If we boil things down, this course shows us an image of Europe that is fundamentally about conflict, crisis, nationalism, and the heavy weight of ugly histories. The Europe we’ve seen this semester is a Europe in crisis. Even at times in agony. It suffices to recall that Europe is a place where a Turkish family’s house can get burned down by neo-Nazis, as in Solingen, Germany in May 1993. It’s a place where refugees drown by the boatload offshore, or where refugee camps can catch on fire, as on the Greek island of Lesbos this September 19, sending more than 3,000 refugees fleeting. It’s a place where a French citizen can take a Kosher supermarket hostage on behalf of the Islamic State and then get killed by the riot police, as Amedy Coulibaly did almost two years ago, and then be construed by right-wing xenophobic politicians as hard evidence of an implacable clash of civilizations between “Islamic fundamentalism” and the (fantasized) West. It’s a place where pension payments to the elderly can get slashed to satisfy foreign lenders, and also a place where people can die while waiting months for socialized medicine to give them heart surgery. Austerity policies, like socialist ones, can kill. Europe is a place where whole worlds have been burned down and slaughtered only to be rebuilt and reborn, like my grandfather’s childhood apartment in Berlin, which, sometime after his family fled or died in fled Nazi Germany, was converted into a parking lot.

In sum, crisis and conflict are the essence here, not the accident; they’re the shape of the historical frame, not an exception or ornament. If you picture European history since 1945 as a sea, this one has rarely been still. As you recall, we started out class by thinking about nationalism and the nation. Again, if you learn one thing from this class, it is that the nation is by definition a conflict zone. The history of nations in Europe, even in a relatively limited historical scope as the period since 1945, demonstrates that crisis is not new.

Already in 1947 in Greece, or earlier in the 1930s in Spain, European countries were divided by civil war. And I’ve learned from reading your papers that many members of our class tend to idealize the nation as a unified thing. But again: nations are never unified things. Nations are ongoing conflicts. Struggles. When people pretend that the nation is unified, you have to take that with a grain of salt. It may be an aspiration. It may be a fantasy. It may be propaganda, as in Queen Frederica’s orphanages. In any case, it has never been true that any nation is altogether united, because it is just not actually possible for a mass of millions of people to share a single “soul.” There is only ever an unsteady balance between partial unity and disunity; disunity is a constant. In that sense, civil wars — like the ones in Greece and Spain — are not moments where nations break down. They are merely moments where the conflicts at the heart of a nation can no longer be hidden or postponed.

This gets us to the question of the European Union, whose destiny, of course, is impossible to foresee. It’s worth recalling that a large part of the European Union’s project was to prevent war. The 1992 Maastricht treaty that created the European Union, for instance, began by “recalling the historic importance of the ending of the division of the European continent and the need to create firm bases for the construction of the future Europe,” and stated that its aim was “to promote peace, security and progress in Europe and in the world.” By creating a new type of European citizenship and trying to foster “social integration,” the aim was to decrease malign nationalism. Yet malign (if not malignant) nationalism has instead prospered in the 25 years since Maastricht.

Part of the aim of our course, then, has been to arm you with some critical skills for thinking about nationalism and the nation. Again, Ernest Renan was largely right when he said what a nation was not. A nation is not simply a territory, a race, a language, or a religion. One has to qualify Renan’s view: of course many nations are strongly associated with all these things, which is why we can associate the nation of England with the English language, the Anglican church, and some stereotypes about racial whiteness. Danforth and Van Boeschoten’s quip is worth recalling here: “Nations, in other words, are large, politicized ethnic groups that exercise, or hope to exercise, state sovereignty over a specific territory” (2012:35). We can acknowledge that nations do have certain social, linguistic, “ethnic,” religious and territorial roots. But there is no such thing as the soul of a nation. All nations are divided to one degree or another; no nation is entirely ethnically, linguistically, or religiously pure.

So this raises a question: Why do people think nations are pure if they are actually impure? Why do they seem to be unified if they are actually disunified? Here we can go back to the Queen of England’s Christmas Speech, with its curious blend of kitschy family harmony, official Christendom, and displays of military force. Nations have narrators. People end up believing in the existence of nations because they are swayed by these narrators – they may even identify strongly with them. People imagine that they belong to unified nations because they are in the sway of these national stories.

The problem is, national narrators are seldom entirely trustworthy. Hopefully in class you’ve learned to ask yourself some critical questions about them: What kind of person gets represented in this image of the nation? And who’s getting left out? Whose interests does the national narrator serve? Whose interests do they betray? If they portray the nation as being unified in opposition to some foreign adversary, is the adversary really foreign? Or is it actually a part of the nation that is getting falsely pushed outside and then treated as foreign, as with the large group of Muslim citizens of the French Republic, or the Greek citizens ostracized for their Macedonian roots?

Indeed, national narrators often convey their images of unity through antagonism against foreigners. But let’s be clear: the conflicts and crises that afflict Europe today are substantially internal to Europe, not strictly imposed from abroad. We could make a list of different kinds of conflicts in Europe:

• Economic conflicts: debt, economic growth, expensive social programs
• Conflicts over ethnic otherness: xenophobia, social marginality, integration of immigrants, specific antagonisms towards North Africans, Turks, Muslims, sub-Saharan Africans, not to mention Gypsies, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and so on.
• Conflicts of identity (which are inseparable from conflicts over ethnic others: who is British in a multiracial Britain?)
• Crises of social reproduction (can one get a job? a college degree? who will do childcare? how will death be recognized, unrecognized, collectively processed?)
• Conflicts of order and disorder (how will unruly populations be policed, whether migrants or striking workers?)
• Conflicts of political respectability (what will be the role of neofascists in Europe?)
• Conflicts of heritage: what will be the role of the past, when the past is irredeemable? when the past is fascist? when the past is full of unmarked graves? Can bad pasts be forgotten or transcended? Or, as Look Who’s Back suggests, is the potential for fascism alive and well in Europe today? What is the role of monarchy in a democracy? Is it a sign of oppression or merely a new national brand?

In our class, we’ve also looked at different ways that conflicts and crises get handled. They can get forgotten, as the Greek civil war has been by many. They can erupt into street conflicts, like with the British coal miners in the 1980s. They can get channeled in somewhat irrational directions, like political abandonment and precarity got channeled into Brexit. They can elicit satire, as with Black Mirror and its commentary on the alienation of technological progress, or with the representation of Hitler returned to the streets of Berlin in a moment of increasing hostility towards immigrants. Crises can shift history away from the “progressive” future that the European Union was supposed to facilitate, becoming moments of historical reaction. We can start to ask ourselves: Is conflict ever a ruse for something else. What gets concealed by a crisis?

We’ve also learned concepts that are useful for thinking about how people cope with crisis and live through it. Liminality is one way of dealing with crisis: you can leave your home in a fishing village in Ghana to become liminal in Italy, in hopes of getting better economic prospects. Precarious employment can be a way of surviving in a compromised world, even if it is one where traditional postwar forms of labor stability seem to have declined. I would even speculate that the concept of precarious employment will not be entirely irrelevant to your own generation’s experience as you enter the work world.

But in any event, if the course has a more philosophical moral, it must just be this: that crisis has become ordinary, that social and national conflict is inevitable, and that life is less about finding absolutely solid ground but rather is about navigating crisis, surviving conflict, and accepting that differences and even antagonisms are not going anywhere. Some might mourn the reality of this sort of unstable world. But I would say the opposite: conflict shows us that we are not trapped in a frozen order, and that history is still possible – indeed, is still unfolding before our eyes.

What do I mean, worldmaking?

What I mean is: gender holds up the world. (Is that even a metaphor?) It’s a catastrophic world for some; a liberatory world for others; it’s an ambivalent, precarious, awkward, inconvenient, effervescent world for so many of us. But in any case, inasmuch as the world is being held up at all, it’s held up by gender. NOT ONLY. But in substantial part.

One of the things that this means is that gender is not only a form of constraint, an outside “social norm,” or a harsh repressive apparatus. It is also a productive force (and a force of production); a zone of creativity and improvisation; an architecture for social dramas and a set of dramatic occasions; sometimes it’s a source of joy or, as they say these days, “euphoria.” Gender is what gives social things their color, one could say, or that shows us their depth by organizing the flow of light and of shadows. We’ve tried to bring some new things into the light. And we’ve observed that gender calls out to us (that’s what interpellation is) and it gives us a place to occupy (whether we choose to stay in it or not). We’ve investigated how gender organizes both the work of social reproduction and the social reproduction of work.

Gender as we know it here is not just worldmaking. It’s capitalist worldmaking.

Thus gender organizes the hidden work of social reproduction: childbearing, caretaking, cleaning, raising, educating, celebrating, holding people up. It’s interesting how in writing that sentence, one can say the word women without even uttering it. But of course, it is not only women, and the division of gendered labor is shifting in some important ways. You can end up with two very different images of the world if you study its historicity — that means the way that it becomes historical, the way that it is changing, the directions of its motion — and then if you study a freeze-frame of its structures — the way that everything seems to endure across space and time, the immutable principles of the system. The gender binary sometimes seems immutable, embedded in our infrastructure and even in our unconscious. Yet it seems to be shifting out from under us…

Meanwhile, gender also organizes the social reproduction of work. In a world where it sometimes seems that almost everything is commodified, gender is partly what is there to ensure that the system of commodity exchange and capital accumulation can continue, gender makes sure that we are ready for work, wakes us up on time, organizes our homes… To be able to get up and go to work is, again, to be an object: that’s what we are doing when we work for a wage, selling our labor power and ourselves as commodities.

Gender, then, makes us objects. But not all forms of objectification are equally dehumanizing. To be a mother or father or nonbinary parent is also to be a sort of object for one’s child. A “transformational object,” some psychoanalysts would call the maternal role: an object that serves to let somebody else transform herself into a subject. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be the kind of object that a caregiver is. I’m not saying it is always unalienated or unambivalent or unexploitative. But perhaps without moments of objectification, we would not be subjects either. And gender makes us subjects, organizes selves, is already there inside us. For better or worse, it preshapes our very forms of perception, the cognitive schemas that organize our gaze, our hearing, our sense of touch. And not just the raw sensory impressions themselves, but the conditions of possibility of their use. When are we allowed to look at each other, when are we asked to avert? What are we allowed to hear, or not hear? Who touches, who gets touched?

I’ve been touched by this class even though I’ve been overwhelmed by it. One of the most interesting moments for me in this class was when we talked about emotional labor and being a student. It turns out that even though this is an institution that is structurally affluent, virtually everyone here has done some form of service or care work, most of which is structurally devalorized and much of which is gendered.

People reported being asked to be “eager”, “available,” “polite,” “firm,” “infinitely available,” “neutral,” “eager to help,” “curious,” “not rude,” “vigilant,” “calming,” “nice,” “confident,” “looking fancy,” “efficient,” “authoritative or comforting” (for the EMTs).

I mean. That’s a lot of emotional work.

Meanwhile the kinds of norms that come from the school environment are fundamentally set up to encourage you to identify as the future managers of a neoliberal, precarious economy. Again, here’s what we said about being a student at this university, in 2019, in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States, in the Global North. (We are deeply situated. We are not universal.)

You must be attentive. Get good grades. Be silent. Take notes. Stay awake. Be eager. Care. Be on time. Do the work. Be competitive. Be proactive. Be curious. Participate. Be good at time management. Have “executive function.” Appear overworked. Be young. Like groupwork (which is widely loathed). Treat school as top priority. Everything is a means to an end. Don’t question authority. Accept that the person who grades you is right even if they’re not…

These norms might seem natural to you, or not. As an outsider, I think this list of requirements is utterly overwhelming and bewildering. It asks you to accept multiple forms of domination and discipline. But you are also supposed to stay enterprising, optimistic and productive, and to take on the burden of filling in for any failures in the institution. You’re supposed to be intensely entrepreneurial but docile, you perform agency and enthusiasm but obediently, and your instrumentalism is without bounds.

In an important way, the norms of being a student draw on the sorts of emotional labor that many of you have had to perform in other jobs. But they add to it the possibility of having some power, authority, status, and institutional agency. It also seems to offer you the possibility of leaving behind the sorts of service work that you have previously done so as to aspire to something “better” or at least different (in that omnipresent future that is infinitely deferred).

This whole scenario fills me with existential questions about what I am doing as a teacher. And about what you must be doing as students…

But again, the class is really not about giving you answers or even a settled theory of how gender and social reproduction work. It’s about sensitizing you to questions. Who are we such that we think about gender? (To think about gender is already gendered…) Whose desire animates a space, whose fantasy? (Whose desire animates this classroom? Mine? Yours? No one’s because we are all too exhausted and alienated?) Whose perspective is this? Who is at the center of this scene, who is marginal? Who is working and who is on the slack?

As I speak, I’m working, but I’m not sure from whose perspective I’m speaking. I’ve ended up feeling like the problem with teaching this class is that it is hard to really be present because we are always asked to be instrumental, always asked to be projecting into the future. (That’s true for teachers too: we are also supposed to be always instrumental.) Of course, there’s a reason why we aren’t always present: the present can be a bad place to be. My heart goes out to those of you who are stressed and overwhelmed and struggling with dilemmas, structural and otherwise. I’m sure I don’t know about most of them. I still respect the fact that people are going through things that aren’t going to come out in a classroom, at least this classroom, maybe any classroom.

Teaching, again, is a lot about emotional labor too. And scenes of failed reproduction. I’ve learned a lot about failure as a teacher here. I’ve gone home and felt crushed by having said something that was wrong or inadequate or just bad for our mood. I’ve talked too much and watched people get worn out by the noise of my own voice. I’ve never taught this class before, you know, and so I’ve also learned a lot about which readings work and which don’t, which sequences of ideas work and which ones are too abstract, which assignments produce good results and which ones… produce meh.

At the same time, this class has been the first time I’ve ever been comfortable presenting in a feminine way at work. For all its other problems, I’m grateful to the university environment for that. A class on gender seems like a fitting place for that.

It’s a strange day for me (as a worker) because this might be the last class I ever teach; I don’t have another academic job lined up, and I literally can’t afford to keep being a precarious academic because I have kids to feed and this economy is not working. I sort of love teaching even though I’m still working on not being bad at it. And this isn’t a class about me, but I’m a social symptom too (I encourage you to learn less from what I say than from my obvious contradictions). I think it always matters who the teacher is, and I think teachers owe you some kind of accountability or at least some self-analysis. I owe you that. It’s strange, because next week I’m leaving Cleveland — the work here is done — and literally I may never set foot here again. That’s what precarious academic work looks like right now: a long trail of absences. I wish I had been able to do a better job of teaching this material to you all. But I’m still grateful that I got the chance to try. Good luck with the end of the semester.

THANK YOU.

That’s it, class is over, I know you’re all busy, you’re all free to go now.

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!

A dozen women students showed up, no men. The class has 60 enrolled students, about 90% women overall. I was warned by my colleagues that only the truly committed students were likely to show up at the last lecture. The warning was sound.

I often come to the last day of a class with a written lecture, but this time it seemed to me that what I wanted to do was exemplify ethnographic analysis. So I started by telling two enigmatic stories from when I was an undergraduate student.

Here was the first:

Back in 2003, I was riding my bike through a desolate tiny town in the foothills of the Catskill mountains, looking for a place to stay the night. A group of kids was on the sidewalk, and they started talking to me as I rode past.
“Hey!”
“Hi!”
“What’s your name?”
“Eli!” I may have said; I’m not sure.
“Can I ride your bike?”
“Maybe later,” I said.
Then they asked a more surprising question:
“Are you gay?”
I just kept going.

The second story was even stranger.

I left work early on a hot summer day and went for a walk in a little river valley. After walking for a while, I sat down in a secluded spot, and covered my shoulders with a blanket to keep off the sunburn, because I was very pale.
Out of the woods, several kids appeared suddenly, shouting, trailed by a young dad who seemed to have little authority over them.
Frustrated by the lost solitude, I pulled the blanket up higher to cover my head and waited, hoping the kids would go away.
But instead they were intrigued.
“Who are you?” they asked. I didn’t answer.
“Maybe it’s an alien!” they shouted. “Maybe the aliens left it there!”
I laughed quietly at these remarks.
“Let’s throw a rock at it!” they shouted.
I said to myself: No one in their right mind would throw a rock at a total stranger under a blanket.
A rock hit me in the shoulder. Then I came out from under the blanket and stared angrily at the children. They stopped bothering me and eventually wandered off.

These stories seem to me mainly to testify to the weirdness and aggression that can emerge when people try to make sense of strangers, of the Other, of things they don’t understand. So we talked some about that in my class.

Afterwards, I asked my student to respond to a writing prompt: “What’s a question you wish someone would ask you?”

A lot of them seemed to interpret this as a Big Question, and pondered for a few minutes before writing anything. Afterwards, I read their responses out loud, letting people stay anonymous, which they preferred.

There was an odd feeling of shared vulnerability that I hadn’t really experienced before in a classroom. “If you’re an ethnographer and you can get people to share things like this with you, you’re doing something right,” I told them by way of a conclusion.

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.

Since I’ve been teaching large lectures for the first time, I’ve had to think about grading in a new and larger-scale way. It’s different to teach 150 students than to teach 24 students. And in particular, I’ve been especially frustrated this week by how some of the traditional grading criteria — stylistic and textual evaluations of students’ writing — map too neatly onto sociological divides (race, class, native language, cultural capital). Different grading criteria are in order, ones that aren’t proxies for social origins.

But for now, I just wanted to post — at least for my own future reference — these little considerations from Postman and Weingartner’s 1969 classic Teaching as a Subversive Activity:

Each time you give a grade to a student, grade your own perception of that student.
The following questions might be useful:
1. To what extent does my own background block me from understanding the behavior of this student?
2. Are my own values greatly different from those of the student?
3. To what extent have I made an effort to understand how things look from this student’s point of view?
4. To what extent am I rewarding or penalizing the student for his acceptance or rejection of my interests?
5. To what extent am I rewarding a student for merely saying what I want to hear, whether or not he believes or understands what he is saying?

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

“To gain knowledge, $$, and power.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• To gain knowledge, $$, and power

• Upward movement/mobility + to extend the mind

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

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

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

• To learn & develop skills for your everyday life.

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

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

• to expand
  the mind
  of
  an
  individual

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

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

• To have a certain status.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coda: Anthropology of Digital Cultures

Let’s start out with a definitional question. Does this expression, “digital culture,” actually mean anything? In one sense, a digital culture is really just a culture. All cultures have technology. All cultures have media. All cultures therefore also have ideologies about their media, which enable people to actually communicate (or have communications breakdowns). So “digital culture” just becomes a synonym for “the world you live in.” That we live in.

The class has thus been partly an exploration of the social world writ large. That’s why we’ve talked about what it means even to have an identity. (Is your identity your difference from everyone else? is it your uniqueness? or is it also your commonalities with others? your belonging to something shared?) We’ve talked about how people show their status (with their follower counts), try to mask their status (like with their credit scores), then try to show them again. We talked about what memes are — ironically, the Internet Memes that everyone thinks of as “memes” are themselves a meme, in the general sense of a little reproducible unit of culture. We talked about the funny histories of user interfaces – the obsolete tech, the magnifying glass or old-school telephone handset that’s been turned into a computer icon that we all recognize, even though we practically never encounter the original thing.

Part of the agenda has been about demystifying. That’s why I’ve tried to teach you a very little bit about how the technology actually works. We noted early on that the internet is not the web — the internet being something like a series of “pipes” that move data back and forth, “the web” being a specific type of data (and a form of culture and interaction) that moves across these pipes. We saw what happens when you actually load a web page in your computer. (You guys all remember what a DNS lookup is, right?) More recently we saw some of the nuts and bolts of how an internet connection can actually reach an out-of-the-way place, like a distant reservation in the mountainous deserts of San Diego County. We saw what it would look like to try to “hack” something: it looks boring, unlike the movies, like a bunch of text scrolling across a computer screen. You don’t need to know much of anything to be a hacker, you just download something and press go. We saw the campus server equipment: it just looks like a bunch of machinery with flashing lights. You don’t learn much from looking at the flashing lights; you learn more from looking at the people interacting with them, like the full-time staff whose job is to get anxious if the server indicators aren’t all green. I emphasize that my purpose in talking to you about how things work is not to make you tech experts. It’s just to insist to you that this stuff is not very mysterious. If you want to understand what’s happening around you, you can. It’s built by humans; it’s mostly still understandable by humans.

But our agenda is also about showing how things get mystified. This for me is why The Matrix was worth watching in our class, even though it’s getting old: because it dramatizes a digital world where blatantly dehumanizing things are going on. If you’re an online personality, or even an everyday user of social media, you can find yourself branding yourself, “selling” yourself, crafting an image that you get stuck with… Even when that’s lucrative, it seems to push people into sad forms of self-concealment, stuck with a personal brand based on “sharing everything online,” even though it’s always impossible to actually share everything. Authenticity is often an act — and perhaps web technology tends to make that easier, not harder. We talked about how things start to seem natural — through repetitive motion, through habit — even though they aren’t. I guarantee you that in a previous world, that gesture that Katie so excellently observed, where people kind of sneak their phones down into their pockets or try to hide them (say from the teacher), did not exist. We also talked about PostSecret, a site where people disclose things to an anonymous internet public at times, perhaps, to avoid actually having to apologize to people close to them whom they harmed. Digital worlds are full of forms of concealment.

As a point of comparative method, I’ve tried to strike some kind of balance between letting you explore your personal experience and showing you things you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. Many of you wouldn’t otherwise encounter The Matrix or the weird Conscience of a Hacker. I was also more interested to see that you largely are quite far removed from professional tech culture, of the affluent San Francisco/Silicon Valley type. Even though that’s right here in California, it’s really still a different world. And that’s an interesting thing about digital cultures: they keep us separate from people who are practically right next to us. How many of you use Snapchat to communicate with the residents of those homes just across the street from campus on Philadelphia? (Only one in twenty-five, I observe.)

It’s hard to get outside your comfort zone, and that’s just as true in the digital world as in the physical landscape. Exploring isn’t something that just happens. The world is too overwhelming and too vast. We don’t know where to start. That’s why one major part of the class has been to talk about how to do research: it helps you focus your attention, helps take you someplace new. That’s why I’ve had you make scrapbooks and why we talked a lot about what makes a good question. How are things gendered? How are things racialized? How are things classed? What gets left unsaid? Who’s really in charge? Who profits and who labors? What kinds of rationalizations are getting fed to you?

This gets to the last part of the class, which has been to break down a bit of the mythology around education and teaching. You all know that if I could invent a utopian classroom, it wouldn’t be organized quite like this one. It would have less bossiness, less authoritarian structure, less of a divide between teacher and student. But we’re in a college where classes are taught a certain way, which is hard for us to stray from, and I’m certainly not criticizing anyone for their style of inhabiting actually-existing educational institutions. I’m just suggesting that you should make a point of not naturalizing educational scripts that are fed to you. That raises further questions: What is education really for? Does it really make any sense? Do you really need to respect the teacher’s authority? When is that a good idea and when is that arbitrary? Again, I’m not here to tell you the answers to these questions. Just to encourage you to ask them.

Thanks for coming, everybody.

Anyway, I just rediscovered a self-critical postscript that I had started writing afterwards about why that workshop didn’t really work out. Here it is, in the spirit of the thought that dwelling on our unsuccessful projects is a good idea.

The original workshop announcement:

This workshop aims to develop a mostly nonexistent genre that we could call the genre of the actually scary institutional critique. The premise: that many people have nestled away somewhere in their brains something about their institution (or department, discipline, campus, job, world, whatever) that to them is utterly intolerable, inexplicable, unjustifiable, ludicrous, unlivable, some little huddled kernel of lingering rage that can almost never be expressed, or at least that remains unresolved, because the genres in which we express institutional critique are generally either nonexistent, routinized by collegial etiquette, trivialized by being expressed only in private to friends, or else dismissed as activist hysteria or some other form of irrational excess feeling. The further premise: that it would be worth trying to develop a genre that would be equal to these non-normative moments of intense critical feelings. A genre that would break with the conventions of courtesy that make critique into an academic mode of social reproduction, that would exceed the routinized forms of mild annoyance that are normative for everyday differences of professional opinion.

Not that everyone does or ought to go around in a state of fury or other intense feeling, not at all. But it remains troubling that there are people who are really upset by various aspects of the academic world (I’m assuming we can all think of examples of this) who have no available genre with which to make their experience into something public that would actually threaten and change the people around them. Who have no genre equal to moments of real antagonism. Of course, universities have systems of unequal authority, mass complacency, self-interest, disinterest, etc, that make the inefficacy of critique far more than a question of genre. But the problem of making a critical genre that can actually scare (or touch, move, change) people in spite of all the defense mechanisms is one that seems to deserve our time.

Format: We’ll start with a discussion about critique and emotional intensity, and then move to a series of writing exercises in this possible genre. 

And here’s what I wrote afterwards:

Our aim was to have been actually scary institutional critique and we didn’t quite get there.

Psychologically speaking, I suppose you could say that this was because there wasn’t an overwhelming collective will to be scared. If anything, I felt like we were realizing a collective desire to talk, to have a bit of intellectual effervescence and being-together, to have phatic contact, to have optimism. Our meeting was not a scene of crisis or meltdown. Something scary would have been almost foreign to its atmosphere.

Procedurally speaking, this was also because we started out with a discussion of the premise of the workshop and stayed within this ostensibly preliminary moment probably longer than we should have. I wished afterwards that as a facilitator I had been more ready to cut short the discussion and skip to the writing exercises, although I was naturally eager to hear what people said, and I felt, afterwards, like I’d learned something important about criticality from that.  At the same time, I was a little perturbed to realize that we had fallen back slightly on our habitual logics of intellectual exchange: the logics of clarification, of questions and answers, of establishing our differences and similarities of opinion, of conversing. I ought to have known that these genres of talk were in a way already at cross purposes with scary criticism, because scary criticism necessarily stands outside the logic of normal conversation and outside the desire for kindness and outside the rhythm of normal temporality.  As I imagine actually scary critique, it calls for a response, yes, but not necessarily an intellectual response, not necessarily a timely response, not necessarily a thoughtful response. Maybe starting with a conversation was already a paradox.

What did, nonetheless, become clear to me is that there were some real difficulties with the premises of the workshop as I had imagined them. (1.) I had presumed that everyone has a lot at stake in the institution and therefore potentially would have an interest in being fully present and fully vulnerable to processes of critical reflection, but, as Michelle pointed out, many people have other kinds of relations with the university, more instrumental or practical relations; many want to come get some knowledge and some credentials without committing to the university as a total institution. In my view a university is indeed a total institution: both experientially, from the point of view of those of its inmates who live on campus or who at least live constantly at the scene of their work, and ideologically, inasmuch as universities are not just piecemeal providers of services but are also vehicles for visions of what society at large ought to look like, vehicles for cosmologies and totalizing ideologies. But some people don’t relate to the university so totally or so personally, and hence don’t feel much of the irrational utopian impulse to improve the institution.

(2) Which reminds me of a second problem, one chiefly raised by Lauren: that, contrary to the workshop’s tacit fantasy, we don’t live in an ideally rational public space where eloquence is necessarily power or where better means of expression or diagnosis or affect transfer necessarily mean better results. It seems to me that, of course, yes, there is no guarantee that critique will ever change anything, and there are no magical rationalisms to resort to. But at the same time, surely a total absence of criticism would be an even more unpalatable response to problematic institutional situations than an uncertain critical project? Criticism may be neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for change, but pragmatically speaking, can’t it help? Along these lines, I suppose I would advocate a sort of minimal optimism about the potential of critical rationality.

 But at the same time, what still feels deeply contradictory about the premises of the workshop was that I simultaneously presupposed (a) a deeply nonrational, prediscursive, utopian desire to participate in a hazardous, collective critical process and, at the same time, (b) a kind of quasi-rationalist commitment to a discursive procedure (or “genre”) by which critical desires might be given voice. I mean, given that the premise of the workshop was about trying to make critical affects audible and collectively disturbing, obviously my aim was to establish something far from a nice placid space of rational debate, but ultimately there was also a hope that this sort of critique would open towards some transformative logic (whether in the guise of a discursive rationality or otherwise).

Another ambiguity in the original program: Who was the scaring supposed to be directed at? Was it about scaring the self or scaring the other? At any rate I meant “scary critique” as a way of scaring someone; but there are such immense individual differences about what’s scary to us or to others.

One of the lessons I learned was that the scary is the particular. The scary seems to have a much more complex relationship to the generic than I had initially understood. Can there, in fact, be a genre of scary criticism, or does a “critical genre” already imply routinization and formalization that detracts from an event of scaring (or being scared)?

If it’s the latter, maybe we should revise the workshop’s premises. Maybe we should say: let’s get rid of the idea that scary critique should find its home in a genre, period. Maybe we should think of scary critique as a way of troubling genres (with apologies to Butler). Of course we can’t really communicate without genres. But trying to make a better genre is quite a different project from trying to avoid being generic.

As an afterward to this (in 2017): I see in hindsight that this whole rubric has a family resemblance with Bruno Latour’s 2004 mediatation, “Why Has Critique Run Out Of Steam.” But on re-reading Latour’s essay, I’m disappointed to rediscover that he thinks of critique as fundamentally epistemological. In that essay, “critique” is basically a set of scripts for demystifying false idols and attributing unconscious motives, whose underlying purpose is to show that the critic “is always right”:

When naive believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naive believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. (239)

Latour is of course describing something real about academia here (though see also Eve Sedgwick’s essay on “paranoid reading,” which is much more psychodynamic about critical affects and which I’d like to write about in detail). But critique in my terms here is not really supposed to be about epistemological classification (“X is real, but Y is a fetish”) and it’s not supposed to be about attacking an Other or gratifying a Self.

To critique, in the way I had in mind, is partly to establish affective solidarities in the face of bad circumstances. In other words, critique is about giving voice to the intolerable (and there are many kinds of intolerability). It’s about breaking with the convention that we must appear to be ok. Rather than being about self-fortification (as in the weirdly anal-retentive script that Latour describes), it’s supposed to be about thinking about how we come undone.

We already have plenty of rituals — like “confession,” “therapy,” or “critical analysis” — that limit and channel these moments of intolerability; but they usually end up being functionalized, just another lid keeping people steaming in their pots. Nevertheless, these rituals aren’t entirely hollow. Essays that dwell on intolerable moments — Viola Allo’s Leaving remains one of my favorites — are still powerful and deserve some sort of amplification that they don’t always get. And I like the critical essay format — more than, say, the personal confession — precisely because it gives voice to the impersonal side of being undone. It amplifies what’s collective about bad news.

I’m just not sure whether this form of affective amplification can be generic. It seems like a bad contradiction to hope that any genre can reliably produce an event of rupture.

So we talked about crisis, basically. But this was only a crisis within a crisis, because crisis was already omnipresent in our classroom environment. The whole class has been a slow-moving affective crisis, for me. (This is saying something redundant, admittedly, since most crises feel like slow motion at the time, the slow motion of shock at least, or the slow motion of ambiguity, even if they get reframed in hindsight as events; and most crises are affective, except for the ones that you don’t yet know how to sense…)

It’s been the sort of class where, a lot of the time, after you leave the room, as the teacher, you feel obscurely broken down and sad, and then the feelings linger into the evening, and then they emerge again with the next class, or at most they get vaguely attenuated without dissipating. I actually do think my students have learned a number of important things about Europe (they had barely heard of Franco, or even of socialism), and their papers and homework show a lot of thinking and knowledge, but I don’t think they think they’re learning something. Instead, they largely feel disaffected about the whole endeavor. So this — how shall I put it? — this collective mood of detachment frowns down on the classroom as soon as I open my mouth. It just hasn’t gone away in months.

Three major contexts played a role in the production of this dire teaching atmosphere.

1. The room: at first they put the class in a huge lecture hall (see picture above), which pushed the first month of class into a quasi-lecture mode, discouraging conversation and fostering standardized disaffection. By the time we got a smaller room, all the bad group dynamics had already crystallized.
2. My own ignorance of this student population: what they can read, what they can write, what they expect, how to give them instructions, how to get them involved in anything. It took weeks of trying various exercises and formats to find something that got the non-talkative students to be remotely engaged.
3. The reality of disaffection: starting early on, it was clear that some students were going to be, well, much more engaged than others. From where I sit, the students fall into three general groups: the talkative, the shy, and the permanently disaffected. The talkative students are great and they do get engaged with the material, but they are a minority; I feel guilty for not having found ways to get the shy students more involved; and I feel outright frustrated by the students who more deliberately tune out.

If I had been a more experienced teacher, I might have overcome much of the shyness and disaffection, I think, in those first weeks where things still felt fluid. But as things stand, I feel that I’ve come away learning more from my class than the students did. Partly I learned a lot about teaching techniques: as in music, you have to make every possible mistake, it seems, at some point along the way. Partly I just learned more about the course content, about Europe and about my own reading assignments. When you make a new syllabus, you don’t really know how well everything will hang together until you put it in front of the class, and I’ve learned a lot of little empirical connections, like how precarious African migrants in Italy actually have some connection to the sociology of Brexit. Writing a hyperspecialized PhD is really such poor preparation for teaching about an entire continent. (Though I also talked about how Europe is a fake category error of a continent.)

Perversely, it’s only now that I’m almost done teaching the class that I finally feel ready to start teaching it. Part of me just thinks: OK, I’m learning, I’m learning, next year will be much better. Part of me thinks: it’s partly random, even experienced teachers have classes that never come together. A senior colleague came to observe my class in October; I remember vividly how unhappy he was last semester when he faced a similarly disconnected mood in one of his own classes. Part of me thinks: people are how they are, it’s not all about me or our group dynamics. One of my own students even told me, privately, not to expect much from the clique of the disaffected: I gather their stance may not be entirely specific to me. Part of me thinks: I really wasn’t trained to teach students like these; many of them really dislike reading, even what I think are short and accessible readings. (I’m sure I just have false consciousness about what “accessible” readings are for them.)

But I also really need these rationalizations, and I recognize that they are rationalizations, because it’s just so painful to have a class not go well. Admittedly, it doesn’t say in my job description that producing good moods is required. But somehow, it’s still there somewhere in the unwritten rules. Consequently, my sense of disappointment is also a sense of transgression.

My grad school teacher Lauren Berlant says that bad teaching is inevitable (“like bad parenting”). My collaborator Charles Soulié from France told me once, after I visited his sociology classroom, that “uncertainty is a constant of the trade.” But the general doesn’t really redeem the particular (never has, never will). And I expect that I don’t need theoretical redemption here so much as a more developed reparative practice. Never making teaching mistakes would be good, but knowing how to fix mistakes would be better. Like in software development: most of the work consists of fixing your own mistakes, debugging weird behavior (whether by machines or organisms), getting things back on track.

Or again as in music: you can make all kinds of technical mistakes as long as you don’t let the audience catch on. I mean, I don’t cry in the classroom; I have a performative face, of course. But I also don’t like leaving the room in so many shapes of sadness. So I suppose I also need better affective buffers against the reality of weird moods — which also seem to be a “constant of the trade.” To teach is to be permeated by your students’ moods. But that vulnerability isn’t always an asset.

But I was more intrigued by Plato’s remarkable, zany account of the origins of ambivalence, which I don’t think has gotten so much recognition. We have to be a bit anachronistic to read “ambivalence” into this text, to be sure, since the term in its modern psychological sense was coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. Nevertheless, I want to explore here how Plato comes up with something that really seems like a concept of ambivalence avant la lettre. It emerges in the text from his long meditation on the nature of a guardian, which is premised on the initial assumption that the guardian’s nature (or anyone’s nature) has to be singular and coherent.

SOCRATES: Do you think that there is any difference, when it comes to the job of guarding, between the nature of a noble hound and that of a well-bred youth?

GLAUCON: What do you mean?

SOCRATES: I mean that both of them have to be sharp-eyed, quick to catch what they see, and strong, too, in case they have to fight what they capture.

GLAUCON: Yes, they need all these things.

Hilariously, the dog is being set up from the outset as the being that cumulates vision and muscle, and therefore gets to be the founding image of a human guardian class. These two facilities are also something like the two branches of what we now call the national security services —  “sight” metaphorically gets us the “intelligence services,” and muscular strength stands in for the “armed forces.” That is, the guardian is a miniature state apparatus. Of course, it also needs some moral virtues:

SOCRATES: And they must be courageous, surely, if indeed they are to fight well.

GLAUCON: Of course.

SOCRATES: Now, will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it is not spirited? Or haven’t you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in any situation?

GLAUCON: I have noticed that.

SOCRATES: Then it is clear what physical qualities the guardians should have.

GLAUCON: Yes.

SOCRATES: And as far as their souls are concerned, they must, at any rate, be spirited.

GLAUCON: That too.

So the guardians are also supposed to have coherence between mental and physical characteristics. Their spirited and invincible “souls” go along with their finely honed physical faculties. And yet a problem occurs to Socrates: who would want to live alongside these fighting machines?

SOCRATES: But with natures like that, Glaucon, how will they avoid behaving like savages to one another and to the other citizens?

GLAUCON: By Zeus, it won’t be easy for them.

SOCRATES: But surely they must be gentle to their own people and harsh to their enemies. Otherwise, they will not wait around for others to destroy them, but will do it themselves first.

GLAUCON: That’s true.

SOCRATES: What are we to do, then? Where are we to find a character that is both gentle and high-spirited at the same time? For, of course, a gentle nature is the opposite of the spirited kind.

GLAUCON: Apparently.

SOCRATES: But surely if someone lacks either of these qualities, he cannot be a good guardian. Yet the combination of them seems to be impossible. And so it follows, then, that a good guardian is impossible.

GLAUCON: I am afraid so.

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to construe this image of “a character that is both gentle and high-spirited” as an image of ambivalence, in two senses. (1) Affectively, the guardian should be able to inhabit mixed affect. (2) Sociologically, the guardian is supposed to inhabit a tense double role, solicitous towards the in-group and “harsh” towards the outside. Of course, it now seems obvious to social researchers that people can occupy ambivalent, contradictory roles. But that only makes it more entertaining to see Socrates state that role ambivalence is outright impossible (because it contradicts the intrinsic coherence of one’s nature).

It goes without saying that Plato’s equation of someone’s “nature” with their personal characteristics belongs to a social metaphysics of virtue and character that has become archaic, though certainly not altogether incomprehensible to us. Nevertheless, we see that curiously, ambivalence comes across here as a sort of upper-class virtue, one of the things that gives the guardians their exceptional and necessary qualities. Fortunately for the argument, Socrates soon finds his way out of his initial view that ambivalent natures are impossible:

SOCRATES: We deserve to be stuck, my dear Glaucon. For we have lost track of the analogy we put forward.

GLAUCON: How do you mean?

SOCRATES: We have overlooked the fact that there are natures of the sort we thought impossible, ones that include these opposite qualities.

GLAUCON: Where?

SOCRATES: You can see the combination in other animals, too, but especially in the one to which we compared the guardian. For you know, of course, that noble hounds naturally have a character of that sort. They are as gentle as can be to those they are familiar with and know, but the opposite to those they do not know.

GLAUCON: Yes, I do know that.

SOCRATES: So the combination we want is possible, after all, and what we are seeking in a good guardian is not contrary to nature.

GLAUCON: No, I suppose not.

Oh good — the philosophical project of designing a race of supreme but benevolent overseers can continue after all! Now back to the dog analogies.

SOCRATES: Now, don’t you think that our future guardian, besides being spirited, must also be, by nature, philosophical?

GLAUCON: How do you mean? I don’t understand.

SOCRATES: It too is something you see in dogs, and it should make us wonder at the merit of the beast.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that when a dog sees someone it does not know, it gets angry even before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him. Have you never wondered at that?

GLAUCON: I have never paid it any mind until now. But it is clear that a dog does do that sort of thing.

SOCRATES: Well, that seems to be a naturally refined quality, and one that is truly philosophical.

One has to love the easy slippage from behavioral dispositions to characterological qualities. Argument was easier in these days.

GLAUCON: In what way?

SOCRATES: In that it judges anything it sees to be either a friend or an enemy on no other basis than that it knows the one and does not know the other. And how could it be anything besides a lover of learning if it defines what is its own and what is alien to it in terms of knowledge and ignorance?

GLAUCON: It surely could not be anything but.

SOCRATES: But surely the love of learning and philosophy are the same, aren’t they?

A charming assertion, unsubstantiated by social analysis of “philosophy” (as a modern academic discipline) but no doubt presumptively justified here by the Greek definition of philosophy as “love of wisdom.”

GLAUCON: Yes, they are the same.

SOCRATES: Then can’t we confidently assume that the same holds for a human being too—that if he is going to be gentle to his own and those he knows, he must be, by nature, a lover of learning and a philosopher?

GLAUCON: We can.

I think the reasoning here is something like: If species A does behavior X and has nature Y, then it follows that if species B does behavior X, it must also have nature Y. The unargued premise being: a being’s behaviors follow transparently from its nature.

In any event, we can now “conclude” (at least if we accept the rest of the argument) that the guardian class needs to have this ambivalent nature in order to fulfill its function:

SOCRATES: Philosophy, then, and spirit, speed, and strength as well, must all be combined in the nature of anyone who is going to be a really fine and good guardian of our city.

GLAUCON: Absolutely.

SOCRATES: Then that is what he would have to be like at the outset. But how are we to bring these people up and educate them?

So ambivalence here emerges as the necessary dispositional structure of a good “guardian of a city.” The guardians must be contradictory by nature and ambivalent in behavior: oscillating between philosophy and brute force, kindness and brutality depending on context. What becomes interesting — but what I don’t have time to explore in any more detail here — is that this nature is not entirely innate, but also has to be produced and reinforced by education. So ambivalence is both a functional necessity and an educational product.

I just find that a bit fascinating: that one of the markers of the ruling class, for Plato, is their structural ambivalence. To be sure, this ambivalence is as much a bivalence of virtue as a flexibility of affect, so in that sense it is far from a strictly psychological account of ambivalence, but one can, I think, see the germ of ambivalence as a potential badge of class distinction. In a world where everyone fulfills a social function preordained by their natural capacities and aptitudes, it becomes a curious marker of superiority to have multiple capacities, multiple affective dispositions.

I’ve started to tell them they can call me “Eli,” as a sign of… a sign of what? Familiarity? Informality? Friendliness? Being easygoing? Not wanting to reinforce the old-school hierarchies? Some combination of these. But it also occurs to me that telling my students what to call me is still a way of inhabiting authority, even if I ask them to call me something less-hierarchical. So instead of requesting that they call me “Eli,” I just frame it as giving them the option of calling me by [firstname]. They can exercise it as they choose.

I’m less invested in what my students call me, per se, than in the forms of knowledge and eloquence that we’re able to create together, and the broader institutional structures that make that possible. In that sense, forms of address seem like a relatively ornamental part of classroom culture, while the deeper forms of learning, bureaucracy and institutional power seem more fundamental. At the end of the day, I’m grading their work, and not vice versa, however we may address each other.

That said, ethnographically speaking, there’s something quite interesting about these moments where shifting to an informal speech register doesn’t really change the academic hierarchy. Maybe it does shift the atmosphere a bit, or pushes classroom culture in a certain direction; maybe it differentiates you from your more old-school colleagues. But even this obviously has a lot to do with the teacher’s social characteristics; many women academics — who get subjected to casual but structural forms of gendered disrespect in the classroom — have good reasons for preferring more traditional forms of address. I’m not convinced that familiarity necessarily breeds disrespect, but clearly formality can discourage it, as if one kind of hierarchy could help undo the bad effects of another.

I started out here wondering if classroom informality really matters. Yes, perhaps, but it doesn’t always accomplish what you want it to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But now that I’m teaching, I find myself more and more affected by the weird force of collective gaze and mood that constantly strikes the teacher’s body. To teach is to be observed. To be seen. I used to see teachers as subjects, agents who were generative of social structure. Now it’s sinking in just how much teachers are also objects. Objects of students’ perception. Of their own self-perception. Of historical expectations that they had no hand in creating. They become meteorological instruments measuring the collective weather.

In the classroom I’m constantly getting caught up in these little gusts or gales of shared affect. Sometimes there’s a good atmosphere or a sense of excitement. Other times the room feels confused, lost, paused, stuck. I’m the first to admit that this kind of affective knowledge of the classroom situation is horribly unreliable; you don’t really know what anyone is thinking just by looking at them. But it’s still the best feedback you have, the most immediate measure of collective sentiment. An imperfect form of realtime knowledge that – as a realtime social actor — you need.

You realize that the students perceive you in certain ways, some of which are useful, some of which are certainly inaccurate. The teaching self gets ever so slightly decoupled from other parts of the self. It gets subjected to weird pressures, to unconscious expectations. The students like a certain kind of voice, a certain kind of rhythm, a certain set of tasks, and gradually that affects you, makes you alter yourself, whether by resistance or acquiescence.

There’s a certain performative energy that comes from standing in front of the class (and in the classroom I just finished teaching in, there was literally no place for me to sit down). One of the things that goes along with that performative energy is a sense of teaching as a performance. All spring I felt a particular eagerness on teaching days, coupled to a sort of residual, nebulous performance anxiety. I evolved all sorts of preparatory rituals: making notes on what to say, trying to drink the right amount of coffee and to wear the right clothes, refilling my water bottle just before leaving for the classroom. Most days I’d pause outside the classroom door to look south at a particular view of the metropolis landscape around Long Beach, which always left me more peaceful.

In any event, this whole series of pre-performance routines certainly confirms that teaching is like a species of acting. You might have to switch parts from time to time. Sometimes it’s more like improv comedy, other times it’s more like standing guard outside Buckingham Palace. Sometimes pedagogy takes shape as a singular event; other times it’s trial by repetition.

It’s marvelous and weird that through this convoluted set of performative interactions, attachments and relationships can form. The students can become more and more familiar, more singular as characters; they seem to feel more and more at home with you as a teacher, even as a person, although the relationship is always very mediated by the institution. I told my students that they could call me “Eli,” but this semester, they all found that unthinkable. “You deserve your title, you’ve earned your PhD,” they said when I asked. Actually, I suspect that many of them didn’t remember my name, preferring to just refer to me as “Professor.” I’ve found as a researcher that many college students don’t know their teachers’ names, so I don’t know why this should surprise me. Social roles always dwarf the individuals who occupy them.

To encounter teaching as a form of performance and (self-)objectification isn’t to discount the impersonal structures of power and misrecognition that inevitably shape classroom interaction. I stand by my earlier research, even if I wouldn’t write it the same way now; and I wouldn’t expect that my embodied experience as a teacher would be the same sort of knowledge — at all — as that of an ethnographic observer, and indeed it isn’t.

Nevertheless, at the end of my first semester teaching at Whittier, I’m struck by the unexpected force of the students’ gaze, their moods, their silences, their ability to create collective momentum and then dampen it. The teacher’s body becomes an unplanned instrument of sociability and vulnerability. I’ll let you know if I find I entirely get used to it.

p.s.: writing this post reminds me that 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. I’ll come back to this.

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.

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

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.

It’s the 1st of December, 2009. I’m having coffee with a young man who is my classmate in a class on The Symptom (le symptôme). I think his name is K., but am not sure. He has dark, long hair, a prematurely tired face, a short body, a set of metal crutches and a handicapped leg that dangles.

He is in trouble, he says. He says he doesn’t get what is going on in any of his seven classes. He isn’t sure what he is going to do when midterms come [les partiels].

We talk about the relationship between the department’s pedagogy and its politics. It’s unclear what the relationship is, we agree. But, he adds, one little link [un petit lien] comes in the form of the relations between professors and students. Our teacher in the symptom, for instance, is a lot closer to her students than a traditional teacher would be. But nevertheless: he doesn’t know her name. He doesn’t know any of his professors’ names, he says. He’s only there for the ideas, he says.

K. would leave Paris 8 after that school year, going back to Toulouse where he was from. He had been living in Paris in a cheap apartment, but had never been happy there, hadn’t made a lot of friends, he would tell me, resignedly.

K. was himself a symptom. Of something. His alienation, we might too readily suggest, was the social and subjective product of low status, youth, lack of Parisian social networks, and non-membership in the philosophical nobility, with its characteristic forms of language. He really believed in the intrinsic value of philosophical ideas that Paris-8 offered, but by his own account, couldn’t make sense of them.

Hello,

You will find below a proposal for an alternative seminar.

A seminar titled “The expression of social malaise” will be held every monday at 9pm. Drawing on the recent works of our colleagues from Guadaloupe and those of our working-class neighbors from 2005, we will learn to generate acts of symbolic, media-ready disobedience.

The seminar will begin with a theoretical exposition of alternative means of expressing social malaise (occupying train stations and commercial buildings, setting garbage cans on fire, vandalizing bus stops). The practical application of these means will be open for discussion, and there will be a presentation on indispensable information for strikers (about the cracks in the riot police’s armor, protecting yourself from tear gas grenades, and practical legal advice).

The second part of the seminar will be dedicated to physical exercises relevant to this expression of social malaise (exercises in dispersion, intensive running, basics of close combat, unarmed and with blades, throwing paving stones, fabricating Molotov cocktails, and so on).

Course credit for students will involve an individual and spontaneous student project, preferably of a practical nature. This seminar can be counted for credit either in Law or in Communications.

Participants from the experimental centers of Clichy-sous-bois and Villiers-le-Bel will intervene in the seminar.

A and M

PS: If this proposition is taken seriously, the organizers of the seminar are not to be held responsible.

Some of the listserve participants then chimed in with suggestions on the grading system; whereupon a professor suggested rather more seriously that even in fun, such discussions probably shouldn’t be left in the public record.

It’s probably superfluous to note, at any rate, that the humor of the proposition apparently derives from the juxtaposition between the register of illegal street violence and academic discourse. The former is mockingly dignified by the latter; the latter is profaned by the former. One is left wondering, though, what sort of impulse towards imaginary disobedience motivated the authors, and what sort of social function this humor is serving or undermining.

Philosophizing in senior year???

1) The 2003 “official instructions” for the philosophy teaching program in senior year say: “Philosophy teaching in senior year… contributes to forming autonomous minds, warned of reality’s complexities and capable of putting to work a critical consciousness of the contemporary world.” What do you think of this?

These formulations pose two major problems.

First, it strikes me as shocking that a philosophy textbook should begin with a series of “official instructions.” An instruction, in the sense of a directive, is entirely contrary to the “autonomous minds” that we are told to “form.” Are we told to “force our students to be free”? Moreover, in the context of schools, “instruction” has a second dimension: we still talk about “public, obligatory, civic instruction” [in connection with public education]. But instructing is not educating. Instructing basically means shaping someone’s mind to fit the competences that the institution judges socially useful. Educating on the other hand means communicating a potential to a mind which, one day, will allow it to help define what is or isn’t valuable for its society. Yet according to the “official” declarations, we’re still on the model of instructing, in both senses of the term.

Second, the goal proclaimed for high school philosophy teaching is completely exorbitant. I know that many people subscribe to it. But we should be astonished by the excessive disproportion between the end and the means: they have groups of thirty pupils, a very limited range of practical exercises, lecture courses, etc. And above all, it’s impossible for philosophy teachers to “form autonomous and critical minds” if the pupils haven’t been invited to be autonomous or critical since the day they arrived in the schoolhouse. Not to mention that the art of thinking isn’t reserved for philosophy. Would one be exempted from “thinking for oneself” in history, literature or physics? It must be said that the goal [of our philosophy teaching] is, in our present circumstances, pretty disconnected from these realities; and we might therefore give up on grading students’ homework against an ideal that very few people can claim to have attained. We could, at least for starters, propose simpler exercises that would be better adapted to our students’ competences (the ones “formed” by our instruction) and to our own. At the university we do all this readily enough.

2) What should be at stake in philosophy teaching? What should be its goals?

Well, I don’t want to say that there’s nothing special to expect from philosophy teaching. To my eyes, philosophy is in essence a critique of our values and an effort to demonstrate, by one method or another, the legitimacy or pertinence of the values we hold. The philosophers who we’ve read and reread over the centuries have all undertaken an examination of the values of their times. That said, these philosophers don’t play the moral purity card [la carte de bonne conscience]. They direct their critical examination at themselves, working with their own keen perceptions of the possibilities and blockages of their epoch. Today, as in the past, many people, including our official instructors, defend some values without examination and try to impose them on others. Wondering where our values come from, going over them with a fine-toothed comb and sorting them out, creating new ones, scrutinizing the motives for our adherence to them and the mechanisms that inculcate them — that’s what a reading of the philosophers can invite us to do. And that’s a truly priceless service.

Like Zask, I’ve been struck by the official rhetoric in France about teaching people to have free and critical minds, which always seems to entail, as Zask points out, the contradictory project of “making” people free, and to presuppose the unlikely premise that educational institutions know what freedom or criticality are. But I’m most interested, here, in the part of the interview that proposes a definition of what’s essential about philosophy: a critique of values.

It’s not an easy exercise, at present, to come up with a well-defined area of inquiry that’s essentially philosophical. Many areas of inquiry that formerly “belonged” to philosophy — physics, society, politics, the nature of “man” or of language, the structure of thinking — have over time (and not without struggle) developed autonomous disciplines of their own, which contest and quite often dominate the intellectual terrain formerly occupied by philosophers. There are plenty of philosophers who still write about all this stuff, of course, but these objects are no longer exclusively philosophical, and as André Pessel has put it, “if this link with constituted knowledges [in other domains] disappears, philosophy sees its field extraordinarily limited and reduced to an exclusive study of subjectivity.”

Without going into great detail about competing conceptions of philosophy (see some American examples), it seems to me that some of the more obvious options aren’t terribly thrilling. Consider some of the most well-known: there’s philosophy as the conceptual foundation of all the other sciences, or (in an alternative version) philosophy as the conceptual handmaiden of the sciences (ie, the philosophers show up to help scientists “clarify” their theoretical ideas); there’s philosophy as a specialized conceptual inquiry into fairly narrow but autonomously philosophical domains; there’s philosophy as the history of ideas; in a more instrumental version, there’s philosophy as a place for building “skills” in critical thinking (as in the lycées).

It seems to me that there’s something to be said for most of these fairly academic projects, though I’m especially skeptical of the first one. But most of them (leaving aside the first and last) don’t afford a particularly exciting public role to the field. Of course, in France we also see more politicized conceptions of philosophy: philosophy as (in effect) the training ground for public intellectuals (always a small group), philosophy as “class struggle at the level of ideas” (via Althusser), philosophy as an emancipatory project (often cited at Paris-8). Here again, however, the latter two are extremely marginal and the first, ultimately, is fairly elitist.

Zask’s proposal for philosophy as a critique of values, in this light, has the advantage of being potentially open to all, sociopolitically interesting, and not necessarily a buttress of the status quo — without, however, necessarily becoming self-marginalizing (as so much marxist philosophy tends to). As an ethnographer of philosophers, obviously my relationship to philosophy is a bit strange, but let me just say that while I’m ambivalent about some of the field’s more grandiose claims, the idea of a field that does critique of values seems pretty compelling. A lot of anthropologists want to do work like this, but disciplinary norms of empiricism and relativism tend to prevent us from producing very well-theorized normative work.

But my favorite story about him [one Andrew Levine] concerns the first class he ever taught. It was during the exciting days of anti-Viet Nam War protests and Columbia building seizures, and Andrew was totally engaged. I ran into him as he was off to teach his first discussion section ever. He explained to me that he was eager to break down the authority structure of the classroom. He was going to ask students to call him by his first name [this is back when no one did that], and would have the students sit in a circle so that he would not be in a superior position standing in front of the class. “Andrew,” I said, “these students are not stupid. They know that at the end of the semester, you are going to be the one giving them a grade. You can’t pretend not to be an authority when you really are one.” “No, no,” he protested, “this is going to be different.” Several hours later, I saw him again, and he was quite crestfallen. “They treated me like The Professor,” he said sadly. “But you are the professor,” I said.

The story is from Robert Paul Wolff’s memoirs from the 60s. Of course, it was naive on the teacher’s part to imagine that a change in naming and seating practices would magically transform authority structures. But there are still some things to learn here:

(1) We’re reminded that pedagogical innovation can emerge preferentially from politically charged historical moments, like the Vietnam protests. Implication: we can’t and shouldn’t presume that all historical contexts offer identical pedagogical options. I know this sounds really simple, but I find it hard in practice to have a sensitively historical and institutional way of thinking about pedagogy, even though I know this historicism can be therapeutic. If egalitarian pedagogy doesn’t work at my university in Chicago, maybe that says more about my institution than about the pedagogical project itself…

(2) We have here the rise and fall of a utopia in the span of a few hours. We’re reminded at the outset that the students are not stupid; they understand that outward signs of equality are hardly the same thing as equality. And yet the young professor still believed — we’re not told why — that this is going to be different. There’s something utopian about that kind of moment of stubbornness, about the refusal to accept the socially inevitable that can sometimes (though admittedly not in this case) itself help shift the parameters of social inevitability. Stubbornness is a brilliantly political emotion. I don’t have an analysis of that yet, though I’m interested in what happens when stubbornness becomes a political symbol. Perhaps I should think about pedagogical stubbornness as well.

(3) The moment of the professor being interpellated as the professor by the students seems worth thinking about. (“They treated me like The Professor!” we’re told sadly) Are the students demonstrating instrumental rationality in this moment, tacitly calculating that it’s just not worth their while to participate in their professor’s privileged anti-institutional desire? Are they just demonstrating some kind of typical student habitus of deference or a will to self-subordination? Or is there some more positive interpretation of this kind of student behavior? Autobiographically speaking, I’ve had lots of great teachers who I happily treated and recognized as teachers, even while usually still trying to assert my own intellectual agency one way or another… I haven’t really worked this through, so far.

College students who turn more or less consciously and hopefully to philosophy for enlightenment are, at bottom, in search of a satisfying life. They may have a pretty clear idea of what this includes. “It means,” said a football man whom I asked what he meant by a satisfying life, “employment, a fair income, the prospect of a family, and the chance to do something for people on a larger scale than just yourself or your family.” But they feel profoundly insecure as they contemplate the conditions under which this satisfying life must be sought. This feeling of insecurity is due not only to the threat of portentous on-going affairs, but to their own lack of a positive philosophy of life with which to face the world.

This statement doesn’t come from the present or the recent past; it comes from 1939, from a curious little American text by one M. C. Otto called “College Students and Philosophy.” Otto’s main aim is to excoriate his fellow philosophy professors for their anti-instrumentalist view of their discipline, that is, for their rejection of their students’ desires for a philosophy that would be useful in the world. For a short text, it has quite a long attack on philosophy professors’ urges to retreat into the sanctity of pure concepts and “esoteric wisdom.”

But what I think is fascinating here is mainly the early emphasis on precarity or insecurity (as they apparently called it then). Otto reminds us that insecurity is scarcely a uniquely contemporary phenomena, in spite of what one may be tempted to imagine in light of the pervasive sense (in France and the U.S.) that ordinary life is newly troubled. And Otto points out that precarity is not only a matter of economic and material problems but also of available intellectual resources, of “a positive philosophy of life with which to face the world.” Of course, Otto probably underestimates the effect of “portentous on-going affairs” on collective consciousness. I’m no expert on the U.S. in 1939, but I imagine it wasn’t the most cheerful geopolitical moment. (I’m suddenly wishing my grandparents were still alive so I could ask them about this.) But Otto, even if he may push the point out of perspective, does have the great merit of suggesting that disciplinary education may play an important role in forming consciousness and hence in shaping students’ cognitive relationships to the world.

Now Otto seems to have some very un-contemporary notions about forming consciousness, about educating the whole person, about being educated as a general state of being that helps one live through a fluctuating and incomprehensible circumstances. Today education is often considered a matter of isolable and measurable competences, of transferable skills, of favorable position in social networks, of positive career outcomes. Interestingly, even many of the most anti-establishment professors tend to accept this framework insofar as they often fall back on trying to teach skills like “critical thinking.” Or should I say: on trying to teach critical thinking as if it were an isolable skill.

This brings us to a point that’s worth pondering today. I repeat that Otto was nothing if not pro-pragmatic in his approach to education; he scorned the academic retreat into the scholarly “life of the mind.” But for him, the most pragmatic form of education was one that provided the most general form of intellectual relationship to the world, the most pragmatic form of education was one that imparted (or helped students to create) a “positive philosophy of life.” He would have thought it a very poor pragmatism that did no more than teach a limited set of discrete skills with nothing knitting them together into a worldview. His pragmatism was rather holistic, existential, “philosophical.” In reading Otto, one discovers that currently prevalent notions of pragmatism tend to be in essence technical pragmatisms, ones which rule out more existentialist pragmatisms that might offer philosophies of life that go beyond a series of coping mechanisms or career plans.

Otto reminds us that there may be dramatically unconventional forms of educational pragmatisms that would deserve defending. Note that Otto’s idea of pragmatism is one that is almost definitionally incompatible with a standardized test: there can be no such thing as an adequate standardized test of an existential relationship with the world. But this only shows us (as French academics love to remind us) that contemporary pragmatism is itself often based on impractical ideological presuppositions. Indeed, by Otto’s notion of pragmatism, there could be nothing less pragmatic than a standardized test, because a standardized test would accomplish nothing other than delaying the time when the real pragmatic work of maintaining a philosophical relationship to life could get done. I feel a certain sense of personal sympathy with Otto’s view, because I have the feeling that the best thing I got from college was an anthropological worldview.

And there’s something about his rhetoric of intellectual precarity that still seems oddly contemporary to me. “College students in this sliding, slithering contemporary world, so hard to make sense of, need a little place for their feet,” Otto asserts in closing. But then he concludes that “It should be our privilege [that is, the privilege of the professors] to help them gain it.” And it strikes me that part of Otto’s image of education, which amounts to trying to construct a philosophical relation between inchoate self and uncertain world, involves a rather confident notion of the teacher’s role. I’m not sure that most teachers nowadays view themselves as able (leaving aside willing) to help students escape a state of intellectual precarity in a “slithering” world. After all, if there are no coherent selves to begin with, there can be no question of wholesale formation of said selves… No doubt it’s much easier, in today’s humanities, to resign oneself to a quasi-postmodern world where the teacher’s role is about articulating differences and contradictions rather than resolving them.