The kind of theory I was taught in college had a big aura. It was a chic kind of theory, a French kind of theory, one entwined with hipster and bohemian aesthetics, with “female effacement” (Johnson 2014:27), with things postmodern or poststructuralist, with American whiteness, and with a barely repressed spirit of commodification and elite competition. In the American university context, this theoretical competition was readily entangled with clumsy masculine ambition and ersatz intersubjectivity, as one can see from a late-1990s satirical song about dating at Swarthmore College.

The song, “Theory Boys,” began:

Comes on the scene in a sharp wool coat
Bright eyes, hair a little too long and big teeth
Wanna strip away the phrases he recites by rote
Wanna find out what’s underneath

Don’t want to talk about anything I think I know
It won’t take long to see I’m hopelessly outclassed
And when you finally get him home
Has he got what it takes to last you?

One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
One of these days I’m gonna have to get away from theory boys
When they read Foucault for fun
That’s when you know it’s time to run! If they’re so much
Smarter than me, why do they act so dumb?

[Fein 1998]

Let us dwell on “Theory Boys” for a moment, since its lyrics convey a whole theoretical world. The theory boy’s theory was a prestige object, used not in the service of any collective politics, but as part of a masculine bildungsroman which was nothing if not cringeworthy. In the song’s scenario, the theory boy was a bad boyfriend because he not only thought he knew everything, he also sought to make you feel inferior in the face of his knowledge, distilled from obsessive readings of fetishized male philosophers — Foucault and, as another verse notes, Nietzsche. Today one would call him a mansplainer, and his ostensibly subversive cultural knowledge was not to be mistaken for actual thinking. On the contrary, it consisted essentially of rote formulas that may, nevertheless, have channeled genuine existential angst. “Man is mortal, life is pointless, God is dead and stuff,” was the summary of his views offered in the fourth verse by the composer, Elizabeth Fein, who went on to become a psychological anthropologist. The theory boy was a connoisseur of yesterday’s philosophical dissidents in France and Germany, and what he sensed as radical chic was really a palimpsest of yesterday’s academic imperialisms, now eclipsed by the United States’ ascendant academic industries. Meanwhile he protected his expertise by avoiding his interlocutor’s domains of knowledge; he privileged his own verbal prowess over sexual reciprocity with his partner; and he aspired to style by practicing Francophile bobo consumerism, notably, as the third verse notes, by binging on coffee and cigarettes.

Methodologically, the point is that theory was enmeshed in a system of angsty patriarchy and frustrated desire. It was not that the theory boy definitively preferred the literary androgyny of French theory to the embodied femininity of his partner, since being a theory boy was clearly his coy sexual strategy.[1] In the libidinal economy of the song, the theory boy automagically constitutes an object of desire for the woman protagonist. He seems enticing in spite or because of his repulsive and excessive qualities, which give her desire for him a certain masochistic quality. In this, her desire mirrors his: the desire for theory is itself a masochistic desire, because who but a masochist (in this view) would be dumb enough to read Foucault for fun (Kulick 2006)? Just as the girl never gets what she wants from the boy yet can’t quit him, so too, it would seem, does the boy never get real knowledge from Foucault, but can’t stop reading him. The three of them enter into a paraphilic love triangle, where a girl chases a boy who chases a book, which in turn androgynously embodies both the masculinity of philosophical authority and the aesthetic femininity of French culture. Yet all the while, by the song’s account, the theory boy remains oddly trapped in himself, and in his barely intelligible code: “At least he can speak his own language—no-one else knows how.”

We could say that the theory boy’s theory becomes a fetish object, in a libidinally charged though not directly sexual sense. The objects of fetishistic desire (paraphilia), whose inanimacy affords them a welcome stability and predictability, can play a powerful function in stabilizing libidinal economies (Berlant 2012).[2] Fetishes serve at once to comfort and alienate, interfering with easy fantasies of subjective sovereignty. For the fetishist is not self-sufficient, he needs the object; he is not in control, but neither is he obliged to swallow too much intersubjectivity, since his desire can be satisfied by a substitute; and ironically, his very lack of sovereignty can make new things possible.

Now the “theory boy” is obviously a specific social type, and an idealized one at that. He is not a stand-in for Anglophone critical theory at large; he is neither an Angela Davis nor a Herbert Marcuse, neither a Barbara Johnson nor a Sara Ahmed. But in the instabilities which afflict him as he tends his theory fetish, he represents a political dead end whose implications reach far beyond the narrow confines of American elite college culture. If the unfinished global legacies of twentieth century radicalism show anything, it is that dialectical fantasies of a happy merger between revolutionary subject and revolutionary theory have generally proven unrealizable.[3] “Theory” in its post-sixties sense has consequently often been in a bad relationship with politics — as my French interlocutors sometimes complained — and this fraughtness is inseparable from its potential to become an academic fetish object.[4]

Still, it is not my view, either in this case or in general, that theory (itself a highly historically mutable category) is a fetish by nature. It is merely analytically important that, at certain historical moments, it can become one. Meanwhile, no one would mistake Theory Boy for a utopian: he is too dogmatically affirmative about theory for that, and too hostile to other human beings. But his masculinist fetish of theory has the merit of showing a deep connection between patriarchal desire and the forms of objectification that continue to organize the theory universe. This has been only too apparent to women — and no doubt invisible to too many men.

Notes

[1] It is an ideological curiosity that French culture is strongly gendered female in American public culture (whether in terms of fashion and beauty products, of Paris as a love space/object, in terms of France’s military and economic inferiority to Britain and America since the 19th century, or in terms of its artistic and intellectual movements). It is intriguingly compatible with France’s general femininity-for-America that French Theory was often deeply masculine and male-dominated. For more on the ambiguous gendering of French national self-representations, see Cooper (2000), or on gender in French philosophy, Le Doeuff (2003).

[2] As Berlant puts it, “The fetish enables desire to be controlled, to be manageable, to be comprehended, signified, and also screened out by the material form. Moreover, the fetish has no uniqueness nor singularity, like the penis; it can always be possessed, reproduced, replaced, and collected. Thus it encompasses value and valuelessness, and construes desire through aggression and protectiveness” (2012:34).

[3] I think here of the unactualized fate of Firestone’s revolutionary Marxist feminism, or Biko’s subject of Black Consciousness, or even Lukacs’s theory of the revolutionary proletariat (which may not be the Ur-form of this fantasy but certainly traces an extreme version of its failure).

[4] Aijaz Ahmad comments even more pessimistically than me that “It is also arguable… that dominant strains within this ‘theory’, as it has unfolded after the movements of the 1960s were essentially over, have been mobilized to domesticate, in institutional ways, the very forms of political dissent which those movements had sought to foreground, to displace an activist culture with a textual culture, to combat the more uncompromising critiques of existing cultures of the literary profession with a new mystique of leftish professionalism, and to reformulate in a postmodernist direction questions which had previously been associated with a broadly Marxist politics” (1992:1)

References

• Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso.
• Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.
• Cooper, Nikki. 2000. (En)Gendering Indochina: Feminisation and female figurings in French colonial discourses. Women’s Studies International Forum 23(6):749-759.
• Le Doeuff, Michèle. 2003. The Sex of Knowing. New York: Routledge.
• Fein, Elizabeth. 2017 [1998]. “Theory Boys.” Swarthmore College Alumni Songbook, 2017 Edition. Pp. 7. Swarthmore, PA: Swarthmore Folk.
• Kulick, Don. 2006. Theory in Furs: Masochist Anthropology. Current Anthropology 47(6):933-952.
• Johnson, Barbara. 2014. A life with Mary Shelley. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

So here is a little excerpt from the preface that explores the relationship between French Theory and the recent controversy over the HAU journal in my field.

It seems retro to appeal to French Theory as a source for the utopian imagination. From the point of cultural anthropology, French Theory now seems outmoded, since the 1960s are long since “past,” and nothing now seems less novel than its Great Men, Foucault or Deleuze. What is the point of an ethnography of an outmoded moment of intellectual production? Ironically, though, the very rejection of French Theory lies at the heart of anthropology’s latest crisis of coloniality: a coloniality founded on new pedestals for old men (and, it must be said, some women). It is worth exploring this in some detail, to show how French Theory remains key to reflexive struggles within Anglophone anthropology.

In June 2018, six months after #MeToo, a more specific conflict erupted in anthropology, centering on the journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The journal’s namesake category, hau, had been extracted by Marcel Mauss from a 1909 ethnography of Māori “forest lore” and repurposed in his 1923-24 “Essay on the Gift,” where it became an increasingly decontextualized concept of the “spirit of the gift.”[1] In 2011, HAU’s founders, Giovanni da Col and David Graeber, inaugurated their project by drawing on Mauss. His essay, they said, was “the quintessence of everything that is equivocal, everything that is inadequate, but also, everything that is nonetheless endlessly productive and enlightening in the project of translating alien concepts” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:vii). But it was the journal itself that ultimately became an equivocal, inadequate and productive symbol of the violence of theory.

The insider critiques of the journal chiefly took the form of #MeToo-style public testimony about an abusive workplace. Anonymous letters from the journal’s staff testified that da Col, who was Editor in Chief, had systematically mistreated them. They described financial mismanagement, wage theft, “daily vitriolic reprimands,” “overwork, exhaustion, and de-moralization,” and “inappropriate sexual comments,” and they argued that the journal’s open access mission had been betrayed by transferring its operations to the University of Chicago.[2] Graeber publicly disowned the project, writing an apology for the failed “realization” of what he still called the project’s “brilliant concept.”[3] The journal’s continued defenders, preoccupied by internal reorganizations, declared that the allegations amounted to a smear campaign by disgruntled egotists, confused outsiders and misguided radicals making “destabilizing efforts.”[4] (The phrase became infamous.) It seemed to me that the journal’s defenders never made a very persuasive public case for themselves, while the alleged labor abuses struck me as depressingly common features of precarious academic workplaces.

But the ensuing debates, which circulated on numerous blogs and on Twitter under the hashtag #HauTalk, rightly made HAU into a broader site for critiquing coloniality and elitism in contemporary anthropology.[5] Just as #MeToo had insisted that we not deny our coevalness with sexism, #HauTalk reiterated that colonial structures in anthropology were not a matter of the past, but were an ongoing crisis in the present, as Zoe Todd particularly emphasized (2018). It was commonly observed that HAU was a product of the elite Northern centers of the field: it was based largely on social networks from the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago (my own alma mater). The Mahi Tahi collective wrote pointedly from New Zealand to ask, “How well have the journal’s recent practices, decisions and approaches lived up to the Māori concept of hau, a concept that the journal has continually stated is its central ethos?”[6] Adia Benton’s comments from 2017 were picked up again; she had been one of the first to say publicly what minoritized anthopologists had been saying privately, that HAU had fixated on “a rather old-fashioned model of canonizing the oldies,” and that these “select few ‘theorists’… skew[ed] white, old and male.”[7] Takami S. Delisle summed up the “core problem” as “white colonial elite masculinity.”[8] Was it a coincidence that the editorial board foregrounded representatives of “old school” anthropology, while the journal seemed to reject contemporary theories of identity, coloniality, race, gender, sexuality, and the intersections of all these?

Let us turn here to re-examine HAU’s founding statement, which turns out to center on a specific melodrama of masculine recognition. For Da Col and Graeber, the widespread influence of French Theory in cultural anthropology had left us a “discipline spiraling into parochial irrelevance” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii). Instead of borrowing ideas from Foucault or Deleuze, they argued, we should take refuge in the heartlands of our discipline, distilling concepts from ethnographic data instead of borrowing them from others. “It’s only by returning to the past, and drawing on our own hoariest traditions, that we can revive the radical promise of anthropology” (xxix). Doubling down on territoriality, the HAU founders also pictured the discipline in Leninist terms, declaring that “anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today” (2011:xi). I have nothing against critiquing imperialism, but unlike Lenin, Graeber and Da Col did not link their radical rhetoric to any collective labor politics or political project. On the contrary, the rhetoric of anti-imperialism worked to downplay the journal’s own elite position in the academic field. In theory, Da Col and Graeber sought to diversify anthropology, promising to “promote intellectual diversity across different traditions… outside the North Atlantic and Anglo-Saxon academic juggernauts.” Yet these were the very juggernauts that had seeded their project with its initial academic capital — a contradiction which the authors proved incapable of working through.[9]

Thus if the radical promise of anthropology was ever “revived” at HAU, it was buried alive again the same day. The obvious detachment from contemporary Māori culture—however much it was valorized as a source of ethnographic concepts—was only matched by an equal and opposite disengagement with its French counterpart. As an ethnographer of French academic life, I was struck by how HAU’s founders unwittingly replicated the form of shallow, ahistorical engagement with France that they deplored in others. They treated “French Theory,” “European thinkers,” “Continental philosophy,” and the “Western philosophical tradition” as synonyms for each other, reproducing an essentialized, undifferentiated image of Europe. And instead of seriously analyzing theoretical production in the Cold War moment of decolonization and Western Marxism, they invoked a bizarre analogy with Classic Rock, dismissing “French theorists from the period of roughly 1968 to 1983” as “the intellectual equivalents of Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin” (Da Col and Graeber 2011:xii).

If “Classic Rock” was passé to HAU’s founders, the funny thing is that then they got nostalgic for theory from the era of Dixieland jazz, Tin Pan Alley showtunes and Frank Sinatra. In the first half of the 20th century, they declared plaintively, anthropology had produced “concepts that everyone, philosophers included, had to take seriously” (2011:x). They noted excitedly that Jean-Paul Sartre had written about the potlatch and that Sigmund Freud had written about totems. Yet their casual expression “everyone, philosophers included” was really a misnomer for a narrow Franco-German sphere of white, male, overwhelmingly bourgeois intellectuals. In 1949, which HAU cast as the end of anthropology’s glory days, 68% of French university students were children of the bourgeoisie or of civil servants, while less than 2% emerged from the industrial working class.[10] Meanwhile, in France, anthropology hardly even existed as a discipline.[11] The Big Men of French social theory — Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu — were all initially credentialed to teach philosophy, via a French certifying exam called the agrégation. This philosophical legitimacy, not (contra HAU) some inherent draw of early anthropology, was key to why French philosophers took ethnology “seriously.”

Meanwhile, it is hard to idealize this intellectual epoch, since it was also a factory for vicious colonial and racist ideologies, as Aimé Césaire documented in his Discourse on Colonialism (2000 [1950]). The very French institutions that produced Mauss were themselves organs of structural racism, in a way that HAU never acknowledged. In 1952, Frantz Fanon described the agrégation as sufficiently racist that black men would simply not bother with it. “When an Antillean philosophy graduate says he won’t bother to take the agrégation, citing his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone.”[12] I find it disturbing that these seminal critiques of colonialism mark the ending of HAU’s preferred era of social theory.

In any case, when HAU went on to call contemporary anthropology an “intellectual suicide,” what they were lamenting was not a failure of political engagement with the communities where we do research, but a failure of renewed recognition from present-day academic elites. This is why I say that HAU was founded on a melodrama of masculine recognition. Its founding mood was embattled woundedness, and its founding relation was the fear of not finding legitimacy in the eyes of the Other — this obscure “everyone” that still seemed to focus on European philosophers. Da Col and Graeber went on to fantasize about creating a “different mode of engaging” with philosophy, but they did not imagine studying philosophers ethnographically (which, of course, is the project here). Instead, invoking a game of competitive one-upmanship, they liked to envision ethnographers showing that Deleuze and Guattari had been wrong about one concept or another (2011:xiv).

I have long appreciated Graeber’s contributions to anarchist anthropology and his activism. But he has never sufficiently processed his own investments in the elite section of the discipline, and I must disagree strongly with his conclusion that HAU was founded on a “brilliant concept” that was poorly realized. On the contrary, the project was always compromised by its basically affirmative stance towards anthropology itself, by its indifference to intersectional critiques of the field, and by its inability to move beyond the elitism and structural violence of its institutional origins. It was sometimes said during #HauTalk that HAU had renounced one locus of white masculinity, French Theory, only to enshrine another instead. Yet if we look at the social institutions of French Theory, it turns they are not only the institutions of pure white radicality that they seem to be. Like contemporary anthropology, they too are sites of struggle with coloniality and masculine domination. One reason for an ethnography of French Theory, then, is to learn from a set of French struggles that most of us are not even aware of.

Césaire, Aimé. 2000 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Chimisso, Cristina. 2005. “Constructing narratives and reading texts: approaches to history and power struggles between philosophy and emergent disciplines in inter-war France.” History of the Human Sciences no. 18 (3):83-107.

—. 2000. “The mind and the faculties: the controversy over ‘primitive mentality’ and the struggle for disciplinary space at the inter-war Sorbonne.” History of the Human Sciences no. 13 (3):47-68.

da Col, Giovanni, and David Graeber. 2011. “The return of ethnographic theory.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory no. 1 (1):vi-xxxv.

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil.

—. 2008. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1990. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton.

Sauvy, Alfred. 1960. “L’origine sociale et géographique des étudiants français.” Population no. 15 (5):869-871.

Todd, Zoe. The Decolonial Turn 2.0: the reckoning. Anthrodendum, 15 June 2018. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/.

Notes

[1] See Mauss 1990:114n24-25.
[2] “Former and current HAU staff letter”, June 14, 2018, https://haustaffletter.wordpress.com/; ”An Open Letter from the Former HAU Staff 7”, June 13, 2018, https://footnotesblog.com/2018/06/13/guest-post-an-open-letter-from-the-former-hau-staff-7/
[3] “HAU Apology,” David Graeber, https://davidgraeber.industries/sundries/hau-apology.
[4] ”Letter from the new Board of Trustees,” HAU Journal website, June 11, 2018, https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/announcement/view/17
[5] An overview of these debates is at “HAU Mess,” https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSHK7oM8jxF9ppg_oVnX2VjWofn0VrH3Hf7GMqvlygYSDcuJ3-rSlGVQNEyKeHXLNVjabGBfJnL1Mnx/pub
[6] ”An Open Letter to the HAU Journal’s Board of Trustees,” June 18, 2018, https://www.asaanz.org/blog/2018/6/18/an-open-letter-to-the-hau-journals-board-of-trustees
[7] Tweets by Adia Benton, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799037889024000, https://twitter.com/Ethnography911/status/908799682637389824
[8] Tweets by Takami S. Delisle, https://twitter.com/tsd1888/status/1009592747588714502
[9] To be clear, I also got my academic capital from this juggernaut, and I too oppose it in theory while benefitting from it in practice.
[10] See 1949 data in Sauvy 1960:869. I counted as “bourgeois or civil servants” the categories professions libérales, chefs d’entreprise, fonctionnaires, and propriétaires-rentiers.
[11] On French disciplinary recomposition in this period, see especially Chimisso (2000, 2005).
[12] “Lorsqu’un Antillais licencié en philosophie déclare ne pas présenter l’agrégation, alléguant sa couleur, je dis que la philo­sophie n’a jamais sauvé personne” (Fanon 1952:22). I have modified the English translation somewhat from Markman’s recent version (Fanon 2008:17).

I especially liked its capacious theory of women’s freedom.

STATEMENT BY CHICAGO WOMEN’S LIBERATION

February 1969

During sit-ins and other protests at the University of Chicago over the firing of Professor Marlene Dixon, a radi­cal feminist, for her political ideas:

What does women’s freedom mean? It means freedom of self-determination, self-enrichment, the freedom to live one’s own life, set one’s own goals, the freedom to rejoice in one’s own accomplishments. It means the freedom to be one’s own person in an integrated life of work, love, play, motherhood: the freedoms, rights and privileges of first class citizenship, of equality in relationships of love and work: the right to choose to make decisions or not to: the right to full self-realization and to full participation in the life of the world. That is the freedom we seek in women’s liberation.

To achieve these rights we must struggle as all other oppressed groups must struggle: one only has the rights one fights for. We must come together, understand the common problems, despair, anger, the roots and processes of our oppression: and then together, win our rights to a creative and human life.

At the U of C we see the first large action, the first impor­tant struggle of women’s liberation. This university—all uni­versities—discriminate against women, impede their full intellectual development, deny them places on the faculty, exploit talented women and mistreat women students.

(From Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 531.)

The summary judgment about sexism in all universities is quite striking as well. Clearly, in some ways gender relations in universities have changed immensely since 1969. But at the same time: the themes of the critique still resonate today.

But everything here is sadly unremarkable, aside from the gender and sexuality parameters. Workplace hierarchies and precarious gigs are ripe for abuse. Harassment is largely about enjoying power and transgressing other people’s boundaries. It exploits ambiguity and hides in plain sight.

These usual truths are all I have. I still think they’re worth hearing.

It’s an older story now, and I left out the names and places.

* * *

I had just graduated from college with an anthropology degree. I was bi and genderqueer, but not as out as I would get later. I was working as a temp receptionist for eleven dollars an hour at a big urban university.

Next to me at the front desk sat a charismatic gay man. I found him cute.

Let’s call him M.

We flirted a little at work. It was a boring place to work. I felt so very awkward in my totally ill-fitting, unfashionable efforts to dress business casual.

Once as we were leaving work at the end of the day, we kissed on the sidewalk.

M. was a bunch older than me and had a permanent job. He wasn’t my boss, but there was an asymmetry. But let’s be clear, the first time, the kiss was welcome. It was very quick. It had a certain energy, an anxiety. Our coworkers could have seen us. That would have been so weird.

We parted ways at the subway.

Maybe a little later there was another one kiss like that. I think there might have been about two okay kisses. I wasn’t taking notes.

But then after the kiss, or two, the office became a miserable space for me.

* * *

It’s hard to explain how miserable it was. Miserable in this nothing is what it seems way. There was the normal part of office life, and then the other part, the part hidden right in front of everyone.

The succinct version doesn’t do it justice. M. started to hit on me constantly at work. It was only barely clandestine. I really didn’t like it, I didn’t respond positively, and I didn’t know how to make him stop.

He sat right beside me at a long counter, facing the public. Whenever he thought he could get away with it, he would turn towards me and make these come-hither, sit-on-my-lap gestures. I’m sure he found it sexy and fun. I found it mortifying.

The truth is, I suspect he enjoyed my discomfort, or my powerlessness. I frowned back at him sometimes, or wrinkled my brow. These desperate, little gestures.

Two women worked right alongside us — literally three, five feet from us. But they never noticed anything. There are always moments when someone is looking the other way, when they’re down the hall. You would never think anything like this could happen in such a well-lit, sterile office environment.

This went on for a while.

I would go home at night and feel awful, like something was happening to me that I didn’t really understand; I just knew I felt trapped. I remember that I began to doubt myself a lot — like maybe it was my fault, or I’d asked for it, or I was misunderstanding something.

Sexual violence of this sort is mostly epistemic violence. Somehow your truth has become unhearable; you’re living something that is invisible; your version of the story is beyond subordinate, it might as well be nothing. All of these are pretty classic feelings for workplace harassment situations, I gather.

It was extra awkward to complain, because someone in my extended family had originally helped me get the job, by putting me in touch with her friend, the HR person for that branch of the university, who in turn sent me to the temp agency. I didn’t think much about complaining.

Meanwhile, some harassment scenarios might be unambiguous, but mine was awkward because there was a consensual part before it was non-consensual. That also made it harder to explain to anyone.

* * *

One day in the elevator, M. jumped me once the doors were shut. As he came up close and kissed me, I protested more directly than usual. “No, stop, M!” But it all happened quickly and he didn’t listen. The brief collision with an unwanted body. The elevator doors opened again soon.

Did he tell himself I was just being coy?

I don’t think he thought he was doing anything wrong. Not consciously.

But I also think he knew I didn’t like it, and that was part of the draw. They always say harassment is really about power — getting off mostly on power — but it only makes sense when you see it in person.

Meanwhile, I wouldn’t say it was capital t Traumatizing — to get kissed when I really did not want to get kissed — but it left me very rattled. At best, it was a really depressing boundary violation.

* * *

After three weeks on reception duty, I got moved upstairs to a different temp worker task, filing enrollment records.

Though the new work was deathly boring, it was a relief to be away from M.

But somehow, he kept finding excuses to stop by the file room to make sexual overtures. He even showed up and did it once in front of my one friend in the office, a woman.

It was hugely validating to have someone else see how egregious and gross it was. I’d started telling her about it, but I don’t think she really believed me until she saw it herself.

* * *

Anyway, after six weeks there, I quit. I had a new job lined up first.

In the exit interview, I told the temp agency I’d been sexually harassed.

I remember how hard it was to say anything, even then, when nothing professional was at stake. I remember having to get up my nerve. This little moment of hesitation.

The manager was superficially sympathetic. Should we only send women temps to that site, to keep them away from M? he wanted to know. (Which is a heinous cop-out.) Could we contact the employer?

I did let them contact the employer. The university HR person invited me to come describe my experience — to meet her, I had to sneak past M. at the front door of the building. But when I said that the first kiss had been consensual, she seemed really skeptical. I left her office feeling shaken. Frankly, the complaint process made me doubt myself even more.

* * *

My friend told me that M. did get reprimanded after I complained, and he seemed very chastened. This news didn’t really make me feel a lot better.

A month later, M. reportedly still talked about me, saying I kind of miss him* but he hates me.

[*my accepted pronouns at the time.]

He just never really got it, I guess.

Maybe most harassers just never get it. He just thought it was about “hating him” for some random interpersonal reason.

But I still don’t even hate him. I just hate the situation. And the lingering feelings that go with it. The feelings that maybe I am the bad person in the story, the broken one, the unreliable one, the queer subject who wanted something and then not what came next, the one who suffered through becoming an object.

It wasn’t a very bad harassment case. I had an exit. I didn’t suffer professionally. To be honest I don’t think about it most of the time. It was just something that happened.

Something that nevertheless should not have happened.

* * *

Why didn’t you protest more directly? someone might ask. But harassment is about constituting you as an object. And this process can be woefully effective.

When you end up spending so much time putting yourself in question, dealing with the confusions in your own psyche, it can feel like there’s no space to put anyone else in question.

And if you don’t know what harassment is, it’s hard to understand at first that it’s happening to you.

I wish I had been taught something about harassment beforehand. I wish everyone was taught that.

But would any amount of training really have prepared me?

I’m still not sure.

I just know how much I admire the courage of those who protest more successfully than I did.

This was written in 2018, but with some edits in 2020 to slightly improve the analysis.

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.

It doesn’t really matter to me what the survey is about. The survey has two fatal flaws:

1. It uses clickbait marketing tactics to try to reach me.
2. It purports to compensate me by offering me a chance to win a gift card.

Both of these strategies are insulting and, inasmuch as “professionalism” means anything whatsoever, unprofessional.

Literature review: Clickbait is just a bunch of clichés, normally used in titles, that seek to generate phony desires to become a reader of some online article. The standard emotional logic is about generating a feeling of missing out or an epistemic lack — “XYZ happened, you’ll never guess what happened next!”

Here, then, are some phrases used in the survey messages that I consider clickbait: “Don’t miss your chance to take part,” “We have not heard from you yet!”, “AAA needs your help!”, “Please watch your inbox”…

It’s as if they want me to believe that there was an actual personal relationship here and not just the nth request to provide data to an organization that gouges its members on fees and rents its journal portfolio to Wiley-Blackwell… Not to mention that instead of just sending me one email about this survey, they sent me three.

This takes us right into spam territory. Listen, if I’d wanted to participate, I would have. Show some respect for my time and attention.

The question of respect brings me to the atrocious gift card lottery that is supposed to incentivize/compensate for my participation.

Look, we’re (ostensibly) professional social scientists here. That makes us experts in how to compensate people fairly for participation in research. If a student of mine proposed to compensate their research participants by giving each of them a lottery ticket, I would explain that that was ridiculous. But giving out a chance to win a gift card — which is exactly the same thing as giving me a lottery ticket, from my perspective as the recipient — is somehow considered appropriate in many university and scholarly contexts.

Back when I was in grad school, for instance, this was how the student health services people tried to get me to click on their survey link:

As an expression of our appreciation for your time and input, all students who complete the survey will be entered into a random drawing with a chance to win one of the following prizes:
1st prize – (1) iPad mini, 64GB tablet with Retina display (mfsr $599)
2nd prize – (1) Kindle Paperwhite 6″ reader (mfsr $139)
3rd prize – (10) $25 gift certificates at the University Bookstore

My disciplinary association, by contrast, is considerably more frugal:

In appreciation for your time, you will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for a chance to win one of ten $25 Gift Cards.

Let’s suppose there are 10,000 members (source) — $250 total in gift cards divided by 10,000 comes out to $0.025 per member.

So basically we are getting a little message here about what our time and attention is worth: 2.5 cents is considered is a fair average rate for survey-completion services.

Now they also mention that the survey should take five minutes to complete. From this, we can calculate the hourly rate that the AAA considers fair compensation for survey participation.

$0.025/5min = $0.005/min
$0.005/min * 60 min/hr = $0.30/hr

So here you have it, everybody: for our professional time and energy in contributing to the statistical data banks of our disciplinary association, we are being compensated at thirty cents per hour. That’s just slightly more than 4% of the current U.S. federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr).

At this point, it would be less insulting just to ask the research participants to participate gratis.

But this brings me to my real thought about this. Governance by survey is not a satisfactory form of participatory democracy. And it’s not fair to force a group of increasingly precarious professionals to pay a large annual tax to a disciplinary association that fundamentally has no form of participatory governance.

The word for what they do is rent-seeking.

And it is precisely because my disciplinary association is a large, opaque and self-interested entity, seeking primarily to reproduce itself as an organization rather than to help its members, that it resorts to this sort of casino-consumerist substitute for participatory input. It’s bad social science and it’s bad democracy. The irony, however, is lost on the organizers.

Anyway, halfway through the volume, I find a compendium of sexist comments made to women graduate students at the University of Chicago. I thought it would be worth reproducing here, since I haven’t seen this text before and I think it’s good to have this sort of discourse out in circulation. While the general lines of this sort of sexist thought are pathetically familiar, the horror is always in the particulars.

THE HALLS OF ACADEME

The Women’s Caucus, Political Science Department, University of Chicago

Several of our professors have made these comments—some of them in jest— without realizing how damaging comments like these are to a woman’s image of herself as a scholar:

“I know you’re competent and your thesis advisor knows you’re competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you’re doing.”

“The admissions committee didn’t do their job. There’s not one good-looking girl in the entering class.”

“Have you thought about journalism? I know a lot of women journalists who do very well.”

“No pretty girls ever come to talk to me.”

“Jane Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the only decent book I’ve ever read written by a woman.”

“Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook.”

“They’ve been sending me too many women advisees. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“I hear I’m supposed to stop looking at you as a sex object.”

“We expect women who come here to be competent, good students but we don’t expect them to be brilliant or original.”

Student: “No, I wouldn’t stop teaching if I had children. I plan to work all my life.”
Professor: “But of course you’ll stop work when you have children. You’ll have to.”
Professor to student looking for a job: “You have no busi­ness looking for work with a child that age.”

Some people would say things are better now than they used to be. Well, are they?

It turns out that Cape Girardeau was just in the news, in a Guardian report on rural racism in America. A lodging house in town was once included in the Green Book for Negro Travelers, a historically important guidebook telling black people where they could safely travel in the United States. But Cape Girardeau is nonetheless a highly racist place.

In the latest Guardian report, it becomes emblematic of the experience of driving while black:

For younger African Americans, racial profiling by police has become the new frontline in their experience of driving while black. Marshall Egson, whose family owns a large colonial-style house in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, which was listed in the Green Book, likens the cumulative effect of being stopped over and over again by law enforcement to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“Every time I go out in my car I worry: am I going to make it home?” he says. “Over time it gives you PTSD. The way I see it, most every black man in America has PTSD.”

As the road miles of my tour of Missouri pile up, past and present seem to elide. When did the Green Book end and the present begin? Has there ever been a break?

I kick myself as I read this for not having had the political consciousness to have even looked into race in this town before writing about it. The stories are there to find.

For instance, in 2005 there was a rally against racism at the local hospital, which was reported on IndyMedia:

In July 2004, I lost my mother, my best friend to blatant discrimination and negligence from a very oppressed and racist hospital. After several attempts of trying to resolve this matter peacefully with the hospital, all efforts where ignored. So on March 26, 2005 my family along with the National Alliance of Black Panthers gathered in front of St. Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau, Mo to protest in a peaceful manner. We wanted to shed light on the past events of racism and unfair treatment of African Americans, as well as Minority Medicaid recipients.

According to Holli Wrice, who wrote the report, the city police rapidly tried to halt the demonstration:

During our peaceful protest, a police officer came to our demonstration and told us not to use the bullhorn, and stated this was against city ordinance. Sistah Shazza and myself demanded to see the ordinance rule. (Allow me to mention that The NABP as well as myself had contacted the Police Department prior to the demonstration, to see what measures we can take for such usage of the bullhorn, and obtain a permit and etc). The Officer told us if we continued to use the loud horn, he would lock all of us up.

The protesters were also subject to acts of overt racism, on Wrice’s account, beginning with a threat of vehicular homicide by the KKK:

Several hours into our peaceful protest, the Ku Klux Klan drove a truck as close as they could to us repeatedly coming very close to the curb in which we were standing. They yelled niggers; all the while they drove their pickup with a huge confederate flag waving from the rear of the truck. Some of my family went to a nearby restaurant and they were called niggers. Employees from the hospital showed their nametags and gave us the middle finger.

Wrice eventually concludes that “Racism still exists and is very thick and blatant where I reside, here it is 2005 and you still have white supremacists sporting Klan uniforms, Man, I need to tell them that is played out now, times are changed. America is still ass backwards, its up to us to keep the dream alive and going.”

A few years later in 2012, the KKK (defended by the ACLU) won a court case against the city to gain the right to leave flyers on people’s cars.

The racism that affects a town is of course almost certain to affect the local university. So it’s not surprising that the local college, Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), is associated with similar dynamics. (I’m not, of course, claiming to be an expert on SEMO or to be giving an exhaustive analysis of it. What follows is just what I can find out with a bit of online research.)

A recent analysis of language use on Twitter named SEMO #1 in the nation for frequency of “derogatory” speech, based especially on frequent use of the word “bitch.” The survey was methodologically controversial — and denounced by the college itself — because it consisted purely in a statistical analysis of the spatial proximity of derogatory language to the campus, without considering context or verifying that students were the ones doing the tweeting. But while the data is obviously a very indirect measure of campus climate, if you ask me, it definitely says something about local prejudices.

Local reporters in any case readily corroborated the findings. One Twitter user commented that “SEMO is super racist”; another person showed that students from the campus were advertising a “slave auction outside the university center.” Meanwhile, about two years ago, one student started an online petition (with 81 signatories) to denounce his teacher’s “hate filled racist rant blaming people of European ancestry for the plight of those of African ancestry.” (What specifically was said?) A 2016 Black Lives Matter exhibit was defaced with a pro-police message. And in a Facebook group “Living at Southeast,” efforts to discuss racism were shut down by school administrators.

A few years earlier, in 2013, an online forum discussion about whether SEMU is racist generated this response from someone in Cape Girardeau named “Nazi pride”:

“Black women r disgusting and mostly bald lol even black men kno white women are way more beautiful that’s y there always trying to bag one the white race is the apex of beauty and knowledge we tought u how to read write your welcome btw without us ud be wearing loin cloths chucking spears at elephants.”

In a remark like this, the level of racism and white supremacy is so extreme, it’s hard to even notice the exceptional stupidity that goes with it.

Meanwhile, liberals wrote to the newspapers in the wake of Ferguson with thoughts like, “As a lifelong Missouri resident, I’m sad that our state has gotten a racist reputation… I know most of us aren’t racists and are sad that Missouri has been labeled as a racist state.” As if racism was just an image problem and not about contesting white supremacist discourse and practice on the ground.

This brings me to my mea culpa as a scholar of higher education. When I went to this town in 2011 — admittedly I was just passing through, but still — I didn’t ask the right questions or look in the right places. And I completely missed the racial and racist dynamics that hang over this town, and over its local university.

It’s an analytical mistake I don’t plan on making twice.

Edit: I see that some people from SEMO are perhaps reading this post! I’d welcome additional commentary, corrections to my impressions, or any other feedback.

Here’s what the policy says:

Want to comment? Please be aware that only comments from current AAA members will be approved. AN is supported by member dues, so discussions on anthropology-news.org are moderated to ensure that current members are commenting. As with all AN content, comments reflect the views of the person who submitted the comment only. The approval of a comment to go live does not signify endorsement by AN or the AAA.

On the one hand, this only means that anthropologists who can’t afford the Association’s exorbitant annual dues are going to be further excluded from the Association’s public forums. (There are rumors that many anthropologists only pay the annual dues in years when they are attending the Annual Meetings, because otherwise membership confers few useful benefits.) I am certain that no one is going to be incentivized to join the AAA merely to write a comment on this site, which implies that policy constitutes a harmful form of economic exclusion within the profession without any identifiable upside.

But on the other hand — and even more importantly — this commenting policy just further emphasizes the Association’s paleolithic relationship to technology (cf. their latest tech fail), and in particular their weak grasp on the culture of web publicity. Websites like AN are public spaces. There are cultural norms about how online discussions work in such spaces. It flagrantly disrespects these norms to provide public commenting facilities — as on any blog-like site — and then to deliberately reject all comments by non-dues-paying members.

To be clear: you don’t charge people cash to comment on your articles, because they are already giving you something for free by writing their comments. To comment is to contribute. To comment is to create a space of exchange where otherwise you just have a one-way transmission into the digital void. It’s fair to ask people to create accounts before commenting, to cut down on abuse, but there’s little precedent for making it into a cash transaction.

If you want to have members-only web forums, the generic convention is to hide them behind a login screen for members, instead of coupling a public comment box to an anti-public message. Thus the current policy is both hostile to the digital public and out of touch with web culture.

“Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.”

“To gain knowledge, $$, and power.”

I thought their answers were quite interesting, partly for the interrupted way in which a healthy cynicism makes its furtive appearance, and partly because I suspect that my students largely fed back to me the stock narratives that the college was always feeding them (about critical thinking, opportunity, etc). In other words, the students always tell you what they think you want to hear. Or rather, since they rarely know much about you individually, what they think a generic professor would want to hear.

At the same time, perhaps I should give them credit for being quite idealistic on the whole about the value of education. Here’s what they said.

• Education is for students to learn how to critically think. Being educated helps you understand the world and aspects within it.

• Education is supposed to be for the expansion and knowledge of all people regardless of age, race, gender, or religion. However, education has become a privilege to those who can afford to pay for it and the access to resources.

• Education is for the purpose of creating an elite status. Education (for the most part) accelerates an individual to success + subsequent wealth (usually). I think this is the motivation to pursue higher education.

• To provide us with options, expand our perspectives & increase understanding/empathy. Also, to let us know how little we really know.

• To learn – learning fosters personal & societal growth. So essentially education is for fostering growth.

• To gain knowledge, $$, and power

• Upward movement/mobility + to extend the mind

• Education is intended to improve people’s intellectual ability. What it really does is create arbitrary competition among people.

• Education is intended for ensuring that the mass population can make well-informed decisions in their lives, giving us the highest-functioning society.

• Education is used to teach people basic knowledge or skills that will be beneficial for the future.

• To learn & develop skills for your everyday life.

• Knowledge = opportunity. The more you know the better.

• Education is a tool to help those who receive it be able to use knowledge and information positively and with good judgment to better oneself.

• to expand
  the mind
  of
  an
  individual

•  To gain knowledge about a subject, often so you can find a career within that subject.

• To show employers you have knowledge of a particular field.

• To have a certain status.

• It is to pass on knowledge so we can continue to build and grow our society.

• It’s to help you become a more well rounded person, does it always work? Nope.

• Choice that can give you choices (which you may not want to make) / To see the world with a more critical (less ignorant) eye / Opportunities to make change for yourself and others. Education gives choice and opportunity; it’s up to the individual to take it or not.

Reading back over their responses, I’m struck by the decidedly composite nature of many of these accounts. Many of them say in essence: learning is good in itself, and it serves instrumental functions (career, social change, money, etc). Really, it seems unsurprising that something as overdetermined as mass higher education would leave people with complicated feelings about its purpose.

It’s also interesting that many students want to preserve a definite distance between the self and the educational process. “Education… it’s up to the individual to take it or leave it.” “Education is a tool.” “Does it always work? nope.” In answers like this, education isn’t about the core of who you are. It’s about a process outside you that may or may not penetrate you. A humanist might exclaim here that all instrumentalism is alienation.

An eminent professor at a well-known university on the East Coast once alerted me to two distinctions. First, between students who need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else, and the students who need to learn that everyone else matters just as much as they do. Then, between students who are smarter than they think they are, and students who think they are smarter than they are. The joy of teaching here is that so many of our students are smarter than they think they are, and need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else.

On a crude first approximation, these two distinctions could be glossed as “elites vs non-elites” and “narcissists vs self-deprecators.” One might of course guess that the two distinctions sometimes map onto each other, but that’s not what I wanted to say.

What I wanted to say is just that, in my fairly brief experience teaching, there is a weird problem with the first distinction — “between students who need to learn that they matter just as much as everyone else, and the students who need to learn that everyone else matters just as much as they do.” In brief: some non-elite students both don’t think they matter, and are curiously indifferent to the mattering of some further others.

So on one hand, my non-elite students typically haven’t had that sense of manifest destiny or at least ingrained self-worth that elite university students tend to get from their family trajectories, their educational consecration, and so on. “They know they aren’t the best,” one colleague told me laconically when I got to my postdoc. A lot of these students are destined for the less elite type of professional-managerial class jobs, like school teaching, social services, or regionally oriented business. (Gender divides emerge there, of course.)

This non-elite attitude extends moreover to their relationship to knowledge. A lot of these non-elite students don’t exactly think of themselves as mattering intellectually. They outsource a lot of their epistemic authority to professors or other authority figures; they tend to give in really easily in classroom situations if you challenge their views. I’ve tried to get them to question educational authority and to encourage them to develop their sense of intellectual self-worth, but that kind of pedagogy (in addition to being a walking contradiction) is still something I’m working on.

But in the meantime — and here we come to the problem with the initial distinction — I’ve often found that my non-elite students can themselves be curiously indifferent to the mattering of other social groups outside their own frame of reference. For example, I taught two years in a row on an intriguing paper on American Indian internet access in Southern California. And both times I found a remarkable indifference among my students towards this indigenous population, even though the sites in question are only an hour or two away from my classroom in Southern California, and thus one might think potentially part of our local space of social knowledge. One of my students, voicing prejudice in the guise of reading the assigned reading, went so far as to accuse American Indians of being “lazy.” In all cases, it was hard for my students to really take seriously the actual existence of the people in question. (I suspect that the same would be true for other ethnographic cases farther removed in time and space from their present.)

In short: it’s possible both to need to learn that you matter “just as much as everyone else,” and to need to learn “that everyone else matters just as much as you do.” Perhaps the elite-nonelite distinction that I introduced above is, in the end, a very poor gloss on a complex field of social hierarchy and recognition.

The actual experience of sitting on the platform was surprisingly unstructured. We were far enough from the audience that people chatted to each other a good deal, often in low voices to avoid disturbing the proceedings. Everyone was provisioned with a water bottle and a program, and arranged into three long rows of seats facing the audience, behind the higher-ups. There was an amusing hierarchy of chairs, such that the Trustees had brown wooden chairs, while the faculty had white plastic ones. Longtime attendees seemed to have strong views on where to sit, and arranged themselves in the faculty marching lineup with an eye to ending up in their preferred seat. The front row had a better view, but were conversely more on display; whereas the back row was somewhat shaded from the harsh sun by a backdrop. Individuals’ seating strategies sometimes led them to depart from their place in the official lineup, which was supposed to be in rank order.

In a sign of the times, a lot of faculty people were on their smartphones during the ceremony. Most people didn’t use their phones the entire time, but did consult them at least every few minutes. If you look carefully at the above picture, the professor with the pink hood has her phone out, possibly taking a photo of the audience.

The ceremony had previously been represented to me as “the most required faculty event of the year,” and I received numerous emails over the course of the Spring semester reminding me that my presence was obligatory, informing me that absences had to be approved by the Dean, and so on. The reality was much more casual: no one seemed to keep track of who actually showed up or how they presented themselves. “Can’t you stand in a straight line?” the Dean shouted out to us mock-seriously as we stood in a ragged file to greet the students. I also noticed that many faculty opted for sun hats rather than the official academic caps.

As the phone usage suggests, not everyone was completely attentive the whole time. “Is it done?” I heard someone ask plaintively during the lengthy presentation of diplomas. At the same time, though, many faculty carefully watched the graduating students going by, often clapping enthusiastically for students they knew personally. There was an obvious social hierarchy encoded in the amount of applause from the audience — the more popular students received more cheers (sometimes supported by their fraternities or sororities). Meanwhile, some relative “outcasts” (often male) received practically no applause.

Where I went to college, the graduating class was far too large to hand out diplomas individually during the ceremony; instead the diplomas were handed out separately at small per-department functions. I must say that handing out hundreds of diplomas individually in front of a huge crowd is an inefficient process, in spite of the obvious efforts at efficiency by the diploma presenters. The graduates were arranged in a queue at stage right and, when their names were called out by the Dean, they walked across the stage, were handed their diploma, shook hands with the President, and exited stage left. A crew of senior faculty was responsible for making sure the diplomas were handed out in the correct order, and they did their task with nearly machinic efficiency. (The process presumed that the graduates had been correctly lined up in a pre-given order, matching the order of diplomas in piles.)

It struck me, watching the process, that the distribution of diplomas was a perfect icon of “education as pipeline.” Everyone has their place in the queue; they all go through the same physical motions; they all end up with the same ritual result (being socially recognized as graduates).

Yet within this visual representation of the education pipeline, there was also this odd, evanescent moment of individuality. You get to have your name read out ritually to a huge audience. Some of the students strutted or struck poses for the audience. Others tripped or dropped their hats as they traversed the stage. This added a minor degree of drama.

Meanwhile, the faculty on stage followed along by reading the alphabetical list of graduates in the program. Alas, a typo appeared over and over at the bottom of almost every page of the program, under the graduates’ names. “Academic Disctinction” somehow slipped past the copyeditor.

This didn’t surprise me too much, because only a few days earlier, a sad email from the campus bookstore had apologized profusely for having stocked a t-shirt where “Whittier” was misspelled. At least one faculty person at graduation pointed out that this shirt would probably have become a collectors’ item if they had decided to keep selling it.

There was in any event something poignant about having the graduation become, in effect, the “firing hall” for faculty whose contracts are up. One normally thinks of graduation as being about the departures of the students, but at places like Whittier where there are plenty of temporary faculty, it’s also a scene of the departure of precarious faculty. (Adjuncts aren’t required to attend, but visiting faculty and postdocs — everyone technically on the “faculty” list — do have to.) “It’s a lot of people’s last day,” one tenured faculty member told me. Behind every ritual, there’s a labor politics.

As I left the ceremony, I decided to walk home through the nature trail that goes uphill from the Whittier football stadium. The parking lot rapidly dies down into dust; you can see the dots of the crowd through the fence at right.

Even from among the leaves, you could still hear the brass band playing exit music.

I’ve long had a memory of having seen this complaint crop up in earlier decades, and I just stumbled back across its source in a 1969 paper by Donald Campbell (in which he critiques the “ethnocentrism of disciplines” and advocates a “fish scale model of omniscience,” but that’s another story). Here’s Campbell critiquing the “scholarly ego ideal”:

While on the theme of recreational reading and the duplication of fish scales, it seems appropriate to deplore the tendency of social scientists to feel that they all should read current newspapers, particularly the New York Times. Certainly the collective perspective would be better if most spent the equivalent time with newspapers of other epochs or with historical, anthropological, archaeological, or literary descriptions of quite other samples of social milieus. Rather than the ego ideal of keeping up with the current worldwide social developments, the young scholar should hold the ideal of foregoing current informedness for some infrequently sampled descriptive recreational literature. Too often our ego-ideals settle for uniform omniscience, knowledge of both past and present, of both here and there, and too often we settle for the same pattern of compromise all our colleagues are settling for. Compromise from the Leonardesque aspiration there must be, but even in leisure reading, one can hold as ideal the achieving of unique compromises.

Source in Google Books.

She was born in Morocco (and has had to think plenty about eluding the “diversity” pigeonhole); I’ve long been struck by her charisma as a public speaker (which isn’t to say that her political projects have always been unproblematic, needless to say).

In any case, I came across a recent interview in which she makes an interesting comment on the cultural value of education in France:

I’ll transcribe:

— Vous êtes la première femme ministre nationale de l’Education dans la République. On a un problème avec les femmes en politique!

— Ça va mieux quand même! Non mais je commence toujours par faire un diagnostique qui se veut relativement positif, parce que sinon, c’est déprimant et jsuis pas là (?) pour être décliniste. Je fais pas partie des gens — et il y en a plein dans le paysage politique actuel — qui croient que c’était mieux autrefois. Euh non. Par exemple sur la question que vous m’êtes posée, autrefois, les femmes, elles étaient nulle part. Le fait qu’il a fallu attendre 2014 pour avoir une femme Ministre de l’Education, ce sur quoi ça en dit long, c’est en fait comment dans notre pays on perçoit l’éducation. On perçoit l’éducation comme un vrai levier de pouvoir. Et c’est pour ça qu’on n’y a pas mis de femmes. Parce que, malgré tout, on continue à donner le vrai pouvoir aux hommes.

— Vous pensez que c’est pour ça ? Vraiment ?

— Ouais, oui fondamentalement je pense que c’est ça. Même si je pense que parfois ça s’est joué inconsciemment.

In English this comes out to:

— You are the first woman National Minister of Education in the Republic. We have a problem with women in politics!

— Oh, but it’s getting better. No I mean, I always start out with a relatively positive assessment, because otherwise, it’s depressing, and I’m not here to be a defeatist. I’m not one of those people — and there are lots of them in the current political landscape — who believe that formerly it was better. Uh no. For example, with the question you’ve asked me, formerly, women, they were nowhere. And the fact that we had to wait until 2014 to have a woman Minister of Education, it speaks volumes about how our country perceives education. We perceive education as a real instrument of power. And that’s why they didn’t put women there. Because, in spite of everything, they continue to give the real power to the men.

— You think that’s what it is? Really?

— Yeah, yes, basically I think it’s that. Even if I think that sometimes it works unconsciously.

So basically, Vallaud-Belkacem’s view is that it’s because we respect the power of education that we haven’t had a woman minister of education before. Within the familiar patriarchal logic that she evokes, women are by definition low-status, so they must be kept out of roles that are high-status; masculine exclusivity thereby becomes a sign of societal esteem.

The comparative question that immediately comes to my mind is: What’s the gender history of the U.S. equivalent role, the federal Secretary of Education? It turns out (I didn’t know this) that the U.S. Department of Education was created by Carter in 1979-80, and that the very first Secretary of Education was a woman, Shirley Hufstedler. The job was then monopolized by men from 1981-2005; after which there have been two women in office, Margaret Spellings in George W. Bush’s second term and Betsy DeVos under Trump. Nevertheless, neither GWB nor Trump put education at the center of their political or ideological projects (though No Child Left Behind was admittedly a large educational intervention early in GWB’s term).

In short, a cursory comparison seems to confirm Vallaud-Belkacem’s intuition. The United States has had several women Secretaries of Education and simultaneously it values education less as a zone of national politics than France does. This value difference is, however, also partly an organizational artifact, since in France but not in the U.S., public education is directly part of the state apparatus. It seems to make sense that since public education is somewhat decentralized in the U.S. context, the national education bureaucracy would be diminished in symbolic value.

(An aside for French analysts — obviously my claim is not that this political difference is entirely determined by gender, just that the gender difference here is symptomatic. Obviously, the French far right is doing pretty well this year with a woman candidate.)

In any event, I have long been struck by the usually-unmarked masculinity of Marxist theory, in both the United States and France. To draw on my personal experience in the academy, I might mention dominant male figures like Terry Turner, an activist Marxist-structuralist anthropologist who taught me an introduction to Marx’s work in college, or Moishe Postone, who has long led an intimidating Marx seminar at the University of Chicago. In these sorts of seminars, you’re not likely to hear much about gender, and the presumption of universal reason usually seems to lodge just a little too comfortably in the figure of the male teacher. It’s the usual critical theory paradox: ostensibly emancipatory ideas get drenched in the conventional authority of male power.

Now of course I’m not saying that there are no important women Marxist theory people — Nicole Pepperell’s work comes to mind, or Kathi Weeks’ recent The Problem With Work. A little farther back, the 1970s socialist-feminist theory world was one of the most important moments in Marxist theory, with books like The Dialectic of Sex and The Politics of Housework. (Though it is not always clear that most male Marxists have read those books…) And I emphasize that I’m not necessarily singling out the Marxist theory part of the academy as being the worst possible case of masculine power. (Though that would be a depressing comparative analysis which I haven’t undertaken.)

But.

The masculinism of Marxist theory continues in the present. And it is a problem.  A not-just-historical problem.

As a case in point, consider this new essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Headquarters of Neo-Marxism” by a political philosopher, Samuel Freeman. Freeman’s essay is a review of three books about the Frankfurt School, all three written by men (Stuart Jeffries, the German Stefan Müller-Doohm, and Peter Gordon). The reviewer is a man. Every single person mentioned in the review is male, except for Hannah Arendt in a footnote. And a quick look at Freeman’s five other book reviews in the New York Review of Books shows that he has only ever deigned to write about fellow male authors.

Gender avalanche. Is that a thing?

Perhaps I should note that Freeman himself is not a Marxist. I hadn’t heard of him before I read this review, but he seems to be a Rawlsian, to judge by his book publications. Rawls’ work, not incidentally, got denounced by at least one card-carrying Marxist philosopher as “an ideological rationalization of mid-twentieth century American welfare state liberalism” — and not surprisingly, Freeman’s seemingly favorite member of the Frankfurt School is Habermas. This on the grounds that “as John Rawls said to me, he is also the first major German philosopher since Kant to endorse and conscientiously defend liberalism and constitutional democracy.”

Freeman predictably goes on to write — in a non-class-conscious way that is entirely out of keeping with this topic — that “We may sometimes lament capitalist excesses and be bothered by the emptiness of consumerism, but few of us condemn capitalism as a moral corruption of the self that prevents us from realizing true human values or from knowing the truth about ourselves and our social relations.” It is only in the last paragraph that he concedes that the current Trump-Republican program might push us back towards thinking about a Frankfurt School-esque analysis of authoritarianism and capitalism.

OK, so Freeman isn’t “really a Marxist” (the gist of his essay is essentially “Marx + Frankfurt School for Dummies,” incidentally, with a strong liberal bias). It would nevertheless be pointless to draw too strict a line between the “official Marxists” and people like Freeman who seem to want to become public spokesmen for Marxism, as the latter role is already a form of participation in the marxian universe of discourse. And it’s that entire social universe of Marxist/marxian theory that is way less feminist and more masculine than it should be.

In Freeman’s defense… Actually, I’m having a hard time thinking of much to say in Freeman’s defense. It’s 2017. Nothing about feminism is really settled (and philosophy qua discipline has immense problems with sexism and sexual violence) but I find it a lamentable commentary on Freeman that he didn’t seem to notice the blatant masculinism of his own discourse, or of the Marxist tradition he is commenting on. And it’s a sad commentary on the New York Review of Books, moreover, that their editorial process evidently does not preclude publishing texts like this.

Total self-consciousness is manifestly impossible. That doesn’t make minimal self-consciousness an unreasonable standard to insist on, whatever one’s gender.

American universities, especially the most prestigious and the most exclusive, are skhole made into an institution. Very often situated far away from the major cities — like Princeton, totally isolated from New York and Philadelphia — or in lifeless suburbs — like Harvard in Cambridge — or, when they are in the city — like Yale in New Haven, Columbia on the fringes of Harlem, or the University of Chicago on the edge of an immense ghetto — totally cut off from the adjacent communities, in particular by the heavy police protection they provide, they have a cultural, artistic, even political life of their own, with, for example, their student news­ paper which relates the parish-pump news of the campus. This separ­ate existence, together with the studious atmosphere, withdrawn from the hubbub of the world, helps to isolate professors and students from current events and from politics, which is in any case very distant, geographically and socially, and seen as beyond their grasp. The ideal-typical case, the University of California Santa Cruz, a focal point of the ‘postmodernist’ movement, an archipelago of colleges scattered through a forest and communicating only through the Internet, was built in the 1960s, at the top of a hill, close to a seaside resort inhabited by well-heeled pensioners and with no industries. How could one not believe that capitalism has dissolved in a ‘flux of signifiers detached from their signifieds’, that the world is populated by ‘cyborgs’, ‘cybernetic organisms’, and that we have entered the age of the ‘informatics of domination’, when one lives in a little social and electronic paradise from which all trace of work and exploitation has been effaced?

From Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 41.

The motivations for academic work are similarly supposed to be other than pecuniary. One is supposed to work for existential reasons, or out of commitments to higher values that go beyond the purely economic — the “pursuit of knowledge” in some quarters, the dedication to making citizens or producing social justice in others. Yet it’s no criticism of these values to observe, as many have already observed, that these higher values can become alibis for an amplified self-exploitation. “You’re doing it out of personal commitment,” they tell you as you donate your weekend to the institution.

A strange moment in this process, though, is the moment where colleges and universities beg their own employees for charitable donations.

Thus I’ve been surprised to receive email and paper mail requests numerous times per year from my current employer, Whittier College, originating in their Office of Advancement. As the illustration for this post shows, they even emailed me before the end of 2016 to suggest that “Charitable giving might help reduce your income tax bill.” But the only reason I have a tax bill is because they themselves are paying me a salary. So if I gave them a donation, that would … essentially be returning a portion of my salary to my employer.

Which amounts to asking me to work for free, or anyway for less, as if, again, academic work wasn’t actually something you do for a living. (I say “for a living” and not “for the money” to signal that what motivates me is the practical survival of our household, rather than money for its own sake. For people motivated by the latter goal, academia is obviously an inefficient route.) In any event, this seems a strange message to send to one’s employees. The same thing used to happen when I worked at the University of Chicago, so it isn’t just Whittier College in question; but in that case at least I was actually an alumnus.

I would recommend to academic employers that they at least ask their employees to opt in to the list of prospective donors, rather than giving their names to Institutional Advancement purely because of the mere fact of their employment.

Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake is a well-documented and systematic analysis of what we might call American-style neoliberalism, which applies itself more through market pressure and managerial ideology than through direct state regulation (as in many European cases). The book focuses on what he terms the “devolutionary cycle” of privatization of U.S. public universities. While these universities have remained legally public, Newfield defines privatization not in terms of formal legal status or ownership but in terms of practical “control”: who wields influence, sets expectations and creates incentives. One of the great conceptual strengths of the book is its demonstration that privatization as process can be at once partial and paradigmatic, a totalizing system that may nevertheless benefit from leaving occasional gaps that can serve it as alibis. As he observes, ”the privatization of public universities is a complicated pastiche of mixed modes, which is why so many people can plausibly deny that it is happening” (28). Nevertheless, as he discovers firsthand, the decline of public support and financing has become an unquestionable fact (rather than a contestable policy choice) for many senior administrators. “State money isn’t coming back,” Newfield gets told bluntly by an assistant to the University of California’s chair of the board (188).

Newfield’s analysis has two modes, one taxonomic and the other more deconstructive. On the taxonomic front, he proposes a useful series of conceptually distinct (though empirically overlapping) “stages” of privatization: (1) the decline of the “public good” as an institutional ideal; (2) the chase for outside money; (3) the permanent growth of student tuition and fees; (4) the decline in public funding; (5) the calamitous rise of student debt; (6) the (partial) privatization of educational processes themselves (e.g. via MOOCs, online course vendors); (7) the decline in student learning that corresponds to resource scarcity; (8) the sociological decline of the “middle class” (including the professional-managerial workers) via wage stagnation since the 1970s. None of these processes are unfamiliar to critical scholars of higher education, but Newfield brings new clarity to a wealth of detailed economic, institutional, pedagogical and policy data.

In his more deconstructive mode, Newfield also debunks a series of standard ideologies about the privatization process. For instance: The search for outside research grants actually costs more than it brings in, once the non-reimbursed overhead costs of institutional infrastructure are taken into account (85-93). The humanities, in spite of their small grant revenues, end up subsidizing the sciences by bringing in large student fees at low instructional cost (Figure 7, 99). The private banking sector is actually less efficient than the public sector at providing student loans, but it has manipulated the national regulatory framework to capture this lucrative lending market, while undermining the public Direct Loan Program (201). Student tuition increases are not always the result of cuts in public funding, but in fact often precede them; and they also teach legislators that public funding cuts can readily be offset by other revenue sources (133-138, esp. Figure 13). Finally, Newfield argues that privatization is not the cure for university’s wasteful spending (via market or austerity “discipline”). Rather, privatization is a key cause of budgetary expansion, since marketization forces universities to spend broadly on feature parity with their peers and to “engage in a perpetual scramble for cash” (146).

In the optimistic part of his conclusion, Newfield proposes that each of these stages of “decline” should be reversed — by restoring public funding, eliminating student tuition and debt, restoring a commitment to public goods, and so on. The aim would be to create a new “virtuous cycle” of “democratized intelligence” and “mass quality.” Yet Newfield’s conclusion also foresees the skeptical responses that his essentially social-democratic vision is apt to elicit. He is all too aware that no single reform can reverse decades of privatization doxa. Thus the real aim of the book is to constitute an alternative common sense. Newfield’s book summons the reader to adopt the views that higher education is a public good deserving of public funds; that higher education should not be stratified by race or class; that it should not subsidize for-profit enterprises or cater to philanthropic donors; and that equality should become both the ideal and the socioeconomic reality of American society.

I must note that Newfield’s optimistic counter-doxa must now face a deeply hostile political climate. In spite of gestures “away from privatization” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign (319), the new Trump administration is likely to champion privatization and deregulation, not egalitarian public services. This context switch draws our attention to something that Newfield strategically downplays: the identity of his project’s logical opponents. These would presumably include the affluent (who would be taxed to pay for Newfield’s proposals); the private loan industry; potentially the for-profit and non-elite/non-profit private colleges (which compete with public institutions for working-class students); outside research funders, philanthropists and the educational tech sector; and the political Right, which is committed to shrinking the (non-military) public sector. Faced with this set of entrenched interests, is a renovated, non-racist social democracy even possible in the United States? And what might become of Newfield’s relatively non-partisan egalitarianism — which seeks to enlist university administrators and the general public, not just the academic left — in such partisan times?

But suppose for the sake of argument that this robust social-democratic (“egalitarian capitalist”) society were feasible. Certain further questions about Newfield’s program would still present themselves. Is it possible that Newfield still distantly idealizes higher education, and in particular the faculty? He notes that the UNIKE project in Denmark “helped suspend my churchy centrism toward the university” (xi), but his book still ascribes to the public university a unique potential for mass intellectual emancipation. The general ascription of emancipatory possibility seems fair enough (“universities can democratize intelligence”), but is it fair to go beyond that to claims about necessity (“only universities can democratize intelligence,” cf. 5)? After all, as many precarious intellectuals get forced out of the privatized university, alternative intellectual spaces and institutions are becoming more salient. Does the university, even Newfield’s hypothetical “mass quality” university, deserve a monopoly on intellectual virtue, in light of the forms of domination and hierarchy that, as Bourdieu showed, accompany professorial power as such? In my reading, the utopian component of Newfield’s analysis still leaves many open questions, but in any event, it is a great merit of this study to produce in one gesture a materialist analysis of our compromised present and a utopian wish-image of an egalitarian mass university. I would merely insist that all utopias are themselves social products calling out for further analysis.

Given my situation, in a university that was ruthless about publication, the only way to survive was to publish at a high level. And yes I will here offer a mea culpa: I was from the very beginning determined to publish up a storm and I did emphasize to my students and all those around me who would listen that this was one (and perhaps the only) way to keep the door open. It was more than the usual publish or perish. For all those suspected of Marxist or anarchist sympathies, it was publish twice as much at a superior level of sophistication or perish. Even then the outcome was touch-and-go, as the long- drawn out battle over Richard Walker’s tenure at Berkeley abundantly illustrated. The Faustian bargain was that we could survive only if we made our radicalism academically respectable and respectability meant a level of academicism that over time made our work less accessible. It became hard to combine a radical pedagogy (of the sort pioneered by Bill Bunge in the Detroit Geographical Expedition) and social activism with academic respectability. Many of my colleagues in the radical movement, those with anarchist leanings in particular, did not care for that choice (for very good reasons) with the result that many of them, sadly, failed or chose not to consolidate academic positions and the space that we had collectively opened was threatened.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this kind of comment about the aftermath of the 1960s — in short, that many radicalized academics washed out of the academy for lack of academic legitimacy. That kind of details are good counterpoints to the stereotypes about how the American academy is populated by “tenured radicals.”

I would also underline Harvey’s remark that, “For all those suspected of Marxist or anarchist sympathies, it was publish twice as much at a superior level of sophistication or perish.” Harvey has always come across to me as a particularly thorough type of scholar — even to the point of being verbose — and now I see why.

Here’s what Whittier College looks like this time of year.

I confess I avoided a handful of passers-by in taking these photographs, but the sense of momentary social emptiness is very real nevertheless, as if emptiness was one moment at the far end of a swinging pendulum of social motion.

I ended up concluding that the Bad Writing Contest was a scene where low-status-academics got to symbolically denounce higher-status academics, so in that sense the whole affair was basically about status dominance; but I had put the project behind me, until I was reminded of the topic by Corey Robin’s recent comments about Judith Butler as a public intellectual. I’d like to focus briefly on his main claim: that Butler’s seemingly inaccessible writing style did not prevent her work from being culturally generative and iconic. As he puts it:

It is Gender Trouble—that difficult, knotty, complicated book, with a prose style that violates all the rules of Good Public Writing—that has generated the largest public or publics of all: the queer polity we all live in today.

To be clear, Robin’s view is that Butler’s success as public intellectual was neither because nor in spite of her prose style, but rather that success was altogether orthogonal to prose style. He proposes that “it’s not the style that makes the writing (and the intellectual) public. It’s not the audience. It’s the aspiration to create an audience.”

I can’t avoid thinking that Robin is too hasty here to dismiss “style” as a force in the social world. Here I would stay close to the usual readings of the “linguistic turn” and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin or Roland Barthes, and insist that style is not external to the production of social relations in writing. Rather, it is intrinsic to their being.

One could make Robin’s argument more persuasive, accordingly, by not drawing such strict distinctions between style, empirical audiences, and aspiration-to-create-publics. If style mediates social relations in texts, then one’s “aspiration to create an audience” must necessarily occur in and through style. And an aspirational audience, moreover, cannot spring from nowhere; it is at best a symbolic tranformation of existing social realities.

We can speculate about all the different ways that this occurs, or we can actually do ethnographic research on readers of critical theory, as I did in my 2008 paper on literary theory classrooms. I didn’t do research on Butler’s readers specifically, but I can imagine that for some readers, the prose of Gender Trouble can be transfixing precisely because of its difficulty, or can be a rite of passage because of its difficulty, or an important moment of socialization; or perhaps it can come to constitute an incomprehensible locus classicus. One time I actually heard a queer studies ethnographer declare that he had had to read Gender Trouble to be in the field, but that it was commonly understood to be impossible to make heads or tails of.

In any event, Robin goes on to draw some conclusions about the generativity of public intellectual work:

In the act of writing for a public, intellectuals create the public for which they write.

This is why the debate over jargon versus plain language is, in this context, misplaced. The underlying assumption of that debate is that the public is simply there, waiting to be addressed.

But again, style mediates potential readerships as well as actually existing ones. I agree that “jargon vs plain language” is an unhelpful way to frame the issue, but it remains the case that style is massively consequential in  facilitating relationships with readers. Let’s be sympathetic, though, and reformulate Robin’s view as saying that through its very style, public intellectual work can generate new publics and reorganize existing audiences. And I would certainly agree with him that Gender Trouble – in and through its style – has helped generate a “queer polity.” Let’s grant Robin’s claim that public intellectual work at its best is generative: that it can bring into being new publics, as Butler’s work has.

But we need a second big qualification here. Robin’s focus on an “aspiration to create an audience” presumes that we can distinguish between authors with this aspiration and authors that lack it. Ironically, though, it’s not true that this cultural generativity (or even a radically reimagined audience) was in any way Butler’s aspiration when she wrote the book. She explains herself that Gender Trouble was addressed to Anglophone feminist theorists of the 80s, a perfectly comprehensible public that was at that point already becoming institutionalized in the academy (I think) and did not need to be a particular object of authorial aspiration. Indeed, she tells us that she was quite surprised by the unexpected larger success of her book, in fact. Here’s what she wrote in the 1999 preface to the book:

Ten years ago I completed the manuscript of Gender Trouble and sent it to Routledge for publication. I did not know that the text would have as wide an audience as it has had, nor did I know that it would constitute a provocative “intervention” in feminist theory or be cited as one of the founding texts of queer theory. The life of the text has exceeded my intentions, and that is surely in part the result of the changing context of its reception. As I wrote it, I understood myself to be in an embattled and oppositional relation to certain forms of feminism, even as I understood the text to be part of feminism itself.

It’s fair to say that Robin’s appeal to “aspiration” as the criterion of public intellection is a sneaky way of bringing back authorial intentionality into our analysis. But Butler notes herself that her intentions were fairly circumscribed (to the feminist theoretical field at the time) and in no way decisive. Let us then, contra Robin, not appeal to authorial aspiration as the key ingredient in generative public-intellectual work.

It seems better to me to note, instead, that every author writes for an idealized readership that never corresponds exactly to an actual audience (if any), and that any text is susceptible to becoming culturally generative, whether or not the author aspired to that generativity. Contrast Gender Trouble‘s unexpected success with Hardt and Negri’s intentionally anthemic, though similarly difficult book Empire. Empire was a minor hit on the academic left, but it didn’t found any new polity, even though it sure seemed like it aspired to.

In sum, if we cut out Robin’s dismissal of “style” and his appeals to authorial aspiration, we’re still left with a perfectly plausible thesis: that “public intellectuals” can be distinguished from what one of my French interlocutors called “tutors of the status quo” because their work (and its characteristic style) ends up generating new discourses and thought-worlds, and new polities and publics around them. You can’t decide to be a public intellectual, on that view, because what counts is really one’s interaction with social context, even as this may take the form of rupture. Generativity vs repetition is a spectrum, moreover, but it’s not impossible to judge case by case, and Robin is obviously right that Butler’s work has been massively generative.

I wanted to conclude, nevertheless, with a rudimentary dialectical qualification to Robin’s thesis. In short: intellectual work can be generative even as it is alienating. Too often we assume that inaccessible writing is an either/or — either it’s good and generative (and the detractors are misguided), or it’s bad (and intentionally incomprehensible and its defenders are elitists). All my research in university classrooms confirms that it is almost always both: some readers are inspired, others are excluded; some have their mind blown (gender is iterative!) and others (often those with less academic capital, which sometimes correlates with race and class lines) are totally frustrated. I wish our analyses of intellectual work could all begin with the premise that academic writing is an instrument of social fracture and not only of cultural production.

Robin misses this, because he wrongly dismisses the mediating force of style, replacing it with a speculative aspiration-to-create-new-publics. Along the way, he manages to create a wrongly one-sided image of Butler’s work, as if it were purely positive in its aspirational generativity, and in no way structured by academic forms of exclusion (since “actual audiences” and “jargon” aren’t the real issues for Robin).

Don’t get me wrong — I admire Butler as a critical theorist, and the cultural circulation of her work is radically distinct from her person, fanzines aside. But we have to be attuned to the institutional reality of critical theory in the university, and Butler’s work, to me, is a also a reminder that even our great successes cast shadows and create wounds in the social body.

In 1984 I began full-time teaching in a tenure-track position at a small college in Ohio. One day, walking across campus with one of the most senior members of the faculty, I was discussing with him some classroom difficulty we were both having. He shook his head in resignation and said something I have heard faculty all over the world say so often, as though it explains everything, “Well, you know, most of our students come from working-class backgrounds.”

This time, for the first time, I did not stand there in shamed silence. Although it was not my most articulate moment, I said, “So what, Richard? So do I!”

He stopped walking as he threw back his head and laughed. Then threw his arm around me and said, “So do I, Diane. So do I.” I don’t know what that moment meant to Richard, but for me, that moment meant that I was able to say that being working class is not an excuse or a sorrow or a shame. It happens to be where I come from.

There are two kinds of social difference that come in contact here like a short-circuit: the teacher vs the student, the self-that-one-is and the self-that-one-was. The premise of this moment — two teachers talking about their classroom problems — is that to be a teacher, one has to objectify one’s students. But then it becomes obvious — at least in this story, which is why it’s even a story — that this kind of objectification depends on a folk sociology. “Well, our students are from XYZ backgrounds…”: there’s a horrible potential there to slip over the line that separates benign objectification from outright essentialism.

But this time when that line gets crossed, the narrator can’t prevent herself from letting her own social identity come out in protest against the institutional hierarchy that usually precludes teacherly identification with the student masses. And there’s a joy and laughter in that moment of deconstructed hierarchy.

I would still observe, though, that one readily stops being working-class if one becomes a tenure-track college teacher. Class origins aren’t everything; they aren’t necessarily identical to class destinations. Which is why Kendig can apprehend one’s own social origins as something deeply rooted within her but also as something that has become outside and thus a bit uncanny.

My name is ——. I am the Lucy Adams Leffingwell Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western University. I am also a lifetime member of the American Anthropological Association and President-elect of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. I am writing to ask that you vote against the boycott of Israeli universities.

My name is Dale Eickelman, the Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College…

I am Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. I write to urge you to watch this important new video where anthropologists who know something about the matter demonstrate how an academic boycott is ultimately personal.

I am Ulf Hannerz, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. I have been a member of the American Anthropological Association since the 1960s, and I am a former member of its Committee on World Anthropologies. I have voted against the boycott resolution.

My name is Myra Bluebond-Langner. I am a medical anthropologist currently at the Institute of Child Health, University College London where I hold the True Colours Chair in Palliative Care for Children and Young People as well as Board of Governors Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Rutgers University. I am a long-term member of the American Anthropological Association and a recipient of the Margaret Mead Award from the AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. I am writing to urge you to vote against boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA’s spring ballot.

I am Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, a member of the AAA for over thirty years. I write to urge you to vote NO on the proposal to boycott Israeli universities in this year’s AAA spring ballot.

I am Michele Rivkin-Fish from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I am writing to urge you to vote NO to boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA’s ballot this month.

These are all the opening lines of the anti-boycott emails. I have to say I’m struck — amazed, really — by the massive recourse to institutional affiliations, titles and credentials. It is as if the most important task for these authors was to establish their own power, as if that in itself conferred authority. None of these people are untenured; none of them are unemployed; none of them are adjuncts; none of them are working-class, all of them are privileged; and we’re meant to know and value that as we imbibe their prose. It’s like a parade of academic capital that you hadn’t planned on watching go by.

One particular slippage that I find interesting is the quite direct equation of the person with their title. I am XYZ, not I work at XYZ. I find that particularly pernicious, as there is nothing more antithetical to the spirit of democratic inquiry than identifying speech with the institutional trappings of its producers. And yet it turns out that the anti-boycott group has an explicit rationalization of this equation. They note in “ten reasons to vote against the boycott” that

Badges we wear at conferences, by-lines at the top of journal articles, resumes and terms we use to introduce each other all consist of names attached to titles and affiliations – institutional idioms that define who and what we are.

But is it really the titles and affiliations that define who and what we are? It’s an idea fit for a feudalism re-enactment camp, but apparently for this group of academics, the thought can somehow be defended non-ironically. Do they not realize that this proposition amounts to saying that unemployed scholars are nothing? And that their recourse to their own titles tends to make their whole discourse nothing but an argument from authority?

My father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people who don’t know him, of pointing to things with his right pinky. Why it’s disconcerting is that his pinky is only a stub. Its top half was sheared off on a conveyor belt while he was working in a feed mill that supplied the many duck farms then dotting a good part of Long Island east of Queens. As a teenager in the early 40s, he loaded eighty-pound bags of feed, then after coming back from driving a half-track across Africa, Italy, and Germany, he forewent the GI Bill to drive a tractor trailer delivering those eighty-pound bags to the duck farmers. While Long Island metamorphosed from farms to suburbs, he took a job as a dispatcher—as he puts it, telling the truckers where to go—at a cement plant that flourished with all the building.

When I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook, founded with the sluiceway of postwar money to universities and serving the people in the new suburbs, I would sometimes show up at the office hours of a well-known Renaissance scholar and Shakespeare critic. He was born the same year as my father and also served in World War II, but after the war signed on for the GI Bill to get through the University of Chicago. He always seemed surprised to see someone appear at his door; he was tough-minded, with a neo-Aristotelian, analytical edge common to Chicagoans of his generation, which put some students of my generation off, but I saw the gleam of ironic humor underneath, plus I liked the challenge. He would typically fuss with his pipe (this was when professors still really smoked pipes, and in their offices) while we were talking. One afternoon in his office, watching him light his pipe, I remember noticing that his fingernails were remarkably long, and polished to a low gloss.

If you’ve ever done what used to be called manual labor for any extended period of time, you’ll know it’s hell on your hands. Or if you’ve ever read Life in the Iron Mills, you’ll realize that class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

But personally, if I look at most academics’ hands nowadays, ten years after Williams was writing, I mainly see the capacity to feel pain. The whole image of ourselves as “mental laborers” all too easily leads us to undertheorize the fact that our work process consists largely of interacting with machines. We are professional machine operators, even if we don’t think of it that way, because our work process is computerized: we operate computers for a living. That’s not the only thing academics do, to be sure, but it takes up a great deal of our time, as reading, writing, research, grading, and communicating all get redirected into digital formats.

And these machines can readily damage our bodies. Particularly our hands.

For instance, one former graduate student writes:

By the end of my time in grad school, my wrists were in agony, and my left pinky finger was simultaneously strained, pained and numb.
Even an hour of typing per day would lead to aches and pains (up through my forearm) that lasted through the night.

A psychologist writes:

So it appears our geeky heroine may be showing some early signs of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Damn those long hours of coding physio data and its necessitation of bizarre hand movements!!

The critical geographer Jeanne Kay Guelke wrote in her 2003 Road-kill on the information highway: repetitive stress injury in the academy:

I experienced tingling, numbness and hot-and-cold sensations in my hands, together with pain and muscle spasms in my lower arms and wrists.
[…] Rather than finding the ‘disembodied’ freedom-producing, cyborg-like identity in computing as envisioned by some futurists, word-processing had made my own body all too tangible and limiting.

Guelke also mentions that “96.8% of a sample of students interviewed at San Francisco State University reported some physical discomfort associated with computer use” (392).

In fact, almost twenty years ago, the Washington Post was already commenting on the physical problems exacted on students’ hands:

Pax-Shipley, who graduates this month, has had to face the possibility that she may never completely regain the use of her hands. Accepting that fact, she said, “was hard at first. It was a long grieving process.”

Guelke offers a useful disability studies analysis of the whole topic, as well as a number of important political questions. Why, she asks, are we not demanding that computer manufacturers produce gadgets that are friendlier to our bodies? Why do we not have ergonomics clauses in our contracts or as objects of collective bargaining? How do gender and occupational hierarchy enter the picture? Needless to say, there are politics whenever there is risk of workplace injury, as there should be.

But I think my point is more rudimentary. Academics’ hands are fragile. They are a zone of vulnerability. We shouldn’t read them simply by their external signs (whether the nails are polished, whether we see calluses). Rather, we should become attuned to the hidden injuries of digital labor that can get sent out through their very nerves. We should see the hands not as a sign of privilege but as an object of restraint, the part of our body shackling us to the machinery of our work. Far from being signs of our agency and capacity to act in the world, as they are conventionally construed, academic hands on the keyboard strike me as one of the major instruments coupling us to our institutions.

JESSICA MARIE FALCONE
Kansas State University
Anthropology Program
204 Waters Hall
Manhattan, KS 66502

Here’s another example, from Bonnie Urciuoli’s paper on neoliberal workplace language:

Bonnie Urciuoli
> Department of Anthropology
> Hamilton College
> Clinton, NY 13323
> [email protected]

To be sure, there are good reasons for this information to be available. If you want to ask the author a question, it helps to know their contact information. If you want to get a sense of which universities are supporting certain research topics, it helps to know where a given scholar is working. Or even, if you are trying to do meta-research on academic prestige and hierarchy, it’s pretty handy to be able to see who gets represented and who doesn’t, or maybe to get a really crude measure of gender and racial representation based on the scholars’ names (which inevitably encode certain social characteristics).

That was the case for listing affiliation. But I think there is a strong case that we should stop listing affiliations in journal articles.

In brief: the naming of affiliation is also the creation of stigma. What kind of stigma, you ask? The stigma of precarious employment. The stigma of being out of work, “unaffiliated.” The stigma of career ambiguity. The stigma of not having an affiliation to put in this box.

You really notice the problems of affiliation if you graduate with a Ph.D., for instance, find a job in some other field, but still want to publish an article. Take my former job working in campus IT. Is a job in campus IT a plausible affiliation? I don’t think so: most employers require that you don’t use your job title for non-job-related purposes. What if your employer doesn’t want to be associated with your findings? Wouldn’t you need to show them what you were publishing beforehand? Whatever you might say about academic freedom, there’s less of it for non-academics.

For a year after I got my doctorate, I just kept listing my graduate department instead of my actual job whenever someone asked me for a scholarly affiliation. It beat writing “independent scholar.”

Underneath the current system of declaring one’s affiliations, there’s an assumption that one’s scholarly identity is equatable with one’s job, with one’s institutional belonging, and with one’s paycheck. I think that as global academia gets increasingly precarious, these things are all getting unbundled. You might not get your paycheck from being a scholar. You might have an institutional affiliation that’s partial, that’s barely declarable. You might be broke and unemployed but need to publish in hopes of getting a job so as to get less broke. All of these conditions are ill-served by the affiliation metadata that journals are requiring.

I think they should abolish it. These days, you don’t need to publish your academic department and campus address to be contactable; we have Google and academia.edu if we want to find someone’s CV. Publishing an email address is a sufficient form of contact information.

I think it may make sense to still collect metadata about the employment status of scholars who publish in journals, so that it will still be available for meta-analysis. But it doesn’t need to be published with the article. In my modest opinion.