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?

Philosopher: But I don’t know — you aren’t interested in the solutions to problems?

Ethnographer: The solutions to philosophical problems for example?

Philosopher: Problems! Real ones! For example do you consider that the word “being” has several senses? Or not? Fundamental ontological question. Do you accept that there are several senses or one? It changes everything. And what are your arguments one way or the other?

Ethnographer: Well me personally I’m not an expert—

Philosopher: But it’s a really important question. Do you accept a category like for instance the possible?

Ethnographer: Yes OK—

Philosopher: Between non-being and being? Do you grant an ontological existence to the notion of the possible? Me, no. Others, yes. And one tries to say why and why not. If you grant something like human dispositions, do you grant a distinction between for instance what one calls the faculties— understanding, imagining, dreaming, are these the same things or not? Do you grant something like freedom? Do you not know how to answer these questions? And do you say yes or no or something else? The response to these questions isn’t of the order of metanarratives. It’s of the order of the truth, pure and simple.

Ethnographer: Sure, I can agree.

Philosopher: But it’s really important. This is what philosophy is!

Ethnographer: Well I’d say that what interests me as an ethnographer is that, being able to ask these sorts of questions, not everyone asks them in the same way, and what interests me as an ethnographer is the different ways of situating these questions, of raising them.

Philosopher: You’re not interested in the truth of the answer?

This was a relatively traditional philosopher who was invested, as you can see, in a fairly standard view of philosophy as “solving problems.” Here, he pressed me quite hard to express interest in that project. But I felt obliged to insist that adjudicating local truths is not what ethnographers are usually interested in!

It’s interesting to me that he found my refusal baffling. It’s as if at heart it was hard to imagine that other disciplines worked on profoundly different questions from those of the traditional philosophical canon.

But what goes unsaid in this interview is that I, the ethnographer, was not the only person who wasn’t trying to “solve problems.” In fact, many of the radical philosophers I studied in Saint-Denis were also quite uninterested in this problem-solving approach to philosophy. More often than not, they sought to produce new concepts, to re-reading classic texts, to reflect on the present, to “intervene” critically in debates — and all of this could happen without necessarily solving any of the classic philosophical questions.

I expect my interlocutor here would have dismissed some of his colleagues, as well, as not being interested in real philosophy.

But if I learned anything in my research on philosophers, it’s that there can be interesting disputes over what philosophy is. (Every orthodoxy involves heterodoxy, after all.) To claim that philosophy is a well-defined field would seem, in that light, somewhat fraught.

But I’m getting ahead of the textual excerpt I wanted to present. Although it doesn’t always manage to be an accurate description of the university, it compensates by being entertaining and at times outrageous. (Outrageousness being nothing to sneeze at when it comes to desanctifying institutional self-images.)

The University of Chicago is more self-absorbed—more precisely, self-obsessed—than any other institution of higher learning in America. Its animating myth was manufactured by Robert Maynard Hutchins, the institution’s pivotal president and promoter non pareil. “It’s not a very good university,” Hutchins declared, “it’s only the best there is.” Never mind Oxford or Berkeley. Harvard and Yale may fill the corridors of power, loyalists say; in the domain of ideas, Chicago rules. Nowhere else is the “Ivy League” a term of derision—the land of academic “Jay Leno-ism,” it is called, a reference to its veneration of big-name professors derided at Chicago as “dying elephants.” A passing remark made long ago by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is recycled as if it were gospel: “I think the one place where I have been that is most like ancient Athens is the University of Chicago.”

Three-quarters of the faculty live within a mile of the campus in the enclave of Hyde Park, a hothouse of learned chatter and salacious gossip set apart, by design, from the bombed-out inner-city landscape, peopled mainly by dirt-poor blacks, which surrounds it. The fact of isolation, it is said half-jokingly, is why the university’s athletic teams are known as the Maroons. The Chicago tribe takes pleasure in furious disputations about everything from monetarism to metaphysics. While Harvard preens, Chicago navel-gazes, turning out bookshelves’-worth of histories and biographies, faculty committee reports, student newspapers, broadsheets, and websites devoted to itself. There are several hundred listings in the “introductory” bibliography of the university’s history that the campus librarians have prepared.

Seemingly everyone is an amateur historian, mining the past for ammunition that can be used in the present. “No episode was more important in shaping the outlook and expectations [of higher education in the decade following the Civil War] than the founding of the University of Chicago,” writes Frederick Rudolph in his benchmark history of American higher education. It is “one of those events in American history that brought into focus the spirit of an age.” When John D. Rockefeller launched the university with a gift of $2.3 million, he expressed the hope that an institution situated far from the tradition-bound East Coast would “strike out upon lines in full sympathy with the spirit of the age.” Although Chicago is a great school, in this respect Rockefeller would be disappointed. The dominant trope, observes Dennis Hutchinson, professors of law and longtime dean of the undergraduate college, is that “at Chicago we’ve always done ‘X,'” meaning whatever is being advocated at the moment.

There is another, less frequently acknowledged tradition in Hyde Park, a willingness on the part of the university’s leaders, including Hutchins and William Rainey Harper, the founding president, to do whatever has been necessary to raise money for a chronically cash-starved school. Among its past ventures are a junior college and the nation’s biggest correspondence school; in 1998 it attached itself to Unext.com, a for-profit business school.

(34-35)

…Only senior professors should teach the core couses, Andrew Abbott asserted, because only a widely published academic can stand as a “central authority figure who can model for the students the discipline of rethinking ideas.” What a marvelous notion: Kant or Mill interpreted by Mortimer Adler or Allan Bloom, transcendent texts in the hands of master interpreters. But you would have to go elsewhere to find it. At Chicago, the ideal of a college where intellectually obsessive undergraduates are instructed in small classes by full professors, Socrates among the genius set, collides with a shabbier reality. Science courses are delivered lecture-style, as in most universities, and few sections are led by faculty members. Even in the humanities and social sciences, points out Richard Saller, the university’s provost since 2001, nearly two-thirds of classes are taught by graduate students and non-tenure track faculty.

At Chicago, faculty devotion to the core isn’t bred in the bone. It’s a historical accident resulting from the university’s peculiar division into two separate faculties. Until the 1960s, the graduate faculty, based in the disciplines, taught Ph.D. candidates, while the college faculty, hired separately, instructed undergraduates. Although the intention was to build a university that rewarded teaching as well as research, the result was a rancorous split between the discipline-based professors, who regarded themselves as the “real faculty,” and the “have-not” college instructors, dismissed as glorified high school teachers. “There were people teaching economics who didn’t know Milton Friedman was a professor here,” Saller says, shaking his head at the oddity of it all.

This division of labor was abolished in the 1960s. Since those who have subsequently been hired, like faculty everywhere, have more specialized interests, when the college instructors retired there was no one to fill the classroom void. At the same time, in order to compete with leading universities, Chicago has cut the teaching load from six to four quarter courses, and many professors teach only one undergraduate course.

These fact on the ground make for decidedly odd bedfellows. Donald Levine, a sociology professor and the former dean of the college, for whom the common core is a passion, found himself in rare agreement with anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, whose enthusiasm for a substantial diet of required courses was premised on his fear that if undergraduate had more opportunities to take electives, people like himself would have to teach them. “I’m not a college type,” Sahlins says. That’s an understatement, since he refers to himself as a member of the graduate department of anthropology and rarely sees undergraduates.

“What we’re doing has intellectual integrity!” was the rallying cry of the traditionalists. But “you can only go so far,” observes one professor, “before you have to point at the faculty and ask, ‘Why aren’t you teaching?'”

“The contradiction we’re trying to resolve,” says Richard Saller, “is that we don’t want to be Harvard or Yale, and use the large lecture format. We want to do as much as possible in small classes—but we can’t do this with tenured faculty.” The irony is palpable. At a university where devotion to general education is the watchword, until a few years ago professors were not expected to teach any undergraduates.

(39-40).

The Kirp chapter centers on the tale of 1990s conflicts with then-President Sonnenschein, which had everything to do with money, professorial labor, and the university’s self-image. It’s somewhat amazing if you read that link (to the official website) how thoroughly the nationally-publicized conflicts during Sonnenschein’s watch have been effaced from his official biography.

Perhaps it is necessary, to be a good sociologist, to combine some dispositions associated with youth, such as a certain force of rupture, of revolt, of social “innocence,” and others more commonly associated with old age, such as realism, and the capacity to confront the rough and disappointing realities of the social world.

I believe that sociology does exert a disenchanting effect, but this, in my eyes, marks a progress toward a form of scientific and political realism that is the absolute antithesis of naive utopianism. Scientific knowledge allows us to locate real points of application for responsible action; it enables us to avoid struggling where there is no freedom—which is often an alibi of bad faith—in such a manner as to dodge sites of genuine responsibility. While it is true that a certain kind of sociology, and perhaps particularly the one that I practice, can encourage sociologism as submission to the “inexorable laws” of society (and this even though its intention is exactly the opposite), I think that Marx’s alternative between utopianism and sociologism is somewhat misleading: there is room, between sociologistic resignation and utopian voluntarism, for what I would call a reasoned utopianism, that is, a rational and politically conscious use of the limits of freedom afforded by a true knowledge of social laws and especially of their historical conditions of validity. The political task of social science is to stand up against irresponsible voluntarism and fatalistic scientism, to help define a rational utopianism by using the knowledge of the probable to make the possible come true. Such a sociological, that is, realistic, utopianism is very unlikely among intellectuals. First because it looks petty bourgeois, it does not look radical enough. Extremes are always more chic, and the aesthetic dimension of political conduct matters a lot to intellectuals.

(Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 196-7)

I don’t immediately find this plausible. It seems very Aristotelian and not very dialectical, as if Bourdieu says, “let’s find the happy medium between voluntarism and resignation!” rather than what seems to me a more desirable politics, which would continuously, jarringly oscillate between unrealizable utopian dreams and a “realist” politics of compromise, a politics set in motion by the constant contradiction between actual and possible, a politics in which the circulation of utopian representations attempts to reshape the limits of practical possibility and vice versa.

But Bourdieu of course does not exactly advocate a massive, magical reshaping of political practice, in which everyone would be instantly assimilated to his version of reasoned utopianism. If anything, he would recognize, sociologically, that such an occasion is “very unlikely among intellectuals.” So perhaps Bourdieu is actually arguing not for the total vanquishing of voluntarism or fatalism, but rather that sociologists should assume a mediating position in the division of political labor, in which their role would be to contribute their knowledge of social possibility and probability to political projects.

That might be useful; but Bourdieu still seems concerned to distinguish “rational” from “aesthetic” politics in a way that seems implausible. Although it is certainly true that intellectuals often aestheticize politics, they aren’t the only ones who do so, and it’s unclear why “reason” and “aesthetics” should be opposites. Insofar as aesthetics is about the norms of form, and reason has form, all reason is already aestheticized, while one might conversely argue that aesthesis involves, if not reason, at least an inner logic. The closest thing to a statement on “reason” I’ve read comes in Bourdieu’s 1991 piece, “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason.” There he claims roughly that the historical conditions of possibility of scientific knowledge depend on science being organized such that “logic is the mandatory form of social struggle” (23). He says little, however, about the content of this rationality, this logic. Is this rationality the sole possession of the Bourdieuian sociologist? If so, does only the Bourdieuian sociologist have access to reasoned politics?

Perhaps not, but only, for Bourdieu, to the degree that sociopolitical reflexivity can be generalized beyond the sociologists. “When you apply reflexive sociology to yourself,” Bourdieu goes on to say, “you open up the possibility of identifying true sites of freedom, and thus of building small-scale, modest, practical morals in keeping with the scope of human freedom which, in my opinion, is not that large” (199). So to a large extent Bourdieu aims less to advocate a positive political project than to combat the politics of self-deception, to combat the “irresponsible” struggles that obscure the pursuit of more plausible projects.

That seems to me a wise idea. But of course the trouble is, as I argued over at Nate’s blog last month, that politics are an epistemological nightmare, that it’s hard to know which struggles are plausible and which aren’t. Is Bourdieu really arguing that sociological research contains the answers to all questions of political plausibility? I find that very unlikely, because scholastic knowledge tends to be difficult to put in practice, precisely because it is the product of an objectifying escape from practice that, according to Bourdieu, constitutes the scholastic point of view. But then, a major empirical weakness of Bourdieuian research on universities lies in its neglect of the relations across social fields that happen when academic knowledge is imported and translated and applied outside the academy, in politics for instance.