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.

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.

• At an abstract level, how should socialization of graduate students look as a process? Should it be auto-socialization, self-socialization, where we mostly do the work of socializing ourselves into the professional world? Or should it be faculty-directed, top-down, a process of being led into the promised land of scholarly pleasure? Or should it be group-organized, a process in which students socialize each other and form a kind of social collective that learns from and teaches itself? Of course it is all of these, but I think that often our dissatisfactions have to do with the proportions between them. Each has its disadvantages: loneliness, authoritarianism, peer pressure.
• Thinking about graduate education is a form of reflexivity, but reflexivity has its disadvantages: it can waste time that could be better spent elsewhere; it can be a means through which we end up resigning ourselves to the present; it can even become a weapon turned against our colleagues. Still, the first question in the panel, and one that I like very much, is: what are the costs of not being reflexive? As Anneeth Hundle pointed out, these can be very concrete: the perpetuation of bad racial dynamics in a department, for instance. And it seems to me that the ethics of the status quo are inherently bad ethics, because they seem to presuppose that the actual world is as good as it can ever get.
• But the thing about reflexivity is that you have to be reflexive even about your reflexive moments: a potentially infinite regress. And one of the new questions that comes to my mind is: what kind of recognition and reward are we looking for in questioning graduate education? Do we expect to be pleased through the validation of our peers? The panel wasn’t perfect, in those respects; everyone surely had to walk away without feeling like their concerns were fully answered.
• Dominic Boyer argued (gently) against me that reform is impossible, and that thus we should settle for therapy. My first thought here is that even doing therapy is already a kind of reform, and that he’s understating his own accomplishments in teaching theory reflexively. (Though the crucial question might be: does he believe in therapy that cures? Or just in therapy that helps us cope with what we can’t change?) My second thought is that I don’t really care if we call it “therapy” or “reform” as long as the underlying ethical and psychological issues are being addressed. But my last thought is that I wonder if it’s worthwhile for us as graduate students to try to reform the current system at this exact moment. What if we ask instead: how will we do things differently when we are in a position of institutional power, when we have our own students; how does graduate education look when we dream of ourselves as the professors? The status quo has so much inertia that I think we need to look for hope partly in the future rather than in the immediate present.
• Finally, a major issue, raised by Anneeth Hundle but not finished, is: how are we silenced by academic institutions? And how are these silences structured and distributed? It’s a question with no immediate answer.