[csaa-forum] cult-studied ECRs

[Glen Fuller]

I want to engage with a single dimension of Mel, Jean and Josh's 
original post -- the ‘early career’ part -- through a series of 
questions and rhetorical flurries. 

Firstly, the supposition that ‘early career’ researchers are going to 
respond is ambitious. Only those with the authority of sedimented 
legitimacy (tenured profs) or with the frivolous naivety of non-career 
marginalia (postgrads) will bother responding to your provocative call 
for comments. One group doesn’t have anything to lose yet, while the 
other group determines, in part, who loses and who doesn’t. Those with 
the most to lose are the non-established, precarious workers of post-
phd academia. Rock the boat? Not in the seductive mist of the 
performance-based, outcomes-funded, technical school of immaterial 
trades. Maybe this is just the performative rhetorics of boat-rocking? 
Who has the bloody time anyway
? (not me! Sorry supers! eeek) Those 
people who should be voicing their own situations on this issue are 
probably not even on this list.

Secondly, weren’t most people in the cultural studies-strain of the 
humanities flung outwards by the cultural centrifuge of the hegemonic 
order? Perhaps an irrepressible slow-burn rage? A feeling of social 
disjunction? Of not belonging? A shared desire in the uneasiness of not 
belonging (through choice or not) to a system or Establishment that we 
find rotten/uncomfortable/dis-tasteful? I don’t know. What is the point 
of being an academic if one is doing it to have a ‘career’? Don’t 
careers happen by accident within the critically-engaged humanities?

The constitutive labour of ‘early career’ (or ‘career’, for that 
matter) implies a calculated engagement with the necessary conditions 
of future employment prospects. When do you have a ‘career’ in an era 
of non-tenured academic positions? Isn’t a ‘career’ a form of 
trajectory that is back-filled from cessation (retirement)? Or perhaps 
we are seeing a contemporary variation of Oliver-Twistian precarious 
labour: “Please sir, I like to have a secure job?” “Secure!” Is there a 
threshold of status and reputation reflected in the number of 
publications (roughly the Bourdieu/neo-liberal outcomes-based model)? 
Or when you have learnt the skills of meeting the right people, saying 
the right things, reading the right books and so on, in a processual 
machinic-mode of a disciplined ‘careerist subjectivity’ (During’s 
example, and the libidinal-political economy of ‘schmoozing’)? Maybe 
you can get away with just doing enough in each category to satisfy the 
respective (perceived) requirements to facilitate the extension of the 
career ladder (extended from the societal attic built by the government 
so all the good academics can hide in the shadows squawking at each 
other about the current situation like demented 
crows, ‘farrrrrk’ ‘farrrrrk’)? Someone tell me I am wrong, please, but 
doesn’t this demand technologies of the self that continually mediate 
between the ‘what-is’ and the future (‘what-is’, and certainly not the 
potentiality of ‘not-yet’) with the eye on the prize of employment, 
rather than something else, like a fidelity towards critical 
engagement. Sublimation into the management-based oligarchies of 
academia (perhaps, postgrads, we are all training to be right-wing NSW 
Labor politicians?). Maybe it is just a silly issue of semantics with 
the word ‘career’
?

However, hasn’t Ien Ang discussed, at a number of events, the necessary 
strategy of doing just enough to facilitate participation in 
the ‘system’, thus enabling the creation of a relatively autonomous 
space for cultural research? Surely the powers that be intuit they need 
an incorporated or captured antagonism for the maintenance and exercise 
of power (ala errr, Paris VIII); if this is what is happening, can’t 
this work to the advantage of those who seek to critically engage with 
the contemporary? I meet, but mostly witness senior academics who are 
working their respective butts off to create a space for younger (and 
not-so-much-younger) academics (postgrads and the mythical ECRs) all 
the time through securing funding streams and structural policy-based 
engagement. So isn’t it a problem of not being able to see 
the ‘multitude’ for the ‘grammar’? 


-- 
PhD Candidate 
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney

Read my rants: http://glenfuller.blogspot.com/