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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

p.s.: writing this post reminds me that it’s important for teachers who aren’t women to acknowledge their anxiety and vulnerability, given the preposterous gender ideals that still circulate in academic culture. I’ll come back to this.

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.

“That’s the burden of the job: knowing all the things that others don’t know or would rather not know. Much that I know I can’t talk about, and I have had to get used to being the object of (usually) undeserved suspicion. Because I know so much, my actions are not fully intelligible to those who observe them. The hardest part of being provost has been learning that it’s right and proper that I be suspected — that such vigilance is part of what keeps our institution healthy.

In the end, the burden of knowledge is worth it. The pleasures of the job are many, not least of which is understanding this marvelous institution so well — a Rube Goldberg creation that really does work, and very well indeed. And the opportunity to kibitz on the intellectual lives of more than 500 keenly intelligent and resourceful faculty members is an immense privilege. Even cleaning up their messes and fixing their leaky roofs gives me great satisfaction.”

Consider some counterintuitive features of this argument. 1. The Provost is cast as knowledgeable in contrast to the ignorant faculty. 2. Knowledge is viewed as a burden. 3. The Provost is apparently omniscient: a paradox, in light of his acknowledged noninvolvement with the ostensibly central activities of the institution, research and teaching. 4. Knowledge must be kept secret (he does not quite say why, but we imagine that too much transparency would be somehow lethal to smooth institutional operations). In this discourse, knowledge is turned on its head. Rather than being an open public good, whose transmission and development is for the benefit of society at large, in this case knowledge (particularly financial knowledge) becomes a threat to the university if it’s disseminated. The knowledge of the provost makes him, paradoxically, unknowable to others; his actions become inscrutable as his privileged knowledge is kept secret.

Now, a rather different take on knowledge and higher education comes across in William Deresiewicz’ nifty essay “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” The essay is an attack on the elite education you get at Yale, where Deresiewicz teaches. He lists five main disadvantages:

1. It “makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.”
2. It “inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”
3. It nurtures ‘entitled mediocrity.’
4. It “gives you the chance to be rich… but it takes away the chance not to be.”
5. “It is profoundly anti-intellectual.”

I’m moderately sympathetic to these claims, and they certainly describe well-known deformities of elite education, although there are also plenty of people who get elite educations without suffering these maladies. It reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu’s argument in “Rites of Institution” that a rite of passage serves, not only to transform those who undergo it, but also to decisively separate the initiates from those who will never pass through the rite. We might argue that an elite education is not only, perhaps not even primarily, a process of internal transformation for the elite themselves; it is also a means of creating social distinction and privilege, of marking the elite as superior to the rest.

From this perspective, a critique of Deresiewicz’s article offered by Marty Nemko, called “In Praise of Elitism,” leaves much to be desired. Nemko’s response, basically, is that elites are of “above-average value to society,” and should be praised in order to help them achieve their best. “It is in society’s best interest… that the best and brightest be the ones given the extra opportunities, so as to maximize their greater potential for improving society,” he says. His only qualm is that elites need to be taught to value “pro-social rather than narcissistic ends.” While Nemko believes that the elites are naturally and unproblematically selected as the best and brightest, Bourdieu would suggest that the elites only become elites through their consecration by the educational system. Nemko, in fact, dodges the entire issue raised by Deresiewicz to begin with, which is that not all smart people are elites and not all elites are smart – certainly not in all respects. The arbitrary organization of elite groups massively betrays its ostensible meritocratic values.

On the whole, I find Deresiewicz rather persuasive in his indictment of elite education, much as Jeffrey Williams’ wonderful critical analysis of “smart” made me want to rethink how I judge my academic colleagues. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing people’s accomplishments, as Nemko advocates, but recognizing a success is not the same as bowing down before a fetishized caste of the successful, as if success inhered in their persons and not their actions. And Deresiewicz is quite right to criticize the fantasy that elite education is all good. He observes perceptively: “While some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled… while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is.” In the economist’s terms, elitism has its opportunity costs for individual and society alike.

Unfortunately, Deresiewicz’ alternative to elite education involves a fetishism of its own. “The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers,” he argues; the aim is to create intellectuals who are “passionate about ideas,” “independent,” ready to go “into spiritual exile,” “thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.”

What’s troublesome is not so much the claim that education should produce intellectuals, but the kind of intellectuals Deresiewicz envisions. They derive their intellectual sanctity from “solitude,” from isolated “introspection” — in essence from a fantasy of the intellectual, recognizable in Plato and Descartes and Nietzsche, who retreats from society to penetrate alone to its secret truths, only to return with the claim that his/her unique truth affords a unique “vision” for social reform. Such an intellectual seeks the sanctity of social withdrawal along with the virtuous life of social engagement.

At times, this view of the intellectual (which I’ve examined provisionally in this short essay) has struck me as dangerously contradictory, an effort to seize and yet disavow political power. We might, more sympathetically, view it as a progressive dialectic between thinking and action. But I wonder: do intellectuals really need to be, at heart, solitary autonomous thinkers? What about organic intellectuals, who do their thinking as part of the broader social group they’re part of? What about intellectuals forming collectives who work together, collaboratively? Such modes of intellectual action deserve further examination.

Come to think of it, O’Donnell’s description of the solitary Provost amounts to one more fantasy of this isolated intellectual, whose exceptional power is justified by the uniqueness of his knowledge. One wonders whether universities would be more fair, if provosts were more open with their precious budgetary knowledge, more open to distributing institutional power across intellectual collectives, less inclined to create sham committees whose recommendations are ignored… Yet again, the intellectual organization of the university seems incapable of living up to its own ostensible intellectual virtues.