My father has a disconcerting habit, especially for people who don’t know him, of pointing to things with his right pinky. Why it’s disconcerting is that his pinky is only a stub. Its top half was sheared off on a conveyor belt while he was working in a feed mill that supplied the many duck farms then dotting a good part of Long Island east of Queens. As a teenager in the early 40s, he loaded eighty-pound bags of feed, then after coming back from driving a half-track across Africa, Italy, and Germany, he forewent the GI Bill to drive a tractor trailer delivering those eighty-pound bags to the duck farmers. While Long Island metamorphosed from farms to suburbs, he took a job as a dispatcher—as he puts it, telling the truckers where to go—at a cement plant that flourished with all the building.

When I was an undergraduate at Stony Brook, founded with the sluiceway of postwar money to universities and serving the people in the new suburbs, I would sometimes show up at the office hours of a well-known Renaissance scholar and Shakespeare critic. He was born the same year as my father and also served in World War II, but after the war signed on for the GI Bill to get through the University of Chicago. He always seemed surprised to see someone appear at his door; he was tough-minded, with a neo-Aristotelian, analytical edge common to Chicagoans of his generation, which put some students of my generation off, but I saw the gleam of ironic humor underneath, plus I liked the challenge. He would typically fuss with his pipe (this was when professors still really smoked pipes, and in their offices) while we were talking. One afternoon in his office, watching him light his pipe, I remember noticing that his fingernails were remarkably long, and polished to a low gloss.

If you’ve ever done what used to be called manual labor for any extended period of time, you’ll know it’s hell on your hands. Or if you’ve ever read Life in the Iron Mills, you’ll realize that class is not just a question of what money you have or don’t have, nor solely a question of status conferred by cultural capital, but that it marks your body. If you look at most fellow academics’ hands, you’ll rarely see calluses.

But personally, if I look at most academics’ hands nowadays, ten years after Williams was writing, I mainly see the capacity to feel pain. The whole image of ourselves as “mental laborers” all too easily leads us to undertheorize the fact that our work process consists largely of interacting with machines. We are professional machine operators, even if we don’t think of it that way, because our work process is computerized: we operate computers for a living. That’s not the only thing academics do, to be sure, but it takes up a great deal of our time, as reading, writing, research, grading, and communicating all get redirected into digital formats.

And these machines can readily damage our bodies. Particularly our hands.

For instance, one former graduate student writes:

By the end of my time in grad school, my wrists were in agony, and my left pinky finger was simultaneously strained, pained and numb.
Even an hour of typing per day would lead to aches and pains (up through my forearm) that lasted through the night.

A psychologist writes:

So it appears our geeky heroine may be showing some early signs of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). Damn those long hours of coding physio data and its necessitation of bizarre hand movements!!

The critical geographer Jeanne Kay Guelke wrote in her 2003 Road-kill on the information highway: repetitive stress injury in the academy:

I experienced tingling, numbness and hot-and-cold sensations in my hands, together with pain and muscle spasms in my lower arms and wrists.
[…] Rather than finding the ‘disembodied’ freedom-producing, cyborg-like identity in computing as envisioned by some futurists, word-processing had made my own body all too tangible and limiting.

Guelke also mentions that “96.8% of a sample of students interviewed at San Francisco State University reported some physical discomfort associated with computer use” (392).

In fact, almost twenty years ago, the Washington Post was already commenting on the physical problems exacted on students’ hands:

Pax-Shipley, who graduates this month, has had to face the possibility that she may never completely regain the use of her hands. Accepting that fact, she said, “was hard at first. It was a long grieving process.”

Guelke offers a useful disability studies analysis of the whole topic, as well as a number of important political questions. Why, she asks, are we not demanding that computer manufacturers produce gadgets that are friendlier to our bodies? Why do we not have ergonomics clauses in our contracts or as objects of collective bargaining? How do gender and occupational hierarchy enter the picture? Needless to say, there are politics whenever there is risk of workplace injury, as there should be.

But I think my point is more rudimentary. Academics’ hands are fragile. They are a zone of vulnerability. We shouldn’t read them simply by their external signs (whether the nails are polished, whether we see calluses). Rather, we should become attuned to the hidden injuries of digital labor that can get sent out through their very nerves. We should see the hands not as a sign of privilege but as an object of restraint, the part of our body shackling us to the machinery of our work. Far from being signs of our agency and capacity to act in the world, as they are conventionally construed, academic hands on the keyboard strike me as one of the major instruments coupling us to our institutions.

In cartoon fashion, with computer-generated, half-robotic voices, the video shows what happens when a young woman student comes to her professor’s office. She is there to ask for a letter of recommendation to graduate school in English literature, and the professor tries to talk her out of it, citing a host of practical and experiential reasons why it is “not a good idea” to go to graduate school. But the professor discovers at each turn that the student is incapable of hearing her objections. Rather than reconsidering her decision, the student takes every opportunity to voice her ardent desire for a clichéd “life of the mind.”

Professor: So you said you want to meet with me today.
Student: Yes. I am going to grad school in English.
Professor: No. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
Student: Yes. I am going to be a college professor.
Professor: Do you see where I am teaching? We’re in the middle of Nowhere, Nebraska. Do you want to move to the middle of nowhere to teach?
Student: I got an A on my Hamlet paper. I have brilliant thoughts about the theme of death in literature.
Professor: In all of literature? What field do you intend to specialize in?
Student: All of it. I’m going to be a college professor. I’m going to write smart things about death in literature.
Professor: Do you know how many admissions committees are going to laugh at your application?

We begin with a familiar enough institutional situation. The student has a plan for her academic future, for which she needs her professor’s help. The professor dislikes the plan, and tries to switch scripts to a different, more advisory encounter, where her superior expert knowledge and her moral authority might trump her student’s wishes. The student, in turn, responds to her professor’s discouragement the only way she can. She does not dispute the facts, since she has no resources for doing so; nor does she dispute the professor’s moral authority, since the very premise of this encounter is that she admires and covets her professor’s elevated role. Instead, when the student’s affirmative “Yes” meets an immediate “No” from above, she responds by gazing steadily back at the professor and flatly contradicting her in turn, standing by her image of an academic future, reiterating her desire. Neither party wants to change her views. They are immediately at a standoff.

An academic viewer of the video is, I suspect, likely to spontaneously see the student as embodying youthful naivety. After all, her beliefs about academia are plainly absurd. Her claim to have “brilliant thoughts about the theme of death in literature,” for instance, only reveals her woeful ignorance of the importance of academic specialization and expertise in graduate study. The professor, by contrast, displays some first-hand knowledge of graduate student life, of things that make admissions committees “laugh at your application.” She comes across as the voice of blunt institutional realism. The pleasure here for young American academics, I suspect, has much to do with getting to see naivety put in its place, laughing at the ridiculousness of the student’s reasoning. Academic viewers get the chance to identify with the seeming voice of knowledge, confirmed in their awareness of all the reasons why academic life is complex and terrible.

It would, however, be deeply inadequate to interpret the video as an encounter between the naive, typical young student and the older, wiser professor. I would argue that in fact the scholarly point of view is not embodied by the character, the representation of the professor, but rather is embedded in the gaze of the viewer, the structure of the situation. Instead of describing a confrontation between two subject, as it may seem to do at first glance, the video stages a conflict that occurs within the subjectivities of today’s academic humanists. Consider the penultimate soliloquy of the video:

Professor: You will have a career where people will constantly demand that you justify to them why you exist, and you will begin to question the nature of your own existence. You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation.

It is apparent that neither the professor nor the student has much individuality; they are spokespeople for social types, the everywomen of today’s humanistic disciplines. But what becomes clear as the video progresses is that these two figures are less two separate characters than two distinct moments in a single academic lifecourse. They represent two moments in a shared social destiny that functions through mimesis and overidentification of the young with the old. This structural identity between young and old, I would argue, is made clear poetically by the increasingly ambiguous use of you, which eventually comes to designate both the professor and the student. “You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation”: you in this context refers at once to the student in the future, to the professor in the present, and perhaps to the viewer as well, whose split subjectivity is only concealed by momentary overidentification with the character of the professor.

The scene reminds us that recognition and overidentification always work in more than one direction. The work of phantasmatic overidentication is obvious in the case of the student, who comes into the office wanting to become the person she imagines her teacher already is, a person who (in the student’s words) is “going to write smart things,” who “will inspire students to think critically about literature,” who has “potential as a literary scholar.” But what becomes clear from this later speech is that the professor recognizes herself in the student as well, indeed recognizes herself only too clearly, as she despairingly tries to warn the student of the probable existential costs of a hopeless scholarly career, a “complete waste” of a life.

Again, it is inadequate to understand this encounter as a moment of mutual misrecognition between two subjects, because what we have here is not a depiction of two selves meeting, but a structural diagram of academics’ split subjectivity. Consider: the student is not the incarnation of a non-academic come to mount an attack on the professoriate, she is something much more uncanny — a projection of the cruel optimism and attachment buried within the academic self. Her uncanny identity with the professor is precisely the source of the professor’s discomfort. Indeed, one might speculate that part of the attraction of the video, for an academic viewer, is that it allows academics to externalize and objectify their own painful attachment to their degraded profession, and then to experience the vicarious pleasures of disavowal via the professor’s increasingly bitter attacks on the student. Faced with her student’s refusal to listen, the professor eventually resorts to incredulous insults: “I cannot respect you,” “You cannot seriously be this stupid!” When we recall that the professor deeply identifies with her student, we realize that these statements are actually disavowed self-criticism. They amount to exclaiming, “How can I be this stupid?” and “I cannot respect myself!”

This disavowed self-criticism is a symptom of the professor’s internal and external contradictions. She says that academic work is impossible, a “complete waste” with “no health benefits,” “slave labor for the university.” But she herself remains deeply committed to it, being a consummate professional, as we will see confirmed in a moment. This initially seems mysterious, because everything she has to say about academia is negative. Why stick around if she hates it, we might wonder? One might respond that her negativity is merely the product of experience; certainly, as I noted earlier, she has a more materialist, more institutional understanding of academic life than the student does. She notes that “less than half of PhDs get a tenure-track position,” asking “Who in the world will be willing to follow you to Alaska so you can teach at Juneau Community College?” In the final analysis, though, what first seems to be an institutional, materialist perspective actually encodes a phantasmatic and ideological relationship to the milieu.

Professor: Oh my god. Life is not a movie script. Humanities in higher education is under attack. SUNY-Albany just cut their French and Italian programs. The Tea Party may take control of Congress. They believe all college professors are radical Marxists and they are scheming up ways to have us all fired.

It becomes apparent here that the professor’s views of academic life are themselves deeply exasperated and exaggerated, skewed by class anger and a prevailing discourse on professional vulnerability. Her overarching reading of her institutional situation, that “humanities in higher education are under attack,” is itself a totalizing and excessive metanarrative. As we have seen earlier, humanities enrollments have been relatively stable for some time across the United States, and while it is true that a handful of humanities programs have been closed, there has never been any objective danger of “all professors getting fired.” One can get a sense of the generalizing ideology at work by comparing the claim that “humanities in higher education is under attack” (in general) with its supporting evidence: that one university out of 7559 has cut its French and Italian programs. The professor perceives a global menace, but in reality, her disciplinary location would likely involve a much more diverse set of local threats, stabilities, ambiguities, and ongoing institutional work, like the work of advising that we are witnessing.

Indeed, as far as one can judge from the scene, this professor’s job may be bad, but she keeps doing it all the same. The worst risk for her is not getting fired, in the end, but having to confront her own alienation from her work and from her ideals. Not surprisingly, this alienation seems to become palpable for her at the moment of encountering an Other who wants to become her. Her response then exaggerates external menace and hostility, as if to camouflage and rationalize her internal ambivalence about her job. If her professional ambivalence is externalized in one direction onto the student, it is also externalized in another direction onto the institution, as if the situation, not the subject, was what was bad and compromised.

In the last scene of this video, there is a sort of ideological climax:

Professor: …You will discover that your life has been a complete waste, and that will be confirmed to you when a student like you walks into your office asking you for a recommendation.
Student: So will you write me a recommendation?
Professor: Yes. Give me the forms. I will have it for you by Monday.
Student: Thank you. I find you very inspiring.
Professor: Please get the frack out of my office. (She blinks.)

For the character of the professor, this is the ideological moment of the whole encounter, the moment where she can no longer fend off ideological interpellation, where she believes she sees through all the false premises and promises of an academic life, but fulfills her role in academic reproduction anyway. In this moment, her own repressed attachment to the structural optimism that organizes academic careers becomes apparent through the very form of her machinic, compulsive relation to her own praxis, as she reverts to type (though, in this story, she was always already her type). Asked if she will write a recommendation, she finally becomes pragmatic, efficient. “I will have it for you by Monday,” she says. The student then thanks her and calls her inspiring: this looks like a ritual false compliment, but in the last analysis is just an accurate statement of the reality of the student’s fantasy, since structurally, she does find her professor very inspiring. And the coda that follows, where the professor cannot prevent herself from venting her bitterness at the student – “Please get the frack out of my office” – is the moment that confirms the futility of academic self-consciousness. Her curse is an impotent gesture of rebellion that relieves frustration, but changes nothing.

The professor, in sum, inhabits something like the cynical stance that Peter Sloterdijk calls enlightened false consciousness, a state of “[knowing] oneself to be without illusions and yet dragged down by the ‘power of things’ ” (1984:193). The student on the other hand is in just the opposite position: she inhabits ideology wishfully, and she voices a sort of dream logic, where her wish (to become an academic) becomes feasible merely by being pictured. Hers is a logic which is impervious both to rational counter-argument and to emotional appeals, a logic which depends on overidentifying with her idealized image of the professor while ignoring any unwelcome features of this Other. As I suggested earlier, the form of this wishful subjectivity is a logic of sheer repetition, which only knows how to affirm its fantasy, over and over, mechanically.

There is a dialectic here between fantasy and institution; each is the condition of the other. The student’s intolerable affirmativeness is coupled to an insistent instrumentalism. She wants to be a college professor; and for that, she needs her letter of recommendation. And in the end, she will get it. On one level, all that we see here is a standard institutional negotiation about the terms of her instrumental request for a letter. But, as we have seen, the professor tries – and fails – to resist this instrumental request on the grounds of her own reasoned analysis of the situation. On a second level, then, the video illustrates the impotence of intellectual argument and critical knowledge in the face of fantasy; all the intellectual arguments fail, one after the next, to make the fantasy even budge.

Yet there is a telling irony about these fantasies: far from being deeply original, deeply individual inventions, they themselves are sheer institutional products. Just what is the common denominator of the student’s stated passions for “thinking critically about literature,” for “working hard,” for collaborative learning,” for “inspiring students,” for having “potential as a scholar,” for wanting a “life of the mind”? Nothing if not that they are all bits of American liberal arts marketing rhetoric; they are identical to the vague platitudes that humanistic scholars generally produce when asked to give a public rationalization of liberal education. And so in fact we are confronted here with a doubly uncanny image. Not only is the repressed ambivalence of the humanities professor revealed here by the presence of the naive student who wants to become her, but also the deep, sustaining fantasies about the goodness and value of humanistic scholarship turn out to be structurally inauthentic, the internal echoes of our own academic marketing discourse. In short, the student is uncanny because she is someone who appears to truly believe the platitudes about critical thinking, etc., that we put in our mission statements, someone who demonstrates that our fantasies about the fundamental worth of scholarship are fantasies that come from outside.

In the end, like all successful ideological projects, the video works to make the real into the tolerable, to mediate objective social and subjective contradictions by translating them into enjoyable fictions with easy objects for our displaced ambivalence. In order to do this, as I have tried to show, it inadvertently dramatizes our professional repressions of our own ambivalence, our disavowal of our naive and comical optimism about the life of the mind; and it must re-enact many of the dynamics of projection, identification, disavowal, and disgust that are at work in contemporary precarious academic subjectivity. In the end, what one identifies with as a young academic humanist is perhaps the wretched, inescapable impossibility of the situation.

The political moral of this story is quietist: it suggests that there is nothing in the end to do but live through the worst of the absurdities we are offered, continuing to do our jobs after incredulity has set in. It is in this sense a perfect illustration of the fact that today’s “crisis of the humanities” is less a matter of outright disappearance than of progressive alienation, downclassing and internal stratification.

Here I just want to show you a little of what the house looked like.

Seen from the quiet back street where it sat, the house looked conventional enough, with a solid stone façade, high windows with the obligatory shutters, a witch’s hat of a gable.

If we look in through the garden gate, though, we can see that the garden is decidedly non-Cartesian, the path is narrow, the entrance bowed over with branches. The garden is a protected space, walled off, the plants preserving the boundaries of private life.

If we go farther into the garden (these next few pictures were from the next day, which was cloudy) we see that the space doesn’t open up into a large open lawn, but rather is divided into little areas with different things, the bush that shelters the bicycle trailer, the path that’s edged by a long clothesline, a brushpile higher than your head.

At the very back of the yard, a workshop was under construction. Building materials and tools piled everywhere. On the windowsill of the unfinished building was a curious row of wooden shoes, and inside there was a bass drum waiting to be played.

The yard was patrolled by a cat.

If we go back towards the street, we can see the dramatic difference between the front and back sides of the house. The front was decorated with a façade and full of windows. The back side was largely windowless and bare, the staircase being set against the blank wall at left. The main entrance to the house was unused, and the kitchen entrance through that glass porch became the main entry.

The little motorbike used for errands is just visible at left, its round mirrors like insect eyes.

From inside the house, we can look back out through the kitchen door, the long rows of pots and pans barely visible in the reflected daylight.

In our first real look at the kitchen, we immediately see what to me was the most fascinating phenomenon in this house: the incredible density and diversity of physical objects. Every horizontal surface is occupied. There are pots and pans of all types and styles. There are ladles and clothespins over the stove, an intestinal string of dangling garlic, a silver cylinder of an electric kettle. Bottled water in a plastic can with a handle, crowds of orange-tipped spices parading on the shelf, various kinds of pottery that I don’t have the vocabulary to classify. Dishes waiting to be washed, dishes waiting to be used. Beans in a jar, a bottle of Pepsi, a mortar used for grinding up grain. It was a space of managed chaos.

Facing the street was a big room that served for eating, for storing, for collecting objects, for sitting in armchairs. It was a room that had an even more astounding diversity of objects: objects of culture, of art (in unclassifiably many styles), of music (a piano and a radio), of business (on a desk with papers), of children (a toy train). Let me show you some of the things that were to be found in the corners of this room.

The table under the window had metal tools, a bowl full of collected rocks, a small watering can, a small lamp, a roll of twine, a black shovel, a tiny model lighthouse in checkered black and white, a big hollow tube of a black candle melted to a round stone that served as its base.

On the other side of the dining table, an immense sideboard held little art objects, family photos, tiny dolls, animals in plastic, a kid’s drawing, a watch, some empty bottles, a thermometer, a feather, a little clock, a folded bandanna, a silver pail, a toy rooster, beads, an antelope figure, a little green tree, a lavender rock…

I agreed with my host that my glass of juice on the dining table was beautiful in the light.

The other end of the room was equally complicated to look at. Mix of antique furniture with a scattering of mundane things, an ornate mirror beside a child’s blue globe, a carved cabinet beside a cardboard box, a fancy brimmed hat beside a mass-produced red backpack. This scene, like the others, was not particularly arranged to be seen; it was more like the accidental result of a rising tide of inherited and found objects, overflowing in every corner.

There was a huge armoire full of books. All sorts. Plant guides, French-German dictionary, a submarine guide to the Atlantic coast, novels by French writers I’ve never heard of, Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, bird guides, old books whose pages needed to be cut apart with a knife if you were going to read them.

If we climb up the stairs to the landing on the first floor (which Americans would call the second floor; but French floor numbering starts at 0), we come to a pair of mirrors and a table with a new assortment of art objects and a little clock. I decided to leave myself in the picture for once. Wouldn’t want to be one of those ethnographers who effaces themselves from their representations of the field.

Around the corner, we find a bathroom that used to be a bedroom. This wasn’t the kind of house that originally had a shower, I gather, so half of one of the bedrooms had been converted for the purpose. It made for an odd kind of mixed-used space; this half of the room looks like a bathroom, while the other half (off to the right) was a bedroom with fluffy comforter, as if the room were a page from the children’s book Magical Changes where you recombine different images in surreal fashion.

If we climb the stairs to the third floor, the walls get a bit less decorated and it feels a bit more spacious. There was a skylight that seemed more modern than the traditional French windows on the lower floors.

Finally at the top of the house was a long high-ceilinged bedroom where I stayed up under the eaves. A narrow window peeked out under the gable I showed in the first picture above. It looked old, its paint a bit flaked, partly cracked, the shutter trimmed with rust.

Out the window was a view of the town, the pike of the cathedral about to spear the cloud in the distance.

Arabic or Turkish art objects off in the corner, more stored than looked at, but nonetheless making you feel like you had suddenly fallen into a glimpse of a completely non-French world.

Over the low mattress where I slept loomed a little constellation of lamps on the dresser. (I see I hadn’t made the bed.)

I won’t give much of an analysis of this scene for now, since I have other things to write today, but I find it interesting to ponder the domestic history apparent in this thicket of objects. The house was in its third generation in the family, presumably accumulating stuff all the while; probably most of the things there had little histories of their own. I’m not sure that I would even know how to classify all the objects in these photos; it would be impossible to find a neat distinction here, for instance, between “useful” and “aesthetic” objects. Even some of the most utilitarian kitchen objects were aestheticized, stylized; while conversely, even something seemingly decorative like a round stone might end up serving as an impromptu candelabra. I was reminded again that there’s way more to someone’s life than the little fragment of a self that gets presented on a university campus. A professor’s life — or at least this one — has a long history of social relationships that leave little traces of themselves in the form of collected things in the home. And this history (from what I heard of it) no more adds up to a single linear narrative than the mass of things in the living room conformed to a single principle of accumulation.

My host, I have to say, was someone who reminded me enormously of old American hippies of my acquaintance, the kind of person who you’d find at Paris-8 far more often than at more traditional French universities. He seemed to have a strong sense that his house was a non-normative space, a place that needed “cleaning up” to be presentable to company; and indeed, his home was noticeably more cluttered than other faculty homes I’ve glimpsed. At the same time, it was a tremendously lively space, full of projects done and half-done; most faculty don’t build their own workshops in the back of the garden, and that wasn’t even his only construction project. We can see here, it seems to me, that the home can be a space of deep non-normativity, partially liberated from the judgmental attitudes of the neighbors or the public, a space where an alternative order can be created that diverges from French society’s usual obligations of neatness and propriety.

There’s a lesson here for researchers, like me, whose main ethnographic sites are institutional ones. If you only look at what happens in, say, a campus, you’re at risk of forgetting that what you’re looking at is one of the most highly regimented spaces in the society in question, and probably needs to be understood in relationship to the relative spaces of freedom that people have in their domestic life. No one lives their whole life in institutional space, after all. At the same time, on the other hand, a foreigner like me is bound to have limited access to these domestic spaces, especially when they’re not the main focus of the project.

Maybe in some future project I can look into the interface between domestic and professional life in academia. I imagine that for many faculty, this boundary zone is full of painful compromise and fracture, somewhat like a dislocated shoulder.