The life of the mind. Adam Kotsko writes something honest, if despairing, about graduate study in the humanities and about how people are socialized in it:

Much of what passes for "philosophy" is just a series of formulaic exercises that demonstrate their belonging to a particular discipline -- a certain writing style, a certain approach to authoritative figures, etc. Most "philosophers" are far more formed by some idea of professionalism than by the texts themselves, and I suspect that a genuine formation by those texts would not comport well with the goals of the university, which is to produce a particular class of workers who fit well within a rubric of professionalism. And as I think of taking a meditative approach to texts, I think: I don't have time for this. I need to make these texts into something, turn them toward the goal of producing my own piece of writing so that I will continue to meet the requirements of scholarly productivity which graduate study is socializing into me.

The professionalistic approach -- which, for many of us lovers of texts, is initially the necessary evil that will allow us to live "the life of the mind" -- quickly becomes the primary consideration; public standing in a particular type of game trumps all other possible standards of value in the final analysis. ...

I met a student after [attending a philosophy lecture], obviously a very bright guy, who had hit the jackpot and been accepted to DePaul. We got to talking about various things, and I think that in essence, he treated me like shit. He had to have his little pissing match with the kid from Nowhere Theological Seminary, who came to the lecture with his overeager undergrad friends. I wonder how much different I would really be, even if I had gotten into a program that would make it so that I won't have to worry for a few years -- maybe part of the reason it's so grating is that this gnawing sense of insufficiency keeps getting grilled into me, such that even when I'd "arrived," I would still feel like I constantly need to prove myself, just like him. Because I wouldn't feel like I deserve it, because there is no deserving -- there is no available way to determine deserving. And so, prove yourself -- for nothing, to no one, to no end.

And Brad DeLong, on whose blog I found the reference, proceeds pontifically to blow smoke up his ass:

And I think, "Uh-oh." You see, when you think of what you are doing as "dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse," you have fallen victim to the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth life. ...

As long as Adam Kotsko views himself as turning the crank on a machine ("squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published") he is doomed. But if he can shift his mental frames, and remember what is really going on--that Kierkegaard is desperately trying to communicate something difficult and important that he only half-grasps, and that Zizek is mulling this over and answering back--he may yet be saved. It's when the moment comes when Adam gets so excited by watching Zizek argue with Kierkegaard that he thinks, "I have something to add to this; I have something important to say too"--then is the moment to write down what you have to say, not in order to build your c.v. but because you have something to say. In fact, the only effective way to build your c.v. is to let it happen as a byproduct of your having something to say.

Look, I like Brad's blog, and Brad (from what his writerly tone tells me of him), but this just pisses me off. So I'll say it intemperately: tenured professors like DeLong, especially tenured professors with comfortable side-careers as public policy experts or whatever, have no fucking business at all lecturing younger scholars on their spiritual deficiencies. Not when said tenured professors are (this is a generic statement, by the way) the willing beneficiaries of a system that exploits the cheap, endlessly renewable labor of graduate students and adjunct/temporary faculty (the "gypsy scholars") while simultaneously ratcheting up the credentialing pressure on their junior colleagues.

Adam's supposed to avoid the sin of careerism for the sake of his soul; well, you're embedded in a system that all but forces intellectuals to become careerists—and has been biased increasingly in that direction in the last decade-plus. (Sorry, but having a passion for the pure life of the mind is manifestly not the best way to build a CV, not when you're competing for jobs and advancement with hundreds of other people who aren't burdened with illusions about the need to find a marketable niche and work it.) You know, Brad, if you tenured types really want to make it possible for your juniors to have more richly self-determining intellectual lives? Try admitting fewer students to your grad programs, hiring fewer adjuncts, and easing the credentials crunch in the tenure process. When you start working seriously to reduce the pressure on the lower ranks, I'll start believing you mean it about encouraging younger scholars to follow their bliss.

From my perspective—the perspective of an otherwise talented academic who got unlucky, got exhausted, and couldn't push through—Brad is a lottery winner. He's welcome to it: but I don't customarily enjoy hearing lottery winners lecture other people about the spiritual value of thrift. It's in the nature of the academic system that it mystifies success: that the winners feel their winning is an expression of virtue, rather than a complex interaction between personal ability, social formation, and unrepeatable opportunity. That mystification is no different from what you find in most other systems of reward, really, but academic self-consciousness ought to be a little better at cutting through it.

In other circumstances, there'd be things to like about Brad's post, in spite of its somewhat stale rehashing of Areopagitica, such as his nice account of Machiavelli reading in his personal library: but the complacency, the presumption, is impossible to like. Adam is struggling with something many, many younger scholars are forced to go through—forced, in the current configuration of things, to an unusually great degree—how to maintain a sense of genuine intellectual engagement, of selfhood even, in a system organized in such a way as to grind it down. Brad may be fortunate enough not to have had to go through the worst of that struggle, or to have put it safely in his past: but that's no excuse for failing to understand, or willfully obscuring, what the struggle is about.

In my own grad student days I worked as an organizer in the effort to unionize Yale teaching assistants. One afternoon, in a meeting with my DGS, Paul Fry, a man I liked and respected, I had to listen to him blather self-approvingly about the "scholar of one candle" in Stevens' Auroras of Autumn, adducing it to insist on the insuperable "contradiction" between collective action and the requirement of solitary contemplation that scholarship imposes. And I thought, what a load of pious horseshit. And I knew that, as far as the question of my working life was concerned, he and his sort were no friends of mine.

posted by michael  2:46:46 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Exactly my point. Thomas Cahill, op-ed in the Times today, says more compactly what I was fumbling for two days ago:

John Paul II has been almost the polar opposite of John XXIII, who dragged Catholicism to confront 20th-century realities after the regressive policies of Pius IX, who imposed the peculiar doctrine of papal infallibility on the First Vatican Council in 1870, and after the reign of terror inflicted by Pius X on Catholic theologians in the opening decades of the 20th century. Unfortunately, this pope was much closer to the traditions of Pius IX and Pius X than to his namesakes. Instead of mitigating the absurdities of Vatican I's novel declaration of papal infallibility, a declaration that stemmed almost wholly from Pius IX's paranoia about the evils ranged against him in the modern world, John Paul II tried to further it. ...

But John Paul II's most lasting legacy to Catholicism will come from the episcopal appointments he made. In order to have been named a bishop, a priest must have been seen to be absolutely opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, birth control (including condoms used to prevent the spread of AIDS), abortion, divorce, homosexual relations, married priests, female priests and any hint of Marxism. It is nearly impossible to find men who subscribe wholeheartedly to this entire catalogue of certitudes; as a result the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents. The good priests have been passed over; and not a few, in their growing frustration as the pontificate of John Paul II stretched on, left the priesthood to seek fulfillment elsewhere. ...

Sadly, John Paul II represented a different tradition, one of aggressive papalism. Whereas John XXIII endeavored simply to show the validity of church teaching rather than to issue condemnations, John Paul II was an enthusiastic condemner. Yes, he will surely be remembered as one of the few great political figures of our age, a man of physical and moral courage more responsible than any other for bringing down the oppressive, antihuman Communism of Eastern Europe. But he was not a great religious figure. How could he be? He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church.

It seems to me that the notion that JP II is "more responsible than any other" man for the end of the neo-Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe is a pious canard, but let that pass for now. (I know how the Poles feel about the moral courage lent them by the example of the Polish Pope, and one has to honor that feeling—but there was moral courage coming from a lot of sources in the days of Solidarity, and great movements of social and political change don't well up because of any one person's will or example.)

My sense of what we were in for from the media in the wake of JP's death may have been off: it was easy to extrapolate from the priest-ridden gabble of the death watch, and last year's Reagan hagiography, and imagine the worst. Good to see genuine, informed critique find an opening.

posted by michael  9:04:44 AM  
tell me about it []