I do miss blogs.

Someone wrote to me this year to say, “maybe this blog should be a book.” I felt flattered. I don’t think so, though. It was writing for a different time. I wouldn’t want to have to revise it all for a new context.

Now I’m not in academia. I’ve said my goodbyes to my academic field. I don’t feel like quite the same person I used to be. I’m not concerned with the same things. I don’t need to criticize a culture I’m not part of.

So I think this is it for the old blog! Goodnight, world! I’m going to migrate all the content away from WordPress so I don’t have to think about WordPress any more. But all the content and URLs should stay the same.

I’m still around on the internet. I still write a lot. And you know where to find me!

My first summer in France I had a sublet for eight weeks. It wasn’t a place that made a lasting impression on me, but I just came across a list of rules and guidelines that I sent to an American grad student who needed a place to stay for a week.

I wasn’t in town at the time, so I sent him a comically long list of instructions. I guess I was trying to put down everything I knew in writing. It turns out to be a good reminder of all the details of everyday life.

The first problem was getting my friend the key.

OK, so it turns out that Duff [our mutual friend] is in Paris for a couple weeks, visiting his parents, and I think I’m going to leave my key with him. It should be a little easier for you to pick it up that way, even if you show up at some odd hour or whatever.

Then I gave a long list of considerations.

Here’s a list of practical stuff to know about the apartment:

Getting here

• Roommates’ names: Christophe (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Siegfried (cell: 06 xx xx xx xx), Ann (from Luxembourg). Not sure of their schedules — Christophe at least is coming home sometime next Tues or Weds. I don’t know how their English is but they probably speak at least a little!
• Address: 1xx Blvd de Magenta. Nearest metro stop: Barbès-Rochechouart. (From the metro, go straight south on Blvd de Magenta and it’s on yr left in like 30m.)
• To enter the apartment: you enter a code to open the outside door (which is large and wooden — it is also the egress for a garage). The code: B5048. The lock will click open (this is standard procedure for Paris, i don’t know if you’re familiar). Once inside, you take a right into the stairwell, hit the light switch if it’s off, climb two flights of musky-smelling stairs to the second floor (in America it would be called the third floor, but in France the ground floor is called 0, as you probably also know). You’ll see two apartments. Ours is the one directly across from the elevator, and you’ll recognize it by the “rêve général” sticker on it.
• The latch on our front door takes a wee bit of getting used to. The key only goes in one way up (it will not enter the lock if it’s upside down). Then, counterintuitively, you must you be pushing the key in while you turn it. Sometimes you have to pull the door towards you with the handle, also. Don’t worry, this will all makes sense when you try it, I think.

It’s like I was trying to provide just enough information about French culture and urban geography to help someone navigate the environment.

Once inside the apartment

• In case you get here and there is no one to show you around… my room is the one at the far end of the hall, across from the kitchen and next to the bathroom! I’ll leave some bedding. Try not to be too loud on the floor late at night — apparently it creaks like mad in the apartment below ours.
• Kitchen is all yours — my allotted shelf in the fridge was second from the top and my cupboard was the top one in the left-hand cabinet, in case you wanted to store food. Stove and dishes are pretty straightforward, and people share the usual spices, oil, a few dry goods like flour, etc. Basically if it’s near the stove or sink it’s cool to use.
• There’s an ethernet cable for internet on the desk. Not sure about wifi.
• Small supermarket (‘monop’) is just outside the house, two doors down. Open late if you’re hungry. Bad selection but quick. Also if you want takeout, I happen to be partial to sandwich grec (ie, gyros), and you can find a million Turkish restaurants just north-west of the house on Rue de Clignancourt. Finally, if you go down near the gare du nord, a bunch of shops and restaurants are open at all hours, even sunday when most stuff is closed.
• To EXIT the apartment: if someone else has locked the door, you have to unlock it from the inside with the key. (This confused me the first day i lived here.) Then to latch the door, you have to open the latch with your key while you shut it. (It’s apparently really bad for the lock to shut the door without holding the latch open.) Obviously, you should also lock up if no one else is home!
• Washing machine by the sink. Drying racks in bathroom and living room. Detergent in my room if you need it!
• You should shut the bedroom window if you go out — it can rain and even if it doesn’t, the kitchen window is often open, which creates powerful cross-currents that will probably slam the doors in between.
• The shared agreement of the apartment is that if something runs out (toilet paper, whatever) you should take your turn replacing it. Don’t sweat this too much, you won’t be there long.
• It’s good to take out the trash though if you think of it… trash can’s in to the courtyard (through the double inner doors across from the outer door of the building).
• In case of some type of emergency… the water shutoff is in the kitchen by the sink; hot water heater above the sink; electricity cutoff in the back closet of Christophe’s bedroom, which is across from the living room.

You can see a whole domestic order starting to take place, with rules for sharing, rules for using appliances, rules for how to make noise, rules for how to shut the windows… None of these were like legal strictures. They were just shared understandings.

Incidentally, here’s what my subleased room looked like. Most of the stuff wasn’t mine.

This was the kitchen.

I ended my instructions with a little bit of tourist information.

The bedroom’s balcony is awesome for watching the street, with a good view of Sacré Coeur at night. I recommend the view from the top of Sacré Coeur if you haven’t been up there, in spite of the throngs of tourists. Other places I highly recommend in Paris: Parc de Belleville also has a stupendous view of town and no tourists; Parc de St-Cloud, near the end of metro 9 and 10 and technically outside the city limits, is beautiful and quiet and you can walk for hours in the woods. And basically everywhere without tourists is a much more interesting place to walk around on the street (19th and 20th arrondissements are good for that). Across the street from our house is the beginning of the Rue de Faubourg Poisonnière, which is a good little street to walk south on.

If you read all this, you get the idea that it wasn’t a bad place to live.

But when I remember living in this place, what I remember is mostly the extreme solitude of early fieldwork. I liked my roommates, especially Christophe, but they were never home. It was summer, so my research sites in French universities were closed down, and I didn’t have much to do. I remember staying up until the middle of the night and cooking greasy food by myself. I obviously liked going for walks, which evoked this whole tradition of exploring Paris by foot. But then, there are so many racial, class, and gender politics on the Paris streets. To explore Paris without being hassled by the police for your skin color is already a form of white privilege, I would have to say.

It’s been about twelve weeks since I left my faculty job in South Africa. I really liked teaching there, partly because the weight of the Apartheid past was still so very present in Stellenbosch that, in an unexpected way, it made it feel especially worthwhile to teach critical social science. But it was just too far from my partner and our kid, who had stayed here. Obviously, we had explored different options. Leaving Stellenbosch ended up being the right thing, and I’m not ambivalent about it, even though I miss the teaching.

Here’s what I wrote on Facebook as I was leaving:

I made so many mistakes in the classroom this year, but for obscure reasons, I also really fell in love with teaching in South Africa, so much that I’m in tears now, writing this. My colleagues told me to be ambitious and teach what I thought was challenging, which was the opposite of my postdoc, where my boss said the students were pretty mediocre and not to expect much. Here I got less afraid of the classroom, and more in touch with which boundaries I need and which ones I don’t. I got better at being myself, at accepting the mistakes and fixing them, at being reflexive in front of the students, and at managing bad affects (mine & other people’s). Some students didn’t like my act and some loved it, and sometimes their critiques of my classes were spot on, and sometimes they came from detached kids who rarely showed up. I think I got better at hearing the critiques and doing my best and just feeling… alive. I don’t necessarily know what people thought or what they took away, and that indeterminacy is important. Teaching is a modest project. But I want to believe that when I was more present, they were more present too. Sometimes I could see it in their faces, I thought; and to my considerable delight, a lot of supposedly “bad students” sneakily turned out to be pretty good ethnographers.

To leave a place is to figure out how to acknowledge your losses, to learn what you will miss.

That experience also taught me, contrary to what I’d imagined, that mixed feelings are not the same thing as ambivalence. Ambivalence in the strong sense, I think, only emerges when mixed feelings are also in conflict with each other, or express some contradiction. But you can feel happy and sad at the same time without having this sense of unresolution that ambivalence provides. Ambivalence is a way of deferring the solutions to struggles, of keeping contradictions open (sometimes, of course, it is an permanent deferral). But me, I’m at peace with my mixed feelings.

Still, on a professional front, it was very hard to leave a teaching job without having another one figured out first. I hope I can find a new university position in America, but we’ll see, since the academic job market in my field is still pretty meager. I still think my work is good. But I’m still writing about precarity, and experiencing it.

We often think of precarity as meaning short-term work contracts, but oddly, when I was at Stellenbosch, I had a permanent academic position, but it was still precarious because the geography was so incompatible with my life realities. The trip, one way, was 25 hours and three flights, minimum.

I liked my colleagues and I’m happy that I’m going to stay affiliated with my department in Stellenbosch for the next few years. I’ll go back and visit, maybe even teach a short course.

Meanwhile, I’m doing much more childcare, and trying to finish my book about French disappointed utopians. There are a lot of coffeeshops in this neighborhood, which constitutes a sort of college town for Case Western Reserve University. Maybe I’ll write more about this neighborhood, with its odd class markers and its unusual (for America) degree of racial diversity. The spaces around universities always bring out my ethnographic instincts.

Being a bit anxious makes it easier to get up and get moving.

I’m staying in a basement flat, not even really a studio, since it has no kitchen, but only a bedroom, all white, which I’ve never decorated except with lamplight. By the bed there’s a door to a cave-like bathroom, which has no window, but does have a cranky exhaust fan barely able to remove the accumulation of moisture. Often when I go out, I leave the fan on.

Today I get up and find my glasses and, without even having coffee, sit down at my jumbled desk in the next room. The next room is technically not my apartment, but rather a furnished basement belonging to the larger house where my landlords live. (I do share their kitchen and some of the other living space.) In the basement, my desk is stashed in a corner, with a ridiculous ergonomic keyboard (the Kinesis Advantage), some piles of papers and notebooks, and a bit of music recording gear.

Anyway, I have to teach today at nine, but I want to send an Important Email beforehand, so I spend a while writing that. I puzzle over the wording. I probably also procrastinate a bit with Facebook and the news, but eleven hours later, that’s already become blurry in my memory.

An hour goes by, and then I have to I rush through getting ready, pausing for a minute to puzzle about an outfit that feels sufficiently Teacherly. I find a gray sweater with a wide collar, a checkered shirt, and my black Doc Martens, which have acquired an obscure but real emotional function in my teaching practice. They aren’t quite a talisman, but when I do the kind of teaching where you stand up in front of the room, they keep me more steady and feeling, very slightly, more invincible. Honestly, I have never felt very invincible in a classroom, but it’s still nice to fortify yourself a little against the world. As if you could be held together by the look.

Then a happy accident: I have exact change for the departmental coffee machine (which costs R10, about 80 cents), so I can go straight to work, pausing only to pack an apple and a granola bar. It’s after eight, and my bike tire needs air, so I risk driving — it is essentially a five minute drive without traffic, but sometimes traffic is quite slow in this small city. My lamentable current rental car, a Volkswagen Citi Golf, doesn’t like to start; often it stalls after ignition. If you give it more gas right after it starts, it seems to warm up after five or ten seconds. I haven’t driven stick for years, and I’ve gotten rusty about car coaxing techniques.

Soon the car is coaxed down the hill, past the fancy private schools, over the little river, past the Helderberg dormitory, past the town square. The pedestrians negotiate via hesitant glances over whether they will cross the street right in front of me. Once I make it to the Arts and Social Sciences building, I have about 25 minutes to put down my things, gulp my vending-machine coffee, print out my teaching materials, and chat with my colleague, R., who has generously agreed to co-teach with me today.

This month I’m teaching a short-form version of ethnographic methods, which meets for three hours, twice weekly, from 9am to noon. The class, for students in a 1-year graduate degree program called Honours, is technically called “qualitative methods,” but really I am trying to teach a class about what it means to interpret social situations. In the end, it’s not just “how we gather research materials,” it’s also what we make of them.

How does one interpret? How does one write an interpretation?

Well, here’s an interpretive question that I don’t know how to answer. At the door to the classroom, two minutes before nine, I find the students all clumped up in the hallway, waiting at the locked door to the classroom. Since my office is ten meters down the hall, I wonder why they didn’t come ask me earlier to help get the door open, instead of having to wait outside. But probably they sensed that opening a locked door was not their problem.

I get the door open, and people inside. It’s a room I haven’t taught in before: a “board room” with a massive oval table that keeps people facing each other, but far from each other. Everyone sits as far away from me as possible, but as the later arrivals show up, the gaps fill in.

We have a long and somewhat emotionally-intense-for-me class session on how to do interviews. It’s intense because I have never actually co-taught a class before, and it turns out that I have some minor but real disagreements with my coteacher, R., about interview technique, and about time management in the first part of class. He’s a lovely person and I instantly feel very guilty for my maladroit efforts to limit the time we spend on an opening discussion.

Here was the plan for the three hours of class (as I prepared it in advance):

1. Q&A about interview guide (15min)
2. Demo interviews in front of the class (45min)
   1. R. interviews Eli about a surprise topic, while students observe what happens interactionally
   2. Eli interviews R. about his “dream class”, while students write down dialogue as verbatim as possible
   3. Interview with a volunteer student, while students listen without taking notes, and take notes afterwards about what they can remember.
3. Break
4. Students practice interviewing each other in pairs
5. Students have time to notice themes and analyze their interviews (10min)
   
6. Group discussion of interviews and analysis

Amazingly, we mostly stick to the schedule. We only have about twenty minutes for the closing discussion, where I do a go-around to get everyone talking. By the time everyone has commented on their interviews with their classmates, class is just about over. We’ve largely tried to stress that interviewing demands real rapport, but it occurs to me at the last minute that, ethnographically, you can also learn a lot from awkward or interpersonally unpleasant moments. So I tell a story from my own fieldwork about that, but it’s a story about a somewhat dark moment, and I wish afterwards that I’d told something more light-hearted, to avoid ending class in a crestfallen mood.

It’s always hard to know what moods mean in the classroom and how they matter. But for me, when I’m teaching, often moods are all I have to go on when I’m there in the moment. So I do feel concerned that they are relatively positive.

It was also an intense class because when my colleague interviewed me in front of the students, he chose for his topic “Eli’s first impressions of Stellenbosch.” My first impressions of this place were quite overwhelming, having gone straight to a job interview from a 25 hour flight, and finding the city to be a beautiful, but quite racialized and unequal place. And while I could have decided to answer the questions a very guarded way, I decided to be fairly open, to not pay attention to the room of students watching us, and to look only into the eyes of my interviewer. At one point I remarked that there was a certain “masculinity of power” at the university, and then, like a good interviewer, R. asked what I meant by that. I found it hard to tackle a huge question like that without collapsing into a super academic register.

Afterwards, the students asked a very reasonable question: “Why did you still respond to questions that made you uncomfortable?”

There’s really no good answer to that. Sometimes we don’t extricate ourselves from awkwardness. Eventually, I say I think questions follow a logic like that of gift exchange, so that it’s just ritually hard to not respond to them, or even reciprocate.*

Anyway, after class eventually ends, time gets a lot more unstructured, and less hurried. I chat with my colleague quite a bit about how our class went. He liked it, he says, which I’m happy about, since he’s been teaching research methods for quite a while, and is a hard act to follow.

My memory gets vague about the rest of the day. I walk down the block and buy lunch at a grocery store; I do some classroom admin things; I chat a little bit online to my friend who teaches linguistic anthropology on a different continent; I feel overwhelmed by life but relieved to be done with class; I’m touched by the energy and seriousness of the class as a group; I leave my office door slightly open so that I can sense the flurries of motion in the department hallway.

As evening sets in, I sit down at my desk and write this, because I think it’s still valuable to have documents about everyday academic life. Now it’s quite late and everyone else has long since gone home. But since my family isn’t here in South Africa, I can indulge in working odd hours.

That is one version of a teaching day. Outside, it’s pitch black but the sky is clear and full of stars. I drive my little car home.

* Credit where it’s due: I think I got the analogy between questions and gift theory from a paper by Esther Goody, I suspect “Towards a Theory of Questions” from 1978, but I only ever had a photocopy and now I can’t find it to check!

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’s Thursday, and my last class of the week is about twelve and a half hours away. Some part of me wants to start getting revved up now, since it still feels performative to teach, taking an energy that I try to build up in advance.

But a painless and oddly physical sense of disorientation has also set in, clouding the evening clock. It remains viscerally confusing to be alone in South Africa, teaching; my family is in America while I’m out here this year, as I’ve mentioned before. (This is very hard in completely obvious ways, which I won’t elaborate just now.)

In any event, I’ve been here the past three weeks, but the days and nights never quite learn to get along. Each day there’s too much coffee or too little, too little motion or too much, and never quite enough sleep, and even that, always disorganized. Time is like an outfit that you thought would fit, but when you got home, somehow it was slightly too small.

There’s an institutional reason for this over and above the existential factors; while elsewhere teaching usually confers a stable rhythm, here it’s a bonus source of disorientation, since here my class isn’t scheduled at the same time from one day to the next. I’m just teaching one class this quarter, which meets four days a week; twice it’s at noon, one day it’s at eight in the morning, which is inconveniently early, and one day it’s at nine. The evening before the early class, an unwelcome, unsleepy energy sets in.

I’m not an anxious teacher, as these things go. And increasing experience brings some kind of dedramatization. If my offhand math is right, I’ve taught about 160 university class sessions, cumulatively. It’s enough to start to be habit-forming; I’ve started to take certain parts for granted, like the basic logistics, the classroom “learning materials,” and the grading. While other parts — how to pace the material, how to adapt to diverse learning capacities — still feel like a work in progress.

But the odd thing about teaching is that, as soon as the first day of class was over, it stopped seeming like the first week of the term. Instead, it seems to me right now — this is Day 4 — that this class commenced at the birth of the universe and will continue on, exactly like this, for at least 525,000 years from now. I actually really love this class — teaching people how to do ethnography is probably my favorite thing to teach — so I don’t think this sense of timelessness is a form of angst, escapism, or complaint. Nevertheless, I don’t remember this degree of disorientation from previous classes.

It’s lucky that I have many alarm clocks.

In the meantime, the crickets are loudly keeping time, the last light is gone from the west, and I’m thinking about how to teach my students some feminist epistemology in the morning.

Here’s what I’ll look out at when I hastily print my teaching notes in the department office:

The ants are everywhere around the kitchen sink, swarming through the crack in the dishwasher door. Afterwards, every time you feel the tiniest itch, you suspect the ants of crawling on you.

I want to explain here to you how the arrival of the ants is not just a natural phenomenon. I want to discuss how it emerges from the local economy of housework, from the South African system of cheap domestic labor. And its antediluvian structures of race and gender. I want to say something about how those who purchase domestic labor may prefer to leave certain kinds of work, like dishwashing, for those who are paid to complete it. And about how that may inadvertently provide the ants with a food source.

But it’s hard for me to write here in detail about my household economy. There’s a lot that’s hard to talk about in this social context. Not that anyone tells you not to speak about it. They don’t need to.

The economy of domestic labor in South Africa — as in southern California — is completely visible but barely spoken about. Hidden in plain sight, the eye can take it in, but the tongue should be still.

It was hard for me to find a place to stay when I first got to Stellenbosch. So I was happy to find a little apartment. It’s in the basement of a big house overlooking the city. At night the city lights twinkle down in the valley. Proximity to the mountain is of course a form of class symbolism.

The neighborhood, Bo Dalsig, is one of the wealthiest in the country. All the houses have huge gates and security systems. The residents come and go in expensive cars. On weekday mornings, the domestic and yard workers climb the hill on foot.

At first, I walked to work. It took about 25 minutes. Then I bought a bike and it took 10. Then last week, my colleague lent me his spare car, which isn’t any faster than biking to get to work, but makes it much easier to come home with the groceries.

It’s the day before classes start, and I’m teaching a medium-sized lecture class about how to do ethnography. I’ve taught this topic before, a few years ago in Chicago, but this year I rewrote the syllabus to focus much more on analyzing ethnographic situations. The lectures are organized around a series of basic concepts: situations, projects, culture, ideology, representation, contradiction, practice, strategy, conflict, reflexivity, that sort of thing. Meanwhile the students will be doing fieldwork each week and talking about that in discussion sections. Here they’re called tutorials.

I’m looking forward to teaching, in spite of some minor anxiety about the first day of class. You never know quite what will happen in a class; you just know you’re physically invested in the outcome. Before I was a teacher, I didn’t realize how much one has to invest in the role and the ensuing performance. I’ve never been a stage actor, but I think of teaching as a cousin of acting.

One time an eminent, retired woman academic told me that she still got anxious before giving conference talks. And if you stop getting anxious, that’s a problem, she added. The same for teaching, perhaps. I’ve never had much stage fright, so for me, the anxiety is more a source of energy than of paralysis.

I’m writing about anxiety again because I really think it’s important — wait actually, I’ve said this before, so I can quote myself:

“It’s important for teachers who aren’t women to acknowledge their anxiety and vulnerability, given the preposterous gender ideals that still circulate in academic culture.”

Of course, the economy of teaching remains hard to write about publicly, especially in the present (i.e. not in hindsight), because there’s so much that goes into maintaining role separation between teachers and students, so much backstage work on both sides. And because the class and gender and race lines in many university systems are real, and remain very fraught. Not entirely unlike in the domestic work context.

But I’ll have to come back to this. It’s the day before the first class, so in the spirit of seriousness, I will go into my office on a Sunday morning and write my lecture. The first day of class, you end up spending half the time explaining the logistics anyway. There’s domestic labor in the classroom too: neatening things, making organization, clearing up cobwebs.

Best,

I have always found best an oddly alienating sign-off. So alienating that I almost want to argue it should be abolished. Though as you’ll see, I’ve become ambivalent about that view too.

What is it that bothers me about Best? It’s rote, of course. It feels a bit cold to me. It’s terse. It’s a perfunctory convention, and while I don’t hate conventions per se, I hate when conventions deprive us of an occasion for some sort of human warmth. It feels to me like fake sociability.

If you read this little word literally, it raises an obvious question — best what? Best… indifference? Best customs? Best formalities? Best is a modifier, but what does it modify? Best wishes? That’s what I think it is usually supposed to mean, but best wishes is truncated, too. I suppose it means something like I’m sending you my best wishes or I wish you the best (in life?).

In South Africa where I’m teaching, sometimes people do say Best, but there is also an alternative convention: Kind Regards. I actually like it much better than Best, because it seems to mean something more definite and much warmer, but it’s hard for me to use in practice, because it’s not part of my habits. One student told me that “kind regards is overrated anyway.”

Still, instead of writing Best, I like writing yours or take care (for friends) or some adverb expressing a mood or cheers (especially with Brits). One of my grad school teachers was famous for signing messages VBW, S, for “very best wishes, sincerely.” I used to sign off peace when I was in college, but it long since started to feel like an affectation. Sometimes when I just sign my name, eli, that feels almost unmediated.

But honestly, I mostly sign my work email best wishes because at least it’s best something.

And if I’m even more honest, the fact is that best wishes becomes a bit rote, too.

I want to say we should abolish Best, but I begin to suspect that any valediction will become rote if it’s overused, and thus relatively empty.

The more I think about it, the less I’m sure what would be a good norm in writing sign-offs. Perhaps there can be no good norm in the way I want, because the very reason we have norms is to save people from having to particularize and humanize their professional relationships.

Is it possible to institutionalize warmth?

It comes to mind that in any cultural system, there is a set of possible greetings and sign-offs that are organized through their differences from each other. Thus, in my part of American culture, the handshake is the standard professional greeting, and it’s distinguished primarily from waves (more informal) and hugs and kisses (more intimate), on an ascending hierarchy of warmth and intimacy. The handshake is a bit impersonal, ultimately, not because of any of its tangible qualities, but because of its symbolic difference from hugs and the other options.

It follows that what makes best impersonal is that it’s marked as being more cold and institutional than yours or sincerely, and also more formal than take care, peace, etc. So if we were to put an alternative term like kind regards where best currently sits in our system of sign-offs, it would presumably become just as hollow.

The question is thus not about abolishing best but about figuring out why we need to be able to ritually signal this very minimal warmth. Why do we need to constantly exchange cold warmth with each other? What is the meaning of institutionalized sterility? It’s more than nothing, but by design, it’s not much.

If you write best a lot, what’s it doing for you? Is it just the easiest option, given the cultural environment? Or does it have some aesthetic merits I’m missing?

Maybe best is, perversely, doing something useful for me after all. It gives me a thing to very publicly not do. Does that just mean I’m inhabiting the worst form of hipster culture — in essence, depending on mainstream norms as something to reject, as if that rejection in turn conferred a tiny bit of authenticity?

Maybe. I still don’t want to sign best, though. Like someone said once on TV: “Best is the worst.”

Twelve or fifteen standardized brown boxes of books, covered in dollar store tarps and dust from lizard corpses and asbestos toxins — I’m lining them all up, three by four, three by five. Each box is stamped identically with bar codes, and green icons certify that they are all made from recycled paper, but nothing says where the recycled paper came from, so you wonder, does it come from dead books? Obsolete books? All those textbooks that your students don’t really read — do their carcasses get recycled into your moving boxes?

I’m leaving all the boxes in a dirty garage with bad air in Whittier, California, where my precarious postdoc contract is coming to an end. And a week later the movers will come for them, but I won’t watch as they stack them up in a trailer. The books will traverse the desert flats and the desert mountains, sit indifferently through a long series of desolate towns, and cross the Mississippi driven by some unknown driver. Each day the books will get slightly more crushed by the furniture stacked on top of them. One moving company estimates that my family’s belongings collectively weigh about 8,400 pounds. I start to fantasize that the moving trailer will fall in the sea or off a cliff, and so free us from the immense weight of our household goods. But would we do anything but buy them again? What are we if not agents of our metastasized objects and objectified needs?

Even the books, for those of us working in bookish fields, become fetish objects whose inhuman spirits impel us to adopt false needs as our own — such as the need for academic work in a dehumanized world, where labor equals docility, pliability, and migration. In a rigid system whose parts don’t fit together, gnashing like mismatched gears, the individual is always asked to grease the gears with their flesh or to crush the self down into some malformed space misnamed “opportunity.” That’s why my books are en route to Cleveland, where my partner is starting a postdoc, and it’s also why I won’t be staying in Cleveland, because I’m going a few weeks later to another teaching job 8,200 miles farther away. Separation has become the condition of our continued academic labor, and we have to believe that this separation is a condition of future togetherness, a step towards solving the misnamed “two body problem.” But even my books won’t be coming on the transatlantic flight. I’ll miss them, too.

2. Ideologizing your library

In Walter Benjamin’s tragicomic essay “Unpacking my Library,” he portrayed his book collection as a mournful space of freedom. His books, he said, got more free in his private hands than they could in a public library, since in his hands each book summoned up a specific history and memory: the memory of its acquisition, the history of its writing. The book collector, for Benjamin, was quintessentially someone who knew how to take books beyond their mere use-value. For a collector, the books were not necessarily for reading, and certainly not for reselling at a profit. Instead, they constituted a world that was curiously authentic and “intimate,” a world that the collector could “disappear inside.” In this dreamy world, “he” — always he — could come to “live in” objects.

It is perhaps not coincidental that this essay dates from 1931, the year after Benjamin’s brutal divorce and his parents’ death. What would be more logical than retreating into a fetishized object world after the collapse of one’s human relationships? For Benjamin, and probably for everybody who hauls their books around, unpacking a library is an ideological compensation. The question is: a compensation for what?

3. The class character of Walter Benjamin

When Benjamin announced that his library had a non-instrumental character, this was only a half truth. In fact, Benjamin was economically dependent on his library. It constituted one of his only economic assets: he had to sell part of it to pay his divorce settlement. Later, he saved much of it from the Nazis in Germany only to see it seized by the Gestapo in Paris. Hannah Arendt suggests that the seizure of Benjamin’s library was among the reasons for his famous suicide on the Spanish border: “How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts?” (Illuminations 17). No doubt Benjamin felt magical while unpacking his library, as he proclaimed. But the books were also a prime tool of his trade — writing — and he couldn’t not need them. Far from escaping the forces of instrumentalism, Benjamin depended on his books’ use value as much as on their exchange value.

A little materialism is in order, even in the face of someone who likened a certain historical materialism to a “Turkish puppet.” The fact is that Benjamin grew up a rich kid, culturally encouraged to disregard material concerns. Arendt calls him “typical of an entire generation of German-Jewish intellectuals”: the progeny of “successful businessmen who did not think too highly of their own achievements and whose dream it was that their sons were destined for higher things” (26). Thus Benjamin’s dad subsidized him into his thirties; he lived at home because he would not get a job; and he mooched his wife’s journalistic income. Arendt, who also grew up in a wealthy German Jewish household, excuses Benjamin’s behavior by alluding to his class habitus: “It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth” (25-26). Everyone is a prisoner of their habitus, it’s true. But the important point about Benjamin is less the rich kid origins per se than the life trajectory that it facilitated. A general trajectory of precarious downward mobility was Benjamin’s lot in life, culminating ultimately in his suicide.

4. The very center of a misfortune

Whether or not Benjamin was the first precarious intellectual to commit suicide, it is certain he was not the last. The newspapers are full of them, like the unknown adjunct teacher whose body was “found at the bottom of a cliff in the Blue Mountains” last year in Australia, or the American adjunct at Temple University who recently declared: “Suicide is my retirement plan.” Benjamin precociously sabotaged his possible academic career by criticizing the wrong people, and never got paid much for his own journalism. As Arendt put it: “Like Proust, he was wholly incapable of changing ‘his life’s conditions even when they were about to crush him.’” And she added: “With a precision suggesting a sleepwalker his clumsiness invariably guided him to the very center of a misfortune” (7). Benjamin was destined for an immense solitude. “No one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone” (9).

Precarious intellectual work is often misunderstood as the exception to a rule, and never more than in our fantasies. Maybe I can still get a tenured job. Maybe I can cross the border. Maybe I can escape my lot. But to twist an Arendtian phrase, precarious life is always the very center of a misfortune. And centers (like margins) are places of collective experience; thus Benjamin’s misfortunes are less singular than they appear. He was far from the only German Jew to commit suicide: someone in my family did the same thing when the Gestapo arrived at her door. And I doubt that Benjamin’s loneliness was really so much greater than that of the melancholy old adjunct who worked last year at the desk next to mine, barely speaking to anyone, even less being spoken to, and dousing himself repeatedly with cigarette smoke. I would not say my colleague was more isolated than Benjamin — only that he was not less.

Still, I understand why Arendt describes Benjamin’s experience with superlatives. Strategic quintessentialism, if that’s the word for it, becomes a useful strategy for representing precarious experiences that usually aren’t allowed to matter. In a world indifferent to loneliness, for example, one has to say something hyperbolic, like “no one is more isolated than X,” to make any impression. Benjamin himself suggested enigmatically in 1931 that “solitude is a privilege of the rich, or, at least, of economically secure beings.”

What’s superlative about Benjamin is just that he illuminates the center of precarious misfortune. And if we want to leave our misfortune, before we can leave it practically, we must first leave it ideologically.

5. Walter Benjamin is the problem, not the solution

Somehow Walter Benjamin has acquired a special place in the intellectual landscape. The fetishists love him, consciously or unconsciously; as with Nietzsche, the marriage of cryptic writing and ambiguous politics lends itself to all sorts of reappropriations. Benjamin’s prose is fungible today because it is so evocative. Its imagistic, essentializing, dialogical, magical character makes it exceptionally functional as an accent in high-end prose spaces. If you need an argument from magical authority, Benjamin’s prose is pre-organized into deployable aphorisms. If you want to edge towards “radical” (perhaps post-Marxist) politics without being dirtied by political realities, the imaginary angel of history always loves to hover over your shoulder.

Even my friends at the Modern Language Association, radical critics of the academic status quo, seem to idealize Benjamin a little in their marvelous recent parody, Feces on the philosophy of history. They comment, at one point, that “Hope for the future, as Benjamin reminds us, requires a belief in the failure of the present” (388). It would be more exact to say that hope for the future requires a belief in the failures of Walter Benjamin, and an analysis of their causes. I cannot agree that Benjamin reminds us of how to believe in a future without precarity. Rather Benjamin suffered precarity. He was precarity — to the death. He fell headlong through precarity like a dream world from which books offered an imaginary waking. And this falling, this precarious trajectory, is perfectly understandable. Benjamin’s failure, though, was his belief that unpacking one’s library is possible.

6. Precariousness within and without

To make sense of packing and unpacking, we need some account of precarious subjects and their object worlds. With only a slight effort of overinterpretation, we can extract one from Benjamin’s own comments about precariousness in a little-known passage of “Unpacking my library.”

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

Let us read this as an allegory about precarious intellectual labor. As such, it is above all a tale of bad options — psychosis or criminality — that are always lurking as a set of calamitous last resorts for precarious workers, who end up organized, like Benjamin’s collector, by a dialectic of passion and chaos. Passion leads them on, these précaires, and chaos keeps them down. At any moment, their “attachment to books” — itself a stand-in for the internalized will to work, for habitual epistemophilia, for libidinal investments in academic objects and fantasies — at any moment, says Benjamin, this attachment may break down into a loss that makes you sick or gets you locked up. Whether by loss of your books or loss of your job, you are always at risk of getting shattered in an event that emerges suddenly from beneath the cloak of habits that otherwise veil your inner disorders, making them “appear as order.” Precariousness describes the order of our things, our books, because it describes the balancing act of our work: it is inside us because first it was outside us; it is outside us because first it was within us. And this balancing act, insists Benjamin, is not something you can depend on. It might get you killed.

Benjamin is wrong, though, when he likens our ambient chaos to “chance” or “fate.” Today we still invest in such a misidentification every time we talk about jobs as a matter of luck (“I’m lucky to have a job”) or fate (“this job is a perfect fit for me,” “the job gods aligned in your favor”). This mythological discourse — where magical thinking pretends to resolve structural nightmares — only blinds us to the relentless incompatibility between a diabolical machine and its damaged inhabitants. Worse still, it makes us forget that the ambient chaos is not a space of good and bad luck, but just a banal tool for managing the reserve army of intellectual labor. It’s hard to bargain collectively when you’re packing your library yet again, when you can’t find your shoes because they’re lost in the moving boxes. You stick to the script when your whole world is so unsteady that a mythological order is better than none. And on the other side of the table, the people who are buying labor never complain too much about the buyer’s market.

But I digress. Benjamin gives us a marvelous image of a precarity whose “accustomed confusion” is as much within as without, a structural instability which at any moment could erupt into calamity, crime, psychosis or suicide. This precarious life then gets re-organized by compensatory investments in objects (like books) motivated (at least partly) by an inner desperation which mainly appears in silhouette, under threat of loss.

7. Books and the experience of dislocation

All that got a bit abstruse. Let us ask again: Just why was Benjamin unpacking his library?

It’s simple: he had to unpack his library because he had to move. Frequently. After his divorce, Benjamin had to get his own apartment, where he promptly found himself faced with a “ridiculous variety of projects… undertaken simultaneously.” But even as he felt a certain pleasure in his new home, his correspondence shows that he was vocally dissatisfied with the experience of living there, complaining about the rent, the neighbors’ piano, and the “constriction of the space in which I live and write.” When here is anywhere, nowhere or wherever, it makes sense to flee into the books, so that the stability of fantasy can buffer the cacophony of rented rooms.

So we can answer our earlier question. Book collecting is a compensation for the experience of dislocation. But it is not only compensation; it is also a projection of the order of life into the order of things. By hauling the books from one unstable dwelling to the next, the forced march of the books is made to mirror the forced dislocation of the self. “If I have to go, the books have to go too!” The books’ presence thus becomes deeply ambiguous. They index the disorder of precarious existence. But they also index the persistence of a self who cares for something (the books) and who can discover tenderness in the memory banks. They reveal a marvelous capacity for self-reenchantment in the face of loss. They reflect the desolation of a past and the promise of a utopian future of writing. “Of all the ways to acquire books,” Benjamin maintained, “writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.”

8. Packing and unpacking

One time I saw an ancient tenured professor, George Stocking, getting rid of his library. He had been retired for years and finally was moving out of his office, which was a warren of ancient books, a comprehensive collection of Cold War social science. For him, packing up and giving away his library was a singular event, almost a deliberate prequel to his death, which followed only a few years later. But for itinerants like me, packing is a way of living through a world suffused with malicious structure: not an event but a practice of ongoingness.

After a few years, you are always packed, no matter where you go or what percent of your books are in boxes. Unpacking, contra Benjamin, is not possible. At best you can do a simulation of unpacking, a silly theatre where you go through the motions of inhabiting a place knowing full well the imminence of future ejection. Contract ended, no more rent money! No more health insurance, no more desk in the adjunct office! And so, knowing that at any time you could be sent packing, you always have to be ready to go: pre-packed.

So there is no unpacking, only packing. An unbalanced system of precarious self-management. You get offered something (a job, a degree, a free trip); it ends; maybe you’re hurt; you pack; you go on. Packing and unpacking are inadequate words for the emotional work of dislocating, of being torn apart from yourself and asked to act whole, of pretending that every other morning you don’t wake up with nightmares and then feel so tired.

9. The impossibility of precarious feeling

Because you’re always packed, you cannot feel. Or rather: all the feelings become provisional, harried, almost distant, like lurkers in online chat. You can’t feel what’s good because of the nearness of the bad, and you can’t feel what’s bad because at any moment something good might spring out. You can’t live in the present because it’s a precarious present, but you can’t live in the future either because you know it’s a lure that mainly keeps you invested in a bad institution. Ambivalence is too good for you. You can’t muster up either of its terms, the good or the bad. You’re ambivalent, perhaps, about the impossibility of ambivalence. Like Benjamin said, any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.

We’re all Walter Benjamin. It’s better to identify with him than to idealize him. And if identifying with Benjamin helps us see the false exits from the center of a misfortune — the retreat from relationships, the suicides, the fantasy overinvestments in books — then the question remains: what would be a true one?

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.

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.

“In what sense is deviance important for its own sake, rather than merely being necessary (perhaps even regrettably necessary) because “the good” is not socially acceptable in all contexts?”

A few ways of thinking about this came to my mind:

1. Deviance is always morally necessary because all (known) social systems are imperfect, so it’s just guaranteed that some good things will come across as deviant, no matter what social context you inhabit. Thus, deviance gives flesh to the inevitable clash between normativity and virtue.

2. Deviance is necessary as a way of demonstrating anti-authoritarianism, that is, as a counterforce pushing back against social discipline and authority. While some kinds of authority are admittedly better than others, every authority structure needs to be reminded constantly that it is not absolute or without flaws. Thus, deviance expresses a primordial resistance to domination.

3. Deviance is a good thing because vast seas of cultural likeness are just hideous. Thus, deviance expresses a basic aesthetic of diversity.

4. Deviance is fun. While I acknowledge that deviant behavior often also entails social suffering and punishment, subterranean transgression is one of the few pleasures left in a commodified world.

5. Deviance is sociological inquiry. If you never break any norms, you don’t really know the limits of what’s socially possible, since social orders are seldom as firm as they appear to be, and so you are failing at being curious. Thus, deviance expresses a basic spirit of empiricism.

6. Deviance is self-knowledge: If you just accept the patterns of individuality and normative behavior that are taught to you, you are not actually an individual, but a drone. Thus, deviance expresses a desire to not be a Borg.

7. Finally, should the objection be put to me that these defenses of deviance just set up deviance as yet another dominant cultural value, let me emphasize that I entirely expect additional deviance from the aforementioned code of deviance. Thus, deviance is its own dialectical force of cultural progress.

]]> https://decasia.org/academic_culture/2017/03/15/academic-work-as-charity/ Wed, 15 Mar 2017 20:46:45 +0000 https://decasia.org/academic_culture/?p=2334 In so many ways, academic work is hard to recognize as being work in the standard wage-labor sense of that word. It can take place at all hours of day or night, outside of standard workplaces, without wearing standard work clothing — in bed with the laptop at midnight, perhaps. American popular stereotypes allege that teaching is outside the realm of productive action and thus second-rate — “those who can’t do, teach.” That’s a maxim which devalues the feminine work of reproduction in favor of an implicitly masculine image of labor, but I digress; my point here is just that such claims reinforce the image of academic work as being in a world of its own.

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.

• A License of 3 years is approximately analogous to an American Bachelor’s.
• A 2-year Master, similar to an American Master’s, can be either a “Research Master” or a “Professional Master.”
• The Doctorat (Ph.D.) theoretically takes 3 years, but often more, after which one gets to be called Docteur. (The doctorate in French had a great deal of institutional complexity over the years which I won’t go into here.)
• The Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches is derived from the German Habilitation: it’s a post-PhD degree usually given mid-career and required to supervise doctoral students. (Fortunately, this has no equivalent in Anglophone academia — though overproduction of PhDs is such that one might venture that something like it would logically have to be created as a new form of status differentiation.)

Thus the most advanced degree types are both named after German precursors; the License is strictly a French invention; and the intermediate degree, the Master, borrows its name from English. If this was a hierarchy and not a historical accident, one would see that the academic system put Germany at the top, Anglo-America in the middle, and France at the bottom. (German and American universities have been the dominant foreign references in modern French academia, as Christophe Charle has shown.)

That’s not the funny part, though.

What’s funny is that when the Master was first introduced in 1999, it was spelled in weirdly Frenchified form as mastaire. I imagine this was partly to make the spelling more pronounceable in French (since “er” in French is typically pronounced “ay,” and moreover usually signals a verb, not a noun). But also it indicated a minor attempt to “nationalize” the foreign loan word.

Yet as you see from my table, it’s not called a mastaire any more. Three years later, presumably to cohere with the international norm (and perhaps with the Bologna Process standards), the degree was renamed to just use the English spelling, Master. Since the names of degrees are spelled out in national statutes, this required statutory action to correct. An amusing official decree of April 2002 thus reads:

Article 1 – Dans le titre et dans toutes les dispositions du décret du 30 août 1999 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.
Article 2 – À l’article 8 du décret du 4 avril 2001 susvisé, le mot : “mastaire” est remplacé par le mot : “master”.

(Essentially that says: “In official documents from 1999 and 2001, the word ‘mastaire’ is replaced by the word ‘master’.”)

And while the revised spelling was no longer very consistent with standard French orthography/pronunciation, I found in my field research that that made no difference. There are lots of borrowed English words in French already; I never saw anyone have problems pronouncing them. Le master ended up sort of halfway between French and English, usually getting pronounced something like “luh masterre,” with a standard French r sound.

It’s interesting, though, that the possessive part of the English “Master’s” has vanished in the French borrowing, as has the disciplinary marker we append to the formal degree name (“Master of Arts” or “of Sciences”). Translations are always messy, never more so than when they involve institutional and juridical categories. Le master ends up being English and yet not English, French and yet not French.

I previously argued that if academic overproduction is in many ways market-like we might want to push for a better regulated market in knowledge. I suggested that this could be a complementary strategy to the usual denunciations of market forms in academic life. There is nothing the matter with critiques of market forms, I will stress again; but for all that, they need not be the end point of our thinking.

Continuing that line of thought, I’m wondering whether mass overproduction of academic knowledge may not have some unexpected effects. Its most obvious effect, of course, is the massive amount of “waste knowledge” it generates — the papers that are never read (or barely), citation for its own sake, prolixity for institutional or career reasons, pressures to publish half-finished or mediocre work, etc. All of these are the seemingly “bad” effects of mass overproduction.

But does mass overproduction have any clearly good effects? I like to imagine that one day, machine learning will advance to the point where all the unread scholarly papers of the early 21st century will become accessible to new syntheses, new forms of searching, and so on. We don’t know how our unread work might be used in the future; perhaps it will be a useful archive for someone.

More immediately, I’m also wondering if mass overproduction is creating new forms of self-consciousness in the present. In Anglophone cultural anthropology, it seems to me that mass overproduction is forcing us to constantly ask “what is at stake here?” Older scholarship seldom needed to ask itself that question, as far as I can tell, and certainly not routinely, with every article published. It became common, somewhere along the way, to ask, “so what?”

As one crude measure of this, I checked how often the literal phrase “what is at stake” co-appeared with “anthropology” in works indexed by Google Scholar, dividing up by decade (1951-2010). What I found out is that this exact phrase occurred last decade in 14,600 out of 853,000 scholarly works in anthropology. (Or at least matching the keyword “anthropology.”) This comes to 1.71% of anthropological scholarship published last decade. Obviously, 1.71% is not a large percentage, but what’s important as a barometer of tendencies in the field is that the percentage has risen considerably since the 1950s. Back in 1951-1960, only 35 publications mentioned “what is at stake” (0.2% of the 17,300 works published that decade).

Here’s the data:

                          Hits incl.  Percent
               Hits for   "what is    incl.
Decade         Anthro     at stake"   "at stake"
1951-1960      17300      35          0.20%
1961-1970      37700      160         0.42%
1971-1980      89900      480         0.53%
1981-1990      198000     1480        0.75%
1991-2000      609000     5860        0.96%
2001-2010      853000     14600       1.71%

Growth since   49.3x      417.1x      8.5x
1950s

Put another way, there was 49 times more anthropology published in 2001-2010 than in 1951-1960, but the expression “what is at stake” was used 417 times more often in 2001-2010 than in 1951-1960, thereby growing a bit more than 8 times as fast as the field in general. Google Scholar’s crude keyword search is too imprecise to measure how much work actually discusses what is at stake one way or another, but I expect that a more sophisticated linguistic analysis would show similar patterns over time.

So. Let’s say it’s true that cultural anthropologists now talk about “what is at stake” much more than they used to. The standard explanation for this is basically cultural and political. Cultural anthropologists are just much more self-conscious than they used to be, or so the story goes. They’re attuned to the politics of their representations. They’ve had to ask themselves about the relationship between their theories and colonial regimes. They no longer write under the assumption that producing objective knowledge is possible or even desirable. That’s what many of my colleagues would say, I think.

There’s plenty of truth there. But I wonder whether the sheer fact of overproduction – the massive flood of publications, the massive pressure to publish, the fact that we are not just a small village where everyone knows each other – may not also contribute to a sort of routinization of existential crisis. After all, if we are in a massive market of knowledge and attention that’s driven by the pressure to constantly produce, it stands to reason that the value of our product is constantly under scrutiny. I think that that’s partly what the “stakes” question reveals: an assumption that, until proven otherwise, our epistemic product has no value.

On some level, it is of course ridiculous to constantly have to prove that something major is at stake in every article, because when one is in a system of mass production, it is illogical to demand that the mass-produced part be singular, or even distinctly valuable. On the bright side, this massive existential focus on “the stakes” does help puncture an older generation’s dogma that scholarship is intrinsically virtuous. Existential self-doubt is a healthy thing, in some measure.

The downside, though, is that this focus on the stakes can oblige us to constantly exaggerate the value of our work— if only in order to get published and to attract readers. When everyone has to declare the great stakes of their scholarly products, this opens up a vast new space for self-promotional hyperbole. One might conclude, then, that mass overproduction can produce new forms of existential self-consciousness and self-scrutiny; but ironically, this existential awareness can itself readily become a new self-marketing opportunity.

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.

9:12 am. I’ve just finished getting my coffee, refilling my water bottle, and saying a gruff Hello to the guys across the hall who do desktop support. They seemed busy. All four of them: a recent arrival from California, right out of college with a bony face; an undergrad; a Ukrainian who has been here for five years; and a guy from downstate Indiana, in his late 30s, who previously worked at a cable company and now manages our group. It’s a fairly masculine environment, which I’ve talked about with the manager before, but our group is slowly becoming more diverse, which I’ve felt glad about.

Back at my desk, which is marked by three enormous computer monitors and a futuristic ergonomic keyboard, I get an email from someone who’s leaving the university: “Yes, today’s my last day.” I ask if she can do one last piece of work before she leaves, sending out an email announcing a new project. I know she’s had that item on her agenda for the past few weeks, but probably got overwhelmed and couldn’t get to it earlier.

Now I’m revising the code that calculates a currentTerm property (that is, it figures out the current academic term) for our student tracking application. I used to generate the current term using a lazy approximation, by just dividing the year evenly in 4 quarters, 3 months each:

getTerm: function(date) {
    var currentQtr = Math.ceil( (date.getMonth()+1) / 3),
    currentYear = date.getFullYear();
    return `${currentYear}-${currentQtr}`;
}

But it turned out that the start and end dates of each term varied each year, so if you want to know the current term, you really have to compare today’s date with that list of term start and end dates. Here’s how that looks in ruby:

Time.class_eval do
    def term_qtr
        target_date = self.to_date
        index = Time.term_boundaries.index do |term|
            term['to'] >= target_date
        end
        Time.term_boundaries[index]['term']
    end
end

I can refactor this to be a little more succinct. (Refactoring is jargon for revising code to be cleaner, neater, cleverer while still producing the same results.)

def term_qtr
    target_date = self.to_date
    term = Time.term_boundaries.find {|term| term['to'] >= target_date }
    term['id']
end

A few minutes later, I’ve finished wiring up my new feature to appear in the user interface (which is made in Ember.js). I’ll document how I did that. Wiring, we call it. Or gluing. Programming is full of weird metaphors

Annoyingly, in the process of doing that, I notice a new bug. If you create a new record, don’t save it, navigate somewhere else, and then navigate back to the new record, you see an error page. Grr.

That needs fixing, which I’d like to do immediately. I hate putting off bugfixes; they’re usually vaguely satisfying. But I’m also trying to answer an email mentioning a different bug, which is that a particular “year in program” field is getting miscalculated in a certain case (the case of a student who’s on leave, to be precise).

To be able to answer the email and announce that the bug is fixed, I have to do a whole bunch of separate steps:

1. Fix the bug
2. Re-test the application
3. Deploy to the test server
4. Re-run the reset_counters function on 7294 records (takes about 30 seconds)
5. Test the results
6. If OK, deploy to the production server (“deploy to prod” it’s called for short)
7. Run the reset_counters function on the production data
8. Check to make sure that everything looks OK
9. Then, finally, notify the user that their request is complete.

As I write back to the user, I try to explain the non-technical version of why the bug happened. I never know if our users really care, but I imagine that they like to know that the computers aren’t just black boxes, that they are comprehensible, that things are basically straightforward under the hood. They usually say thanks, but I almost never see them in person, so who knows. (There’s something structurally odd about gender and information technology, which is only exacerbated by being a faceless voice that appears only in email.)

I try to keep track of everything that needs doing at my job, but it’s overwhelming. I have some post-its; I have a short todo list on my whiteboard; I have a plugin for my text editor (PlainTasks); and we have a group-wide task tracker (asana) that I try to use for anything that I’m not about to get to. I get new tasks via email, and I don’t always write them down if I think I can do them immediately.

Now it’s 11:41. The hall is quiet. My desktop is a morass of papers and gadgets, and my silverware needs washing out before lunch. I did water my plants, and the sun has come out on the little tree outside my window. Its leaves are getting that parched autumnal pre-death look.

The departing person gets back to me, and I start writing comments on her draft announcement message. Then I poke around a little more in my application, and find some weird blank records. I delete them, and add some documentation explaining that they were all blank, and deserved to be deleted. I’m not forced to write this sort of documentation, I find it helpful for my sanity to keep track of ad hoc changes to production data.

An utterly unrelated request comes in. Our course scheduling system needs a new start time. Apparently no one has ever scheduled a Tuesday/Thursday 8:30am start time before.

A different, utterly unrelated request generates several emails back and forth, about a student whose name is spelled inconsistently in different systems. I try to reach someone in the central identity management IT office who might know more, but he doesn’t answer my instant message. It’s a rare morning when I’m not distracted by instant messaging. IM is like 75% of my human contact with my coworkers. It’s not that humanizing, in the end, but it does retain traces of humor and ricochet at times.

Electronic clutter drives me insane. A clean screen feels comforting.

I find a post-it that I wrote but now don’t understand. “Deploy! prefix”. What could that mean? I’ll throw it away, on the theory that it is probably obsolete.

Now I take a look at the error that I found earlier, the one that crops up when adding new records in my application. It looks like it is trying to load a record with no ID from the server; the server complains that you can’t load something with no ID; and this generates an error screen in the client. It looks like it’s trying to undo changes to a record that was never saved, so I take a minute to fix the bug where the application is trying to reload an unsaved record. That part of the bug is easy to fix, but the error remains.

It’s 12:25, and I should really eat lunch, but I really want to fix this bug, before I have to do dull data imports yet again. I lower my adjustable-height desk and slump down in the chair.

12:40: Too hungry to not eat, started eating at my desk while poking around for the bugfix.

1:07 Still haven’t fixed my bug, but found Ember Data issue 3678 on GitHub, which seems to be pretty much the same problem. I write a note on the issue ticket, hoping that someone from the project team can help me out.

1:17 I finally fixed my bug. It turned out to work poorly to reload() a hasMany association that contained a new record. (I don’t have time right now to explain what this means.) I added a check for that. Committed my code. Too bad my comments on the GitHub issue now (from above) may or may not be useful. It’s 1:26. Time to go outside.

2:25 Back at my desk, I’m staring at a data import from the old student database to the new one. I almost know it all by heart, but I do have a checklist to run through.

Circles spin. Click the same button for UTF-8 encoding over and over. Finish. Don’t save my custom export settings. I’m using a Windows Access database running on my Mac, inside VirtualBox. Boxes inside boxes. Virtualized everything, but you forget it’s virtual after a while. Virtual control alt delete. Virtual error and hangups. Spinning icons that don’t stop. In the end, I get bored waiting and press “Power off.” Virtual “Power Off,” that is. Restart. Open all the virtual stuff up again. This time it works: “Fin Aid Table” exported!

All 17 tables exported. I have to post-process one of them: you open it up in Excel, save as UTF-16 text, close, open it up in BBEdit (a plain text editor), change the file encoding type to UTF-8, save again. Switch virtual desktops back to the one that has my application code loaded up. All the while, I’m listening to some piano music that I recorded earlier this year. The electric piano has a beautiful round tone, punctuated irregularly by the creaking of furniture in the room when I was recording.

Stupid problems with the data import that I’m half inured to. Can’t find fellowship contract with import id 0. Can’t look up final status for “Transferred” (it should be “Transfer”). Beginning import of access_degree_applications at 2015-09-30 15:40:46… Text flies by on the console, dozens of lines per second. 0 failures, on to the next one. Stultifying. But vaguely electrifying. My back starts to hurt, and so do my wrists. Now I’m listening to some 80s pop music that I think no one but me would ever like. No one is trying to reach me, except a few more random emails that scroll across my screen. It’s not really a busy day, exactly, but it feels somehow stressed. As always. Too much to do. Too much to do isn’t a crisis, it’s our state of being. I’ve been staying a little late lately and skipping lunch. It’s always a dumb choice, since no one even asks me to. I just do it.

When I look over the records of import errors, I find that some of them have been fixed by my project collaborators. That’s nice, but now new import errors naturally crop up. It’s like weeding. Never done. Except that you don’t get a garden at the end.

4:26pm. Feeling overwhelmed by nonsense. Tiny errors. New errors that replaced old ones. Wishing I had cleaned my desk. My supervisor IMs me to ask about a human resources question.

5:00 The workday ends.

I got hired largely because I had a background in both anthropology and web programming. These past few years, while I was finishing my dissertation, I was also working full-time as a web applications programmer for the University of Chicago’s Humanities Division. Mainly I built administrative applications for them — internal software to keep track of student progress, keys, endowments, course scheduling, that sort of thing. I also worked on some research projects — Scrolling Paintings and the Digital Media Archive were the most interesting — and used a bunch of handy technology, like ansible, solr, ruby on rails, ember.js, drupal, shibboleth, LDAP, nginx, postgres, or redis. It was an unusual job, because a lot of universities don’t have in-house software development, but I learned a lot there.

In any event, my new job in Whittier is half in the Anthropology Department and half in the Digital Liberal Arts Center. This spring I’m teaching a class on digital cultures, and next fall, I’m thinking of teaching a class on anthropology of education, and another about web programming. And I’m working on a couple of book projects coming out of my dissertation — one’s going to be about the French faculty protest movement in 2009, the other about the Philosophy Department at Paris 8 — and hope to be able to blog much more regularly, at last.

May 4, 2011. Last day in Paris. A man across from me on the metro dangles one hand in his crotch and texts with the other. A woman across the aisle is chewing gum and has flipflops with painted nails. The day is hazy, footsteps tap on the car floor, the train squeals as it accelerates; it picks up speed and the cement panels flash by and the advertising, CHOISISSEZ LE LOOK MALIN it says in orange on blue, hint of a smell of pastries, of sweaters, thrashing of the air through the open windows. I’m aboard the 14 train going to Saint-Denis to see a friend one last time; it sighs, the train, the man across from me now replaced by another, he rises, a woman gathers her purse, staggers a little as she gets off as the train shudders, with its long tube of fluorescent lights, with the grey of the car and the black of the tube that the tube of the train rushes along, rushes through; and I’m elbowed gently, but fortunately it’s not a période de pointe.

Crossing the halls in Saint-Lazare, they’re full of old piss, and a vague smell like supermarkets. The body is adapted to the flow of the crowds, knowing where to turn left, where to skirt the flow of other bodies from one or another staircase spewing and gusting, where to take the shortest path that avoids collision. Minimal eye contact when the body is still; more contact, maybe, when passing people coming the other way down the hall. Then on the 13, the order of the stations is long since memorized. Guy Moquet — that used to be my stop, I used to live there, leans and tinges of rain and familiarity when I went through the neighborhood the other day. Dimly lit tunnel is covered with graffiti, which wouldn’t have been true on the 13, since even metro lines have class politics. A man stands up very straight, his back against the door. The train rumbles and rumbles, not yet at the point of roaring. On a platform we see the manual laborers of the cultural industry, someone installing a new billboard, polishing it, smoothing it down. The man by the door still stands straight, the train continues to hurtle, to fling.

What, then, is boredom as a practice?

To stack two pens one on the next.

To roll the pens in the pen case, a Mexican folk art/hippie-esque knit bag with a dark zipper.

To test a pen.

To put new ink in it.

To try to wipe off the ink with a whiteout marker.

To cradle the back of the neck in your palm.

To send an SMS, surreptitiously, keeping your phone mostly still in your pocket.

To sigh and lean back, one arm crossed, in white t-shirt and jeans.

To put one foot up on the chair to retie your shoelace.

To sit sidesaddle in your seat.

To stare intently at the ethnographer’s notebook, looking away when the ethnographer glances at you.

To look at the ethnographer’s notebook again as soon as he lets his guard down…

[Field notebook V, p.35]

Anthropologists have sometimes claimed that when ethnographic subjects “look back” at the ethnographer, that this is almost a political act: a way of challenging the power relationship that normally sets the observer up and over the person being observed. Here I’m not sure that that’s what it was. Here I think that looking over the ethnographer’s shoulder at their notebook was more of an attempt to escape the tedium of a local situation.

Now that that small matter is behind us, I hope to have more time to write — here, and other places.

Nothing is so enduring, when once established, as forms of culture. If French ideas had really penetrated Virginian society, they would have become as dominant in the South as German ideas are now becoming in the State universities and school systems of the Northwest. French ideas survived in Virginia and in the Carolinas long after the Revolution, and long after the French Government had ceased to interfere in our politics. It was one of the most difficult tasks in Southern educational history to dislodge French philosophy from its academic strongholds in North and South Carolina. It was done by a strong current of Scotch Presbyterianism proceeding from Princeton College southwards. In social forms French culture lingers yet in South Carolina, notably in Charleston.

(pp. 27-28)

I rather like the theory of culture implied here: it’s like a sort of strangling vine that, once taken hold, is quite hard to dislodge. And I am decidedly fascinated to learn that good old Princetonian Presbyterianism played a vital historical role in “dislodging French philosophy from its academic strongholds in North and South Carolina.” Who knew that it was ever lodged there to begin with? Certainly not me, and I dare say not many other people currently alive. As usual, this historical landscape is creased and torn with forgotten, curious details.

Je définis l’utopie comme de l’ordre du non-réalisable mais cela n’empêche pas de la penser et de vouloir la faire être. La pensée utopique est très réaliste car elle s’appuie sur des choses incontestablement réelles, c’est-à-dire les sentiments, les passions, les attractions mais sans se préoccuper des moyens de la faire être. Par exemple, Fourier parle de travail attrayant. À l’heure actuelle, il est peut-être impossible d’avoir un travail attrayant. N’empêche que cette idée doit à tout prix être maintenue. Le fait de donner à chacun des occupations selon ses désirs, de ne pas mobiliser quelqu’un sur une unique activité mais de diversifier toutes ces participations aux travaux, c’est irréalisable. Mais on doit maintenir cette utopie contre vents et marées sous peine de perdre le sens même de la vie. Je ne pense pas que l’utopie soit une projection vers l’avenir mais c’est un mode de vivre. À tout moment, il faut ouvrir dans sa propre vie d’autres possibles. Même si on ne les réalise pas, cela évite d’être bloqué à l’intérieur d’une sorte de fatalité. Il faut résister à une fatalité historique. 

I define utopia as the order of the unrealizable, but that doesn’t prevent thinking it and wanting to bring it into being. Utopian thought is quite realist, since it draws on incontestably real things, that is, feelings, passions, attractions; but without worrying about the means for bringing it into being. For example, Fourier talks about worthwhile [attractive] work. At this point in time, it’s perhaps impossible to have worthwhile work. But this idea must still be maintained at all costs. The fact of giving everyone an occupation corresponding to her desires, of not recruiting someone into one single activity but of diversifying all one’s involvements in labor: it’s unrealizable. But one must maintain this utopia, come what may, or else risk losing life’s very meaning. I don’t think that utopia is a projection towards the future; it’s a way of living. At every moment, one must open up other possibilities within one’s life. Even if one doesn’t realize them, this prevents you from being blocked within a sort of fatalism. Historical fatalism must be resisted.

Two points here are important to stress. 1) Utopianism isn’t necessarily affirmative. Indeed, what makes something utopian is that it rejects something about the present: it is necessarily a critique of the present. 2) It needn’t project a wish for a whole entire “new society,” not be centered around a futurism; it can center around something smaller-scale, something in the here and now. For instance, the desire to have an attractive or worthwhile job.

Alas, even this more modest utopianism isn’t always easy to realize in the course of everyday life.

It’s not fair to tell someone you’re from Risley and have them roll their eyes and look at you funny. It’s not fair to be teased or have someone assume you’re a gay, pot-smoking poet with piercings and handcuffs who hates white christians and GAP clothes. It’s not fair to be asked “so how was the orgy?” every Monday morning. And it would seem at first that things like the snow cock would only perpetuate this. But I think it’s important to weigh the impacts. Someone walking by Risley, seeing the snow cock, might remark to themselves “crazy Risley,” shake their heads and keep on walking. Perhaps they’d say “it figures! Damn perverts and their orgies!” But I don’t think that it would change people’s minds if the cock hadn’t been erected in the first place. No one would have though “Gee, I used to think Risley was the weird dorm, but the absence of icy genitals makes me think I was wrong!” The fact is that our reputation is staked on a whole lot more than frozen, suggestive precipitation. It’s based on us.

I have to ask “what would it take to get people to change their minds?” I mean, seriously…we’d have to get rid of Rocky immediately, and the LGBTQ probably shouldn’t be as vocal. The SCA sure looks like freaks on the front lawn when they practice. Masquerave has people milling around our dorm dressed all sorts of perverted ways. And then there’s the way Risleyites dress in general…

I’m not trying to prove a point, because I don’t know which side of the issue I belong on yet. I definitely don’t like the bad rap we have, but on the other hand we also have a good reputation, and they both come from the _same_thing_. I don’t think we could get rid of one and keep the other. I think it’s written into the charter, and baked into the bricks that Risley challenges its inhabitants at least as much as it does the rest of Cornell. To truly change that, to the extent that people don’t give us the occasional funny look, would mean getting rid of more than snow sculptures. It would mean getting rid of what makes us Risley.”

As far as I remember, one group was arguing that the obscene snow sculpture had been built without permission, gave us a bad name, and should be removed; while another group defended it on grounds of artistic expression. But what we find here — as in all good ethnographic texts — is a kaleidoscopic view of a whole social world in miniature. All its characteristic qualities are characterized. There’s a non-normative sexuality — “gay,” “handcuffs,” “orgies.” There’s a taste in drugs: “pot-smoking,” to be opposed loosely to more mainstream “beer-drinking.” There are representative wardrobes and personal styles: “piercings,” “freaks,” “perverted ways,” “the way Risleyites dress in general…” And there are typical artistic forms, like poetry, the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In short, we have here practically a piece of folk structuralist analysis: an exposition of the system of oppositions that organizes local identity around a series of differences from the mainstream (from “white christians” and “GAP clothes”). We see here the historical residue of something Stuart Hall described decades ago in his excellent paper on “The Hippies“:

The existential, spontaneous, loosely-organized, near-anarchic modes of Hippie society and ‘art’ provide the lived test of authenticity for this new kind of political movement. Their emphasis on the need for the individual radical to ‘live through’ his act of disaffiliation, the libertarian and anti-ideological mood of the sub-culture, find whole areas of sympathetic response in other political groupings and tendencies… The Hippies have not only helped define a style, they have made the question of style itself a political issue. (161)

What I find interesting about this text, though, is not only its typology of countercultural forms, but also its vivid performance of a certain kind of communicative rationality — and in this it is anything but countercultural. In short, the author displays mainstream, normative college “critical thinking” skills to investigate the condition of being of anti-mainstream. The author is constantly  investigating, presenting and weighing evidence, evaluating causality, taking reasoned positions. As the author puts it, “it’s important to weigh the impacts”: even if x seems to reinforce the community’s negative public image, the absence of x might not do anything to improve it. And moreover, in a splendid cultural studies insight, the author points out that a negative collective identity is not necessarily separable from a positive collective identity: “they both come from the _same_thing_.” It strikes me as well as the characteristic move of a certain enlightened college relativism to defer judgement: “I’m not trying to prove a point, because I don’t know which side of the issue I belong on yet.”

In the end, then, what we see in this text is the unsteady merger of enlightenment critical rationality with bohemian counterculture. Such a merger would seem to have a certain class basis: bohemian renunciations of the mainstream often come from children of the middle class, momentarily in rebellion both against their class destiny and against cultural normativities of all kinds. As far as I know anecdotally, a lot of those people would ten years later end up either working in the culture industries (in theatre, art, etc) or else go to graduate school.

It’s interesting to reflect, at any rate, on the curious combination of hippie culture and scholarly rationality, and on the contradictory aspiration that the author of this text characterizes so nicely: the aspiration to be different and not to be teased or to become a stereotype. The author suggests that such an aspiration was structurally impossible to realize. I’m not sure about that, though: people are good at finding new camouflage for new circumstances.