I would like to return to a portion of a comment in the CHE thread on tenure:
What the faculty lack (and what is helping to erode the academic freedom and tenure system) is collegiality.
No, not in the sense used by administrators (and faculty) to deny an outspoken faculty member tenure.
Real collegiality — back to its etymology. The “bound together”-ness that was the source of academic freedom and tenure in the first place.
That is from comment number fourteen. It is worth thinking about.
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Also, it is not true that the AAUP says collegiality should be of no concern in tenure and promotion cases. Read their statement on this matter. The more interesting academic and labor question concerns the competing definitions of collegiality: being “nice” or “fun” (we know it isn’t that), being obedient (administrators would like us to think that), and being a colleague in the older sense, which I like. Colleagues collaborate.
Axé.
Note: This message from Professor Zero has been sent from the Castle, where she is still in a holding cell. Her hearing continues tomorrow. Meanwhile she directs you to the Paper Chaser‘s excellent Prufrock videos.
THE DIRECTOR
coldhearted scientist وداد 
My impression, from reading theoretical postulations on Lacan, is that once you entere “the symbolic register” of language (and perhaps before this stage, too), empirical reality is lost to you. So, you can’t say “this approach works better than that”. It’s another way of saying that once you enter the realm of speech, we are all neurotic.
So, in these terms, I guess “collegiality” means whatever you take it to mean.
Nietzche actually explains that better than Lacan, in a more intelligent and more informed manner. I’ve got the text in the office.
Sure, language is all metaphor, etc. But Lacan et al are very hopeless, or feign extreme hopelessness, and they can only afford it because they are in fact in positions of extreme power, I say!
Yes, i began to think of that last night (because I’m trying to figure out Lacan). Language enables you to convey only what you already have in common (which makes it a very difficult mode of communication for those who are foreign). language is what makes common.
The thing is that I don’t think empirical reality does get lost – I think it gets changed, and in some cases I think it gets made accessible. I can remember acquiring language very clearly, perhaps better than Lacan can himself, and I remember reflecting upon it at the time, noticing how it changed perceptions and perceptives, realizing that I was losing touch with the prelinguistic experience of the world.
I am not sure the prelinguistic experience of it was more genuine, though, and that is where I disagree with Lacan – although he would retort that one is inducted into the symbolic order at birth, I suppose.
I’d say language is one of the lenses or filters we have available but it is not monolithic and does not cover everything. What we have in common, yes, but I need to dig out the Nietzche piece that explains it (I think) as this interesting system of metaphors. It is *so* much better informed and more complex and subtle that what the Lacanians and Derrideans have to say, or so I find.
This must be my traditionalism coming out – both Lacan and Derrida told me in person that I was a traditionalist when I attended their lectures. I am saying this in an arch way: I think they are the conservatives / the power mad.
Yeah, I know it is the standard thing to say that empiricism doesn’t get lost by the acquisition of language — and of course it doesn’t. I guess then that my point is a more subtle one — because what I am seeing from the articles I read yesterday is that this is assumed to be lost, due to the assumption that language is a value-laden but highly abstractive sea of signifiers.
What I am saying is that I see a danger in the Lacanian paradigm itself — and this no doubt depends on how it is applied by various thinkers and practioners.
But take the issue of abusers and abusiveness. An empirical take would say, “This person has done such a thing before and they are therefore likely to do so again.”
An approach that depends on swimming in the sea of signifiers would say, “You have a certain attitude towards a situation that you choose to take as abusive. You have decided to take it in that way before, and so you are likely to do so again.”
Although I must say that it is nice for you to have met those academic highflyers…..maybe.
Anyway, I think that this theory of language (not yours — but often and perhaps not always the Lacanian one) has been used to castrate English speaking academicians, so that they are not able to speak about reality but only about their own moods and attitudes. There seems to be some political agenda underlying this — maybe to advantage those of the non-English speaking parts of the globe.
Another thought — When I am in the mode of thinking in the manner of my culture of origin, it is the equivalent of a kind of preverbal state. I do not see the rhyme or reason for categorising identities and labelling them, as I do when I am thinking more in Western terms.
Nice to have met high flyers, it actually is. I went to a lucky school. These were not my favorite of the various high flyers who came there, taught courses, gave lectures and so on. The thing about actually meeting high flyers is that they are more interesting than imitations of high flyers. And then you’ve heard some of what they have to say directly, which is always more interesting.
The reason a certain type of current academician they can only speak about their own moods and attitudes is (I think, primarily) identity politics (in some deformation, anyway). And then that Western (I call it colonialist) strategy of labelling so as to control.
I think we will see the end of identity politics soon (says I, attacking it from the root).
I hope, or at least in its now hegemonic form. The thing is that the main purveyors of it are the dominant Western types, who believe their identity is the best, the goal, the universal.
I do wonder whether most deconstructive paradigms and the application thereof doesn’t give the ones who apply it — the ones who have something akin to the character structure that reeducation expected you to have — a kind of masochistic thrill in undoing what has become so much cement in their identities.
But, it doesn’t work that way for me. I have a rather fluid, like a roaring river, identity to begin with.
I think that is what it is – a masochistic thrill. Also – from what I could tell, at least one of my deconstructive / psychoanalytic professors really was a masochist! I mean, S/M parties in S.F., all of those things back in the day.
But not having that character structure to start with, it is all rather pointless, and having *really* been a victim of something, not just a play victim in an S/M scene, it is worse.
IMHO, of course.
Yeah, I agree with all that you say. It really is difficult to participate in, and to fully understood the deconstructive thrill if you do not have that character structure to begin with, and/or you have had more than the usual scraps with real life.