File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1998/deleuze-guattari.9806, message 141


Date: Wed, 17 Jun 1998 03:14:12 +0800
From: Liano Sharon <lsharon-AT-ms2.hinet.net>
Subject: Re: Bashing academia


A few questions and not a few incoherent comments for the "bashing"
academia thread.  I've been following this silently so far, though it
interests me very much.  Having now read what I've written below I feel
compeled to appologize in advance for the tone I've taken, but the fact is,
it does expres the feelings I have on the subject and I only hope I won't
offend anybody to much--as a matter of curtesy, not philosophy.
Comments and questions inserted below:

At 06:35 PM 1998/6/15, you wrote:
>Alexander:
>
>I think it genuinely wonderful that you care enough to have written this
>lengthy and eloquent defence of intellectual life in the universities. Just
>a few quick responses below.
>
>At 11:50 AM 6/15/98 -0700, you wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>I think that most of us would agree that NO institution is above
>>criticism, least of all the university.  Luba nicely points out the
>>(often unexplored) importance between academic production and capital
>>(the financing of education, not to mention the "business" of academic
>>publishing, of teachers' salaries, of funding for departments and
>>programs, etc.), as well as the all-important relation between
>>knowledge and power more generally (from identity-politics to striking
>>students at Yale).  I think we can all agree that these relations need
>>to be analyzed, thought through, criticized, and compared to new
>>possibilities.
>
>Obviously no argument here.
>

	I agree with you both, but must point out that these explorations, while
obviously so central to the current thread, seem to be largely ingnored in
the arguments that have been made.



>>
>>Still, as long as we're dealing with anecdotal evidence, I would have
>>to say that, from my own experience, I find it harder to accept the
>>notion that the university is primarily, or even in any considerable
>>measure, a place where one learns to say the "right" thing for the
>>"right" people at the "right" moment (i.e., the university as
>>initiation, regulation, indoctrination, etc.).

	As long as we're speaking anecdotally, I have had preciesly the opposite
experience throught my education.  No offence inteded, but I find it more
likely that you have accepted the arrangements of educational institutions,
and infact you demonstrate this acceptance below, and that because of this
acceptance you fit into these institutions well enough that they do not
seem overly constraining.  Anecdotally, when I was 10 I was already tired
of having people tell me what I had to read and which questions I had to
answer and when I had to have x,y, and z finished--as if I had no say in
what I learned, how I learned it, when I learned it--because in their minds
I had no say.  And in their minds I also had no say in how I did things,
from the style and formatting of a paper, to the steps in a math problem,
and very often to the acceptable stances on a given essay or book.  I found
it patronizing then, and I found it patronizing 6 years later in highschool
and 6 years after that in grad school.  I have no problem admitting that
I'm quite bitter about it sometimes, even though I know some people will
use that as an excuse to dismiss what I'm saying.
	Are you telling me you never had a so-called educational institution, or
even a well meaning prefessor, _decide for you_ what to study and when and
how and how to report what you'd "learned," complete with regulation
punishments for not complying?  I can hardly believe you've never had this
experience at any level of education.  I've had it at EVERY level of
education.  This may be anecdotal, but has anybody found a university or
some such that doesn't have defined classes where they've decided for you
what books you'll read and what papers you'll write, some times even
_years_ in advance?  Has anybody found a university or some such that
doesn't have established punishment regulations for disobediance and
deviation?  They tend to call this "grading".  Would someone care to
explain what relevance grades have to learning?  In my opinion,
unsurprisingly, they have absolutely none, yet they are nontheless
ubiquitous with "educational institutions".  And, yes, I do think there is
a very solid and definable continuum of practices and standards and
acceptable procedures that binds these often nontheless diverse
institutions into a totality, not unfractured and not unfragmented to be
sure, but more solid than has so far been expressed here.


>>To be sure, anyone who
>>would choose as his/her career the role of an academic MUST learn the
>>traditions in which he/she is to participate; part of that means
>>learning what the academics before us did, how they spoke, how they
>>understood themselves and their work, what their arguments were, etc. 
>>Anyone who would bypass this labor of learning-the-tradition is, I
>>would say, probably not going to be very happy at a university (they
>>might even be kicked out).  For though such work can be exhilarating,
>>it can also be boring, even irrelevant to one's interests; but it
>>remains necessary nonetheless, and it requires the ability to
>>re-express the lessons and arguments of our professors (and of their
>>professors, and of their professors, etc.).  
>
>No disagreement here either.

	I'll put in a very big dissagreement.  Why is this necessary?  One of the
last people to tell me this was necessary was a professor who was upset
that I was reading Deleuze.  She said, "You can't read Deleuze yet".  I
said, "why not," she said, "you haven't read enough Plato yet," I said,
"what does that have to do with reading Deleuze?"  She said, "you haven't
read enough to understand Deleuze".  I said, "how do you know what I can
and can't understand?"  Those are direct quotes, I'll never forget that
encounter.
	To tie in something I mentioned before, this is preciesly where you
demonstrate your acceptance of the institution.  That is, you have here
defined the university as the place where we are supposed to orgy in
("anyone who would choose as his/her career the role of an academic MUST
learn the traditionsand") then regurgitate ("it requires the ability to
re-express the lessons and arguments of our professors (and of their
professors, and of their professors, etc.").) what the unioversity has said
before.  You "MUST" read, internalize, and "re-express" what we tell you
to.  It is "necessary".  I ask again, WHY?  Necessary for what?  Necessary
for complience, for fitting in, for conformity, all true--what else is this
"necessary" for?  Do I need to read Plato to understand Deleuze?  Why are
Eastern philosophy courses almost always for second or third year students,
while Plato is often required the first year of college--they need to read
Plato to understand Lao Tzu?
	I have never undestood why emersing oneself in "the tradition" is in any
way necessary for learning, for "undergoes changes".  If it is not
necessary for learning--and I would argue that it isn't, and futher that it
isn't even useful for learning, or at least that there are much more
creative ways to learn--why is it necessry to repate myself just one more
time.



Earlier in this thread M.A. King wrote:
----------------
Everything that isn't joyful is bad for the soul?  

{certainly not, agree with you here}

I'm finishing up my M.A. thesis these days ... there haven't been many
moments along the way
that I would call "joyful", but I hardly think that it's been
"pathological", either.  I like what Foucault has to say on this topic:
"The 'essay'--which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in
the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not [and this is the hard
part, the part which, I readily concede, is made extraordinarily difficult
by the way universities work] as the simplistic appropriation of others for
the purpose of communication--is the living substance of philosophy, at
least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past,
i.e., an 'ascesis,' *askesis*, an exercise of oneself in the activity of
thought" (_The Use of Pleasure_).
----------------

I like this a lot too, and Luba has said something similar to the following
(though perhaps with less vitrol :), but what seems to me the whole
substance of it is, King concedes, "made extraordinarily difficult by the
way universities work".  Isn't that giving up the whole game?  What is
learning if not a process by which "one undergoes changes" rather than
"simplistic[ly] appropriat[ing]" others' {facts, ideas, concepts,
structures, images, etc., etc.}?  Is it not pathological to attempt
learning in an environment where learning itself is constantly relegated to
least importance behind a vast array of rules and regulations on knowledge
itself, and the structures and conduct of expressable thought?  Where one
is in fact often told, more or less directly, that ones' own ideas, images,
feelings--ones' thoughts themselves--are out of bounds, invalid in learned
discourse unless already thought by more deserving personages?  What could
be more pathological than trying to learn in an environment where thinking
your own thoughts is proscribed, must be done covertly, cannot be allowed
to emerge unless already approved by others before you thought them, unless
your thoughts already _were_ others' thoughts, so that by expressing them
you only demonstrate your complete subsumtion into the system--you
demonstrate that you no longer need to be schooled, you already think
others' thoughts on your own without being told you must only think others'
thoughts, you're safe, you can graduate now.  Talk about pathological.

	Sure there is some room to manuever, so give, some leeway, but it is, in
my opinion, something on the same order of the leeway Chomsky describes as
given to dissenters in "demoncracies".  It is a very contrained leeway that
nonetheless gives the institutions and their supporters the opportunity to
say, "there. look, see that guy, _he_ doesn't agree with us, but we don't
toss him out."  



>>
>>     Still, while necessary, this process of internalizing the
>>"accepted" and "traditional" ways of thinking is by no means the whole
>>story of the university.  As someone who spends most of his time in
>>literature departments (the situation might very well be radically
>>different in philosophy or history departments), I have found that the
>>one thing that EVERY professor I have studied with wanted from his/her
>>students was *originality*.
>
>I'm glad you've been so fortunate, but I remain skeptical about this as a
>general principle. Originality how defined and gauged?

	Have to agree with Luba here--I've found this very rare (anecdotally).  As
Luba asks, you say every professor wants originality--but originality in
what?  Anecdote:
	I remember in undegrad I was majoring in math and found the assignements
boring--I knew that I knew the stuff already and the homework wasn't
helping me learn anything, so I made up my own assignments which I
carefully designed to incorporate the concepts underlying the regular
assingnments, but going further.  Only one faculty member ever accept my
home-made assignments.  Every other one agreed that, yes, I was
demonstrating adequate or better knowledge of the concepts we were wroking
on, and yes, what I was doing was significantly beyond what was expected,
but refused to accept them because they were not assigned.  I told them to
go ahead and give me their zeros.  They said, why don't you just do the
assinments?  I said, why don't you do them yourself?  They said (in one way
or another), because I'm the professor and I already know how to do this.
I said, well, that's why I don't do them either--I'm not learning anything
from it, I'd rather spend my time working on projects that are helping me
learn something.
	In your lit departments, what would a professor say if a student walked in
and said, "well, I know you assigned a paper on _War and Peace_ which we
just finished, but I wrote a paper on Tolstoy's politics based on direct
biographica information and literary analysis of some of his other writings
instead because I think it's important to look at how he lived in relation
to what he wrote, but _War and Peace_ didn't turn out to be central to my
focus."   Note that this is still relatively close to the assignement (in
my reconing anyway), and I expect that there would be some professors out
there who would take the paper with minor complaints.  However, I would
guess that a majority would tell the student to go back and write the
assigned paper or be punished--regardless of how "good" or "bad" the paper
the student presented was, if the professor would even read it.  I've had
similar situations both in lit and in philosophy departments.


>
>
>  EVERY professor I have ever had has made
>>it quite clear that their highest expectation for their students, what
>>they want more than anything, is a fresh perspective, something new,
>>something not-yet-thought.

	Have you ever been allowed to turn in a paper with no references?  With no
indication that you culled this idea from the morass of others' thoughts
you "MUST" "internalize" (your words)?  Serres has an interesting passage
in his discussion with Bruno Latour (SP?) (_Conversations on Science,
Culture, and Time_) where he wonders if eventually all words will have to
be replaced by proper names and so reduce all discourse to a recital of all
the professors who have gone before.  Hagel Kant Aquinas, Deleuze Simons
Plato Han-Fei Tzu, Bloom?  If you must always place your thoughts within
and/or in relation to what has already been thought, is this not a
significant, even a cripling constraint?  If not, think about what this
implies about how much your thoughts conform to existing thoughts in "the
tradition".  People talk about tracing the evolution of critical theory, or
poststructuralism, or hermenutics, or a thousand other "traditions"--and I
don't see many leaps, I see a lot of people writing stuff like, "well, she
read so and so who had a concept of such and such which was very smilar to
the concept she eventually developed, but it was different here, and here."
 I've even seen some of this on this list recently.  Doesn't this say
something about how we are taught to be constrained in thought?

	Note that in his lates book Serres doesn't use references or footnotes.
But interestingly he still says that this internalization of "the
tradition" is necessary.

>
>But isn't it true that this something new, something not-yet-thought is
>nevertheless expected to be formulated within certain prescribed
>theoretical frameworks? After all, it would be naive to think that all
>sorts of approaches are equally encouraged, that some aren't decried as
>passe or otherwise unworthy. And yet it could well be that such approaches
>may well come into vogue again someday in, as you say, a new and fresh
>way--depending on exactly who initiates the fashion.But I'm sounding
>cynical. Don't get me wrong. I love exciting and challenging new theory,
>but I'm dismayed by the discrepancy between protestations of multiplicity
>of intellectual perspectives and the academic reality as I've experienced
>it. 

	Agree with you totally Luba.

>
> And I have had A LOT of teachers, some
>>famous, some obscure, all of whom agree on this.  Merely rehashing a
>>contemporary debate on something is NOT going to get you the high
>>marks--if you have nothing original or creative to contribute, you're
>>not going to catch the prof's attention.

	INterestingly enough, my first advisor told me that I could not write a
thesis expressing my own thoughts on a subject, I had to write, according
to her, "a comparative analysis" to demonstrate that I understand at least
two "traditional" philosophical standpoints "deeply enough to merit a
degree".  Direct quote.
	But more to the point, how many paper topics do you get to chose rather
than having had them assigned, as if you couldn't come up with something
interesting to write about?  I had a few classes where this was allowed
occasionally, but I'd say it was NOT at all acceptable 90% of the time.  IN
other words--ok, write something new and creative, but it must be on the
topic the professor choses and it must be framed in this "traditional
canon," make sure to braket everything with some one else's name.


>
>Perhaps not, but timely allegiance to a certain position can do much to
>score one political points at moments of heated debate. Professors are only
>human: complete with ideals *and* insecurities.
>
>
> And of course, this is why
>>being an academic always flirts with isolation, with absorption in
>>obscure topics, with withdrawal: simply, it takes a whole lot of work
>>to be both learned in a given tradition AND to be able to say
>>something new and interesting about it.  

	Again, why are you trying to say something interesting only if its about
"the tradition"?  It seems implicit in this statement that universities are
arenas for internalizing traditions and expanding them, and expressly not
arenas for moving beyond them if they have anything to say about it--which
sometimes they don't, of course.

	Well, that's my two cents for the moment.  As its now 3am where I am, I'm
not to sure if I should send this without editing while I'm awake, but here
it is anyway.

Fire away,

Liano





   

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