Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

The Post-Colonial State in Our Time

Yesterday, I attended a talk given by Vijay Prashad, professor at Trinity College in Connecticut and author, most recently, of The Darker Nations: A People's History of The Third World. Much of what he said is not strictly speaking original, but the interpretive framework he is after promises to bring together many disparate phenomena operating across the developed/developing world divide, from urban gentrification to the creation of financial bubbles. To understand the current world order, Prashad takes us back to the imagination of an alternative path, the Third World dream of liberation and self-assertion; through it, as Fanon once said, formerly colonised societies would achieve what Europe could not.

From an economic and geographic perspective, this vision is decidedly not new: we see the invocation of the old I.S.I. (import-substitution-industrialisation) model set against today's neoliberal tyranny, the South-North resource flow as "accumulation by dispossession" (Prashad quotes David Harvey on this), and so on. But in a cultural sense, the awareness of the immediate postwar aftermath as an age of new global connections, which I discussed earlier in the context of Amitav Ghosh's essay on Hindi films in the non-Western world, is a fruitful area of historical thinking that is just now coming to the fore. Prashad's focus on major state figures like Nehru, Nasser and Sukarno, and on high-level events like the Bandung conference, thus serves a dual purpose: to render new cultural meanings to traditional diplomatic and political narratives (showing how these figures were important to a deep and wide movement that thought of the world differently, not just seeing them as another Cold War power bloc), and to argue that the idea of the Third World was institutionally anchored in state and transnational power (the implicit contrast is to today's fragmented, subterranean, ragtag resistances epitomised by the World Social Forum). The destruction or "assassination," in his term, of these power structures represented the real death of the dream in the late 1970s.

After his vibrant and provocative presentation, I asked Prashad a nagging question. On the one hand, he still views the "Global South" as a viable force in international relations, and he is interested in studying the developmental models and pathways of "BRIC" (Brazil-India-China) nations as an alternative to the current U.S.-dominated world order. But on the other hand, he rightly pointed out that India's current government continues to send heavy subscriptions to the IMF and is even seeking to restart the Doha round. Is the post-colonial state not now part of the very process that creates an "accumulation by dispossession"? Can it be part of a "globalising" world economy and a source of resistance to it at the same time? Prashad's answer was that elections matter and things may change. The Indian state does not essentially have one role or another, but its policies swing back and forth; therefore, it is also susceptible to influence, to the contingent democratic process. An electoral victory, for example, would presumably reconfigure the state on the world stage. Such a faith in popular democracy to triumph over large-scale structures is in many ways not traditional Marxism at all. It relies instead on forging innovative links between local resistances and state power, and not in the least on a considerable degree of optimism.

The Self-Importance of Self-Criticism

Perhaps because of the Great Recession, or as an inevitable consequence of globalisation's long-term restructuring of every aspect of our lives (when, as Marx once put it, "all that is solid melts into air"), it has become fashionable to suggest that the university system in the United States is due for a fundamental re-structuring. Most of the animus seems to be directed at humanities education as increasingly "useless" and "irrelevant" in an economic climate where tenured faculty positions are fast disappearing. On the external side, the argument (put forth with some force a few years ago by Thomas Friedman) that the U.S. lags behind Asia in scientific education is a valid policy concern. But it is the internal criticism that has been gathering steam: by this I mean academics turning an introspective, self-critical look on their profession and its limitations for the future.

The most high-profile shot across the bow was fired by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in his recent New York Times op-ed entitled (provocatively enough) "End the University as We Know It."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

To those of us thinking about an academic career, some of his arguments are all too familiar. He correctly notes the oversupply of underpaid, debt-ridden graduate students vying for jobs that do not exist. His attacks of the tenure system and increasing specialisation (which means that young scholars produce, in Taylor's view, obscure books that do not sell) are entering dodgy territory. His solutions, especially his thematic interdisciplinary re-organisation of educational institutions around problem areas like "Water" are in the domain of the fantastic. Though Taylor gets points for creativity, his proposed system would eliminate the opportunity to specialise in a particular discipline that lies at the very basis of interdisciplinarity. A scholar not properly and rigorously trained in history and anthropology can have little to add to a colleague in the mathematics or physical sciences. If everyone is a bit of a poet and a bit of a biologist, they end up being nothing much at all.

It would be easy to take the route of defending humanities education by pointing to the intrinsic worth of "developing the mind," or stressing the transferrability of "critical thinking" skills to the business or policy domain. But this would be a cop-out precisely because it entails a complete surrender to the argument that humanities are useless, by making them either a "Chicken soup for the soul" that cannot be taken seriously in an environment of difficult budget choices, or admitting that the only way a humanities major can be useful is by taking a job in government or business.
Taylor and other critics have named the problem: the humanities do not engage with the wider social world. But the pressure to change should not only be on universities. Why not demand that policymakers, businessmen and NGOs pay greater attention to those obscure books that do not sell? Would not our foreign policy, for instance, be different if people in Washington read less popular histories and simplified security reports and engaged instead with serious in-depth studies of the people of a region (like the Middle East or South Asia)? But the process of translation is tricky. The world of academic writing requires a sense of open-endedness and refusal to prescribe, while the world of policy calls for immediate action. There is a window for dialogue, but historians and anthropologists must be left alone to do their job as observers of our complex world, not transformed into task-oriented bureaucrats.

To return to the crisis of academia, in an even more introspective critique known to many students currently applying to graduate school, Prof. William Pannapacker writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education with some categorical advice: "Just Don't Go."

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

This is an impassioned plea that is much easier to accept because it is written to help save thousands of unfortunate souls from a life of misery. Once again, much of what Pannapacker says is absolutely spot-on, particularly his astute observation that many students who go to graduate school do so because of esoteric concerns like their "special interest" and "love" for a subject, their refusal to venture out into the real world, their need for validation, their romanticism of scholarly life, and the limits to their skills. His assessment of the declining number of secure jobs and the massive competition that results (thousands of applicants for one position amounting to nothing more than a lottery) is sobering and realistic. His solution is far simpler than Taylor's: unless you have an independent source of income or reliable connection, don't get a PhD.

The problem with all these criticisms is their exaggerated self-importance. Pannapacker is doing precisely what he accuses his naive graduate students of doing: making an emotional argument based on idealistic, insider notions about what academia is. Teaching at a university is simply a job like any other. Garbagemen, foresters, baristas, taxi drivers and call centre operators do not go around on the Internet posting long-winded diatribes about the state of their profession. Those of us who are going into academia certainly need to be, and are being, made aware of the enormous financial and lifestyle risks of such a choice. But we should understand that there are many jobs that are far worse and far less economically secure in a service-based economy. Farmers, manufacturers or people without college degrees in the United States are in an arguably worse position, not to mention everyone in the developing world trying to scrape a living for their families by diversification, immigration and other means. The trials and tribulations of an unemployed PhD. are painful but not catastrophic. Taylor and Pannapacker grew up in an age when academics enjoyed a comparatively more important social position, and their expectations for the profession (as well as their assumptions of students' expectations) reflect this. The future generation of academics already knows better.