Wisdom
Posted on | April 7, 2005 |
As something of an antidote to all the doom and gloom around Australian cultural studies at the moment, I wanted to share a little story that keeps me happy during icky times at work. Now, submitting a PhD is a pretty scary process. You put years of your life in the all too human hands of another person, and for about six months hope like hell that they’re in a fairly generous mood when they get around to reading it. It’s rare to get very much say in who your markers are. Even if you do get to write a shortlist with your supervisor, whether or not you get who you want often depends on the vagaries of said person’s schedule – how late in the semester it is, how many theses they’ve already marked in the same year, whether they’re even in the country, etc. etc. Stories abound about certain big names in the field marking theses on long haul flights, or in the bath with a glass of red. Anyway.
One of my markers was a person I have incredible respect for, but who I wasn’t at all sure would be sympathetic to my work. This person summons in me a dizzy kind of esteem. I see them as the embodiment of a surprisingly rare commodity in the contemporary academic workplace: wisdom. I also see them as representing all the best kinds of attributes associated with the word ‘gentleman’ (and I don’t often use that word positively). Compared with the kind of thinking this person does, I feel like a naïve upstart with little real idea of the history of scholarship.
This is the person who would later write that my thesis was ‘original and ingenious’ at the beginning of a five and a half page report in 10 point, single spaced font. The response included suggestions for further reading, but they weren’t offered in the common antagonistic style of ‘how obvious it is you haven’t bothered to read such and such’. It was more in the spirit of: ‘these are the essays that I still reflect on, so many years a part of this profession, and now that you’ve reached this beginning point of your career, I’d like to share them with you’.
Among them was Max Weber’s ‘Science as a Vocation’. I’m just getting in to it, and I thought I’d return the favour for others of you bothering to pursue scholarly work - in cultural studies no less - despite the lack of inspiration that sometimes surrounds us.
The dilettante differs from the expert… only in that he lacks a firm and reliable work procedure. Consequently he is usually not in the position to control, to estimate, or to exploit the idea in its bearings. The idea is not a substitute for work; and work, in turn, cannot substitute for or compel an idea, just as little as enthusiasm can. Both, enthusiasm and work, and above all both of them jointly, can entice the idea.
Ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us. The best ideas do indeed occur to one’s mind in the way in which Ihering describes it: when smoking a cigar on the sofa; or as Helmholtz states of himself with scientific exactitude: when taking a walk on a slowly ascending street; or in a similar way. In any case, ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion. (136)
[...]
In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in then, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds. Every scientific ‘fulfilment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated. Whoever wishes to serve science has to resign himself to this fact. Scientific works certainly can last as ‘gratifications’ because of their artistic quality, or they may remain important as a means of training. Yet they will be surpassed scientifically—let that be repeated—for it is our common fate and, more, our common goal. We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself. Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end? (138)
More to follow.
PS. Good luck Jean!
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8 Responses to “Wisdom”
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April 7th, 2005 @ 1:21 pm
I am proud to reclaim the term “dilettante” - I want to follow in the eccentric footsteps of those nineteenth-century people who followed their voracious interests - philosophy, music, art, architecture and design, writing and publishing, political activism - not because they weren’t dedicated to or good at one, but because they loved them all too much to specialise.
Ultimately, dilettantes were loath to let the drudgery of professionalism crush their space for ideas. Weber has a point about the inspirational value of desk-brooding. But it’s a shame that the culture of “professionalising” and “institutionalising” cultural studies has devalued and crushed the best things about dilettantism.
Nobody on the CSAA list cares what I think - why, I don’t even work at a university! What would I know! But perhaps one way to sidestep the tedious droning issuing from that list (this week I seriously considered posting the words “blah fucking blah”, but the fallout wouldn’t have been worth it) and to defend the field from claims of political insularity is to respect people who practice CS as part of their wider interests, which in turn invigorate their insights.
April 7th, 2005 @ 3:07 pm
Oh, yes! Mel, this post has given me more of a lift than my first coffee this arvo after a week without caffeine. As someone struggling through the final stages of a PhD (which without boring you all looks at the sift of community, virtual community, place and teletechnologies) that has evolved as a one of those strange, unruly beasts known as an “interdisciplinary research project” and attempts to straddle both media & communications/cultural studies and architectural theory, I love the idea of reclaiming the term ‘dilettante’. And having being told in a roundabout way that the path I have chosen constitutes a form of career suicide (because I am formally enrolled in arch not CS), even though I chose my path because, as Mel puts it, I love both fields and don’t wish to specialise, I particularly like the part about respect for people who practice CS as part of their wider interests which in turn invigorate their insights.
April 7th, 2005 @ 9:48 pm
thanx Mel!
April 8th, 2005 @ 1:15 pm
Useful distinctions
Melissa has a gentle, insightful story in response to the recent raruraru on the Australasian (actually, it’s overwhelmingly Australian) Cultural Studies list, that I predictably had a role in starting. I’ve tracked Mel’s work since meeting her at a…
April 8th, 2005 @ 3:46 pm
Aw shucks Danny
Thanks for pointing out the distinction regarding interdisciplinarity, too, which I think is right even tho I sympathise with Mel and Rowan. These are big issues and speak of the compromises that are forced upon us if we wish to subscribe to institutions like universities and genres like theses. To reinforce your point, here’s Weber again:
“In place of individual hero-ecstasy or piety, of spirited enthusiasm or devotion to a leader as a person, of the cult of ‘honor,’ or the exercise of personal ability as an ‘art’—discipline substitutes habituation to routinized skill. In so far as discipline appeals to firm motives of an ‘ethical’ character, it presupposes a ‘sense of duty’ and ‘conscientiousness’.” p. 254
I like this guy, even tho he writes in a weird tone - it’s both assured and defensive at the same time. Makes me think he got teased a lot at school and hounded by whoever the black-skivvy equivalents were during his career…
I’ve found a few more quotes of his that are probably even more relevant to the CSAA list debate. I want to share them in a separate post because I find them a bit challenging. Stay tuned.
April 12th, 2005 @ 1:24 am
It’s kind of refreshing to see Weber come to life again, though nobody could suppose (could they?) that cultural studies is a ’science’ (i.e. Wissenschaft) in the form he is thinking of: cultural studies doesn’t progress interminably towards truth; its a creature of fashions, political conjunctures, structures of academic governance, cultural geograpy etc whose temporality has nothing to do with development nor even to a Raymond Williams-y residual/embergent distinction.
And wisdom?
What’s that?
April 12th, 2005 @ 10:46 am
Oh Simon, wisdom is something professors are supposed to have! Isn’t it?
April 13th, 2005 @ 12:51 am
No professors aren’t supposed to be wise. The modern academy was born out of wisdom’s ashes. Wisdom’s now the domain of gurus, prophets, therapists, the very old and other assorted marginals and illusionists (how unironically can one write that?). Professors are bureaucrats of knowledge; they’re professionals; they apply techniques to produce knowledge and information with specifiable social benefits in instutitions which are as Weber would have said ‘bureaucratically rational’.
And in the end knowledge is better than wisdom. At least for us.