Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 10:57:15
From: Luba Slabyj <romanframe-AT-v-wave.com>
Subject: Re: Bashing academia


Alexander:

I don't want to give you 'my worst' when you give your best, as below
(although I do take your meaning). Everything you say below strikes a chord
with me--how could it not?--or at least with that part of me that
hopes/wishes for the best kind of academic scenario. I, too, like the idea
of working within a framework in a way that helps expand it, take it in new
directions. *But* your own occasional qualifications point to the many
difficulties and obstacles that can beset such an aspiration. I'm glad
you've included the odd qualification--even if your optimistic outlook
doesn't allow you to expand upon it--because keeping in mind such
considerations is what makes the difference between simply asserting that
the system works (even if it doesn't) and making every effort to *ensure*
that it works as well as you claim it does. Or at least it's the first
step. But at the risk of sounding pious, I urge you to work on your
imagination. Students have been, are presently being, 'persuaded' to leave
academe without in any way themselves being 'Nazis.' Believe me it happens.
And the fact that you would put it this way doesn't at all surprise me,
since it's the most tempting way to 'explain' why "bad things happen to
good students": i.e., they're not *really* good students, they lack
"originality," they're "lazy" or "not sufficiently committed," and all the
other serviceable justificatory phrases that get trotted out without
necessarily being *true.* (Indeed, often so much boiling oil poured over
the gates onto the heads of the fleeing 'barbarians,' not because the
barbarians any longer pose a 'threat' from the outside, but because
consciences must be salved, morale boosted, ideology upheld *within* the
gates. And in this latter respect, it's often students themselves, not
professors, who are hardest on those departing because their anxieties
about their own possible 'failure' badly require alleviating.) And in a
similar vein, try to imagine, rather than an Artaud, Bloom, Auerbach,
Foucault, Girard, those nameless, faceless people who did have something
worth saying but have never been heard from because the time,
circumstances, system didn't permit. Not much point in bitterness, as you
rightly note, but nor should anyone pretend that these people didn't make
the grade simply because they weren't cut from a cloth of sufficient
quality--or at least without a willingness to explore what we mean by
"sufficient quality." I'd like to quote an apposite passage from
Middlemarch, since you referred to it earlier, but unfortunately, those
oft-discussed passages at the end, even while they urge compassion and
admiration for the undistinguished life, nevertheless leave me a little
uneasy. They don't seem to go far enough; indeed, at the wrong moment, they
smack a little too much of the literary equivalent of Victorian charity.
Which doesn't mean I don't love George Eliot.
Anyway, analysis is the thing; the closer the issue touches you the better.
The hard part is making the proper allowances even if these pain you (I'm
speaking to myself as much as/more than? to you or anyone else), while
maintaining what you firmly believe. And I do *firmly* believe that there
is *much* wrong with the current graduate-student experience that could
begin to be remedied if the problems were readily acknowledged and openly
discussed in the first place. The sooner this starts happening, the better,
in my opinion, especially because the issues are difficult. This has a lot
less to do with "lousy" professors vs "lousy" students (it won't do to
villify profs, who have their own difficulties, even if they also possess a
greater share of power) than with severely overburdened economies of time,
energy, patience, vision, etc. that make injustices inevitable if the
issues remain unaddressed--that make injustices inevitable even if they
are, alas. But there's no change without the impetus that recognition of
injustice brings, only an intensification of predominant features at times
of economic and other stress.  

But all of this is off-topic, so I'm not going to pursue it any further
unless you or anyone else really wants to. By the way, I'm wowed by the
wealth of information/discussion coming through this list. I'm learning a
great deal.

With admiration for your great enthusiasm,
Luba 

At 09:31 PM 6/15/98 -0700, you wrote:
>
>
>Just a few more remarks/confessions:
>
>Luba asked if it were not true that even supposedly "new" or
>"creative" approaches (to philosophy, literature, history, etc.) were,
>in the context of academic life, not always already confined by
>certain theoretical frameworks, institutional expectations, etc., and
>that these constraints thereby excluded from the realm of
>possibilities certain approaches as "unworthy".  To be sure, this
>happens, and will always happen, so long as there are intellectual
>trends in any way shape or form--just as there are trends on this very
>list, certain perspectives excluded (or at least shouted down), etc. 
>Yet I sort of feel that--and here is where I'm going to sound REALLY
>naive--if you find yourself in that position, that is, if you find
>yourself arguing for something that few or none of your peers really
>accept, and you nevertheless strongly and passionately *believe* in
>it, well, that's probably the *best* possible place to be.  THAT's how
>you become a trend-setter, rather than a trend-follower.  That is the
>*dream* of every academic. Break the barriers, leave the herd:
>*That's* what creative thinking is all about.  That's the moment when
>you really have to show your teeth, as it were, to call upon your will
>to power, to argue for your ideas despite the adversity with which you
>are faced, despite the rolling eyes, the dismissive waves, the baffled
>shrugs.  Who wants to agree with everyone?  If ever I found myself in
>a position where a lot of people were buying my ideas (not likely), I
>would most certainly start looking for something else to talk about. 
>I know this sounds stupidly romantic, or just superficially
>Nietzschean, but it is something I wholeheartedly believe in: Deleuze
>wrote philosophy in the manner in which *he* wanted to write it, and
>I'm sure he couldn't care less about whether or not his peers really
>took him seriously (or maybe he did care, but not in a way that would
>change his style).  He had some stuff to say, and he said it.  His joy
>was also his courage.  (And I can almost see all my peers out there
>wincing right about now; my shoot-from-the-hip, John Wayne approach to
>academia is bound to roll some eyes--and I confess it tickles me.)  
>
>     So yes, there are theoretical frameworks which constrain academic
>debates, but for the most part these are blessings in disguise: there
>is nothing more exciting than the thought that one might genuinely be
>exposing or even breaking free of "institutional" limits, or otherwise
>offering a critique that one's peers had not thought of, or simply
>could not tolerate because of their unconscious presuppositions. There
>is no better place to be, as an academic, than that place where you
>KNOW you have something valuable to say, but no one else (or only a
>few people) have really been able or willing to grasp it.  Yeah, it
>can mean feeling lonesome, like an exile; it can mean going
>unpublished, not getting a good job, or even being unemployed. (Though
>really we must keep in mind that for the most part I've been talking
>about *student* life, and not necessarily the post-graduate experience
>of being "on the market" or of actually teaching in a department,
>which I certainly know nothing about.  Personally, however, I cannot
>imagine any university department so barbaric that they would actually
>kick a Ph.D. student out simply because she held different views than
>the professors' own--unless they were like Nazi views or something). 
>When you find yourself in this position, you might even start to
>wonder if you're just mad, and everyone else is sane.  But that is
>just when you have to laugh--a Nietzschean laugh, to be sure (we all
>must write under the threat of going mad, after all).  To be that kid
>who, before anyone else, laughs at the naked emperor--that is a
>properly Nietzschean ambition, and it can *only* happen when there are
>frameworks to step outside of.
>
>I might put this another way by using Foucault as an example.  Here is
>someone for whom the concept of *exclusion* was central to his work:
>that is, that all discursive practices are premised upon certain
>fundamental exclusions, and that those exclusions themselves need to
>be unearthed and exposed--this idea (very abstractly put, I know)
>guides almost all of Foucault's work.  However, there is also this
>sense I get from Foucault that, in a way that is almost impossible to
>relate, he secretly *cherished* this tendency of discourse; that is,
>that in a way he loved the very possibility of being excluded, of
>being pushed to the side, of being labeled deviant or mad or
>nihilistic, since it is only there, in the obscure spaces where the
>"accepted" discourses no longer seem to function, that something like
>freedom could possibly be approached.  Which is why Foucault looked to
>the poets (Mallarme, Nerval, Artaud) for the great examples of
>subversion.  Artaud's freedom was precisely his suffering--and his
>suffering was owed as much to his *belief* in the madness imposed upon
>him (in the respect that he affirmed the distinctions of clinical
>discourse, though in an inverted way, perhaps) as it was to the sheer
>uniqueness of his experience.  Were it not for people telling him that
>he was mad, Artaud might not have written.
>
>To put this another way, and to use a less dramatic example than
>Artaud, we might look at some of the great comparatists of this
>century: Auerbach, Girard, and Harold Bloom.  If you read these
>critics' masterpieces, you may be surprised by how absurdly *simple*
>are their claims: Auerbach's notion that "modern" literature
>represents interiority in new ways (last few chapters of *Mimesis*);
>Girard's thesis that desire in certain novels is *mediated* (*Deceit,
>Desire, and the Novel*); Bloom's thesis that poets have agonistic
>relations to their precursors (*Anxiety of Influence* and others)--if
>these claims are in any way unique or unlikely, it is only because of
>their obviousness, of their banality, of their simplicity.  In and of
>themselves such claims are wholly unremarkable.  Yet what makes the
>work carried out by these critics brilliant in spite of this, what
>makes these comparatists truly great, has very much to do with the
>manner of the *execution* of those ideas: they pursue their visions
>and claims with such passion, with such rigor and care, with such
>attention paid to their mode of expression, that even readers who
>disagree with them cannot help but recognize such works as great
>accomplishments, that is, as deserving a place in the canon of
>literary criticism.  Look at Bloom today: doubtless there are few
>critics less defended than Bloom, few critics who ignore so completely
>current trends in literary critical discourse.  Yet he nevertheless
>remains a huge figure in the current academic scene.  His books are
>written with true passion, and if he enjoys any prestige today, it is
>because of that passion, not because he abided by trends.
>
>(Of course, it's probably unfair to use a tenured Yale professor as
>one of my examples of what we should strive to be like--but then, I
>don't see any value in setting one's aspirations any *lower* than that.)
>
>I know I can be accused of all sorts of naiveties here: romanticism,
>hero-worship, individualism, complacency, etc., but to be consistent
>with myself I would have to say that I am not too afraid of such
>accusations.  What I *am* afraid of is arguing for a belief that I
>myself do not accept, or working very hard for something that I'm not
>passionate about--but that is a possibility to which I'll not succumb
>without a struggle.  And where has there ever been rewarding thought
>without struggle? Personally, I've had only a precious few professors
>who agreed with me on very much--though I certainly have been
>fortunate in the sense that this has never worked against me.  (Again,
>I can only pity those students whose ideas have either been *so*
>radically different, or else who have had such *lousy* professors,
>that they truly believe that what was expected of them in the
>university was little more than mimicking their professors' views. 
>That is a genuine tragedy.)  If, when the time comes, no one wants to
>publish my work, or no one wants to hire me or let me into their
>conference, then I would probably be doing myself a disservice to go
>around looking for the culprit in some "institution," or to say that
>everyone else was stuck within enforced frameworks, or that I just
>didn't get a fair shot.  I know, I know: this all sounds terribly
>similar to some pernicious "free-market-since-everybody-is-equal"
>ideology.  Yet the fact remains that there *have* been revolutionary
>writers (just as there have been intellectuals who turned their backs
>upon the academy, e.g., Susan Sontag and Greil Marcus, to name only
>two); if you have something to say that seems not to be tolerated by
>prevailing frameworks, then you should take those revolutionaries as
>your heros.  You should aspire to be like them (not to write like
>them, but to show the same steadfastness), and in that regard, you
>should affirm your adversity as a blessing.  If you truly *believe* in
>the value of what you have to say, you will not ever tire of saying
>it, no matter how few people want to listen.  
>
>So go ahead, give me your worst: I have but my conscience to answer to.
>
>Naively yours,
>
>Alexander
>
>
>
>
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