Sometime in 2019, I noticed that my former teacher, Lauren Berlant, had changed their pronoun to they. They’re gone now, and the work of mourning is ongoing. Yet it seems to me that the most optimistic thing we can do is to keep learning from their work, their thought.

This might be awkward, since our relations to our teachers are so often enigmatic and awkward. Yet they can also sometimes be transformative and life-sustaining. Once, in a rare autobiographical moment, Berlant evoked the power of teachers to hold us together when we’re not really OK:

As though they knew what it was like to be me in my family, my teachers, and the world of school and work they sustained, made my life possible. I do not know whether I expected it, or demanded it, or even whether they knew what they were doing, or whether I deserved it.^[1]

I do not know whether they knew what they were doing: we can all say this of our teachers, even if they made our lives possible. I’m not sure exactly what Berlant meant by adopting they, late in life. I do know, though, that Berlant’s life was organized by a long-term disidentification with gender and femininity. As a genderqueer person, I felt a sudden kinship with their pronoun choice, an impersonal joy in finding myself together in the same gesture as my teacher. This joy does not imply any deep mutual understanding or transcendence of the structural distance that always separated us. But it might make space for thought. And what I want to suggest here is that Berlant’s embrace of they was not merely a personal identification. Rather, it is a clue to their larger theory of subjectivity in general.^[2] It sheds light on their theoretical project and its grounding in life and history.

(Caveat lector: What follows is a bit long and somewhat theoretical.)

A real flower child

By the time I met them, Lauren Berlant was an illustrious and contradictory figure in the academic world. They were on the far left at a fundamentally conservative institution, the University of Chicago. They possessed many kinds of capital and openly supported the graduate student labor union. They sympathized with anarchism while occupying a professorial chair named after George M. Pullman — Pullman being famous for owning a railroad company town where, in 1894, striking workers were shot by federal troops. No wonder, perhaps, that Berlant felt profoundly alienated by the university where they worked, while being in some ways deeply ensconced there. Ninety years after the Pullman strike, Berlant was hired — at age 26 or 27 — as an assistant professor. By age 35, Berlant was already writing about how disappointed they were with the possibilities for radical, progressive, or left action at the university. Their efforts at feminist utopianism in turn had attracted derision. “You’re being characterized all over as ’68, a real flower child,” Berlant reported hearing from a colleague in those days, the early 1990s.^[3]

Where did Lauren Berlant come from? Berlant’s own coming of age seems to have been traumatic and utopian, marked by multiple forms of abandonment and awkward intermediacy (particularly in social class terms), and by attempts both to escape from life and to reattach to it. “I was eleven in 1968,” they commented, “and a precocious—wild—eleven… And so I went to a commune when I was fifteen, I went to rallies, I hated Nixon appropriately, and I had socialist proletarian grandparents on one side of the family.”^[4] By the time Berlant graduated from college — the countercultural Oberlin in the late 1970s — they were already an experienced feminist teacher. But once they began graduate school, the utopian impulses may have proved a mixed blessing. Berlant has described their graduate education at Cornell University in the 1980s as a scene of trying to survive in a pretentious culture of “high theory.”

Everything was extremely poststructural at Cornell, and besides not having a Continental philosophical background—which I quickly had to cultivate—I was also a Marxist and a feminist. I didn’t think that these should be deemed vulgar compared to what was deemed high theory.^[5]

Some people find stability in defining themselves as feminists or Marxists, but for Berlant, while these identities offered space for thinking, they also seem to have conferred a risk of stigma and exclusion. Berlant recalled graduate school as a moment of being socially unrecognizable, “quite blundery and Martian-like from the perspective of my colleagues as well as myself,” and of “struggling terribly, partly because I felt stupid all the time, as usual, and partly because at that time there was very little feminism for graduate students in the English department.”^[6] A patriarchal institutional culture can readily produce both an organized absence of feminism and a sexist climate of representing illegible outsiders as “stupid” inferiors. Berlant’s rightful rejoinder to this was that there’s nothing vulgar or unintelligent about feminism.

Yet Berlant’s feminist critique, and their personal struggles against illegibility and marginalization, did not culminate in radical or melodramatic rejections of poststructuralist theory either. It all led into something more nonbinary; and yet the nonbinary for Berlant has never been a simple negation of binaries. Instead it is a way of opening space within, outside and alongside them, a way of holding incompatible things together without subsuming them into a definite theory, a single genre, or a stable affective style.^[7] Even after Berlant started using “they” pronouns, they also kept “she” pronouns. I think they saw the pronouns as optimistic invitations, not fixed identity markers. In Berlant’s thought, too, the nonbinary is a conceptual gesture, not an organized object. This gesture consists of a radical affirmation of multiplicity.^[8] Multiplicity pervades Berlant’s analysis of subjects and their subjectivities — an analysis which largely eschews conventional psychology in favor of exploring “the multiple tethers of the subject to the world.”^[9]

What, then, is Berlant’s account of how we are tethered to the world?

Subjectivity is multiple

Berlant did not prefer the general to the particular, and they did not set out to formulate a general theory of subjectivity. On the contrary, they participated in a version of queer theory where “theory… has meant unsettlement rather than systematization.”^[10] Nevertheless, when I sat down to read Berlant’s work last year, certain common observations about subjectivity did become clear to me. Let me suggest a provisional list of Berlant’s conceptual axioms, even if these are heuristics, not absolutes.

1. Subjectivity is multiple. It’s so easy to say this, and yet so hard to think it all the way through. The subject’s multiplicity means many things. It means that there is never just one kind of social subject; there are always many kinds of subjects. It means there is never one thing going on within us, always lots happening. “I would foreground non-coherence as a principle of being rather than a cumulative effect of serial finitude,” Berlant says, “I never thought that the subject ought to be seen as in one state.”^[11] It means we are always in multiple relationships (of kinship, sex, school, work, fantasy, etc), never just one primary relationship (it’s not all Oedipal triangles). Our many relationships each emerge, overdetermined, from many different histories. We also have many desires, and many desires about our desires, and many desires not to desire. We have many stories and theories about ourselves, and many relations to these stories. Subjectivity is soothing and it’s vertigo: it proliferates scales and modes of being, oscillating between the abstract and the concrete, the social and the affective, the big deals and the little nothings that are all wrapped together in a life.^[12]

2. Subjectivity is radically historical. Such a view has been a hallmark of critical theory since Marx, at least. Berlant particularly insists, following Foucault, that what is historical is not just identities and subject positions, but also all the terms and processes of our affective existences. Thus one of the great moments in Berlant’s work is the analysis of “trauma” as an emergent moment in the history of late capitalist public subjectivity, an analysis which in no way denies the reality of trauma and social violence, but which insists that the genres of traumatic expression have their own history.^[13]

3. Subjectivity is conventional. To be a subject, then, is to inhabit terms of subjectivity that come to us from outside, and we can call these terms conventions. But characteristically, Berlant insists that interpellation and conventionality are not only negative processes. Rather, they organize our optimism: “To love conventionality is not only to love something that constrains someone or some condition of possibility: it is another way of talking about negotiating belonging to a world.”^[14] Thus it is not necessarily bad to be conventional, and we cannot really avoid it anyway. Being a person implies inhabiting genres of living and being that capture our attachments, or that teach us what attachment means in the first place. Conventions are not only fetters; they are a space of fantasy and pedagogy.

4. Subjectivity is worldly and permeable. Berlant takes our inner lives very seriously; like a novelist or a therapist, they believe in the complexity of our psyches, of our moods and affects, defenses and boundaries. But they also take seriously our subjective locations within histories, scenes, relationships, and social formations. As they put it, subjectivity is always subject to “the overdetermining work of ideology, atmosphere, the unconscious, distraction, ambivalence, attention—in short, the many ways the subject takes up a position in any episode and in the world.”^[15] This is a materialism in several senses. It acknowledges the material impact of feelings and shared moods. It also chronicles the material impacts of systems of cultural production, economic precarity, vulnerability and violence.

5. Subjectivity is a survivor. The subject gets by. Even when we are hit and kissed and damaged and sickened and disappointed and scared and in love and horribly broken, we might still find new places to turn, or even find comfort in our own stuckness. And the very existence of predictability can be a pleasure; on Berlant’s view, a pleasure is simply “a repetition that makes a form, not necessarily something that feels good.”^[16] There is a ruthless practicality about the subject, trying to get by in the face of a bad world. This practicality is nevertheless not the essence of the subject either; it is just one more pattern one might notice about people.

6. Subjectivity is wishful. It is a den of fantasies. It is not always centered on our “lived experience” or our “ordinariness.” It is genuinely escapist, whatever content it might give to its escapes. Ironically, this also means that fantasy makes lived relationships more manageable: “Without fantasy… there would be no way to move through the uneven field of our ambivalent attachments to our sustaining objects.”^[17] Since desires are multiple, we frequently find that we want a thing and its opposite, or we want something that interferes with what we also want. This interference might not be a problem; Berlant repeatedly cites the Freudian dictum that “there is no negative in the unconscious.” Nevertheless, our wishfulness or fantasy life might threaten our own wish for coherence or our relations with others; just as we are often trying to catch up with others, so too are we stuck trying to catch up with our fantasies.

7. Subjectivity is rhythmic. Rhythm organizes what is overwhelming in our lives; it helps manage our fantasies and contradictions. Thus we can “be ourselves” at one moment and radically out of character the next, and the rhythm of these moments can prevent their interference from being destructive. Sometimes bad rhythms or the breakdown of rhythm do become a problem; but the impact of a rhythmic disturbance is something we can negotiate with, not something that is given all in advance. It is perhaps salient that one of Berlant’s chief instruments of childhood optimism was a rhythm instrument (the guitar).^[18] The notion of rhythm comes to orient Berlant’s theory of form, where we attune ourselves to rhythms and patterns that may or may not have any names, genres, or regulatory apparatuses yet. (A genre is an institutionalized rhythm.)

8. Subjectivity is affirmative. This certainly does not mean it is not full of negation, both in the aggressive will-to-destruction-and-incoherence sense^[19], and in the sense of being subject to oppression and suffering. Still, “any object of optimism promises to guarantee the endurance of something, the survival of something, the flourishing of something, and above all the protection of the desire that made this object or scene powerful enough to have magnetized an attachment to it.”^[20] Desire might be destabilizing or destructive in practice, but the form of it always has a sort of affirmative, optimistic force in the world.

9. Subjectivity is projective and object-oriented. This means that all our relationships constitute their objects. All subjectivity veers towards fetish subjectivity: “The fetish reproduces the general structure of desire, which is an activity that aims at repeating pleasure by finding substitutes for a lost or unstable object.”^[21] Nevertheless, “objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.”^[22] Thus all objects are also placeholders for other things. Every attachment is also a reference to an earlier attachment; every scene is derivative of other scenes; nothing in social life is entirely sui generis. These references can become quite abstract too, since many of our desires are for very abstract things. Sometimes what we like in an object is that it represents the very existence of possibility itself or even the possibility of transformation.

10. Subjectivity is impersonal. This means at least three things for Berlant. 1) We are never seen fully by others; they are always projecting so much onto us that, ultimately, they see what they arrange to see. Thus, whether I am being subjected to “violence” or “love” from others, it “isn’t about me.”^[23] 2) What’s personal about us, in an emotionally-authentic-and-vulnerable sense of the personal, is at most only one part of our lives. We also contain impersonal multitudes: we can be robots of convention, agents of discipline, radical interruptors of our own personal narratives, bewildered sleepwalkers, and so on. 3) Finally, our very notions of what is “personal” are themselves the result of genre conventions.^[24]

11. Subjectivity is incoherent. This follows from its being multiple and having multiple desires. It follows from its being deeply personal, and also deeply not. Subjectivity’s incoherence involves contradictions, tensions and antagonisms. But the impact of its incoherence is an empirical question. Our antagonisms might or might not be experienced as conflicts or dramas. They might just be experienced as alternative “positions” that we can take up one after the other in our fantasies. “The scenic form of fantasy enables the desiring subject to produce a series of interpretations that do not have to cohere as a narrative.”^[25] By removing the assumption of radical coherence or of radical incoherence in the subject, we can then be more curious about when coherence does or not happen, and when this does or does not pose problems.

12. Subjectivity is ambivalent.^[26] Ambivalence is an affective corollary of incoherence: ambivalence is how our incoherence is lived. On Berlant’s view, ambivalence is “an inevitable condition of intimate attachment.”^[27] As such, it is often unfairly stigmatized. Ambivalence means in part that our feelings are always plural and that we are always partly open to feeling incompatible feelings. We are open to affective flows that might push us away from the positions we thought we inhabited. The clichéd view about ambivalence is that it is a genre of inner drama, such as a grandiose struggle between two opposing poles, love and hate. But Berlant does not see ambivalence as having a fixed plot, or even any resolution other than provisional. Rather, ambivalence is something more nonbinary: it is the prerequisite of our existing in multiple ways in the world. Nor is it a purely passive state; it is a site of action, whether conscious or unconscious, and perhaps even “a pleasure in its own right.”^[28] At one point Berlant suggests evocatively that “ambivalence is a kind of temporalized bargaining.”^[29]

I might emphasize here that a nonbinary theory of the subject is not the same as a theory of nonbinary subjects. Berlant has not to my knowledge specifically analyzed nonbinary gender subjectivity. Rather, what is nonbinary about Berlant’s approach to subjectivity is its rigorous intellectual refusal of dualisms, schematisms, simplifications and closures. It is a radical affirmation that everything that is, is also something else — and thus that everything is enigmatic. Even “the nonbinary” is multiple, in the end. In Berlant’s work, the nonbinary might describe an unconscious desire (to refuse and refashion femininity, for instance); a conceptual commitment (to multiplicity); and a structure of feeling (we feel many things at once). Was this somewhat effervescent approach to thought not influenced by the social and intellectual life of the 1960s and 1970s, and their famously affirmative “philosophies of desire”? Perhaps, but Berlant’s thought always has a dialectical moment too, a moment of negation and critical ricochet. Sometimes I think one can read Berlant as trying to create a dialectics without binaries, a dialectical writing that stays true to immanence, historicity and femininity. Where conventional Marxist dialecticians have tended to privilege production, energy and motion, Berlant was equally interested in reproduction, exhaustion and stuckness.

Fort-da with the dialectic, or supervalent thought

Over the years Berlant came to identify less as a Marxist than, more broadly, as a “materialist.” They quit their campus Marxist Theory Workshop in 1985, switching their focus to feminist and queer studies, and later to affect studies. There was surely a gender politics in this: they tended to avoid masculinist critical theory culture, in its boys’ club version. Nevertheless, like the critical theory tradition, Berlant’s writing always aims to produce thought that is radically immanent to a brutal and inconsistent world. Berlant describes their project at one point as “the activity of being reflexive about a contemporary historicity as one lives it”^[30]; they also cite a “desire to angle knowledge toward and from the places where it is (and we are) impossible.”^[31] Such a project has no definite genre and no plot.

But this form of thought might still have its organizing images. Berlant at one point anchored their intellectual work around something called supervalent thought, which was also the title of their blog. They explained:

A supervalent thought is a thought whose meaning resides not only in its explicit phrasing, but in the atmosphere of intensity it releases that points beyond the phrase, to domains of the unsaid. It’s a pressure. A supervalent thought produces an atmosphere, disturbs modes of apprehension, consciousness, and experience. It wedges things while inducing leaking. It’s a resource and a threat.

It’s a concept from Freud’s Dora. Freud uses it to describe an expressed thought (I don’t love you) that covers up a concealed thought that is its opposite (I love you). But the spirit of the concept is that in the penumbra an ideation, a sensed concept, generates all kinds of contradictions that can be magnetized to induce an impact beyond what’s explicit or what’s normative.^[32]

A supervalent thought is too multiplicitous, too heavily charged, too overflowing and too resonant to pin itself down in any single dialectical drama. In a supervalent thought, the contradictions aren’t gone; they are everywhere. And there is no hope of finding a single driving logic in things or in thoughts. The large “penumbra” of a thought does not necessarily point us towards a Hegelian Absolute or any definite horizon. Rather, it stirs things up, “disturbing” us, shaking us out of our norms or perceptual habits, changing our space of possibilities without imposing a telos. The effervescence of supervalent writing might mirror the incoherence of the world in which we are writing. While much dialectical writing seems to aspire to sovereignty over its object, in supervalent thought we are always outmatched by the multiplicitous force of the unconscious. Supervalent thought might carry us away in spite of ourselves, inducing a sense of nonsovereignty in our thinking.

Still, supervalent thought needs anchors, stock images and points of departure. One of Berlant’s recurrent models for nonbinary subjectivity was the famous scene of fort-da recounted by Freud. Fort-da, as Freud reports, is a game invented by a bourgeois German child around the First World War. In the game, a small child copes with his mother’s periodic absences by banishing and then unbanishing his toys. Frequently throwing a toy away into the corner, he shouts “Fort” (German for gone). Occasionally, he also brings the toy back, shouting “da” (there). Freud speculates that this game helped the child find agency in a situation that he experienced as passivity (since he was powerless to prevent his mother’s absences), adding this may also have constituted a substitute for revenge on the beloved object (the mother).

In Cruel Optimism, Berlant approaches fort-da as a way of thinking about how we spend our lives oscillating between different subjective stances.

The child’s “loss” and “recovery” of the top is read generally as the bargaining any subject does to retain a notion that her or his intelligibility or continuity in the world is a function of her or his will. However, the capacity of the ego to respond to contingency via a principle of form should not imply that the subject “really” is contingent and only masterful in a compensatory way. Each position, repeated countless times, is its own pleasure, and the playing child is also increasing his capacity to be in the room with myriad potentialities.^[33]

In other words, fort-da is not only a pathetic Freudian symptom that compensates for the pain of having an absent mother. Rather, it illustrates Berlant’s basic views about the ways that subjectivity isn’t binary. What fort-da suggests, at its most basic, is that to be a subject is to be ambivalent about the object. (Anything, incidentally, can become an object to a subject — our “object” in psychoanalytic jargon could be a parent, a toy, an institution, a relationship, etc.) And we are not fixed in one specific subject position; rather, our subjectivity comes into being as a motion across multiple stances. We cling to our object and we throw it away; we are lost children and vengeful autocrats; we are intrinsically multiple creatures. The game of fort-da, on Berlant’s first reading, is a scene of training in multiplicity — a way in which we learn the pleasure of changing positions, and a way of increasing our tolerance for this stance-changing.

A few years later in Sex, or the Unbearable, Berlant comes to question whether the game should be seen as “a form” at all, in any singular sense. They propose instead that it might be read as an experimental space where multiple things are happening at once.

Although the child’s play with a top that he loses and repossesses repeatedly is widely read as a scene of play as mastery over loss, why not read it as a scene defined by a play with multiple consequences and risks—for example, the risks of possessing, ambivalence, being in control, being out of control, being alienated or dissociated, and/or the pleasures of cycling through these? Why not read the child’s play as an experiment in potential form that does not seek out a form? Is it not possible that recontextualizing a problem shifts its conditions of extension even if one of its persistent conditions is its negativity?^[34]

On this second, more expansive reading, fort-da is a scene where we are inventing new practices to process our multiple affects and desires. The Berlantian thought that emerges from fort-da is that we are always responding to ambivalence with intensive bargaining, which becomes the ordinary praxis, in effect, that emerges from supervalent thought. In our everyday scenes of existence, whatever the object of our present desire might be, we are always trying to calibrate our relations to it, trying to make sure we have the right amount of it, but not too much. As Berlant insists, it is so easy to be either overwhelmed or abandoned by one’s object, and so hard to make sure that one’s subjective calibrations are not over-corrections that yet again miss the mark. In short, Fort-da is how people always are with objects and other people, and all thoughts are potentially supervalent.

If one reads across Berlant’s work, it is striking how much it is permeated by people’s ongoing need to bargain with the world.

Even though I wish to remain myself, I may want also to experience the discomposure of intimate relationality, yet want only the discomposure I can imagine, plus a little of the right kind extra, and how can I bear the risk of experiencing the anything that might be beyond? How can I bear not seeking it?^[35]

Or earlier:

Think of the frequent moments in the life of a relationship when you experience frustrated sovereignty, needing to feel free to be vague, wrong, opaque, distracted, withholding, or irresponsible at the same time as you need your intimate to remain open, unsuspicious, clear, and caring, as well as alive with the capacity to surprise you (but not too much!). Love demands an imbalancing act.^[36]

For Berlant, almost all subjectivity is this kind of Goldilocks subjectivity — suspended between too much and not enough of whatever our desire might seek. It is nevertheless dialectical in the sense that it is not trapped in a closed oscillation. It is reflexive and immanent thinking: it takes us someplace, it becomes historical, it gets us through life. Or indeed, it might make life itself into the object on which one’s ambivalence is enacted or avenged.

Berlant divulges (in a rare moment of linear autobiography) that they had done fort-da with their life, describing their experience in Oberlin College.

I was very ill while I was there with anorexia which stemmed from a lot of things, including poverty and rape, and I returned to the game of fort-da with my own existence. I was supporting myself—I put myself through college—and it was all very insecure.^[37]

Is it any wonder that later in life Berlant began to theorize precarity, having lived through it? And what then, what comes after precarity? What happens after you wear yourself out with ambivalence, with fort-da, with relentlessly tracking the environment for new cues, with a frenzy of intellection? Since Adorno at least, dialecticians have no longer known where we were going. For Berlant, the utopian often still lingers as a distant horizon, as something much more fragmentary than The Revolution, as an unreachable object of desire. Supervalent thought leads us in Berlant’s work to one of its blind spots: to exhaustion. One might then ask: who is the subject of exhaustion in an exhausted world? The subject of exhaustion is the subject of reproduction. A subject with a gender.

The nonbinary, the feminine

This brings up a seemingly straightforward question: who is the subject of a Berlantian theory of the subject? The question seems to have a clear general answer: women. Berlant’s work is predominantly about women’s culture and writing, and this feminist methodological choice has a powerful effect. With an eloquent and forceful silence, it displaces men from their historical position as the default subjects and objects of critical inquiry. Nevertheless, Berlant’s work does not idealize women, nor construe their femininity as a singular form. Instead, Berlant is deeply committed to the view that “women” is a historical field without a timeless unity. “Feminists must embrace a policy of female disidentification at the level of female essence,” Berlant wrote back in 1988. “What we share is a history of oppression by patriarchy in its various alliances with other hegemonic economic, state, racial, and religious practices; what we do not share is our relation to these systems of oppression.”^[38] Berlant then argued that when we refuse to organize feminism around a universal subject of women, it becomes possible to comprehend “the overdetermined and incoherent activity that passes for, or simulates, something like the essence of woman”^[39] (my emphasis).

In 2021, it may be easier to imagine feminism without a universal subject of women than it was in 1988. But I must say, in the face of a new essentialism that pervades many contemporary trans and nonbinary communities — one that sometimes manages to picture even nonbinary gender as an alternative essence of self — it is still powerful to argue that womanhood is already in itself a set of incoherent practices passing as an essence.^[40] “Passing” in trans vernacular is understood as the process of becoming recognizable as a coherent bearer of a binary gender category.^[41] The heterotopian process of passing expresses an entirely understandable longing to dodge symbolic violence, to slip under hegemony’s radar, and to be welcomed warmly by the world. But in its very framing (passing or not), it also tends to construct cishet hegemony itself as much more coherent than it ever is. Whence the continued radicality of Berlant’s early view: that cis women too are only passing as women.

What does this passing look like in practice? Berlant approaches gender in the first instance as a condition of ordinary subjectivity, and unsurprisingly, it turns out that people really like to play fort-da with gender. Berlant’s work is not remarkably sanguine about our collective capacities to transform gender norms, but it is quite optimistic about the clandestine ways that gender enables us to transform, escape and sustain ourselves. Thus Berlant suggests at one point that “gender categories are best seen as spaces of transformation, nodal points that are supposed to pro­duce general social intelligibility while encrusted with constantly chang­ing noncoherent meanings.”^[42] As Berlant’s subsequent work has explored the “overdetermined and incoherent activity” called femininity, it seems to me that the feminine has also led into something nonbinary.

On one level, the nonbinary in Berlant’s analysis of women is purely an emergent rhythm. It is immanent in the patterns of women’s subjectivity. The feminine for Berlant is a space of multiplicity and ambivalence, even if it is permeated by regulatory ideals, foundational fantasies, and aspirations to simplicity. It includes attachments and revulsions, exploitations and egalitarianisms, potential for excess and potential for insufficiency, a permanent flux and a constant repetition. To patriarchal eyes, femininity’s multiplicity has sometimes appeared to be a fatal incoherence, but we could just as well call it ordinary being in the world. In The Female Complaint (2008), Berlant derives a preliminary account of this incoherence from a brief reading of Lydia Davis.

“Generally, the women in [Davis’ book] Almost No Memory lament [their] cramped existence, turning into cedar trees that ‘group together in a corner of the graveyard and moan in the high wind’; fulfilling their femininity by being reactive to men and children; being emotionally central to intimates while querying the value of the bargains they’ve struck with these ongoing intimacies. Their main fascination is in watching themselves shuttle between emotional generosity and resentment at the demands for emotional service by children and lovers to whom they are attached” (17).

Women’s lives here are cramped because they are dominated by the unworkable contradictions of their seemingly endless emotional labor. This labor is not entirely without symbolic benefits, since it provides the “fulfillment” of being one’s gender role, the slow drips of recognition from the men and children whom one tends, and perhaps even the sheer pleasure (“the sensual spectacle,” 19) of seeing one’s care labor keep the world in motion. Nevertheless, these benefits are not enough to provide stability. The Others only take and never give, or not enough: “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.”^[43] The multiple pressures are overwhelming. The emotional skills that make femininity so rewarding can also sensitize you to everything that is untenable about life in an oppressive system. But even the contradictions of femininity can be partly managed by convention.

The analysis continues: “She feels a failure not because she has not developed emotional competence but because she has overdeveloped it… she keeps from falling apart by shifting between hypervigilance and inattention. This enables her to remain close not to her lover but to the situation of love and the promise of exchange… Over and over in Davis’s work, a woman’s self-consciously writerly eloquence and keen insight lead to descriptions of what does not change despite the woman’s frantic aspirational activity toward making emotional simultaneity… Davis’s point is to show that somehow the accumulation of knowledge leads to an unraveling for the writer/speaker and yet this unraveling, which ought to produce madness, is actually ordinary feminine consciousness. It turns out that even unraveling has its genres” (18).

The unraveling of femininity can thus become a space where we become nonbinary. The capacity to exist in a nonbinary way — to be one thing and also another, to cope with multiplicity more or less gracefully, to process ceaseless demands from the Other while not collapsing, to feel generosity and resentment simultaneously, or conversely to feel affirmed by one’s seeming captivity to the Other — all this is arguably a standard feminine capacity. And femininity, like every gender, is a holding environment: a cultural form that can absorb all kinds of things, indeed a cultural form (more than any other) charged with absorbing all kinds of things. So becoming unraveled or nonbinary (not that these are the same) does not necessarily become an exit from a binary gender location. On the contrary, femininity can readily absorb the unraveling of its own subjects.

But what do people do when they become conscious of the ways that their normativity is a dumpster fire, their gender constituted by unraveling, their dignity tantamount to their capacity to endure structural degradation? Commonly, such subjects turn to other women, who might at least recognize the pain of systematic misrecognition and disrespect. Yet this turn to women’s public spheres might yet again cause you to get enlisted in a type; to experience ambivalence about the conventions of femininity; and to get caught in new forms of repetition. “The circularity of the feminine project will not escape you, therefore: it is a perfect form, a sphere infused with activities of ongoing circuits of attachment that can at the same time look like and feel like a zero” (20). Of course, feeling like a zero, in Berlantian terms, might start to become a familiar consolation. “The sense of treading water or drowning in the present can also mark the pleasure and even the comfort one might derive from the most painful repetition” (244).

Berlant is extremely generous, although necessarily ambivalent, towards women’s conventional practices of solidarity and conviviality. They frequently draw a contrast between feminism and conventional women’s culture, but rather than presuming that the former is a virtuous improvement over the latter, Berlant’s research points to feminism’s limits as an existential rubric. They eventually conclude that “feminism has been a much better resource for critique than for providing accounts of how to live amid affective uncertainty, ambivalence, and incoherence” (234) — a narrative project that I think seems urgent to Berlant, both personally and theoretically. The “female complaint” genres that so interested Berlant are one major way in which conventional women’s culture facilitates survival, by providing categories and narratives that help process the ambivalence of love, care work, and structural subordination. Yet there is no definitive escape from type there, just a refiguring of femininity that makes its ambivalence more bearable.

Misrecognition is an optimism

Berlant’s work is not a new theory of radical politics. On the contrary, it has to be read as a theory of how any radicalism would be radically incomplete without an account of feminity, of reproduction, and of life outside the political. And for those of us who live most of our lives in the capitalist world system, it answers a different question: about how to survive emotionally in the bad world where we spend most of our time. Berlant has occasionally suggested that the core message of U.S. popular culture is “You’re not alone.” One wonders if there is something of a core message in Berlant’s work too. If there were, it might seem at first to be “I’m OK.”^[44] No matter how bad it gets, on Berlant’s view, there is an optimism always implicit in our tendency to develop patterns, rhythms, and styles of being in the world. But this core message would also have to have a qualifier: “I’m OK (even though I’m not).” The ways that we are defined by our stories of negativity and negation do not just go away. “Trauma can never be let go of.” This is not a negation of negative dialectics; it is a nonbinary dialectic, meaning an effort to be transformed by ambivalence and to find optimism in our very bargaining. The imperative of Berlant’s materialist reflexivity is, then, to investigate the real places we come from and then to ask what dialectic of optimism and exhaustion they have left us caught up in.

To theorize emotional survival in late capitalism might almost be a utopian act in itself. But I think Berlant’s project holds some more specific lessons for those of us who want to ditch conventional gender and make something new. It implies that to the extent we are serious about remaking social life, this will be not just about creating new social forms such as labels, identities, or publics, but will also be about learning new ways to inhabit our psyches and attachments. Nonbinary gender often seems like a supervalent thought in search of a genre of conventional identity, one inclined to begin with a heroic narrative of largely individual self-assertion, self-transformation, and recognition struggle. Berlant would not try to prevent our creating new conventions. Surely, we need new conventions. But Berlant might also encourage us to reflect on the limits of that kind of identity project. Their work might provide pathways towards inventing new forms of nonbinary desire, love and bargaining. And it might suggest that any nonbinary gender project might need to take seriously the lessons of conventional femininity. Surely no nonbinary space will survive without habits of care and emotional sustenance, habits which should not disregard the lessons of women’s structural ambivalence about care work.

Yet I also find myself thinking: it seems vaguely like a betrayal of these texts to look to them for political guidance. They give us no road maps towards radicality, towards unambivalence, or even towards better ways of surviving. “I don’t usually make credo-style speeches,” Berlant declared in 2009, “nor pitch my practice at a level of generality that’s supposed to model a way of being for colleagues.”^[45] What anyone might learn from Berlant’s work is supposed to remain indeterminate; that is perhaps one reason why Berlant has never written a pedagogical introduction to their own thought. “One cannot predict how and when—with intellection as the guardian of the bruised and disappointed self—someone will move toward any number of possible identifications,” Berlant comments in their analysis of Two Girls.^[46] It is, in this sense, a genuinely anarchic project, one that refuses the patriarchal imperative to reproduce oneself in one’s students. It provides no clear direction; it only provides the mimetic force of its own example. At most, it might give us hints for making sense of the directions we are already going.

Here I find myself wondering again: Whose intellection guards whose bruise? And who is getting worn out guarding the bruises anyways? We come back in the end to the question of education, the question of teachers. This is one of Berlant’s lasting contributions to materialist feminism: that we must theorize teaching just as intensely as we ever theorized domestic labor or motherhood. Berlant was my teacher for most of a decade in graduate school, and I found their presence to be world-making for me, even though it was overdetermined, glimpsy, and full of misrecognition. One time, I said (after my quals or some other brutal ritual) that I was grateful that they treated me like a human being in a graduate institution (the University of Chicago) that mostly dehumanized us. They protested, saying something like “What about my intellectual engagement with your work, isn’t that what matters?”

I was momentarily surprised that they could felt like anyone could possibly have underestimated their formidable intellectual presence in the world. But for years afterwards I felt guilty — guilty for having equated their existential presence with their femininity, and for having leaned on their care labor to help me survive the toxic culture of the university, as if that were in any way their job. Now, ironically, it feels like my increasing distance from graduate school (and from the academy) makes it easier for me to read their work, or even to acknowledge their thought in a way that formerly was structurally foreclosed.

The nonbinary reading of Lauren Berlant’s work may itself be a scene of misrecognition. But Berlant would remind us that misrecognition is also an optimism. And maybe that’s what we can learn from Berlant’s struggles with a contradictory existence: not just how to use “they” pronouns, but how to find optimism in the struggle to get by in a bad, incoherent world.

Works cited

Berlant, Lauren. 2016. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times.” Environment and Planning D no. 34 (3):393-419.

—. 2012. Desire/Love. Brooklyn: Punctum Press.

—. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2009. “Affect is the New Trauma.” Minnesota Review no. 71-72:131-136.

—. 2008. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1997. “Feminism and the Institutions of Intimacy.” In The politics of research, edited by E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine, 143-161. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

—. 1997. “Trauma and ineloquence.” Cultural Values no. 5 (1):41-58.

—. 1997. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 1994. “’68, or Something.” Critical Inquiry no. 21:124-155.

—. 1988. “The Female Complaint.” Social Text no. 19/20:237-259.

Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2014. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berlant, Lauren, and Jay Prosser. 2011. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography no. 34 (1):180-187.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner. 1995. “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” PMLA 110:343-349.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Hobarek, Andrew. 2001. “Citizen Berlant: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Minnesota Review no. 52-54:127-140.

Seigworth, Gregory J. 2012. “Reading Lauren Berlant Writing.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies no. 9 (4):346-352.

Tyler, Imogen, and Elena Loizidou. 2000. “The Promise of Lauren Berlant: An Interview.” Cultural Values no. 4 (3):497-511.

[1] “Feminism and the Institutions of intimacy,” 159.

[2] Berlant’s most general formulations of this part of the project appear in blogs and interviews. For example, “I have a really different view of the subject, and this is what I’m trying to write into being. I think it begins and proceeds as a porous and disorganized thing that is constantly impelled (compelled and desiring) to take up positions of clarity in relation to objects, worlds, and situations, but the available clarifying genres of personhood underdescribe the range of practices, knowledges, impulses, and orientations that people have while they’re foregrounding being this or that kind of thing at a particular moment… It’s a new realism of the ordinary subject who is at once durable and diffused” (“Life Writing and Intimate Publics” 187).

Compare also: “a person is a loosely-knotted cluster of impulses, reflections, apprehensions and prehensions moving through ordinary time (imagine a net with head, hands and feet).” (https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/19/combover-approach-2/)

[3] “’68, or Something” 125.

[4] https://thepointmag.com/politics/pleasure-won-conversation-lauren-berlant/

[5] “Citizen Berlant” 134.

[6] ”Citizen Berlant“ 134, ”Institutions of Intimacy” 145.

[7] Berlant does cite at one point Monique Wittig’s image of “the prisonhouse of binary relationality” — the expression is Berlant’s — that forces us to be “intelligible as a gendered subject” (Sex or the Unbearable, 14). The rejection of that intelligibility would arguably be betrayed by rendering it as a new nonbinary gender, but I digress.

[8] As Michael Hardt explains, multiplicity is a Deleuzian technical term for “a notion of difference that does not refer back to (and thus depend on) a primary identity, a difference that can never be corralled into an ultimate unity… this expanding, proliferating set of differences that stand on their own, autonomous” Hardt in Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (ix). Deleuze at times envisioned this in quite sweeping terms: “There is no being beyond becoming, nothing beyond multiplicity… multiplicity is the inseparable manifestation, essential transformation and constant symptom of unity” (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 23-24).

[9] Cruel Optimism 287n30.

[10] “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?” 348.

[11] https://supervalentthought.com/2010/12/12/combover-approach-1/

[12] Berlant’s world is not just multiple, then; it is recursively heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of the world can pose its own problems of subjective organization. As Berlant comments, ”So many different kinds of structure organize the estrangements and attachments of the world that how we are to live among and transform their existence both materially and in fantasy is my central question” (Sex, or the Unbearable 116).

[13] “Trauma and Ineloquence.”

[14] Female Complaint 3.

[15] Cruel Optimism 287-288.

[16] Cruel Optimism 138.

[17] Desire/Love 69.

[18] I might also cite their persistent affection for Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis.

[19] Berlant and Edelman: ”Negativity for us refers to the psychic and social incoherences and divisions, conscious and unconscious alike, that trouble any totality or fixity of identity. It denotes, that is, the relentless force that unsettles the fantasy of sovereignty. But its effects, in our view, are not just negative, since negativity unleashes the energy that allows for the possibility of change” (Sex, or the Unbearable, vii-viii).

[20] Cruel Optimism 48.

[21] Desire/Love 36.

[22] “The Commons” 394.

[23] Cruel Optimism 125.

[24] Impersonality: “The state of the interruption of the personal, and the work of normativity to create conventions of the personal” (Cruel Optimism 159). I would note that Berlant is exceptionally skeptical of the compulsory melodramas of emotional authenticity that organize a certain version of a “personal life.”

[25] Desire/Love 77.

[26] “What if we derived our social theory from scenes of ambivalence, which is to say, the scenes of attachment that are intimate, defined by desire, and overwhelming? We understand why we are overwhelmed by extreme and exhausting threats and actualized violence, as they menace the endurance of the world and of confidence in ongoingness. What’s harder to process is why it is hard to bear the very things we want.” (“The Commons” 395).

[27] Female Complaint 2.

[28] Female Complaint 2.

[29] Tyler and Loizidou, “The Promise of Lauren Berlant,” 511.

[30] Cruel Optimism 5. Compare Jameson: “Briefly, the dialectic may be said to be thinking that is both situational (situation-specific) and reflexive (or conscious of its own thought processes)” (Valences 322).

[31] Cruel Optimism 124.

[32] “Supervalent Thought,” https://supervalentthought.com/2007/12/23/hello-world/

[33] Cruel Optimism 287n21.

[34] Berlant in Sex or the Unbearable 79.

[35] Cruel Optimism 146.

[36] Female Complaint 12-13.

[37] Hobarek and Berlant 133.

[38] “The Female Complaint” (1988) 253.

[39] “The Female Complaint” (1988), 254.

[40] It is interesting to note that Butler’s famous rhetorical question along these lines — “Is drag the imitation of gender, or does it dramatize the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established?” — only appeared in Gender Trouble two years after this paper came out.

[41] Meanwhile, it is common to acknowledge in U.S. queer cultures that genders are “social constructs,” but this often means in practice that gender identity is considered susceptible to individual gestures of self-definition, through a sort of agentive striving to become what one always already was.

[42] Queen of America 86.

[43] This is the end of the first sentence of The Female Complaint.

[44] Berlant comments at one point that “to desire belonging to the normal world, the world as it appears, is at root a fantasy of a sense of continuity, a sense of being generally okay; it is a desire to be in proximity to okayness, without passing some test to prove it” (Female Complaint 9). It seems to me that without downplaying the violence of belonging, Berlant would urge us not to shame people for having this fantasy.

[45] “Affect is the New Trauma” 135.

[46] Cruel Optimism 145-6.

I want here to explore feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s professional encounter with critical theory in Britain. I draw here on her published reflections on her education, set largely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For Ahmed, theory’s reified masculinism was a point of departure in her process of coming to consciousness as a feminist. Ahmed, who resigned her professorial position at Goldsmiths to protest widespread sexual harassment, initially encountered “theory” as an undergraduate in the literature department at the University of Adelaide. When she moved to Cardiff University’s then-new Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory for her doctoral work, she learned a major lesson: that theory in the abstract was predominantly theory in the masculine.

What I glean from Ahmed’s writing is that her coming-to-consciousness-against-theory took place in four key moments.

1. In the first moment, in Adelaide in the late 1980s, Ahmed traversed the theory boy-style superiority complex. She quickly rejected the philosophy department only to discover the power of theoretical capital.[1] “I remember, when I was an undergraduate student, thinking that the people who took the ‘theory’ courses in my literature department were cleverer!” (2000:98). This perception of cleverness was, I think, a moment where Ahmed felt a structure of ideology flicker over her, a norm trying to establish itself. One way that critical theory has intimidated, and in this has also protected its patriarchal heritage, is by presenting itself as a task of the clever Other who was only potentially the self.

2. In a second moment, pursuing her doctorate in Cardiff, Ahmed faced pressures to reshape her own identity in keeping with French Theory’s fetishized patrilineages:

When I was doing my PhD, I was told I had to give my love to this or that male theorist, to follow him, not necessarily as an explicit command but through an apparently gentle but increasingly insistent questioning: Are you a Derridean; no, so are you a Lacanian; no, oh, okay, are you a Deleuzian; no, then what? If not, then what? Maybe my answer should have been: if not, then not! [2017:15, my emphasis]

In this impoverished theory space — “theory is used to refer to a rather narrow body of work,” she reports (2017:8) — the key social imperative revolved around the question: What are you? This demand for an identity in theory needs to be read alongside Ahmed’s eloquent description of racial hailing on the street in Britain:

I am walking down a street in Cardiff. And I am stopped by someone; he is walking the other way. How interested he seems. In what, am I what? ‘Hey, where are you from?’ […] I know what the question is asking of me. I resist giving the answer I am being asked to give. ‘Australia,’ I say. No, I mean originally. […] He knows I know what he is asking. I give in, wanting to move on. ‘My father is from Pakistan.’ That’s it. The conversation is over. I have given the right answer, the answer he was waiting for, even hoping for. [Ahmed 2017:116]

Sometimes identity demands are a progressive force, but here are they are a reactionary one, a moment of colonial and racial discipline. Such a sense of discipline was mirrored in the theory case: “Are you a Derridean?” and so on. Such questions are also an ideological hail, teaching you who you are by telling you to pause for authority. They are also a moment of essentializing taxonomy, where intellectual space is given a set of propertarian names and divided up after the fashion of a Great Enclosure. Manifestly, the three patrilineages in Cardiff — Derrideans, Lacanians, Deleuzians — were all French. Yet these three French men and their lineages were also almost not-national, taken out of historical context and reframed as abstract nodes in an intellectual space which cast itself as the only one that mattered. Interestingly, there was a certain affective surplus in this process of interpellation. Just why was Ahmed called not just to affiliate with French Theory, but also to give it her love?

I suspect that love became mandatory because theory-fetishism had become an obligatory mode of academic reproduction, and reproduction always demands a mandatory affective excess. To love theory is not a form of sexual romance but a form precisely of fetishism: a love of a reified thing, an object that also functions as an academic brand. That does not mean that fetishism is pathological. Indeed, it is enabling, but what it enables is an institutional system premised on misrecognizing “theory” as a thing. In emphasizing the forms of branding and reification that organize theory, Ahmed helps us see that ”theory itself” is premised on fantasy structures of hierarchical recognition, aspiration, elite-building and commodification.

3. For all their supposed radicality, these structures can also become remarkably antipolitical. That is apparent from the third moment of Ahmed’s encounter with theory, where theory’s masculinity emerged as a moment of harsh boundary maintenance on the part of her teachers.

I still remember submitting a critical reading of a theory text in which woman was a figure as one of my essays… I was concerned with how statements made by the teacher, like “this is not about women,” were used to bypass any questions about how the figure of woman is exercised within a male intellectual tradition. When the essay was returned to me, the grader had scrawled in very large letters, “This is not theory! This is politics! [2017:8]

To police the boundaries of theory, for this teacher, was an act of anger or at least of energetic venting. It was to scrawl, rather than discuss; to assert, rather than think. As with Theory Boy, the adulation of theory goes along with a wish to pin it down within heavily policed boundaries. And this wish for a fixed image of theory went along with a brutal rejection of questions about women and gender, a rejection sometimes policed, Ahmed adds, by women instructors. This introduced stark contradictions between theory and academic practice. “I met academics who wrote essays on feminist theory but who did not seem to act in feminist ways,” she recalled (2017:14).[2] This sounds like an impossible trap.

4. Yet in a fourth, feminist moment, Ahmed found a way out of the fundamentally melodramatic drama of theoretical inclusion. Rather than writing a critique of theory that would implicitly center it in her work, she ultimately chose instead, in Living a Feminist Life, to deflate, dedramatize, relativize, and partially normalize it.

Even though I am relatively comfortable in critical theory, I do not deposit my hope there, nor do I think this is a particularly difficult place to be: if anything, I think it is easier to do more abstract and general theoretical work… I think that the more difficult questions, the harder questions, are posed by those feminists concerned with explaining violence, inequality, injustice. The empirical work, the world that exists, is for me where the difficulties and thus the challenges reside. Critical theory is like any language; you can learn it, and when you learn it, you begin to move around in it. Of course it can be difficult, when you do not have the orientation tools to navigate your way around a new landscape. [2017:8-9]

Ahmed thus closed her narrative about critical theory by deconstructing precisely the sense of superiority, singularity, and openness that had organized its aura in her undergraduate days. Reframing empirical work as harder than theory, she reversed the original dogma that theory was where the cleverer people went. And insisting that critical theory is “like any language,” she reduced it from a master discourse to merely one discourse among others. Her conclusion became one of mandatory ambivalence, verging even on ironic appreciation. “I will come out with it,” she declared: “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work that is taught and read as critical theory” (2017:10). Her very enjoyment worked to deprive theory of the abject energy that a more extended critique of its masculinism might have conferred upon it.

But Ahmed’s act of dedramatization in turn calls attention to the two dramatizations that were at play here: theory’s self-dramatizations, which Ahmed sought to undo, and the dramatization of the subject who is critical of theory, on the other. Here, as love-of-theory became ambivalence-about-theory, Ahmed enacted a particular gesture of negativity. In declaring “If not, then not!” she negates the very grid of legibility that was supposed to organize her academic world.

Yet for Ahmed this moment of negation, period, was coupled to a dissociative, structural optimism. “I do not deposit my hope there” was coupled to “I enjoy and appreciate much of the work.” The critique of patriarchal discipline ends in ambivalence: I would suggest that this ambivalence is a already powerful feminist gesture. Curiously, a contradictory and even violent academic environment can become a good place for a subject to develop ambivalence. The very badness of an environment can finally become functional, liberating one to look elsewhere for one’s optimism.

Needless to say, this unexpected use of a bad structure does not justify its existing in the first place.

[1] Ahmed’s education began with an early rejection of the Adelaide philosophy department, a department which only taught “sadly… pretty much straight analytical philosophy,” and failed to address her intellectual interests “in how we know things, in questions of truth, in perspective and perception, in experience and subjectivity” (2017:28).

[2] She added that these academics “seemed routinely to give more support to male students than female students, or who worked by dividing female students into more and less loyal students” (2017:14). Elsewhere, she recalls that “One tutor got so cross with me in an argument about Derrida’s use of the figure of ‘woman,’ that she threw her cup of coffee down on a table and stormed out of the room. The coffee spilled all over me. I was startled, often, by the trouble I seemed to cause” (2015:181).

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
—. 2015. “Being in Trouble: In the Company of Judith Butler.” Lambda Nordica no. 2-3:179-192.
—. 2000. “Whose Counting?” Feminist Theory no. 1 (1):97-103.

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

The song, “Theory Boys,” began:

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

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

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

[Fein 1998]

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

The seminar was taught by Jeff Williams, an English professor who I’ve been in touch with for fifteen years. We’re in pretty different fields, and a generation apart in age, but we’ve shared this odd interest in writing critically about academic culture. It’s a weird, great feeling to be around like-minded academics, and to get reminded that there’s solidarity in specialization. After you work on your tiny specialized research project for a long time, you can start to feel increasingly closed in on yourself. Then it’s nice to be reminded that solitude is just one moment in a thought process.

Anyway, in Jeff’s seminar, I tried to explain how I came to work in France. I explained that a lot of French “theory” had actually produced by this particular Philosophy Department (at Paris 8), and I explained that I’d come to write about it as an institution permeated by utopianism and ambivalence (not to mention disciplinary masculinism and a complex relation to the postcolonial world).

After I had gone on extemporaneously for a while, the room felt a little hushed, because it was eight at night. So I asked if we could go around and have each person ask a question. (I was afraid that not everyone would speak if we didn’t have something structured.) And people asked such great questions, it turned out, that I wanted to write them up here, to remember them, and honor them a little.

Here they are:

• How do you collect your data? Who did you talk to?
• Coming back to this country from France, what’s your opinion of the U.S. system?
• What did you teach in South Africa?
• How does anthropology relate to literary studies?
• What’s the connection between philosophy in France and theory in the USA?
• You do ethnography — what do you make of how ethnography fits into cultural studies?
• What’s your writing process for your book?
• We heard a lot about your ambivalence. Where’s your hope and positive investments?
• You’ve been in three very different higher education systems — France, USA, South Africa — what are French and South African universities like?
• What do you still idealize?
• How do you position yourself in academic space? Where do you fit in?
• Who is your audience? Do you intend to suggest a remedy to ambivalence?
• What surprised you in South Africa? In France?
• You criticize the places that you inhabit in academia. What happens when you’re negative about your own institutions? What are the implications of that for you?

(All these are paraphrased from my notes.)

Some of these are just really interesting comparative questions that I wouldn’t have thought of. Some bring up points that have a lot of existential stakes for me. And some just remind me that any time you try to talk outside of your field, you partly need to explain the basics of your field. (What is ethnography anyway?)

I couldn’t really answer all these questions (without writing another book probably), so I felt like I had been given a gift I couldn’t entirely reciprocate.

At the same time, there were more questions I had wanted to ask the class — questions about the feelings that go with theory and academic life, mostly. They were things like:

• What are things about academic life that surprise you? What seems logical or illogical about university institutions?
• What’s it like to be a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon? What do you make of “theory” in literary studies?
• Have you ever had a thought you couldn’t express? Or (conversely) have you encountered academic texts you couldn’t make sense of?
• What’s your experience of the relationship between academic texts and everyday life? When does academic writing speak to your life and when does it feel disconnected?

Next time I do something like this, I’ll have to leave more time for more discussion of this sort of theoretical consciousness…

* What is a career but a debatable interpretation of a series of biographical accidents?

One of the difficulties with using the term ‘modernity’ is the contested, shifting nature – indeed promiscuity – of its use in the literature. There are almost as many defiŽnitions of it – some social/institutional, others attitudinal/cognitive (Gaonkar 1999) – as there are scholars who write about it. Thus modernity’s deŽfining feature is, for Weber (1958), instrumental rationality; for Habermas (1983), the ideals of the Enlightenment – science, knowledge, reason, progress; for Marx (1977), the commodity form and all that commodities and markets entail; for Berman (1982), perpetual dynamism, ambiguity, ephemerality, unending rupture; for Giddens (1990), trust; for Taylor (1999), comfort; for Baudelaire (1981), presentness and the everyday. Then again, others prefer to emphasize different traits, each seen as a/the essential feature of the modern: secularism, critical humanism, pragmatic instrumentalism, revolutionary consciousness, self-realization, the emergence of the nation-state and of certain types of public sphere, the rise of mass media, a legal order based on contractualism and the right-bearing individual, a Fordist regime of production, globalization.

Moreover, there are other less celebratory takes on modernity – critics who see its dark side as intrinsic to the modern itself: the ‘iron cage’ of rationality and routine (Weber 1958); the alienation and exploitation of labor under capitalism (Marx 1977); the slave system which made possible industrializing Europe’s wealth accumulation (Gilroy 1993; Mintz 1985); imperial expansion (Lenin 1971; Mandel 1975; Wallerstein 1974); the fascist regimes of the interwar era (Bauman 1989; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972), and so on. [pp. 88-89]

Here, the masculinity of theory seems to entail the invisibility of gender, but I digress…

Sometimes I also catch myself starting to write paragraphs like this (though I would hope with a more socially diverse set of references). It feels fun to try to systematize lots of different ideas or theories. But the thing is, being encyclopedic rarely does much for your reader (unless you are writing a bibliographic essay). And in reality, being encyclopedic is often quite difficult because classification is difficult. (That’s why Marx appears twice, first in the “celebratory” paragraph, then in the “less celebratory takes” paragraph.) Of course, I find myself classifying things anyway. Being an academic is so much about organizing ideas and labeling them…

Anyway, it’s not every day I come across someone who tries to sum up such a massive field in such a short space, so here it is as an instance of that. (If you are in fact interested in longer reviews of modernity theory, by the way, I particularly recommend Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Definitional Excursions.”)

And yet:

Werner (1948) showed how mental development proceeds from syncretic (non-differentiated), diffuse, indefinite, rigid and labile to more discrete, articulated, definite, flexible, and stable functioning. In primitive mental functioning (where Werner convincingly demonstrated formal parallels among higher animals, human children, primitive peoples, and schizophrenic and brain-damaged human adults) objects in the external environment are not apprehended as things with separate, fixed characteristics. Rather, objects tend to be understood in relation to their emotional and motor connection with the perceiver, animistic qualities are often imputed to inanimate objects, and there is an inability to distinguish separate parts, or to discriminate between essential and non-essential characteristics.

I was reading the paper in question because I’ve been thinking about whether the notion of “reality testing” can be analytically useful. In particular, I’ve wondered whether it could apply to moments where people aggressively press the boundaries of institutional reality, to the point where social reality itself seems to be having a breakdown. I saw numerous people in my French fieldwork complain that situations were getting “surreal,” meaning not-normatively-real, and I find it useful to see these as moments where people were testing their normative impressions of reality against their immediate situations.

But it’s demoralizing to see that psychoanalysts, who are the main theorists of reality testing, have also used the notion to reinforce these hyperprimitivist notions of lower, savage, child-like, animalistic thought. If anything can still be made of the notion of reality testing, it would need to be cleansed of this primitivist genealogy.

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

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

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

But.

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

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

Gender avalanche. Is that a thing?

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

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

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

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

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

If one description of scholarly activity is “producing knowledge,” then logically, wouldn’t we expect that there would be such a thing as “overproducing knowledge”? Can there be an overproduction crisis of scholarship?

It’s been said before. For instance, here’s Tim Burke from Swarthmore writing in 2005:

The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It generates knowledge that has no declared purpose or passion behind it, not even the purpose of anti-purpose, of knowledge undertaken for knowledge’s sake. It fills the academic day with a tremendous excess of peer review and distractions. It makes it increasingly hard to know anything, because to increase one’s knowledge requires every more demanding heuristics for ignoring the tremendous outflow of material from the academy. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher.

You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.

But this isn’t exactly the kind of overproduction that I’m talking about. This is what I would call herd or mass overproduction, a sort of overproduction that “ordinary academics” produce as a matter of survival in a scholarly system that incentivizes publication quantity. “Ordinary academics” — the ones who have jobs or want jobs of the kind where publishing is required, that is — which isn’t all academic jobs, by a long shot.

Herd overproduction, on Burke’s view, is a generic state of being, a thing “everyone” is doing. But what I’m thinking about is a different kind of overproduction: let’s call it elite or star overproduction. That is, the kind of overproduction that academostars often practice. To be clear, not all recognized academostars overproduce in quite the way I mean, and conversely, some singularly prolific academics are not necessarily at the very top of the scholarly prestige hierarchy — but there is a strong correlation between hyper-prolific writing and star status, in my experience.

Star overproduction does something different than just produce a mass of mass expertise. If herd overproduction produces relatively generic, interchangeable, unremarkable research commodities, then star overproduction reinforces big-name scholarly brands; it’s more like releasing a new iPhone every year than building a minor variation on a cheap digital watch. Star overproduction captures an outsized share of academics’ collective attention, more as a matter of general brand loyalty (“I like to keep up on Zizek”) than because it is necessarily the highest quality academic product. As a corollary to this — and this particularly irks me — certain hyper-prolific academics really let the quality of their work slip as they begin to hyper-overproduce. It’s as if they just have too many obligations, too much exposure, like a decent band that just doesn’t have a dozen good albums in it. Fact-checking sometimes gets iffy; the same arguments get repeated.

All this makes me wonder: after a certain point in a hyper-productive career, might it be more ethical to pass the floor to other, more marginalized academics?

More generally, if there is a market for scholarship, could it be a better-regulated one? Scholars like Marc Bousquet (The Rhetoric of “Job Market” and the Reality of the Academic Labor System) have rightly criticized the notion of a “market” as an adequate description of academic labor allocation, but market-style social dynamics do crop up in a lot of academic life, in my experience, and the critique of market ideology need not preclude regulatory projects of one sort or another. For instance, might we have a collective interest in preventing oligopolies of knowledge? In preventing overly large accumulations of academic capital? Could we help the marginalized publish more by placing limits on publishing success?

Or to be a bit hyperbolic, but also more concrete: Could there be, hypothetically, a lifetime quota on publication, a career-length word limit? Suppose, for instance, that such a limit were set at a very high level that most of us would never approach — but if you did get to the limit, your time would be up?

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.

If we look only at recent Marxist research on intellectuals, we essentially find two bodies of theory, neither of which is entirely satisfactory. On one hand, we have studies that consider the class position of intellectual workers (Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich 1976, Meisenhelder 1986) or that look at labor relations within academic institutions (Bousquet 2008). Such studies are often quite informative, as far as they go, but generally fail to investigate the form or content of intellectual knowledge. A second much more ambitious project, that of Italian “workerist” Marxism, tries to retheorize knowledge at the very center of capitalist production, arguing that we are in a new era of “cognitive capitalism” in which the main objects of production are “knowledge, information, communication and affect” (Hardt 1999:91), rather than industrial commodities as such. This project draws attention to shifts towards a service economy, to an increasing emphasis on commodified knowledge, to an “informatization” of the production process, and to an emphasis on producing subjectivity and “affect” (or “feelings”) for consumers. Unfortunately, it is a body of thought characterized by hyperbole, by claims to have diagnosed a new epoch of capitalism, and by insistent allegations that most past categories are obsolete. Maurizio Lazzarato, for instance, dismisses Marx’s classical distinction between mental and manual labor (1996:133), arguing that “the fact that immaterial labor produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power, and knowledge” (142). This entails the view that intellectual labor has been almost completely generalized around the globe. Indeed, Lazzarato argues that as capitalism has figured out new ways to reappropriate and refunctionalize mass struggles against work, as capitalism has taken advantage of the masses’ desires to be cultural producers, “a new ‘mass intellectuality’ has come into being” (133).

Certainly there is some reality to the trends diagnosed by the immaterial labor theorists; a shift to services is important, as is the capitalist project of selling and packaging knowledge and experience, as is the digitalization of work and leisure. But when these arguments are overemphasized, I would argue, we are inhibited from analyzing what continues to be particular to traditional intellectual institutions by framing them overhastily as a relic of an earlier era’s “modernist” disciplinary knowledge. When they analyze universities, they often characterize them as the new epoch’s factories, as the emblematic institutions of today’s capitalism. This makes it particularly hard to account for the fact that “immaterial labor” theory is, especially in the United States, a product of the university left. A more sober theory of intellectual production, I would argue, should make it easier to analyze not only the moments of outright corporate colonization of university systems, but also the local determinations and blindnesses of left intellectual projects that have become subject to the university’s specific imperatives. Without knowing it, in my view, the immaterial labor theorists (and notably the edu-factory project) succumb to an almost Lukacsian excess of dialectical conviction: like Lukacs, they have an unexamined faith that radical theory can and must be articulated with radical praxis. I would argue that it is, in fact, helpful to de-dramatize our theory of intellectual production, admitting that intellectual labor is just one kind of labor among others, with its own specific politics and subcultures. And contemporary intellectual labor, I would argue, is not always immediately functional within capitalism; the university is not yet an entirely marketized or commodified institution. But academic subcultures have their own problems; part of what we gain from a more specific study of intellectual production is the realization that the university system has quasi-autonomous left subcultures, like the ones that avidly read Italian Marxist theory. These subcultures at once enable fantasies of radicality and prevent them from being realized.

All this said, I do agree with the immaterial labor theorists that there is something historically specific, at a large scale, about contemporary intellectual production. Not every society, as far as I can tell, has a mass institutional apparatus dedicated to the production of knowledge as an end in itself. Such a fetish of knowledge for its own sake, in my view, is structurally implicit in the globalization of technoscience and of the university, both of which have dramatically expanded since the Second World War. Such an expansion can be documented quantitatively (Schofer and Meyer 2005), and has received a governing ideological framework in the form of a discourse on the “knowledge society.” It is a discourse that is patently politically convenient for neoliberal economic interests, but one which has also taken root in civil society organizations: UNESCO’s director general wrote in 2005 that

“The upheavals stemming from the Third Industrial Revolution – that of the new technologies – have produced a new dynamic as the training of individuals and groups, scientific and technical advances and modes of cultural expression have been constantly evolving since the mid-twentieth century, notably in the direction of growing interdependence… Can we today imagine any use of biotechnologies that disregards the cultural conditions of how they are applied? Or a science heedless of scientific education or local knowledge? Or a culture neglectful of educational transmission and the new forms of knowledge? The notion of knowledge is central to these changes. Knowledge is today recognized as the object of huge economic, political and cultural stakes, to the point of justifiably qualifying the societies currently emerging.” [UNESCO 2005:4, my emphasis]

There are at least three main things that characterize the contemporary global fetish for intellectual production. (1) Knowledge has become  “the object of huge economic, political and cultural stakes.” (This does not mean, however, that it has become the primary factor in production.) (2) “Knowledge” is thus mythicized as a fantasy object, as an end in itself, and given privileged ideological elaboration by policymakers and social scientists. (3) Intellectual production also becomes a structural compulsion, which people in intellectual institutions can enact without needing to explicitly endorse or believe in. Intellectual production, in other words, is not only a massive empirical phenomenon, but also a native obsession, an inhabitable mythology, in short a culturally particular end in itself, by turns conscious and unconscious.

All these claims would need further elaboration.

“There corresponds to the capitalist mode of production a type of intellectual production quite different from that which corresponded to the medieval mode of production. Unless material production itself is understood in its specific historical form. it is impossible to grasp the characteristics of the intellectual production which corresponds to it or the reciprocal action between the two.” (Marx, in Williams 1977:81)

A cursory look back at “traditional” Marxism gives us two broad theoretical traditions dealing with intellectual production. On one hand, there is a tradition of thinking in terms of “base” and “superstructure” that distinguishes, with more or less theoretical subtlety, between economics and production on one hand and culture or ideology on the other. Such a theory has notoriously been critiqued for its potential for conceptual errors; in 1921, Lukacs was already endorsing Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of “Marxist vulgar economics,” and arguing instead for a dialectical theory of social totality which would let “‘ideological’ and ‘economic’ problems lose their mutual exclusiveness and merge into one another” while still not equating the two (1967:34). Even in the 70s, theorists like Raymond Williams felt obliged to point out that reifying the “base” and “superstructure” as separate entities—as if the two terms captured something more than dynamically interrelated moments of a total social process—is both analytically unhelpful and untrue to Marx’s original intention (1977:75-82). Hence we find that more recent Marxist theory seldom speaks of “base” and “superstructure” as such; the terms themselves have been superceded by a post-Althusserian concern with “structural causality,” implying a more flexible relation between economy and culture (Jameson 1981), and by a feminist interest in theorizing how economic production relates to social reproduction (Firestone 1970). But granted that this tradition has been significantly reformulated over time, it seems to me that this point of departure nonetheless still has something to recommend it, inasmuch it encourages us to think structurally about how not-directly-economic activities relate to the sphere of production as such. It encourages us to think about the functional role of the unproductive. And in the case of the intellectuals, it encourages us to ponder the fact that mental labor has to be understood in opposition to physical labor, that the intellectual class gets defined not just through free-floating self-definition but also in opposition to other social groups.

The trouble, though, with this first theory is that it tends towards an overly functionalist theory of intellectual labor, tending to reduce intellectual production too rapidly to its ideological functions or class basis (Sartre 1968:ch. 2, esp. 53-56). It lacks a theory of the practice of intellectual labor, tending at times to reduce it to non-productive “ideology.” Hence the interest of a second Marxist tradition, one which theorizes the relation between theory and praxis. Such a theory was apparent as early as Marx’s 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, which argued that thought and action should ideally be brought together in “practical-critical activity,” and that “man must prove the truth… of his thinking, in practice,” or else fall into a pointless, “purely scholastic” attitude. Such a theory obviously makes more space for considering knowledge-making as itself a practical activity, and for analyzing the relations of intellectual production within which knowledge is made. My sense, though, is that this theory of theory and praxis has most classically been restricted to quite a narrow band of activity. If we look again to Lukacs’ text on Luxembourg, we find a decided argument that theory and praxis can only be brought together under the aegis of proletarian politics. This argument, it is important to point out, involves a quite explicit attack on disciplinary specialization and bourgeois science:

“The process of abstraction and hence the isolation of the elements and concepts in the special disciplines and whole areas of study is of the very essence of science. But what is decisive is whether this process of isolation is a means towards understanding the whole and whether it is integrated within the context it presupposes and requires, or whether the abstract knowledge of an isolated fragment retains its ‘autonomy’ and becomes an end in itself. In the last analysis Marxism does not acknowledge the existence of independent sciences of law, economics or history, etc.: there is nothing but a single, unified­ dialectical and historical-science of the evolution of society as a totality.”

And a moment later: “Bourgeois thought judges social phenomena consciously or unconsciously, naively or subtly, consistently from the standpoint of the individuaI… The totality of an object can only be posited if the positing subject is itself a totality; and if the subject wishes to understand itself, it must conceive of the object as a totality. In modern society only the classes can represent this total point of view.” [1967:28]

Lukacs goes on to explain that it is uniquely within the Communist Party that theory and praxis get intertwined, that it is within the Party that the truth of society is proved through revolutionary action, that the party “is assigned the sublime role of bearer of the class consciousness of the proletariat” (41). In short, not just anyone can bring theory and praxis together; only the proletariat and the Party can become totalizing subjects that objectify and also revolutionize the social order. “Theory-praxis” for Lukacs, in other words, is not an analytic category that one would use to analyze existing institutions of intellectual production, but rather a specifically Communist aspiration and, if anything, a standard for critiquing the shortcomings of bourgeois intellectuals. Now, with the benefit of a century of hindsight, it seems clear that Lukacs was wrong to assume the necessity of a tight link between historical materialist theory and revolutionary practice; contra Lukacs, neither a completely “conscious” proletariat nor a fully “dialectical” method are necessary or sufficient conditions for radical political action. But by the same token, if we extract the theory of “theory and praxis” from the confines of specifically Communist organizing, we may find that it is a useful notion in analyzing other kinds of theoretical practice, other sections of the apparatus of intellectual production. And reading across these two Marxist theoretical traditions (and with all due apologies for the brevity of this discussion), we might suggest more broadly that a reasonable theory of intellectual production would unite an interest in the relations between theory and praxis in particular sites with a concern for the specific structural status of intellectual production in the larger socioeconomic system.

Such a rigorous theory of intellectual production has, in my view, managed to elude us this far.

So I think we have to ask: Does it make any sense to claim that knowledge is valuable in itself? This seems to me something that should have to be demonstrated, rather than taken for granted by academics (whose profession and whole way of life, admittedly, encourages them to take it for granted).

As a preface to this discussion, we have to acknowledge that the topic raises two major conceptual questions: what we mean by “knowledge,” and what we mean by “a value in itself.” Without undertaking a long philosophical investigation, I’ll just say that it’s not prima facie obvious to me that it makes much sense to talk about the value of human knowledge in general. Knowing the contents of my sock drawer and knowing the physical parameters of the center of the Milky Way are different kinds of knowledge with very different sorts of value; the former is of practical value to me (and pretty much no one else), while the latter is of no obvious practical value to me but is of considerable professional importance to astronomers. It’s true that basic practical, cultural, and linguistic knowledge is a prerequisite for being a socially viable human being: at some basic anthropological level, one just can’t be a person without having all the prerequisite knowledge for enacting personhood. It’s true, then, that insofar as being human is valuable, knowledge is necessary (and instrumentally valuable, at least).

But I think to go any farther we have to make a number of distinctions that tend to undermine the coherence of the original question. There are many kinds of value and, perhaps more importantly, many possible contexts for judging value. Philosophers have attempted to assess the value of knowledge in relation to other sorts of cognitive states (belief and true belief, for instance) as well as the place of wisdom in the good life. Economists have had a lot to say about the value of knowledge, which is thought to be shifting as new kinds of “intellectual property” develop (see arguments about whether knowledge is a “public good“). There is, for that matter, a whole school of sociology centered on the premise that we now live in a “knowledge society” in which knowledge has become central to the economy and polity in unprecedented ways. (I’m skeptical.) In short, we can’t assume that knowledge is just one thing or that having value is straightforward. What kind of knowledge are we talking about? And what kind of value are we ascribing to it?

Now, things get somewhat simpler once we realize that when academics talk about “knowledge” in general, they usually just mean “scholarly knowledge.” When academics defend knowledge in itself, often they’re saying that scholarship is an intrinsically valuable activity, and that scholarly knowledge is important and valuable for its own sake, regardless of its practical significance or lack thereof. I had a philosophy teacher in college who said that a culture without philosophy was an impoverished culture, which seems to be the extreme version of this view. (Of course, it’s uncertain whether ‘philosophy’ designates institutionalized academic philosophy or just any kind of organized reflection. In the latter case, every culture clearly “has philosophy” one way or another.)

It seems to me that when faculty argue for “knowledge as a value in itself,” that is, or easily enough becomes, an argument that in practical terms they should be paid to do whatever they want with no social benefit other than the ones they decide for themselves. Indeed, sometimes people even go so far as to believe (a) scholarly knowledge is intrinsically good for society and (b) that scholarly knowledge can only be evaluated by the community of scholars themselves, which amounts to saying, by unspoken implication, that (c) whatever ideas scholars happen to like, even if through the purest collective whimsy or delusion, are intrinsically good for society. It’s hard to separate the radically impersonal plea that knowledge matters for its own sake from the radically self-interested argument that academics should be paid to pursue whatever knowledge they see fit.

Now, I don’t want to deny the intuition that I have – that I think many academics have – that it’s quite simply a good thing to know. And more specifically to know about the world in the kinds of ways that academics make possible. It’s hard not to feel that it’s just a good thing in itself to know how the world is organized and where it came from and how a star is structured and how a poem is written and that birds’ bones are hollow and that there was a horrible massacre in El Mozote in 1981. Which, moreover, the US government turned a blind eye to. (Reading about that massacre, I have to tell you, was a memorable moment in my adolescent consciousness of the gruesomeness of politics and history. The value of knowledge is something that takes form in respect to particular historical and biographical moments.)

But we can’t be content to take for granted this unexamined intuition that knowledge is obviously a good thing. There are equally powerful intuitions in our culture that run in the other direction; knowledge can be misery, as Christian mythology about the Garden of Eden reminds us. Curiosity killed the cat. And so on.

Now I’m tempted to conclude by saying that, instead of a theory about the value of knowledge, we should instead propose a theory of what leads people to want to defend its value. Because what the contemporary French case indicates is that academcis defend the value of knowledge “in itself” mostly when they feel threatened with being instrumentalized by projects they don’t like. To claim that knowledge is valuable in itself is a very ambiguous positive claim, but a very strong negative claim. Above all, it says something like: you can’t reduce sociology (or whatever other liberal art) to a vocational skill or a policy research group. The claim that knowledge is a value in itself, in spite of its seemingly abstract and general nature, is actually something that seems to arise as a rejection of very concrete proposals that “instrumentalize” academic work.

But it seems to me that to say that knowledge is valuable in itself is, arguably, just shorthand for saying that one can’t enumerate everything it’s good for. It’s shorthand for saying that it’s good for society’s self-understanding as a whole, or for the good of human life, or for any number of other grandiose and general projects. To say that knowledge is valuable in itself is, arguably, just to announce that one is at an epistemological impasse: that one thinks it has larger values beyond itself but can’t spell them all out.

I hope to go farther in this line of thought soon, in future posts.

The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics of various peoples. No one who has even superficially concerned himself with French culture can have failed to be impressed by the qualities of clarity, lucid systematization, balance, care in choice of means, and good taste, that permeate so many aspects of the national civilization. These qualities have their weaker side. We are familiar with the overmechanization, the emotional timidity or shallowness (quite a different thing from emotional restraint), the exaggeration of manner at the expense of content, that are revealed in some of the manifestations of the French spirit. Those elements of French civilization that give characteristic evidence of the qualities of its genius may be said, in our present limited sense [of culture not as high culture nor as all of a people’s traditions but as the practiced ‘genius’ of a civilization], to constitute the culture of France; or, to put it somewhat differently, the cultural significance of any element in the civilization of France is the light it sheds on the French genius.

From this standpoint we can evaluate culturally such traits in French civilization as the formalism of French classical drama,  the insistence in French education on the study of the mother-tongue and of its classics, the prevalcence of epigram in French life and letters, the intellectualist cast so often given to aesthetic movements in France, the lack of turgidity in modern French music, the relative absence of the ecstatic note in religion, the strong tendency to bureaucracy in French administration. Each and all of these and hundreds of other traits could be readily paralleled from the civilization of England. Nonetheless their relative cultural significance, I venture to think, is a lesser one in England  than in France. In France they seem to lie more deeply in the grooves of the cultural mold of its civilization. Their study would yield something like a rapid bird’s-eye view of the spirit of French culture.

One notes that some of this theoretical advice is still being learned today, as when people take pains to demonstrate that some cross-cultural cultural phenomenon (say, the global presence of McDonald’s chain restaurants) varies radically in local significance. As Sapir points out, the same ‘trait’ can take on very different significances in different places.

If one were to give a more systematic reading, this essay would deserve further note for its hostility to cultural comparison, for its hostility to radical social change (cultures must be taken for what they are, and change slowly, he argues), for its theory of the value of history, for its dialectic between ‘collective’ and ‘individual’ culture, for its quasi-Frankfurt School critique of cultural standardization, and for its lament of a contemporary loss of access to meaningful, valuable forms of activity. David Graeber has recently argued that “American society is better conceived as a battle over access to the right to behave altruistically [than as a site of pure market rationality],” claiming furthermore that liberals have monopolized access to ‘doing good in the world’ by largely monopolizing the culture industries (and alienating the working class in the process). Sapir long before had already written: “The vast majority of us, deprived of any but an insignificant and culturally abortive share in the satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are further deprived of both opportunity and stimulation to share in the production of non-utilitarian values.” Admittedly, the class and political analysis is less developed by Sapir, but the fundamental observation is strikingly similar.

Now, as you might guess from its title, the real thrust of the essay has to do with evaluating cultures not in relation to each other, but in relation to a highly un-politically-correct ideal of ‘genuine’ culture, which, to simplify in the extreme, involves having the possibility for meaningful, creative life in an organically developed cultural landscape that endows everyday social action with some more-than-instrumental significance. By this criterion, Sapir takes pains to point out, the most technically advanced ‘civilizations’ are not necessarily the most genuine cultures; indeed, he suggests that primitive societies, everything else being equal, are more likely to be genuine cultures on account of their lesser degree of social differentiation and division of labor.

But this isn’t a good time for an exposition of Sapirian culture theory: the purpose of this post is simply to remind us all that even famous anthropologists can and do serve as merchants of cultural stereotypes. To offer my own ethnographic perspective, I have yet to encounter a surfeit of epigrams here in France, and to judge by the university system, it is far from obvious that ‘balance’ or ‘clarity’ are indeed the dominant French cultural values. However, if by chance you find yourself entertained by Sapir’s schematic view of French culture, I do recommend that you also look up what he has to say about the existentialist Russians, or again about the Americans — “where a chronic state of cultural maladjustment has for so long a period reduced our higher life to sterile externality.”

Let me pause for a moment and say that this topic is somewhat new for me, since for years I’ve felt somewhat skeptical about ‘neoliberalism’ as a concept. I remember when I had no idea what it referred to and felt that it was some kind of meaningless sign that signified primarily that someone (probably someone academic) really didn’t like something. Then, later on as I did classroom ethnography, I began to feel that neoliberalism was part of broader metanarratives about universities that were abstract and often irrelevant to ordinary academic life. Now, though, as I slowly get a better comparative sense of national university histories, I’ve changed my mind about neoliberalism, because it seems that the term, in the context of university reforms, really does designate a historical process that’s happening worldwide. As far as I can see, ‘university neoliberalism’ designates the process that brings together many of the following phenomena (not necessarily all at once, but as a set of loosely linked processes with clear common themes):

• Newly hierarchical, bottom-line, market-oriented academic management. Universities look more like corporations in their organizational and behavioral structure. Corresponding decline in faculty governance, pedagogical and disciplinary autonomy.
• Withdrawal of public (i.e., state or governmental) money and a turn towards private sector funding.
• Casualization (sometimes also taylorization) of academic labor.
• Decline of the idea that education is a public good or a right; and a corresponding rise of ideologies of education as a commodity, and universities as an investment.
• Privatization and branding of universities. Increasing provision of consumer services to students.
• Development of systems of competition, ranking, evaluation and audit within and across academic institutions.
• A shift from universities as small, elite institutions to mass institutions deeply involved in vocational reproduction and “economically useful” knowledge (one could take this as a particular ideology about what role universities should play in mass social reproduction). New ideas about the relation between education and job-related skill-building.
• Increased organizational intimacy between universities and business enterprises – business-funded research, corporate partnerships, and the like.
• Rise of the international and global context as the relevant context in which universities should be evaluated.

These things are global: I’ve read about neoliberalisms of this ilk in, for instance, the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, Austria, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Cameroon — just to take the list that spontaneously comes to my head.

However, the first thing to learn from this week’s set of readings, as Zach points out, is that “such convergences [in what we call neoliberalism] are always historically and geographically specific, [and] that ‘neoliberalization’ can have wildly different effects and discursive articulations.” To give a thumbnail summary of this variation: in New Zealand, neoliberal reforms since the 1980s have introduced new forms of auditing, benchmarking, consumerization, and generally quantitative forms of management; according to Larner and Le Heron, this was partly embraced by academics themselves, and at any rate does not seem to have generated large opposition. There was a general consensus among academics that reform was needed, they say.

In Mexico, on the other hand, neoliberalism provoked violent reactions. An effort to charge tuition (at the relatively low rate, to US eyes, of $90/semester) provoked a student strike that shut down the National Autonomous University from April 20, 1999 to February 6, 2000. Ultimately, the strike foundered on internal differences between its “radical left wing” and more “moderate” students, and was shut down in the end by a raid of 2,400 police, without having achieved its political goals. Political discourse centered on a conflict between populist, social-justice-motivated students, who claimed the constitutional right to free higher education for all, and “market-driven philosophies,” related to the Mexican government’s desire to better integrate the country into the global economy.

This conflict was, of course, framed differently by different sides. Some conservatives claimed that “politics had no place in an academic institution” (quoting Imanol Ordorika, p.352) — a political move in the guise of an antipolitical move. Among the leftist students, on the other hand, an interesting variety of nationalist universalism surfaced.

“This is not only a national problem but an international problem,” one student commented; “The imperialist politics that have been planted in Mexico and abroad have driven privatization not only in education but in all public sectors. For the most part, and in the near future, all that is the common people or nation will no longer be. We will be in foreign hands, the hands of the United States” (343-4).

As if the international were the locus of capital and imperial force, while the national remains the locus of the people and the common. As Rhoads and Mina put it, “antiglobalization and proautonomy rhetoric characterized the student strikers” (336). And indeed, a specific national role for the university was invoked by students, who said things like: “The university is the cradle of culture for the country.” I call it a nationalist universalism because it associates the nation, Mexico in this case, with seemingly universal goods like culture, justice, and democracy. Recall that in Bill Readings’ influential 1996 book, The University in Ruins, he argued that the university as bearer of national culture was dead. We can see here that this conclusion, drawn half a decade before the UNAM strike, was premature. (My guess is that Readings over-generalized from the North American case he knew.)

And to make matters still more complicated, it isn’t only the opponents of neoliberalism who lay claim to national values. The proponents of neoliberal reforms themselves are nationalists, of a sort: nationalists who (claim to) believe that the nation’s best interests lie in an embrace of the global economy, in a new merger between education and market, in the embrace of international standards and institutional forms. The New Zealand case illustrates this well: as Larner and Le Heron say themselves,

“[The] role of the university [has changed] from that of an institution premised on, and constitutive of, a national economy and a national society, to that focused on a particular understanding of international competitiveness in which the aspiration is to identify points of difference and areas of strength through which national institutions can be linked into global flows and networks.” (845-6)

Is neoliberalism therefore a new sort of national strategy? Or is the nation slowly being restructured by transnational neoliberalism? Paradoxically, it would seem to be both at once. (I’m dimly aware that scholars have quarreled about this for decades, but it’s not my field.) And as we examine the clash in Mexico between neoliberal reforms and social justice protesters, we can observe universities becoming the scene of a clash of different kinds of universalisms: a universalism of the market, of economic exigency, opposed to a universalism of transcendental values and of political emancipation. This is too abstract and schematic to be worth much, I realize, but it reminds me of a pair of opposed political slogans from May 1968 in France.

1. “Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible.” (Be realists, demand the impossible.) It’s a slogan which makes a famous appeal to a radical and transcendental political role for academic protest.
2. “Soyons réalistes : pour bouffer, il faut de l’argent.” (Be realists: to eat, you need some money.) This slogan, a parody of the first, makes a bluntly practical appeal to the economic necessities of survival.

Anyway, I wish I had more time to develop this peculiar ongoing link between university and national, political and economic logics… and I also wanted to write more about sub-national identifications with universities. In Cameroon, there were years of violent ethnic clashes over the universities, based in part on an ethnic and linguistic identification between the Beti and “their” university. Konings says: “The self-styled Direct Action group… openly declared that the University of Yaounde was on Beti land and thus should fall under Beti control. It often declared that the Anglo-Bami students should either recognize Beti control or ‘go home’ ” (188). This should remind us that there are very common, quite deep identifications between peoples, places, and universities, often at scales other than national — state universities in the U.S., for instance, are located in their state, named for their state, and intended to educate the people of that state, for instance. But this species of university totemism, for lack of a better word, will have to wait for further elaboration.

Next week we’ll be reading from a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies on neoliberal knowledge in Asian universities. Stay tuned.

1. Introduction: Clashing futures in university politics
What is the future of French universities in a globalized world? According to the Magna Charta Universitatum, signed by a number of rectors of European universities in 1988, “the future of humankind depends largely on cultural, scientific and technical development; and this is built up in centers of culture, knowledge and research as represented by true universities” (Rectors 2003:6). But not everyone in Europe shares this utopian view of universities as the salvation of the human species. In the midst of French protests against university reforms in 2007, the Department of Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII held a meeting to discuss the campus strikes. According to the minutes: “Questions were raised about concerns over finding work. That one would worry about one’s future – to say the least – doesn’t mean that one wants one’s concerns instrumentalized by and for projects that will make the future even darker still” (Paris8philo 2007). In other words, in the thick of the political fray, these philosophers viewed academic knowledge not as the future of humankind, but rather as an uncertain defense against a world of scarce employment and darkening futures.

What, then, is the relationship between academic knowledge, politics and the future in contemporary France? In the “knowledge society,” how does the future come to mediate knowledge-making and politics alike; and how do knowledge and the university come to be central to political futures in France and across Europe? Along with several other scholars (Fuller 2003; Meyer, et al. 2006; Nassehi 2004), I reject the view that the “knowledge society” constitutes a radically new society or economy. Rather, I see the “knowledge society” as a new cultural schema and political discourse, one whose cultural metamorphoses and political dynamics demand anthropological analysis. This project will thus examine the academic production and politics of knowledge via an ethnographic study of contemporary French philosophy, and of the political struggles that surround contemporary French universities. This is not the only site where knowledge society politics have become significant (cf. Rabinow 1999), but it is a good one, insofar as universities are among the knowledge society’s key institutions.

French philosophy in particular appears to be an especially good place to examine the relationship between academic life and national knowledge politics, since philosophy has long been central to the French Republican project (Douailler 1988). To gain a comparative understanding of contemporary philosophical practice, I plan to study two philosophy departments: I will spend a semester each at the University of Paris-VIII (St-Denis) and the University of Provence (Aix-en-Provence). Within these two departments, I will examine philosophical knowledge-making and political engagement. Beyond the departments, I will scrutinize policy, media and activist discourses dealing with the national university system. In particular, I will focus on the different futures that are imagined, feared, longed for, and put in question in these sites. The French university is often said to be “in crisis,” and its future has often been debated, as has the future of philosophy as a discipline. I hypothesize that, by scrutinizing the cultural production of futures, we will be better able to understand how philosophical knowledge-making is related to the politics of French universities and of the “knowledge society” at large.

The underlying theoretical agenda of this project is organized around four related questions. First, how is philosophical knowledge understood, made and learned? Second, how is philosophical knowledge-making changing in the context of French university politics? Third, how does this philosophical knowledge, in turn, find its place within its broader political situation; how does philosophy become politically or publicly engaged? And finally, what sorts of future-making projects connect or differentiate philosophical knowledge-making and university politics; what common futures bring structure to the cultural scene of universities in the “knowledge society”? I draw these questions from research traditions in anthropology and sociology of knowledge; from studies of the semiotics and politics of academic institutions, particularly from recent studies on the sociology of French philosophy and the transnational politics of the Bologna process; and from recent anthropological research on futures in other contexts. In bringing these disciplinary traditions together, I hope to contribute a new, anthropological perspective on the politics of the future to a growing interdisciplinary scholarship on knowledge and academic cultures. Such a perspective is badly needed in a moment when most scholarship on higher education, critical or not, tends to see universities as ruined or threatened institutions (Readings 1996, Slaughter and Leslie 1997). Rather than seeing universities as sites of organizational conflict and disarray (Kerr 2001) or functionalist reproduction of neoliberal capitalism (Shumar 1997), I will propose we view them as vehicles for cultural projects of “knowledge” and future-making that deserve further attention.

2. Theoretical context: Anthropology of knowledge and the future
The theoretical foundation of this project lies in anthropology and sociology of knowledge (Barth 2002; Crick 1982; Swidler and Arditi 1994), a tradition which has evolved from its Marxian, Nietzschean and Durkheimian origins to encompass studies of contested knowledge in social fields (Bourdieu 1977), of large-scale formations of knowledge and power (Foucault 1972; Foucault 1995), and of the micro-social workings of semiosis and concept formation (Silverstein 2004). Much recent ethnographic research has focused specifically on knowledge workers and expert cultures (Glaeser 2003; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2000; Mazzarella 2003; Riles 2000). Here, in examining how French philosophy is involved with French politics, I draw particularly on studies that demonstrate a reciprocal relationship between experts and their surrounding social orders. That is, while experts shape public knowledge and national culture, they are themselves constituted and limited by the national knowledge they help produce (Boyer 2000; Masco 2004; Verdery 1991). I am also influnced by research on what has been termed the “politics of knowledge” (cf. Pels 1997), which encompasses struggles over the state’s involvement in science and higher education (Delanty 2002; Fuller 2000; Weiler 2005), the negotiation of competing claims of expertise (Bloor 2000; Epstein 1996; Wayland 2003), and the involvement of academics and academic knowledge in the political realm (Lagasnerie 2007). All of these issues are indeed central to the analysis of my chosen ethnographic case. However, in this project, I also hope to substantiate two major critiques of this literature.

(1) It suffers from a lack of interest in epistemic structure and system, topics which were best developed methodologically by an earlier era’s cognitive and structuralist anthropology (Berlin, et al. 1968; D’Andrade and Romney 1966; Frake 1964; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Lévi-Strauss 1966; Sahlins 1976). For example, Dominic Boyer’s recent study in anthropology of knowledge (Boyer 2005) traces the tropes of “system” and “spirit” through German journalistic practice without giving more than an impressionistic sketch of the general system of everyday forms of knowing in which these tropes take their place. Karin Knorr-Cetina’s research on “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), a capstone work of laboratory studies of science, never really systematizes the systems of knowing that she examines. As a corrective to this tendency for practice to displace structure in anthropology of knowledge, I will propose that we theorize knowledge not just as a semiotic outcome of social interaction and negotation (Latour 1987), but also as a system of epistemic forms, analogous to the general system of communicative forms theorized long ago by Hymes (1964) in linguistic anthropology. Of course, this system of forms is reshaped and reproduced in social practice, and, following on studies of science laboratories (Gusterson 2001; Knorr Cetina 1979; Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Sims 2005; Traweek 1988), I will also attend to the practices of knowledge making through which this knowledge system is produced.

(2) An unresolved tension lingers in this literature between theorizing knowledge as a universal aspect of human society (Barth 2002), and theorizing “knowledge” as a culturally specific phenomenon, even as an ideological project. In theorizing the “knowledge society,” Stehr comments that while knowledge is an “anthropological constant,” the knowledge society is unique because of the unprecedented degree to which knowledge becomes central to economic production (Stehr 1994:93-99). But while anthropologists of knowledge typically assume that “knowledge” is a universally applicable analytic category, the “knowledge society” affords a very clear case in which the very category of “knowledge” becomes a locally politicized symbol. To study the “knowledge society” is to study the ideological processes that constitute “knowledge” as a key stake of political struggle — which is obviously not a culturally universal scenario. I hope to shift the emphasis, that is, away from a universalistic study of knowledge and towards a particular analysis of “knowledge” as a “lexical totem” (Boyer 2005:60) of a certain European cultural and political order.

These theoretical concerns take on more specificity when brought into studies of French academic culture, which have, in fact, not always taken “knowledge” as a central theoretical object. Pierre Bourdieu has produced the most substantial and well-known body of research on French higher education, offering analyses of class reproduction among students, of professional struggle among faculty, of the types of capital displayed in academic discourse, and so on (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu 1990; Bourdieu 1996; Bourdieu, et al. 1994; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979). In fact, the most empirically relevant prior literature for my own project derives from a Bourdieuan school of sociologists, who have produced a detailed set of studies of French philosophy, dealing with such things as the academic book market, the representation of foreign philosophers, the reproduction of the philosophical profession, and the structural situation of the avant-garde (Boltanski 1975; Fabiani 1983; Fabiani 1988; Godechot 1999; Lepenies 1983; Pinto 1983; Pinto 1994; Pinto 2000; Pinto 2007; Soulié 1995; Soulié 1997; Soulié 2002; Verdes-Leroux 1975). But there are two problems with this literature. First, on an empirical level, the sociologists are too quick to delimit their research object, assuming prematurely that the social field of philosophy is identical to the academic discipline (cf. Lagasnerie 2007). Here, on the contrary, I hope to show that in France the social field of philosophical action goes beyond the narrow confines of the discipline, becoming substantially entangled with the field of university politics. This result, once substantiated, will also be an important corrective to the substantial literature on French university governance (Chevaillier 1998; Musselin 1997; Musselin 2004; Tavernier 2004; Weisz 1983), which tends to over-privilege the top-down policy perspective in analyzing university politics, and hence overlook less official forms of public and political engagement.

Second, I would emphasize that the ultimate result of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in which the habitus is always more or less well adjusted to the objective social and cultural structures in which it finds itself, is one in which knowledge always ends up being ultimately instrumental to social reproduction (Sewell 1992). It seems to me that this formula could be usefully reversed: rather than viewing knowledge as an instrument of social reproduction, as in Bourdieu, we could view social reproduction as the process by which culturally given knowledge projects are realized (see Sahlins 1976). Departing from Foucauldian and Bourdieuian paradigms in which, other differences aside, knowledge-making is seen as an instrument of social reproduction and political power, I will suggest, as mentioned above that we view politics and social practice as, among other things, vehicles for culturally arbitrary knowledge projects — the “knowledge society” being the most recent. This should both invert and complement the traditional Bourdieuian and Foucauldian view.

The future, and temporality in general, become important here because knowledge-making projects, particularly those examined here, are structured centrally around differently imagined futures, hopes and expectations (Miyazaki 2004). The future has attracted much recent attention from ethnographers (Boyer 2006; Escobar 1995; Guyer 2007; Peebles 2008; Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Weiss 2004), who have explored how futures are both discursively formulated and tacitly enacted. But although a number of studies have examined the temporal structure of academic cultures (Bourdieu 1988; Goffman 1981; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Sabin 2007), they have remained primarily descriptive, and aside from a few brief remarks about class reproduction and vocational orientation (Bourdieu 1979:63; Nathan 2005:151-2), the future has not come into question there. Here, I hope to advance our theoretical understanding of futures in academic contexts by drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of futurity and Nancy Munn’s analysis of intersubjective spacetime. In Sartre’s existentialist philosophy, a future is always projected as the horizon of an actor’s practical activity, and every practical project is oriented towards an implied future (Sartre 1992[1943]:180-187). In a more sociocentric version, I would argue that we can view social practice as necessarily embodying future-making projects, whether at an individual, institutional or societal level. Hence, we can analyze the implied or explicit future horizon towards which social practices are oriented. Such a perspective is essentially consistent with Munn’s more recent anthropology of time and value, which showed that, in Gawa, the processes of expanding “intersubjective spacetime” are means by which “[the] community seeks to create the value it regards as essential to its communal viability” (Munn 1986:3, my emphasis). While Munn did not specifically examine futures, I expect to find that, along these lines, the future becomes a form of value in my fieldsites. In other words, I will ultimately advance a theory of the cultural production of futures, not only as a mode of representation and experience, but as a medium of social and political value, and as a tacit dimension of knowledge-making projects.

3. Historical context and site selection: French philosophy and the European knowledge society
The national political role of French philosophy dates at least to post-revolutionary debates about education in the 1790s (Douailler 1988). By the early 19th century, philosophy was instituted as an obligatory lycée course, viewed as both the intellectual pinnacle of secondary education and as a form of political education for enlightened citizens. In this way, philosophy was at once intellectually and politically central to the French Republic. This view persists to this day: according to Mark Sherringham, currently Inspector General of National Education, “The Republic surpasses the teaching of philosophy, but its content and its conditions of possibility remain at the same time fully philosophical” (Sherringham 2006:62). In keeping with this disciplinary commitment to the Republic, a number of French philosophers have served as high government officials, notably Victor Cousin (Goldstein 1968) and Louis Liard (Greenberg 1981; Weisz 1983) in the 19th century, Alexandre Kojeve in the post-war period (Price 2000), and recently Luc Ferry (Pinto 2007:141-154) and Blandine Kriegel (Bowen 2007:13-16). At the same time, philosophy has harbored deeply oppositional political projects, notably those of twentieth-century Marxist philosophers like Kojève, Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, and unorthodox intellectuals like Sartre and Michel Foucault (Foucault 1980; Roth 1985; Schalk 1979; Sprinker 1985). In short, scholastic traditions and outright political dissent have been brought together within a discipline that has, at least at moments, also become the legitimate intellectual discourse of national, Republican ideals (Mathy 2000:ch. 3; Wolin 2000).

But the relation of academic knowledge to politics has changed in France, as Europe has become increasingly economically and institutionally integrated (Borneman and Fowler 1997), and as universities have become increasingly central to mass social reproduction (Schofer and Meyer 2005). This new “politics of knowledge” has its roots in the 1960s and ’70s, when social scientists like Daniel Bell (Bell 1973) and Alvin Gouldner (Gouldner 1979) foretold the coming of a “post-industrial” or “knowledge” society, run by a “new class” of technocrats and intellectuals and newly centered on knowledge production and management (Stehr 1994). By the end of the century, these prophecies, whatever their flaws, had moved into the political and policy arena. In the last twenty years, an extensive discourse on the “knowledge society” has developed in European higher education policy, politics, and rhetoric. From the 1988 Magna Charta Universitatum quoted above, to the European Commission’s 1997 declaration of a “Europe of Knowledge” and the international Bologna Process (1999-2010), the basic premise of university policy has been that knowledge is central to society’s existence in a new way. An accompanying series of international reforms has aimed to “harmonize,” rationalize and improve university education, under the banner of “developing European cultural dimensions, … citizens’ mobility and employability and the Continent’s overall development” (European Ministers of Education 1999:7).

In France, however, the government policies implementing these reforms have met with major opposition. As I mentioned earlier, students at dozens of universities have protested university reforms, notably in 2003 and 2007. Faculty have organized collectives like “Save the University” and “Save Research,” and produced a growing critical discourse on the Bologna Process and French university policy (Charle, et al. 2004; Charle and Soulié 2007; Faure, et al. 2006; Oblin and Vassort 2005; Schultheis, et al. 2008). Yet as I indicated above, the future figures as a central concern across all sides of these political struggles. While continental “knowledge society” discourse has its utopian faith that universities are crucial to the European future, the futures of French universities are constantly cast in question. Troubled by low funding, low prestige, and questionable vocational relevance, they are constantly described as “in crisis,” “mediocre,” “a field of ruins,” even “dead.”

Philosophy serves as a good barometer of the changing politics of the “knowledge society,” because philosophy’s status has changed in the post-war period. Philosophy, considered the “queen of the sciences” in the 19th century (Fabiani 1988), has lost its pre-eminence as natural and social sciences have become increasingly prominent, and has had long-standing rivalries with other disciplines, notably history, sociology and psychology (Bourdieu and Passeron 1967; Chimisso 2000). After 1968, the political engagements of the discipline shifted back towards a less-radicalized Republican liberalism (Mathy 2000; Pavel 1989), and today the discipline itself has an uncertain future. While some, like Sherringham, portray philosophy as a centerpiece of secondary education, others fear a world of declining resources (Bourgeois and Menasseyre 2008). While the likes of Alain Badiou (2004) and Dominique Lecourt (2001) lament the lost radicalism of the past and accuse the present of mediocrity, others, such as Pascal Engel (2004) and Luc Ferry (Ferry and Renaut 1990), reject the past to advocate a depoliticized future of “modesty” and “humanism.” These debates about the discipline’s future, crucially, have taken the form of a debate over its relationship with politics. Philosophy’s future, I suspect, is put in doubt by European knowledge politics in which science and technical advances serve to guarantee national viability in the international marketplace, and philosophy is less central to French Republican legitimacy.

The question, then, is how philosophers manage their changing political fates in practice, and how that impinges on their daily academic knowledge-making. The two field sites I have selected are designed to show two quite contrasting forms of political engagement within the discipline. Philosophy at the University of Paris-VIII (Vincennes–St.-Denis), in an unpretentious Parisian suburb, was formed in 1970 in response to the educational crisis of the ’60s, and originally the department was comprised almost entirely of Marxist philosophers (Soulié 1998). Although it later become less radical, its chief priority remains “the analysis of the historical contexts and political implications of philosophies.” Its students also remain very politically active, supporting undocumented immigrants’ right to education, and proposing a “day of reflection on the future of the university” during the blockades of 2007. On the other hand, philosophy at the University of Provence, in the small provincial city of Aix-en-Provence, is known as a center of the American-influenced, less politicized “analytic” philosophy. The department offers a master’s in “argument and social influence,” the only such program in France, which they view as relevant to public activism and private enterprise alike. Its students wrote in their first annual newsletter that they were “allergic to militantisms of all stripes” (AsPhiX 2003). In short, while Paris-VIII exhibits a more direct form of philosophical engagement with politics, Aix-en-Provence is a place where new currents within the discipline and non-politicized forms of public engagement are more prominent.

4. Methods: Comparative departmental studies in context
As indicated above, primary fieldwork for this project will be divided between the two chosen departments. I plan to spend Autumn 2009 at the University of Paris-VIII, and Spring 2010 at the University of Provence. In choosing the university department as my primary unit of analysis, I hope to move beyond studies that focus exclusively on students or on faculty and hence fail to scrutinize the general social system of the university (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Felouzis 2001; Millet 2003; Moffatt 1989; Nathan 2005). Unlike a study of a classroom or a laboratory (Latour and Woolgar 1986 [1979]; Thorkelson 2008), a study of a university department affords a site in which the functionally differentiated activities of teaching, research, extra-academic interaction and organizational work are brought together. Yet university departments per se have not often been the primary objects of social-scientific or ethnographic inquiry. The limited number of extant studies has focused on internal conflicts and the department’s relation with its broader discipline (Camic 1995; Jennings 1997; Small 1999; Tuunainen 2005), on disciplinary “moral orders” (Ylijoki 2000), on research management (Morris 2002; Walton 1986) and on the teaching-research relation (Snell 2001). These studies tend to conceptualize the department as a social and organizational unit rather than as a site of knowledge-making, and tend to be oriented inwards towards the institution or the discipline. I would argue that we need to analyze departments more rigorously as “epistemic cultures” (Knorr Cetina 1999), and that we need to expand our analysis outwards to see how departments orient themselves towards external and extra-academic publics and political circumstances.

Hence, in this project I conceive of the department as a heterogeneous site of knowledge-making and public/political engagement, oriented at once inwards around its own bureaucratic and social structures, and outwards towards its broader institutional and political contexts. To explore these multiple facets of departmental structure, I envision multiple forms of data collection. I plan to conduct (a) observation of philosophical events such as lectures, seminars, colloquia, conferences, and meetings (building on my own ethnography of literary theory classrooms, Thorkelson 2008); (b) interviews with university professors, university students, and administrators; (c) observation of normally private philosophical activities like reading and writing, particularly when informants can be persuaded to narrate these activities to me (following on Bazerman 1985); and (d) examination of official documents, published papers, website activities, and secondary sources on the departments.

I plan to select two or three classrooms for intensive semester-long observation, at both license (undergraduate) and master levels, in order to gain a cross-section of knowledge-making practices. I will choose courses on the history of philosophy, on epistemology (a speciality of Aix-en-Provence), and on politics (a speciality of Paris-VIII), since these are the courses most likely to yield metadiscourse on philosophy, knowledge-making, and political engagement. Within these classrooms, and in other public philosophical settings, I will primarily be making a record of discourse and social practice, but will take preliminary notes about how philosophical knowledge-claims are made, how metadiscourse emerges around these knowledge claims (Hyland 1998; Silverstein 2003), how disciplinary and university politics are invoked or impinge on the situation, and how futures are enacted or discursively constructed. In interviews, I plan to pursue the same sorts of questions more directly, asking more specifically for actors’ views on the mechanics of philosophical knowledge-making, the relationship between ordinary academic life and university politics, and about individual views of the future. I intend to select informants and interviewees through a general request for all students, staff and faculty to speak to me; while this will not yield a 100% response rate, it will avoid the tendencies of snowball sampling to reproduce the existing lines of social association and dissociation within the departments.

To supplement this departmental research, I plan to conduct additional fieldwork on the political life of the French university system at large. First, I will assemble an archive of media coverage, official documents, and critical commentary on the university system and the broader discourse of the European “knowledge society.” Second, I will conduct a series of interviews with university and government officials, education researchers, and journalists who are involved in public discourse on universities. I will be asking primarily about the workings of university politics, and about individual views of the university’s future. Third, I will observe the organizational practices of three recently-formed groups that focus on university politics: ARESER (Association for reflection on higher education and research), Save the university, and Save Research. I will also examine philosophical organizations, such as the French Society of Philosophy, the Society of Analytic Philosophy, and the Association of Philosophy Students in Aix-En-Provence (AsPhiX), especially inasmuch as these become engaged with changing university politics. I envision attending these organizations’ public meetings, collecting documents, and analyzing the resulting discourse for its structures of political engagement and mobilizations of academic knowledge. This additional research, which I plan to conduct alongside the more focused departmental work, will be aimed at gaining a more global view of the political and intellectual world of French universities beyond the departmental situation.

All this data collection is intended to enable four avenues of analysis, which correspond to the theoretical topics listed above and which I will elaborate below. First, I intend an analysis of the forms and practices of philosophical knowing; second, an analysis of the political organization of French university reforms as they impinge on the departments I’ve chosen; third, an analysis of the modes of political or public engagement that I observe; finally, and most importantly, an analysis of future-making projects across all these sites. I envision the first three analytical topics as necessary foundations for an analysis of futures; while I view the analysis of futures as a way of grasping the underlying cultural conditions of the other three analyses. So these are not four totally separate types of analysis, but will rather, ideally, be reciprocally informing.

My analytic approach to philosophical knowledge as such is primarily inspired by the methodology of contemporary linguistic anthropology. I am interested both in the practiced system of knowledge-making (Frake 1964; Hymes 1964) and in the system of local ideologies about knowledge that regiment this system (Silverstein 2003; Thorkelson 2007). Therefore, drawing on transcripts of my observed situations, I will begin by constructing a taxonomy of philosophical knowledge forms, such as a “dissertation,” an “argument,” a “thesis,” a “distinction,” an “oeuvre,” and any other local forms that emerge in the field. I will then expand my analysis to include the practices through which knowledge forms are created, circulated and reworked, and in which knowledge claims are introduced and negotiated. In particular, I will examine the production of knowledge in social and symbolic interaction (Goffman 1974); its use and reception; its media of transmission (Barth 2002); its affective structure (e.g., what kinds of knowledge are considered “exciting” or “interesting,” cf. Davis 1971); and its relationship to politics (politically significant? apolitical?). Drawing on semiotic studies of texts and textuality (Brenneis 1999; Mertz 2007; Silverstein and Urban 1996; Urciuoli 1999), I will particularly scrutinize the way that knowledge-making is textually mediated in books, essays, websites, lectures, and other genres, which serve technical instruments of philosophical knowledge in something of the way that particle detectors do in physics (Galison 1997). I will also examine ideologies about knowledge, noting what counts as valid or legitimate knowledge; who is a legitimate knower; what forms of knowledge are considered sound and unsound, and so on. The analytic aim is to assemble a holistic picture of departmental knowledge production systems, and to be able to compare knowledge-making across my two chosen departments.

My approach to political organization and political engagement, on the other hand, is mainly influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s prior research on academic institutions (Bourdieu 1988; Bourdieu and Passeron 1979), and by Jacques Rancière’s research on politics (Ranciere 1992). I will begin by assembling an analysis of the social field on which the maneuvers of university politics take place. This will draw on my broader background research on public discourse and official governmental interventions on universities, as well as on focused interviews in which I hope to explore personal views and experiences of university politics. The idea is simply to assemble a map of the policy actors, governance systems, political maneuvers, and debates within French universities. I will pay particular attention to how these are affected by transnational European reforms. Having thus gained a general picture of the political situation, I will follow political events as they happen during my fieldwork, focusing on the following analytical questions: (a) what counts as “political”; (b) who is recognized as a legitimate political actor, such as politicians, officials, student organizations, unions, and the like; (c) how academic knowledge, particularly philosophy, becomes politically significant; and (d) what is recognized as valid or successful political engagement.

In tandem with these analyses of politics and knowledge-making, I hope to develop my analysis of futures and future-making projects. Drawing on the concept of the future that I derive from Sartre and Munn, as described above, I will be interested in observing tacit futures in philosophical practice; I will also inquire about people’s plans, projects, and thoughts about the future, as well as examining public rhetorics of the future. Again, I will look for these in both collected documents and transcribed social situations. (The frequent semiotic invocations of “crisis” in French universities, and of “fear of the future,” will be especially important to investigate, as they indicate a perceived lack of a stable future.) I plan to examine futures at four analytical levels: (a) the futures of individuals, particularly their career or vocational prospects; (b) the collective futures of philosophy departments and academic associations; (c) the future of philosophy in France; and (d) the mass futures of French and European universities at large. Then, having assembled this array of futures, I will attempt to ascertain which ones are unique to particular sites, which ones spread across contexts, and how this whole array of futures fits together or falls into contradiction. The aim, ultimately, will be to discern how different futures underlie the interlocking but quite different projects of philosophical knowledge-making and university political action. The choice of the two philosophy departments, moreover, should open up two different perspectives on the future of philosophy in France, since Paris-VIII and Aix-en-Provence differ greatly in their trajectories within the discipline, and can be hypothesized to have quite different future orientations. Finally, I will compare the local and institutional futures I observe with the futures projected in broader European discourses on the knowledge society, which will offer at least one datum on how the “knowledge society” is contested and lived.

6. Broader impacts for anthropology of universities
I envision a number of broader impacts for this project. First, the very process of doing the research, by virtue of its choice of ethnographic object, should contribute to especially rich international collaboration with French colleagues who are both analysts and participants in the university system. As mentioned above, I have already been invited to affiliate with a laboratory (LAHIC) studying the history and anthropology of cultural institutions, and I expect the project to yield long-lasting possibilities for trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange. Second, the research, when appropriately summarized and popularized, should afford eventual opportunities for anthropological participation in current debates over U.S. higher education and academic politics. All too often, U.S. debates on universities are not informed by an international, cross-cultural perspective, and anthropology offers great potential for offering more culturally sensitive analysis of university cultures. I have already been involved in several projects aiming to make social research relevant to university governance and reform, and plan to actively report this research in these extra-scientific forums. Third, the focus on the classroom and departmental setting will hope to contribute to engaged scholarship on teaching and learning in academic settings, a field which has suffered from a lack of basic research (Thorkelson 2008; Wisniewski 2000). Fourth, the focus on the discipline of philosophy and its engagement in politics may offer new empirical support for the social function and utility of humanistic disciplines, which are all too often overlooked by research that sees only natural and social sciences as having social benefits. Finally, by examining futures, perceived crises in the future, and fears about the future, I hope to shed some light on the contemporary hopes and anxieties that the image of the “knowledge society” at once condenses and obscures.

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I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental – valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This seems to me not very well phrased, because the distinction between an institutional ideal (which is really what this is about) and institutional reality is not well established; and “instrumentalism” is very clumsily formulated. Fish mentalistically defines being “instrumental” as a matter of purpose or intention; while of course not everything that’s intended to be “useful” actually ends up being useful, and purposes are not often as monolithic as Fish makes them out to be. Is my intrinsic enjoyment of a bag of potato chips, to take the most laughable example, diminished or even altered by the fact that eating is also instrumentally useful for avoiding weakness and eventual death by starvation? Not really; contra Fish, something can be instrinsically valuable while also being useful for some other end, even when that “other end” is, abstractly, far more important than the immediately valuable experience of, say, chewing up crisp little ovals of grease and salt. Purposes can be multiple with regard to a given activity, whose “intrinsic” merits, moreover, aren’t automatically distorted by an instrumental attitude projected onto it. Extrinsic and intrinsic value, instrumentalism vs value en soi, are not mutually exclusive. And Fish is wrong to imagine that scholastic “understanding and explaining” are automatically distorted the minute that someone starts having an intention of  “intervening in social crises,” or that the academic merits of academic knowledge are incompatible with their having some other function, like job training.

Faced with demands for higher education to be “relevant” or “engaged,” either by producing a better corporate workforce as business leaders might want, or by teaching social justice as progressive activists would prefer — faced with these demands, anyway, Fish retreats into the argument that “higher education has no use; it is just intrinsically valuable.” It strikes me that this is actually an strangely deceptive move, because as a professor, higher education is obviously, trivially useful: Fish stands to gain an obvious utility — in fact a paycheck! — from the higher education that he argues is a “determined inutility.” Here is the unspoken reality of Fish’s argument: academic knowledge is useless to everyone except those faculty who are paid to reproduce it.

But part of the problem here lies in an overly dichotomous view of the relationship between the pragmatic instrumentality and the fanciful end in itself. It strikes me that Thorstein Veblen, a hundred years ago, had a much more insightful view of this relation, which I wrote about in my orals. I’m going to excerpt my analysis because it seems relevant here (you’ll probably notice the writing style becoming more academic):

In The Higher Learning in America: A memorandum on the conduct of universities by business men, the distinction between pragmatism and fantasy, the instrumental and the in-itself, is turned on its head so very many times that any settled synthesis of its terms becomes unfeasible. Veblen begins by examining “esoteric knowledge” in cross-cultural perspective. Although its “content and canons of truth and reality” vary, being products of a social group’s “institutions” and “habits of life,” he finds that esoteric knowledge is generally ascribed “great intrinsic value… of more substantial consequence than any or all of the material achievements or possessions of the community” (2). The pursuit of this knowledge is based on two instincts: the Idle Curiosity, and the Instinct of Workmanship. Now, here there is already a contradiction, multiply expressed. For one thing, esoteric knowledge is universally rated higher than practical material achievement, and yet it is itself a product of the work of institutions and specialists — in a sense, a practical achievement of its own. For another, the two instincts that lead to the production of esoteric knowledge are themselves opposed as pragmatism is to idealism: the Instinct of Workmanship is a kind of practical principle of production, while the Idle Curiosity is that which yields “a knowledge of things… apart from any ulterior use,” that is, a definitionally anti-pragmatic principle. To add one more wrinkle, in an earlier article Veblen had defined the Instinct of Workmanship as a “quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit,” suggesting that even within the very principle of pragmatic action lies an a priori aesthetic norm.

In sum, at the most general level of collective symbolism, esoteric knowledge (which we Westerners call “higher learning”) is cast as impractical, as over and above practical activity. Yet the making of this esoteric knowledge is, for Veblen, a thoroughly practical institutional project, based moreover on a divided set of instincts which themselves recapitulate the troubled opposition between practical and impractical. Of course, “pragmatic” is not a monovalent term here either; higher learning is pragmatic inasmuch as it is the outcome of practice, but it is not pragmatic in the sense that it is not (for Veblen) directly instrumental knowledge, not necessarily useful in the doing of any other task. In other words, ‘esoteric knowledge’ is not pragmatic to the extent that it is (or should be) allowed to be an end in itself. Veblen, however, is skeptical that this knowledge embodies “fundamental and eternal truth,” commenting that “it is evident to any outsider that it will take its character and its scope and method from the habits of life of the group” (2). Insofar as the group inevitably disavows this institutional determination of its highest verities, it appears as if esoteric knowledge were, from the start, the product of a community’s fantasy of anchoring its ultimate view of reality in something other than practice.

But this purely abstract critique of higher learning is not the end; rather, Veblen treats it as the start of a more specific institutional critique of the intrusion of business logic into higher learning. Such an instrusion seemed to Veblen of relatively recent origin, a feature of post-Civil-War university expansion, the decline of clerical power in colleges, and the general system of business and industrial production of the period. For Veblen, business influence stemmed from the Boards of Control (as he summarized Trustees, Regents, and the like). Above all, the Board appointed the President, and controlled the budget; hence it was able to re-orient the university toward vocational and professional ends, to mandate constant financial and institutional growth, and to influence the hiring of business-friendly faculty and the removal of those who disrupted the institutional image — among other things.

In the course of the analysis, a whole new host of contradictions developed around this intrusion of the pragmatic into the academic. In theory, Veblen felt that “if the higher learning is incompatible with business shrewdness, business enterprise is, by the same token, incompatible with the higher learning… they are the two extreme poles of the modern cultural scheme” (12). In practice, however, this radical incompatibility seemed not to obtain. On the contrary, Veblen ascribed the institutional success of “practical men,” coming from technical and professional schools, to “that deference that is currently paid to men of affairs, at the same time that [their] practical training gives them an advantage over their purely academic colleagues, in the greater assurance and adroitness with which they are able to present their contentions” (9). In other words, practical men may have been out of place in academe in theory, but not in practice. As a result, “while the higher learning still remains as the enduring purpose and substantial interest of the university establishment, the dominant practical interests of the day will, transiently but effectually, govern the detail lines of academic policy, the range of instruction offered, and the character of the personnel” (16). Here, far from the university being opposed to business, this very distinction becomes the principle of the university’s internal operation: while the academic principles of impractical learning govern the outermost reaches of institutional form in the longue durée, all the practicalities of the university are shaped by practical men.

But in another set of dialectical reversals, Veblen took pains to show that the so-called practical men were themselves prisoners of a rather extensive panoply of fantasies and irrationalities. To begin with, Veblen views the incursion of the practical, professional men into the university as, in part, an effort to “lift [their work] to that dignity that it is pressed to attach to a non-utilitarian pursuit of learning” (9). In effect, pragmatists were in full pursuit of the non-instrumental, of values in themselves. More profoundly, insofar as the businessmen were ultimately representatives of the leisure class, their pursuit of profit and practicality was ultimately not practical, but was designed rather to afford opportunities for conspicuous leisure and consumption, that is, the intentional waste of resources in the pursuit of status. These businessmen, Veblen argued, steered the university into the same game: a headlong pursuit of institutional status by way of increasingly ostentatious buildings and grounds, student sports, grandiose academic ceremonies and the like (30, 37, 41). And these vast departures from the pursuit of learning became, for Veblen, a massive exercise in public and self-deception: “this large apparatus and traffic of make-believe… is the first and most unremitting object of executive solicitude” (64). All the while, this irrational “make-believe” was cloaked in a near-fetish of “the practical,” which became a justifying rhetoric for executive decisions in the service of private gain (49, 61).

“All of which may suggest reflections on the fitness of housing the quest of truth in an edifice of false pretences,” Veblen is led to exclaim at one point in this analysis (37). But the upshot of Veblen’s analysis is less a simple negation of higher learning by the forces of pragmatism, more a complex institutional vortex in which pragmatism constantly comes into new contradictions with the cultural, the moral, and the utopian. In one place he advocates the impracticality of scholarship; in another he paints scholarship as itself practical in relation to the fanciful delusions of the university presidents. Veblen himself, it seems, valued “practicality” more in theory than in practice: far from adapting to the demands of academic life, he was, as C. Wright Mills puts it, “a natural-born failure” in terms of institutional success. In short, I think we can see in Veblen an ongoing synthesis of fantasy and pragmatism, one contradicting the other only for the contradiction to become productive of the social system as a whole — only to again be brought into contradiction.

About Fish, then: he seems stuck at the zero degree of this synthetic process, not seeing the instrumental use to which he puts the “inutility” that he advocates, nor observing the ways in which the institution itself is internally structured by the distinction that he thinks should distinguish it from its outside. I’ve just been reading a book called L’empire de l’université (The Empire of the University) that argues for an end to any rigid intellectual distinction between the inside and the outside of the institution – an argument which would have fatal consequences for all efforts to evaluate the university’s value ahistorically in isolation from its societal context. Such as Fish’s.

Technocrats say we live in a knowledge society. Educators and politicians sometimes say we live in a knowledge society. Sometimes they’re trying to say: a world where formal knowledge from the education and research sector is crucial to social success, economic production, and the like. OK, education is a means of getting jobs, and a marker of social distinction. Scientific research is sometimes very politically involved (paradigmatically, the Manhattan Project). None of that seems to add up to a social order where “knowledge” is the foremost concern, mightiest tool and dominant value.

Sociologists keep fantasizing that they have the power and insight to rename society. They invent terms: knowledge society, information society, postindustrial society, postmodernity. Nico Stehr, in his 1994 book Knowledge Societies, tries to persuade us that the knowledge society denotes a society based on “knowledge,” rather than on “labor” or “property.” Here’s his list of the changes that, collectively, signal the knowledge society’s emergence:

• the penetration of most spheres of social action, including production, by scientific knowledge (‘scientization’).
• the displacement, though by no means the elimination, of other forms of knowledge by scientific knowledge, mediated by the growing stratum of and dependence on experts, advisors and counselors, and the corresponding institutions based on the deployment of specialized knowledge.
• the emergence of science as an immediately productive force.
• the differentiation of new forms of political action (e.g., science and educational policy).
• the development of a new sector of production (the production of knowledge).
• the change of power structures (technocracy debate).
• the emergence of knowledge as the basis for social inequality and social solidarity.
• the trend to base authority on expertise.
• the shift in the nature of the societal conflict from struggles about the allocation of income and divisions in property relations to claims and conflicts about generalized human needs.

I find the last of these rather opaque, and it seems unclear whether all of these really are global trends. Is there really a growing tendency to base authority on expertise, for instance? Are most spheres of social action truly “penetrated” by scientific knowledge? That is not clear. And there is a tendency in Stehr to treat “science” and “knowledge” as the independent forces reshaping other social formations, with insufficient consideration of the ways that “science” and “knowledge” (by which Stehr really means socially legitimated, primarily academic knowledge) are themselves dependent variables, products of political and historical circumstance.

What Stehr does say about knowledge is suggestive but vague. He hesitates between analyzing knowledge as an “anthropological constant” of any possible society (since all social action depends on some kind of knowledge), and as a historically specific value and force of production. He also seems to be suggesting that knowledge constitutes a new and thickening form of mediation between human individuals and world:

…knowing is a relation to things and facts, but also to laws and rules. In any case, knowing is some sort of participation: knowing things, facts, rules, is “appropriating” them in some manner, including them into our field of orientation and competence. A very important point, however, is that knowledge can be objectified, that is, the intellectual appropriation of things, facts and rules can be established symbolically, so that in the future in order to know, it is no longer necessary to get into contact with the things themselves but only with their symbolic representations. This is the social significance of language, writing, printing and data storage. Modern societies have made dramatic advances in the intellectual appropriation of nature and society. There is an immense stock of objectified knowledge which mediates our relation to nature and to ourselves. In a general sense, this advancement has been called, in other contexts, modernization or rationalization. This secondary nature is overgrowing the primary nature of humans. The real and the fictional merge and become indistinguishable; theories become facts and not vice versa, that is, facts do not police theories. (13)

There are two thoughts happening here. First, Stehr wants to establish that knowing is social, not in the strong constructionist sense that all objects of knowledge are social constructs, but in the weaker sense that all knowledge entails not just a relation to a known object, but also to a procedure for knowing, a set of “laws and rules.” Then he wants to suggest that knowledge gets disconnected from knowing subjects, that knowledge doesn’t require a knower because it circulates on its own as the “symbolic representation” that is the product of some prior act of knowing. Such a large mass of objectified knowledge is now circulating, Stehr thinks, that our relation to our worlds is permanently mediated through this traffic in social representations. As if we are all even more alienated from the world by knowing too much. When Stehr says that “the real and the fictional merge,” I don’t think he means that we can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction; I think he means that the world itself is now increasingly re-organized around the “fictions” of scientific knowledge.

Pending a different order of evidence than Stehr offers, I am inclined to reject the claim that contemporary society, however one wants to label it, is really very unique in having an epistemically mediated world. Surely the Azande lived in a no less symbolically constituted space. But Stehr, importantly, is not simply applauding the new social order that he thinks we live in. Rather, he believes that the “knowledge society” is uniquely precarious:

Although much effort has been invested in the reduction of the contingencies of economic affairs and in the improvement of the possibilities of planning and forecasting, the economy of the knowledge society is, as much as the rest of global society, increasingly subjected to a rise in indeterminacy. While success may at times justify the high hopes of many that techniques and technologies will be developed to reduce if not eliminate much of the uncertainty from economic conduct, sudden and unexpected events almost invariably disconfirm, almost cruelly, such optimistic forecasts about the possibility of anticipating and therefore controlling future events. As a matter of fact, and paradoxically, one of the sources of the growing indeterminacy can be linked directly to the nature of the technological developments designed to achieve greater certainty. The new technology contributes to and accelerates the malleability of specific contexts because of its lower dedication (limitation) to particular functions. Technological developments add to the fragility of economic markets and the need of organizations operating in such a context to become more flexible in order to respond to greater mutability in demand and supply. In the sphere of production, as a result, a new utopian vision arises, a vision which Charles Sabel (1991:24) sketches in the following and deliberating enabling terms:

“Universal materializing machines replace product-specific capital goods; small and effortlessly re-combinable units of production replace the hierarchies of the mass-production corporation; and the exercise of autonomy required by both the machines and the new organizations produces a new model producer which view of life confounds the distinction between the entrepreneurial manager and the socialist worker-owner.”

Much of the standard discussion of these matters, at least until recently, has been animated by opposite expectations. Bell (1973:26), for example, confidently asserts that the ‘development of new forecasting and ‘mapping’ techniques makes possible a novel phase in economic history – the conscious, planned advance of technological change, and therefore the reduction of indeterminacy about the economic future.’

But the factor of greater fragility, malleability and volatility is not confined to the economy, the labor market and the social organization of work and management, nor does it merely have ‘positive’ effects on social relations and individual psyches. Greater vulnerability corresponds to greater fragility and greater flexibility is linked to new regimes of production. (158)

This is interesting because it suggests that a newly precarious world is not only the product of a new capitalist labor regime but also the product of a new epistemic and technical regime of disorientation, in which technology designed to be malleable ends up being unstable. As if the “knowledge society” had a structurally unstable future. Of course, dialectically speaking, what society doesn’t have a structurally unstable future? But the question remains: even if “knowledge society” is the wrong name, what contradictions structure the futures of contemporary Euroamerican social orders?

There’s something maddeningly abstract about Stehr’s book. We don’t learn what it is like to know something, we don’t see case studies of knowledge entangled in the social world, we don’t see cross-cultural comparison, we don’t see experiential detail. It’s hard to comment on the book, even, without getting caught in its abstract morass. But one wonders: perhaps the abstract, scholastic, combative, polysyllabic, skeptical convolution that one feels in reading Stehr’s prose is precisely what life in the knowledge society is like? Does Stehr’s book perform what it describes? If so, all the more reason to shun the knowledge-based social order he articulates.

It’s probably also false. What’s actually happening, according to another article a few weeks later, is that applications to expensive private universities are dropping, while more students are probably going to go to cheaper schools, particularly public schools. But the question remains: if fewer people got to go to college, why would that be a bad thing? Or rather, what makes higher education valuable?

I have to say I’m skeptical about most of the arguments I’ve encountered in this arena. I have an intuition that there is something worth defending, but most of the existing arguments seem deeply flawed. Here I just want to outline some critical and methodological theses that seem to demand our attention.

1. Sound arguments are neither necessary or sufficient for a thing’s existence or value. Higher education does not stand or fall on the basis of a sound argument in its favor. Many, probably most, teachers and students have no good argument to justify their activity, and that doesn’t necessarily make a difference. (Social practice, mercifully, need not be founded on philosophically valid premises.) Insofar as going to college has become a customary part of the life course for Americans of a certain social class, it can just become something that one does, almost as a matter of ritual. Does one go to college because it is valuable to do so, or does it come to seem valuable because one does it?
2. Moreover, arguments for the value of higher education vary across time and place, and as a function of people’s social positions, interests and aims. To understand higher education, and thus to account for its value, is in part a matter of understanding the differentiated social worlds in which many different values are ascribed to the institution. How does one understand the value of a polymorphous institution, or reckon with value claims that are contested and plural? Any argument I could present here would equally take its place in this field of existing arguments, in tension or harmony with them, and would likewise have to examine its common origin in broader sociohistorical fields and processes.
3. At a strictly logical level, there are different ways to structure arguments for the value of higher education. We have to make a number of conceptual choices just to pose an argument of this sort. For instance:
   1. Is higher education valuable as a process or as a product? Does the process, the sheer experience of higher education, taken as a polyphonic set of moments, matter, no matter how ephemeral its results? Or is it the product or outcome, the effect, the state of being educated, of having survived, of being credentialed, that matters? Or if both, how does one relate to the other?
   2. Relatedly, is it the formal aspect of higher education that is relevant to its value, or do we evaluate the whole life process associated with college? Are we thinking of higher education as what one’s supposed to learn in a classroom, or do we include the dorms, the frats, the clubs, the odd jobs, the late nights, the whole mythical American college experience?
   3. For whom is higher education valuable? I might argue that my college education was valuable to me as a single person, without making claims about the value of anyone else’s education; or that higher education is valuable to some social group or another; or even that higher education is valuable for society at large.
   4. What temporal horizon do we use to evaluate the value of higher education? An hour? A year? A century? Surely its value must change over time, just as higher education and its social contexts have changed drastically over time? And longer timespans tend to fit well with larger units of analysis. Perhaps higher education is valuable now, at this very moment, for some teenager in the midst of a transcendental intellectual awakening; perhaps on the other hand it has been valuable for society on the whole over the last five decades, promoting social mobility, as some argue.
   5. What kind of value do we ascribe to higher education? Is it in some sense intrinsically valuable? If so, what is its content such that it has intrinsic value – skills? knowledge? cultural awareness? habits of mind?* Or does one simply see education as intrinsically valuable without being able to explain why – which would most likely be rooted in the central cultural premise of formal education, which is that the state of being educated, whatever its content, is simply recognized as having a higher status than the state of “not being educated”?
      
      Or is higher education less intrinsically valuable than instrumentally useful, by opening up possibilities beyond itself — jobs, professions, worldviews, cultural affiliations? Or is it perhaps neither intrinsically nor instrumentally valuable, but rather valuable for its side-effects: the skills, for instance, one has to develop to cope with the contingent conditions of college life, skills for sociability, money, cuisine, stamina, and so on.* Or, finally, is higher education valuable because it is functionally necessary, inasmuch as it performs functions that “society” needs or desires? For instance, one might say that higher education is necessary for producing a skilled, flexible workforce, an informed and critical citizenship, a technocratic elite, a nation of depoliticized debt-laden consumers, or whatever.
   6. Do we argue for the value of higher education as it exists now? Or as it was in the past? Or in our nostalgic fantasy of its past or our utopian vision of its future? What degree of idealization should our arguments countenance? Does value reside in what something is, or in what it could be?

   These issues tend to overlap with each other, but I think they are each conceptually distinct, and I think in many cases there is no a priori reason to choose one way or another.

4. I tend to hear two major sorts of arguments in circulation when it comes to higher education’s value. First, the vocational argument would have it, roughly, that higher education is good because it helps one to get a job, and indeed opens up routes to various high-status professions and occupations, not to mention greater wealth and income. At the individual level, this tends to become an instrumentalist argument: “it’s good to be wealthy” or even “college is a good investment.” At the societal level, it becomes a functionalist argument: “society needs higher education because it needs to reproduce a skilled workforce”.

   The problem with this argument, of course, is that college education is often not very good preparation for a job (with big exceptions in engineering, nursing, social work, and other applied fields), and that the university’s role in reproducing class hierarchy is not necessarily something to celebrate. I note that the potential for individuals to rise up in class status through higher education actually presupposes the continued existence of class hierarchy and inequality, at a structural level. If there were no hierarchy, there could be no mobility. Elite American universities, moreover, seem to have served for a long time as bastions of upper-class social reproduction. So this argument seems rather politically problematic (not to mention somewhat dismissive of the general education that college often involves).

   Second, a more liberal artsy argument holds that college need not (and probably should not) be directly vocationally relevant. Rather, higher education is reckoned valuable because it makes one a critical thinker, a creative and well-rounded person, knowledgeable, virtuous, autonomous, historically and politically and scientifically aware, fluent in foreign tongues. Sometimes this argument is linked to ideas about what a good citizen should be, about general culture, and so on.

   Like a good academic, I don’t have anything against this per se, but it strikes me that the values expressed here are actually those of a certain class of professors, universalized as if they ought to become everyone’s values. Critical thinking in particular is somewhat fetishized by academics, and tends to be mentioned almost robotically in defenses of higher education. Also, there may be troubling class polarization around these two arguments. Is it mostly the privileged who can go to liberal arts colleges, disdain immediate vocational utility, and in short, afford to pay for non-instrumentally-useful educations? If so, the former argument may be an argument given preferentially to the children of the privileged (though I don’t have statistics on this), and that would be disturbing.

   Andrew Abbott, for instance, told incoming University of Chicago students, in 2003, that education is good in itself simply because being educated makes one able to have more experience, richer, more meaningful and more complex experience, than an uneducated person. I won’t bother to refute this bit of anthropological lunacy here; I just want to note that, at a highly elite institution, Abbott specifically dismisses vocational training as a candidate for the value of education. Over at the nearest community college, Malcolm X, on the other hand, the most prominently displayed field is the most vocational: nursing.

5. It would be easy to argue for the value of higher education if I were certain that scholarly knowledge is an authentically, intrinsically good thing, like my philosophy teacher in college, who once said directly that a culture without philosophy was an impoverished culture. If this were the case, it would certainly be easy to argue that it is desirable to become versed in scholarly ways.

   Alas, things are not so easy, since I am skeptical and ambivalent about the value of scholarly knowledge. It’s so easy to find things that are wrong with academic culture (isn’t that the very premise of this blog?). At the same time, it is just this skepticism and ambivalence that higher education, according to arguments about “critical thinking,” is supposed to impart. So perhaps it is a measure of the very success of higher education that one should become skeptical of its value.

6. College is, for “traditional” students ages 18-21 or so, a phase in the lifecycle in which one doesn’t have to work. Of course, Marc Bousquet has demonstrated just how exploitative “student jobs” can get, and Jeff Williams emphasizes that student debt is a new form of indenture. So perhaps we should say: in which some people manage to avoid the full force of the work world for a few more years.

   Insofar as most jobs suck this may well be a valuable thing in itself.

7. The value of higher education is something that is the subject of intense marketing and propaganda by colleges and universities themselves. It isn’t just that there is a socially determined field of arguments; the arguments themselves are politicized, politically and institutionally motivated.
8. But one can nonetheless plausibly argue that, on the whole, it has been very good for those millions of Americans who have gotten to go to college, especially in the post-World-War-II era. Although that said, it may not have been good for all these people in the same way. Different kinds of people go to universities; it requires a charmingly universalistic value theory to imagine that its value would be identical for all of them.

… And yet if higher education is to become more scarce — or just more stratified – a general argument for its value would be a crucial political resource. Although I hate to say it: the most valid argument is not necessarily the most politically effective.

* Thanks to lauren berlant for great discussion of this issue, particularly on the points starred above.

Richard Wolin, in “America’s Tolerance for French Radicalism,” attempts to describe the complementary histories of French poststructuralism in France and America. Making no distinction between the American nation and American academic culture, he argues that american pluralism and “democracy’s historical strengths” made it possible to assimilate post-structuralism as “merely another framework to choose from amid the ever-expanding marketplace of ideas.” Let’s leave aside the claims that America is democratic and pluralistic through and through, and that our intellectual world forms a free marketplace. These platitudes need not detain us. What’s more interesting is the claim that the intellectual world is “ever-expanding.” Here we have a more complex spatio-temporal image of the intellectual world: to be ever-expanding is to be growing in space as it progresses through time.

This sounds like a coy analogy with the astronomers’ hypothesis of an ever-expanding universe. Yet while Wolin apparently imagines the expanding marketplace of ideas as an endless intellectual bounty, the astronomers have envisioned a world whose infinite expansion will end not in unlimited light, but in indefinite cold and darkness. We might ask Wolin, is an endless marketplace really anything but a stultifying dream? And there’s something more directly debilitating about Wolin’s spatial image of the intellectual world. He views intellectual exchange as fundamentally bounded by national borders, walled off into separate French and American worlds. This leads him to homogenize French and American intellectual spheres. While he equates America with liberal pluralism, he equates France with an unstable radical-authoritarianism. He can’t recognize the immense internal differentiation of the French intellectual field, the profound differences between Derrida’s and Foucault’s institutional careers, the separation of French philosophy into small avant-gardes, numerous sub-specialties, and many different institutional milieux. (Foucault, far from being forgotten in France, is now taught, contra Wolin, in French lycées.) And even as Wolin denounces the category of “post-structuralism” as an American invention, he employs it unwittingly himself, describing a homogeneous American response to poststructuralism unsettled only by a few “committed disciples.”

François Cusset, on the other hand, in “French Theory’s American Adventures,” takes a much more subtle view of theory’s spatial and historical situation. He asks about theory’s future, about the convergence of theory and activism, about the intellectual transformations that theory met as it crossed from France to America. He does see an inversion between the political fate of theory in France and in the U.S., but less ahistorically than does Wolin:

“What we are facing here is a symmetrically reversed situation: on the one hand, a society run by a new wave of conservatives, but whose intellectual field, limited to isolated campuses, enjoys a proliferation of radical discourses, minority theories, and bold textual innovations, with little effect on the rest of America’s public space; on the other hand, a country run by a new wave of liberals (François Mitterrand’s “socialists”), but whose broad intellectual field, occupying a central role in the public space, has just been taken over by a herd of young center-left humanists, with the result of sweeping away leftist and radical tendencies and replacing them with a universalist moral blackmail still on the front stage in today’s France.”

That is, while a conservative American government faces a segregated but lively subculture of campus leftism, a liberal French government is accompanied more harmoniously by a widespread culture of “center-left humanism” that actively suppresses more radical leftist discourse. Hence, in contrast to Wolin, for Cusset it’s America that’s more politically bipolar and France that’s more oppressively and homogeneously liberal. And Cusset foresees new possibilities for the spatiotemporal flow of poststructuralist theory:

“French society is now at a time when all those American intellectual currents, forbidden for import over the last three decades, can finally be put to use in making sense of an unprecedented situation. Indeed, universities and independent publishers are working hard these days to make cultural studies, minority theories, “pop” philosophy, gender analyses, and the postcolonial paradigm not only better known in France (the only major country where prominent theorists behind such currents had not yet been translated), but also critically reformulated to better address specifically French issues… [French theory authors,] their texts, and the endless interpretations they inspire (together forming one cultural continuum) can still help us fashion a future of struggles and world making — within but also beyond higher education, in the United States but also throughout the rest of the world.”

In other words, while Jeff Williams laments that theory is being reprinted and memorialized in the U.S., Cusset informs us that American cultural and theoretical critiques are now being imported into France with renewed intellectual vigor. (For example, Judith Butler’s 1990 classic, Gender Trouble, was recently published in France, in 2005.) Wolin, for his part, rejects “poststructuralism” as irredeemable irrationality even as he rather cheerfully characterizes it as one more competing product in the intellectual market, as if he’s uncertain whether to give it a philosophical thrashing or to compliment it on its market share. Cusset, on the other hand, says that we need to get beyond blithe reenactment or crude rejection of theory, taking a more critical historicist approach:

“If theory is to be of any use nowadays, the many tricks and games implied by its cultural metamorphoses should be taken seriously: by addressing the American identity of French theory, and even by pondering the strange feedback effect of a recent return of French theory to France.”

In other words, if we are to critically reappropriate theory, if we are to make use of it in the present or future, we must first analyze its history, examine its flows through time and space, and more generally, put spatiality and temporality at the center of our theoretical consciousness. Such an analysis, for Cusset, is necessary for making theory again relevant to social struggle and transformation. One might say that Cusset is advocating a dialectical and historical – maybe even Marxist – approach to theory as a historical phenomenon and an intellectual avenue for political change.

The prevalence of rhetorics of time and space in academic texts has intrigued me for some time (“here I’ll demonstrate that x…”; “we must begin anew”; “we must go back to Freud”; “we have transcended Freud”; I hear frequent talk of intellectual “moves” on an intellectual “terrain” of “positions”). These peculiar spatiotemporal strategies and rhetorics, curious in themselves, are also perhaps revealing of the fantasy structure of academic labor, in which immaterial, abstract intellectual activity is humanized and rationalized by way of familiar schemas of place and time. I suppose it goes without saying that such strategies often serve as conduits for academic power and debate and struggle: to call something passé, say, is most certainly to denigrate it. And it may be that academic construals of time and space have some more buried ideological function, deserving of further scrutiny.

But on a less abstract level, I wonder whether a critical reappropriation of 60s radical philosophy is really the best intellectual task we could set for ourselves. I often suspect that today we lack the sense of intellectual excitement that was present once, elsewhere. Perhaps it would be better to form new theories and intellectual collectivities, rejecting aspirations for thorough mastery of the intellectual past. We needn’t consign ourselves to the endless rereadings of Marx and Adorno that define a group like Chicago’s Platypus. Should we take the path advocated by Hiro Miyazaki, in which we generate intellectual hope for ourselves by re-enacting the hope of others on a new terrain? Or is the intellectual future something that we discover by undoing the world around us rather than trying to imitate it?