Ponderers, Sloggers, Slackers and More: Understanding the profiles of bloggers to help promote academic self-regulation.

Every once in a while you can come across an article so extraordinary you are left wondering how it has not managed to penetrate the blogosphere- especially when it is about the blogosphere's reflexivity, or lack thereof! I feel grateful to Mark McMahon then for providing this material that can obviously expand a lot on what I have said about the blogosphere over the years in relation to academia. Indeed, one of the most innovative aspects of McMahon's piece is that he sets out the steps that can be taken to improve blogging as a form of learning. Not only bloggers, but anyone interested in pedagogy more generally, should find his suggestions highly worthwhile. Teachers of all stripes will probably recognise these patterns in their students--and yes--in their colleagues as well! Hell, anyone honest enough will recognise aspects of themselves in these categories. As for me, I can sometimes be a "worker blogger" and "a slogger blogger", but I'd like to think that I'm a "ponderer blogger" for the most part. I'm certainly not harboring any delusons about being an "uber blogger" though.

I was partially prompted to post this because I've been very disappointed by some of the stuff I've seen. One example that comes to mind--by no means atypical--is the whole flamewar about "grey vampires", insofar as its proponents are quick to label critics as having only a paralyzing effect on "digital discourse". Sadly though, in such instances, the benefits of "digital discourse" appear to be simply taken as read, rather than explained, letalone defended, in the depth they require to be substantiated. As McMahon in effect demonstrates, the risk is that such individuals are themselves falling victim to "bragger blogger" syndrome, "in which a high level of self-concept combined with a low level of metacognition meant that they were unable to critique their own work". By extension, this can result in an inability to accept criticism from others. 


But ad hominem attacks are not the point of this post. I prefer to forgive and forget. Anyway, I think ad hominem attacks have already done enough damage and no doubt partly provoked the whole "grey vampire" backlash in the first place. So, it's time instead to move forward. McMahon is invaluable in this regard because he is not preoccupied with self-justification; he is making constructive criticisms which everyone can benefit from. And so now, without further ado, to a few of his key points:

Patterns of Self-Regulation in Blogging

To expose the types of thinking evident in blogs, six examples are presented that
represent the ‘typical’ blogger in terms of the elements of self-regulation discussed.
These are:
• the Slogger Blogger – demonstrating volitional control;
• the Worker Blogger – demonstrating cognitive strategy use;
• the Eager Blogger – demonstrating motivation;
• the Ponderer Blogger – demonstrating the reflection inherent in selfmonitoring
• the Bragger Blogger – demonstrating high self-concept; and
• the Über Blogger – demonstrating a high level of metacognition.
These are discussed through textual analysis of learning outputs that best exemplify the above characteristics. While it may at first appear to be a somewhat reductive approach to defining a complex process, it is hoped that it will provide a simple framework to assist future students in understanding themselves and the strategies that work best for them.

Strategy Use in Blogs – The Slogger Blogger and the Worker Blogger

The best evidence of strategy use is in the blogs within the unit on Writing for Games lay in the specific activities that students selected. Typical cognitive strategies evidenced by Worker Bloggers were:
• summarising readings;
• describing designs;
• sourcing other forms of information; and
• writing personal anecdotes.

Most students in the group were able to produce elements of the above. These varied, however, in the extent to which they demonstrated higher order thinking. Worker Bloggers could select strategies and apply them to their assignments. Summaries were the most common of those demonstrated by weaker students in that they tended to describe what the week’s reading was about. This involved some necessary selection of detail but not always an ability to effectively critique work. Similarly being able to express opinions, identifying links and articulating design ideas in an unintegrated way are all symptomatic of students who operate purely at the strategic level but without engaging in self-regulatory processes.

The best of these were also Slogger Bloggers, who showed an ability to manage effort. One ‘slogger’ provided lengthy descriptions of the reading but even then there was little that related back to the week’s topic and other materials such as the lecture notes. Failure to apply volitional control, on the other hand, resulted in little or no work contained within the blog. These Non Bloggers are typically the students that fall by the wayside over the semester. Only one student in this group could be classified as demonstrating high volitional control but weak cognitive strategy use.
This student simply reiterated the contents of that week’s lecture,with each post beginning, ‘This week was about…’. Ultimately there was little evidence of the student having done anything other than attend the class and reword the lecture material.

Non Bloggers may be amenable to a more rigorous and frequent approach to assessment to provide an external mechanism to ensure consistent effort. Slogger Bloggers, however, appear to have the opposite problem, where they cannot match their effort with a consistent level of quality. For those that do not have existing cognitive strategies, direct instruction may be helpful. The assumption that all students already have existing skills in areas such as summarising or internet research proved an inaccurate one, at least for the student in this cohort.

Motivational and Self‐Monitoring Processes in Blogs – the Eager Blogger and the
Ponderer Blogger

While most of the students in Writing for Games could submit their work and use received strategies such as summary appropriately, they did not always demonstrate a high level of motivation or self-monitoring. Ponderer Bloggers did more than apply strategy - they connected strategies together to enhance them and reflect on their value. A good example of this was one student who identified key elements of a reading on genre that were perceived as particularly relevant and then discussed in terms of how it applied in films as well as games. The student identified a contrasting perspective and sought to reconcile it with the one in the reading. As self-monitoring is a key regulatory process that assists in the formation of strategies it is important to provide students opportunities to reflect on their performance and to go beyond being purely Worker Bloggers. While it was not a component of this particular activity, one of the intrinsic benefits of blogging environments is its potential as a medium for peer review. Allowing for social remediation that is geared towards learners’ zones of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) provides a strong point from which to reflect as well as exposing learners to multiple perspectives on an issue. Such techniques may be able to support Ponderer Bloggers in developing new strategies.

Many of the students appeared to have a high level of motivation. This was evident in the stated enthusiasm for the concept within class and in their blogs, with one student in an early activity where they were required to discuss their motivations for studying the unit arguing that this was an opportunity for him to combine two of his loves –creative writing and gaming. Previous teaching evaluations have demonstrated a strong orientation towards having choice in their blogging activities and may have explained the large number of Eager Bloggers that made up this group. The level of enthusiasm inherent in the tone of some of their writing when either agreeing or disagreeing with concepts or ideas reinforced this (‘This article summed up my ideas perfectly’) as well as the strong evidence in the form of the outputs of motivation through the effort evident in their work. For the two students who could not be classified as Eager Bloggers it became clear that personal relevance was a major factor in their motivation or lack of it. The first statement of one student on her first week’s blog was that she ‘didn’t like writing’. In order to address these Slacker Bloggers, teaching strategies need to be in place that go beyond purely extrinsic motivators such as assessment to provide more intrinsic mechanisms to motivate learners. Malone (1981) for example described motivational factors such as Challenge, Control, Curiosity and Fantasy. In having a strong sense of ownership of their work, and a lot of choice in terms of activities, most students could be described as demonstrating Eager Blogger characteristics.

Self‐Awareness

 The separation of self-awareness to affective and cognitive components is a necessary but somewhat arbitrary one. Corno (1986), argued for metacognition as the dominant controlling process; that ‘affect is the subjective perception of emotional states; thus associated attempts to control negative affect fall within the domain of metacognitive control’ (p. 334). While this may be true, most would argue that knowing oneself and believing in oneself are still discrete states of awareness. To have belief that is not based upon an accurate model of ones abilities suggests that on its own self-concept is a limiting state. This evidenced itself in the form of Bragger Bloggers within the unit Writing for Games. Gaming often is associated with fan-based activity where the line separating knowledge of the medium as a consumer and ability to actually design games can be a difficult one for novices to understand. Bragger Bloggers were most visible in this study where students articulated designs that tended to replicate their own favourite games without providing much originality or creativity. In this sense, their high level of self-concept combined with low level of metacognition meant that
they were unable to critique their own work. Providing a ‘reality check’ for such students to ensure that they continued to question the value of their work became an important focus of the feedback provided throughout the semester. This was done by asking students to question the originality of their ideas and provide a mini ‘exegesis’ to accompany their designs, which both placed their work in a cultural framework but separated it from other typical examples. Further evidence of Bragger Blogging could be found in a tendency of some students to critique other examples without applying the same level to their own work.

The flipside of self-concept was evident in Blamer Blogging, which in the case of this study proved to be a more damaging concept. This was evident through self-blame or the application of defense strategies such as self-handicapping, defensive pessimism or self-justification. Examples of this were where one student regularly qualified his ideas as ‘not very good’ but failed to identify specific aspects that could be improved.

Another student in class admitted that he deliberately left his work until the last minute, not because he could not regulate his effort but because he could then justify a bad mark as a result of his laziness rather than his talent. It is therefore important that blogging environments encourage supportive feedback and allow the risk taking inherent in many creative processes. Enabling students to identify a specific number of strengths and weaknesses in their work allows self-assessment to be done in a way that is not punitive, as does ensuring that peer feedback is always focused on improvement rather than identifying problems.

As the dominant controlling process there is evidence to support the contention that metacognitive blogging is the ultimate goal to be achieved. The best examples of blogs were those that provided a clear development of design and an ability to both justify design features and identify areas for improvement over coming weeks. Such students are called Über Bloggers in this paper because they have share some qualities with the Nietzschian concept the Übermensch – a transcendent individual characterised by a Will to Power, which is not necessarily a state of domination over others but more one of creativity and self-efficacy (Nietzsche, 1977). Such students may be seen as manifesting the true potential of blogging. The most metacognitive of
blogs demonstrated the best of its subordinate processes – enthusiastic and timely posts that bore witness to the application of key strategies both for design and learning within a framework of reflection and self-evaluation.

Recommendations

The profiles discussed in this paper are not designed to be a complete or fully accurate depiction of the multiple forms of discourse in blogs as they relate to self-regulation. Rather, they are provided here as a point of discussion and basis from which to explore the value of blogging for effective learning. Nevertheless the following key findings may prove useful for those attempting to use blogs as a learning tool:

• Provide extrinsic volitional rewards and controls such as frequent assessment.
• Provide direct instruction on the strategies inherent in blogging within the
academic discipline.
• Encourage intrinsic motivation by providing challenge, engaging curiosity and
promoting choice and personal relevance.
• Encourage multiple perspectives, contextualisation and recontextualisation
learning content.
• Provide opportunities for peer review.
• Provide a supportive environment for risk taking, identifying strengths as well
as weaknesses and providing opportunities for improvement.
• Have students not just reflect on their work but themselves as learners,
through self-assessment, journaling their thinking processes and developing
plans.

Read the full article here.

Open access is no cybertarian fantasy

I tip my hat to derridata for bringing this one to my attention. It's written by Toby Miller, who I've previously credited (in my "Melissa Gregg" post) for his work on "the well tempered self". Although he does not specifically refer to that here, it is easy to read between the lines, as I attempted to do, to see how that could specifically be applied to the "author function". Or, as he puts it this article, "Who can stay abreast of journals as forms of knowledge rather than personnel evaluation?" Another reason I find  this issue so interesting is that I make my living researching, ghostwriting, and editing journal articles, along with the odd book, for the higher education sector.

 The greed of publishers never ceases to amaze me. Afterall, what they are basically doing is "double dipping": the universities churn out the articles that are published in the journals, and then the university has to in effect "buy them back" by subscribing to the journals. This is why I've always supported open access. As Miller makes abundantly clear though, such a transition would require considerable institutional support. Like I also said, there could be some very good ramifications for independent scholars/bloggers, who are frustrated by the prohibitively expensive tollbooths that publishers have put on the information superhighway.

I'm a bit cynical too about smaller publishers, such as Zer0 Books, who appear to spend all of their time looking to turn the blogosphere into private intellectual real estate. A bit of skepticism seems in order in regard to their rhetoric. Do they really offer an alternative to the mainstream publishing model? From what I can see, their business model merely exploits Web 2.0 tools to discern "market trends" i.e. who is dominating the attention space, whereas the big publishers use more expensive and accurate bibliometrics, such as Web of Science. If offered no other choice, I'd still opt for the established academic publishers because at least you can be sure they attempt to offer a more rigorous form of quality control i.e. double blind peer review. In regard to the blogosphere/Zer0 Books model, I've never forgotten Cory Doctorow's argument that the authority of any Internet based data ranking will be inherently problematic because of a reliance on metadata standards. Doctorow offers a detailed argument as to why these standards should be regarded as "metacrap", which still holds up overall, even if we want to make more allowance for how information overload may be equally culpable as laziness, egocentrism, stupidity, and falsehood, in determining the meta-utopia. It appears that every argument in support of folksonomy as a form of democratization can be logically countered by Doctorow, insofar as metadata exerts a formative influence on which information is available to choose from. Hence, one must never make the mistake of conflating market populism with genuine democratic populism.

What we need then is a real alternative which combines the advantages of open access and quality control. I better go now though because I have some more projects to complete, but I hope to find time for blogging again soon.

Academic Repression

On some campuses, administrative officials have monitored classes, questioned the political content of books and films, and screened the lists of guest speakers—all in the name of scholarly objectivity and balance.

In some places, however, trustees and administrators readily pay out huge sums for guest lectures by committed, highly partisan, rightwing ideologues.

The guardians of academic orthodoxy never admit that some of their decisions about hiring and firing faculty might be politically motivated. Instead they will say the candidate has not published enough articles. Or if enough, the articles are not in conventionally acceptable academic journals. Or if in acceptable journals, they are still wanting in quality and originality, or show too narrow or too diffuse a development. Seemingly objective criteria can be applied in endlessly elastic ways….

Mainstream academics treat their politically safe brands of teaching and research as the only ones that qualify as genuine scholarship. Such was the notion used to deny Samuel Bowles tenure at Harvard. Since Marxist economics is not really scholarly, it was argued, Bowles was neither a real scholar nor an authentic economist. Thus centrists ideologues have purged scholarly dissidents under the guise of protecting rather than violating academic standards. The decision seriously split the economics department and caused Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontif to quit Harvard in disgust.

Radical academics have been rejected because their political commitments supposedly disallow them from objective scholarship. In fact much of the best scholarship comes from politically committed scholars.

One goal of any teacher should be to introduce students to bodies of information and analysis that have been systematically ignored or suppressed–a task that usually is better performed by iconoclasts than by those who accept existing institutional and class arrangements as the finished order of things. So it has been feminists and African-American researchers who, in their partisan urgency, have revealed the previously unexamined sexist and racist presumptions and gaps of conventional scholarship.

Likewise, it is leftist intellectuals (including some who are female or nonwhite) who have produced the challenging scholarship about popular struggle, political economy, and class power, subjects remaining largely untouched by centrists and conservatives.16 In sum, a dissenting ideology can awaken us to things regularly overlooked by conventional scholarship.

Orthodox ideological strictures are applied also to a teacher’s outside political activity. At the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, an instructor of political science, Ted Hayes, an anti-capitalist, was denied a contract renewal because he was judged to have “outside political commitments” that made it impossible for him to be objective. Two of the senior faculty who voted against him were state committee members of the Republican Party in Wisconsin.17 There was no question as to whether their outside political commitments interfered with their objectivity as teachers or with the judgments they made about colleagues.

–Michael Parenti, “Academic Repression, Past and Present”

A bizarre disconnect

I was fixing some errors in my "Hyper real religions" post, which I blame on a bad bout of illness, when I received an email from Derridata castigating Melinda Cooper, who is fast becoming a central figure in debates about biology and society:

"...woeful as Melinda Cooper's bizarre disconnect from political economy with weather turbulence...goddess help us if this morphs into Sloterdijk-inspired atmospherics

AT THIS POINT A HUGE AMOUNT OF TEXT HAS BEEN DELETED FROM THE ORIGINAL POST BECAUSE OF A REQUEST TO PROTECT A BLOGGER'S PRIVACY/PERSONAL IDENTITY. HOPEFULLY IT CAN REAPPEAR IN A MODIFIED FORM IN THE NEAR FUTURE. MY APOLOGIES.

So if some of Cooper's recent efforts are indeed disappointing, it's better to turn attention elsewhere. Steve Fuller informs me that his latest book favourably refers to this blog, so I look forward to receiving my signed copy, as well as preparing an interview, or some other kind of feature, which should appear here soon.

We also recently took in China Mieville's appearance at Kinokuniya, so I'll try to post some pics and maybe a brief writeup too.

In Pursuit of Knowledge

Listening to Frank Donoghue's comments inspired me to look up this book by Deborah L. Rhode, which claims that only 2% of published humanities articles are ever cited by other scholars. The disparity inspired Donoghue (follow the "related videos" link in the clip I posted earlier today) to argue that conferences are a much better forum for exchanging ideas.

Here is the description of Rhode's book:

"Although academics have never lacked for critics, publications on the profession tend to be either popularized polemics, which are engaging but misleading, or scholarly analyses, which are intellectually responsible but of little interest to anyone but specialists. In Pursuit of Knowledge offers an alternative: a unique portrait of academic life that should appeal to both experts and a general audience.

Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including higher education, history, law, sociology, economics, and literature, the book focuses on the ways in which the pursuit of status has undermined the pursuit of knowledge. Deborah Rhode argues that both individual scholars and institutions in higher education are caught in an arms race of reputation. The result has been to skew priorities in scholarship, erode commitments to teaching, compromise efforts of public intellectuals, and impede effectiveness in administration.

The book offers several solutions to counter these pervasive problems in our research institutions. Rhode makes a case for increasing accountability and realigning reward systems. She argues that what is needed is a greater sense of responsibility among universities and their faculties to narrow the gap between academic ideals and practices.

In Pursuit of Knowledge is meticulously researched and elegantly written. It is also exceptionally entertaining in its use of quotations culled from over a hundred academic novels, including works by Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, David Lodge, and C.P. Snow. (For example, from P.G. Wodehouse's The Girl in Blue, “The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”) The result is a highly readable but also deeply reflective analysis of the academic profession".

The Last Professors

The Last Professors is equally scathing on the hypocrisy of our disavowed competitiveness. But wait: the People’s Republic of the Humanities, competitive? Donoghue puts it a little more gently, discerning “a collective behaviour that ironically duplicates the very corporate values from which we humanists wish to distance ourselves” (26). Exhibit A: graduate school, which picks the best and brightest and then drives them to despair by demanding superlative performance in “a unique kind of competition in which the stakes are extremely high and the rules are never fully explained” (33). Exhibit B is the job market, typically experienced as “an intense personal drama about individual distinction and merit” (37). Exhibit C: the still-hallowed monograph, unpurchased, unborrowed, unread, and unassailable. In all of these cases, we define success in impossible terms. And I use the first person here deliberately: there is no “they” doing this to us. Don’t believe me? Try striking up a conversation at the next academic meeting with, “We should forget about writing monographs.” It is hard not to agree with Donoghue that our research models are “clearly broken” (55).

Here and here for further details.

Thanks for the links Derridata. Have you read this yet?:

"Student rebellion is therefore deep-seated, with the prospect of debt slavery being compounded by a future of insecurity and a sense of alienation from an institution perceived to be mercenary and bureaucratic that, in the bargain, produces a commodity subject to rapid devaluation".

From the same piece:

"In the corporatised university students now confront capital directly, in the crowded classrooms where teachers can hardly match names on the rosters with faces, in the expansion of adjunct teaching and, above all, in the mounting student debt which, by turning students into indentured servants to the banks and/or state, acts as a disciplinary mechanism on student life, also casting a long shadow on their future".

Academic Rumspringa, Peer Review as Holy Scripture

There are a raft of issues to be dealt with here.

But firstly, give 'em enough rope and they hang themselves: what I posted about Slavoj Zizek in "Britney Is Cheaper" is pretty much confirmed in The Truth of Zizek, edited by Bowman and Stamp. I was amused by the irony in Simon Critchtley's contribution, which recounts how Zizek accused him of being an academic Rumspringa:

"the Amish practice of letting their children run wild for a couple of years of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll with the 'English' before either deciding to return to their community or preferring not to. Basically, Zizek accuses me of...[engaging] in a series of hysterical political provocations based on the dim memory of some radical past."

I regard Jeremy Valentine as doing a better job than Critchley of fleshing out the implications of this characterisation for Zizek himself. Gilbert makes specific mention of how Zizek does not take cognizance of the institutional and commercial forces that act upon him and make his interventions possible. Think of my Britney comparison then, when Gilbert writes:

"What we see here is simply the logic of celebrity culture and deep commodification extended to the field of 'intellectual' publishing, and it is virtually a truism today to acknowledge that celebrity is one of the most striking manifestations of the commodifying and individualizing logics of neoliberal capitalism".

In other words, Zizek is no social epistemologist, and, as Gilbert convincingly demonstrates, a dubious Marxist to boot. These are serious charges, so one might expect a vigorous self-defence to be launched in reply. Sadly, the reply could most charitably be described as a philosophical minotaur: a mythological creature, pale and only half formed. Zizek's strategy is to argue that he simply has no institutional power. He claims there are no academic departments dominated by Lacanians, as proof of his marginalization, and that he gives public lectures because, "this is all I have". But would Zizek be able to retain tenureship if he did not have such an extensive publication output as well, what with auditing culture being what it is? And wouldn't his celebrity status ensure that the teaching component of his tenureship would virtuallly give him a rubber stamp to teach whatever (and probably whenever) he wanted, because enrolments in his courses would far surpass that of the average journeyman academic? Surely such relative privileges would more than compensate for any "marginalization" Zizek may have felt when, according to him, his letters of recommendation did not lead to candidates winning academic jobs? Why not square up to the specific charges about publication and celebrity status, rather than just ducking and weaving all the time?

Because no straight answer is forthcoming, I can only conclude that the answers are so unsatisfactory because these kinds of people are simply unprepared for this line of questioning. But why should I expect anything different? Afterall, when you are habitutated to operating in a bubble you probably won't change too much. Recidivism rates will remain high for such serial offenders because there is little incentive to do anything else as you are so totally institutionalised you cannot openly acknowledge the forms of "structuration" at work in academia i.e. it both enables and constrains your actions. Donna Haraway is someone who could see through the kind of imposture Zizek embodies, when she warned of the danger of adopting the "God trick", to see everything from nowhere- what could also be described as omniscience.

With Haraway still ringing in my ears, let me be perfectly clear then about where I'm coming from. I'm not in the business of peddling academic gossip. What I've said about Zizek is meant to have nothing to do with anything that trivial. I'd also distinguish it from Furedi's argument concerning how peer review is infused with vested interests. For Furedi, this is pretty much unavoidable, but he claims it need not always invalidate holding authors accountable to an objective standard of scientific evidence. He maintains that this accountability can even come from "the grey literature", ie. what is published outside of the official channels of peer review. What appears then as a democratisation of [extended] peer review though, founders on an unfortunate reliance on the sanctity of objective scientific evidence as the gold standard to measure intrinsic worth. In practice, what this means is that Furedi is unwilling to accept any 'vested interest' that equates to 'advocacy science', wherein research is politicised and moralised, on behalf of a greater cause than the individualised careerist advancement that can routinely manifest in the procedures of peer review.

It's not difficult to see though that Furedi isn't throwing a very long lifeline to scientists, who, need I remind anybody, also comprise the general public. Furedi's goal appears laudable at first glance: peer review should not be used as a form of Holy Writ to prevent the public from raising concerns about, for example, climate science. But wouldn't these concerns be raised in the name of some other standard of the moralisation and politicisation of science anyway? For example, people living in the communities that could be affected by the implementation of scientific policy, could, quite rightly, demand a greater say in how the science should be used in an everyday context. So, it's the inclusiveness of peer review that needs to be extended, and this does not require placing a moratorium on social epistemological concerns.

Speaking personally, whenever I listen to an anarcho primitivist such as John Zerzan, I don't even really need to be a climate science sceptic to know why I find his beliefs so repellant. I've already got ideas from my sociological studies about why everyday life in the form of communitarianism he advocates would quickly become unbearable. I was reading Richard Sennett before I'd even heard of climate change. Moreover, writing as a sociologist, Furedi should have no trouble acknowledging this either. Just look at the mission statement of Spiked:

"spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it".

So it seems the definition of a "free thinker" certainly need not entail any exclusive reliance on the scientific method. If the challenge is to escape the dangers of academic rumspringa and peer review as holy writ, those who have sensed Steve Fuller waiting in the wings, can feel relieved that I can now bring him to centre stage. His record speaks for itself, as it is clear he would find common cause with Spiked in principle. To escape the twin dangers I've been discussing though, he would also insist, as a social epistemologist, on reading together the "two Karls": Marx and Popper. Indeed, mentioning Fuller at this point provides a convenient way of bringing this post full circle. Back in 2000, he was interviewed in the journal Configurations (8/3/pp389-417), and had this to say about the choice of research problems for many academics. Permit me to drop this science on you. It is a description of how many folks follow the path of least resistance, which reminds us that Zizek et al are symptomatic of a general, institutionalised character type:

CMA: To what extent, if any, are research problems dependent on the researcher's interest profile, taken in a psychological sense?

SF: You know, I'm a very funny kind of academic, because I don't have a very high opinion of academics as a group of people. My impression of academics is that they basically stick with what works. Let's say you're a graduate student and you spend a certain time working on a thesis. (This is so true in the United States, where people end up taking their thesis and making it into the basis, the methodological basis, for what they do subsequently.) They do this thesis, they've got this method, they manage to publish a few articles that get them some initial visibility in the field, and then they say: "Well, gee, people seem to like this. Let me see how many different ways can I do the same thing for the rest of my life."

CMA: So we are back to B. F. Skinner?

SF: I really think old B. F. is underestimated. The guy had some ideas, though he wouldn't call them that! He had some good conditioned responses, I should say. But in any case, his take on things is largely true--and so disappointing.

CMA: But is there something more to it than just positive feedback, so to speak, or reinforcement? Some motive or motivational structure of belief?

SF: I've always found it very hard to figure out why people go into academics. I don't actually think many people go into it because they've got an idea that they want to promote. If you were a naive observer on the scene, you might think that was the reason people would go into academics. But my experience with students and colleagues, even the very bright ones, is that that's not really what they are about. Once they find something that works, they simply stick with it. They like the environment or the lifestyle or something about academic life. Then they ask, "What do I need to do to be recognized as one of these people?" Thus, I find a lot of academics are almost pathologically interested in having other people in their fields respecting them. There's such a great deal of concern about that it ends up really influencing the problems they choose, etc. Of course, even ambitious people will always think certain "respected" characters are idiots, and they wouldn't want to please them for anything in the world. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how often academic discourse will revolve around: "Well, you know, X was in the audience at my latest talk and, you know, he asked me a very pleasant question and I think he likes me . . ." I don't think this way myself, but I think most people think this way and that's why they end up working on the kinds of topics that they do. It's not because they come in wanting to work on the topics, or anything like that.

The joke isn't funny anymore

After what has just happened at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, I cast my mind back to the distinction drawn in Will Teach for Food: PhD can mean two things: Poor Hungry Desperate, or Privileged Histrionic Demanding. Of course, nothing can excuse such an extreme form of protest, and I feel so sorry for the victims....

"Welcome fool, you have come.....

...of your own free will to the appointed place.The game is over.The game of the hunted leading the hunter...it is we who have found you and brought you here and controlled your every thought and action since you arrived......."

This is a quotation from the final scene of The Wicker Man, where at last Sergeant Howie learns the terrible truth from Lord Summerisle about what is to happen to him at the hands of a remote community of pagans. I've mentioned it before, and hope to post again on the cultural significance of this film more specifically, but here I want to use it in relation to "knowledge politics" (just as I did in one of my first ever posts, which quoted Tyrell's speech to Roy Batty from Blade Runner, as mirroring the academic supervisor/student relationship...and also The Matrix as an allegory of the kinds of theory favoured in the blogosphere). So this is the most recent part of an occasional series, on my part.

To be sure, I mentioned before in "Loneliness As a Way of Life" that The Wicker Man holds some appeal to me as part of a fantasy of what my funeral could consist of. Just imagine Lord Summerisle's words I've quoted here opening the service, turning to address the casket. I know that some people may not share my sense of humour, so it is hardly a practical proposal, just as I am only too well aware that the sections of the blogosphere I've referred to before are not inclined to critically apply the science fiction tropes they favour to their own practices.

But rather than talk about them specifically again here, I'd like to consider what else appeals to me about Lord Summerisle's speech. I can't help thinking that part of the appeal of horror as a genre is that it can act as a catalyst to paradoxically heal cognitive dissonance. The epiphany, the horrific moment of revelation, concentrates the senses, so that the scales fall away from your eyes. At last you can see the truth for what it really is. Danger can then sometimes become a prelude to escape (although not in The Wicker Man of course). There is some appeal then in escaping the mundane contingency constitutive of modernity. A special characteristic of this contingency is the institutionalisation of formal democratic equality, which is undercut by the commodification of social relationships. This contradiction in turn has a corrosive effect on intimate communication, thereby generating cognitive dissonance.

The best explanation I've read is Pixley and Bittman's sociological approach to the communication patterns characteristic of modern family life. Referring to Bateson's work on the inability of schizophrenic patients to metacommunicate, they reference how it becomes difficult to distinguish play from serious intent: i.e. a nip is not a bite. Hence, ways and means have been devised to manage the contradiction between the recognition of formal equality and its actual realisation. The discrepancy between the two is discernible in the way that a command can be disguised as a query: a husband who asks his wife, "where is my tie?", is actually issuing a command, "go and find my tie, and bring it to me". Psychotherapists describe this common scenario in terms of "pseudomutuality". It is played out and replicated in many institutional settings, and not surprisingly, this can include the relationship between student and supervisor, in which the former can be made to feel like an anxious child attempting to please a capricious parent. A variation of this theme can be found in the management technique of "remote control" described by Richard Sennett in his Authority.

These are powerful social forces, so it is to be expected that they conspire against the realisation of the Habermasian "ideal speech situation" advocated by Pixley and Bittman. The university may offer access to esoteric knowledge, but it is not the norm for the institution to be forthright about the discrepancy between subjective experience and the ideals it supposedly represents, which can prove disenchanting for students. The student life can prove to be a trial by ideal, just as it was for religious novices who had to suffer horrendous deprivations to emphasize the point that accessing the esoteric knowledge was no easy thing (for films on this topic, check Martyrs and A Man Called Horse).....with the important difference that the liberal student environment helps ensure meaning is always "deferred". "Rites of passage" are perhaps not what they once used to be, because there are two [deeper] forces undermining each other. The horrific moment of revelation, should it ever arrive in the university context, is something like The Necrosocial I posted about earlier. Indeed, the reference to a "cult" in this context makes my The Wicker Man parallels seem even more apposite:

What almost no prospective graduate students can understand is the extent to which doctoral education in the humanities socializes idealistic, naïve, and psychologically vulnerable people into a profession with a very clear set of values. It teaches them that life outside of academe means failure, which explains the large numbers of graduates who labor for decades as adjuncts, just so they can stay on the periphery of academe. (That's another topic I've written about before; see "Is Graduate School a Cult?" (The Chronicle, July 2, 2004.).

And for those who "make it" as tenured faculty, is there any circulation of a timeless devil's dictionary to help prepare them for the otherwise unspoken assumptions that will govern their work practices?

In either case, it is difficult to say how much, and what kind, of consolation exists, for those who somehow feel cheated. That's not for me to decide. All I'm saying is that there should be complete disclosure about the benefits and hazards of the respective available courses of action. The risk, as I see it, is that contrary forces can sometimes send the naive to their doom. Too late, they catch a glimpse of a wicker man over Lord Summerisle's shoulder (resplendent in his formal academic gown, in my scenario). And these are the last words they ever hear, a horrific moment of clarity, before they are sacrificed in an act of altruistic suicide, by the lighting of the wicker man: you will die, so that others may live!:

You are the fool, -


Punch, one of the great fool-victims of history,


 
for you have accepted the role of king for a day,


 
and who but a fool would do that?


 
But you will be revered and anointed as a king.


 
You will undergo death and rebirth -


 
resurrection, if you like.


 
The rebirth, sadly, will not be yours,

The Necrosocial

"In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination. We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else. Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else. We have measured ourselves and we have measured others. It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their capital as a businessman. It should feel good, gratifying, completing. It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination. After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.

We are convinced, owned, broken. We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education!

When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant. We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values. What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own.

The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general. They sell the practice through the image. We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice".

Read the full text: The Necrosocial.

–>Here are some further resources, after the really amazing events of Nov 18-19 including serious face-offs with the cops at Berkeley and UCLA, which may radicalize a huge student/faculty/staff movement.

–First, a great segment of Democracy Now, which includes the audio of the statement read from within occupied Campbell Hall, as well as a good interview with Bob Samuels.

–Occupy California, from Santa Cruz, has links to all the radical and confrontational groups, whose work has been very successful (no confrontation, no movement!).

–Bob Samuels’ blog is worth a read.

–A very interesting post by a UCSB professor, R. Flack, written in advance of Nov. 18-19, where he shows all the conditions that are coming together for a major social movement. This is actually pretty thoughtful stuff.

"We are our own worst enemies"

High time then for some John Mowitt:

Marx himself, wily Moor that he was, provides important if unwitting insight

when in elaborating the related distinction between productive and
unproductive labor he writes: “A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a
productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution
along with others, using his own labor to increase the mon ey of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.” And then the “phrase that pays”: “But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being subsumed even formally under capital and belongs essentially to a transitional stage” (Capital 1044). As a reiteration of a parallel he earlier draws between professors and masters within the context of guild production (1029), the later formulation invites one to consider both whether with the advent of the global society of control, school teaching in fact remains lost in transition somewhere between the pre-formal, the formal and the real subsumption of labor, but also to what extent and with what significance does education factor, and factor decisively in Marx’s thinking about the becoming real, of formal subsumption. As both matters may be further agitated in the ensuing discussion I’ll not develop them further except to assert, in the interest of effecting a transition of my own, that from where I sit the transition is over.

The university is a “knowledge-mongering institution” and school teaching is now productive labor, which is precisely why syndicalism has asserted itself with urgency, if not success, in every corner of the educational field, but also, more ominously why the drumbeat of “deliverables” has become tortuously loud.

An academic speculative bubble?

I hope to resume normal blogging later this week. But until that time, Derridata, further to the previous post, I decided in the later part of this post to reproduce part of our previous email exchange, which originally focused on this.

What's interesting to us is the ongoing ways in which these financial discourses frame the attempts of certain philosophers to account (!) for "the economics of attention" related to their work. I find this particularly interesting insofar as it uses political economy to critique the "object fetishism" of Speculative Realism (scroll down to Bryan K's comment in the previous link and you'll get more ideas on where this could go in the future). Harman is apparently someone given to remarking how the "stock" of other philosopher's is losing value, when as you remarked before, the abstracting of equivalences implied by such comments hides the work of making equivalent.

I can see other noxious effects of this way of thinking. Caricaturing critics as "grey vampires" amounts to little more than the logic of "possessive individualism": more people read the blog being criticised than the one written by the critic, so ergo,the former is somehow automatically inherently superior to the latter. But if the former has done nothing to really establish that the basis of its appeal is democratic populism, any appeal becomes limited by its anchoring in either personal idiosyncrasies, rhetoric, ignorance of viable alternatives, or even, dare I say it, successful niche marketing (my next post hopes to elaborate on this point). This becomes most obvious when attempts are made to rebuff critics who argue it is objectionable that monopolies on the attention space are undemocratic, because they reduce the plurality of the blogosphere. I side with neither of these positions. Some abstract ideal of pluralism in and of itself is not necessarily desirable. No, it is the capacity to speak on behalf of an ethical constituency ordered by particular structuring principles that really counts.

I can explain what I mean by noting the significance of Harman's reference to Nietzsche's legacy to justify his own philosophical enterprise (just Google "grey vampires"). By this reckoning, Nietzsche's true significance lies with his willingness to risk mistakes, to confound orthodoxies. So, even though he made many mistakes, he ultimately cleared a pathway for other thinkers. Putting to one side the dubiousness of comparing himself to Nietzsche in terms of distinction and abilities, Harman's reasoning really goes awry by not contextualising Nietzsche with respect to the university. Nietzsche resigned his academic post aged 24, so he spent the balance of his life as a thinker outside the walls of the university. That his work has since been able to serve a pedagogical function attests to the structuring principle of the university: its capacity to horizontally redistribute any risks or rewards associated with the breaking of established forms. It is the kind of democratisation, for example, that Raymond Williams wished to operationalise in his conception of "a common culture". If I understand his argument correctly, the same might be said about Steve Fuller's arguments in The Governance of Science, which hold that the "right to be wrong" needs to be institutionalised. Thus it's clearly political and dependent on the establishment of a constitution. There is no point then in simply valorising the "flexibility" of certain thinkers to move in and out of the institution for its own [precarious] sake, in the manner of the blogger I criticised in my "Melissa Gregg" post- who, not coincidentally, is also one of Harman's staunchest supporters.

While I endorse the opening up of academic discourse to a more public conception of extended peer review, I'm also suspicious when this presumes the initial bypassing of peer review in the university itself. My hypothesis is that there is usually an inverse relationship between the most prominent theoretical voices in the blogosphere, and the attention they receive in the university. Anyone with institutional access could test this by doing a comparative search on library databases of authors and then try out Technorati and other blogsearch tools. I suspect that very junior faculty are disproportionately represented in the blogosphere, when compared with institutional measures of, in addition to their publication records, winning of internal and external grants, PhD supervision, and esteem measures. But I say this not to damn the blogosphere tout court, only to suggest that it is undesirable when it fails to give the university its proper due as a social technology. To use economic terms again, this is a debt that must be acknowledged, even if it can never be fully repaid (for what constitution could ever govern the blogosphere?).

To be sure, when academic peer review goes wrong, it can be as nasty as anything you'll find in the blogosphere, (producing the phenomenon known as scholarshit):

...but I still acknowledge the debt, as I know I wouldn't be editing or blogging if I'd never gone to university.

Another interesting find of late offers some confirmation of my predictions in my earlier "carbon chauvinism" posts regarding the future of Speculative Realism. Yup, there are some attempts at damage control already because SR is being brought into alignment with questions of animal rights. You can get some sense of the basis for the objections here, and then try exploring that blog further to see how things are shaping up. Be sure to read Anthony Paul Smith's comment on The Inhumanities too.

The necessary inertia of philistine invention

I was looking back on my earlier "Melissa Gregg" post, and it got me thinking about possible positive connotations to the Foucauldian "technologies of the self" I had referenced there in only a fairly negative way. Suddenly I remembered Thomas Osborne. His work is highly attractive to me as it marks an escape from the cul de sac I see the aforementioned Harman and his defenders in the blogosphere trapped in, and the same might be said of their detractors, at least to the extent that they too play the game of subjectivism: i.e. this is at base a struggle to decide who has a monopoly on the creative energy needed to avoid disenchantment of the world. It logically follows, according to the fatuous standard of reasoning favoured by this select group of speculative realists, that those with the highest [sic] productive output have the requisite enthusiasm, meaning their opponents can only be parasites (or rather, "vampires").

Osborne in effect simply refuses these oppositions. Although the logic behind his argument is too complex to detail in full here, I can at least mention how Osborne speaks in terms of "philistine invention" rather than "creativity", and why the meaning and value of inertia, in his estimate, must also be rethought:

"One might observe at this point that not the least thing about the activity of inventiveness is that it is difficult, and that because of this one cannot necessarily see it happening at the time. Inventiveness is more often than not untimely –hence the critical import of the verdicts of posterity and, correspondingly, the necessity of a certain ‘negative’ aesthetics of creativity, the humility of acknowledging that even in acknowledging creativity itself we do not know what creativity is as such. What looks like inertia for some comes to a more objective, later generation as evidence of a breakthrough. And what might seem like a breakthrough can come to seem just like further inertia when viewed from a later more objective perspective. So, in the terms given currency by Stanley Cavell, it is precisely acknowledgement rather than knowledge that is the only orientation we can take towards inventiveness itself. In the light of history, in the light of reflection, the experts can tell us that Cezanne was a subject bearer of various powers of inventiveness. But was he a creative person? No matter. Such a question is an irrelevance, an effect only of our psychologism."

Suffice to say, this discussion becomes suffused with irony when speculative realists start to defend themselves by resorting to psychologism! Is a little methodological consistency simply too much to ask for? Speaking as someone who was trained as a sociologist, I can at least console myself with Osborne's observation that "sociologists make better philistines than most". I can't expect "philistine invention" to feature in the aforementioned epistemic wars. Part of the problem here is the medium of the blogosphere itself, the "clusterfuck" immediacy of which has proven especially receptive to that theoretical imbroglio known as "cultural studies"- an anti-discipline defined in part by consciously distancing itself from sociology.

But even in cultural studies circles there is growing recognition of the virtue of a sensibility somewhat comparable to "inertia", as Osborne defines it; in these rare cases it is acknowledged in all but name that Weberian disenchantment is a product of the increasing rationalization of academic labour. There is a difference though in the academy because the problem is not so much that academic journals are adapting to the shortened economies of attention that blogging and Google searching have accustomed readers to, but rather how academics are routinely expected to "multitask". Irrespective of the medium they engage with, (books, print journals or e-journals), what is greatly diminished is the reading time, (i.e. the inertia), required to evaluate and respond to the work of other scholars. To be sure, the fast food analogy Bowles uses to make her point is already familiar from Fuller's book on the transformation of universities by "knowledge management" principles, but it would go against the grain were a cultural studies scholar to cite a sociologist. In any case, her point still appears valid, and also further ratifies Ben Agger's argument that the "publish or perish" mentality is really a symptom of what he calls "fast capitalism".

I'm puzzled, however, why some bloggers (again, as referenced in my Melissa Gregg post) would attempt to present necessity as something of a virtue i.e. when you are destitute because of precarity you are obliged to keep moving, but this mentality merely engenders the dilemma Simmel once described:

"The frequent changes in fashion constitute a tremendous subjugation of the individual and in that respect form one of the necessary complements to social and political freedom."

There may be one final twist to this tale. By extension Osborne teaches us that a careful reading is necessary to understand that creativity is more than just an ideology. Indeed, this is his primary justification for rejecting the category of creativity and replacing it with the more inertia ridden idea of inventiveness. For an example of a contrasting perspective though, one need look no further than Ben Watson's rush to judgement:

"So I was forced to leap up and seize the microphone to voice my criticism of the way French philosophy, ever since Kojeve's lectures on Hegel, has hobbled along with a flawed dialectic; Sartre, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Badiou...they're compromised rubbish, and for very concrete reasons: France having had the most reactionary Communist Party on the planet...craven aspiration to bourgeois academic fame; the inability to think beyond the mind/body dualism of Descartes...which dualism immediately manifested in the conference as a stand-off between explanations of spectral music as a result of 'nature' or science'."

Making the university safe for intellectual life

In Twitter type mode today: only time for a brief rejoinder to my previous post. I just want to re-emphasise that the aim was to argue that there is something worth saving in the institution, something irreducible to the character types laboring under the limitations of current conditions. I've said enough in the past to make it very clear [I hope] that it would be very foolish to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which would leave only the blogosphere as a public sphere. It's not clear to me that much can be done for the blogosphere that would be capable of approximating the kind of prescription implied by the title of this post. But anything that could be done is precisely what is downgraded by certain tenured philosophers.

It's ironic that said academics can recklessly skate over the kind of argument I'm presenting here. I'm thinking, for example, of speculative realist Graham Harman, who on his blog makes some incoherent points about the kind of "mouthy punks" whom, he argues, dominate the blogosphere. Harman explains that his interest is only in democratising access to knowledge, rather than democratising knowledge production. I applaud Harman that he is willing to publish a book on Bruno Latour and make it available through open access. He is also willing to debate Latour in a public forum, thereby confirming the social epistemological imperative of having a democratic right of reply. But his distinction between access and production really makes no sense at all. Wouldn't it be the case rather that democratising access would have a "knock on" effect of collectively improving the quality of critical responses, thereby also holding the academic accountable by putting them on "trial"? It is also somewhat disingenuous of Harman to complain about bloggers flaming him behind pseudonyms, rather than standing behind their words. As an academic Harman should already be familiar with anonymous peer review, so in principle he has no grounds for taking exception to anonymous interlocutors. Harman should also understand that not everyone is employed by an organisation that values the expression of "academic freedom" to the extent to which he has grown accustomed as an academic, so it is entirely legitimate for bloggers to protect their true identities. An excellent critical entry point to get at the stakes of this argument can be found here (I recommend reading the responses to that post also, as well as following the links to Harman et al). Not coincidentally, much of that posting chimes with the reservations I've expressed many times about the continental philosophy blogosphere.

I say again: constructive criticism is indispensable, but it can only take place once some ground has been cleared by finding weaknesses in the arguments in question. Harman appears unconvincing then when he says that critics are only motivated by the resentment of not having a "project" of their own. Bullshit. I'm talking about a form of creative destruction that will clear a space for something else. I've always been consistent in this respect in the choice of alternatives I've substituted for the object of each critique. So in this spirit I will invoke again Fuller's social epistemological imperative of the integration of teaching and research in the university as a means of ensuring the continuous destruction of social capital:

"It’s a commonplace to describe the functions of the modern university as the integration of teaching and research. The original idea was for this integration to take place in each professional academic, whose duty to push back the frontiers of knowledge was matched by an equal obligation to make that knowledge available to the widest audience possible. In The Sociology of Intellectual Life, I discuss these two phases as constituting the creative destruction of social capital. Here’s what I mean.

Research involves the accumulation of social capital, as academics, investors and clients create the networks needed to produce and maintain new knowledge. Most, if not all, of these people are motivated by the desire for competitive advantage in the economy, the intellectual field or society more generally. However, the Enlightenment norms of the university prescribe that this knowledge not be limited simply to those able to pay for it; hence, the pedagogical imperative. For its part, teaching requires the translation of knowledge claims into a language comprehensible by those who were not directly involved in its production or, for that matter, are likely to extend it in the directions intended by those so involved. In other words, teaching aims to destroy whatever initial competitive advantage the researchers had. This in turn triggers a new cycle of knowledge-based social capital creation, which will be itself overturned over time, etc. The overall result is a constant stream of innovation that ensures the dynamism of the social order".

Fuller argues that as teaching and research have become more split, this ideal of creatively destroying social capital becomes a more remote possibility. The danger then of Harman's petty style of pedagogy, which necessitates a policing of his interlocutors, is that it attests to academia becoming the victim of its own success in a manner consistent with an emphasis on greater technical specialisation in the period since WW2. Breadth is consequently sacrificed for depth (remember Harman's injunction about not democratising production) and Fuller here echoes Ben Agger's basic argument that was cited in my previous post. The net result of the breakdown each describes is an absence of dynamism in the social order and a mirroring in the blogosphere of the worst excesses of a university unsafe for intellectual life.

So why can't we try instead for something other than the self-serving protection of academic real estate? If Harman's statements demonstrate the extent of his willingness to become reflexive about his knowledge practices, and their effect on others, then he does little to encourage greater interest on my part in his work. It's the reason I've stuck with Fuller. Perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to compare Fuller's critiques of Latour with Harman's general approach in his book The Prince of Networks (just Google to find the free downloadable copy). But until such a time, I will avoid his book like the plague.....

To get a greater sense of Fuller's perspective, I recommend listening to these podcasts:

Steve Fuller (Sociology), The Sociology of Intellectual Life

• Sociology of Intellectual Life
• Academic Authority in a Digital Age
• Experts, Intellectuals and Academics
• The Unholy Alliance of Bullshit and Plagiarism

More on the psychic economy of higher education

I've felt my interest in this topic heating up lately, what with all that discussion over on the Crooked Timber blog and elsewhere about the precarious nature of independent scholarship, the need for public intellectuals (complemented by a "public sociology") to compensate for the careerism that threatens to make academia a symptom of fast capitalism (i.e. one writes primarily to amass a publication record for the sake of the impressive curriculum vitae that will advance your career). I am someone who believes in constructive criticism though, so I point toward six conditions for realizing the university in these difficult times. I believe that the characteristic difficulties described in the links that feature in the later part of this post are well covered by the sixth of the aforementioned conditions i.e. communicative tolerance: the quietness of staff is not a sign of high morale. Everyone must be encouraged to express themselves, even if this carries the risk of more whistle blowing.

Of course, there must be interaction between each of the conditions before there is any chance of realisation. Condition 6 is very closely allied with condition 1 i.e. critical interdisciplinarity: different schools might find themselves having to work more collaboratively for a greater interest, rather than continually forming strategic alliances inhouse which merely encourages the politics of cloning- mentoring others to say the same things as you- albeit not quite so well expressed (according to sociologist Liz Stanley). Indeed, derridata tipped me off to some eloquent testimony of how academic business as usual can foster disenchantment:

"The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed. The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. . The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping. Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.

The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join. And while there is a relationship between micropolitics and geopolitics, it is far more tenuous, far more mediated by local institutional conditions, than the new faculty first imagines.

Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it. For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum. The fact that the new person was hired with accomplishments and expectations much higher than so many senior faculty members does not help this form of fear, of course.

While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one’s unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members. Senior faculty don’t exactly help or support one another either. Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness".

This anecdotal evidence about micropolitics certainly squares with my ex-university. The school of sociology split into two mutually hostile camps, meaning that collegiality was almost non-existent, to the point where certain staff members would not even acknowledge each other in the hallway. It's probably not unreasonable to surmise such generative factors have played a part in other professions of exhausted patience. During the course of my own postgraduate work it was a piece written by Jill Blackmore and Judyth Sachs that left an indelible impression on me. This may have had something to do with the fact that I had already read so many books by Ian Craib, in addition to, somewhat ironically, (given they were faculty at my university that had split into the opposite camp), Game and Metcalfe's Passionate Sociology. What particularly haunted me in that book was the admission that the "deception is cruelest" when the academic poses as a "friend" to the student, as this masks the power/knowledge inequalities in the relationship. These authors buttress their case through a semiotic reading of graduation ceremonies: the student ascends the stage to tip the mortarboard to the academic, and for that fleeting moment is symbolically acknowledged as the academic's "equal", before walking back down the steps and assuming the "lower" position.

And yet I appreciate this must be hard on some academics too, as they must feel forced, sometimes in spite of themselves, to shut off their emotional responses so as not to get too personally involved, even when they have previously enjoyed talking about the subject for which they and their student "share" (a word loaded with all sorts of ambiguous connotations in this context) a mutual love. This "lost love" is what Game and Metcalfe wish to reignite in their "passionate sociology". Irrespective of the prospects for its realisation, I have some sympathy for the commitment behind it, at least to the extent it dovetails with Ian Craib's shrewd insight that sociologists may otherwise be particularly prone to normotic (i.e. no internal life) personality structures.

There is something else I would like to say about this issue but it will take a while longer for it to crystallise, so another time perhaps.

Thank you Melissa Gregg for this honest, damning indictment

God help you if you're a young scholar just starting out. Why isn't it mandatory then for academic departments to hand out copies of this article to their aspiring postgraduate students? Don't be fooled that you will be pursuing your research interests wherever they take you, and answerable only to your peers, when key decisions about research impact factors are made by bureaucrats and publishers. To be sure, what Gregg says here basically echoes something I had read years ago about the "crisis of scholarly publishing" written by John B. Thompson in Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, but I still feel her article is invaluable by offering local evidence of a more global trend.

But Gregg's testimony should also be a sobering reminder for bloggers, given how much of the research produced in universities later becomes fodder for the blogosphere. It puts paid to the thinly disguised, self aggrandising recent claim of kpunk, for example, who argues that the best work in institutions are produced by those who had faced a period of destitution "outside". The problem is that his category is simply too broad (given the continual influx of "new blood"/postgrad students, along with young academics just starting their careers) and that the kinds of authors kpunk routinely cites as his confirmatory authorities where theoretical matters are concerned are themselves among the most successful byproducts of the institution, rather than shaped by any formative experience of "destitution". Perhaps such a characterisation holds to some extent in the independent/avant garde vs "the mainstream" music circles kpunk moves in, but if it is up to the critic to "redeem" these artists by interpreting them through academic concepts, then "destitution" starts to look more unconvincing as an apriori indicator of quality in that context as well.

Here's why: if you're a "teledon" like Badiou or generally otherwise renowned as per Fred Jameson, you will have so much autonomy in your work that the vagaries of anything like the ERA need never be of any real concern: you will be a nodal point in the academic network that exerts a huge gravitational pull, meaning you will be orbited by a large number of "satellites" i.e. other academics writing second order observations of your work, thereby consolidating your centrality in the collective attention space. As highlighted by the concept of "mundane excellence", the monopoly on resources available to you and the associated high comfort level act as a feedback mechanism, in turn generating more confidence and, not least, the ideas that power your productive output. This means it's not necessarily any experience of destitution "outside" the institution that makes a qualitative difference, given how the internal networks of each institution, and the larger interpretive community of which they form a component part, are themselves internally divided. Melissa Gregg really drives home this point. Oftentimes the central figures are able to produce the best work simply because they have the biggest monopoly on the resources needed to get things done.

But for those less fortunate academics, the only major problem used to be that you had considerable latitude to work to your own standards, with the result that you were never sure if you had achieved them or not. It is a problem that has been relativised since, rather than removed, given how the government now prescribes more targets. Then as now, this working environment can lead to a lot of depression and burnout (confirmation of this plight can be found in Fred Pahl's ethnographies of his fellow sociologists, virtually anything written by my sociological hero, Ian Craib, as well as in Andrew Metcalfe and Anne Game's Passionate Sociology). The academic might find themselves in a state of constant anxiety: no matter how many or how quickly the buckets are filled, they can still potentially spring a leak as soon as a peer identifies an omission in the argument or even the cited literature. Leaky academic papers can result in leaky selfhoods, which means a leaky agency lacking the resilience needed to push on through a fallow period. If nothing is ever definitively accomplished, in the same cut and dried manner as something as mundane as, for example, winning a tennis match, one becomes more susceptible to the structure of feeling known as melancholy (cf Gershom Sholem). It too can be understood as a kind of feedback mechanism, but one that fails to indemnify those who experience it. This results in a curtailing of creative expression and sometimes even dropping out altogether. Once this occurs the dominance of the more central figures in the interpretive community becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

And then there is the feeling of powerlessness, of being fatuous, forced to live with a Cassandra complex in a world where revolutionary change is not close at hand. This is exactly the kind of dilemma that Adorno talks about in Minima Moralia. So basically the problems Melissa Gregg describes compound the earlier ones by adding a level of pressure from publishers and government alike. No doubt accountability is required to some extent, but surely not if it seriously compromises the historical function of the university as a site of free enquiry to the point where Australian academics can no longer even write about their own country!!

I don't have an institutional affiliation, so I have no vested interest in saying these things to damn bloggers and independent researchers alike tout court. To be sure, I've written before about academic "peer review" as a potentially more democratic distributive mechanism than the blogosphere, but I'm forced to concede it can be open to abuse too, in the sense that the "invisible college" can mean editorial panels can be stacked by personal acquaintances, acting under the pretence of anonymity, meaning that decisions are not always truly merit based. And of course, anonymity can make it harder to prove that someone has appropriated your ideas for their own gain if your work is rejected. But I am still confident that these reviews can be "blind" enough in most cases to ensure that abuses are not always the order of the day.

I've also previously mentioned how bloggers and independent researchers could be empowered if they could break the deadlock of publishers protecting their intellectual property rights: let's hope a greater push towards "open access" is not far away then. Academics could be held more accountable too if they were obliged to more often meet the independents "on their own turf" (i.e. journals), thereby having to respond to criticisms rather than just dismissing them as usual because of the medium in which they appear (i.e. blogs, or smaller publishers without the same standard [sic] of recognised gatekeepers). Open access would be a great way too for academic libraries to save on the hefty journal subscription costs that publishers force them to pay.....

Sadly though, this reference to libraries also leads me to think that the "Right Foucauldian technicism" that characterises theoretical research in cultural policy has come back to bite us on the arse, in the sense that the people who graduated with this mindset in the late 1980s have since gone on to staff the government departments that are now reshaping our educational policies in terms of the ERA "targets". Putting to one side, for the moment (as this mindset dictates), how education is supposed to be critical, the fact that it should also be practical has been subsumed by the understanding that it is primarily a technology for reshaping the conduct of liberal subjects. This in effect means that your subjectivity is perpetually problematised by being made aware of contingency. Capitalising on the dilemma Adorno spoke about (my "buckets" analogy), these Foucauldians then argue that culture offers a range of "solutions", that the citizen will then buy at the marketplace (I'm thinking here of Toby Miller's The Well Tempered Self, but I could also be talking about Tony Bennett, or older texts, such as Culture and Anarchy). Of course, these solutions only hold for a short time, and then new answers will be sought. It's the "society of control" described by Deleuze all over again, but the great irony is that many of those familiar with this text, be they in academia or the blogosphere, seem not to have thought too reflexively about their own information seeking habits in these terms. This is no trivial matter to consider: I certainly can't think of even one case when any of these people have explained how they found the current text they're writing about by visiting a library. Why this blindspot then? Is it because the required voracious reading habits can only be accommodated by the liberal solution of private consumption? Is this what it really means to always be on the "cutting edge"?

So Melissa's article has haunted me, as I've started to think more about how academia, and its variants in the blogosphere, can be easily co opted by the society of control. Indeed, this may well be the dark truth of Foucault's remark, "people know what they do and why they do it. Fewer of them know what they do does......" For example, this critical dimension regarding institutions is unfortunately lacking in Jodi Dean's contribution to Framing Theory's Empire. Dean contends that some people will become so disenchanted with difficult continental theory that they will turn back to simplistic empiricism. Dean compares this reactionary attitude to her own Southern Baptist upbringing, when she was told that all that was needed was the Holy Spirit contained in the Bible. I am arguing though that it is worth looking for a more reflexive, critical approach in the interest of navigating between the Charybdis of [certain strands of] continental philosophy and the Scylla of positivism. Clearly then it is not just the privatisation of research habits I'm concerned about, but how Dean writes as if the "difficulty" of her preferred texts somehow automatically exempts them from the locus of control, when in fact the opposite may be true. It hardly seems coincidental either that she also make disparaging references to "mainstream" and "conventional" theorists in a way that reminds me of the shortcomings in kpunk's piece (he's on her blogroll too, offering some proof of the continuities in their thought). In short, I was disappointed by Dean's response as Framing Theory's Empire was supposed to be focused on institutional histories, and such "social epistemologies" are in short supply nowadays. It's not clear to me that the dozen or so Zizek texts (!!!) Dean says are awaiting her attention next will offer any real assistance in this regard.

My argument therefore is that more thinking about what we do does, and its relationship to our information seeking behaviour, is a step in the right direction. Melissa Gregg offers a useful guiding light in her critique of business as usual in academia, and for this we owe her our thanks.