May Day Musings
Posted on | May 4, 2005 |
Bruce Robbins’ Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture has an interesting take on the idea of ‘anti-professionalism’ that has been preoccupying me lately. With reference to Stanley Fish, Robbins claims that ‘professions work by denying that they are professions’:
The professional wants to believe in his or her own merit, which requires freedom. But since self and merit are in fact constructed and determined by the profession (this is the strong, foundational sense of the term), you have to attack the profession in order to assert your own freedom vis-à-vis the profession. And in so doing, you are asserting the ideology of professionalism: freedom, merit, etc. [...] In being oppositional, Fish says, you are just following the profession’s orders.
Robbins is one of few male critics I’ve found to use the following rationale when cautioning those who talk about the oppressive nature of the professional workplace:
One can only think of the workplace as tyrannical if one hypothesizes some other space, like the home, which can be seen as a site of freedom and autonomy, congenial to the intellectual. But one can only see the home as this alternative space of freedom from the tyranny of the workplace if someone else is slaving away at the chores that need to be done there. What is assumed by this familiar definition of the intellectual as against the professional, in other words, is a sexual division of labor in which cooking, children, and other encumbrances are someone else’s business.
Let us be clear. There is no “home” in this sense, no place where thought can be free from all material encumbrance and social entanglement, and it is time to stop trying to return there again and again. [...] In order to take the true meaning of the real but relative freedoms we have, we have to stop positing spaces of freedom which [...] inevitably mask someone’s servitude.
What this passage acknowledges is that:
In the academy since the late 1960s, the extraordinary success of the new feminist scholarship in transforming the professional order of things should indeed, I think, force a change in the blithe, commonsensical disdain for professionalism that professionals themselves so often take for granted.
Heading home the past few nights I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially given that on Monday I used yet another public holiday to catch up on work. (A lot of my weekend is taken up with housework, which means I never seem able to finish reading the weekend papers - visitors can attest I always have a foot high pile on my lounge room floor). Professional status is certainly an important feminist achievement, and I’m incredibly grateful that it is now an avenue available to someone like me. But I wonder how many of my peers in academia consider their current lifestyle in any way touched by the workers’ demand for 8 hours to rest, 8 hours to work and 8 hours to play. For me, there is something very wrong about a situation where professionalism comes at the expense of these earlier objectives.
Who can afford to keep a 40 hour week in today’s academic workplace (tho this is hardly limited to academia)? Especially when you happen to be single and without children - which in various obvious and less overt ways remain the only legitimate conditions affecting one’s capacity to keep long hours. There seems to me little coincidence to this; something quite neat about the way alternative and queer lifestyles neatly fit the drive for productivity.
Weeks like this make me very interested in pursuing other forms of work. Or an attractive benefactor.
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2 Responses to “May Day Musings”
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May 4th, 2005 @ 12:53 pm
Hi Mel, what a poignant time to think about these issues! As someone heavily invested in professional critique (and auto-critique), I get annoyed at the type of argument represented by Fish (or Robbins’ representation of him here). Every critique is invested in the terms of what is criticised, but that’s by no means a problem - in fact, it’s only from a space of implication that we can effect change, right? And for Robbins himself:
One can only think of the workplace as tyrannical if one hypothesizes some other space, like the home, which can be seen as a site of freedom and autonomy, congenial to the intellectual.
This is not only a poor strawperson argument, it’s logically untrue. I think we can make value assessments against a field, rather than on either-or terms. We don’t need to imagine a completely non-problematic “other space” in order to recognise that the academia generally normalises chronic overwork, that this overwork is not conducive to healthy familial and social relationships, and that when the *best* academics keep thinking of leaving there’s something not working very well. Hope it clears for you, and good luck on the sugar-daddy/mommy front - share your strategies if you find one :)!
May 4th, 2005 @ 1:56 pm
I’ll second Danny’s suspicion of the strawperson argument regarding the possibility of the third space of feminine domesticity. I live alone and without kids, and I work from home mostly…
I like this bit:
“There seems to me little coincidence to this; something quite neat about the way alternative and queer lifestyles neatly fit the drive for productivity.”
… and the socio-economic structural realities of ‘flexible’ and ‘immaterial’ labour…