I was not surprised to find out that in the 1970s, sexism and rape culture were major problems among the male-dominated French far left. They remain issues on French campuses today.

But I was nevertheless dismayed by men’s grotesque responses to an early feminist meeting at Vincennes. Men were asked to leave a women-only meeting (accounts differ as to when this request was made). But the men balked at leaving the room, instead attacking the women, insulting their intellects, their politics, their credibility, their sexuality, and their legitimacy.

The male insults were recorded in a subsequent feminist tract, “Verbal abuse at Vincennes,” which was reproduced in Jean-Michel Djian’s Vincennes: Une aventure de la pensée critique.

The context, according to the tract: “On Wednesday June 4 1970 (and not 1870), thirty girls had announced their intention to meet among themselves to talk about their problems.”

I’ve translated many of the insults that emerged.

• There’s no woman problem
• I don’t see anyone I know, no little girl activists
• What group are you with?
• You speak in whose name? In the name of sex?
• The catharsis of lady intellectuals
• They don’t have what it takes to get psychoanalyzed
• You’re little girls with complexes and that’s all you are
• It’s petty bourgeois problems
• It’s no good to compare us to the bourgeois
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
  
• You want to get taken seriously? It’s unreal
• Believe me, your movement won’t get taken seriously, given the attitude you had tonight (silence)
• We’ll leave once you give us a political reason. [Why?] We want to make sure you don’t screw up.
• A woman’s catharsis can only come from a man
• If we don’t support you, your movement is bound to fail
• Big dicks, big dicks
  
• I propose that you remove us by force
• They’re sex-starved, we’ll give them a good lay [C’est des mal baisées, on va bien les baiser]
  
• If you want your equality, let’s screw
• But who’s going to clean up after you?
• Big dicks, big dicks [des grosses bittes]
• Lesbians
• She’s naughty
• Just seeing you grouped together pisses me off
• I’m more scared of girls than of riot cops
• You’re a cunt (he gets a slap in the face)
• Big dicks, etc

I’m not sure I have the words to comment right now on what this says about the sexist culture of the French far left in the 1970s. It’s more than depressing, more than awful, more than politically outrageous. Also it’s beyond arrogant and beyond juvenile in its practices of sexist objectification.

The month after this, a feminist statement was published, called “Against male terrorism.” I haven’t been able to find the document, but according to Joëlle Guimier’s new analysis of “The difficult life of women at Vincennes,” the text declared that “In our liberation, men have nothing to lose but their alienation.” That seems like a surprisingly generous reading under the circumstances.

Edit: I originally wrote in this post that the meeting had been advertised as a women-only meeting. One French interlocutor reports that it was initially not unspecified, and only announced as women-only (“non-mixte”) as a result of men’s masculinist conduct during it. I have not been able to resolve the conflicting accounts of this point.

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

STATEMENT BY CHICAGO WOMEN’S LIBERATION

February 1969

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

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

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

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

(From Sisterhood is Powerful, p. 531.)

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

One is taught constantly to produce texts and to judge texts, but that isn’t the same thing, because writing is a process, and the text is merely the product. A theory of a product isn’t a theory of its production.

There is of course a cottage industry of advice, guidelines, tips, “rules for writing,” writing strategies, and so on. Generally this advice is instrumentalist. It tells you, “Picture your reader!” “Write short sentences!” “Always revise!” “Have modest goals!” It tells you, in sum, “Write like this if you want to succeed.”

The problem with this sort of writing advice is that it isn’t really about writing. It is about career success, behavioral self-optimization, and complying with norms.

The second problem with writing advice is that it constantly equates writing with composition. But composition is only one metaphor for writing. Perhaps improvisation (to borrow a sibling musical category) is another possible metaphor for writing. Maybe it’s even a good one?

In jazz improvisation, for example, there’s a form that you’re expected to know, and a set of standardized scales and harmonies, but through some curious real-time alchemy (which I imagine musicologists have written about in great detail), each phrase is supposed to come out as something singular. “Fresh,” perhaps. New, even. Somehow unpredictable, but still communicative — “having something to say,” as a former housemate of mine used to put it. Otherwise you’re just ringing the changes and it’s automatically boring.

A lot of academic writing is like this kind of bad jazz improvisation, the kind where the musician is palpably avoiding taking any risks. Too predictable. You can already guess what’s going to be said before you read it. If you write from an outline, this sort of text tends to come out. The overall form is respected. An argument gets made. But in stolidly composed writing, you don’t necessarily get that feeling that good essays are supposed to convey: the feeling of a live intelligence darting from one turn to the next, surprising you or taking you places. Totally composed writing never gets close to the unconscious. But the unconscious is where good thoughts come from.

I’ve been working on my book about Paris 8’s Philosophy Department, and I find that I just don’t get far without making space to improvise. By improvise, I mean: trying to take in everything I know about my object of inquiry, and then letting the thoughts come out in words through some sort of loose process where I stare at the page and see what comes out, more like free-association. (Improvised music is also a form of free association.)

This improvising moment is only one of the many moments in a writing process. Another, the more obvious part, is the long revising cycle. Just to be autobiographical: once I have some sort of rough draft, often full of notes to myself like “cite XYZ here” or “say ABC here,” I re-read it and edit until I’m happy. I used to print everything out to read it on paper; now sometimes I re-read on the screen.(Weirdly, if I make a PDF of my own writing, it feels more like reading a piece of paper than if I read the text in my text editor.) Maybe I’ll re-read and edit once or twice as I’m writing, just to get the text presentable, and then again after a few days or weeks to get a better overall perspective, and then a few times in response to feedback from my friends or colleagues. (Not counting peer review-type revisions.) There are lots of versions.

I’m not claiming to be at all original; I was taught to do all this revising work. “All writing is rewriting,” my graduate school teacher Susan Gal used to say. Writing groups used to be all the rage back in Chicago. There were whole infrastructures for supporting revisions.

But the process of producing the first draft: that’s the part that still feels like improvisation to me. The blank page is rather like a long silence waiting for you to play some notes. Sometimes when you sit down to write, you manage to get in contact with something that’s not rote or frilled. Other times the words come out drab or blurry, but then you can try to fix them in revisions, a completely different activity. I try not to compose, in the sense of trying to be sure what I want to say before I say it. You just don’t know how it has to sound until you’re there in the right context.

I’m curious if this makes sense to anyone else out there?

I’d like to have more ways of talking about writing as a praxis. This is a first stab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve gotten interested in programming as a stock of useful metaphors for thinking about intellectual labor. Here I want to think about scholarly reading in terms of what programmers call caching. Never heard of caching? Here’s what Wikipedia says:

In computing, a cache is a component that stores data so future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation, or the duplicate of data stored elsewhere. A cache hit occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a cache miss occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs.

Basically the idea is that, if you need information about X, and it is time-consuming to get that information, then it makes more sense to look up X once and then keep the results nearby for future use. That way, if you refer to X over and over, you don’t waste time retrieving it again and again. You just look up X in your cache; the cache is designed to be quick to access.

Caching – like pretty much everything that programmers do – is a tradeoff. You gain one thing, you lose something else. Typically, with a cache, you save time, but you take up more space in memory, because the cached data has to get stored someplace. For example, in my former programming job, we used to keep a cache of campus directory data. Instead of having to query a central server for our users’ names and email addresses, we would just request all the data we needed every night, around 2am, and keep it on hand for 24 hours. That used up some space on our servers but made our systems run much faster.

One day, I had a thought: scholarly reading is really just a form of caching. When you read, in essence, you are caching a representation of some text in your head. Maybe your cache focuses on the main argument; maybe it focuses on the methodology; maybe on the examples or evidence. In any event, though, what you stick in your memory is always a provisional representation of whatever the original document says. If you are not sure whether your representation is accurate, you can consult the original, but consulting your memory is much faster.

I should probably issue a disclaimer here. I’m intentionally leaving aside a lot of other things about reading in order to make my point. Of course, academic reading isn’t only caching. Reading can be a form of pleasure, a form of experience valuable in itself; it can be a process of imaginary argument, or a way of training your brain to absorb scholarly ideas (which is why graduate students do a lot of it), or a way of forming a more general representation of an academic field. All of that is, of course, valuable and important. But I find that, after you spend long enough in academia, you don’t need to have imaginary arguments with every journal article; you don’t need to love the experience of reading; and you don’t need to constantly remind yourself about the overall shape of your field. Often, you need to read only a relatively well-defined set of things that are directly relevant to your own immediate research.

The analogy between reading and caching becomes important, in any event, when you start to ask yourself a question that haunts lots of graduate students: what should I read? I used to go around feeling terribly guilty that there were dozens, or probably hundreds, of books in my field that I should, theoretically, have been reading. I bought lots of these books, but honestly, I mostly never got around to reading them. That wasn’t because I don’t like reading; I do. It’s because reading (especially when done carefully) is very time-consuming, and time is in horribly short supply for most academics, precarious or not.

Now if we think about reading as a form of caching, we begin to realize that it might be pretty pointless to prematurely cache data that we may never use. For that’s what it is to read books pre-emptively, out of a general sense of moral obligation — you’re essentially caching scholarly knowledge whether or not it has any immediate use-value. To be sure, up to a point, it’s good to read just to get a sense of your field. But there is so much scholarship now that no one human being can, in effect, cache it all in their brain. It’s just not possible to have comprehensive knowledge of a field anymore.

I find this a comforting thought. Once you drop comprehensive knowledge as an impossible academic ideal, you can replace it with something better: knowing how to look things up. In other words, you do need to know how to go find the right knowledge when you need it. If you’re writing about political protests, you need to cache some of the recent literature on protests in your brain. But you don’t need to do this years in advance. You can just do this as part of the writing process.

That’s a rather instrumentalist view of reading, I know, and I don’t always follow it. I do read things sometimes purely because they seem fascinating, or because my friends wrote them, or whatever. But these days, given the time pressures affecting every part of an academic career, we ought to know how to be efficient when that’s appropriate. So: have a caching strategy, and try not to cache scholarly knowledge prematurely.

Original:

An enormous amount of research, beginning in France perhaps with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), has emphasized practices that subvert and evade the forms of social domination that Bourdieu had documented.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Kent,

Thanks for all of your help. I won’t hold you responsible for its content, but it couldn’t have been written without your assistance many years ago.

Clyde W Barrow

It’s always curious to encounter the traces of strangers’ personal relationships to each other. One gets the sense that these two people didn’t know each other all that well, that they had encountered each other “years ago” when Barrow was working on his dissertation, and that when the book finally appeared in print, the author, still then near the start of his career, was delighted to finally be able to show people what he had produced. There’s a nice sense of self injected into the professionally cordial tone of this note; while the author signs his full name instead of just his first name, he signals that the project was dependent on this other person, that it “couldn’t have been written without your help.”

I’m interested in the particular mixture of gratitude and absolution from responsibility that we see here, in the combination of “thanks for all your help” and “I won’t hold you responsible for its content.” This mixed message is one I’ve seen a lot in scholarly texts, but I never entirely understand what’s driving it. In this case it appears in the second person, but often it’s more impersonal, a sort of announcement to the reader: Thanks to X Y and Z, who are in no way responsible for the remaining errors in the argument, something like that. But does anyone really imagine that people named in the acknowledgements are responsible for someone else’s texts? Does association imply endorsement? It’s as if it was assumed to.

Why, more generally, is it that we scholars feel obliged to mix gratitude with an obligatory insistence that we don’t take responsibility for anyone else’s work? Is it a reminder that we live in a regime of private intellectual property, as if the tacit message here was actually “X Y and Y shouldn’t get the formal credit here; these ideas are officially mine.” Or is it just a matter of rote imitation? As if young generations of scholars just stick in this phrase because they’ve seen it elsewhere and feel like it must be normal? Or perhaps it’s more practical than I give it credit for; perhaps enough people have been burned by having their names associated with other people’s bad academic claims that they started this as a mechanism for limiting intellectual liability.

I note that the identity of the Kent in question remains mysterious. No Kents are mentioned in the Acknowledgements, but Barrow does repeatedly mention the existence of unnamed collaborators. At one point he thanks “some still anonymous individuals at the Chicago Historical Society, Nevada Historical Society, and Kansas State University Archives”; later, he’ll finish the acknowledgements by saying, “There are of course many friends and colleagues who have contributed in their own way.” Perhaps one of them was Kent.

As a matter of fact, Barrow starts out his book by commenting on its place in the university system — fittingly, since it is a book that aspires to analyze that system. Here’s what he says:

The industrial character of contemporary university work is never more readily apparent than when one acknowledges the many people who have contributed their labor to the production of those commodities we call books. The intellectual labor process is now a socialized and genuinely collective effort that takes place on a national and even global scale. It requires many kinds of labor, occupational skills, clerical support, and administrative services by persons who are often invisible to the university professor. Many anonymous people should therefore be recognized at the outset as an integral component of the production process which resulted in this book.

One wonders, though, if Barrow’s book really is so similar to mass-produced industrial commodities. The letter to Kent doesn’t seem very commodified. Would someone who work on an assembly line making thousands of identical automobiles, grapefruits or iPads really write a letter saying “I won’t hold you responsible for the content of this grapefruit, this iPad, this automobile”?

No, it’s the best bet available for improving society. This standard bourgeois liberal view of mine has the same cynicism of all bourgeois liberal views—it says to the people on whose necks one trods that it will be better for their children’s children if they keep on getting trodden upon while we educate the more intelligent of their children to understand how society works. But I believe it anyway. I honestly think that we—the parasitic priestly class which confers sacraments like BAs and PhDs—are the best agency for social change on the scene. I don’t trust the aroused workers and peasants to do themselves or anybody any good. To put it still more generally, I think that nothing but a revolution in this country is going to make it possible for millions of people to lead a decent life, but I still don’t want a revolution in this country—simply because I’m afraid of finding something worse when the revolution is over. So insofar as I have any thoughts on the higher learning in America they are to the effect that we pinko profs should continue swinging each successive generation a little further to the left; doing it this way requires the continuation of the same claptrap about contemplation we’ve always handed out, because without this mystique the society won’t let us get away with corrupting the youth anymore.

(Quoted in Neil Gross’s sociobiography of Rorty.)

So basically, Rorty could not, or could no longer believe in the claptrap of the beauty of liberal arts education as teaching “contemplation”, but was happy to continue its rhetoric in the service of gradualist progressive politics (“swinging each successive generation a little further to the left”). His reason for being against a “revolution” was fairly understandable, if not very noble: as a good “liberal bourgeois,” he was afraid of being worse off afterwards. Or, he suggests, of having someone else be worse off afterwards. His claims to altruism are somehow not very convincing, and one gets the sense that Rorty was animated by a curious contradiction between his own class interests and his anti-Communist leftist ideals. (Gross goes on about his parents’ politics at great length; it’s one of the best parts of that book.)

What is more interesting to me here is less Rorty’s ultimately banal admission that his politics were limited by self-interest, and more the guilty and remarkable acceptance, at the start of the excerpt, that ultimately his own class position was based on exploitation and domination of people lower in the social hierarchy. As he puts it, “[my view] says to the people on whose necks one trods that it will be better for their children’s children if they keep on getting trodden upon while we educate the more intelligent of their children to understand how society works.”

Is this not a remarkable sentence?

What is at stake in Rorty’s acceptance of the cynicism of his own view?

And why exactly does Rorty mistrust the “aroused workers and peasants”? In the name of his own supposedly superior, more disinterested, more considered position?

And what shall we make of Rorty’s own despairing and contradictory comment that “nothing but a revolution” could make possible a “decent life,” but that he still doesn’t want a revolution? To what extent does he ultimately reject the possibility of a “decent life” altogether? A life where one group “trods” on another is hardly decent, by definition.

For that matter, where, in the end, did Rorty’s presupposed standards of decency come from? What, if anything, legitimates them?

… Some texts don’t have any answers, it seems to me as I write.

Never having been asked to comment on anything on this blog, I felt a little puzzled, but eventually thought, why not? So here, if you like, are some theses on understanding this instance of a presidential speech.

(1) A presidential speech is a balancing act, a diplomatic performance; and as such, it is almost inevitably produced under severe institutional and diplomatic constraints. One might put it like this: university presidents enjoy no right to free speech. Or at least, no free speech without the threat of retribution from any of numerous quarters. If you read Dean Dad’s wonderful blog about his life as a community college dean, the first thing you find out is that university management (call them leadership or administrators if you prefer) operates in a state of constant compromise and constraint. In a great recent post, he explains something about the constraints on what one can say in his role: “When I spoke only for myself, it didn’t really matter what I said. But as a leader in the institution, comments that once would have been merely snarky were suddenly taken as indications of larger directions.” Just think of Larry Summers. As president, one is heavily vetted to begin with, continuously accountable to multiple constituencies, and under pressure not to rock the boat. And as Dean Dad points out, “front-room talk” isn’t the same as “back-room talk”: even if presidents may be frank in private, they are seldom unguarded when acting in their ceremonial role. First thesis: presidents are not free agents. Corollary: a presidential speech on academic freedom invokes a value that it cannot practice.

(2) The presidential speech is a kind of self-instituting, self-authorizing ceremonial language that functions to assure or reassure the continued dignity of the institution. And a presidential speech is hence less an empirical report on an institution than a moment in the reproduction of an institutional self-image. As in commercial advertising or a political campaign, one puts one’s best foot forward. It’s less that what is said is false as that campus life is glossed with the veneer of an institutional fantasy. This fantasy — one can see it in Zimmer’s speech — implicitly embodies its own criteria of evaluation, which are essentially aesthetic. In such a speech, institutional reality vanishes into the self-satisfied ether of institutional desires for beautiful self-representations.

Hence one of the most striking moments in Zimmer’s speech is when he says — his speech by the way is about academic freedom and hence he talks about the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, a document which I have already examined on this blog — anyway, Zimmer, I was saying, rightly says that to understand the Kalven Report we must situate it in its institutional context. But to my eyes as an anthropologist, what Zimmer calls “contextualiz[ing] the Kalven report within institutional culture” would be better called contextualizing the Kalven report in his obligatory presidential fantasy of institutional culture. See for yourself:

…I believe it is necessary to contextualize the Kalven report within institutional culture. The commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom is not a simple one. It is difficult and to succeed demands a culture and community that will support it. The University of Chicago holds these as its highest values and we seek to reinforce them at every turn. The Kalven report is a component of this culture. Many other institutions push other values forward as legitimate competing interests, and their culture may not support such a strong position on this particular set of values. Every institution needs to come to its own conclusion as to what it is and what it wants to be. It needs to decide how much weight to give to various competing interests. Kalven only works at the University of Chicago because of these common values at the University, and can only be fully understood as a part of the realization of these values.

The University of Chicago’s “culture” here is one that is presented as having monolithically shared and uncontested values. Its community is portrayed as a heroic agent that has managed to maintain a difficult but successful “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom.” This obviously is not an empirical description but an artfully patterned and arranged permutation of highly valorized ceremonial language. There are no real people in this description, no disciplinary or economic or political differences, none of the gritty detail of routine institutional dysfunction. Uttered by a janitor, this description would be surreal (given the class and educational connotations that lie hidden within this governing language); uttered by a student, it would be sycophantic. Uttered by a president, it is a moment that shows the empty self-referentiality of ceremonial rhetoric. (I don’t mean to completely trash these fantasies of institutional valor, and I’m certainly not saying there’s nothing good about the university, but I do want to emphasize the aesthetic fixations of this discourse.) And while presidential descriptions do vary over the years, this public affirmation of institutional virtue is clearly part of the obligations of the president’s job, and not mainly the expression of a personal or scholarly opinion. Second thesis: a presidential speech is institutional fantasy hour, an obligatory ritual pause whose ideological emptiness guarantees that its form will be more significant than its content.

(3) This description of institutional culture should be taken as official self-image rather than a genuine description, but let’s say we read it naively as a description, since Zimmer does gesture towards describing a culture, even if somewhat rhetorically. Now, frankly, this description of a “culture” strains my ethnographic faculties. If Zimmer ever happens to read this blog — a moment I do not foresee — I must protest that my experience suggests that, as an empirical description, what he says is quite false. Chicago is in reality not as special as it imagines itself: it is an institution much more like institutions elsewhere: it is a university where one hears plenty of false and unrigorous claims, plenty of lazy inquiries that are neither open nor intense, plenty of situations where “intellectual freedom” is limited by prevailing disciplinary prejudice and intellectual narrow-mindedness. Zimmer states that the university has a “commitment to maintain open, rigorous, intense inquiry in an environment of maximal intellectual freedom,” but interpreted empirically, this statement is not only false but also performatively self-refuting. In other words, the very sloppiness and clearly deeply constrained nature of this presidential statement is already evidence in itself that institutional culture is neither perfectly rigorous nor perfectly free. Third thesis: read inside-out, contextually and symptomatically, presidential speech can serve as a barometer of the disingenousness of campus self-images.

(4) The rhetoric of “culture” and “community” serves to conceal all the ways in which the university is neither a settled culture nor a community of equals. Particularly disingenuously, the university administration disappears as an actor, as if the voice of the president was, unproblematically, the voice of the university. It seems, in fact, that Zimmer has a deeply autocratic view of himself as the sole authorized voice of the university:

Were [former president] Hutchins’s political activities an expression of academic freedom or were they chilling, given that he embodied the University as its president? Many today, including myself, would question this level of political engagement for a University president. While separating the University from its president in a legal sense is easy enough, it is problematic practically, and thus the potential chilling effect of a politically active president is something I and other of Hutchins’s successors have tried to avoid.

Now, indeed as I said above, it is difficult for a president not to be viewed as a spokesperson for a university, but what strikes me here is that Zimmer sees his only option as being one of retreat into his role as the practical “embodiment” of the university. He shows no interest in developing a campus process for developing a more democratic university consensus. Indeed, insofar as he ardently defends the Kalven Report — which asserts that the university (administration) must take no political positions, even ones overwhelmingly demanded by faculty and students — he asserts that the university president’s role is to resist the will of the campus majority. For Zimmer, the administration’s role appears to be to resist outside as well as inside pressures. (There is something deeply disturbing to me, frankly, about his equation of 1930s Nazi dominance of the University of Berlin with 1980s calls on the university to divest from South Africa. The idea that he would very nearly equate these as unwanted political influences is frightening.) What he doesn’t mention, of course, is that the administration is permanently obliged to bring in funds for the university and that this might be relevant to an assessment of political neutrality. “Investing” for him does not count as a political act, only “divesting,” which is suspect, apparently, because it involves imposing an outside political will on what should be a strictly internal business decision.

Thus again we are back at the nexus of institutional power and money, two major features of university life that, one might think, would be highly relevant for a theory of academic freedom. And yet are so thoroughly unexplored in Zimmer’s speech. But in the end, I almost pity this president. Even if he happened personally to agree with everything I had said here, he would, on my assessment, be incapable of saying anything so scathing in a public forum. His role, and the dignity of the institution he claims to embody, would prohibit it.

One day when I have time to write a longer article, a comparative analysis of university presidents’ discourse from both sides of the Atlantic would seem to be in order.

I recently came across the very curious Europhilosophie, which seems to group together a number of philosophy working groups (on Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Bergson, Fichte, phenomenology, materialism, and psychoanalysis, among others). An acquaintance of mine, doing a thesis on the situationists, is part of the Groupe de Recherches Matérialistes. It turns out that members of this group offer seminars in various places. For your entertainment I therefore present the course description for a seminar on “Reading Marx/Readings of Marx” (Lecture(s) de Marx). It will be offered next fall at the (very philosophically prestigious) Ecole Normale Supérieure.

Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris
Seminar 2009-10

Reading(s) of Marx

Place: Ecole Normale Supérieure – 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
Contact: Guillaume Fondu

The idea for this seminar comes from a simple observation [constat] drawn from the development of last year’s university movement: that of the nonexistence, as far as students were concerned, of structures of collective reappropriation of philosophical discourse, or at least ones falling between professorial lectures and solitary meditations, which by themselves cannot constitute the horizon of a veritable philosophical engagement. Given this starting point, it seems sensible to us to constitute a reading group around a well-defined program, so as to learn to work together and to permit a labor of common theoretical elucidation. In so doing, the choice of Marx as a philosophical figure strikes us as decisive on account of the new discursive practice he set in motion: a science of the collective by the collective, and a theoretical practice inseparable from its own genesis and from its micro- as well as macro-social effects. We wish to set in motion such an enterprise, one which will devote itself above all to the study of canonical texts reassessed in their “actuality” [leur actualité, their contemporary significance] which we know does not correspond to a spatiotemporal interval but rather constitutes the untimely mark of every revolutionary project, inasmuch as it connects to the concrete not to describe it “purely and simply” (ideology) but to give it its only true political form.

Marxist discourse has not finished, neither with writing history, nor with inscribing itself in history; and no approach to Marx can ultimately economize on the successive readings and rewritings of a text that constantly wanted to reactualize itself [ré-actualiser, make itself contemporary again], according to the whims of the fluctuations of the epoch and of its immanent revolutionary potentials. Reading(s) of Marx will thus take several directions, united in the coherence of a rediscovery of the social both in theory and in practice, with Marx but sometimes also perhaps against him.

The seminar will meet weekly, and will be split in two parts, devoting alternate weeks to Marx’s early texts and to the study of Capital, so as to permit everyone to get involved at their own pace. The year will begin with a presentation and a discussion of the seminar’s practical details, and the first sessions will be organized by the conveners [les responsables], dedicated to a reading of Marx’s early Critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, and to an immediate start on Capital in the second week. One can only hope that the rest will follow.

The dates and the room for the seminar meetings will be announced at the start of the academic year.

At an earlier point I think I would have been interested in how a document like this incorporates a subtext of classroom power relations. So for instance one can observe that this document contains a tension between the desire to produce a collective of apparent equals and the obvious assumption of pedagogical agency and authority by the teacher. Not to mention that the intellectual subtext is in certain respects marked as secondary; bold text (in the original) is used to give practical directions about how to find out where to show up and whom to contact for more information, rather than to emphasize, say, some intellectual point.

Although these hidden dynamics and contradictions of authority are certainly active here (and the pedagogical contradictions of leftist philosophers have in fact been the object of explicit reflection by French students, which I will come back to sometime), this sort of analysis now seems to me a trifle predictable. (My paper on literary theory classrooms goes into some detail on this topic.) What seems now more interesting is the organizer’s intense sense of the relation between a philosophy – Marx’s work for example – and its presence in the present, its “actuality” as they put it.

Marxism is cast here in the temporal frame of a going concern, not of (say) a dead doctrine. It has the temporality of the “untimely” (intempestive), of the unfinished. That is, the temporality of constantly bringing itself back to the present, of constant reflexive re-involvement in its genesis and effects, in its fluctuating “revolutionary” potentials. The political horizons of the course appear to be both radically Marxist and also radically academic: although it proposes to delve into Marx in order to offer students a philosophical engagement with the present, it also proposes no concrete form of political practice beyond reading and seminar participation. For that matter, even its pedagogical form remains somewhat indeterminate. The unfinished nature of Marxism apparently corresponds to the unfinished nature of the proposed seminar: its details are left uncertain, filled for the present only by the “hope” that “the rest will follow.”

Have been reading Sartre lately, the Search for a Method (which so far seems to be a grumpy critique of Marxist orthodoxy), and I’ve been struck by his insistence on delving into the specifics of particular social forms, his insistence on sociological and psychoanalytic detail in the analysis of any particular historical phenomenon (petit bourgeois authors for example). I have often felt unsatisfied with what feels like a refusal, by sociologists of knowledge, to enter the interior of the intellectual worlds they analyze, by their privileging of social form over conceptual content. I’m hoping, in examining French philosophy courses this year, to avoid this kind of mistake; which means, among other things, thinking more closely about the urge to make philosophy, as in this course description, a means for a “veritable philosophical engagement” with the present. What kind of intellectual future is implied in a hope to make philosophy fully present at a time when it seems out of sync with its moment?

One day a few weeks ago I stopped by a political demonstration against the French university reforms. The organizing group, La Ronde Infinie des Obstinés, specializes in what are essentially indefinitely long circular marches, rather after the pattern of a vigil. Their name amounts to “the infinite rounds of the stubborn,” though someone tried to explain that une ronde infinie could also be interpreted as a merry-go-round! At any rate, the idea is that by marching nonstop they can manifest their “infinite” determination and commitment to the cause. But what cause, you ask? Well, for those anglophone readers out there, I thought I would give a rough translation of their pamphlet (French original here). As you’ll see, on this occasion they were trying to persuade French candidates for the European Parliament to take a stand on university reforms.

100 hours to make teaching and research into a campaign debate

“It’s more than time…”

Four months of strikes, of protests, of occupations, of infinite rounds of the stubborn. We, who make, think and dream the university, we, teachers, researchers, staff and students, affirm that the current reforms striking the university are part and parcel of a real political will, one in full submission to the economic field.

Four months we’ve faced an enterprise of propaganda, an enterprise of governmental denigration of the men and women who make the university live.

Four months in which the movement against the consequences of the LRU has grown stronger, because we understand today the deep vices and mortal dangers with which it threatens the university: all-powerful presidency, business-like management, marginalization of scholarly criteria in decisionmaking, generalized precarization of the staff, explosion of the price of tuition. This law will produce in France what it has produced wherever these principles are put to work: arbitrary management of careers and research groups, dependence on private money, walling-off of knowledges, destruction of whole teaching sectors, growing social injustice.

At once authoritarian in its implementation, bureaucratic in its principles, and liberticide for the university world, this law “Liberties and responsibilities of the universities” (LRU) is only a French caricature of a European process.

In effect, the European university system is affronted today by a transformation and reforming that is the academic side of the submission of the whole of society to the “invisible hand of the market.” The promoters of this society and their national craftsmen have associated this destruction with the names of two of the oldest European universities, those of the Sorbonne (declaration of 1998) and of Bologna (declaration of 1999).

But the “Bologna Process,” which is at the heart of European university politics, has never been publicly discussed. Its inscription in the Lisbon Strategy (2000) destroys the university as a place where enlightened and thinking citizens are formed; it means foreclosing on the values of elaboration and transmission of knowledge on which European universities should rest. In appearing to valorize the university’s missions, it negates them. It aims to apply to the university world rules that can never be applied to it.

It is thus time to affirm that the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy have the function of introducing into the universities a generalized competition put under the auspices of economic profitability.

It is time to affirm that the notion of “employability” is no more than a tool for destroying the humanistic knowledges that are at the heart of our civilization.

It is time to affirm that the notion of the “knowledge economy” conceals the transformation of knowledge into an economic good.

It is time to affirm that the slogan of “adapting the university to society” doesn’t say that this society is reduced to purely economic ends.

Today, we affirm that the adaptation of the European university doesn’t necessarily entail a reductive utilitarian obsession with the employability of its graduates. We refuse the application of this market logic to the university, this logic which reduces the rational to the useful and calculates utility in terms of profit. The university is not the place of a pure utilitarianism calculated in exclusively economic terms. The acquisition and invention of knowledge is a right for all and cannot be limited. Knowledge, creation and research are not commodities, but are the good of all: they are not for sale.

We demand from the future members of the European parliament a clear formulation of their vision of the university of tomorrow. We require that they take up the fundamental subject of the education of future generations of free and enlightened citizens, that they pose the problem of the university and of research, of education and formation as a major theme of the European campaign, that they publically accept or forcefully reject the complete submission of the university, of research, of the education system to market logic and to purely economic interests. We demand that they affirm with complete certainty that education is a public good, and that they draw out all the necessary consequences.

We are stubborn and our vigilance, infinite.

This should give you a flavor of the arguments against the current university reforms (which have been ongoing now for years, actually). And I quite like the poetic structure of this document. Of course, if one were to evaluate the results in purely utilitarian terms, as it seems to demand not to be evaluated, it probably wouldn’t count as a total victory — the recent elections were a major loss for left-wing parties and a gain for the UMP, which, of course, is the party that has implemented the university reforms that the Ronde is protesting. But people I talked to at the time were happy to see that five political parties had sent responses to queries about university policy. Just getting a political response already is a success for a relatively small group like this one, I’m sure.

And all month I’ve been asking people: where do they find political hope after months of politically fruitless protests and demonstrations? Stubbornness, in this light, becomes a rather interesting and strategic political emotion, a way of refusing despair and refusing defeat and a way of deferring the end of a struggle until the desired results have been obtained.

(Thanks to Jean-Claude for the photo of the Ronde.)

With the onset of summer, I’m faced with the end of the academic year, the end of class meetings and conferences, the end of departmental meetings and protests, and hence the temporary loss of most of the usual opportunities for face-to-face ethnographic observation in the traditional sense. My field site is shutting down. But I’m trying to ask myself: what do I make of the fact that I still possess an wonderful, unmanageable number of printed pages, of written things, of texts, that I need to read? And that this reading is simultaneously a chance to do textual analysis but also, and this is what seems to deserve more attention, a form of participant-observation in the world in question. Academia is nothing if not a community of readers. What then are the tactical or theoretical implications of a summer spent reading in a project on academia?

It strikes me that my point of departure has to be this: that reading isn’t something I can approach as a form of background knowledge, as a source of pure context. Nor for that matter can reading be a form of pure textual decoding that serves only as an instrumentally necessary prelude to some type of textual analysis. Nor, for that matter, is this necessarily a matter of doing “ethnography of reading,” which is essentially a traditional ethnographic investigation of a given set of readers. Of course it’s important to examine local means of reading, interpretation and textual reception, as Jonathan Boyarin or Janice Radway or Charles Bazerman have done in various contexts from physics labs to Book of the Month Club editors. But still, what I’m interested in isn’t ethnography of reading but ethnography as reading. Sitting on a bench reading a book as a way of being-there in an academic world. Reading as a form of participation, not just of observation. After all, the locals are constantly trying to get me to partake in their common means of textual exchange, by constantly suggesting books for me to read. These book suggestions are of course themselves invaluable ethnographic data. But reading itself is a way of learning one’s way around a space, a way of retracing a set of thoughts or “problématiques,” a way of developing competences of comprehension and belonging for later use, a way of assimilating some of the aesthetic parameters of a social world, its characteristic framing devices, its cast of characters, its rhythm. There’s a reason why half of my conversations here revolve around who has read what: having read a text provides a source of social solidarity and a ground for further exchange.

On a more theoretical level, in conceptualizing reading as a means of participation in an academic world, I think we must make a real effort to resist the temptation, always common, to theorize a social world as, above all, a world of physically co-present human beings in real-time social interaction. Rather we have to think of academic texts as moments in a complexly mediated and disaggregated social world, one where perhaps you can learn more about someone by reading their book than by having an hour-long interview. Ursula K. Le Guin has beautifully asserted that authors are, always, already there in their texts: “We write stories about imaginary people in imaginary situations. Then we publish them (because they are, in their strange way, acts of communication—addressed to others). And then people read them and call up and say But who are you? tell us about yourself! And we say, But I have. It’s all there, in the book. All that matters.”

I don’t know many true post-structuralists, but this blunt assertion of authorial presence should give them chest pains, if they happen to be reading this blog. Le Guin, incidentally, never claims that authors are the uniquely privileged interpreters of the texts they produce; but only that their texts, being the products of long labors of writing, provide evidence, acquaintance, knowledge of the author. This seems to me true, particularly for academic texts, which, with their thickets of formal citations and fairly clear displays of intellectual affiliation, are relatively useful guides to systems of professional relations. For example, there were certain sociologists who I already suspected to be quite politically different before I arrived in France, and who turn out, in fact, to be quite politically different. (A euphemism.)

In this sense, one can read social relations out of texts, can read intellectual trajectories and movements out of texts, can read stylistic maneuvers and claims of authority or importance out of texts. To be sure, reading alone produces a rather limited and partial experience of an academic world. But the academic world would be equally inaccessible, maybe even incomprehensible, without reading. Because, again, reading is a form of participation. And one could go farther: reading is one of the constitutive forces of academic worlds, a practice of social and intellectual (re)production, an act of worlding that yields a cosmos where there are landscapes of ideas and concepts, immaterial “schools of thought” and “intellectual trajectories,” clashes of ideology playing out at once in terms of pure theory and in terms of the job hiring process.

Now, to do ethnography through reading as a way of examining textually mediated academic worlds is not, I emphasize, to become the kind of idealist semiotician who believes that there’s nothing outside the text. Is not to believe that everything human is a text. Is not to argue that anthropology is just hermeneutics or that every percept or behavior is a “cultural text.” I oppose those theorists who hold views of this sort. But I also don’t think that academic reality is reducible to its more obviously sociological dynamics (to positions on a disciplinary field, to institutional hierarchy and competition, etc). That kind of sociology tends to elide or minimize the cultural and intellectual content of the world it dissects. A better way of thinking about academic life would perhaps begin neither from the institutional infrastructure nor from the purely intellectual dynamics, but rather from an analysis of the relations of intellectual production, a theoretical placeholder term that I hope to think through before long.

Will try to post more often. Coming up soon: photographic analysis of academic pride parades; preliminary readings of some recent French philosophical work on the university; perhaps notes on my somewhat problematic relationship to the French language…

Intellectual: … Difficulty is illegitimately manufactured whenever an absence of empirical breadth is mistaken for the presence of conceptual depth. Say you restrict yourself to speaking in the name of Marx and Freud, and then address things that cast doubt on what they said, such as the absence of a proletarian revolution or the presence of post-Oedipal identity formation. Not surprisingly, you end up saying some rather complicated and paradoxical things. But you have succeeded only in engaging in some roundabout speech that could have been avoided, had you availed yourself of a less sectarian vocabulary. But the continental philosophical game is mostly about deep reading and roundabout speech. By the time you have gone to the trouble of learning the relevant codes, you will have become an ‘insider’, capable of wielding a sort of esoteric power by virtue of that fact alone. This is a trick that the US continental philosopher and queer theorist Judith Butler learned from Plato.

Philosopher: All I know about Butler is that a few years ago she won the ‘Bad Writing’ contest awarded each year by the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature. So she must not have been that successful.

I: Au contraire. In fact, the editors played right into Butler’s hands, though neither she nor they appreciated it at the time. An accusation of ‘Bad Writing’ boils down to the charge that the author doesn’t know what she’s talking about. In fact, of course, it implies only that the accuser doesn’t know what the author is talking about — and hopes that others share this problem.

P: But why worry about Butler’s literary malfeasance in the first place?

I: Exactly the point! That she is accused at all is already a major concession to her power. (This is why intellectuals like to make accusations: we want to force the accused to reveal the power they’re trying to hide.) So all that Butler had to do after her opponents’ opening blunder was to use the least force possible in displaying her power, preferably by conveying magnanimity. In short: don’t insult the accuser. Butler managed this is no less than The New York Times. She portrayed difficult writing as a kind of self-sacrifice that few have either the will or the opportunity to perform. The reader was left believing that Butler and her fellow travelers write as great explorers sailing to uncharted regions under the flag of Humanity.

P: Once again, I detect a note of sarcasm in your analysis. So what’s the point?

I: The point is that accusations of ‘Bad Writing’ merely refinrce the sort of difficult writing championed by Butler and others influenced by continental philosophy. The real problem isn’t that Butler doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The problem is that what she’s talking about isn’t best served by what she knows. She has clearly raised some important issues relating to gender identity, especially once the biological basis of sexuality is called into question. These issues are bound to loom large in law and politics in the coming years, especially as developments in medical research and biotechnology allow for various cross-gendered possibilities that go well beyond cross-dressing: suppose people could easily undergo a sex change or be equipped to performa role traditionally restricted to one sex – such as carrying a pregnancy to term? However, you can’t get very far addressing these questions if you’re armed with little more than a pastiche of recent French post-structuralist thought.

I put in bold the parts that I find most interesting. I particularly like the analysis of “bad writing” as a kind of performative speech act – one which is based on shared incomprehension on the part of its utterer as well as their audience, one which, in a sense, projects ignorance and incomprehension into the writer when in point of fact it exists primarily in the reader. This is an important compromise position between two overly dichotomous positions on “bad academic writing” — one of which reduces charges of “bad writing” to a misleading rhetoric that hides other political projects (of advocating a more culturally conservative role for the humanities, for example); the other of which would view bad writing as simply “bad” according to purely linguistic and stylistic criteria (themselves probably unanalyzed). One is too dismissive of the fact that some people actually can’t make head or tail of a given text; another takes for granted that all texts should be equivalently readable. Fuller, in contrast to these positions, interprets “bad writing” accusations as products of a judgment about the writing itself, but one that is the product of a particular community of readers with local norms of intelligibility.

The other things that I find stimulating here are: (1) the idea that the complexity of some academic discourses is unnecessary and arguably even spurious, because it is a product of overly constrictive premises; (2) the idea that one examine important intellectual problems without knowing that one’s methods or prior knowledge are poorly suited to the task. I guess this is a particularly provocative accusation when it comes to Butler because she’s become so canonical, and I don’t really see what Fuller is suggesting she ought to have done instead (and calling her work a post-structuralist “pastiche” is excessive), but I rather like the idea that one’s scholarly habitus can turn into a (valorized, misrecognized) intellectual disability. That seems to me very plausible.

These are the books I got from George Stocking‘s office when he decided to give away his book collection in December. They are a strange memorial to the ending of a scholarly career.

He had sent out a half-comic announcement:

Free Books, Offprints, Journals, Dissertations, etc. from the Library of G.W.S.

Available Wednesday, Thursday, Friday this week in Haskell 213, 10am-noon; 1pm-3pm

First Come, First Served. Bring a Back Pack, Box, Carton, or Wheel Barrow

I would have liked to have brought a wheelbarrow, but there’s no way to get it up the stairs and no place to put that many new books on my shelves.

I wonder whether it was hard to part with the books. Maybe at a certain point in time one ceases to be excited about book collecting. It makes me wonder: are all humanists and social scientists also bibliophiles? My first temptation in someone’s office or living room is to inspect the bookshelf. Walter Benjamin seems to have taken this attitude to the height of fetishism: “Inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects.” So he ends the peculiar essay, “Unpacking My Library.” And he commented earlier on: “Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor [and hence unable to purchase books], but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.”

Stocking wasn’t giving away copies of his own books, I note. No, it was copies of other people’s books which he no longer needed or couldn’t bear to bring home to his house. He was giving his office space back to the department. There were a lot of hardcover books that I would not have paid for today. Old editions of classic books in my field, Diana Crane’s Invisible Colleges, Jencks and Riesman’s Academic Revolution. Old but well-weathered paperbacks, philosophy of science, Ludwick Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (an apparent precursor to modern science studies), a thin paperback by Santayana whose spine had never been cracked, books on the Enlightenment that are so old that their authors sincerely believed that there really was an Enlightenment that brought an end to the medieval darkness. I don’t know anyone who seems to believe that now, but it has a charming mythical structure to it.

There was a decaying copy of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. It’s the most popular of the books I got and the only one I’ve read so far. The tale of a white guy who had his skin darkened in 1959 and reports the experience of being black in the south. Interesting that Stocking was reading it. It’s a first printing. Must have been a popular sensation when it came out.

To be given someone’s books is to share a small piece of their history as a reader and collector. To be given books from someone two generations earlier is more like entering a time machine. You see which books mattered long ago to someone doing research in a different era. You might have heard of the titles but it wouldn’t occur to you to buy them new, if it were even possible to do so. But soon enough they blend into the long stacks of books on your shelf and you have to sift just to find them.

I know I got some books from my grandfather (who was, I confess, a professor), but they start to disappear into the shelves. I’m looking through for them. Some Hume and Dewey and Whitehead, I think, and archaic anthropology, The Golden Bough and The White Goddess, Gramsci and Raymond WIlliams, The Power Elite and The Twisted Dream. To open the cover is to enter a different imaginative world, where even the scrawled marginalia become interesting because you know the person writing.

The beginning of the Twisted Dream sounds like it could have been written this week. “The United States is in the midst of a developing social crisis, at once economic, political, and moral, simultaneously domestic and international…”

So the relationship with one’s advisors is the institutionalized moment of semi-autonomy from the institution, a moment in which one’s academic situation is governed by the contingencies of evolving personal and intellectual relations, and only more distantly by the bureaucratic requirements of the graduate program.

This can evoke all kinds of intricate psychosocial dynamics between student and advisors. Being in the middle of them, I can’t really speak from experience here, but let’s look at Janice Radway’s post facto description of her advising relationship, from a 2006 interview in the Minnesota Review with Jeff Williams:

“I first studied with Russ during my sophomore year. I had come out of a very middlebrow background and loved books and reading. I thought of myself as an English major, but didn’t aspire to a professional identity or position. I thought I was going to write as a journalist. In that sophomore year, I took Russ’s class on realism and naturalism, which met three days a week. He was working on The Unembarrassed Muse at that time and offered a special session that you could attend on Thursdays, where he would talk about the popular culture contemporaneous with literary realism and naturalism. I attended those sessions and was transfixed; I was not just transfixed by the subject matter but by his investment in the subject matter. I remember thinking, “This is a job, you can actually aspire to this as a job. You might think of yourself as a teacher, as a professor even.” It sounds silly and naïve, but that really was the moment when I thought about a different future.”

Williams interjects: “My saying is, you don’t get born knowing it.”

Radway continues: “Yes. That was the moment when I realized you could really desire to do this. He became a kind of mentor to me even as an undergraduate. Eventually, I wrote a senior honors thesis that developed out of that class… In that case, I was interested in class and class mobility, though I didn’t have a sophisticated enough vocabulary to discuss it.

“So I went back to work with Russ because he was very encouraging. He was quite driven by ideas, but he wasn’t self-consciously training us to take up research positions in top-tier institutions. He was training people to be teachers who loved the material they were teaching. He was a voracious reader himself and passed on everything he knew. He was legendary for leaving notes, clippings, and citations in his colleagues’ and students’ mailboxes almost every other day. In that way, he literally passed on his passion to all of us.”

Williams: “Do you do that for your students?”

Radway: “No, I don’t know how he had the time to do what he did. It was a different historical moment perhaps, in terms of the life of the university. He certainly didn’t have to contend with email or with endless amounts of administrative tasks.”

The relation with Russ begins in a moment of transfixion. A mimetic moment in which Radway learns to embody her professor’s passion even as it amazes and almost stuns her. A moment in which Radway feels her professor’s feelings and, in that moment, begins to see his present as her potential future. A moment in which an academic future becomes concrete, an academic aspiration becomes “actual,” a desire becomes “real.”

If this is really the beginning of the formation of a professorial habitus, an academic state of mind and being, then it’s interesting that it takes form all at once in a memorable event. As if the habitus were formed event by event, not only through a slow and unconscious process of accretion.

Then when it comes to Radway’s work in graduate school, what’s striking is that intellectual passion was transmitted through textual circulation. The measure of Russ’s dedication was the massive amount of “notes, clippings and citations” that he passed on. If texts are epistemic mediators in academic life, then here we observe the social effects of small texts in circulation, not huge things but merely clippings and citations, working as the media of daily sociability and solidarity.

Russ’s intellectual intimacy with his students was realized as he read voraciously and then “passed on everything he knew.” As if total sharing with one’s students were the true mark of intellectual dedication. As if students were offered all their professor’s knowledge. (A fantasy, that.)

But then in a weird moment of self-negation, Radway says that she doesn’t do that for her students. Times have changed. There isn’t time to share everything anymore. Oddly, she cites email as a reason for the diminishment of intellectual exchange. (I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would hardly have relations with anyone without electronic communication.) Here Radway repeats an academic figure I’ve seen other professors say: one’s charismatic teacher incarnated a form of total intellectual engagement, but one will never live up to that, never equal that.

We see here intense identification with one’s advisor (Russ offered Radway a future as he prefigured it) coupled to definite disidentification (I’m not like that!); we see humanization (advisors share their passions with their students) but also a fair bit of mythicization (“he was legendary”: hence he was not typical).

Here we can see that not all contradictions are bad. Here, contradiction worked as the medium for encouragement, maybe even for happiness. Here, the unrealizable fantasy of total sharing fails productively in the form of an intense (even if not total) circulation of texts and ideas.

This image of intense intellectual exchange appears as an extremely happy medium between the neurosis of total domination by one’s advisors (and this certainly happens to many people) and the anomie of benign neglect (which also occurs too often). I can’t help but notice, though, that intellectual exchange is described as total but also represented as very unidirectional here: it sounds like Russ was sharing everything while Radway didn’t give back much to him. Advising relations are after all based on an institutional hierarchy which one can, at best, try to evade and dampen. They are bound to be asymmetrical. The question then is simply what one can do, or do to with this asymmetry.

In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible manner is liable to be condemned as a ‘mere literary man’ or, worse still, ‘a mere journalist.’ Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly use, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable. The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a ‘scientist.’… It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not. It has become a convention–those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval.

…Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle–but one out of which any scholar can easily break.

…To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.

….Most ‘socspeak’ [that is, sociology speak] is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used–I think almost entirely–to establish academic claims for one’s self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): ‘I know something that is so difficult that you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of undeveloped type.’

…..The line between profundity and verbiage is often delicate, even perilous.

There are, of course, other explanations besides status for academic writing being unintelligible to the uninitiated. For instance, jargon could be one response to outside political pressure — one can imagine academic radicals like Hardt and Negri burying their politics in the grave of their prose. As people like David Graeber have argued, academics are permitted to espouse the most radical politics they can imagine, just so long as their audience is massively restricted by the social barriers embodied in their writing style. And as Mills also indicates, academic style is often something less than a means of attaining status; it can function simply as a condition of disciplinary belonging or group membership.

Alas, I don’t have time to give a good analysis of the politics of academic style, one more contextually specific than this one. But I like the idea that style is the vehicle for academics’ self-undermining desires, for a “vicious circle” of unrealized status or political involvement. Academic writing is an object of attachment and not just a communication medium. “Pose” not only “prose,” as Mills puts it. And a “pose” based on the logical fallacy that Mills points out: that readability is superficiality. My experience is that Graeber’s plain-spoken academic language is admired for that very reason (like in his book on value), and total incomprehensibility is generally scorned, but there is also prejudice, I think, against academics who are always too plain-spoken and seem not to “get” the subtlety of more baroque arguments. This points to a further contradiction in academic writing, which Mills knew but didn’t exactly say: academic writing becomes the vehicle for contradictory social dynamics; that is, our desire to communicate and our desire to produce community (or distinction) are often at odds with each other when we evaluate academic writing.

Finally, I note for further thought Mills’ hypothesis that, by becoming an academic, one is not just sacrificing income, but also the dominant values of the society that one is in a way rejecting, by opting out of (what’s ludicrously called) the “real world.”

Consider the following case. A few years ago there were efforts to get the University of Chicago to divest from Darfur. They failed. At the time, the president Zimmer justified the decision by referring to the Kalven Report, a 1967 document explaining that, in short, the university should be the forum for individuals to formulate their own political positions, but should not itself take political positions. Importantly, there were multiple arguments for what the authors called a “heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing they may be.” The Kalven Report justifies its conclusions with three arguments:

1. An argument that the university has no method for reaching political consensus, because it is obligated to respect dissenting opinions, and not overrule them by majority vote. Hence, any institutional politics would fail to respect minority rights. This is an argument about the ethics of representation and decision-making.
2. An argument that any institutional involvement in politics could undercut the university’s “prestige and influence.” Supposedly, a university can “[endanger] the conditions for its existence and effectiveness” by becoming politically involved. This seems to be a pragmatic argument about the university’s conditions of institutional stability, which are thought to decline as it takes sides on salient social issues.
3. An argument that the university’s “mission,” which is (predictably) described as the “discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge,” simply does not include short-term political involvement. “It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby,” says the report. This is a rather Platonic argument about the university’s apparently eternal social essence. (As Paul Horwitz pointed out last year in commenting on the report, there is of course no reason why every university must have the same mission. Moreover, as the French university historian Jacques Verger would have put it, universities change with the times, including in their missions and concepts. So this argument is, on the face of it, the most fallacious of the three.)

The report, of course, leaves room for an exception to the policy of institutional noninvolvement in politics, or rather two exceptions:

1. When political conflict threatens the university’s existence or of “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.”
2. When the university is involved with money and property, or otherwise acts in a corporate role.

According to the reminiscences of Jamie Kalven, the son of the report’s author (Harry Kalven Jr.), the committee could have put more stress on the exceptions, but chose instead to emphasize the guiding principles.

Now, in evaluating the Kalven Report we have to examine not just its logical structure but also its contexts of use. Although I am no historian of the document, a few initial points are clear. According to Geoffrey Stone, it was written in the late sixties as a means of allowing the university to avoid having to take an official position against the Vietnam War, in spite of what must have been massive student opposition. The document has since been invoked in at least three instances: the campaign to divest from South Africa in the eighties (failed), the campaign to divest from Darfur (failed, as mentioned already), and the campaign against the Milton Friedman Institute this fall (not terribly successful so far). Interestingly enough, this last instance was the only time when the Kalven Report has been used as ammunition against the administration. Faculty critics cited the report in order to argue that the $200-million proposed endowment for the MFI was a (conservative) political statement on the administration’s part.

This last citation of the Report is interesting because it cuts against the apparent trend of the document’s use: as a policy document serving as a shield for whatever decision the administration has already decided. I am generally inclined to agree with the judgment of an alumnus, Bob, who opined that “The Chicago Board of Trustees, with the complicity of the Administration, has used the Kalven Report to justify doing whatever it wished to do anyway, ignoring the Report whenever what it wished to do was fundamentally political (and of course chosing to do nothing is also to take a political position), and invoking it whenever it didn’t wish to be constrained in its activities.”

This points to a very important institutional facet of the Kalven Report, which went mostly overlooked in the otherwise good critical discussion among law professors last year (Geoffrey Stone, Rick Garnett, Paul Horwitz, plus comments). In short: a university, and most certainly the University of Chicago, is not simply a complicated intellectual community; it is also, and sometimes above all, a hierarchical quasi-corporate bureaucracy. The Kalven Report tells us itself that there is no means for the whole university to reach agreement as a collective. That holds for the document itself: the Kalven Report was not written democratically. Rather, it was written by a committee of seven professors appointed directly by the university president. Here is a key paradox of the document: purporting to speak on behalf of the university as a collective, it is in fact only the statement of a small minority masquerading as the will of the people. Or perhaps, the will of the administration masquerading as the will of the university.

Also, the document itself serves as an exemplar of codified, entextualized institutional norms, of objectified authority. The Kalven Report, after all, need not have been written – I suspect that many universities do not have an analogous document. All these problematic cases of divestment and wars could have been resolved ad hoc, without a guiding document. Nonetheless, the Report has managed to set the terms of future debate about institutional responsibility, accruing symbolic value over time simply by existing as an institutionally authorized text. The politics of putting policies down in official documents would be worth analyzing here, in much more detail.

What then, in the end, are the tacit politics of the Kalven Report itself? What kind of politics are implicit in its claim to steer clear of politics? (Not that everything is political, but claims of political neutrality are often deeply political gestures.) We know that it has served to save the institution from having to condemn Vietnam, to divest from Darfur or from South Africa. In the case of Darfur, according to one comment on Stone’s post, there was no morally neutral option available. The Kalven Report, it seems to me, can create situations in which, far from remaining institutionally neutral, the university administration can assert its own minority politics and thwart the will of the campus majority. Of course, since a central duty of the administration is making money, administrative politics can easily tend towards a cynical pragmatism in which positive ROI compensates for any negative considerations. Money and investment and economic action are not free of political presuppositions or implications, as the Kalven Report authors only grudgingly acknowledged, and it seems to me that exception (2), above, should cover an enormous amount of ground.

Of course, as I’ve observed elsewhere, business influence at the University of Chicago is immense. But I’m not sure that we can ascribe administrators’ false hopes of “staying out of politics” to business culture or economic necessity alone. Nor is it true, contrary to the pablum about timeless missions, that the university will cease to be a real university, or lose its public respect, if it takes sides on political issues. The proof of this is obvious: some 155 U.S. universities divested, at least in part, from South Africa, including prestigious institutions like Harvard, Cornell, and the University of California. It would, of course, be stupid to say that these universities have ceased to be universities in consequence.

I would hypothesize that in the last analysis, the Kalven Report serves none of the noble functions it proclaims: it does not make the university politically neutral or avoid controversy; it does not necessarily enhance the university’s prestige (since political inaction can well be popularly interpreted as a reactionary statement); it does not promote the individual’s right to dissent on campus, which is full of all sorts of semi-official orthodoxies; it does not help the university to live up to its timeless mission (since there is no such thing). As far as its content goes, it is a minor ideological document that serves to promote various convenient but false beliefs about the nature of academic institutions. Perhaps on the whole, Bob is right: the Kalven Report serves primarily to prevent the majority of teachers and students from having input into the administrative decision-making process.

Likewise with writing: what’s gibberish to my parents is, I must admit, pretty comprehensible to me. This is because academic language is a tool of social differentiation, used to separate academics from laypeople. But even so, translation is possible. Take the following snip of academic language I saw in an email:

Hi Everyone,

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating. Landscape is often implicated in power relations. Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership. The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project. In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I would translate this banal bit of prose as follows:

The discussion of the relationship between place and power and the idea of being ‘out of place’ is one that I find truly fascinating.

“I am an academic, and I am fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live.”

Elaboration: “I enjoy taking common words like “place” and “power” and treating them as major conceptual problems. I consider this activity truly fascinating. “Place” and “power” could mean any of a huge number of things, but I’ll probably just talk about them in connection with some minor research problem of my own. However, I will make sure to distill any particular places into the abstract, general idea of “PLACE.” Likewise with “POWER.” What I mean by ‘power’ is basically what kids in the street call “the Man” — it has dim connotations of the government, or big corporations, or colonialism, or parents, or all of these and more… And now, an additional twist! Since we’re supposing that there’s some kind of general relationship between POWER and PLACE, we can then ask what happens to POWER when someone or something is ‘out of place.’ Why the scare quotes, you ask? Well, they mean that being ‘out of place’ is also being made into a rarified academic concept, disconnected from popular usage. But wait — one final note! Since other scholars have also been talking about these abstractions for some time, I will be able to make myself matter by joining their discussion.”

Landscape is often implicated in power relations.

“The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together.”

Elaboration: ” ‘Implicated in’ just means ‘related to.’ And ‘often’ is completely meaningless in this context — I don’t really mean that most power relations involve a landscape, because a moment’s thought suggests that lots and lots of power relations don’t have much to do with landscapes. I just stuck in the ‘often’ to make it sound like I’m doing work on something important, and to make myself sound legitimate — which is an important part of making yourself a good academic, OK? so get off my back!”

Probably because of my geographical location, I have most often seen this subject matter approached from a post-colonial point of view, focussing on colonial re-inventions and subsequent representations of land and place as a strategy in establishing notions of ‘rightful’ ownership.

“People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it.”

Elaboration: “I live in South Africa, and people down here naturally tend to think about academic questions from a South African perspective. We used to be a colony, but now we’re a post-colony, so we consequently have a post-colonial point of view. One of the things we study is how people try to prove their rights to own land by using certain ideas about land. These ideas have been changing since the colonial era.”

The gendered representation of ‘place’ and ‘land’ in is often tied closely with this colonial project.

“People think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I wouldn’t want to say what exactly.”

“Again, the words ‘often’ and ‘closely’ have no meaning here aside from making me sound important.”

In my own work I have examined this in relation to the 1930-50 governmentally sponsored ‘Nation Building’ projects in South Africa, and focused on the representations of the gendered landscape in Afrikaans literature and painting.

“I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in connection with those.”

I am currently preparing for a joint series of lectures on landscape. Some of the areas we will be investigating include the use of landscape in computer gaming, and in comics. As comics have not in the past been my major field of study, and academic material on comics in South Africa is rare to say the least, I was wondering if any of you could point me to easily obtainable readings on the subject of ‘land’, ‘landscape’ and ‘place’ in comics. (Incidentally, that list that went around last week with general readings has already been insanely useful and I have several of the books on order from the US already)

“Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out?”

Alana, is your paper published anywhere I would be able to get a copy? Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

“If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”

So, if you put the whole translation together, it looks like so:

“I am an academic, and I am truly fascinated by The Man and thinking about where The Man lives — and where The Man doesn’t live. The Man has ideas about how the world should look and how landscapes should be put together. People near me usually think about The Man and landscapes in terms of who owns what and how they justify owning it. Also, people think that land has something to do with gender. That has something to do with colonialism. I’m not saying what exactly. Anyway, I studied Afrikaans literature and painting in the 30s-50s and wrote about all these ideas in that connection. Recently I got this sweet new gig — but honestly I’m not really ready for it and probably not all that qualified for the job. Can anyone help me out? If you help me, I might put your name in the Acknowledgements section of my next essay.”