the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature. So she must not have been that successful.

I: Au contraire. In fact, the editors played right into Butler’s hands, though neither she nor they appreciated it at the time. An accusation of ‘Bad Writing’ boils down to the charge that the author doesn’t know what she’s talking about. In fact, of course, it implies only that the accuser doesn’t know what the author is talking about — and hopes that others share this problem.

P: But why worry about Butler’s literary malfeasance in the first place?

I: Exactly the point! That she is accused at all is already a major concession to her power. (This is why intellectuals like to make accusations: we want to force the accused to reveal the power they’re trying to hide.) So all that Butler had to do after her opponents’ opening blunder was to use the least force possible in displaying her power, preferably by conveying magnanimity. In short: don’t insult the accuser. Butler managed this is no less than The New York Times. She portrayed difficult writing as a kind of self-sacrifice that few have either the will or the opportunity to perform. The reader was left believing that Butler and her fellow travelers write as great explorers sailing to uncharted regions under the flag of Humanity.

P: Once again, I detect a note of sarcasm in your analysis. So what’s the point?

I: The point is that accusations of ‘Bad Writing’ merely refinrce the sort of difficult writing championed by Butler and others influenced by continental philosophy. The real problem isn’t that Butler doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The problem is that what she’s talking about isn’t best served by what she knows. She has clearly raised some important issues relating to gender identity, especially once the biological basis of sexuality is called into question. These issues are bound to loom large in law and politics in the coming years, especially as developments in medical research and biotechnology allow for various cross-gendered possibilities that go well beyond cross-dressing: suppose people could easily undergo a sex change or be equipped to performa role traditionally restricted to one sex – such as carrying a pregnancy to term? However, you can’t get very far addressing these questions if you’re armed with little more than a pastiche of recent French post-structuralist thought.

I put in bold the parts that I find most interesting. I particularly like the analysis of “bad writing” as a kind of performative speech act – one which is based on shared incomprehension on the part of its utterer as well as their audience, one which, in a sense, projects ignorance and incomprehension into the writer when in point of fact it exists primarily in the reader. This is an important compromise position between two overly dichotomous positions on “bad academic writing” — one of which reduces charges of “bad writing” to a misleading rhetoric that hides other political projects (of advocating a more culturally conservative role for the humanities, for example); the other of which would view bad writing as simply “bad” according to purely linguistic and stylistic criteria (themselves probably unanalyzed). One is too dismissive of the fact that some people actually can’t make head or tail of a given text; another takes for granted that all texts should be equivalently readable. Fuller, in contrast to these positions, interprets “bad writing” accusations as products of a judgment about the writing itself, but one that is the product of a particular community of readers with local norms of intelligibility.

The other things that I find stimulating here are: (1) the idea that the complexity of some academic discourses is unnecessary and arguably even spurious, because it is a product of overly constrictive premises; (2) the idea that one examine important intellectual problems without knowing that one’s methods or prior knowledge are poorly suited to the task. I guess this is a particularly provocative accusation when it comes to Butler because she’s become so canonical, and I don’t really see what Fuller is suggesting she ought to have done instead (and calling her work a post-structuralist “pastiche” is excessive), but I rather like the idea that one’s scholarly habitus can turn into a (valorized, misrecognized) intellectual disability. That seems to me very plausible.

These are the books I got from George Stocking‘s office when he decided to give away his book collection in December. They are a strange memorial to the ending of a scholarly career.

He had sent out a half-comic announcement:

Free Books, Offprints, Journals, Dissertations, etc. from the Library of G.W.S.

Available Wednesday, Thursday, Friday this week in Haskell 213, 10am-noon; 1pm-3pm

First Come, First Served. Bring a Back Pack, Box, Carton, or Wheel Barrow

I would have liked to have brought a wheelbarrow, but there’s no way to get it up the stairs and no place to put that many new books on my shelves.

I wonder whether it was hard to part with the books. Maybe at a certain point in time one ceases to be excited about book collecting. It makes me wonder: are all humanists and social scientists also bibliophiles? My first temptation in someone’s office or living room is to inspect the bookshelf. Walter Benjamin seems to have taken this attitude to the height of fetishism: “Inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.” So he ends the peculiar essay, “Unpacking My Library.” And he commented earlier on: “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor [and hence unable to purchase books], but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

Stocking wasn’t giving away copies of his own books, I note. No, it was copies of other people’s books which he no longer needed or couldn’t bear to bring home to his house. He was giving his office space back to the department. There were a lot of hardcover books that I would not have paid for today. Old editions of classic books in my field, Diana Crane’s Invisible Colleges, Jencks and Riesman’s Academic Revolution. Old but well-weathered paperbacks, philosophy of science, Ludwick Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (an apparent precursor to modern science studies), a thin paperback by Santayana whose spine had never been cracked, books on the Enlightenment that are so old that their authors sincerely believed that there really was an Enlightenment that brought an end to the medieval darkness. I don’t know anyone who seems to believe that now, but it has a charming mythical structure to it.

There was a decaying copy of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. It’s the most popular of the books I got and the only one I’ve read so far. The tale of a white guy who had his skin darkened in 1959 and reports the experience of being black in the south. Interesting that Stocking was reading it. It’s a first printing. Must have been a popular sensation when it came out.

To be given someone’s books is to share a small piece of their history as a reader and collector. To be given books from someone two generations earlier is more like entering a time machine. You see which books mattered long ago to someone doing research in a different era. You might have heard of the titles but it wouldn’t occur to you to buy them new, if it were even possible to do so. But soon enough they blend into the long stacks of books on your shelf and you have to sift just to find them.

I know I got some books from my grandfather (who was, I confess, a professor), but they start to disappear into the shelves. I’m looking through for them. Some Hume and Dewey and Whitehead, I think, and archaic anthropology, The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, Gramsci and Raymond WIlliams, The Power Elite and The Twisted Dream. To open the cover is to enter a different imaginative world, where even the scrawled marginalia become interesting because you know the person writing.

The beginning of the Twisted Dream sounds like it could have been written this week. “The United States is in the midst of a developing social crisis, at once economic, political, and moral, simultaneously domestic and international…”

So the relationship with one’s advisors is the institutionalized moment of semi-autonomy from the institution, a moment in which one’s academic situation is governed by the contingencies of evolving personal and intellectual relations, and only more distantly by the bureaucratic requirements of the graduate program.

This can evoke all kinds of intricate psychosocial dynamics between student and advisors. Being in the middle of them, I can’t really speak from experience here, but let’s look at Janice Radway’s post facto description of her advising relationship, from a 2006 interview in the Minnesota Review with Jeff Williams:

“I first studied with Russ during my sophomore year. I had come out of a very middlebrow background and loved books and reading. I thought of myself as an English major, but didn’t aspire to a professional identity or position. I thought I was going to write as a journalist. In that sophomore year, I took Russ’s class on realism and naturalism, which met three days a week. He was working on The Unembarrassed Muse at that time and offered a special session that you could attend on Thursdays, where he would talk about the popular culture contemporaneous with literary realism and naturalism. I attended those sessions and was transfixed; I was not just transfixed by the subject matter but by his investment in the subject matter. I remember thinking, “This is a job, you can actually aspire to this as a job. You might think of yourself as a teacher, as a professor even.” It sounds silly and naïve, but that really was the moment when I thought about a different future.”

Williams interjects: “My saying is, you don’t get born knowing it.”

Radway continues: “Yes. That was the moment when I realized you could really desire to do this. He became a kind of mentor to me even as an undergraduate. Eventually, I wrote a senior honors thesis that developed out of that class… In that case, I was interested in class and class mobility, though I didn’t have a sophisticated enough vocabulary to discuss it.

“So I went back to work with Russ because he was very encouraging. He was quite driven by ideas, but he wasn’t self-consciously training us to take up research positions in top-tier institutions. He was training people to be teachers who loved the material they were teaching. He was a voracious reader himself and passed on everything he knew. He was legendary for leaving notes, clippings, and citations in his colleagues’ and students’ mailboxes almost every other day. In that way, he literally passed on his passion to all of us.”

Williams: “Do you do that for your students?”

Radway: “No, I don’t know how he had the time to do what he did. It was a different historical moment perhaps, in terms of the life of the university. He certainly didn’t have to contend with email or with endless amounts of administrative tasks.”

The relation with Russ begins in a moment of transfixion. A mimetic moment in which Radway learns to embody her professor’s passion even as it amazes and almost stuns her. A moment in which Radway feels her professor’s feelings and, in that moment, begins to see his present as her potential future. A moment in which an academic future becomes concrete, an academic aspiration becomes “actual,” a desire becomes “real.”

If this is really the beginning of the formation of a professorial habitus, an academic state of mind and being, then it’s interesting that it takes form all at once in a memorable event. As if the habitus were formed event by event, not only through a slow and unconscious process of accretion.

Then when it comes to Radway’s work in graduate school, what’s striking is that intellectual passion was transmitted through textual circulation. The measure of Russ’s dedication was the massive amount of “notes, clippings and citations” that he passed on. If texts are epistemic mediators in academic life, then here we observe the social effects of small texts in circulation, not huge things but merely clippings and citations, working as the media of daily sociability and solidarity.

Russ’s intellectual intimacy with his students was realized as he read voraciously and then “passed on everything he knew.” As if total sharing with one’s students were the true mark of intellectual dedication. As if students were offered all their professor’s knowledge. (A fantasy, that.)

But then in a weird moment of self-negation, Radway says that she doesn’t do that for her students. Times have changed. There isn’t time to share everything anymore. Oddly, she cites email as a reason for the diminishment of intellectual exchange. (I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would hardly have relations with anyone without electronic communication.) Here Radway repeats an academic figure I’ve seen other professors say: one’s charismatic teacher incarnated a form of total intellectual engagement, but one will never live up to that, never equal that.

We see here intense identification with one’s advisor (Russ offered Radway a future as he prefigured it) coupled to definite disidentification (I’m not like that!); we see humanization (advisors share their passions with their students) but also a fair bit of mythicization (“he was legendary”: hence he was not typical).

Here we can see that not all contradictions are bad. Here, contradiction worked as the medium for encouragement, maybe even for happiness. Here, the unrealizable fantasy of total sharing fails productively in the form of an intense (even if not total) circulation of texts and ideas.

This image of intense intellectual exchange appears as an extremely happy medium between the neurosis of total domination by one’s advisors (and this certainly happens to many people) and the anomie of benign neglect (which also occurs too often). I can’t help but notice, though, that intellectual exchange is described as total but also represented as very unidirectional here: it sounds like Russ was sharing everything while Radway didn’t give back much to him. Advising relations are after all based on an institutional hierarchy which one can, at best, try to evade and dampen. They are bound to be asymmetrical. The question then is simply what one can do, or do to with this asymmetry.

In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible manner is liable to be condemned as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, ‘a mere journalist.’ Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly use, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable. The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a ‘scientist.’… It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not. It has become a convention–those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval.

…Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle–but one out of which any scholar can easily break.

…To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

….Most ‘socspeak’ [that is, sociology speak] is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used–I think almost entirely–to establish academic claims for one’s self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): ‘I know something that is so difficult that you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of undeveloped type.’

…..The line between profundity and verbiage is often delicate, even perilous.

There are, of course, other explanations besides status for academic writing being unintelligible to the uninitiated. For instance, jargon could be one response to outside political pressure — one can imagine academic radicals like Hardt and Negri burying their politics in the grave of their prose. As people like David Graeber have argued, academics are permitted to espouse the most radical politics they can imagine, just so long as their audience is massively restricted by the social barriers embodied in their writing style. And as Mills also indicates, academic style is often something less than a means of attaining status; it can function simply as a condition of disciplinary belonging or group membership.

Alas, I don’t have time to give a good analysis of the politics of academic style, one more contextually specific than this one. But I like the idea that style is the vehicle for academics’ self-undermining desires, for a “vicious circle” of unrealized status or political involvement. Academic writing is an object of attachment and not just a communication medium. “Pose” not only “prose,” as Mills puts it. And a “pose” based on the logical fallacy that Mills points out: that readability is superficiality. My experience is that Graeber’s plain-spoken academic language is admired for that very reason (like in his book on value), and total incomprehensibility is generally scorned, but there is also prejudice, I think, against academics who are always too plain-spoken and seem not to “get” the subtlety of more baroque arguments. This points to a further contradiction in academic writing, which Mills knew but didn’t exactly say: academic writing becomes the vehicle for contradictory social dynamics; that is, our desire to communicate and our desire to produce community (or distinction) are often at odds with each other when we evaluate academic writing.

Finally, I note for further thought Mills’ hypothesis that, by becoming an academic, one is not just sacrificing income, but also the dominant values of the society that one is in a way rejecting, by opting out of (what’s ludicrously called) the “real world.”

Consider the following case. A few years ago there were efforts to get the University of Chicago to divest from Darfur. They failed. At the time, the president Zimmer justified the decision by referring to the Kalven Report, a 1967 document explaining that, in short, the university should be the forum for individuals to formulate their own political positions, but should not itself take political positions. Importantly, there were multiple arguments for what the authors called a “heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing they may be.” The Kalven Report justifies its conclusions with three arguments:

1. An argument that the university has no method for reaching political consensus, because it is obligated to respect dissenting opinions, and not overrule them by majority vote. Hence, any institutional politics would fail to respect minority rights. This is an argument about the ethics of representation and decision-making.
2. An argument that any institutional involvement in politics could undercut the university’s “prestige and influence.” Supposedly, a university can “[endanger] the conditions for its existence and effectiveness” by becoming politically involved. This seems to be a pragmatic argument about the university’s conditions of institutional stability, which are thought to decline as it takes sides on salient social issues.
3. An argument that the university’s “mission,” which is (predictably) described as the “discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge,” simply does not include short-term political involvement. “It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby,” says the report. This is a rather Platonic argument about the university’s apparently eternal social essence. (As Paul Horwitz pointed out last year in commenting on the report, there is of course no reason why every university must have the same mission. Moreover, as the French university historian Jacques Verger would have put it, universities change with the times, including in their missions and concepts. So this argument is, on the face of it, the most fallacious of the three.)

The report, of course, leaves room for an exception to the policy of institutional noninvolvement in politics, or rather two exceptions:

1. When political conflict threatens the university’s existence or of “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.”
2. When the university is involved with money and property, or otherwise acts in a corporate role.

According to the reminiscences of Jamie Kalven, the son of the report’s author (Harry Kalven Jr.), the committee could have put more stress on the exceptions, but chose instead to emphasize the guiding principles.

Now, in evaluating the Kalven Report we have to examine not just its logical structure but also its contexts of use. Although I am no historian of the document, a few initial points are clear. According to Geoffrey Stone, it was written in the late sixties as a means of allowing the university to avoid having to take an official position against the Vietnam War, in spite of what must have been massive student opposition. The document has since been invoked in at least three instances: the campaign to divest from South Africa in the eighties (failed), the campaign to divest from Darfur (failed, as mentioned already), and the campaign against the Milton Friedman Institute this fall (not terribly successful so far). Interestingly enough, this last instance was the only time when the Kalven Report has been used as ammunition against the administration. Faculty critics cited the report in order to argue that the $200-million proposed endowment for the MFI was a (conservative) political statement on the administration’s part.

This last citation of the Report is interesting because it cuts against the apparent trend of the document’s use: as a policy document serving as a shield for whatever decision the administration has already decided. I am generally inclined to agree with the judgment of an alumnus, Bob, who opined that “The Chicago Board of Trustees, with the complicity of the Administration, has used the Kalven Report to justify doing whatever it wished to do anyway, ignoring the Report whenever what it wished to do was fundamentally political (and of course chosing to do nothing is also to take a political position), and invoking it whenever it didn’t wish to be constrained in its activities.”

This points to a very important institutional facet of the Kalven Report, which went mostly overlooked in the otherwise good critical discussion among law professors last year (Geoffrey Stone, Rick Garnett, Paul Horwitz, plus comments). In short: a university, and most certainly the University of Chicago, is not simply a complicated intellectual community; it is also, and sometimes above all, a hierarchical quasi-corporate bureaucracy. The Kalven Report tells us itself that there is no means for the whole university to reach agreement as a collective. That holds for the document itself: the Kalven Report was not written democratically. Rather, it was written by a committee of seven professors appointed directly by the university president. Here is a key paradox of the document: purporting to speak on behalf of the university as a collective, it is in fact only the statement of a small minority masquerading as the will of the people. Or perhaps, the will of the administration masquerading as the will of the university.

Also, the document itself serves as an exemplar of codified, entextualized institutional norms, of objectified authority. The Kalven Report, after all, need not have been written – I suspect that many universities do not have an analogous document. All these problematic cases of divestment and wars could have been resolved ad hoc, without a guiding document. Nonetheless, the Report has managed to set the terms of future debate about institutional responsibility, accruing symbolic value over time simply by existing as an institutionally authorized text. The politics of putting policies down in official documents would be worth analyzing here, in much more detail.

What then, in the end, are the tacit politics of the Kalven Report itself? What kind of politics are implicit in its claim to steer clear of politics? (Not that everything is political, but claims of political neutrality are often deeply political gestures.) We know that it has served to save the institution from having to condemn Vietnam, to divest from Darfur or from South Africa. In the case of Darfur, according to one comment on Stone’s post, there was no morally neutral option available. The Kalven Report, it seems to me, can create situations in which, far from remaining institutionally neutral, the university administration can assert its own minority politics and thwart the will of the campus majority. Of course, since a central duty of the administration is making money, administrative politics can easily tend towards a cynical pragmatism in which positive ROI compensates for any negative considerations. Money and investment and economic action are not free of political presuppositions or implications, as the Kalven Report authors only grudgingly acknowledged, and it seems to me that exception (2), above, should cover an enormous amount of ground.

Of course, as I’ve observed elsewhere, business influence at the University of Chicago is immense. But I’m not sure that we can ascribe administrators’ false hopes of “staying out of politics” to business culture or economic necessity alone. Nor is it true, contrary to the pablum about timeless missions, that the university will cease to be a real university, or lose its public respect, if it takes sides on political issues. The proof of this is obvious: some 155 U.S. universities divested, at least in part, from South Africa, including prestigious institutions like Harvard, Cornell, and the University of California. It would, of course, be stupid to say that these universities have ceased to be universities in consequence.

I would hypothesize that in the last analysis, the Kalven Report serves none of the noble functions it proclaims: it does not make the university politically neutral or avoid controversy; it does not necessarily enhance the university’s prestige (since political inaction can well be popularly interpreted as a reactionary statement); it does not promote the individual’s right to dissent on campus, which is full of all sorts of semi-official orthodoxies; it does not help the university to live up to its timeless mission (since there is no such thing). As far as its content goes, it is a minor ideological document that serves to promote various convenient but false beliefs about the nature of academic institutions. Perhaps on the whole, Bob is right: the Kalven Report serves primarily to prevent the majority of teachers and students from having input into the administrative decision-making process.

Likewise with writing: what’s gibberish to my parents is, I must admit, pretty comprehensible to me. This is because academic language is a tool of social differentiation, used to separate academics from laypeople. But even so, translation is possible. Take the following snip of academic language I saw in an email:

Hi Everyone,

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating. Landscape is often implicated in power relations. Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership. The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project. In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I would translate this banal bit of prose as follows:

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating.

“I am an academic, and I am fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live.”

Elaboration: “I enjoy taking common words like “place” and “power” and treating them as major conceptual problems. I consider this activity truly fascinating. “Place” and “power” could mean any of a huge number of things, but I’ll probably just talk about them in connection with some minor research problem of my own. However, I will make sure to distill any particular places into the abstract, general idea of “PLACE.” Likewise with “POWER.” What I mean by ‘power’ is basically what kids in the street call “the Man” — it has dim connotations of the government, or big corporations, or colonialism, or parents, or all of these and more… And now, an additional twist! Since we’re supposing that there’s some kind of general relationship between POWER and PLACE, we can then ask what happens to POWER when someone or something is ‘out of place.’ Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, they mean that being ‘out of place’ is also being made into a rarified academic concept, disconnected from popular usage. But wait — one final note! Since other scholars have also been talking about these abstractions for some time, I will be able to make myself matter by joining their discussion.”

Landscape is often implicated in power relations.

“The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together.”

Elaboration: ” ‘Implicated in’ just means ‘related to.’ And ‘often’ is completely meaningless in this context — I don’t really mean that most power relations involve a landscape, because a moment’s thought suggests that lots and lots of power relations don’t have much to do with landscapes. I just stuck in the ‘often’ to make it sound like I’m doing work on something important, and to make myself sound legitimate — which is an important part of making yourself a good academic, OK? so get off my back!”

Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership.

“People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it.”

Elaboration: “I live in South Africa, and people down here naturally tend to think about academic questions from a South African perspective. We used to be a colony, but now we’re a post-colony, so we consequently have a post-colonial point of view. One of the things we study is how people try to prove their rights to own land by using certain ideas about land. These ideas have been changing since the colonial era.”

The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project.

“People think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I wouldn’t want to say what exactly.”

“Again, the words ‘often’ and ‘closely’ have no meaning here aside from making me sound important.”

In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

“I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in connection with those.”

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

“Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out?”

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

“If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”

So, if you put the whole translation together, it looks like so:

“I am an academic, and I am truly fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live. The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together. People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it. Also, people think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I’m not saying what exactly. Anyway, I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in that connection. Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out? If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”