I had lots of different feelings in graduate school, and lots of them weren’t bad. But for me, some of the hardest things were those ritual moments where your very Being is supposed to be under examination. In concrete terms, that meant the big rites of passage: the qualifying exams, the dissertation proposal hearing, and finally the dissertation defense. It’s easier to think about them now that they’re a bit distant in time.

Sometimes you have anxieties that you just can’t explain rationally. None of my advisors thought I needed to worry about my quals.

Yet here’s an entry in my journal from Sept. 29, 2008.

I was feeling practically gleeful about my exam, pleasantly numb, but suddenly
— I was at a Graduate Students United meeting—
   my roommate calls it a panic attack but I prefer to call it sick from anxiety
— I began feeling bad, locked myself in a little bathroom, locking both the locks on the door.

Horrible cramps in the abdomen, broke into a sweat, turned cold. I looked in a mirror later and I was convinced I’d turned white, the cheeks and forehead pale.

The scary part was less the physical symptoms than the total sense of not panic but weakness.

There’s the nice kind of vulnerability and then there’s the kind where you just feel terrible, a little desperate, helpless, I told my partner later.

So the bad moment was just sitting there in pain, my vision narrowing as if I were going to faint though I didn’t, and feeling afraid of how to get home, wondering if I could beg someone to bring me to their apartment and let me lie on a couch, prone. This awful feeling that something is wrong, and it had come from nowhere.

Then as I’m still in the bathroom starting to feel better, there’s a jingle of keys and a knock. When I come out I find the janitor, Joe, who works nights. I tell him I think I almost fainted. He says he goes in the basement bathroom and douses his head at times like that.

There used to be a cot down there, in the basement bathroom, but they took it away, I say. Too many people sleeping down there, he observes.

***

This all happened a long time ago and nothing bad came of it, really. But I’m posting it because public vulnerability in academia is very gendered, and I think it’s important for those of us who aren’t women to step up and think publicly about the hard moments that academic socialization wants us to endure.

I think because I’m generally unafraid during public performances, people don’t think I’m the kind of person who would feel anxiety elsewhere, in private.

Of course, not everybody has this much anxiety or experiences it the way I have. I don’t usually have moments like this; I actually forgot that this one even happened until I was re-reading my notebook the other day. That said, even though everyone is different, I do think that a lot of people experience massive and polymorphous anxieties in academic life. These experiences are themselves likely quite gendered, and, to insist on my point above, the way we talk about them is very gendered too. And who talks about them is very gendered.

I was amazed to read an article by some male geographers about “neoliberal anxiety” that had no mention whatsoever of anything personal or experiential. They weren’t even aware of the Cartesian and masculine quality of their discourse.

Indeed, there can be a lot of pressure to conceal these kinds of feelings and experiences, because they’re incompatible with the stoicism and invulnerability that is supposed to be part of professional comportment. As you learn when you teach, you can’t be sick, you can’t suffer, you can’t come undone, and you are supposed to be In Control. I mean, you can do these things, but there is pressure not to; they are almost maxims of professional comportment.

I know some people work against these norms, sometimes even building solidarities with their students by working against these norms. (I do that too, sometimes.)

And it’s funny how bad moments can produce unexpected solidarities. Like me and the janitor who told me about dousing his head.

I wonder what happened to him.

One way of thinking about a classroom is as a place of knowledge transmission. From this perspective, it’s intriguing that classrooms often evoke an intriguing phenomena that involves, not knowledge-display or knowledge-transfer, but precisely their opposite, performances of ignorance or what might be called “negative knowledge.” Karin Knorr-Cetina has written, in examining the fixation on possible causes of error among experimental particle physicists, that “negative knowledge is not nonknowledge, but knowledge of the limits of knowing, of the mistakes we make in trying to know, of the things that interfere with our knowing, that we are not really interested in and do not want to know.”

It’s worth pondering whether this category applies to a sort of anxiety about knowledge that I’ve often seen in American grad school classrooms. What I’m thinking of is the kind of conversation where people drape their statements in a shroud of qualifications, qualifications that communicate no propositional content but nonetheless index the epistemological anxiety and low epistemic rank of the speaker. These phrases are all too familiar: perhaps, it seems, in a sense, it would seem to me, to some degree, kind of, sort of, it appears, arguably, I would argue that, on one level, I could be wrong but, you know, you might say, I’m not an expert but, umm, I don’t know anything about X but, etc., etc. Such awareness of fallibility can also appear as a kind of corporeal knowledge, in posture, gesture, and tone: nervous laughs, pulling at one’s hair, avoiding eye contact, and the like. I can remember times in my first couple of years of grad school when, at the very thought of talking, my voice shook and my heart beat wildly. And it’s often the least authorized, most institutionally peripheral and lowest-ranking participants who feel this way — which is to say, in short, that epistemic hierarchy in the classroom can get written onto academics’ bodies and flung throughout their conversation.

When I first was thinking about this question, a friend of mine, Ben White, responded with an interesting comment:

What’s really interesting about the sorts of qualifying statements we make (‘In my opinion,’ ‘Perhaps,’ etc.) is: a.) one (i.e., in my experience) one can be supremely aware of doing this and the artifice of doing so, and one can even want to stop doing so, but nevertheless find oneself continuing to do this. A rhetorical compulsion generated by the social context, perhaps. But, b.) there is a strange circularity to these performances: the qualification, deprecation, etc. of one’s own comments in class, on the one hand, indexes the position of the student as unknowledgeable vis-a-vis the professor. On the other the hand, such qualification is something that can be and is deployed as a particular discursive strategy. If I reflect on my own classroom utterances, it seems to me that there is probably a positive correlation between the extent of qualification of a comment and the certitude I have of that comment. In other words, I think I’m more likely to qualify something I think is completely right on, and something that I’m pretty sure everyone would assent to (i.e., something that I think will be acknowledged as a ‘good point’). Just as much as there is anxiety related to performing poorly, there is also (at least for me) an equal (if not more intense) anxiety associated with performing well. I think there are interesting relations between this sort of anxiety about approbation and the hierarchical, competitive structure of the classroom setting.

I rather like the idea here of thinking about the anxieties of becoming marked by success. Any anthropology of elites presumably needs a theory of the social and psychological dynamics of being high-status. At the same time, for some possibly ideological reason, I’m very averse to thinking of a classroom as having structures of competition. As something of a social determinist, I tend to see the idea of “competition” as amounting to some combination of prior social determinations and sheer random chance; I’m not a big believer in the primacy of individual will or talent. This said, I wonder if this resistance to a concept of “structures of competition” isn’t another one of those intellectual lacunas in cultural anthropology: it becomes difficult to think about something like “competition” as a social form, to say nothing of the relation between competition and classroom knowledge-making.

But for the time being I just wanted to call attention to these curious classroom moments where people announce their nonknowledge. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen this phenomenon much in France. But then, I’ve been mostly looking at relatively introductory philosophy classes, and lower-level students are seldom the most talkative.

I went to Kat’s room to ask her something and found her on the phone and her friend Laura sitting on her couch bed. It appeared from Kat’s tone that something was wrong. I talked to Laura for a minute, and when Kat got off the phone I asked her what was the matter. She told me to sit down. Then she said, “Are you just going to use this for your study?” I asked her what she meant. She said, “You like me, right? You’re my friend, right?”

Portia, who seems to have since quit academia to become the president of a small record company, goes on to talk about how colleges are places where one is “caught,” involuntarily, in relations of sentiment with others. And not just sentiment, but sentimental education: taught how to feel. And taught how to appropriately display one’s feelings. It’s a great essay about the normativity of love and its far from voluntary imposition by “friends.”

But being “friends,” Portia points out, is equally a normative category, supposed, at least by Kat in the above example, to entail liking and affection beyond merely instrumental desires (such as the desire to acquire field data). Certainly this tension between sociality and instrumentality is something that makes me anxious periodically, when I meet people who are, for lack of better words, both awesome and ethnographically interesting. Not because I envision myself, as Portia did, as someone who might manage to stay clear of local friendships and just do the work, but for the opposite reason: because I am happy to make friends with other French academics, but as a result it then feels nonnormative to still be an ethnographer.

I’m not the only to have these anxieties, of course; people I meet are also worried at times about their unclear sense of being ethnographically “watched.” For instance, I do get jokes about being a “spy” with some frequency, but usually it doesn’t greatly interrupt normal social life, as far as I can tell. And unlike Portia, I haven’t encountered the normative discourse about being “friends” here so much. In informal social interaction, in public places where people come and go, it’s possible to pass more or less as a new and somewhat unmarked participant. Not that anything is therefore unproblematic, and I’m definitely not trying to go undercover, but so far, anxieties about instrumentalism haven’t become a major topic of conversation. We’ll see later about what kinds of friendship become normative… of course, it’s not only friendship and informality that are normative; people also have normative ideas about what it means to be an ethnographer or a “research subject,” and it’s interesting too to see what kinds of norms are applied to my presence as ethnographer. Ethnography of academic life, it seems, involves inevitable tensions between contradictory norms and expectations, between normative sociable informality and normative anxiety about being observed, between wanting to pass under the radar and wanting to get outside attention.

Instrumentalism isn’t a risk particular to ethnographers, of course. It can crop up even in regular academic relationships. That’s certainly my experience in American academia – there’s always the threat of having, or not having, careerist relationships. And such risks appear to exist here too, to judge by their dramatization in a quip I heard here, something like this:

Person A (seriously): Person C has a huge network, he keeps in touch with everyone, it’s admirable.
Person B (joking): So you’re saying that he keeps in touch even with people who aren’t professionally useful?
Person A laughs.

The joke being, I take it, that it’s admirable to rise above the bounds of narrow self-interest in one’s social relations…