Half-baked response to Glen

Posted on | July 21, 2005 |

When he asked for more detail on this. I’m finding it really useful to read Bourdieu’s work to get to the bottom of my ambivalence about academia as a vocation - an ambivalence which I think is fairly crucial to resolve in the process of writing my book. Or maybe ambivalence is the tension that drives me and in fact many academics? Anyway, within Bourdieu’s framework I’m someone who feels frustrated with the temporality implicit in the hierarchy of academic capital. In the context of the following passage, for instance, I’m finding it hard to identify with the stage of the career itinerary I’ve reached, perhaps because of my age but also because I don’t know or have regular contact with many other people who are at this same stage.

The agents tend to associate with each of the major stages of this itinerary, which is also an obstacle race and a competitive examination, a normal age of access, with reference to which one might appear young or old at any (biological) age. In fact, since the positions of power are hierarchized and separated in time, reproduction of the hierarchy supposes a respect for distances, that is respect for the order of succession. It is this very order which threatens the celeritas of those who want to ‘cut corners’… as against gravitas, the healthy slowness which people like to feel is in itself a guarantee of reliability (in writing a thesis, for instance) and which is really the most authentic proof of obsequium, unconditional respect for the fundamental principles of the established order.

I can think of two main factors that are at the heart of my current scepticism towards the order of succession. The first is structural: the baby boomers I know are workaholics. They are holding on to their jobs longer (under the encouragement of the government) while working unenviable hours that in my mind are hardly worth aspiring to. The second (which colours the first) is personal: having lost someone very close to me, I’m always conscious of how short life is, and it now affects my ability to defer gratification. This makes it very hard for me to make long term plans of any kind - buying a house (see, it’s a big deal that I want to), charting a career, keeping a relationship… all those things that to Bourdieu demonstrate ‘integration into the social order’ or, in a phrase I just love, ‘a taste for order’.

He continues:

… the powers conferred by mastery of the strategic positions which give control over the progress of the competitors will only have an effective impact on the new entrants – the assistant lecturers, for example – on condition that they are willing to play the competitive game, and accept its objectives. Moreover, the exercise of academic power presupposes the aptitude and propensity, themselves socially acquired, to exploit the opportunities offered by the field… the art of manipulating other people’s time, or, more precisely, their career rhythm, their curriculum vitae, to accelerate or defer achievements as different as success in competitive or other examinations, obtaining the doctorate, publishing articles or books, appointment to university posts, etc. And, as a corollary, this art, which is also one of the dimensions of power, is often only exercised with the more or less conscious complicity of the postulant, thus maintained, sometimes to quite an advanced age, in the docile and submissive, even somewhat infantile, attitude which characterizes the good pupil of all eras.
- Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus

For Bourdieu, ‘the game’ is his recurring metaphor for life: you become one of society’s ‘winners’ by using the tricks (forms of capital) you have at your disposal. And this is what I was getting at the other day. If this is the academic game, I’m not sure I still have the dispositions (the habitus) needed to play it. That is, I’m not sure I’m a good pupil anymore!

Category: Academia, Reading, Research

Comments

One Response to “Half-baked response to Glen”

  1. glen fuller's blog
    August 1st, 2005 @ 4:19 pm

    The Careerist Security of Noblesse Oblige

    The substance of my response is based around an interrogation of the below quote from Pierre Bourdieu posted by Mel on her blog, in relation to her comments about her future (’defer gratification’), and the “Poverty of Student Life” document forwar…

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