[csaa-forum] the ivory ceiling

[Andrew Murphie]

Hi Mel et al,

perhaps there is not one ³ academy², and I would hope that no one would feel
rejected by ³it² as a whole - in fact, the academy has always been divided,
fractious and indeed just generally palpably unfair ... and perhaps one will
always be taken both seriously and not, whatever one¹s position, history and
so forth ... yet perhaps not being taken seriously sometimes in the academy
could be sometimes taken as a positive (as unfortunate as the indications of
this might be) ... and perhaps one is taken seriously within and without the
academy sometimes when one least expects it. (I have to say on a personal
note that I often feel I¹ve been denied opportunities I deserved, but at the
same time, I¹ve been given quite a few I felt I might not have deserved!
Things are never ³smooth²).

Here I¹ll gratuitously throw in a lovely quote from Isabelle Stengers -

³Cosmopolitics defines peace as an ecological production of actual
togetherness, ecological meaning that the aim is not an unity beyond the
differences, reducing those differences through a goodwill reference to any
kind of abstract principles of togetherness, but the creation of concrete
interlocked, asymmetrical and always partial graspings. To take the very
example of what Deleuze calls "double capture", a concept Whitehead would
have loved, the success of an ecological invention is not having the bee and
the orchid bowing together in front of an abstract ideal but having the bee
and the orchid both presupposing the existence of the other in order to
produce themselves.²

This ³presupposing the existence of the other² seems to me to be a core
problem, even assuming as I do, that academies are fractured. And, although
I completely acknowledge Graeme¹s point about how things were, there might
also be a problem with the over-professionalisation of the academy today ­
precisely in such areas as refereeing, evaluation, focus on outcomes, and
the general filling in of forms, WebCT, etc etc ... the general
understanding of technics as allowing for the new ³audit culture² (to use
Marilyn Strathern¹s term). ... I liked it a lot when ³proper process came
in², but now it¹s often become an excuse for all the things someone like
Whitehead (and after him, Stengers) hated about professionalisation (he saw
professionals as actually well-intentioned people caught up in a technical
system that was sweeping a lot of good things away).  In short, process can
be used as a form of exclusion as much as anything else ­ if not more so.
(Maybe Cultural Studies could question this a bit more than it perhaps does
at the moment).

What¹s the answer? ­ well, lists like this perhaps, for a start ­
conversation, in general presupposing the existence of the other .... I
don¹t know... perhaps Welsh beaches ... that does sound like an interesting
consolation..

best, Andrew



On 11/8/04 10:01 AM, "m.campbell3 at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au"
<m.campbell3 at pgrad.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:

>> > Add in a little journal attack not dissimilar to Jeffrey Weinstock's post
>> > earlier this year (I'm still trying to recover from being 'glib', 'fatuous'
>> > and 'wrong-headed') and basically I'm just finding academia, well, it ain't
>> > no fun no more.
> 
> Yeah, I'm interested that you brought up the Weinstock saga, because I had a
> bad experience with the marking of my thesis in which it seemed to me that one
> examiner in particular was revelling in using language in a deliberately
> denigrating way, while sheltering behind the anonymity that the academic
> refereeing process provides. (Apparently I do not practise "good cultural
> studies", and in my work, "the concept of discourse is being badly perverted".
> I still don't know who said this about me, although I have a reasonably good
> idea.)
> 
> I know I am intelligent and capable of articulating complex and original
> ideas. But if you can't be taken seriously within the academy, how on earth
> will you be taken seriously as a freelancer? And the thing that scares me the
> most is that postgraduates are being taught, through 'mentoring' and simply by
> learning to survive in the system, to perpetuate these attitudes.
> 
> I apologise if I seem bitter,
> 
> mel. 


-- 
"I thought I had reached port; but I seemed to be cast
back again into the open sea" (Deleuze and Guattari, after Leibniz)

Dr Andrew Murphie - Senior Lecturer
School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
Australia, 2052
web:http://media.arts.unsw.edu.au/homepage/Staff/Murphie/
fax:612 93856812 tlf:612 93855548 email: a.murphie at unsw.edu.au
room 311H, Webster Building

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