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.”)

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

“To gain knowledge, $$, and power.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• To gain knowledge, $$, and power

• Upward movement/mobility + to extend the mind

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

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

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

• To learn & develop skills for your everyday life.

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

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

• to expand
  the mind
  of
  an
  individual

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

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

• To have a certain status.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the data:

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

Growth since   49.3x      417.1x      8.5x
1950s

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

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

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

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

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

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?

The rhythm is slow. The audience is bored to tears by the respectful abstraction of it all. Religion will end in boredom, and to offer boredom to the Lord is hardly a living sacrifice. (Yet as I write these lines, I wonder if I’m not making a crude mistake. Magic has always gone hand in hand with emotion, hope and terror, and still does. But are there such things as religious ’emotions’? Probably no more than there is a ‘psychological state’ – consciousness or thought without an object – that could be called ‘faith’. These are ideological fictions. Surely religion, like theology, metaphysics, ceremonies, academic literature and official poets, has always been boring. This has never been a hindrance, because one of the aims of ‘spiritual’ discipline and asceticism has always been precisely to disguise and to transfigure this living boredom…)

(Vol. 1, p. 220-21. English translation by John Moore, Verso, 1991.)

So the idea is: the boredom of a traditional Roman Catholic service, far from being detrimental to the theological project, is in fact an essential ingredient in it, because the essence of spiritual — or by analogy, academic — “discipline and asceticism” is to take this boredom and turn it into something profound. One might reason, by extension, that when people say that academic literature is deep and important, what’s happening is that an initially boring object is, precisely, being transmuted through spiritual discipline into something that appears powerful to its practitioners.

I’m not sure I would agree with that, because how can there really be a general fact of the matter about whether something is boring or not? People are different; I agree with Lefebvre’s healthy skepticism about imputing psychological states to institutional rituals. Psychological states like faith, as he puts it, are “ideological fictions.” I’m not sure, in fact, that it makes sense to criticize the very idea of a psychological state in an institution and then still talk about boredom, which is also a psychological state…

But I do think that the operation of academic consecration — whether or not it’s analogous to religious consecration — is always worth paying attention to. And we can thus add Lefebvre to the list of French writers who, even before Pierre Bourdieu, were already criticizing church, state and university in the same breath.

“In this respect teaching was exactly like sex for me — something that you weren’t supposed to talk about or focus on in any way but that you were supposed to be able to do properly when the time came. And the analogy doesn’t end there. Teaching, like sex, is something you do alone, although you’re always with another person/other people when you do it; it’s hard to talk about to the other person while you’re doing it, especially if you’ve been taught not to think about it from an early age. And people rarely talk about what the experience is really like for them, partly because, in whatever subculture it is I belong to, there’s no vocabulary for articulating the experience and no institutionalized format for doing so.”

I’m most struck by her description of the public solitude of the teacher. As if teaching were a kind of isolation among others. (She doesn’t ask herself whether being a student is like this too, but it often can be, of course.) Tompkins thinks that this kind of isolation is the product of an institutionalized system of value in which professors fixate on the excellence of their own pedagogical performance as the sole criterion of the success of their class. In the “performance model,” as she terms it, all that matters is that ((the teacher recognizes that) the students recognize that) the teacher was well-prepared, was smart, and was knowledgeable about the material. As Tompkins points out, such a pedagogy is ultimately deeply self-centered for the teacher, and teaches people to value their students’ and peers’ opinions of themselves above all else.

This actually strikes me as a case of a very typical inversion that occurs in systems of value and evaluation — where the objects of evaluation cease to be valued as such, and become mere means for the attainment of high prestige, value, etc. And the initially valued objects, whatever they were, are generally distorted by a process that values the prestige of a high evaluation rather than the content of what’s evaluated. This, by the way, is what the advocates of standardized educational tests like No Child Left Behind never seem to get: that in teaching the test rather than the material, the material becomes nothing but a instrument for getting good scores on the test, and is distorted in the process. The same might be said about various forms of scholarly research assessment, especially the more quantified ones.

Tompkins tells us that she eventually started teaching along more participatory lines, making each class taught by a group of students, trying to bring her expertise to the table without aspiring to produce a great pedagogical performance. Eventually, she taught a course on emotion. (I note in passing that reflexive topics like this, ones that are experientially accessible to the students, seem to lend themselves particularly well to reflexive pedagogy: pedagogical form and content can resonate together.) In describing the course, which was apparently tense and in some respects a nightmare, she also produces a memorable description of her pedagogical utopia:

You see, I wanted to be iconoclastic. I wanted to change the way it was legitimate to behave inside academic institutions. I wanted to make it OK to get shrill now and then, to wave your hands around, to cry in class, to do things in relation to the subject at hand other than just talking in an expository or an adversarial way about it. I wanted never to lose sight of the fleshly, desiring selves who were engaged in discussing hegemony or ideology or whatever it happened to be; I wanted to get the ideas that were “out there,” the knowledge that was piling up on shelves, into relation with the people who were producing and consuming it. I wanted to get “out there” and “in here” together. To forge a connection between whatever we were talking about in class and what went on in the lives of the individual members. This was a graduate course, and the main point for me was for the students, as a result of the course, was to feel some deeper connection between what they were working on professionally and who they were, the real concerns of their lives.

This may sound utopian. Or it may sound child-like. But I did and do believe that unless there is some such connection, the work is an empty labor which will end by killing the organism which engages in it.

So the idea is to institutionalize a more experimental, affectively rich pedagogical situation, one which leads (in C. Wright Mills-esque fashion, since he also advocated this sort of joining) to a “deeper connection” between the professional and the personal, and whose stakes of failure are death at the hands of “an empty labor.” As if only the personal could “fill up” one’s labor with meaning, and its absence left things empty.

As if the monkeys weren’t bad enough, a new problem recently visited itself upon the institute: stray dogs that attack doctors returning to their dorms late at night. A letter of complaint from the institute’s faculty association says the dogs run through the teaching block, the wards, and the operating theaters. “The excreta can be seen all over, all the time,” the letter says. “It is the worst possible start to the day.”

Animals, in other words, are not inimical to the university’s functional order, since the animal invasions have been around for years without bringing a halt to academic operations. But they are an aesthetic disaster and they offend the scholarly sense of etiquette. There’s something very telling about the moralistic language that the article’s author uses to describe the animals: the descriptive rhetoric alone manages to condemn them, by constituting them as the structural inversion of academic values.

The animals are said to “attack”, “bite,” “grab,” “smash,” “terrorize”: their sheer aggressiveness is contrary to academic norms of incorporeality, meekness, courtesy, etiquette. They take food and drink without asking; they attack without provocation; they destroy academic equipment. They run astray, as if the only good creature is a tame, quiet, slow domestic creature; they run in packs, transgressing the academic ethos of dispersion along a thousand disintegrated, solitary paths. The animals symbolize filth: dog shit litters the operating rooms, upsetting norms of perfect cleanliness. And this is not only a health hazard but also, perhaps primarily, an aesthetic violation, inimical to the aesthetic and moral order of institutional comportment. It is the the sheer frequency and ubiquity of the ‘excreta’ that is ‘the worst possible start to the day,’ as if what was miserable was the fact of being confronted constantly with taboo substances in a blinding, ceaseless rhythm of visual perception.

Even the shit itself is discursively euphemized, called ‘excreta,’ as if the reality of the situation were too much to represent without the protection of technicized language, as if the transgression of academic values could be minimized by describing it in strictly academic jargon. I should point out, incidentally, that it’s considered normal for there to be shit in various human contexts, and that a total phobia of shit is not a universal constant. Having worked on a farm, I can testify that the sight of manure isn’t necessarily the “worst possible start to the day”; it’s rather benign if you’re used to it. Not that excreta would be permitted or welcomed in a farm kitchen, but I think in a less upper-class context shit can be experienced just as something to avoid and clean up, rather than as a shattering failure of the moral order.